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CHAPTER 1
To a stranger, the noise vibrating the foundation of the Hernandez household at five in the morning is chaos. For me, one of eight people in the five-bedroom and two-bath brick building, it’s a typical day. All aside from my sister Sofia, we Hernandez women are hardwired to rise before the sun does.
Titi Sandra, the unofficial leader of the house, always says, “El camarón que se queda dormido siempre se lo lleva la corriente.” Its exact translation is “The shrimp that falls asleep is swept away by the current,” but in simpler terms, it just means, “You snooze, you lose.”
I haven’t done a lot of snoozing these days.
My girlfriend and I have been recreating our favorite moments from the rom-coms we watched last week. Yesterday we made cupcakes inspired by some random made-for-TV movie about a baker who falls in love with a divorce lawyer. Before that, we snuck into a park at midnight and painted our names along the slide. Today, we’re going to watch the sunrise.
Depending on what music builds the earthquake under me and my sister Sofia’s carpeted bedroom, I always know which aunt is in the kitchen. Daddy Yankee thumps under my sandals as I leave Sofia in the bottom bunk to snore, which means Titi Neva woke first to smack pots and pans around.
To get to our bedroom door, I hop over the 3D puzzle of colorful witches that’s sitting at the center of our carpet. It’s three hundred pieces, which would have taken me maybe an hour, but my little sister wanted us to do it together, and we’re on day three now. Marisol’s lucky that she’s five years younger than me and her puppy dog eyes still work, otherwise, I would have never allowed my puzzle record to be ruined like this.
Like she hears my thoughts, Marisol jumps out at me when I open the door.
“Jesus.” I slam my back onto the floral wallpaper, pressing my palm over my pounding heart. “What the hell, Mari, were you waiting at the door?”
“Amelia,” she says, brown eyes wide, two space buns pinning her dark hair back, “do you want to read the next chapter of
Ghost versus Witch with me? You promised we’d read chapter ten today.” I’m pretty sure Mari’s reading level is higher than Sofia’s and mine combined. I caught Sofia making Mari proofread her essays multiple times this past year, and I’m not going to lie, I was pretty tempted to do the same after I piled up a few too many Cs.
“The day has barely begun.” I rub her head, and disappointment clouds her eyes. “Later,” I promise.
“You always say later.”
“I always mean it.” I ditch her to fly down the steps, Daddy Yankee’s voice growing louder as I swiftly dodge Mom holding my one-year-old sister, Zoe, to her bare chest and enter the kitchen.
“Do not run in this house,” she shouts after me, just as Zoe coughs up milk over Mom’s knotted dark curls.
Titi Sandra had workers remove the doorway to the living room three years ago to make the kitchen even bigger, with a single L-shaped couch at the corner by the front door across a coffee table so we could pretend we have a sala.
You wouldn’t know the long countertop is stainless steel with the amount of flour, bread, and pastries hogging the space like salchichas in a can. My family is opening a bakery beginning this fall in the very heart of West Springfield. Every day is nonstop practice perfecting the menu and paying the construction workers at the shop—and secretly testing their reactions to the dishes—with treats and flirting. The latter is led heavily by Titi Ivy.
Another thing the Hernandez women know how to do is flirt. That’s easy. It’s keeping a relationship that’s impossible.
“My firstborn,” Titi Ivy, in a shirt she wears like a dress, greets as she presses a kiss onto my forehead. “Settle the vote. I say scratch ticket, Neva says lottery.”
The aunts love to play the weekly lotto and bicker over which gamble feels the luckiest that week. Usually Titi Ivy goes lotto—higher reward, less chance to win. She must be choosing to scratch now because she lost too many weeks in a row.
“Scratch,” I choose, mainly because I like to be the one to scrape off the skin of the ticket with the “lucky” dime in the kitchen drawer.
“Perfect.” She pulls me with her. “Come help me prepare the flan. You’ll need to memorize the recipe for when you help out at the bakery.”
Titi Ivy moved in four months ago when her third husband died. The other two left. After eating a carrot cake, the third passed away, not knowing it was filled with his death sentence—macadamia nuts—because the bakery forgot to read Titi Ivy’s special requests.
You can imagine the rise and fall of that party.
Happy Birthday, Michael; we love—oh no, oh no. That’s pretty much how Titi Ivy described it, her brown eyes brimming with unspilled tears. Which we didn’t think was suspicious until the tears finally did fall—happy ones—when she told us how much money she got after suing the shop that will now allow my family to build their own.
Not that I’m accusing my aunt of being a murderer. Or uncaring. But I’m also not
not doing that.
I rub off her signature red lipstick I know stains my head. “Sorry, Perri is almost here. She’s taking me to the lake to watch the sunrise.”
“Romantic,” she croons while she leads me to the counter and shoves a powdered empanada straight into my mouth, “but breakfast is more important. Tell her to come and eat, and then you can go.”
I only have the choice to chew or choke, so I chomp on the crispy edge of the pastry. Before the warmth of the sugar gets too dry, the filling of sticky, chunky pineapple meets my tongue. The edge of Titi Ivy’s nail digs into my chin as she wipes crumbs from me, then finishes off the rest of the empanada herself.
Titi Sandra, an apron around her waist with the Puerto Rican flag running across it, rubs a hand over her face, leaving flour residue on her brown skin. A circle of it dots the tip of her square jaw.
“Knead the dough,” she says to me, her chin gesturing to the ingredient on the table. Nobody in this family points with their fingers. It’s always the chin, even if their hands are free. “I have to season the meat.”
“Sorry, Titi Sandra, I have to go.” I’m going to get hell for passing on an order from Titi Sandra of all people, but that’s a problem for future me.
“What is this?” Titi Neva shuts the double fridge covered in sticky notes and awards from school. Mainly Marisol’s, because I’m too busy talking my way out of detention, and Sofia is often pried away from whatever cheerleader she’s making out with, so we’re clearly not the academic stars here. “You think we’re one of those white families in the movies slaving away in the kitchen for you to grab a piece of toast and run out the door? You sit, and I’ll make you pancakes.”
Titi Neva steps in front of me, placing her hands on her wide hips, the tight ponytail at the top of her head unable to tame her ashy-brown curls, a trait she shares with Titi Sandra—they’re the only ones with the same father. They like to lie and say they’re twins, though no one would ever think so. Titi Neva has a lighter complexion and dresses in vibrant maxi dresses with bangles along her arms, and Titi Sandra always wears dark pantsuits, as if the whole world is her courthouse. But another thing to know about the Hernandez women: All the sisters are mentirosas. Their true age is a mystery lost in time and shredded birth certificates. They all claim to be the youngest, and with their clear, smooth-skin genetics, I honest to God wouldn’t be able to guess who actually is.
Titi Ivy waves a meticulously manicured freckled hand. We’re the only ones with the random splatter of spots on our bodies, though I only have a dotting across my nose and cheeks, like someone sprayed them there and forgot the rest of me. On the other hand, Titi Ivy is covered in them, and no foundation can cover them up. “Neva hasn’t gone on a date in years. She’s just jealous of the joys of young love.”
“That’s not it!” Titi Neva presses a hand to her chest, the rainbow of bangles along her arms singing as she moves. I already know by the shift in her voice, when it gets all whimsical and narrator-like, she’s going into one of her
moods. The last time she was in one, she said we all had to bunker in the house because a storm was coming, and the sun ended up being out all day. “I don’t have a good feeling about this
Perri.”
“Here we go,” Titi Ivy says, ending the sentence with a yawn.
“You’re both ruled by Mercury, mi amor,” Titi Neva explains as she goes in to grip my hand—I make it to a fist before she tries to scan the lines of my palm for my future. “She is air; you are earth—she erodes you.”
“If only being a Great Value fortune teller paid,” Titi Ivy tucks her vivid red waves behind her heavily pierced ears, “then we wouldn’t have to use my dead husband’s money to start up our bakery.” Her voice in that careless tone that again makes me not
not think she had anything to do with it.
But if there’s one thing living with a bunch of Puerto Rican women has taught me, it’s to keep my nose out of adult business.
“The stars do not lie,
big sister,” Titi Neva says.
“I’m two years younger than you.”
“You’re older than both of us,” Titi Sandra joins, and side by side, they could get away with claiming they’re twins if you look past Titi Neva being a foot shorter and a little sharper, where Titi Sandra’s face is rounded at the cheeks.
“Can I go?” My voice is a whisper among their shouting and Daddy Yankee.
“I’ve read the sky many times for you, mi amor.” Titi Neva tries to pry my palm open. “The curse plagues you too. No love life. Girl or guy or pal. Just the scent of flour clinging to your fingers when you take over the bakery one day.”
My left eye twitches as Titi Ivy swats Titi Neva. “Don’t jinx my firstborn. She’s not like us.”
“Yes, she most certainly doesn’t poison her lovers.”
On that note, after scrubbing that sentence out of my skull (plausible deniability), I duck under their arms, and Spanish curses swinging along with them, to grab some napkins. The aunts continue to bicker as I find Mom rocking a fussing Zoe on one end of the couch.
After I sit beside her, I run the napkins through the drying milk in her black curls she hasn’t so much as attempted to clean.
She glances up and smiles, her hazel eyes nearly disappearing over the bags beneath them. We’re the only ones who have them, that swirl of brown and green, and it makes me feel closer to her, since the rest of me—the heavy spread of freckles, the thick brows, and the curved cheeks—all comes from my dad. Mom made sure I had
something of her when I look in the mirror.
When was the last time Mom looked in the mirror? There’s a box of unused dye in the bathroom that Titi Ivy got for the multiplying grays on Mom’s head and a filled-to-the-brim pot of under-eye cream.
The more I study her, the more my stomach sinks. I doubt she’s showered this week at all.
As if she reads my thoughts, and sometimes I think it’s a supernatural-mom ability, she says, “I’m fine.”
I’m not sure that’s true.
The other day Titi Sandra called her a helicopter mom. After I Googled what that meant, the term has been stuck in my head. I wouldn’t say she’s obsessively protective—at least, not always. I know she’s nervous because Zoe is so young, and she has had this weird cough in the middle of the night since she was born that gives me a heart attack every other day. Still, I’m pretty sure mothers are supposed to, I don’t know, put their babies down every so often.
I rub my lips together, unsure of what to say that doesn’t sound like I’m questioning her parenting skills. Which I’m totally not doing. I love my sisters an embarrassing amount, which means she did a pretty awesome job with us.
I’m saved and cursed when Titi Neva’s bangles clatter as she lifts me from the couch and drags me to the hallway. We pass the countless framed photos of girls with crooked teeth, braces, and all the embarrassing moments the aunts decided not only needed to be on film but displayed to every guest who walks the yellow halls.
Instead of an entryway closet, meant for easily accessible jackets and shoes when you’re running out the door, Titi Neva has transformed it into a shrine of salty crystals and oddly shaped trinkets she found at secondhand shops or the lawns of weird neighbors I’m not entirely sure were up for grabs.
Titi Neva’s hand twists the blue crystal doorknob. The chimes hanging on top of the wood tinkle as the closet light flickers on, revealing an infinite number of crystals weighing down the shelves and the dozens of hangers holding the jewelry that Titi Neva runs a finger across, mumbling the name and purpose of each. She pulls a silver chain with a long black shape hanging off it, holding it above like she means for me to wear it.
“Black jasper will protect you from negativity,” she undoes the clasp. “This should do just fine.”
I shrug her away. “There’s no negativity I need to block, Titi—” I collide with a soft chest.
Titi Sandra drags her hands over my head and curls. “Your hair is so frizzy. Did you forget to do your oil treatment?”
“No,” I lie as she continues to roughly smooth out any frizz with whatever oil is clinging to her fingers. I sniffle and catch the scent of adobo lingering on her hands from her seasoning the meat.
Great. I’m going to smell like cooked chicken for Perri.
A quick clatter of heels comes from behind before Titi Ivy grabs my shoulder and spins me toward her. I barely make out a word before she’s swiping a gloss over my lips. “A little color wouldn’t hurt,” she says, piling on another layer. “Or a lot. I think I’ll add some liner.”
From the living room, Zoe starts to wail. Titi Sandra pulls me back and tries to tie my hair into a ponytail, muttering about how messy I look. If it wasn’t strengthened from the daily yanking and spinning the aunts do to all my sisters before we leave the house, I’m sure my head would have zero chance of remaining on my neck.
“Fluorite!” Titi Neva chokes me with another necklace.
“When you get home, we’re going to do a mask, my firstborn.” Titi Ivy taps my cheeks twice. “Your pores are forming sinkholes. This is the future face of the Hernandez bakery.”
Mom calls out, “Can someone grab Zoe’s bottle?”
There’s a tug at the bottom of my ripped shorts where Mari has appeared from thin air. “Can we read now?”
Three doorbell rings shudder through the halls. Perri’s here, and I’m
literally being pulled in different directions while the aunts fling their suggestions in the air to blend along with the pulsing reggaeton.
I’ve been in this position plenty of times, and experience has taught me to do the same thing firefighters coached me during elementary school: stop, drop, and roll. I nearly knock over Mari and ruin whatever progress Titi Sandra made with my hair, then do some horror show of a half-crawl and run to the front door.
I pull myself up, hand on the doorknob, then turn to my beautiful family of women all facing my way, still rambling about my hair, clothes, skin, everything possible. Not with judgment; never that.
It’s the love language of the Hernandez women: With every suggestion they’re saying they love me—and that I could do with some more TLC, which is apparently not just a network Titi Ivy marathons in the middle of the night while eating hot Cheetos when she’s stressed like I thought.
And I love them all. So much.
I don’t hate the noise, the chaos, the hour-long waits to get in the shower, the company, the never-solicited opinions. It’s just lately, there’s this weird feeling that’s trailing me. It’s not exactly discomfort, but because I’m so used to
being comfortable with our routine, it feels close to it. Like I’m a little off-balance.
There’s this fluttering of nerves too, especially as Perri’s and my relationship grows closer. I want us to work out so bad, but sometimes I can’t help but worry it’s impossible. Our family
is cursed.
No woman in our family can keep a partner.
Whether it be a breakup, a move, or a suspicious allergy death, every single Hernandez woman, for a hundred years, has died alone. Which sounds so dramatic, I know, but even Titi Sandra didn’t correct Titi Neva when she told—and continues to tell every so often—the story of our family’s curse. Which means it
has to be true. Titi Sandra is as serious as they come. She laughs once a year, during her favorite
Golden Girls episode. There’s no way she would lie about it.
Nobody really elaborates in detail about the Hernandez curse. Titi Neva told me it all started when my great-great-, and lots of greats after that, grandmother was left at the altar and swore that she’d never have another partner again. She’d practically tackle anyone who looked her way after the incident, and all her daughters (there are zero men in our family) and their daughters after that were taught the same. That’s why the Hernandez house was built, so the women can all help one another.
I’m supposed to live here with my sisters until we have our own kids, then pass it down to them so they can do the same. I don’t even want kids, and I find it strange that the aunts sometimes bring up Sofia and I having them when the curse exists. Like we’re expected to be single parents. I don’t want to be a parent. Or single. I want a life of my own.
I’m different—hopefully.
It’s been six months with Perri, my second longest relationship. And my longest relationship was a year, even though I hate to think about it, since it sends my stomach into a full-fledged first-place gymnastics routine.
Still, that’s longer than any of the aunts. Even Titi Ivy, who’s been married three times now. I have a chance at a different life. One where I don’t need steel muscles in my neck and live in a house that doesn’t vibrate with music all hours of the day, to love and be loved. For the curse to be broken.
And she’s waiting outside the door.
