For Priscila, the summer of 2011 was a pink summer, everything looked pink to her. The color of happiness.
For the rest, that summer was overshadowed by the Christmas that followed it, the Christmas they would never forget. The Christmas that was anything but quiet.
The redhead’s sister, who’s also a redhead
Iwake to the sound of the television in my bedroom and open my eyes to find myself face down, head buried between the pillow and the mattress. I sit up—well, barely—and turn my head to find my brother Adrián sitting next to me on the bed, his back against the headboard and a cup of coffee in his hands.
He greets me with a “Good morning.”
“How long have you been there?” I stretch and rub sleep from my eyes. “What time is it?”
“A couple hours and—” he lifts his wrist to check his watch “—it’s eight in the morning, more or less. Well, who starts?”
Adrián always goes straight in for the kill. No half measures. No preliminaries. He warned me yesterday that we needed to talk, that he also had something he needed to share. He’s not going to let it go any longer.
“I will,” I say, answering his question. “Let’s rip the band-aid off.”
“Okay,” he agrees. “Go on.”
I sit up, fully this time, joining him against the headboard. I open my mouth to begin but my bedroom door opens and Jaime appears.
“Family reunion, Cabanas?”
Sometimes I think Jaime just smells me. Without asking, he walks over to the bed, climbs onto it and sits cross-legged across from us. I have no problem talking about what happened with Alex in front of my best friend; in fact, I’m sure he has something to say too. And I don’t miss the sidelong glance my brother and Jaime share. Sure, I’m going to talk now. But once I’m done, I’m going to demand an explanation about what happened yesterday in the ship’s bathroom.
“You’ve arrived at the perfect moment,” I say. “I was just about to tell Adrián my story with Alex.”
“Past or present?”
“Present.”
“So there is a story, then?” my brother asks.
“Of course there’s a story, blondie,” Jaime says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world and my brother’s oblivious.
Adrián rolls his eyes, snorting.
“In retrospect, we could say that it all started because you”—I point my finger at Jaime—“encouraged me to have sex with Alex.”
“True,” my friend replies.
“What? Elaborate, please,” Adrián says, puzzled.
I reel it off in one go, vomit it all out, not even stopping to breathe. “The day of the beach bar opening, Alex approached me in belligerent mode, his usual mode since I came back.” I don’t know why I add that bit, it’s common knowledge. “Then Jaime told me the problem was that our story had remained unfinished, that we went from being madly in love, wanting each other like crazy—”
“Fucking like crazy,” my friend adds, interrupting. I ignore him and forge ahead as if he hadn’t spoken.
“—to hating each other, not seeing each other at all, overnight. We were forced to forget about each other. Jaime assured me that there was too much sexual tension between us because we hadn’t yet put an end to our relationship and that it could be solved with a fuck.”
“You told her that?Really?” My brother looks at Jaime, barely believing it.
“Yep,” I say as Jaime nods, several times, so proud of himself. “And just to be clear, I don’t hold him responsible for what happened after that, far from it. But you know what? I think he was right; Alex and I weren’t done yet. We’d left everything up in the air, like a balloon stuck in a tree. And too many years had passed to keep that balloon contained. We had to do something, set it free once and for all or... just pop it. I kept thinking about it and when Alex showed up again, don’t ask me why, but I blurted out that Jaime thought we should have sex. We argued and I went home angry and sick with everything, and he followed me, and we argued some more, then suddenly he went nuts. He kissed me, took out his keys and we stumbled inside. We started walking up the stairs with a single goal in mind and I couldn’t stop thinking that I hadn’t felt that way in four years. That I had longed for it infinitely more than I thought. That my life had become a succession of black and white slides and then out of the blue, those slides took on a huge palette of colors: pink, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, green, orange, purple—”
“Whoa! Stop, stop, stop, hold on!” my brother yells, raising his hands.
Jaime’s frowning. “Cyan? Is that really a color?”
“Alex started it?” Adrián asks.