Ari wasn’t used to Sloane exhibiting anxiety. “It’s no big deal. I’m happy to help,” she said, interrupting her spiral and attempting to rescue her from it.
Sloane exhaled and released her shoulders. “Thanks.”
A chilly silence wormed its way into the room. Ari was compelled to will it away with a joke. “I can’t believe you don’t speak Spanish. Not even a little something from Dora the Explorer?”
“My parents went out of their way to make sure I never learned. In school, they made me take Mandarin instead of Spanish,” she replied, her eyes darting to her lap while she made the admission. “Rosetta Stone can only teach me so much.”
“Why? Didn’t you grow up here? Why wouldn’t someone with the last name Medina, who lives in a place that’s like
seventy percent Hispanic, not speak Spanish? Even my non-Hispanic friends speak Spanish.”
Sloane’s hazel eyes dimmed, making Ari regret her questions. “They didn’t want me to have an accent,” she explained. “Lots of internalized racism, you know?”
Her honesty was harsh but not shocking. Ari nodded, abandoning her attempts to lighten the mood. “I know something about that. My mom’s Honduran and my dad is Cuban. Most of his family cut us o because he married the help,” she admitted compulsively, her heart stinging at the remembered cruelty. “I honestly don’t understand this false belief that anyone is superior to anyone else.” Ari shook her head. “We’re all just people.”
“That’s really fucked up,” Sloane decided, looking like she wanted to reach across the table to comfort her. “We lap up the bullshit that certain people are more worthy than others and destroy ourselves with it. When I was little, everyone in my family was obsessed with the fact that I’d been born a blonde. The indisputable proof that somewhere along the line we descended from the northwestern part of Spain not conquered by the Moors.” Sloane rolled her eyes and sneered in disgust. “You’d think I was touched by the gods. For shit’s sake my mom was so desperate to whitewash us she named me and my sister Sloane and Harper.” Her laugh was a bitter, caustic thing. “If it weren’t for her equally powerful obsession with being part of the Cuban-American upper class, she probably would have changed our last names too.”
“This stu is ingrained so deep,” Ari agreed. “Even in my house where my dad absolutely adores my mom, her
traditions almost always take the backseat to his. I know it’s also because we grew up in Miami where Cuban culture permeates everything, but it wasn’t until I was older that I even asked questions about where she’d come from, you know? Like I didn’t even connect to that part of my identity until my grandma moved here from Honduras when I was in middle school.” Ari’s chest ached. “She was shocked that I couldn’t pick up
food with a tortilla, tolerate anything spicy, or even understand half the words she said.”
Sloane shook her head. “And no one ever talks about it. It drives me crazy,” she said, leaning back in her chair, looking lighter after having gotten something o her chest. “What’s the worst thing you ever heard as a kid about this stu ?”
Ari sat back and thought about it, but she didn’t need to think too long. The horrific memory was never too far away.
“There was a while in high school where my friends called me Cuban Pocahontas and I pretended to be totally fine with it.” She cringed. “I even dressed the part for Halloween, which I now look back on with abject horror and wonder what the hell I was thinking.”
Sloane’s face contorted in a sympathetic grimace. “That’s pretty bad,” she agreed.
“What about you?” Ari asked, desperate to stay on a subject she’d never discussed with anyone but herself.
“Remember Professor Wagner?”
“He taught intellectual property, right?”
Sloane nodded. “He once told me I didn’t look Hispanic.”
She covered her face with her hands. “And I said thank you.”
“No! Sloane! You did not!”
With her face still covered, Sloane let out a shriek. “I did!
I did! It happened so fast, I said it before I’d even registered what he said. Maybe I was just responding to his complimentary tone, I don’t know.”
“Oh my God, have you laid in bed replaying the event over and over in your head every night since?” Ari asked with a chuckle, entirely too amused by a bashful Sloane.
“It’s been two years,” Sloane replied, peeking out from behind one of her hands. “And I literally think about it like once a week.”
“I do that too,” Ari admitted as she laughed. “I regularly relive every awkward and embarrassing experience I’ve ever had.”
Sloane slid her hands down her face. “It’s such a curse,”
she decided with a lopsided grin that made Ari’s heart take refuge in her throat.
Heat pulsated through Ari’s body, but self-preservation wasn’t enough to keep her from telling another story. “I’ve got another one that really haunts me. You remember how I worked at that grocery store, right?”