The Size of Your Dreams, - [good books for high schoolers txt] 📗

needed help. “You know what else Mr. Griffin would say? Turn to your Mastermind Group.”

“Christy?” Darnell asked.

“Why not? She’s thin and an athlete.”

“Plus she’s a girl, so she probably knows how to cook,” Darnell gave voice to what I’d also been thinking but hadn’t wanted to say.

I tried her cell phone. Christy laughed when I told her why we’d called. “Happy to help. You guys have both been there for me. I’m just leaving swim practice now. I’ll come meet you.”

When she arrived, Christy took one look at our cart and balked. “You’re not expecting to lose weight on this stuff, are you?”

Darnell explained about his mom and her shopping list. “We really don’t know what to buy for dinner.”

“Or how to cook it,” I added.

“I want to get something low calorie,” Darnell said, “but my uncle says that carbs are bad for losing weight, and we think too much meat sounds unhealthy. So we just froze.”

Christy squeezed in her cheeks to keep herself from breaking into giggles. “If you want to go with one of those fad diets, you’re on your own. All I can tell you is that my family eats tons of carbs. My mom cooks just like her mom and her mom before that. And we’re definitely not fat.”

“Where’s your mom from, anyway?” Darnell asked. “Mexico?”

Christy rolled her eyes. “Not everyone who speaks Spanish is from Mexico, you gringo!”

“I’m not a gringo. I’m black, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“You don’t have to be white to be a gringo, Darnell. You’re just a black gringo.”

“So where are you from?” Darnell asked,

“Colombia. We moved here when I was three.”

“And what do you eat?”

“Food, Black Gringo. Real food. Rice and beans and potatoes and corn. We love avocado, mango, salads, and berries.”

Christy grabbed an empty shopping cart and led us around the supermarket. We practically had to run to keep up as she piled in black beans, rice, yucca (whatever that was), and dozens of other vegetables.

“Kelvin, grab a plantain.” She pointed down a vegetable aisle.

The plantains looked like giant bananas and came in two equally unappetizing varieties, green and hard, or a soft yellowish-brown with black splotches.

I must have stood debating which ones to get for some time, since Christy came up behind me and chose a green one.

“Good choice,” I said. “I’ll take unripe over rotten any day.”

“White Gringo, this is how they’re supposed to look. The brown ones are sweet, the green ones savory. And before you make another gringo remark, you eat them cooked, not raw.”

She stormed off, but I caught her grinning to herself. Far from being upset, she was thoroughly enjoying bossing us around.

By the time we checked out, we had two full shopping carts worth of food, and the price at the register was astronomical. Yet, the items Christy picked out came in at a tiny fraction of the cost of what we bought for Darnell’s mom.

When we reached Darnell’s, Christy had us put all the groceries away and clear the countertops before we began. “I can’t work in chaos,” she said. Cooking brought out her Latin side. She pulled up a Carlos Vives album on her phone and swayed her hips in rhythm as she set the rice to cook, adding some spice that turned it orange. It took all Darnell’s focus to stick to his assigned tasks rather than watch Christy at work.

Darnell chopped onions, which got him all teary-eyed, and I peeled and cut the plantain into chunks, but neither of us performed to Christy’s standards. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you Gringos how to use a knife?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “First off, get rid of these puny little things. Haven’t you got a chef’s knife?”

“What’s a chef’s knife?” Darnell asked.

Christy groaned. “Just get me the biggest knife you have.”

Darnell pulled out a monstrous knife that looked brand new. Christy took one look at it and said, “oh good, you do have a chef’s knife. Now pay attention.” She took Darnell’s cutting board and put the tip of the knife near one edge, leaving the back near the pile of onions. “Now, see where the knife is curved? That’s the pivot. Place your left hand there, and rock the knife back and forth.” Her right hand rose and fell like lightning, leaving the onion diced into a hundred tiny pieces. She lifted the cutting board over a pot and, with a flick of her wrist, pushed the onions in with the back of the knife. Christy handed me the knife, “Now you try it with the plantains.”

I tried to duplicate her motions with little success, though, awkward as I was, I still cut up the plantain far faster than I had with my ‘puny’ knife. When I finished, she pushed the chunks into the pot with the black beans (we used canned, even though Christy said you should always buy dried beans and soak them overnight. She acted like a cappuccino lover forced to drink instant coffee). She sprinkled spices into the pot and brought it to a boil.

Darnell looked around at all we were preparing. “Wait, don’t we need a protein?”

Christy smacked him on the forehead. “Beans and rice have tons of protein. You don’t know anything about food, do you?”

Darnell’s shoulders rose to his ears.

“It’s time you got yourself an education, Darnell.” She used his real name rather than calling him Black Gringo—Christy was no longer joking around. She looked him square in the eyes. “How else are you going to lose weight while staying healthy?”

“You’re right.” Darnell nodded. “Smarter, not harder.”

“Smarter, not harder.”

“I guess getting an education should be the first step on my card. I’m just not sure where to start.”

“I’m going to call my mom and tell her I’m staying for dinner,” I said. “It smells like Colombian food might not taste so bad after all. Then what do you say we all sit down and brainstorm ways you can learn what you need to know?”

“Sounds good,” Darnell said.

“Christy?”

“I’m in, Gringos.”

* * *

The Sunday after Christmas started out clear, then snow started falling in late afternoon and didn’t stop.

By the time I woke on Monday, December 28, we had eighteen inches of new snow, and guess who was assigned to go clear the driveway so Dad could get out?

I bundled up against the cold, which kept me snug for the first few minutes on the snow blower, but soon enough I was wiping sweat off my forehead.

After about twenty minutes, I’d made minimal progress on the driveway and had already pulled off my jacket to keep from overheating. I turned off the plow for a quick break—the noise of that thing is enough to set you on edge—and I heard a honk. A truck pushed through the slushy streets, flashing its lights.

Jarod pulled up in his pickup, now outfitted with the snowplow on front. “Get out of the way,” he told me.

I hauled the snow blower back to the safety of the garage. Jarod lowered his plow and drove right up the driveway, pushing a mountain of snow off to the side. It took him three passes—and no more than five minutes—to clear the entire driveway.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Hey, I owe you.” Jarod shook my hand. “You won’t believe what’s going on.”

Before he could tell me, my neighbor from across the street opened her front door and came out with a jacket pulled on over her robe. She waved, and I waved back, a little confused, until I realized she wasn’t waving at me; she was frantically trying to get Jarod’s attention. He signaled to her that he would be over in a minute, then said, “There’s another one. It’s been like this all morning.”

“How many have you done?”

“I’ve lost count. Hey, why don’t you grab your jacket and come with me? I could use the help. I’ll give you $20 an hour.”

“I can’t drive your truck.”

“You won’t need to. I’ll do all of the driving.”

I had nothing else to do, and Jarod had already saved me an hour’s worth of work on the driveway. I ran into the house, told my father that the driveway was all clear, grabbed a bagel from the breadbox, and was back out by the time Jarod had finished the neighbor’s driveway.

She handed him $40 and said, “Are you sure you can’t do the walks?”

“The driveways have to take priority for now, but once the snow stops and the driveways are all clear, I’d be happy to come back and do the walks for you. Here, take my number and call me the day after the snow stops.”

When we got back into the truck, Jarod said, “Dealing with her took me almost as long as plowing the drive. From now on, that’s your job. That, and answering my phone.”

“Who will be calling?”

“I honestly have no idea who most of them are or how they got my number.”

The phone rang, and I stared at it—Jarod hadn’t told me what to say.

“Just put it on speaker for now,” he said, and then called out, “Hi, Dr. McCauley.”

“Jarod, I heard you’ve gotten yourself a plow.”

“That’s right, how can I help you?”

“Any chance you can come by and do my parking lot?”

“Absolutely. You have what, 12 spaces?”

“18.”

“That’s not a problem. It’ll run $200 if you’re interested.”

“That much?”

“I can do it for $100 tomorrow if the snow stops. But today it’s all emergencies.”

Dr. McCauley hesitated, then said, “all right.”

“Wonderful. I should be in your part of town early this afternoon.” Jarod shot me a wink, clearly thinking back to the advice Bill had given him. I knew the location, which was less than two miles away.

There was silence on the line. Finally, Dr. McCauley said, “I’ll make it $300 if you can come right now.”

Jarod shot me a huge grin. “On my way.”

Before we finished Dr. McCauley’s parking lot, two adjoining business managers came over and asked us to do theirs. The snow didn’t stop falling until 3 pm, and we didn’t stop plowing until nearly 10 pm. The phone hardly stopped ringing all day, and by the time Jarod dropped me off at home, I’d left him with a list of bookings for the following day. About half of them were driveways or parking lots, the rest were walkways that he hadn’t gotten to today. I made a couple of hundred dollars for a day of light work. But my earnings were nothing next to Jarod’s. He hit his entire monthly earning goal and managed to cover most of the cost of his new plow all in one day.

* * *

I babysat Megan again on New Year’s Eve while our parents went out with friends. “You seem different,” she said to me.

“Different from who?” I asked as I stirred a bowl of brownie batter.

“From how you used to be.” She looked into the bowl and winced. “Those are going to be totally disgusting by the way.”

“Darnell told me about the recipe. He said he tried it last week and it turned out pretty good.”

“Brownies out of black beans? That sounds so nasty.”

“I know. Can I let you in on a secret?”

Megan leaned in. “What’s that?”

“I wanted to try it because Darnell said they were good. But I also bought a junky chocolate chip cookie mix in case these turn out as revolting as they sound.”

Megan laughed. “How come you changed so much?”

“Oh come on, I haven’t changed that much.”

“You have. You barely talked to me