Cuba 15 by Nancy Osa

fake-marble kitchen table over two bags of White Castles and the leftover fruit punch. The cops had broken up the party, sending everyone home with a warning, and told Mark he couldn’t sell golf balls anymore without a peddler’s license. Abuela and Abuelo appeared suitably chastised over the ruckus; Mark, hunched over in the Death Throne, just pouted.
    Although it was kind of embarrassing getting busted by the police (our neighbors had come out to watch the red and blue lights twirl around and see Mark pack up his golf ball stand), all in all I thought it had been a successful way to end a party. Everybody went home wanting more, there was a ton of leftovers, and I had just witnessed the most bizarre spectacle of my fifteen years on Earth.
    And so I found my Original Comedy material.

14
    I plunged into my script. I mean, you can’t make up stuff like Sunday’s grand-slam ending to the domino party. And, as Abuelo had said good-naturedly afterward, if you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? All I had to do now was write down what happened . . . and then get up in front of a bunch of strangers and act it out, over and over again.
    The horror.
    Speech team was supposed to prep me for my big entrance into the world of women in front of God and my long-lost relatives. But what kind of logic was this: Getting up onstage in front of a strange audience supposedly makes getting up onstage in front of a strange audience less terrifying. That’s like saying that sticking your hand in a blender will make it so much easier the next time around.
    Still, I wasn’t about to quit. Like those Janus masks, I’d always had a love/hate relationship with performing. That first step is a doozy. But once you make it over the fear hump, it’s smooth sailing.
    Mr. Soloman had said a good way to get started was to come up with three points that tied together, building a beginning, middle, and end.
    That was easy; I started with Mark’s golf balls, moved on to Marianao’s domino game, and finished with Abuelo’s
pièce de résistance,
the blackened roast. Then I read it out loud to see how long it was.
    By dinnertime, I had it up to five minutes. Still short, but good enough for a first draft. The premise was that the cops show up at Abuelo’s party and throw me in jail with my family, a fate worse than death. I’d lay it on Mr. Soloman on Tuesday.

    Monday afternoon, with the weather just right for September, Janell, Leda, and I sat in different corners of Janell’s bedroom, reading. Sometimes we did that, hung out in the same room, not talking, just reading; together, but not together. I’d gone deep into Le Guin’s Earthsea, myself; Janell was off playing Chicago P.I. with V. I. Warshawski, and who knew what trip Leda was on. She had burrowed into the beanbag chair over by the stairs, while Janell lay stretched out on the amazingly thick alpaca rug by her bed and I took the window seat.
    I loved sitting in a window seat, loved holding a book on my lap there; it felt so Jane Eyre. The bay window and adjacent French doors let in golden-brown afternoon light, dappled by a birch’s mellowing leaves. A fresh-cut grass scent seeped into the room behind the clicking of the push mower as Janell’s mom worked outside in the yard.
    Janell’s bedroom ran the whole width of the back of her house and opened out onto the deck. When her dad and mom divorced, Janell and her mother converted their den into the most fabulous bedroom in the world. They’d designed different zones for sleeping, studying, and dance workouts, each painted a different tasteful color—eggplant, mustard, kale green.
    Tasteful, in fact, sums up Janell Kelly, and her mother, Alicia Pennpierson, a slender, dark-haired woman with an alluring cat purr of a Southern accent. I’ve known both of them most of my life. Alike enough to be mistaken for sisters, my friend and her mom are my idols. But I’d never tell them that.
    It was hard to switch from saying