Finding Miracles by Julia Álvarez Page A

with each other, but it was that hyped friendliness when what you are really feeling is uncomfortable with a person.
    Up at the front of the bus, Alfie kept glancing in the rearview mirror at us.
    I told myself not to get paranoid. Alfie often did his mirror check to make sure, as he said, that the natives were not acting restless. Sometimes he’d see something going on and he’d sing a few lines altered from some old song to make us behave. “What goes up, must come down, sit your little butts while the wheels spin on,” when someone was standing up in the aisle before the bus had stopped. Or, “On every bus, turn, turn, turn, there are some rules, turn, turn, turn, the rule to be quiet, the rule to calm down,” when we were being too rowdy. Sometimes, just for fun, he’d break into song and the whole bus would join in, “We all live in a yellow school bus, a yellow school bus, a yellow school bus,” to the tune of “Yellow Submarine.”
    Today, I distinctly heard him humming, “Do you believe in passion in a young girl’s heart...”
    Oh please, I thought. It’s true that sometimes I’d look at Pablo, drinking in everything about him. But it wasn’t because I had some mega crush on him like Meredith. I’d stare, wondering, Did my birth mother have that color hair? Is that how my birth father would express himself?
    At least Alfie didn’t say anything obviously embarrassing as I went down the stairs. Just his usual. “Watch your step there, Milly.”
    Pablo was shaking his head as we walked down the road to our drive. “He says all the words wrong!”
    I explained Jake and Em’s theory about Alfie frying his memory cells in the sixties with drugs. “By the way, how do you know so much about the Beatles?”
    “That’s how I learned my English back home.” Pablo strummed an imaginary guitar and sang a few bars of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” tossing his hair every which way in that Beatlemania way.
    It was the first time I’d seen Pablo really let loose. I watched, laughing. Pablo had changed in the last couple of months. His jeans were fashionably faded (which could be that he’d been wearing them on and off for two and a half months!) and wrinkled (which could be Mrs. Bolívar had no time for extra ironing these days); his hair was longer, not tamped down with some hair cream. And now that he was smiling more, his dimples showed. He was looking good, but it wasn’t just that. He seemed easier to talk to, a guy I wanted for a friend. Maybe it was me who had changed?
    “I guess I should scream and throw myself at you,” I teased. “That’s what girls used to do to the Beatles, you know?”
    Pablo smiled, his dimples deepening. “Why do you think I learned their songs?”
    Hmm, I thought. We’d had this long discussion in Mrs. Gillespie’s class about “machismo.” The stereotype of the Latin guy thinking he’s God’s gift to women. “I thought women just automatically did that with Latin men?” I kept a straight face.
    “¿Bueno?”
Pablo looked at me, as if saying, Well? So? Get on with it!
    “Very funny!” I folded my arms and narrowed my eyes at him. “This might come as a big surprise, Pablo. But some women prefer their men as equals.”
    “¡Ayyyy, una feminista!”
Pablo ducked, shielding his face, as if I’d shown a crucifix to a vampire in one of those old movies. It was pretty obvious he was joking. But I didn’t feel like letting him off the hook, just in case.
    “Is
feminist
like a dirty word in your country?”
    “Some men don’t like strong women,” he admitted. “But that just shows how weak they are, no?”
    I gave him thumbs up. Good for you, I thought.
    “Me, I like my women strong,” Pablo went on. “That way they can take care of me.” With a grin like that, he had to be joking. Still, I gave him thumbs down.
    We walked up our drive, Pablo remembering some of his favorite sixties songs.
    “If you love the Beatles so much, I can dig up some of Dad’s