"The Flamenco Academy" by Sarah Bird Page A

specialties to the
menu. He shopped the night before and left everything in the
refrigerator. Nothing microwaved. On Sunday we actually cooked. I
pulled out a couple of fifty-count bags of blue corn tortillas and
dragged them through the red chile that Alejandro’s mother made by
soaking dried red chiles until she could scrape the pulp off the
skins and cook that with pork shoulder.
    I rolled up a batch of pork enchiladas,
another of beef, some with just asadero cheese, covered them with
sauce and cheese, and slid the pans into the industrial oven. I
made another batch with green chile sauce. On Sundays Alejandro
banished fries and tots in favor of sopaipillas. I had just lowered
the first batch into the fryer and the shop was filling with the
heavenly smell of yeast and flour they made as they puffed up when
the high-pitched shriek of a transmission in its final days alerted
me that the Skankmobile approached. I glanced out through the
drive-up window in time to see Didi run the red light at Central
and Monroe before cutting into the parking lot.
    She squealed up in the ’Stang and jumped
out, grabbing the hideous striped uniform shirt we were supposed to
wear, and which Didi might occasionally drape over her real
clothes. Her real clothes that day were the Japanese schoolgirl
drag she’d been wearing last night when I’d left her at the Hilton.
That morning, watching her dance through the parking lot, I was
struck by how spindly, how vulnerable she looked. Her short skirt
showed off the speed freak figure she attributed to ADD. Didi
maintained that her attention deficit disorder kept her distracted
from food. My theory was that she didn’t have ADD. She only claimed
to so she could get prescriptions for the Ritalin that kept her too
speeded up to eat. Or sleep. Sleeping was something she clearly
hadn’t done much of last night.
    She jerked the back door open, stepped in,
and threw her arms open. “Ah, the smell of five-month-old fryer
grease on a Sunday morning. Who needs church when we have Puppy
Taco?” Didi grabbed a handful of the slurpy tomatoes I’d just
sliced up, slid them into her mouth like oysters, and closed her
eyes against what was obviously a monster hangover.
    “Somewhere in the depths of my bowels
today’s tomatoes will meet last night’s Stoli and create the
perfect Bloody Mary.”
    “So did he show?”
    She played it cool. “Who?”
    “Who! Julie, of course.”
    “Ah, Julie.” She imported a look of fond
remembrance. “Dear, sweet, naughty Julie.”
    “Tell! Tell! Tell!”
    “Hydrate! Hydrate! Hydrate!” She turned on
the water in the giant, industrial-sized sink, stuck her hand under
the flow, siphoned about a gallon into her mouth, then collapsed
onto the upturned mop bucket, her skinny rear fitting perfectly
between the wheels on the bottom, legs straight out in front with
that Bambi-on-the-ice kind of sexy cuteness. She heaved a big sigh
and leaned her head back against the wall. Being Didi Steinberg,
Queen of Albuquerque Groupies, took a lot out of a person.
    “So?” I prompted.
    “So our Julie learned more than Swiss at
that fancy boarding school, if you know what I mean. And I think
you do.”
    “Uh, they don’t actually speak Swiss in
Switzerland. I mean, there isn’t actually a Swiss language. They
speak French and German and—”
    “Don’t nerd out on me, Rae, okay?”
    “Sorry. Just keeping the details straight.”
That was my job in our friendship. Keeping the details
straight.
    “So he came back to the hotel? You met
him?”
    “Met him? Uh, yeah, I ‘met’ him.” Didi
rolled onto her right hip and hiked up her skirt to show me the
bottom half of her left cheek. A red hickey, purpling at the edges,
floated across it like an end-of-the-world sunset. Above the hickey
were penned the initials J.C.
    “No effing way?” I shrieked.
    “Yes, fucking way.”
    “And...”
    “You know how sublime and divine and scrumpo
he is in videos?”
    I nodded wildly to affirm