Teófila’s Guide to Saving the Sun
TEÓFILA’S GUIDE TO SAVING THE SUN
CYNTHIA A. RODRIGUEZ
CONTENTS
Prologue
1. First Point of Collision
2. I Won’t Tell
3. Just a Stupid Girl
4. Some Trouble Stays with You
5. Strawberries and Mean Girls
6. Fuck Burnt Hair
7. Happy Birthday, Mr. Williams
8. They Don’t Need to Touch You
9. Anxiety is My Boyfriend
10. Breathe
11. Fear Doesn’t Live Here
12. Want to Know When You’ll Die?
13. Will My Parents Kill Me? Probably
14. Little Miss Cockblock Queen
15. Broken Things
16. Fancy Meeting You Here
17. The Fall that Started it All
18. A Little Bit of an Asshole
19. You Came to Me
20. Naked
21. Not-So-Secrets
22. New Things
23. Hate
24. Where Did You Go?
25. Rainbow Sprinkles
26. Pretty Pain
27. Gone
28. I Hate College
29. Seriously, Fuck Burnt Hair
30. Come See Me Sing
31. Stick People
32. His Beautiful and Massive World
33. Electric
34. High
35. Another One
36. The Sun and the Moon
37. Stupid Girl
38. Liar
39. Patience, My Ass
40. Best Fucking Friend
41. A Fucking High School Reunion
42. This is Withdrawal
43. Oh, How Hard You’ll Fall
44. The End
45. Starve Your Fears
46. Troubled Times
47. Healing Path
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Cynthia A. Rodriguez
The Lost Chapter
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Teófila’s Guide to Saving the Sun
Copyright © 2019 by Cynthia A. Rodriguez
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN: 9781080835485
Cover Design by Mary Ruth Baloy
Passion Creations by Mary Ruth
Edited by Christina Hart
Formatted by J.R. Rogue
First Printing
Mental illness isn’t a privilege.
Depression knows no color.
PROLOGUE
FUCKED FOR LIFE
I fell in love with a star before I knew what he was.
And once I looked up, I was fucked for life.
The girl cloaked by dusk; lived in night but longed for light.
The boy birthed by the sun; created in light and full of night.
Each point of collision led to this massive explosion, where he’s the casualty and I’m the mere onlooker. But who knows?
I feel a lot like a casualty myself.
Elijah may be the one lying in this hospital bed, his heartbeats monitored, but it’s my soul tied to the whipping post, taking every lash; every set of angry eyes on me.
Why didn’t you help him?
Why weren’t you there?
These people who’d only ever seen the boy I befriended, the teenager I liked, the young man I cared for, and the man I love as nothing more than a method of payment. It’s taken us nearly two decades to get here, but our entire story is peppered with hope, lust, disappointment, and a love that’s come so far from its original form, I don’t know how it hasn’t broken.
I glance over at him.
Maybe this is the break.
I can’t take the blame for this. Didn’t they know that I’d tried to tear the tether keeping us together? I’d attempted to cut the cord.
But we didn’t budge.
Not for long anyway.
And I’ve learned that I have no business being anyone’s savior. Not when I can hardly keep myself from drowning.
Why didn’t you try a little harder?
Why couldn’t you save him?
“Will he wake up?” they all ask.
This is the only question they’re bold enough to voice. Because they don’t know him the way that I do.
I know he will.
I know he will.
He has to.
1
FIRST POINT OF COLLISION
Elijah walked into my life with purpose. A proud seven-year-old with his hands on his hips and the sun haloing his head.
The sun, his crown.
The universe already knew he was royalty, I guess. The rest of us just had to catch up.
“What’s that?”
I lift my head and squint against the bright rays to look at the boy disrupting my examining. “Ants,” I answer, matter of factly, because isn’t it obvious? “An anthill.”
“You’re just watching them?” He squats down next to me.
I don’t bother hiding my annoyance when I glance at him, squinting my eyes again and then rolling them.
Secretly, I love the way he smells like peanut butter.
“I think they’re interesting.” The last word sounds important as it leaves my lips. I say it proudly.
“Why you over here all by yourself?” he asks me.
I shrug and he stands.
“I like it.” I don’t know the words to explain why I do, or why his presence feels so disruptive.
“Seems boring,” he announces.
I want to tell him that maybe he’s just stupid and should go back to his friends to play tag or something. Instead, I shrug again and continue watching as they march along, some carrying things larger than their own bodies.
I wish I was that strong.
I don’t see his foot until it’s too late.
“Why would you do that?” I yell, watching the ants scurry around their now-broken home. “What’d they ever do to you?”
My curls have made their way in my face in my fit of anger. I push them away, stand, and take a moment before shoving him to the ground.
I immediately regret it, but I don’t say a word as I stare at him, waiting for him to cry and tell on me.
But he doesn’t cry. Not when he sees the blood on his elbow, not when the teacher asks what happened.
Instead, after the bell rings at the end of the school day, he finds me before I get on the bus and asks me, “Are you still mad at me?”
“I don’t think you’re very nice,” I tell him. And I look him in the eye, the way my mom does when she says she’s disappointed in me.
He kicks at the ground, his eyes now on his shoes. I can tell those shoes were once white, but I love the colors they’ve picked up along the way. Even if they’d meant the demise of the ants’ home.
Maybe they’d rebuild it even better than it was before.
“I didn’t think it was a big deal.” He shrugs this time.
When his brown eyes meet mine, I don’t smile.
“Just because they’re small, doesn’t mean you should hurt them. Didn’t your mom teach you not to bully?”
“Do not tell my mama,” he says, eyes wide, and then I smile.
“I won’t.”
“Sorry I kicked the ants,” he says.
“Sorry I pushed you.” I stare at the tan band-aid covering his el
bow when he brings it into view. I’m sorry for the smooth brown skin, broken by impact.
“I’m Elijah.”
“Teófila.”
He tries to repeat my name and I shake my head.
Theeeh-ohh-feee-lah.
I was named after my papi, who died in Puerto Rico before I was born.
My dad doesn’t say much about him, other than he was mean and had skin like a raisin. Wrinkly from age and dark from our ancestors.
Most people don’t know we come in all kinds of shades. But whenever I talk to my uncles, they remind me that my culture has so many different influences, each one making us special. From our Native American roots, to the heavy Spanish influence of our conquerors, and even African when they brought slaves to our island.
I don’t know what most of it means, but I can recite it word for word.
“Call me T,” I say, offering the nickname my family uses. Everyone but my dad, anyway.
“T,” he says on the edge of a smile.
“Nice to meet you,” I tell him and grin before rushing onto the bus.
I take a seat and look out the window. He’s still standing where I left him, scanning the windows until his eyes meet mine, and he waves.
A moment later, a group of boys call him over and I watch him walk away in those once white tennis shoes.
2
I WON’T TELL
“Where do you think the birds are going?”
We’re sitting on the playscape, just in front of the slide. Elijah’s eyes shift with his question, looking up at the sky, at me, and then back up again.
“Somewhere warmer, I think,” I say.
Snow isn’t on the ground yet, but we’re bundled up in our coats and the gray sky threatens. Elijah’s coat is unzipped, and his words are cocooned by the heat of his breath against the cold air.
“Florida?” he asks. “I heard Florida is hot.”
I shrug. “I dunno. Maybe Puerto Rico?”
Every time I’ve gone, it’s been so hot that the back of my knees sweat and my hair sticks to my neck.
Not like here. Not like the cold that somehow slips into my coat, relentless.
“They can’t fly over all the water,” he says. “They’d get too tired.”
I think it over as I watch them until they’re too far to see anymore.
Most of our fifth-grade classmates stayed inside for the movie instead of coming outside for recess. There are teachers standing by the classroom door, talking to each other. Not really paying us any attention.
“Can I ask you something?”
He’s full of questions today.
“Yep.” I lean back and lie on the playscape.
“You haven’t kissed anyone before, right?”
I close my eyes and smile.
But inside, my heart jumps, over and over.
I’m only ten and a half. I don’t know anything about boys and kissing.
I imagine my first kiss and think maybe I’ll be married when that happens. My dad always tells me so. But I know some girls here are already doing it.
Scary.
“Nope.”
There isn’t a boy here that I would do that with. But I hear whispers and I see the girls giggling over boys.
I tell myself that I’m saving this special thing, but I can’t fully wrap my mind around the desire. Not when the same girls giggling end up in tears a few days later.
Fifth grade is nowhere near as fun as fourth grade was. Or even third grade.
“Me neither.”
That surprises me.
Elijah was the first of us to hold someone else’s hand, to hug someone, to kiss someone else’s cheek.
All these things happened without us talking about it beforehand.
“Summer wants me to kiss her.”
My eyes open and he’s leaning over me.
“Do you want to?” I ask, in earnest. Because this feels like the most important conversation we’ve ever had.
The idea of it makes me want to scoot away, but I stay still.
“I guess. I mean…I like her.”
There’s this little break in my chest, like hearing him say those words hurts me.
Elijah is my best friend. He’s mine.
But I have no interest in holding his hand. Or kissing him.
“Can I practice with you?” he asks me.
My eyes are wide now and I can’t hide it from him, the way he so eagerly watches from above me.
“No way,” I shout and sit up, shoving him in the process. “Gross.”
“You don’t have to be mean, T. It’s not like I want to kiss you.”
“Exactly!” I scoot away from him, emotions battling inside me.
Embarrassment, anger, confusion…and this weird jealousy poking at me like I imagine little mosquitos do.
“Fine,” he says, crossing his arms.
I stare at him from the corner of my eye. He looks up at the sky, not speaking.
And I continue to stare at him, wondering what it would be like to be soft like Summer. To be wanted like Summer. I doubt this would be her first kiss.
And then I wonder what my first kiss would be like, if it weren’t going to be here and now, with Elijah.
I know what people think of me. They laugh at my curly hair that sticks everywhere. They make fun of the clothes I wear. They even talk about how hairy my arms are.
My mom doesn’t think I should be shaving. Not even my legs.
So, if it isn’t now, when will it be? And if it isn’t Elijah, who would it be?
I imagine all of the boys in our grade and make a face.
“Okay,” I mutter.
The sudden brown eyes on me make me wonder if this is what I really want to do.
“You sure?”
Elijah leans toward me and I hold my breath for a moment.
“One kiss.” I eye the teachers and move a little closer to him.
“On three?” he asks.
I nod.
One.
He’s licking his lips.
Two.
He’s leaning in close.
Three.
His lips tap against mine. It’s the briefest of contacts.
And it seems as easy and quick as the little kisses on the cheek I get from family members.
But it isn’t. It’s so far from anything and it turns a faucet on until that drip of confusion is now drowning me.
Elijah’s looking at me, waiting.
“Okay,” I tell him for the second time. “I think you’ll be okay.”
His smile is easy as he leans back and looks at the sky one more time.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I say.
He’s silent for a moment.
And then he says, “I won’t tell.”
I imagine there’s a sadness in those words that doesn’t really exist.
But mine does.
3
JUST A STUPID GIRL
“Does your mama know you’re reading those dirty books again?”
Elijah’s voice yanks me from the top of a cliff, where I’m listening to a man tell me how much he lusts after me in his Scottish brogue.
The tug back to reality is unwelcome.
Because being a thirteen-year-old sitting alone during lunch is so much better?
I shut the book and tuck it in my bag before settling to look at him.
“How do you think you did?” I ask him.
He tries for a noncommittal noise, but I know better.
“We stayed up all night studying. I think I deserve a little more than a grunt, buddy.”
He’s all brown eyes looking everywhere but here and I’m fingers knotting into one another, waiting and worrying.
“Come on, man. I remembered some things and guessed on the rest,” he says.
It’s my turn to make a sound, my groan cut off by his nervous laugh as my head falls into my hands.
“Elijah,” I say, my mouth distorted by the hands I’m now dragging down my face.
“Teófila.”
I fight the smile making its way on my face at the sound of my full name.
“We start high school next year…”
He shoves his tray away from him and slouches back. “Please don’t give me the same lecture my mama does, T.”
“I just worry about you.”
It’s the truth. Worry is a wretched thing. It makes me stay up way past my bedtime, studying things I already know with him. It makes me wonder how he’ll do once high school starts.
It makes me wonder about that awful first kiss of ours. If he ever thinks back on it with the tinge of embarrassment that I do.
I haven’t kissed anyone since.
“You don’t have to,” he says, interrupting my thoughts. “Besides, my dad says he’s gonna talk to a few friends of his and see if there are any people looking for new talent.”
Don’t say what you’re thinking. Don’t say it, I tell myself.
“Elijah…”
His eyes stop me. It’s like they’re begging me to just believe. To have faith that, for once, his dad will pull through and not just deliver another empty promise.
After all, we’re talking about Elijah’s dreams here. Any ambition he has is placed on his voice.
And as his best friend, I need to shut up and just be here for him.
“Yo, Elijah.”
I roll my eyes at the voice speaking behind me.
“What’s up?” Elijah nods at the newcomer, further cementing my annoyance.
Elijah has his own friends and I have…books. And homework and writing stories no one will ever set eyes on. Not even the boy sitting across from me.
Elijah has his own friends and I don’t have to like all of them.
“T.”
I don’t bother looking at Terrence.
He’s the worst kind of person. The kind you don’t want to even acknowledge because of his mean-spiritedness.
“Only my friends call me that,” I mutter and reach for my bag.
“Not my fault I can’t pronounce your weird ass name.”
Jerk.
I grab my book, ready to ignore him when I think better of it and turn to face him, a fake smile plastered on my face. “Who do we blame for you being a moron, then?”
He grabs my book from me and stands, holding it above me.