Chapter 1 Chica, Chica, Chica Flora Violeta LeFevre despised a great many things, but few of them as much as Saturday Spanish school. They called it a school, but it was really just a classroom at the Westerly Education Center. The class was roughly a dozen students, all between the ages of seven and twelve. Like Flora, they all had Latine parents who wanted their kids to speak better Spanish but were too busy to teach them at home. Their teacher was an indefatigable young woman named Señorita María José who was so energetic that Flora suspected that her gold hoop earrings and jangly bracelets were actually solar panels. They were allowed to call her by her first name because it was Saturday school. They were not allowed to ask her why she had a girl''s name and a boy''s name. "It''s just one of those things," she had said.
Señorita María José, or Srta. MJ for short, had grown up in Puerto Rico and was now getting her master''s in teaching at Brown University. All of the parents in Westerly, the town where Flora lived, said Brown University in a hushed and reverent tone, the same way the priest said our Lord and Savior during Sunday service. Flora''s mother said, "We are so lucky to have María José teaching you Spanish. That woman is brilliant!" Flora didn''t have anything against her teacher. What she did have a problem with was spending practically half of one of her two days off doing extra school just because her parents were from Panama. But her parents made her go from nine a.m.
to twelve noon, every Saturday no matter what excuse she could invent, from the time her eyesight "disappeared" to the violent stomachache that was really excellent acting for a ten--year--old, as anybody would tell you. It would have been the worst except for the girl sitting next to her, who was the very best. Flora, who was ten and in the fifth grade, looked over at her best friend, Clara. Clarita slowly and deliberately rolled both of her eyes to the center of her head. Flora tried, and failed, to stifle a giggle. The lesson that day was about reflexive verbs, which made no sense to Flora. Cállate la boca was the only reflexive phrase Flora could say with confidence. But if she ever told her big sister to shut her mouth, she would get into more trouble than she knew what to do with.
"A verb is reflexive when the subject and the receiver are the same," Señorita MJ told the class. "For example, I washed the plate, not reflexive. I took a shower, reflexive." Flora laid her head on the table. It didn''t make sense. None of it made sense. She was hoping to settle in for a teeny--tiny nap when she felt a note come sliding across the table. Flora opened it up and grinned.
It said: Perk up, buttercup. Flora looked over at Clara, who pretended to nap on the table, snored loudly, then pantomimed waking up and looking around as if she were completely disoriented. Flora''s Spanish was far from perfect, but she knew that Clara was muy graciosa. Perhaps even the very funniest of all BFFs. When the clock struck noon, Srta. María José said, "Okay chicos, you are free to go. Disfruten de su sábado." Flora grabbed her navy--blue peacoat and dashed for the door.
"¡Hasta whenever, Señorita María José!" she called out as she exited the classroom. "Wait for me, Flora la Fresca!" Clara bellowed. It was Clara''s nickname for Flora and it had started the previous summer when Clara had taken the windbreaker that she wore around her waist and tied it around her shoulders. Then she took out a golden paper crown from the back pocket of her denim shorts and put it on Flora''s head. She said, "I, Queen Clara, now residing in the realm of Westerly, have found you, Flora, to be the embodiment of all that is fun and good. From this day on, you shall be known as Flora la Fresca." Sometimes the kids at school called her Flo, which Flora hated. But she liked Flora la Fresca.
Even her parents called her that sometimes. If she wasn''t exactly fresca--meaning fresh with a little bit of attitude--she definitely aspired to be. * * * Flora thought of that day as she waited for her friend. Clara threw her quilted silver vest over her bright yellow sweatshirt and did a TikTok dance out of the room. Flora said, "Come on, Clara!" but she didn''t really mind waiting for her to start walking home. Everything was more fun when Clara was around. It was mid--November, but the day was warm like September as the girls walked through Wilcox Park and headed toward the ocean. Westerly was a pretty little town on the coast of Rhode Island.
Two and a half hours from New York and ninety minutes from Boston, it was a popular summer getaway. Most of the year, there were fewer than twenty thousand people in the town. It sounded like a lot, but it wasn''t really. There were only thirty kids in the fifth grade of their public school, and Flora and Clara knew them all, as well as their siblings and parents. Once Memorial Day rolled around, the town''s population doubled. The girls noticed that the streets filled with the faces of strangers as the big summer houses on the ocean''s edge, which sat empty most of the winter, swelled with wealthy families and their guests. Flora''s uncle Rogelio, her mother''s oldest brother, had moved to the town thirty years before to work at the quarry. Westerly Quarry was famous for its natural pink stone.
Tío Rogelio had done well there and as he rose in the company, he got jobs for more and more Panamanians. Soon there were more than two dozen Panamanian families living in the small New England town. Her uncle said that Westerly reminded him of Panama---not the cold or the snow, but how on a warm summer day, you could wake up and smell the briny saltiness of the Atlantic Ocean. Even if you couldn''t see it, you could smell it. Tío said, "Where the sea is, we''re home." Flora stood in the middle of the park and took a big sniff. Clara looked over at her and raised one eyebrow, then the other. "Oh Flora," her friend said.
"Are you smelling the sea again?" Flora nodded. Clara said, "Then I''ll just have to take you there in my boat." She pretended to drag an invisible canoe across the park gravel, then stopped midway and mimed dropping the end of the canoe. "Flora! It''s heavy. Aren''t you going to help?" Flora went to where she imagined the back of the boat to be. She pushed at the air and Clara pulled. Clara looked up and said, "Come on, Flora. Being invisible doesn''t make the boat any lighter.
Put some muscle into it." Flora smiled and took a step back and pushed as if her life depended on it. Clara looked up approvingly and said, "Chica, that''s how it''s done." She stepped oh--so--carefully into the invisible canoe and gestured for Flora to join her. Flora stepped in and sat cross--legged behind her friend. Without needing to say a word, the girls began to move their invisible oars in unison. Sure they knew they looked goofy, but they were busy creating their own world. "A la derecha," Clara whispered softly.
"A la izquierda." They sat that way, legs crisscrossed, moving their hands in semi--circles as if their fingers were oars and the gravel was the deepest blue ocean. Flora said, "My dad said that when I''m sixteen, I can take sailing lessons." Every summer Sunday, early before her mother and sister woke up, Flora and her father would walk to the Westerly boat yard and look at the boats heading out for the day. Her father, Santiago LeFevre, was tall, with a scraggly beard and a smile that was never far from his face. He would drink coffee, she would drink a babyccino---steamed milk with cocoa powder---and they would talk about boats. Flora dreamed about being able to sail a boat, the way her sister talked about getting a driver''s license. Clara kept paddling.
"Great, I''ll take sailing lessons when I''m sixteen too." People passed them in the park, but no one seemed to notice their invisible canoe. "Do you remember that girl Liba Daniels who used to pick us up from school when we were in the third grade?" Flora said "third grade" as if it had been eons ago and not just two years before. Clara nodded and said, "Claro, Liba was cool." Flora said, "My dad told me that Liba got her sailing license and she''s taking a gap year from college. She''s sailing some rich person''s boat from Rhode Island to the Caribbean." Clara looked confused. "Why doesn''t Señor Rich Person take his boat to the Caribbean himself?" Flora said, "It could be a she.
" Clara pursed her lips. "Fine, Señora Rich Person." She shrugged. "I guess it''s a thing. They''re too busy or something, so they hire people to sail their boats from here to their homes in the islands." "You get paid to sail someone else''s fancy boat? How much?" Flora said, "I have no idea. But I want that job." Flora felt her phone buzz.
It was a text from her mother. "¿Dónde estás?" She stepped out of the boat. "It''s my mom. I better get home." "Me too," Clara said. They walked home, talking the whole way about boats and how they couldn''t wait until they were old enough to take a year off of school and get paid cold, hard cash to lounge about on a boat all day. Being in the fifth grade was fun. But being teenagers together was going to be everything .
Chapter 2 Flora''s House The brown shingled cottage where Flora lived with her parents and older sister looked almost like every other house in their little seaside village. But what Flora liked about her house was that there was a secret behind it. When you went.