Romiette and Julio Read Free

declared.
    “No, this one is really scary,” Romi said quietly.
    “Tell me.”
    “In the dream, I’m drowning,” Romi began. “In deep water, like almost dying. It’s terrible, and I’m almost afraid to go to sleep.”
    “Anything else?” Destiny’s eyes were intent.
    “Yeah, the water is so cold, it’s hot.”
    “That doesn’t make sense!”
    “Dreams aren’t supposed to make sense! And I’m choking and almost dead, then there’s this voice ….” Itwas getting difficult for Romi to tell her friend all of this. It was hard enough to experience, but to say it out loud made it more real and much more frightening.
    “Whose voice? Mine?”
    “No, it’s a male voice. A voice I’ve never heard before. Not my dad’s. Not any dude from around here.”
    “I like it! Does he save you?” Destiny was intrigued now.
    “I don’t know. I always wake up just as I hear his voice. Is it true that if you dream you die, then you wake up dead?” Romi asked quietly.
    “You mean that you really will die? I’ve heard that, but nobody who ever died got to come back and tell! Tell me more.”
    Romi sighed. “I wish I could. That’s all I know, but I’m not sleeping very well and I’m getting scared.”
    “Well, didn’t your horoscope say a new man was coming into your life? Maybe you’re hearing his voice.” Destiny was trying to be helpful.
    “I don’t know, but something’s got to give soon. I don’t like this,” admitted Romi.
    Just then, the bell rang for first period, and somebody yelled, “Fight! Fight! Two dudes is goin’ at it!” Dozens of kids rushed to the side of the front hall near the door. Romiette sighed and looked at Destiny. They gave each other a bored shrug, and declared at the same time, “Boys.” Romiette never even glanced toward the crowd that surrounded a kid with green hair and a new boy that nobody had seen before.

4.
Julio
    He was tall. He was strong. He was angry. And he wasn’t afraid to fight. Julio strode down the streets of Cincinnati on that January day, coat collar not doing much to cover his ears from the twenty-degree winds, boots unlaced, fists thrust into his pockets, numbed from the cold. The only thing that kept him warm was his anger. Anger at his parents for bringing him to this cold, gray city. Anger at the sky for being harsh and uncaring. Anger at himself for being scared and shivering in this ugly place. If somebody, anybody, had spoken to him then, he might have lashed out to release his fury. He wanted to destroy a wall or the sky.
    But the sidewalk was empty that January morning. Everyone with sense was on a bus or in a car, or inside a heated building. But the bus he thought he was supposed to take never arrived, so after thirty minutes of freezing in the winter wind, he started walking. The school was three or four miles down the road, he figured, so using his anger as a cloak, he headed down the street to a school he had neverseen, in a city he had just moved to, to enroll for classes in the second semester of the eleventh grade.
    Julio had just moved from Corpus Christi, Texas. He hated Cincinnati with a passion. To Julio, it was cold and dreary and everything seemed to be gray. There was dirty snow all over the dirty sidewalks.
Everything seems tight and enclosed, like nobody breathes here,
he thought.
I want to throw paint everywhere out my window and color this place up! They expect me to LIVE here? Do these people ever have any fun? Not likely. I bet you can’t even get a good enchilada here.
As he walked, his toes losing their feeling inside his boots, he glanced at the few barren, black trees that lined the street. Mostly he saw fast-food places and liquor stores next to storefront churches. Piles of trash to be collected. Recycling bins with beer bottles and unread newspapers. A few pigeons. His mood grew darker.
    There are no big, sweeping magnolia trees,
thought Julio,
only runty little maple trees with cold, skinny branches, no