Winners of Monroe Writes Contest announced

“What’s wrong with it?” Angelo chews a veggie burger and wipes tomato guts off his fingers.

Peeled-paint walls. Cobwebbed windows littered with bug carcasses. Sticky plastic tablecloths. That’s what. 

“People here don’t eat avocado sandwiches.” I’ve only been in town a month, but I know Brunswickians eat fried chicken and shrimp that pop like ripe grapes in your mouth. “Only three percent of Americans are vegetarians.”

“So?” 

“So why didn’t you get a job at a steak house?”

“I got a job where I could find one. Besides, we get free food.”

“Over three thousand jobs were created in Georgia last month. Surely you can find one somewhere else.”

Angelo doesn’t appreciate my factoids. I’ve learned this since we left L.A. two months ago. Angelo put a continent between him and the crime he committed. I suspect he’d like to hop on one of the ships that slide through the river and lengthen that by an ocean.

“Did you know salt marshes produce more food than cornfields? Tons of stuff lives in them.” I haven’t seen the marshes yet. 

“Don’t you have summer homework?”

I shrug. Little Women is in my backpack, but I’d rather surf the web on Angelo’s laptop.
I was zipping that very backpack when Angelo signed me out of fifth period science class. We were crossing into Arizona before I wised up. 

“You’re kidnapping me.”

“I’m rescuing you, Kara. I promised your dad I’d take care of—”

“I want to go home. I want Muffin.” 

I repeated these words each time we crossed a state line. I said them in Houston where I lost my name after Angelo bought papers saying he was legal and I was his daughter. I was still saying them when he signed in as A. Muñoz at the shoebox-looking hotel in Brunswick. I cried when a yellow cat slinked behind the dumpster by our room. Mom was so strung out she couldn’t remember to feed me. She’d never notice Muffin fading away to skinny-kitty nothingness. 

Now, Angelo looks almost happy, chewing his fake burger. “It’s okay here. We’ll buy a shrimp boat maybe. What do you say? Call it La Sobrina Loca.”

That sounds like something Dad would have said. I almost laugh. “The Crazy Niece? You’re the one who’s crazy, Angelo…” I point a carrot stick at him. “Peniche.” I whisper our forbidden name to remind us who we are. 

Angelo frowns. 

I look away. “I want to go—” But the word “home” cracks open in my head like an egg. “I want…to see the marshes.”

 So we do. I stand on their black-mud lip and imagine myself the figurehead on a shrimp boat, Spanish moss trailing like tears from my hair. I skim over water that feeds ten-thousand jillion things.