Before We Were Free by Julia Álvarez Read Free Book Online

feet. Mami has also put some of her lipstick and rouge on me and sprayed hair spray in my hair to make me feel more grown-up. But I guess I still look like I’m twelve going on eleven.
    Later, in bed, I keep waking to the dull, pleasant sound of voices coming from the patio outside my window. Toward midnight, everybody starts singing carols in English and Spanish, and sometimes in both languages combined, now the English overpowering the Spanish, and now the Spanish overpowering the English, depending on whose voices carry the tune of that song.
    I finally fall asleep and dream that Santa has arrived in a black Volkswagen filled with cousins carrying baskets full of apples and raisins and nuts. He’s knocking and knocking at our front door, but no one can hear him for all the party noise inside.
    I sit bolt upright in bed, determined to let him in. An eerie silence fills the house. The guests seem to have left. I open the jalousies beside my bed and look out past the patio to the yard beyond. The party lanterns have been blown out and the garden is shrouded in darkness. But far off, at the back of the property, a light is shining in Tío Toni’s
casita,
a glittering sparkle among the dark foliage. In my dazed and sleepy state, I feel a surge of joy, as if Secret Santa has arrived and I am a little kid again.

four
    Disappeared Diary
    Mrs. Brown always says that writing makes a person more thoughtful and interesting. I don’t know about interesting, but the diary I got for Christmas is sure making me think about a lot of things.
    Sam, for instance. His blond-white hair that no longer seems too white . . . his dreamy blue eyes, like a daydreamy sky . . . and suddenly, I’m thinking, I
do
want him as more than a friend, whether I’m allowed to have a boyfriend or not!
    Before I wrote all this out, I really didn’t know I felt this way deep down.
    I always write with a pencil for a reason. I want to be sure that on a moment’s notice, I can erase what I’ve written. I still have Carla’s huge eraser. With a few strokes back and forth, I can get rid of any evidence if the SIM come to our door.
    Another danger is Mami. Not that my mother is the nosy kind, as she believes God in heaven can see you and that is supervision enough. But given how nervous she is these days, and given the trouble we seem to be in, and supposing a diary should just happen to fall out from under a pillow as she’s straightening a bed, her eyes might read a sentence like “I think I am falling in love with Samuel Adams Washburn,” and that’ll be the end of my being allowed to have Sam as any kind of a friend.
    So whenever I write down something personal, I let it stay written for the rest of the day, like savoring a piece of hard candy before biting down on it. Then, at night, I erase that page to be on the safe side.
    I haven’t told Sam about my diary because I know he’ll ask to see it. I do mention that my parents always review my letters to Carla before I send them off. As for Carla’s letters to me, a messy censor must read them because the envelopes come torn and taped, with whole sentences sometimes blocked out.
    Sam tells me about this invention in the United States called invisible ink that lets you write stuff down so that no one can read it until the page is soaked in a chemical that makes all the letters reappear.
    I wish I had a bottle of that ink for writing in my diary because the truth is I feel kind of sad writing in pencil, always prepared to erase. But Sammy says that ink is probably not sold anywhere in the country, not even at Wimpy’s.
    School is supposed to reopen on Monday, January 9, soon after Epiphany, but we get a notice from the principal that classes will not resume until the end of the month. It turns out a lot of the Americans are traveling to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of their new president, Mr. John F. Kennedy. Many, like the Farlands, won’t be coming back.
    Since Papi knows Mr. Farland from