What the Moon Saw Read Online Free Page B

tortilla. Were the eyes in there, too?
    A boy walked by waving ice pops in the air and carrying a cooler streaked with mud.
    “Would you like an ice pop?” Abuelita asked.
    I nodded. The ice pops looked safe enough in sealed packages. Anyway, I was almost too hungry to care. At the airport, when it was too late to change my mind, Mom had given me a long list of things not to do: Don’t drink unboiled water; don’t eat street food; don’t eat raw fruits or vegetables; don’t eat without washing your hands for thirty seconds first. The last thing I’d eaten was the lasagna I’d nibbled at nervously on the plane.
    Abuelita called to the ice pop boy.
    I liked watching my grandmother. Her braids were woven with an orange ribbon and tied together at the ends. Her hair reached down to the small of her back, and it looked like she’d never cut it in her life. And another thing about her—even though she was shorter than me, she
seemed
tall. The way she held her neck long and her head high reminded me of a cat I had years ago. There was something catlike and graceful in the way she moved, even though she was so sturdy.
    She gave three coins to the boy, and he handed her an orange ice pop.
    His hands were filthy. The plastic wrapper dripped muddy water as Abuelita passed it to me.
    “Here, Clara,” she said, and settled back down in the seat.
    I wiped the wrapper off on my shirt while she wasn’t looking. The ice pop turned out to be mango-flavored and good. I licked it and tried not to worry about germs. I hadn’t even been able to wash my hands after I’d peed behind a cactus at our last stop. I didn’t see any sign of a bathroom at this stop, either. I wondered if I’d get Montezuma’s revenge. That’s what Samantha’s cousin got when she went to Cancún and had ice cubes in her Coke. She spent the whole vacation in the bathroom.
    Abuelo bought the tickets for our last bus, which would head toward the coast. The coast! Just when I started imagining a beach complete with snorkeling and palm trees, he said we would get off hours before the ocean, probably at around dawn.
    What? A whole night of traveling?
This was unbelievable.
    Abuelo showed me the route on a map hanging on the wall by the ticket counter.
    “It can’t be that far,” I said, looking at the key, wondering if I’d entered a land where time and space worked inside a different set of rules.
    “Oh, but it is all narrow mountain roads,” he said. “The bus must crawl slowly around the curves. Like a snake.” He moved his hand like a snake and laughed.
    I laughed back to be polite, but I didn’t like the idea of any winding mountain roads. It sounded dangerous.
    A half hour later, at sunset, when the sky was streaked with pink and orange, we boarded the bus. It started up after a few tries and made its way up the twisted road, snorting and wheezing as though it had a terrible cold. The houses along the side of the road were patched together from scraps of metal and plastic. We swerved suddenly around a little girl riding a rusted bike with a toddler in a diaper on the handlebars. I hung on to the seat in front of me. Chickens flew up, squawking wildly. I noticed they belonged to the same old lady who had been on our last bus. I wished I were back in Maryland in Mom’s new Toyota with AC and airbags, riding along a wide, straight highway lined with clean rest stops and fast-food places. I wouldn’t even complain about the talk radio she always made us listen to.
    Abuelita rested her hand over mine. My fingers were still sticky from the ice pop, but she didn’t seem to mind. The weight of her hand calmed me. It felt comfortable, like a winter blanket.

    After darkness fell, drops of rain began to splatter the windows. The chicken lady’s chickens settled down into her lap. I liked how peaceful they looked sleeping, all breathing together in a pile. Abuelo snored lightly. The rain pounded the windows harder by the second, and soon I could barely