As Long as You Love Me (Previously Kiss and Tell)

Chapter 7 ♔ Bad Idea

My face looked out from the laptop's screen, except it was different. Cora and I had stopped looking identical after Carlos' death. Youth and hope for the future had given us the same softness around our eyes and lips, but mine had been replaced by the hard lines of someone who had lost so much too soon. Although the loss of our brother had hurt her as deeply, her entire innocence in the matter no doubt contributed to the fact that she could still smile all the way to her eyes.

Right now, though, her expression was a lot more like mine. Even though her hair was perfectly blow dried with thin strands of gold dyed across the extensive mass of it, and her face was artfully made up with the same delicate sense of a beauty magazine, she looked a lot like me. And that could only mean mami was right and something was wrong with Coralina.

"I've been calling you," I told her in English. Mami insisted all our lives that we learn English, which at first papi had refuted. It was Carlos who convinced him, half jokingly, that it would be a good idea to learn the imperialist language so that we could understand their rhetoric firsthand. With that in mind, papi decided to enroll us in private English lessons while we were starting high school, without knowing that that would be the reason I'd be able to open a path to emigrate years later.

Despite that, Cora had continued practicing it with me, not because she was finally coming around but because this way our parents couldn't overhear our conversations. And that wasn't any sort of guesswork from me, she'd told me so herself.

Thus she replied in English. "Yeah, I've been busy."

I corrected her pronunciation a bit but praised her for the correct sentence. It still didn't distract me from the meat and bones of this conversation. I let my eyes roam over her and said, "With what? Buying winter clothes for air conditioners that don't work?"

I vaguely pointed at the turtleneck sweater she wore that had to be baking her. My hometown of Maracaibo was considered the hottest city in the country and in a different timeframe, we used to joke that it was the coldest solely due to the prevalence of air conditioning everywhere, at home, schools, shops and certainly in our cars. Ever since the electrical supply became so unstable, though, the city went back to the oven it typically was and its inhabitants were its sourdough bread rolls. Seeing my sister in such a stifling piece of clothing was the most ridiculous sight I'd seen all week, and I'd had to endure Gabriel Cabrera's face up close.

"Oh, my God," Cora said with a healthy eye roll. "This is all the rage here, you know? I bought it at Zara. Only the people who can afford to keep their air conditioner running dress like this."

Never mind, it could get more ridiculous after all.

"Is that what has you so upset?" I asked, running my hand through my dark hair as it air dried. "The fact that you have to dress like you're in Europe so people think you're high class despite clearly sweating your makeup off?"

I could see her process through the barrage of words but when she eventually got the gist of it, she flipped me both birds.

"No, I'm upset because you keep ignoring me."

I raised both hands in the air. "I've been calling you for days and you're the one who doesn't pick up, who's ignoring who?"

"Yeah but I texted you on WhatsApp and you didn't reply," she said, reaching closer to the camera to bare her teeth at me.

I checked my message log and sure enough, there were five texts from her that I hadn't seen in the course of the whole week. Scrolling through them, I didn't see anything that would raise the red alerts that I detected in mami's voice the other night.

Okay, I had to proceed with caution from here on out. I set my phone down and said, "Sorry, I guess I've been too caught up in everything that is going on."