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"From our mother," Lupe answered him, but Pepe couldn't understand her.

"What about our mother?" Juan Diego asked his sister.

"He was wondering about the way we shrug," Lupe answered him.

"You have taught yourself to read English, too," Pepe said slowly to the boy; the girl suddenly gave him the shivers, for no known reason.

"English is just a little different--I can understand it," the boy told him, as if he were still talking about understanding his sister's strange language.

Pepe's mind was racing. They were extraordinary children--the boy could read anything; maybe there was nothing he couldn't understand. And the girl--well, she was different. Getting her to speak normally would be a challenge. Yet weren't they, these dump kids, precisely the kind of gifted students the Jesuit school was seeking? And didn't the woman worker at the basurero say that Rivera, el jefe, was "not exactly" the young reader's father? Who was their father, and where was he? And there was no sign of a mother--not in this unkempt shack, Pepe was thinking. The carpentry was okay, but everything else was a wreck.

"Tell him we are not Lost Children--he found us, didn't he?" Lupe said suddenly to her talented brother. "Tell him we're not orphanage material. I don't need to speak normally--you understand me just fine," the girl told Juan Diego. "Tell him we have a mother--he probably knows her!" Lupe cried. "Tell him Rivera is like a father, only better. Tell him el jefe is better than any father!"

"Slow down, Lupe!" Juan Diego said. "I can't tell him anything if you don't slow down." It was quite a lot to tell Brother Pepe, beginning with the fact that Pepe probably knew the dump kids' mother--she worked nights on Zaragoza Street, but she also worked for the Jesuits; she was their principal cleaning woman.

That the dump kids' mother worked nights on Zaragoza Street made her a likely prostitute, and Brother Pepe did know her. Esperanza was the Jesuits' best cleaning woman--no question where the children's dark eyes and their insouciant shrugs came from, though the origin of the boy's genius for reading was unclear.

Tellingly, the boy didn't use the "not exactly" phrase when he spoke of Rivera, el jefe, as a potential father. The way Juan Diego put it was that the dump boss was "probably not" his father, yet Rivera could be the boy's father--there was a "maybe" involved; that was how Juan Diego expressed it. As for Lupe, el jefe was "definitely not" her father. It was Lupe's impression that she had many fathers, "too many fathers to name," but the boy passed over this biological impossibility fairly quickly. He said simply that Rivera and their mother had "no longer been together in that way" when Esperanza became pregnant with Lupe.

It was quite a lengthy but calm manner of storytelling--the way the dump reader presented his and Lupe's impressions of the dump boss as "like a father, only better," and how the dump kids saw themselves as having a home. Juan Diego echoed Lupe that they were "not orphanage material." Embellishing, a little, the way Juan Diego put it was: "We're not present or future Lost Children. We have a home here, in Guerrero. We have a job in the basurero!"

But, for Brother Pepe, this raised the question of why these children weren't working in the basurero alongside los pepenadores. Why weren't Lupe and Juan Diego out there scavenging with the other dump kids? Were they treated better or worse than the children of the other families who worked in the basurero and lived in Guerrero?

"Better and worse," Juan Diego told the Jesuit teacher, without hesitation. Brother Pepe recalled the other dump kids' contempt for reading, and only God knew what those little scavengers made of the wild-looking, unintelligible girl who gave Pepe the shivers.

"Rivera won't let us leave the shack unless he's with us," Lupe explained. Juan Diego not only translated for her; he elaborated on this detail.

Rivera truly protected them, the boy told Pepe. El jefe was both like a father and better than a father because he provided for the dump kids and he watched over them. "And he doesn't ever beat us," Lupe interrupted him; Juan Diego dutifully translated this, too.

"I see," Brother Pepe said. But he was only beginning to see what the brother and sister's situation was: indeed, it was better than the situation for many children who separated the stuff they picked through and sorted in the basurero. And it was worse for them, too--because Lupe and Juan Diego were resented by the scavengers and their families in Guerrero. These two dump kids may have had Rivera's protection (for which they were resented), but el jefe was not exactly their father. And their mother, who worked nights on Zaragoza Street, was a prostitute who didn't actually live in Guerrero.

There is a pecking order everywhere, Brother Pepe thought sadly to himself.

"What's a pecking order?" Lupe asked her brother. (Pepe was now beginning to understand that the girl knew what he was thinking.)

"A pecking order is how the other ninos de la basura feel superior to us," Juan Diego said to Lupe.

"Precisely," Pepe said, a little uneasily. Here he'd come to meet the dump reader, the fabled boy from Guerrero, bringing him good books, as a good teacher would--only to discover that he, Pepe, the Jesuit himself, was the one with a lot to learn.

That was when the constantly complaining but unseen dog showed itself, if it was actually a dog. The weaselly little creature crawled out from under the couch--more rodential than canine, Pepe thought.

"His name is Dirty White--he's a dog, not a rat!" Lupe said indignantly to Brother Pepe.

Juan Diego explained this, but the boy added: "Dirty White is a dirty little coward--an ungrateful one."

"I saved him from death!" Lupe cried. Even as the skinny, hunched dog sidled toward the girl's outstretched arms, his lips involuntarily curled, baring his pointed teeth.

"He should be called Saved from Dea

th, not Dirty White," Juan Diego said, laughing. "She found him with his head caught in a milk carton."

"He's a puppy. He was starving," Lupe protested.

"Dirty White is still starving for something," Juan Diego said.

"Stop," his sister told him; the puppy shivered in her arms.

Pepe tried to repress his thoughts, but this was harder than he'd imagined it would be; he decided it would be best to leave, even abruptly, rather than allow the clairvoyant girl to read his mind. Pepe didn't want the thirteen-year-old innocent to know what he was thinking.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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