Ratoncita Cousin.

Ratoncita Cousin.

Adriana is a dark skin and attitude like her father girl. She is the oldest, smacking Frankie over the head but watching out for while giggling and loving little Alexis, her sweet surprise little sister. With a thick head of Puerto Rican should have been curly but is straight and black Mexican oil hair that is long and long and thick as a horsetail she wears in one tough ponytail down her back for Alexis to braid small knots in and call them pretty and for Frankie to pull and swing from her like a Tarzan tree trunk older sister.

When we played as kids, she was always the Jasmine and I was always the Aladdin. She was a beautiful child and has grown up to be a beautiful young woman. But she is the type of girl that knows she is beautiful. Popular and full of spunk and plays soccer with boys because it’s fast and fun, not for the boys that fawn over her, but notices that too so she is always laughing.

Got her period at 11 or 12. So early it scared the woman in the family, speculating and suspecting the hormones in all the 2% and American cheese she loved eating as a kid (we called her ratoncita) to be the reason for her early thrust into maturity. Something in the Indiana water turns brown girls that should have been raised in Chicago with her other brown cousins or something in brown blood that made her always older than she was.

I found her diary sitting on the sofa one day, not knowing what it was, opened it and the page said something about dry humping on her boyfriends couch. Closed it quick. Growing up fast girl. Remember she is 15 and I was just about the same age the first time I fooled around, dry anythinged with anyone. I worry that she will be like her mother, like all our mothers, and get pregnant at a young age, unmarried, surprised and alone. But then I realize that all of our mothers raised us fine. If all of our mothers hadn’t been careless, or passionate, wild and unruly young woman, none of us would have ever been born. And she is laying on the couch with a baby that is premature, small druggy-baby—tubes and incubators and blinking lights to measure the measures—her mother is babysitting and Adriana is on the couch sleeping with this warm small thing nestled on her chest.