By the time we got to Josephine’s Sweet 16 there were cheese
      doodle fingers everywhere.

Phat Phil was already deep into his fake Pachanga.
Skinicky, Angel & Dre set up a snap shop by the cake tiers.

Josephine’s eyes were lit like strobes & glitter, her silver dress
      hardly fit her, & because Angel was still tripping, he saw
      sequin in everything: quinine in the ice cream, a fork &
      spoon standoff; he even saw his fate in a rack of plastic
      champagne glasses, bubbles big as balloons released into
      the sky all at once. C’mon, bro, you can’t mess with a man
      who’s wearing a tuxedo, he said.

Cubes of cheddar & guayaba sat like Zen masters on the spheres
      of Ritz Crackers.

Josephine graced her gold-plated throne. Her reinvention was
      imminent.

Put on your cake face, Angel said.

What we thought we heard Skinicky say was, If Sekhmet created
       the desert with a breath, then Shorty Bon Bon split the
       Atlantic to death.

Party over here, party over there, and this rite you get to take
      with you.

The grown-ups spent most of their free time in the bathroom,
      and whenever the DJ played El Gran Combo, we all sighed
      & dipped to the staircase to make out, roll up, or add up.

Little Joe, Josephine’s uncle, tried to call us out on our
      stagnancy– undisciplined knuckleheads, he’d say; and, as
      a way of offering evidence, he’d point to Phat Phil, & there
      was Phat Phil crashing into the VIP table. Almost made
      Josephine’s abuelita spill her rum until abuelita threw him
      a lifesaving turn, and spun Phat Phil back into his sea.

There’s that moment right when the flashbulb flashed on
      Josephine’s smile, where your sense of lottery & random
      tries to reason with you, and, yet, there’s just enough
      chance to survive more than one fresh hell and emerge
      without taking shorts.

“Josephine’s Sweet 16” from THE CRAZY BUNCH by Willie Perdomo, copyright © 2019 by Willie Perdomo. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.