Cath actually answered the text. It was something simple: "HAHAHA, I hope he forgives you." Nothing less, nothing more. They kept going back and forth with those awkwardly polite texts for a while (except she was actually laughing at them), until mid-conversation about the weird shoes their history teacher always wore—

Her bedroom door swung open.

—"¡La once está lista!" (Dinner's ready), her cousin Jennifer announced. 

Cath startled and put her phone face down on the desk but didn't have time to hide the dumb smile tugging at her lips.

"Well, well, well, look who's all smiley," Jennifer sing-songed as she leaned on the doorframe, arms crossed.

Cath just rolled her eyes, stood up from her desk chair, and brushed past her. Jennifer trailed her down the stairs, firing off the dumbest questions: "Was it the cute boy who came over earlier?" "Is he your boyfriend?" "Are you hiding him from your mom?"

And the thing is that, Jennifer wasn't a bad person, not really—she just had the misfortune of being... plainly stupid. She and Cath were the same age, but Jennifer had been held back a year because, apparently, minding everyone else's business was more important than her grades. She only used her head for boys and gossip. And it's not like Cath thought those things were bad, but when they are the only things you care about, it becomes a problem.

"Jenni, leave her alone, they're just rehearsal partners, remember?" her aunt Jessica—Jennifer's mom—called out when she overheard them stepping into the kitchen. Though, by her tone, she clearly believed otherwise.

Aunt Jessica was... a whole different problem. Equally empty-headed as Jenni, she had somehow married rich, had her own house, her own life—and still ended up at the house every afternoon like clockwork, hovering around and sticking her nose where it didn't belong.

The kitchen was filled with the smell of toasted bread and coffee and the rustling of her family moving around.

Cath grabbed her mug from the cupboard, sat down at her place on the table and tried to be as invisible as possible while buttering her piece of bread, but in her house, of course, it wasn't possible to have a peaceful evening.

To her surprise, it wasn't any of her aunts the one who asked first, but the questions came anyway.

"So, who was the boy who came over earlier?" Matteo, one of her youngest cousins, asked.

Cath sighed and braced herself "Just a classmate, okay? We got assigned to practice for a play at school. Honestly, I found it irritating."

The table went quiet for one beat too long. 

Then, Jennifer grinned like she'd just won something. "So irritating you were smiling at yourself while texting him?"

And that was it—the table exploded. English and Spanish overlapped, questions and teasing bouncing off the walls. Her grandmother muttered something with a look of disgust, her grandad stayed stubbornly silent, and Cath didn't even try to defend herself. 

She dropped her forehead onto the table, hoping no one noticed how red her face had turned.

The teasing had mostly died next morning, her day went on as usual, but when she walked into the history class that day James —who was already sitting there—, waved at her pointing at the teacher shoes, and she smiled.

Just to clarify, "once" isn't the same thing as dinner, is a Chilean thing that's more like breakfast but in the afternoon.