SHOUT - Adopted by Lin Manuel Miranda

VERBATIM

When I get home from school, Lin is bent over the couch with two tiny arms swimming through his hair. He looks truly stressed. Sebastian whimpers when Lin pins him to the couch. "Just eat your peas, just eat them!"

His head snaps up when he hears me drop my backpack next to the door. "Oh, Vidya! Oh my God." His eyes are smiling but his mouth is not. "I'm ten minutes late to the theater. You can get him to eat, right?"

"No--" I revise when I see the look in his face. Pure and utter helplessness. "No Gerber?"

"We're all out. V is going shopping tonight. The only ones we have are mashed carrots and peas, and--" He looks at Sebastian's highchair. There's an orange stain on the rug beneath the tray. "They're both gross, honestly." His face scrunches. "I have no choice. I gotta go."

He's out the door before you can say Alexander. Sebastian stares at me from the couch, wide eyed, snot-nosed. Oh please. What am I supposed to do about this? I sit next to him and grab his wrist. He whimpers.

"See how I can fit my fingers around your arm?" I ask. He nods. "My God. It's already started."

He snivels. "What's started?"

"You don't know?"

"No!"

A fresh sheen of tears tremble over his eyes. I grab his chin and make him look me in the face. "First it's the wrist. Then it's your arms. Then your legs and face and feet, then finally your stomach. You disappear without a trace. That's what happens when you don't eat. It happened to a buddy of mine."

"Is she dead?" His voice cracks at the end.

"Not dead. Just gone. Suspended in the purgatory."

He puts his face in his hands and wails. Sounds like a siren. I get a wave of sympathy for the kid. I would be the same way if I spent the first four years of my life in this circus.

I look at the open bottle of mashed peas on the coffee table. Six green blobs surround the container. I don't blame him for protesting that stuff. Looks like something Tobillo puked up. Also, he's four. Why is he still eating baby food?

"That stuff is gross, isn't it?" I ask.

"It is gruesome," Sebastian says.

"Woah, what's that mean?" I pretend to be interested.

"Like, really, really gross."

"Okay, Sebastian. I have a better idea."

I lead him into the kitchen. Lin has this chef hat with cow print all over it. I don't know what sort of seizure he was having when he bought that. I take it from the knob of the pantry door and put in on Sebastian's head. It flops back so that it looks more like a wig, but he giggles and claps when I theatrically gasp at his new look. I pick him up and sit him on the counter, then throw two pieces of bread onto the cutting board.

"You have to eat the peas. But they don't have to taste so nasty. Ever heard of improvisation?"

He shakes his head twice. The chef hat swings back and forth.

"What's your favorite food?"

"Pudding."

I open the fridge. Lo and behold, three packs of pudding are stacked atop each other. One chocolate, one vanilla, one swirled. I grab three of each, mix them together and slather them on the bread. I scoop on three spoonfuls of sugar and Sebastian drains half of their bottle of syrup to top off the sandwich. The two of us should have a cooking segment on television. Cooking for the corrupt. Tastes for Tots.

Being the cool foster sister I am, I let him eat on the couch if he swears not to tell Lin. I'm so cool that I scoop the mashed peas out of the jar and feed them to the dog. Dogs eat their own shit, so Tobillo laps up the green mush in a heartbeat and doesn't know the difference. I even let it lick my fingers before swatting it away. That thing is growing on me.

Sebastian sucks the excess sugar from his hands when he finishes. "Delicioso."

"So you speak Spanish, huh?"

"Si!"

I cross my arms. "Fluently?"

"What is 'fluently'?"

I cross my feet on the coffee table. "Completely. All the way. With no mistakes."

"Most of the way, but I can't speak the grammar."

By the looks of it, the grammar issue goes both ways. But he's four. In early childhood, age is like a get out of jail free card, even in the department of conjugating verbs and identifying subjects and pronouns.

"Maybe I can help. I speak two languages, too."

"You speak Spanish?"

"No."

He shuffles toward me on all fours. "Which language?"

"A real far away one, but the grammar is a lot more complicated than Spanish grammar. Let's start with english."

Once I clear his dish, he leads me to his toy box. The lid is the mouth of a green, wide eyed dinosaur. Sebastian pulls out his Thomas the Tank Eingine figurine and begins his ritual. He flips it around and makes explosion noises. He astounds me. Kids behaved differently in my family.

"Conjugate this." I grab his train and wave it in front of his face. His eyes flash. He's attracted to all things colorful and fueled by coal. "To drive. Like driving a train."

He knows his business when it comes to trains. "I drive, he drives, she drives, you drives--"

"Ehhn!" I mimic a game show buzzer. "It's you drive."

"I knew that. I was carried away in saying drives two times before."

"I drive--" I make the train dip in the air like an airplane. "You drive--" The train flies a loopty-loop. "She, he, it drives."

"You flies the plane." He grabs the train mid-double helix.

"You drives me nuts." I grab the train back from him and make it go wild in the air, doing loopty-loops and twists at treacherous altitudes. Do they make oxygen masks for toy steam engines?

Sebastian isn't so bad. Most kids aren't. The Hope House girls had been ripped in half and beaten with their own bones. No wonder they were mangy, bloodthirsty little hyenas. This makes me think about the Hope House staff. Those people had everything on us-- money, houses, parents. With normal kids, adults feel guilty for contaminating their innocence. They think of all the sex they've had and alcohol they've drunken, and then look at those angelic little faces and wish they could rewind and start over.

Or that's how I imagine it works. I wouldn't know. I'm hardly past infancy.