Each Tiny Spark

The next day after school, Gus and Emilia sit on a quiet hill, and Emilia spots her dad in the auto shop. She uses Gus’s camera to zoom in and sees that he’s working on a car. Gus compares himself and Emilia to spies, and Toni to a scientist designing a space station to obliterate planets. Emilia wonders if Gus is citing a Star Wars storyline.

Abuela suggests going to dinner at six. Emilia has to finish math homework, but she needs help. Her dad watches TV, and her mom calls. Her mom helps her with her homework and tells Abuela to have Toni turn off the TV. Sue says she’ll call Mrs. Jenkins, Emilia’s counselor, but Emilia objects. Sue has to hang up, so Toni tries to help Emilia with her English homework. He jokes about her messy papers and suggests she thinks of them as a puzzle. Toni gets upset when she gets the answers wrong, so Emilia focuses and answers correctly. Toni grabs a Coke and potato chips and tells Emilia to clean her room. She takes out her LEGO boxes and tells Abuela she can give them to the church.

The sun goes down, and Emilia likes the quiet. She goes outside and sees her dad sleeping on the porch swing. She smiles and hopes her dad has nice dreams.

After school, Mrs. Jenkins asks Emilia if she needs help, but Emilia declines. She meets Gus at the Merryville Library. She likes the mildewy, stuffy smell and feels like the books are trying to tell her a secret.

Gus reads a book about legends and myths in the Southern US, and Emilia talks to the librarian, Mrs. Liz, about her tourism guide. She thinks about how her favorite thing to do is drink café con leche with her mom in their home, but she can’t invite people to her home. She then thinks about how her family buys their food at Don Carlos’s Grocery Latino and decides that the grocery store can be a destination.  

Mrs. Liz tells Emilia about the microfilm machine and how it can project articles from film onto its big screen. Mrs. Liz thinks it’s broken, and Emilia offers to help fix it. While in the technology section, she finds a book about Shelby Mustangs—the car model her dad works on. Emilia wants to check it out, but she doesn’t have a library card, so Gus checks it out for her. Gus’s tour guide will be a horror film. Emilia will help him, and he’ll help Emilia.

Toni and Orestes argue amicably about soccer, and Gus says his dad’s parents moved to the United States in the 1980s and worked in chicken plants. As Orestes was about to go to college, his parents got sick, so he had to find work. Gus thinks his dad could’ve been a famous painter. Orestes encourages Emilia to go to her dad, who’s welding the door frame and sheet metal to the car.

Emilia reminds her dad of the third-grade assembly when the principal summoned her on stage and surprised her with a visit from her dad. The memory makes Toni smile sadly. Emilia dislikes the color and state of the Shelby Mustang. Toni loves the color and thinks the car just needs extra love. She tries to talk to her dad about his deployment, but Toni sticks to the car, showing her how to get the paint off the hood with an electric sander. He stresses the importance of focus. If he loses concentration, someone could get hurt.

Toni mentions being a tower guard and working with the local military. He liked the shift before breakfast when it was quiet. Toni grows silent, and after an hour of silence, he offers to buy Emilia a milkshake from Jimmy’s Diner.

Emilia asks Clarissa again if Gus can come to her party, and Clarissa says she’ll think about it. She asks about Emilia’s dad, and Emilia wonders if Clarissa just wants to talk about her dad. When Clarissa’s dad came home from a deployment, he was quiet too.

After school, Emilia and Gus walk to Don Carlos’s Grocery Latino in Park View. Gus says Barry‘s tourism guide is a scavenger hunt involving local trees and insects. Gus says Barry is smart, but he doesn’t test well.

Emilia brings up Clarissa’s party, and Gus doesn’t think she wants him or his friends there. His dad has to take care of his little sister, Daniela, so Gus doesn’t want to bother him with a ride.

Gus kicks a soccer ball into the gutter, and he thinks of the kid-eating clown Pennywise from the horror movie It. Gus thinks the movie says something vital about fear.

Emilia and Gus notice that Park View has more trash than other parts of Merryville, and they run into Mr. Jackson, who watches his two granddaughters during the day. Gus tells Emilia about Barry’s dad, who makes excellent barbeque and is trying to get a loan to open a restaurant.

At Don Carlos’s store, Emilia notices the items she’s too rushed to think about when she’s with Abuela. She interviews Don Carlos, who moved to Georgia from Venezuela in the 1990s. As Atlanta hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics, there were many jobs, and Don Carlos helped build the Centennial Olympic Stadium. Don Carlos takes a picture of Emilia and Gus and puts it on social media. Don Felix, the butcher, gives Emilia meat to take to her Abuela. Mrs. Liz fixed the microfilm machine, and Emilia uses it to research the 1996 Olympics. She learns that the Olympic committee hired a Hispanic activist named Sara J. Gonzalez to do Hispanic outreach. Now, there’s a park named after her. Emilia learns officials didn’t enforce immigration laws so immigrants would come to Georgia. Now, officials enforce them and make people leave even if they’ve been in the US for most of their lives.

Emilia and her mom talk about what she learned at the library. Her mom says the government wanted the workers to do their jobs and leave, leading to anger when the workers stayed. Her mom says the only way to counter injustice is by voting.

Bill Renter, Jay’s grandpa, enters the auto shop. He’s condescending and asks Gus to wash his window. Gus tells him he’s not an employee. Renter invites Emilia and her family to dinner and tells Abuela to thank Toni for his service.

Emilia tells Abuela she’s going to the woods to help Gus with his movie for the tourism guide. Abuela is annoyed. Emilia is becoming a young woman, and she wants her to start thinking about other things, like her quinceañera.

In the woods, Emilia and Gus see a smashed gazebo. Emilia gets a giant splinter, but she pulls it out. The two spot a rose, and they discuss the Cherokee rose and the Trail of Tears in 1938. The US forced the Cherokee to go West, and their journey was brutal and deadly.

Gus intends to call his movie The Merryville River Monster. It’s about a girl who gets lost in the woods and meets a creature. Gus wants Emilia to play the girl and the creature to make the point that maybe people are the monsters. Emilia helps Gus hammer the tarp to the wood, and she puts on her creature costume.