How It All Goes Down
Our fifteen-year-old narrator, Pearl, lives in sunny Fallbrook, California, on her uncle Hoyt's avocado ranch. She and her mom moved there after her dad left them not too long ago. It might be depressing for her mom's love life, but at least Pearl gets to spend time with her cousin, Robby, who is a year older than her. They are always joking around and mocking France since his mom is from there.
One day, Pearl notices a man on the side of the road where all of the day laborers gather, looking for work. He mimes picking avocados, and for some reason, she thinks it's awesome. The next day, he's juggling. Pearl decides to ask her uncle to hire the guy, and to her surprise, he does. It turns out the mime-juggler doesn't talk very much due to an accident, but his name is Amiel. Right away, Pearl is head-over-heels for the seventeen-year-old worker.
It's not long before Pearl and Amiel start exchanging notes with each other. At first, she asks him a bunch of questions and he replies, but pretty quickly they grow closer. She's walking around the woods out by the river one afternoon when she notices a makeshift house right there in the woods. She looks around and figures out that it belongs to Amiel. Pearl promises him she won't rat him out (since he's illegally squatting in the woods), and keeps visiting him in secret.
No one knows about Pearl and Amiel's fling except for Robby, who suspects that his cousin is crushing on the guy. Robby has his own problems to deal with, though. He thinks his dad is having an affair with a young tennis coach named Mary Beth, and in order to find out the truth, he strikes up a friendship with Mary Beth… and even starts dating her himself. Pearl's not sure what Robby's endgame is, but she doesn't really think the whole thing is a good idea. (Gee, ya think?)
Fallbrook is known for big brush fires, so when one starts in October, Pearl is worried about Amiel—she figures living in the woods is the worst place to be when everything is burning. Everyone is evacuated from Fallbrook and leaves town one day when the fire gets really bad, but Pearl sneaks back to the woods to check on Amiel. Sure enough, he's in his home, waiting it out since he's too scared to leave in case he's discovered by immigration. (It turns out he's an undocumented worker, and could be deported back to Mexico.)
Unsure of what to do, Pearl stays with Amiel. The two of them wait out the fire down by the river, plunging into the water so they don't get burned. Meanwhile, Hoyt goes looking for Pearl and dies in the fire. Once the flames calm down, paramedics help Pearl and Amiel, but Amiel runs away so he doesn't get caught. Pearl is physically fine, but emotionally she's a wreck. She blames herself for her uncle's death. Robby does, too, and stops talking to her. Bummer.
About a year later, Pearl runs in to Mary Beth in town. She learns that Mary Beth and Hoyt weren't having an affair after all—it was all just one big misunderstanding—so Pearl writes a letter to Robby explaining this since he's still not talking to her. Pearl's been taking Spanish classes at night school so she can be fluent when she goes to Mexico in the fall. That's right: She's going to look for Amiel.