I wasn’t fazed when my non-fiction teacher asked us to be adventurous, but when she asked us about our allergies, suspicion rang a bell in the back of my mind. Wait a minute, what?
“I got these popsicles at a strip mall, in a Mexican supermarket call ‘Michela’s Paletas’. There are 16 flavors, one for each.” She pulled out a powder blue cooler with a North Carolina logo on the side and unzipped it. Since we were sitting in a circle, she went around and each person took one without get a peek in the in the portable freezer.
There were eight people before she reached me, and I got to take a glance at what some people got. I saw something that looked like pineapple, cola, and something like black or blueberry. And also, I saw flavors like guacamole or mole, one of the two, and death, frozen on a stick.
When I chose mine, she gave me a look that implied something, but I could not tell just then. I was too busy staring at my Popsicle to determine what kind it was. I was turning it at different angles trying to observe it in different lights. I saw that, where the ice cream made contact with the stick, there was a hot pink color, raspberry, or strawberry, maybe? It was hidden by a cream colored frozen liquid that might have been vanilla. At this point, I was ready to taste. But there was one itsy bitsy problem: the plastic cover wasn’t coming off.