by Dana Czapnik
“Look at that sunset,” I say to Percy, who’s standing there sweating, looking all tawny and unwashed and golden. “It’s . . . perfection.” Maybe the only thing I’ve been missing this whole time is just some good lighting.
“Quit being a girl.”
I punch him in the arm as hard as I can—“Fuck you, prick”—and I laugh the way a dude would laugh.
He grimaces and rubs the spot where I nailed him. But he doesn’t hit me back. We walk off the courts into Riverside Park and head east toward the streets. Percy puts his arm over my shoulder like I’m his personal moving armrest, and I look up at his face. If I were someone else, how easy it might be to kiss him. If I could trade in my athleticism for beauty, just for a little bit, just to see what it’s like.
He starts telling me about the new book he’s reading by some French nihilist he’s just discovered. With my arm around his waist, I can feel his lungs expand and contract with the rhythm of his voice. We’ve been through a variation of this routine before. He will want me to read it so he can have someone to talk with about it. And I’ll read it, partially because I’m genuinely interested but mostly because I like talking to him. Because the world rains arrows and honey whenever he’s near me. Painful and sweet.
Run. Run. Go! Faster, faster. Head back, chest out, legs pedaling pavement. Just run. Past the Baptist church and Homeless Steve singing, Spare any change, spare any change, past the brownstones and prewars filled with writers and aging beatniks and geriatric former radicals with their rent-controlled classic sixes. Past the architectural abominations built during the midcentury modern mistake on West End. Run. Down the long slope to Riverside. Let gravity propel legs down the hill. Their muscles’ only job is to keep up with Newton’s first law. Cross Riverside Drive and keep running. Don’t bother looking at the signal in the crosswalk, leg speed too fast to get hit by the cars anyway. The key is, don’t stop. Keep running. Past the commuters from New Jersey getting off the West Side Highway parking lot. Past dog walkers leading packs in Riverside Park. Past needle fiends sleeping slack-jawed on benches. Go faster. Keep up with Percy at the front. Christ, his speed’s too effortless. Racing the molecules in the air and winning. Run down the curved bike ramp past the ivy and the old graffiti that looks like Paleolithic cave drawings. Past the homeless villa in the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin. Run.
The last push is insurance policy. We run all the way down to the Hudson River walk, and Percy dashes to the railing and finally stops himself before James and I pull up behind him. All three of us gasping, bending over, trying not to pass out or throw up our lunch from Burger King. James drops to the ground, turns over on his back, his chest heaving. Eventually his lungs begin to recover, and the heaving turns to laughter. Chased by a cop. If he could talk right now, Percy might call it a rite of passage. The way the Lenape may have had to run from a bear or a wolf before the Dutch came and settled and leveled the land and erased the contours of its topography. Before pavement and steel and underground tunnels and hypodermic needles and silver badges molded to say “City of New York.” Chased by a cop. It’s the modern adolescent’s test of will. And like the young Lenape warriors who may have run our exact route to escape some flesh-eating predator, we won. We are stronger.
Still catching my breath, I lean against the railing and look out onto the Hudson. The Lenape called this water The River That Runs Both Ways. Sometimes you can see that with your own eyes. On a rough, windy day when the world is dank, you can look out over the river from the George Washington Bridge and see that the current in the center flows uptown, away from the ocean. It creates slight ripples in the water, like a V. I think of the people then, in their wooden canoes—maybe they were canoes of war, maybe they were fishing canoes—and the men inside them paddling the water and suddenly, unexpectedly having to wrestle the current. But from where I’m standing the current is imperceptible. It’s a cloudy and restless river, lapping against rusted house boats in the basin. There is a reason Melville opened his novel here—on this dusky water that pours out into the Atlantic. It’s been destroyed since then, unable to sustain any biological life. It’s lost the dark blue beauty it must have had. But I love this water as much as people who grow up next to the ocean love the sea, even if it does smell like raw sewage on rainy days. At least no one dumps their bodies here. You tell me: who can resist the pull of Manhattan from that bridge up there? Daytime or night, doesn’t matter. That sight, it can’t cure cancer or anything, but I’m pretty sure it can cure whatever mental ailment you got because for that minute you’re rumbling along I-95 into the Emerald City, your life is a postcard, and nothing bad ever happens in postcards.
“Whooo, man.” James exhales as he stands up. He backhands Percy across the chest. “Don’t do that to me again, Perce.” He laughs, though he’s not kidding. “I don’t have the green to pay a graffiti fine. You got lucky that donuteater didn’t have our quicks.”
“It wasn’t graffiti. Stop calling it that, it diminishes it.”
“Okay, I’m not calling it graffiti. We’re talking about NYPD bacon here. They can’t distinguish between a Nietzsche quote—or whatever you were writing—and a gang sign.”
Percy kicks a pebble between the railings and watches it plunk into the water. “It wasn’t even a Sharpie. It was a dry-erase marker.”
“For real?”
“Yeah.”
“So why did we run?” I ask.
“Running seemed easier than explaining.” Percy uses the bottom of his blue striped button-down shirt to wipe the sweat off his brow.
“Well, thanks for the adrenaline rush.” James looks down at his watch. “I’ll need it to get through Latin.”
* * *
Senses heightened, on the lookout for our predator, we head back to civilization, to return to school. To places without cops, where dry-erase markers are used to write notes on big whiteboards in the front of classrooms so we can copy them into our notebooks and do well on tests, which will ensure we get into socially acceptable colleges.
I get some high fives and “peaces” and promises of plans to meet up after school to do more damage. Percy and James head downtown a few blocks to go back to Colver, the all-boys Episcopalian school they both attend, where they have to wear a blue jacket with a crest on the left breast pocket and khakis and spend every morning whispering sweet nothings to Jesus. I head in the opposite direction to walk to my last class of the day at Pendleton, an equally horrific nondenominational preparatory academy known for churning out future corrupt US senators and for having the highest suicide rate of any private school in the country. I may have made up that last statistic. I don’t know if anyone is morbid enough to track that sort of thing.
I take my time walking back to school. I have a double period of Spanish to get to, and the uneven sidewalk along Riverside Drive feels like a never-ending walk down the plank. When Percy was still with me at Pendleton, life there was tolerable. He was a popular kid and, because we were best friends, people generally left me alone. But then he got kicked out of school at the beginning of freshman year after a teacher found a couple dime bags in his backpack, and since he was a repeat offender, he was done. Family money bought him a spot at Colver, where the only other new kid in the class was James Fresineau, from Haiti by way of Harlem. After he left Pendleton, I officially sank to the bottom of the social heap and have been there ever since.
Percy’s got a real problem with authority, so it took him a while to warm up to everyone at Colver, and even now, his only true friend there is James. But here’s the thing: Both of us are basketball players. For Percy, that gives him social capital. So even though he can’t stand the preppy jackasses at school, since he became the leading scorer for Colver his sophomore year—when he grew five inches and became this ridiculously gangly kid who doesn’t quite know what to do with his long, skinny limbs in life except when he’s on the basketball court—no one at Colver dares ridicule him. But it’s the opposite for me. I’m not jus
t the leading scorer at my school, I’m the leading scorer in the entire league for two years running, which you would think would garner me the same amount of respect Percy gets. But I’m a girl, and I’m really tall and I don’t have Pantene-commercial hair and I’m not, let’s say, une petite fleur, so everyone just assumes I’m a lesbian. Last year, this kid Brian Deed—who’s more commonly known as “F Squared,” the G-rated version of his nickname, “the Freshman Fucker”—called me a dyke to my face as I was passing him in the stairwell on my way to art, the day after I scored a double-double in a game against our East Side rival. He masked it as a backhanded compliment, like, “Dyke can play ball,” and he put his hand up so I should give him a high five, but I punched him in the balls instead and got suspended. The funny thing is that if I actually liked girls and owned it, I’d probably be accepted at school, because then I’d fit in the box that makes the most sense to people.
The only person I’m actually friends with at school is my teammate Alexis Feliz, this dreamy and tough Dominican girl who can light up a game with a barrage of three-pointers one minute and go completely cold the next. But Alexis is a scholarship kid from an outer borough, and so she has to take the school bus immediately after practice because the walk home from the train late at night is dangerous. Plus she’s dating some guy now, so our time together off the court is limited.
School is tolerable when I break it up into blocks of time: one and a half hours until basketball. Three hours until Percy. I take a deep breath and charge forward. Vamos, Lucy. Go ahead. Go.
* * *
Percy eases open a blunt with his thumbs at the paper crease and removes the tobacco, flecks of which scatter in the wind around us. He tucks his thick, chin-length hair behind his ears and stuffs some buds in the paper and licks the edge. He rolls the blunt like a rolling pin on the hard surface of a composition notebook, trying to make the thing more compact and less fragile. We’re all sitting in an amorphous circle on my building’s roof. It’s not a nice Park Avenue penthouse roof deck. It’s not meant for parties or glasses of champagne or teak chaise lounges. It’s just a tar New York City roof that has never once been cleaned and that we’re technically not supposed to walk on. Every time I take a step, I can feel the impression my foot is making in the tar, and it sometimes makes me nervous that one day the roof is going to give way and we’ll just fall through into the living room of my upstairs neighbor, Mrs. Loo, whose sad, cratered face used to give me nightmares as a kid.
It’s dusk, and the light is getting dimmer, but the tar is still hot from the early September sun that fired the city like a kiln all day, so my exposed thighs where my shorts stop are coated in a layer of sweat. All the dust gathered from taxi and bus tailpipes has settled on the rooftop and is now sticking to my skin. If we were inside a Tennessee Williams play it might feel like the burnt edge of a saxophone solo, but in reality it feels like we’re bathing ourselves in fingernail dirt.
Percy lights up the blunt with a paper match from a drugstore matchbook and takes a hit, his chest expanding and staying that way, dramatically puffed out, with his collarbone stretched against the cloth of his disintegrating T-shirt. He passes it my way and I take it from him, my fingers avoiding his, and suck in a thick hit.
James is sitting cross-legged with my boom box on his lap, blowing on the tape deck to get the dust out so the Velvet Underground will play. His always-in-progress dreads are tied up with a rubber band at the top of his head so they don’t flop helter-skelter around his face. The dreads have been a point of contention with his mother for many years, and she’s made him cut them off each time they get too long because she’s afraid they will ignite secret prejudices against her son in the white teachers at Colver.
Percy’s next to Sarah, his latest fuck buddy, a girl who probably doesn’t know a word of the preamble to our Constitution or why the sky is blue but is in complete control of her feminine wiles and knows the power of a well-timed pout. He pulls one of her green Candies off her foot and inspects it. She giggles and goes “What?” in a high-pitched, cloying voice that makes me want to punch her. It’s not that she’s dumb. It’s that she’s entirely uncurious, and I’ve no patience for the uncurious among us and I have no idea how Percy has patience for it when he is the most curious of all.
“What’s with the Sixties revival? I see all these girls wearing this and, like, bell bottoms now,” he says.
She snatches her shoe out of his hands and takes the other shoe off and puts them behind her. “I like them. They’re cute. The Sixties were the best. People believed in something then.”
“If you drop enough acid you’ll believe in anything.” He takes another hit and closes his eyes, rocking his body back and forth. Waving his arms around him. Starts singing, “Hare Krishna . . . Hare Krishna . . . Krishna Krishna . . . Hare Rama . . .” He opens his eyes. Stops moving. Passes the blunt to James. “The Sixties were bullshit. All those people who bused down south to protest care more now about the stock options in their 401(k)s. I bet Gordon Gekko burned his draft card.”
James hits the back of the boom box with the blunt nestled between his fingers. The tape finally starts to play, but Lou Reed’s voice is slow and deep, like HAL 9000 in his death throes. He takes out the batteries from the back and then puts them back in, each in a different spot, hoping just a little repositioning might give them a bit more juice. “Isn’t your dad Gordon Gekko?”
“My dad’s worse. Greed is good, but exploitation is excellent!” Percy extends his arms, fanning his massive wingspan.
I take the blunt back from James. “The Sixties may have been bullshit, but I would’ve liked to have lived through them anyway. It’s not like injustice was eliminated, it’s just . . . we’d rather play Mortal Kombat.” I take a hit—shallower this time. Don’t want to get too blasted and let the paranoia seep in. “We live in . . . insignificant times.” Tendrils of smoke escape as I talk, and it makes me feel important.
Percy’s eyes aren’t hooded, they’re open wide, and they’re focused on me. Sarah’s watching him, I can see it from the corner of my eye. She’s jealous of the way he talks to me. She’s jealous of the way he takes me seriously. She has shiny, sun-drenched hair and perfect skin and very pale blue eyes. Though she has a pretty face, her expression always reads as bewildered confusion. Behind her back, Percy calls her “the Deer,” as in caught in headlights. But she’s very petite, with a soft, tiny waist, and she has very, very large breasts and wears lacy Victoria’s Secret bras in vibrant colors that are visible through her white cotton T-shirts, and this, I’ve come to discover, is kryptonite to even the most intelligent and thoughtful guys.
“So,” Percy goes, “you’d like to be a part of a revolution, even if you know it will accomplish nothing and America will remain as fucked up as it’s always been.” He smiles at me.
I can’t help but laugh. “Yeah. That sounds about right.” I cock my head to one side and pretend to twirl my hair and go, “Or maybe I just like the clothes,” in a completely accurate rendition of Sarah’s quasi–Valley girl tone. James smacks me on the arm and gives me a look, like, That was awful.
Even though I know Percy isn’t remotely interested in Sarah as a person, he likes her in a way he’ll never like me, so our jealousy of each other is mutual and equally damaging, which I recognize with the left side of my brain. But I’m a creature forever ruled by the right, the part that holds what a more sentimental person might call the whims of the heart, and so I can’t help but feel a sourness toward her and her lacy Skittle-colored bras, which, even if I could fill them out, I would never have the guts to wear anyway.
“Whatever.” She snaps her gum and adjusts her bra strap under her shirt so that we all get a peek at the goods. “The Sixties were the best. Love was free, they didn’t have to worry about AIDS, people cared about each other. I would have made a great flower child.”
Percy pats the side of her face and says, “Pretty, my pretty, pretty flower child,” like she’s a dog
and then lies down on the roof.
Sarah pouts and nudges her way over to him and drapes her body on his, her bare, pedicured toes with shiny blue nail polish probably named something ironic like “Rubbish” or “Rancid” or “Riot” rubbing against his shins, his auburn leg hair glistening. In one quick motion, she pulls her long blond hair out of its disheveled ponytail and nestles herself in the crook of Percy’s arm. He absent-mindedly runs his fingers through her hair, gently pulling out the knots when his fingers meet resistance. His eyes are closed, so he doesn’t know I’m watching him, wondering what it feels like to have fingers run through my hair, positive that my whole outlook on the world would be entirely different if I’d felt that sensation even once. That any of the thousand natural shocks my flesh is heir to would be wiped clean by having that memory locked away to retreat to whenever necessary.
I look over at James, and we both roll our eyes. I’m not sure I know why he’s annoyed—I suspect because it gets annoying after a while to hear a rich kid talk about how crappy America is. Percival Smith Abney is an heir to the P. B. Abney fortune. But Percy hates his wealth. Percy wants to be poor. Because poor is real. And noble. That’s how it is in New York. All the rich kids want to be poor, and all the poor kids want to be rich, and the kids in the middle just watch it all play out and volunteer in soup kitchens and buy clothes in thrift shops and develop opinions.
James and I fit squarely in that middle category. His dad is a musician and his mom is a journalist. He doesn’t have a poignant backstory full of abuse or drugs for the empathetic liberals. His parents pay for Colver in the same way my parents pay for Pendleton: by forsaking their retirement accounts. My family is only slightly better off because my dad is a lawyer. He works on the public-interest side, though, so it’s not like he’s bringing home bank, but it’s enough so that my mom was able to stay home for most of my life and keep me in imitation Vans. So maybe James is sick of hearing it, or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe he finds Percy’s attraction to Sarah as degrading as I find it. Or maybe he’s jealous. Maybe he wishes Sarah’s abundant breasts were pressed against his rib cage right now. All I know is that I’m glad I’m not alone in my loneliness, which I know is a selfish feeling.
