CHAPTER 18
“He dumped me, Rocky.”
“What! He can’t do that!”
“He was cheating on me.”
“Oh, Shelly. Want me to come over?”
Maria hesitated.
“Or, I can just call Laura. Don’t worry.”
“No,” Maria said. “Come over.”
Maria walked to the train station to pick up Rocky. Rocky descended the steps with her sunglasses far up the bridge of her nose, as usual. On the way back to the house, Rocky had to keep asking Maria to slow down. Sorry, Maria kept saying every time she almost lost Rocky on a right or left turn. I’m not in your head, Rocky told her.
At home, Jonathan was sitting on the futon with Ricky, eating chicken and rice. When Maria saw them huddled together, she also saw how the studs in their earrings reflected Rocky’s gaze. She hurried past them, into her bedroom, and showed Rocky where she could put her things down.
Maria didn’t know where to take her, so they got on the bus to the mall. Usually Maria just walked thirty minutes and saved the money she’d spend on the fare, but she didn’t want to risk going past Taco Bell. The manager probably already forgot what she looked like, but what if Jimmy saw them and waved?
“I didn’t know there were malls in New York City,” Rocky said. She bought two cinnamon pretzels, one for her and another for Maria.
“How are your parents?” Maria asked. They were sitting on the concrete ledge outside Skechers. The mall was shaped like a giant circle, and the main entrance faced Queens Boulevard. Buses kept stopping and going like big abused elephants. Dropping off passengers, picking up more. They couldn’t catch a break, those poor buses.
“My mom is fine.”
“How’s your dad?”
“Why are you asking about Charles?”
“I’m not.” Maria ate up her question along with a big wad of cinnamon dough.
At the end of the night, Rocky was asleep in Maria’s bed. Maria didn’t want Rocky to sleep on the futon like Karen did, which was riddled with hard knobs and broken springs. Maria slept on the floor in a sleeping bag.
Maria was surprised when she woke up at ten and saw that Rocky was already awake, filing her nails at Maria’s desk. They went to the Chinese place up the street for lunch, and when they were leaving, Maria’s mother gave Rocky a big hug that made Maria embarrassed. Showing Rocky to her family had terrified Maria for several reasons, and Maria had especially been nervous that Rocky’s glamour and presence would come off the wrong way, but by the end of her visit, Rocky hadn’t seemed to offend anyone. Rocky didn’t bring her Louis Vuitton suitcase, and she hadn’t reeked of cigarettes, either, which was a nice touch.
At the Chinese take-out place, Maria watched as Rocky took a sip of Diet Coke and then set the can aside.
“Your uncle is cute,” Rocky said, thrusting her plastic fork into a sweating heap of lo mein. “Is he single?” She stabbed at a noodle and it bent away. She stabbed again; it caught.
Maria laughed. “He’s always single. But he’s old.”
Rocky lifted the food to her mouth, and the Styrofoam creaked under her hand. “And Ricky?”
“Ricky has a girlfriend.”
Rocky laughed. “Oh, does he?”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t have expected him to be tied down.”
Maria tensed. She picked up a spring roll and bit. “Rocky, don’t go near my brother.”
Rocky leaned back in her chair. “Is that a threat?”
“No. It’s just that you won’t like him. He’s uptight.”
“He doesn’t seem that way to me.”
Maria tried not to show she was irritated.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Rocky said. “So rude.” She sucked on a noodle, and Maria watched as its whole length disappeared into her mouth.
Rocky had woken up in the middle of the night from a dream. She was running down a corridor of a thousand toilets, but each time she went to raise the seat, she found that it was bolted tight. She ran to the next one, and again it wouldn’t lift. Again and again, fractals of forbidden flush. She woke up and clambered to the ground from the bed, and found her way toward the bathroom.
She’d almost forgotten what they’d eaten for dinner until she saw the reams of ketchup under her fingernails. She never ate fast food at home. If she ate french fries, they came from the diner, were made to order. But Maria had told her that she didn’t know any restaurants that delivered to her house, so they went to the Burger King on the corner. Before that, they had eaten two enormous Auntie Anne’s pretzels. Tomorrow, they had plans to get Chinese food on the same street. It was fine for just once, Rocky reasoned, but the next day, she’d make sure to eat clean.
In the hallway, she saw the light under his door, a bar of yellow like a brick of gold. She heard his voice—deep, melodious, lagging. It was lazy in that way only a boy can make attractive. She knew whom it belonged to. He must have been on the phone. Rocky was fairly awake now, but his voice made her think of lying down.
She stood there in the dark and listened, straining to make out the words. But all she heard were murmurs that were sometimes punctured by a rattling laugh that seemed to shake the hallway. She had the feeling of being rocked to sleep. Whenever he laughed, she felt it reverberate against her bones; it steeped into her skin like tea. She stood there, quietly listening. She’d go back to the room in a minute, she thought, but first let me hear that laugh.
A spring released, and Rocky panicked as she realized he was getting up from his bed. Before she could scramble away to the bathroom, he appeared at the door.
“Oh shit,” he said, and then he laughed his beautiful laugh, and Rocky felt her heart bob in her chest, as if emerging from where it had long been sunken and lost. She wanted to capture his laugh and mount it somewhere. She wanted to fix it onto one of the walls. She wanted to hold his laugh static, forever, and replay it whenever she liked.
“Oh no,” she said. “I scared you.”
“Nah. You’re good.” He was wearing nothing but a white tank top and shorts. He had no chest hair, and even his skinny legs seemed smooth. Rocky knew she must look untidy, and she put her fingers up to her mouth. There was a dribble of encrusted saliva at the corner of her lip, and she clawed at it with the tip of her nail. When he looked at her, it felt like hands on her, though she couldn’t tell if he’d like to push her away or caress her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I saw you with Maria earlier. Remind me your name?”
“Rocky.” She knew who he was; she had heard Maria complain about him before. In person, he wasn’t anything near to what Maria always made him seem; she’d expected a monster and found, instead, a languorous brown-eyed boy. When she walked in with Maria earlier that day, she had noticed him sitting on the futon with an older guy, and she had felt their gaze follow her like pairs of antennae. Still, she had to ask. “And yours?”
“Ricky,” he said, raising one eyebrow.
He held his smile on the side of his face, a trait that made Rocky think of Saturday morning cartoons. There was something youthful in all of his gestures: the way that he stood with his feet planted outwards, the way he brought his hand up to cover his laugh as if he’d just said something wicked. His taciturn smirk made the shape of a hook. His eyebrows were perfectly arched, like a girl’s. Innocent. Easily controlled.
Rocky dipped her hip and tucked a stray hair behind her ear. She hoped that the drool around her mouth was gone.
“Can I call you Enrique?” she asked.
“That’s not my name,” he said. “My name is Ricky.”
“What do you mean? Is it Ricardo?”
“No. My name is Ricky.”
“That’s not a real name. Like, my name is Rocky. But on my birth certificate, it doesn’t say Rocky. It says Rachelle.”
There was a silence.
“Hey, you know what?” Ricky winked. “Why don’t you call me whatever you want?”
R
ocky blushed. He smiled, and one slender dimple appeared.
“But can I give you a nickname then?” he asked.
She glanced at Maria’s door. “What do you want to call me?”
“Well,” he said. “Nicknames take a while. Sometimes years. I have to get to know you first.”
“Okay.”
“So will I get to know you?”
“Maybe you will.” She didn’t know if it was she or he who had taken a step closer, but somehow, they were only standing a few inches apart.
“Do you want to come in?” She didn’t answer, and again, he laughed. Rocky saw that he was full of these giggles, as abundant as wrinkles on a crumpled shirt. Rocky understood now that there was no need for them to be mounted and framed.
“You seem tired,” he said. “You can go back to sleep if you’re tired.”
“I’m not tired. I’d love a nickname.”
In his bedroom, he had to clear a space for her on the bed, where a pile of remote controllers and game consoles were stacked. The two of them sat side by side on the spring mattress. It didn’t take years to come up with a name.
“Tiffany,” he said. “Give me a kiss.”
She frowned. “Not Tiffany. That’s just the store. I was Audrey Hepburn for Halloween.”
“So you won’t give me a kiss?”
His lips were hot and spongy, like a cat’s paw pads. She sucked them into her mouth, nibbled on the upper one like a baby teething. It was something she’d learned from those Cosmopolitan magazines.
“Damn,” he said. When he took his hand off her leg, she realized her entire body had gone numb. She worried that maybe she’d done something wrong, that the tip was a hack, and then he flashed her his lopsided grin.
“You’re a good kisser, Tiff.”
She cringed.
“Just call me Rocky,” she said.
When she snuck into Maria’s bedroom, just as dawn broke, Rocky tiptoed around her friend on the floor. Maria’s blanket was pulled all the way up to her chin. It had been Maria’s mother who had brought the girls a set of new sheets and offered Rocky a blanket from a selection of three. Maria’s family was unbearably normal. They all lived together. They all liked each other. Wasn’t there some sort of dark, horrible secret lurking just beneath the surface? But no, that was just Rocky projecting her own fears and paranoias—she had even seen Maria’s mother give her father a kiss on the cheek. Rocky silently climbed back into the bed and looked down at her sleeping friend. From scholarships to paid meals at Patrick’s, it seemed that Maria always got things for free, but that wasn’t even the most of it. Maria was loved. Maria was needed. Was that why Maria never invited her over? It was absurd how unfair it was, and now Rocky was humiliated that she’d ever told Maria about her dysfunctional parents, as if Maria would be able to ever understand.
If Maria had all of this love and attention, Rocky deserved some, too, she decided. She wouldn’t need to ask permission for it, either. She would go right ahead and take it.
Inside the liquor cabinet, there was a bottle of whiskey and another of Tanqueray. She took the gin and before she left, she stopped at the closet and grabbed a pack of cigarettes. The box was sealed up like a present, but unlike a present, she could see right through the plastic. Rocky was fine with that. She was long past the age of preferring surprises.
It had been her suggestion to meet at the twenty-four-hour diner near midnight the day after she slept over at Maria’s. She didn’t want to do something as formal as set up a real date, but she also didn’t want to take Ricky to the Second Avenue hookah bars, where it was more than likely that she’d run into someone she knew from school. Ricky arrived late; he explained to Rocky that he hadn’t accounted for how long it would take him to find parking. Apparently, he’d been circling the avenue in his uncle’s car over and over again.
She was sitting at a booth in the back of the restaurant when the door opened and the host rushed to greet him. Rocky pressed her tailbone into the upholstery to straighten her posture.
“Have you already eaten?” Ricky sat down, and the smell of his shower overtook the eggs frying. It was the scent of dew and charred ember, fresh and ingenuous, but overpowering, too, cheapened. The image of a pine tree car freshener hung over Rocky’s mind.
“No.” Rocky combed a hand through the ends of her hair.
“Are you hungry?”
“Not really.” She crossed her legs under her seat. In his black jeans and crisp shirt, he looked different from when she’d last seen him, when he wore a thin tank top and was rumpled from bed. “But please,” she said. “Get something if you want.” She pushed the water bottle toward him. There were white paper scars on the plastic where she had scratched the label off.
“What is it?”
“Try it.”
He raised the bottle to his lips. When he brought it away, he had the pained look of someone who’d just hit a bong for the very first time—and with far too much conviction. He pushed it away.
“Okay, how about this?”
She took out a little white bag.
“Nah,” he said. “I’m good.”
“Don’t worry!” she said. “I won’t tell Maria. She never does this with me. She doesn’t even know. Your sister’s such a Goody Two-Shoes.”
Ricky hesitated. Rocky could see the gears in his mind turning.
When the waiter came by, they each asked for coffee. They sat there, sipping. Rocky passed the little white baggie to Ricky.
“Where’s the bathroom?” he said.
“Ah, so you’ve done this before.” She smiled. “Straight to the back.”
It was an hour before the waitstaff brought over the check. Rocky dragged her purse from the edge of the booth.
“No,” Ricky said. “I got it.” From his jean pocket, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill.
How cute, Rocky thought, and if there had been another shot left and if there was a little more coke, she might have even said it. At the counter, he grabbed a mint from a big bowl that looked like the kind used to spin lottery balls on TV. The mints were chalky and hard on the outside, but once they were broken, they were gooey with green or orange gel. Rocky hadn’t had one of those mints since she was a little kid. “Want one?” he asked when he saw she was watching. She giggled and shook her head no.
Outside, the streets were deserted, and the avenue was lit like a child’s birthday cake.
“Are they always like this?” Ricky asked, looking around. “They never turn the lights off?”
“Always,” Rocky said. She tittered. “I mean, never. Never.”
They walked uptown, peering into the storefronts where long-limbed mannequins stood akimbo. Others posed with their hands tabled so their arms looked like spades. All of them were expressionless. They had white plastic ovals where faces should have been.
“Look at that one.” Ricky pointed with his chin. “She looks hot.”
The mannequin was draped in a fur vest, paired with a short leather skirt. Rocky stopped to raise her fingers to the glass. Inside, the halls of the store were alight, as if someone would come back any moment from a short restroom break.
“God, it isn’t fair!” Her face darkened. “My mom doesn’t wear fur, and she won’t let me buy any either.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She rolled her eyes. “She hardly eats meat anymore either. She’s been doing all kinds of funny things.” Rocky almost said it before stopping just short: since she decided she wants a divorce. She was surprised at how forthright she wanted to be. When Ricky took a mint from the diner, he had popped a couple extra into his pocket as if nobody had seen, and Rocky understood that beyond how sultry and illustrious he seemed—the jagged diamonds in his ear, his fastened leather belt—he was overwhelmingly simple and boyish. This was, she thought, what endeared him to her.
“My parents don’t eat anything but meat,” Ricky was saying. “I don’t think they know what a vegetable is. Corn and potato don’t c
ount.”
She couldn’t really hear him. She might have had too much to drink.
“Maybe it’s fake fur?” he asked, coming closer. They stood side by side, looking into the store. Rocky’s fingers were splayed on the glass.
“It’s not.” Her heel scraped the concrete as she took another step forward. Rocky brought her parted mouth so close to the surface, it went from clear to fogged.
“I have an idea.”
She turned away from the glass to face him. He glanced from side to side, his eyes no longer reflecting the store display, but the swatches of light from the empty street. “What’s your idea?”
He reached for her hand. She looked down at it tentatively, but didn’t laugh, and together, they walked to the car. He had parked precariously close to a fire hydrant, what Rocky would estimate was well under fifteen feet. He scrambled inside the driver’s seat as she waited against the hood, and when he came out, brandishing the long iron of the club, Rocky understood. She gasped. Then she laughed. This was exhilarating.
“That will work?” She scrunched her mouth to the side, one of her cheeks becoming round like a stone. “That won’t work!”
Ricky walked ahead of her, back to the avenue. She followed a few paces behind and noticed, with worry, that her palm was clammy. She hadn’t noticed a thing when she grasped Ricky’s hand, and now, it was clear it was she who’d been sweating.
He brought the club down to the window, where a spiderweb crackled across the surface, and the glass exploded in fractals. When he hit it again, pieces came scattering to the ground like rain. Rocky had never expected it could take such little effort, and she was even more surprised that no siren had sounded. She watched as Ricky yanked at the mannequin with so much force that it lost its balance and came crashing down to the floor with a dreadful thud. The hollow storefront canopies shook with the sound, and Rocky knew then that they would be caught. The vest was tangled around the bent plastic arms, and before she could see if he successfully freed it, Rocky lifted her legs and ran.
She ducked into an alleyway that cut across a schoolyard. When she reached the other side of the avenue, she continued to run. For blocks she went without stopping her pace until finally she approached the East River and glanced over her shoulder to see Ricky behind her. In a brick hovel overgrown with green ivy, the two of them regained their composure, swallowing down the thumps of their hearts and the whistles of their strained breathing. Like a cat’s, Rocky’s ears went erect with the intent to hear. But there were no honks, no tires, nothing to indicate that they were being pursued. It was as if they had jumped through a portal, and the city had disappeared. Beside them, the river croaked like a bullfrog, and wordlessly, they stood apart from each other like two strangers waiting for the same bus to arrive. Finally, Ricky raised a yearnful gaze at her, and Rocky’s heart began beating so uncontrollably again, the sound of the river disappeared, too.
They Could Have Named Her Anything Page 21
