Blackout

by Dhonielle Clayton

  He won’t beat me. “Show some respect.”

  “Not gonna win.” He bites his bottom lip and clutches his book bag to his chest where he’s hidden his pick. “We should get out of here in like thirty minutes. The trains aren’t running and the ride apps are backed up. I just looked and it’s a forty-eight minute wait for a ride. So we need extra time.”

  “We aren’t going to miss the party. Chill,” I say.

  “We can’t be last minute with the trains not working. You gonna remember the time, elefantita?”

  “Of course.” It’s just a party, I want to say.

  “You better. I can’t miss it just ’cause you’re being all weird and shit and feeling like you’re over high school.”

  “You’re wack. I don’t even like you.”4 My heart is doing a weird flip-floppy thing and I can’t seem to calm down. All the memories crowding in my brain. All the worries about what happens when we can’t spend the summer together. All the fears about what happens next year when we’re in two different places.

  It’s making my brain foggy. I can’t think through our latest bet, can’t figure out the strategy to beat him.

  This wasn’t how I imagined the night would go.

  It was supposed to kick off a new scrapbook. A new set of memories. A new set of the most amazing moments to replay in my head over and over again. A new set of pictures to draw and collage around my words.

  I clutch the old scrapbook to my chest again, the edges slick from my clammy hands.

  Gran said this is a summer of new stories. Adventures. Magic. Even romance. That the City of Light would teach me about myself, give me extraordinary firsts, help me find a story to write. That Paris would offer me enough to fill a hundred scrapbooks. That she had unfinished business there and she’d show me how to finish the things one starts.

  This trip . . . this summer feels like one where everything will change.

  But now, stuck in this dark city and this dark library, I wonder what that will mean for us.

  “So what time should we leave then, elefantita?” he asks.

  I rattle off exactly what he told me and tell him how long I estimate us getting from Bryant Park to Bed-Stuy, given the usual traffic patterns made a mess by the blackout.

  He scowls at me. “Glad you remember.”

  I scoff. “You’re pressed.”

  “Or try responsible,” he replies.

  “Okay, Mr. Responsible.”

  I can feel his smile.

  “What?”

  “I think I want you to buy me new headphones. Need ones that’ll work better with my mic. That’ll be my prize.” He thumps my shoulder. “A good parting gift for our last summer bet.” He tries to peek at the books I’m pulling from the shelves. “Since you’re leaving me here and all.”

  “You mad?”

  “Who am I going to argue with while you’re gone?”

  “Keisha.”

  He sucks his teeth and corrects me: “Kelly.”

  “Oh, excuse me. Let me make sure I get all of their names right.”

  “Stopped talking to her last week.”

  “Not smart enough? Oh, wait, no, let me guess—bad breath or snaggletooth?” My pulse races. There’s always a girl chasing Tristán Restrepo. They come and go, one after the next. He’s the smartest, the tallest, the most charming boy on the block. Well, used to be on the block, used to live in the brownstone next to mine, used to be waiting for me every morning. He’s always been my shit-talking neighbor—and best friend. But I don’t know what we’ll be as we spend the summer apart and go to different schools in the fall.

  “She doesn’t have enough to do. Always waiting on me.” He sighs. “But back to the bet . . . if you happen to win—which is unlikely—what do you want? I’ll have to grab it before you head to the airport tomorrow night. Everything is probably closed now because of the blackout.”

  “What if it’s not something you buy?” I almost whisper.

  “What?”

  “Not telling you yet.”5

  I can almost hear him thinking, trying to puzzle out what I might want. He’s always so arrogant, believing he knows what I’m about to say.

  “I’ll grab you a gift card to that spa you always talking about. To get your mustache waxed.”

  “If I got a mustache, it’s more than you got.” I pucker my mouth at him and put the books back on the shelf.

  “Freshen up those eyebrows, then. Or tattoo them on.”

  “What do you know about eyebrow-tattooing?”

  “You know Magdalena Cruz? She was in Calc with us last year. She got them shits.”

  I look up at him. “How would you even know that?”

  He grins. “Guess.”

  I roll my eyes.

  “The new girl I just met is part Guyanese. She gotta get them done weekly. Eyebrows for daaaaaays.”

  My heart tightens. “Another girl. Of course.”

  “Can’t help it if the ladies love me. I’m popular. She cool though. You’ll like her. She’s friends with Seymour’s cousin.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Whatever, what?”

  “You always have a crush.”

  “Big heart. So much love—” He sticks his tongue out at me. “—to give.”

  “While I’m gone, you’ll bump into a girl and next thing I know, your nose’ll be as wide as the Lincoln Tunnel. You’d sell your whole house to make a girl happy.”

  “Everything but Mami’s picture.” He lifts a picture locket from under his tank, kisses it, and does the sign of the cross. “But you never like anyone.”6

  Tristán pats his backpack where his book lies. “Just surrender, champ.” He puts his warm hands on my bare shoulders. It sends an unexpected shiver through me as if they’re suddenly different from the hands I’ve known my whole life. The same hands I’ve had endless rock paper scissors wars with. The same hands that dunked me in the pool. The same hands that turned clammy while clutching mine during horror movies. The same hands I held when sitting with him day and night at the hospital while watching his mother die.

  But it all feels so different. Like there will be a before and an after I’ve said the thing. Like there’s no going back after the words come out. Like this will be the fissure in the permanent memory of us—a what we were and what we will be.

  Tonight it feels like a new story between us.

  “Not so quick . . .” I grab his shirt and pull him out of the room. “Book the Ryde and by the time it gets here, I’ll be done.”

  “Where we going now?” he complains as I drag him from the ground floor up the stairs to the first floor. “Ryde says twenty-eight minutes.”

  We duck around in the dark. The tinkling jingle of my jewelry echoes. I shouldn’t have worn so much tonight. The white marble arches of Astor Hall curve above us. Tiny balls of flashlights dance on the ceiling, and it feels like we’re trapped in a great big cave.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I glance up even though I’ve seen it more than a thousand times. But never like this. I might love it even more in the dark.

  I remember how the noises of people moving around would echo through the hall. The quiet is beautiful.

  “You about to see all type of marble. Arches and stuff in Europe.” He makes a snoring sound.

  “You have terrible taste. That’s why you don’t appreciate this. Never have.”

  “I’m just not into all this bougie shit like you. Our library in Bed-Stuy was never good enough. You’d always drag me all the way here.”7

  “It’s my favorite place in the whole city. You know that.”

  “I know. I been meeting your ass here these past two weeks.”

  I don’t turn around to scowl at him as I start up the staircase. There are so many stories here. It always felt like maybe all the words in all the books leaked out somehow, seeping into the brass and wood and marble, making the place magic. That it was a place lovers of books came, a place where storytellers and writers were born,
a place where nothing mattered but what if . . .

  “Excuse me. You two—STOP right there!” comes a voice followed by the sharp beam of a flashlight. “What are you doing here?”

  Tristán puts his hand up to block the brightness. “Okay, okay.” He grimaces and whispers hard to me. “I told you this was gonna happen.”

  “The library closed hours ago. You’re trespassing,” the red-faced white man says, lifting his phone to no doubt call NYPD.

  I step forward in front of Tristán. “Sorry, sir, I left my backpack on the second or third floor. I can’t quite remember. But we’ve been searching for it everywhere.”

  “You’ll have to get it tomorrow when the library reopens,” he barks.

  “But it has my wallet and everything in it. My house keys. I won’t be able to get home in the blackout,” I lie.

  He jams his hands to his hips as if exasperated by us. “I’ll get it.”

  “But you wouldn’t know what to look for.”

  “You can describe it.”

  I rattle off an incomprehensible description.

  He grimaces. “I suppose you’re right, but he”—motioning at Tristán—“can wait with me.”

  “I need him,” I whine.

  Tristán holds back a chuckle and I elbow him.

  “I’m afraid of ghosts,” I add and bat my eyes like I’m helpless and couldn’t possibly fumble around in the dark on my own.

  A man without pants darts past us all. “What the hell are you doing in here?” The security guard starts screaming and pointing his flashlight. He takes off after the man, leaving us.

  We race in the opposite direction, ducking into the empty Gottesman Gallery to hide behind the massive stone columns.

  “You’re not afraid of anything,”8 he says through panting. “About to get us arrested.”

  “You afraid?” I slide my back along the cool marble and sit on the floor. “Turn your flashlight app on again.”

  He crashes beside me. “I’m not scared.”

  “Okay.” I tug one of his soft locs and he jumps. “Ol’ still scared-of-the-dark—”

  “Shut up.”

  “You still got your turtle nightlight?” I pull off my huaraches and let my sweaty feet air out. A blister has started to form on my baby toe.

  “Donatello is living his best life. Stop hating.” He flinches as we hear a distant noise. “You think there’s really ghosts in here?”

  “Probably. It’s where I want to live after I die,” I say.

  “You said you were gonna haunt me,” he reminds me. When we were twelve, Tristán bet me that he could conjure his grandmother through a Ouija board we found at one of those botánica Santería shops. We’d lit all the candles from his mother’s prayer altar and sprinkled ourselves with Florida water and sage. We waited for spirits for five hours. I told him none would show up. I won and he had to do my math homework for the week.

  But Tristán told the whole seventh grade we met Biggie Smalls that day instead.

  They believed him. People always do.

  “Let’s wait it out to make sure he doesn’t come back yet,” I say.

  “Your feet just hurt.”

  I wave a sandal in his face.

  “Feet stink too.”

  “Smell like roses. Best toes ever. Look at that sexy-ass big toe right there. Perfect shape. And my polka-dotted polish is fly.” I try to touch him with my foot and he squirms away. “You’d get more girls if you liked feet.”

  “Or I’d be a creep,” he says. “Like what you call those men on the train.”

  Tristán rode the subway with me to and from school every day, long after we got too big for our parents to take turns dropping us off. His presence, even when we were small, warded off everything on our way from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side.

  I sprawl out on the floor. He lies opposite me, our heads beside each other’s. One of his locs rubs against my cheek. I don’t brush it away. I lift my phone, the soft light finding the glass boxes of exhibits. A poster advertises The Greatest Love Letters of Literature. I let the light linger over a few poster-sized letters stretched and blown up beneath clear panes. “Remember when you wrote Nella a love letter in ninth grade?”

  I can feel his smile in the dark.

  “It was the best letter she ever got,” he says.

  “You wish.”

  “I’m eloquent.”

  I couldn’t argue with him about that. He could charm his way out of detention or get a grade raised from a B+ to an A-. All the teachers at Stacey Abrams Prep adored him. He would be a great radio host one day.

  He starts to read one love letter out loud in his serious “on-air” voice: “I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” His voice holds a beautiful deep bass. I remember when it had its little boy squeak to it. “Keats knew his shit. This probably made Fanny go wild.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’d die to get a hundred letters like this.9 Stop fronting.”

  “Whatever. Gran got a love letter in May. Well, more like a love email, and then an old-fashioned one arrived. That’s why we’re going to Paris.”

  He whips around to face me. “You just telling me? Yo, that’s wild. Gran still got it. Been fine forever.”

  “Shut up!” I swat at him.

  “Who sent it?”

  “Supposedly a great love of hers. A man she thought she would marry back in Haiti. She was eighteen. Called him her first real love. Said he left for a job in Paris and never came back. And now, one of her best friend’s—Auntie Althea’s—dying wishes was for Gran to go see him.”

  “Whoa. Gran ’bout to get snatched up. Granpapa been gone for a long time. Now, her best friend, Althea is gone, too. She’s got to be lonely.”

  The memory of my grandfather’s warm brown face filled in: the creases around his eyes, deep wells and tiny smiles, the smell of the pipe tobacco from his shirt pocket, the way his mouth curled as his words slipped from French to Creole and back again. His loss feeling like it happened only moments ago.

  Tristán plays with my bracelet. “You good?” I hear the concern in his voice. He came with me every week to see Granpapa as his memories turned slippery, sliding away no matter how many scrapbooks Gran and I made for him.

  I nod.

  “But imagine having to write a letter every time you wanted to talk to someone. Like how did people really start liking each other or fall in love and shit?”

  I roll my eyes. “The art of the love letter is a real thing.”

  “Nella didn’t think so,” he says.

  “’Cause Nella is queer,” I say. “Thought everyone liked you like that.”

  “They should,” he boasts.

  “And why is that?” I tease.

  “I’m handsome and smart and am a Renaissance man.”

  I make a vomit sound. I was there when he learned that term three summers ago. His mother had taken us to all the art museums in the city right before she’d gotten really really sick. She attempted to teach us both the appreciation of art so that maybe Tristán might take his talent with drawing and painting to the next level. We’d wandered every gallery, looked at every painting or sketch or sculpture, and collected tiny postcards of as many art pieces as we could. He asked so many questions that a docent asked if he planned to be a Renaissance man—a person who wanted to know all the things and have all the talents. He spent the summer trying to do just that . . . and dragging me with him.

  “You still can’t even spell it,” I say.

  “Oh, I can. I just love love and I’m man enough to say it.”10

  I let my flashlight rest on another blown-up love letter poster. After his mother died, he said his heart would be forever broken. I always thought that’s why he didn’t like being alone. He was either helping his dad at one of the bodegas they owned, helping his little sister do this or that, or next door sprawle
d on my couch . . . or with one of the many girls he kept on rotation.

  His phone pings. “Ryde will be here in seventeen minutes, elefantita. Better hurry up.”

  Panic shoots through me.

  “Maybe I should write this new girl a love letter. She’s mad old-fashioned. Worse than even Fatima was.”

  I clench my teeth and try not to let my stomach twist. “Fatima hated me.”

  “She hated anyone closer to me than her. She would’ve hated Paloma if she wasn’t my nine-year-old sister.”

  “She would’ve been your pants if she could. Thirsty-ass.”

  “Is there anyone still in here?” a voice shouts from the hall entry.

  We freeze.

  Beams of light cut through the space. “Library is closed.”

  We wait for the person to walk away before sitting up.

  I wiggle my feet back into my sandals.

  “You about to lose. Get ready to pay up,” he whispers.

  We tiptoe on the third floor, passing murals illustrating the history of the recorded world. I used to point and pester Gran with all my questions about how everything came to be. I pull him into the Rose Reading Room.

  The arched windows let in the twilight, allowing the room to reveal its treasures: long wooden tables with hooded lamps bordered by layer upon layer of shelves, red tiled floors with marble paths, and chandeliers. My breath catches as we walk down the long aisle. I remember being a little girl standing in the very center of it for the first time, clutching my bullet journal and pen to my chest, and saying that I would be a writer, that I would have a book that could live here.

  Carts hold books. Tristán starts to pause at each one, combing through them as we walk past. “Boring . . .” He lifts one. “Racist.” He points to another. “Meh.” He pushes a third out of the way.

  “Bet the book you picked is meh,” I taunt.

  “You wish. I’ll have you know it’s hilarious. A great book should make you laugh. That’s part of its job.”

  “Or cry,” I say, walking between the tables. A few personal books have been left behind. I riffle through the pile. It has everything from the books we were forced to read in school to the ones Daddy loves, to romance and weird fantasy. I wonder what this person was researching and why they left all these behind. Maybe they’d be too hard to carry home in the dark? I open the jacket flaps and spot the same penciled-in name—Eden Shepard. Why’d you leave these here?