Sick Kids In Love

by Hannah Moskowitz

  But then he touches me again, and I think, home.

  I am allowing myself to think, home.

  I’m doing this.

  …

  March is almost over, it’s finally starting to get warm, and Sasha and I are having a rare day where we’re both not feeling all that bad. This will probably never happen again. I go over to his house for our usual Saturday night horror movie ritual, but the movie’s over and it’s not even nine and we’re both antsy. I’m on his laptop on his bed, checking out what’s playing nearby or if there’s some restaurant we haven’t been to or some bar that won’t card two teenagers who really do not look twenty-one. Sasha’s pacing the floor and brainstorming.

  “There’s nothing good in theaters,” I say. “It’s all sequels to shit.”

  “We’re too poor for theaters anyway,” he says.

  “True. So why am I looking at restaurants?” I close a bunch of tabs.

  He claps his hands together suddenly and points at me.

  “Idea?” I say.

  “Yes. Let’s go to Times Square.”

  I laugh. “What?”

  “Come on, when was the last time you went?”

  “I…transfer at the subway station a lot?”

  “It’ll be fun,” he says. “We’ll look at the lights. Watch the people. I’ll get you a pretzel.”

  “We’re New Yorkers,” I say. “New Yorkers don’t go to Times Square.”

  “They also don’t call themselves New Yorkers! You’ve backed yourself into a corner.” He’s being patient, though. A week ago, he would have already been putting my jacket on me. Now, if I really didn’t want to go, we wouldn’t.

  And honestly, it has been a long time since I’ve even walked through Times Square. I usually do everything I can to avoid it. We all do. Hating Times Square is a New York point of pride. We’re supposed to hate everything that tourists like.

  But I have no idea how I actually feel about it. I’m just repeating the things other people say.

  I do know I like pretzels.

  “Okay, what the hell,” I say. “Let’s go to Times Square.”

  We’re the only people at Sasha’s apartment for the first time since we baked my mom’s pie recipe. Nadia’s at dance class, the boys are at their mom’s, and Sasha’s dad is out with the woman he’s been seeing for a little while now. Sasha hasn’t complained as much about him dating as he used to, so she must not be that bad.

  We go down in the elevator and out of the building and toward the subway. He’s all hyped up like he’s never left the apartment before, bouncing a little as he walks, shooting me these completely disarming smiles that make me want to kiss him and never stop. This is what’s in the air on the first warm evening in New York every year. We still have to wear jackets and hats, but it’s finally reasonable to be outside as a destination and not just as a way to somewhere else. Preteens are lurking outside Sasha’s bodega, talking shit about people who pass by and kicking around a hacky sack. There’s an old man sitting in a plastic chair in the doorway of the dry cleaner’s. When we get down to the subway station, there are devastatingly dressed, extremely drunk women laughing so loudly you’d think the subway station was the place they wanted to get to tonight.

  We stand up together on the train, because there’s only one seat and I want to be with him, and he gradually leans in closer and closer to me, our eyes on each other’s, until our noses touch. We don’t say anything. We don’t have to. The train stops suddenly, and we slide into each other and giggle.

  We get off the train at Times Square and weave through the crowd transferring onto other lines and get to the escalator to go above ground. “You ready?” he says.

  I laugh. “You know I have been here before.”

  You can see the Times Square lights through the big glass windows before you even step out of the station, even though the Times Square from the movies, with the red steps and the sidewalk-to-sky lit-up billboards, is still a few blocks away. Sasha takes my hand as we leave the station.

  “I took my cousin here, once,” Sasha says. “His very first time in the city. We walked out of the subway station, and he goes…is this outside?”

  I squeeze his hand. It’s just cold enough out here for his cheeks to flush a little pink. His lips are chapped in the center, and his hands are soft, except for little calluses right at the base of his fingers from his bike.

  “I used to beg my mom to take me here when I was little,” I say.

  “Oh yeah?” He has a voice he uses for me when I talk about my mom, like I’m a frightened little animal he’s worried about scaring away if he’s too eager, but I don’t mind.

  “Yeah.” We keep walking toward Times Square. There are a lot of tourists here, of course, but it’s not as bad as I would have guessed. People are on the street corners, handing out coupons for comedy clubs and pamphlets about Hell, and there are a couple of guys dressed like Spider-Man wandering around the street. “She always wanted to do stuff as a family, but my dad had to work, and…I guess this was easy. She’d bring me here and I was so dazzled by the lights she didn’t actually have to do anything to entertain me, just watch me and make sure I didn’t run off. She wasn’t really much for playing and stuff. We got along better when I was older and we could just exist.”

  “What about your dad?” he says. “Better when you were younger or now?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I thought when he took the promotion to Chief it was so he could spend more time with us. That’s what he said it was going to be. But I guess it didn’t work out that way. She was really upset about that.”

  “He’s been busy lately, yeah?” Sasha says. “Like, even by his standards, I haven’t seen him much.”

  “Yeah, there’s something going on with the hospital. They’re gonna have to stop accepting an insurance they were accepting. Which they already had to do last year.”

  “Wow, that sucks.”

  “Mmmhmm. And otherwise they can’t keep the doors open.”

  “Lose-lose.”

  “Yeah.”

  He takes a deep breath, or as deep as he goes, as we finally reach the square. “On the bright side,” he says, his face tilted up to the lights.

  I smile without meaning to. “Yeah.”

  I know we must look like tourists, standing here holding hands and marveling at the ads around us, and usually that’s something I take great pains to avoid, but right now, I don’t mind so much. The buildings around us are lit up with billboards playing videos of girls putting on lipstick and M&Ms spinning and pictures and tweets from people who use a special hashtag. Up above those ads, the Broadway billboards peek over like the flashy signs’ more serious parents. Tourists are posing for pictures in front of the steps, but there’s always a ton of room to sit on them. I think maybe they don’t know they’re allowed to sit there.

  But we do, of course. Sasha says, “Go ahead, I’ll get you your pretzel.”

  “With—”

  “—tons of mustard, I know.”

  I sit on the steps and watch him walk to one of the hot dog and pretzel carts in that loping, long way of his, his hair blowing back off his face. He jokes with the vendor a little, those dimples showing up so deep on his cheeks I can see them even from here. He reaches into the wrong pocket for his wallet first and gets embarrassed and flustered and adorable. He covers it with another joke.

  And honestly, all these people in Times Square…are they aware of what they’re in the presence of right now? This boy who’s terrified of ordering food, who’s getting me a pretzel so I can sit down? Who’s so self-conscious that he doesn’t know what else to do besides brush everything off but who’s trying something different for me?

  Bow down, New York City. Look at my person.

  And all I have to do is sit and watch and clamp down on that feeling in my stomach t
hat never lets me enjoy anything, to put my fear that another shoe is going to drop, that I am not allowed to be this happy, into a tiny little box and store it away and open it sometime when I’m alone and it can’t ruin our night. When it can’t ruin him. Because maybe it’s baseless. Maybe this time, something is actually as good as it seems. We’ve had the arguments. We hashed it out. We figured out solutions. Maybe we actually really do get to the good part. Maybe if my parents had done that, they’d still be together. This could be all it takes.

  It’s possible I deserve something. Or that he messed up karmically in some past life and somehow I’m really the best he deserves.

  I’ll take it, is what I’m saying.

  As long as it’s real.

  And it could be.

  It’s possible.

  It’s…okay. He’s heading back toward me. Try acting like a normal human who knows how to enjoy things.

  And then he sits next to me and hands me the pretzel and kisses me on the cheek, and all of a sudden, I am.

  We don’t say much. We don’t need to. We just sit on the red steps for a while, sharing a pretzel with tons of mustard, watching the billboards change, watching tourists gape at the buildings, and I fall in love with this stupid little tourist trap and with this amazing city and with this boy who has me under his arm.

  I remember that first day in his apartment, how it felt when I first sank into that bath, and for a minute nothing hurt.

  That’s what it’s like.

  …

  “So it was fun, right?” Sasha asks. We’re back in Chelsea, walking to his place from the subway so I can grab my backpack and we can make out for a while before I head home.

  “It was definitely fun.”

  “And I didn’t… I know it was my idea, but I didn’t…”

  I grab his hand. “You didn’t make me do it. I had fun. Everything’s good.”

  He smiles at me. “Okay.”

  We stop outside his building and kiss for a while, even though we’re about to go upstairs together. I drape my arms around his neck and feel like I’m falling and caught.

  Sasha starts chuckling in the middle of the kiss.

  I pull back a little. “What?”

  “Sorry, it’s, uh.” He covers his eyes. “My dad is at the end of the block, doing the same thing we’re doing.”

  I turn around and look. Dmitri has his arms around some blond woman in a short black skirt, and they are really just going to town. They make Sasha and me look like prudes.

  They pull away a little to gaze at each other, and this crawling feeling starts at the back of my neck and itches its way up to my scalp before I even understand what’s going on, and then it’s my whole body, and I’m suddenly very aware of my heart and my lungs, and this can’t be happening—

  “He’s shameless,” Sasha says.

  “That’s my mom.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.

  “What?”

  “That woman that your dad is… That’s my mom.”

  This is why we don’t trust good feelings.

  Why are you the way you are?

  I think we’re all just copying what we see. Scenes from movies. Feelings that songs say we’re supposed to have. Fights that our parents have. We just reenact them. And of course they’re all reenacting stuff, too. I don’t know. There should be Oscars for real life, and we give them to all the people who are still married.

  —Maura Cho, 16, lapsed optimist

  It’s kind of the nature versus nurture argument, right? It’s not like that only applies to gay stuff, though of course that’s where you hear it the most often. Was I born 100 percent, you-are-definitely-gonna-be gay, was I born neutral—which I guess to them means straight, uh, okay—and then I had gayness thrust upon me by, I don’t know, I guess the argument is my parents or the media, or was it somewhere in the middle and I had, like, a predilection toward gayness that had to be nudged, but not all that hard, by something outside of me? I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. But if you know any, tell them they can study me if they pay me a lot.

  —Luna Williams, 16, certified gay

  Because of the government and capitalism and all that shit. And the baby boomers destroying the economy and then blaming us for it. Did you hear we’re killing the napkin industry? How about you fucking pay us, and then we’ll buy some napkins, sound good?

  —Anna Spumoni, 21, activist

  It’s genetic.

  —Sasha Sverdlov-Deckler, 16, Gaucher disease

  I don’t know. Why did you make me? Why’d I have to die? Wouldn’t I have been more affecting for you as someone just wasting away beautifully and getting all that motherly love and attention? But no. You killed me off. There’s got to be more to this, don’t you think? Because it’s not that you want to be dead. Do you, Isabel? Or do you just think you deserve to be?

  —Claire Lennon, 17, dead

  Chapter Nineteen

  I make Sasha go up to his apartment and get my backpack because I need to go back to the subway station and not up to an apartment where Dmitri could potentially be bringing my mother, or coming up to tell us about his date with my mother, or smelling like my mother’s perfume, or with her lipstick on his cheek, or…my mother my mother my mother my mother.

  I wait underground by the subway card machines and stare at cracks in the tile until he gets back. He has my backpack over his shoulder. “Are you sure it was her?” he asks.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “This is pretty weird,” Sasha says.

  “I should have known this would happen.”

  “You should have known my dad would date your mom?”

  “Not this specifically, just…something. God, this is awful. I take back everything I ever said about you being a baby about your dad dating. He clearly has terrible taste in women and should not be allowed to date.”

  “Well, I don’t think you ever said the word baby, but…I appreciate it?”

  “God.” I hold my head. “God, God, God.”

  “He told me her name,” Sasha says. “Ann…not Garfinkel.”

  “Levine. She didn’t change it when she got married.”

  He says, “Oh, that reminds me. Would we be Sverdlov-Deckler-Garfinkel or Garfinkel-Sverdlov-Deckler? I’m fine with either.”

  “Can you please be serious right now?”

  He takes my hand. “Sorry.”

  “I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” I say.

  “Listen, I’ll talk to my dad about it, okay? I’m sure he has no idea. He’ll end things with her if I explain it to him.”

  “Why would he do that?” I say. “They’ve been dating as long as we have. I don’t have priority.”

  “Yeah you do, because you’re also my best friend,” he says. “My dad’s best friend is this guy Steve on the Upper East Side. I’m not asking him to dump Steve.”

  “I should have known this would happen,” I say again.

  “I’m gonna make sure you don’t have to see her again, okay? I promise.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s just… This is just proof of everything I was telling you. I tried to pretend I was bigger than this, or we were bigger than this, or something.”

  “Ibby,” he says gently. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m cursed,” I say. Someone pushes past me to get to the subway card machine. “Either my family is cursed or we are just horrible fucking people, but either way, we are a fucking curse.”

  “Okay, I love you, but you know you sound kind of ridiculous right now, right? You don’t believe in curses.”

  “There is something wrong with me,” I say. “I keep telling you and you keep not listening.” This gets a very helpful ooooh shit from a group of girls walking past us, who ironically probably think I’m talking about a disease or something.
>
  “I am listening,” Sasha says.

  “No, you’re not. I can’t… This was a mistake,” I say. “Thinking I could have this. Thinking this was even a thing.”

  “If you want me to listen, you’re going to have to explain to me—”

  “The women in my family are terrible,” I say. “I’m terrible. I don’t need to explain it to you because I told you and you didn’t listen. That woman, who left her family and changed her phone number and who, by the way, is still married, is up there making out with your dad, and you don’t get why it’s a problem that that woman is half of me?”

  “Okay,” Sasha says. “I don’t know if this is the wrong time for this, but…I mean, just going from what you’ve told me, I know your mom isn’t a saint or anything, and I’m not saying she is, but…didn’t your dad kind of jerk her around?”

  “What?”

  “He kept telling her he was going to be around more and then leaving her alone,” he says.

  “He had to work.”

  “I mean, so did she, right? And she still took care of you.”

  “He—” I can’t believe I have to explain this to him. “What he does is really important.”

  “I’m sure it is, but it’s also kind of… I mean, he’s turning away people because of insurance stuff. He’s making those decisions.”

  “It’s not like it’s just him. There’s a whole board and shit.”

  Sasha says, “You have an imaginary friend who died because she didn’t have the right health insurance. Are you sure you don’t have some kind of resentment toward him that you’re just…channeling all onto your mom?”

  “I mean...” This is so incredibly not the point, and does he really think he’s going to introduce some new idea about my father to me? He really thinks I haven’t considered this? “Okay, so what if I am?” I say. “So I’m the spawn of two terrible people instead of one? That’s supposed to make me feel better?”