by Una LaMarche
Jaxon.
He spins around, and for a second I’m afraid I’ve said his name out loud. But he looks completely shocked to see me; he actually freezes with the Hefty bag lifted in midair. I smile awkwardly and raise my hand in a wave, realizing too late that it’s completely idiotic to wave at someone who’s standing four feet from you. Jaxon blinks quickly a few times, like he’s testing his eyes, and then cocks his head and breaks into the slowest and most amazing smile I’ve ever seen, like a sunrise lighting up his entire face. He straightens up and puts the garbage down.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” I say.
“Wow. Uh . . . wow,” he stammers softly, and I just smile. I can’t help it. Already I know that this—whatever this is—was worth it; the feeling I’m having, like every cell in my body is doing a somersault at the same time, is positively euphoric.
“Can I help you?” asks the woman refilling the lemonade.
“Oh, um . . .” I shake my head.
“She’s with me,” Jaxon says. “I mean, I know her. Sort of.”
“All right, then,” she says, leaning forward over the counter, voluminous cleavage spilling out of her pink shell top. “You make sure he gets that stanky garbage outside before I faint!”
Jaxon rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “Yes ma’am,” he says, and heaves the bag onto his shoulder. “You stay right here,” he says as he passes me. “Don’t move.”
“He’s a good one,” the woman tells me as the door swings shut behind him. She looks me up and down and then winks. “I always wondered what kind of girl he was hiding away.”
“Oh, I’m not—” I ball my vest in my fists and shake my head. “We’re not—” The boy eating with his mom—he can’t be more than ten or eleven—glances up at me and snickers.
“What is she telling you?” Jaxon says with a laugh, jogging back in from the street. “Don’t listen to her. Cora just likes to cause trouble.”
“Who, me?” Cora asks with a coy smile. Then she turns back to the lemonade. Jaxon gestures to one of the empty tables.
“Stay awhile,” he says.
“I can’t,” I say. He raises his eyebrows and smiles.
“That’s what you said last week, and here you are,” he says. “Come on, sit with me for one minute.”
I shake my head. “I really can’t. My sister is waiting for me next door. I just came to—”
To what? What have I come here to do? My mind is a blank, and my heart is a drum.
“—see you,” I finish.
“Okay.” He laughs. “Here I am. Looking is free, but a photo’s five bucks.”
“Stop it. That’s not what I meant.”
“Then sit,” he pleads. “I’ve been hoping you’d come here, and now you’re here, so let’s talk, or take a walk, or something.”
“It’s not that easy,” I say, glancing back nervously. Hanna could be coming out of the pharmacy any minute, wondering where I am.
“Fine—can I at least give you my number or my e-mail this time? So you don’t have to stalk me?”
I shake my head again, and Jax looks crestfallen. But I suddenly have a better idea. Tomorrow I can make an excuse to run an errand without Hanna. A long errand. Tomorrow I’ll have time to think of what I want to say.
“Meet me at the corner of Washington and Montgomery,” I say, leaning in and tilting my chin toward his shoulder for privacy, feeling the heat radiate between us like one of the magnetic force fields Shosh and I constructed for our fourth grade science project. “Tomorrow, at five fifteen. We can take a walk then.”
He looks confused but intrigued.
“Okay,” he says. “What’s at the corner of Montgomery and Washington?”
“Just be there,” I say. I’m sure Jax is smart enough to figure out the answer to his own question. Washington Avenue is technically where Crown Heights ends; its westernmost border. It’s also where the Brooklyn Botanic Garden begins, a sprawling jumble of trees and paths and ponds we can get lost in, and where neither of us will look out of place. And it’s the only date spot I can think of outside the neighborhood that’ll have me home in time for dinner.
I can feel Cora’s eyes on us and fear I’ve stayed too long already, so I leave Wonder Wings as quickly as I came in. It hurts to turn away from Jax, but this time I know it’s not forever. We’ll see each other tomorrow. We have a date. A date. I have to put a hand over my mouth as I step back down to earth, the warm pavement shimmering in the sun, both to hide myself from anyone who might be passing by and to suppress the nervous scream that threatens to tear from my throat, scattering the pigeons. This is so surreal. But it’s happening. And most incredibly of all, I’m making it happen.
I don’t see Hanna until we’re almost nose to nose. She’s standing on the sidewalk near the curb with her arms crossed, a white paper bag clutched in her fingers and a devilish grin playing on her lips.
“That didn’t look like Shoshana,” she says.
There’s no sense in arguing with her. “It wasn’t,” I say. “That was—”
“The boy from the elevator,” she interrupts, looking both completely shocked and almost uncontrollably excited. “Right?” I nod, and Hanna shakes her head in disbelief.
“Listen, you can’t—” I start. “Please don’t tell anyone about this.” My mind races to grab on to a reasonable excuse. “I had his keys,” I say. “He asked me to hold them while he climbed up the elevator shaft and I put them in my pocket and forgot about them, but then I found them and they had a keychain from this place on them, so when Dad mentioned it before I thought maybe he would be there, and . . .” I trail off, exhausted by my own lie.
“Dev, don’t worry,” Hanna says, linking her arm through mine as we turn to walk back to the store. “I wouldn’t tell anyone anyway.” She frowns as we start to walk. “He’s cuter than I pictured. It’s so sad he’s not Jewish. Imagine the story you would be able to tell your grandkids if you guys got married!”
“Hanna, stop it!” I cry, pinching her arm. “I told you, I had his keys, there is nothing like that going on.”
“Relax,” she says with a sigh. “I’m just saying it would make a good story. I know it’s not real. Can you even imagine? What Dad would say?” She nearly collapses into giggles, which I guess should make me feel better, but instead I feel impossibly sad and heavy.
I do want that fairy-tale ending to my story. But I know that if the boy in my story is Jaxon, I’m never going to get it.
Chapter 10
Jaxon
SEPTEMBER 3, 4:45 PM
I hate cleaning the grease trap. It’s one of those things that you see people doing on reality shows about the world’s nastiest jobs. And at a place like Wonder Wings, which serves french fries, chicken tenders, and battered fish and shrimp along with our signature wings and token salads, there’s a lot of fat that gets trapped. They actually have professionals who will clean a grease trap for you, but Cora is cheap, and she knows I know a thing or two about taking stuff apart thanks to my dad, who hasn’t had an appliance serviced since 1992 (and even then it was just because he broke his wrist and couldn’t replace the dryer belt one-handed).
But today, I am feeling the grease trap. In fact, I’m feeling everything. I might as well have cartoon birds flying around my head ever since I came home from work last night.
“What happened to you? You fall down?” my mother asked when I helped set the table by spinning in a circle balancing plates in each hand.
“Nope,” I said. Then I started whistling.
“Check his irises,” Edna—the future doctor—said. “If his brain is hemorrhaging, they’ll be different sizes.”
“Fayth Griffith’s chest must be hemorrhaging then,” Ameerah said, and cracked up.
“What in the hell is she talking about?” my dad asked bemusedly from his beat-up La-
Z-Boy, where he was nursing a can of beer.
“Boobs, Dad,” I called, and my mom whacked me with an oven mitt.
“What is wrong with you?” she asked with a laugh.
“Absolutely nothing, for once,” I said, which made her smile turn suspicious.
“Something happened at school,” she said. “Didn’t it?”
“Nope!” I said again.
“Oooh, was it Polly?” Tricia said, pouring a steaming pot of rice into a serving bowl.
“Polly?” Ameerah laughed. “No chance. Jax can’t close that deal.”
“I could if I wanted to,” I lied—though on the high I was riding, I sort of believed it—“and it’s not about her.”
“It’s a girl, though,” Joy said from her prone position on the living room floor, where she was leafing through a textbook. “You can tell by his stupid face.”
“It’s always stupid, though,” Tricia said, kissing my cheek on her way to the table.
“It’s just rubbery,” Edna said.
“Thank you, dear sisters,” I said, but all of their chatter just rolled right off. All I could sense was that door swinging open and the burst of warm breeze that licked at the back of my neck and the feeling of stepping off a diving board before I even turned around and saw her standing there, bathed in sunlight. It was perfect. Even though I had been up to my elbows in trash.
“A girl, huh?” my mother said, taking the roast out of the oven. “The last thing you need is a girl to distract you. You’re distracted enough.”
“What?” I joked.
“Don’t be cute,” my father called.
“Can’t help it,” I said, and it was true—I couldn’t.
Now, almost twenty-four hours later, I still can’t. I’m suffering from what might be the world’s greatest mood, even as I scrape big deposits of putrid, gelatinous fat from the sides of the trap into a bucket.
I spent last night (when I was supposed to be doing my philosophy reading) burning a carefully curated mix CD for Devorah. It’s called “Elevator Music” (get it?) and has everything from Jay-Z and Childish Gambino to Bright Eyes and Florence + the Machine and, of course, the Shirelles. I tried not to make it too lovey-dovey, but it’s kind of hard when every song is, in one way or another, about love: wanting it, getting it, losing it, hating it. And obviously I don’t love Devorah. At least not yet.
“Hey, Romeo,” Cora says, leaning against the kitchen door. “You almost done? We got orders coming in.” Normally I clean the trap around five PM, in between the after-school crowds and the dinner rush, when business is slowest. But today I begged Cora to let me do it early so that I could cut out and meet Devorah. “And please,” Cora says, grimacing at my yellow-splattered T-shirt, “tell me you’re not wearing that on your date.”
“Nope, I brought a change of clothes,” I say, scraping the last of the gristle from the trap. “I don’t want to smell like wings for this girl, no offense.” I glance up at the kitchen wall clock, which is bright orange and shaped like the silhouette of a walking chicken. It’s 4:48. I figure it’ll take me ten minutes to change my clothes and freshen up in the employee bathroom, and then another ten to walk to the spot where I’m supposed to meet her. I should add on five minutes to pick up some deli flowers, too, the kind that come wrapped up in a big cone of paper that’ll drip water on my shoes while I walk. Which means I have exactly two minutes to spare.
“So who exactly is this girl?” Cora asks. I’ve been working for her for seven months, and since about day two she’s been acting like a second mother.
“She’s just a girl,” I say noncommittally. “I met her around the neighborhood.”
Cora nods. “I bet you did,” she says. “What happened to Polly?”
I cringe. I can’t believe I’ve spent so much time talking up a crush that never went anywhere. When you let something like that out, it’s not yours anymore; people think they know what’s going on and that you need their advice. No way I’m making that mistake again. No one is going to know what goes on between me and Devorah except for us.
“Polly’s just a friend,” I say. “I’m over it.”
“What about this girl?” Cora asks. “She more than a friend?”
I stand up and wipe my hands off with a dishrag. 4:50. I have to get going. I just shrug and shoot Cora a quick “It’s all good” smile.
She takes a deep, slow breath—the kind people take when they’re gearing up to lay the smack down on you. “Do her parents know you’re seeing her?”
“I don’t know,” I say, turning on the hot faucet in the sink and sticking my arms in up to the elbows, scrubbing them with goopy pink liquid soap. “That’s her business.”
“Uh-huh. Right now it’s her business, but once they find out it’s gonna be your business.”
“Maybe they won’t find out then.” I dry my hands and lean down to grab my bag. I’m going to have to update my route. I should just get out of here before Cora ropes me into a Very Special Episode talk about my love life. There’s a Burger King on Bedford Avenue near Montgomery where I can duck in and change.
“How do you plan on that?” Cora asks.
“Well,” I joke, slipping on my backpack, hoping she gets the hint, “I’m not exactly invited over for dinner.”
Cora sighs heavily. “I know you think it doesn’t matter,” she says. “And maybe it shouldn’t. But you know, Jax, things are complicated. Before you were born, there was—”
“A riot, I know,” I groan, cutting her off. I hear enough about it from my parents.
“A race riot’s not a small thing,” she says, narrowing her eyes. “We may live side by side, but they’re not like us. And they don’t like us. You understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now one more time like you’re not just humoring me.”
“Yes, I hear you.”
“Okay, good.”
But I’m not changing my mind, I think as I breeze past Cora and zigzag through the few front tables and hit the door like Superman breaking through brick. I’ve never felt this way about a girl before, and the only thing that matters—more than color, creed, or keeping kosher—is that she feels it, too. And I’m about to find out. I check my phone: 4:54.
I break into a run.
• • •
4:59 and I’m two blocks closer to our meeting place, standing outside a deli trying to decide between two sad floral arrangements that are leaning listlessly against a crate of shriveled oranges, propped up in a janitorial bucket filled with a few inches of water. One has red roses—a clearly superior flower, the international symbol of romance—but they’re about half dead already. The other has carnations, which aren’t as pretty but look slightly healthier. I’ve been trying to decide for a few minutes, but I keep getting distracted by the Brooklyn Miracle Temple’s cross-shaped sign, which is 3-D and reads JESUS SAVES. Jesus could have at least saved me some decent flowers, I think, and then, immediately: I’m going to hell. I pick up the roses.
5:01 and I’m almost at the Burger King when my phone rings. It’s my mom. I told her I was working late—my second bald-faced lie in less than a week. If I pick up, she might be able to tell I’m not at the restaurant by the street noise. But if I don’t pick up, she’ll definitely be able to tell I’m not at the restaurant, because she’ll call there.
“Hi, Mom!” I say cheerfully, trying not to squeeze the last life out of the flowers as I hold them awkwardly in my armpit. “I just stepped out to grab a . . .” What don’t we sell at Wonder Wings? What would I have to leave to buy? “. . . a coffee!” Third lie. (And really, fourth lie, since I don’t drink coffee, but who’s counting?) “What’s up?”
“Listen, Jaxon, do you think Cora would let you off a bit early today?”
“Uh . . . I don’t know. Probably not.” (Fifth lie.) “Why?”
“Your father got a last-minute job out in the Rockaways and forgot to pick up Joy from her track meet. It ended fifteen minutes ago, and I don’t want her walking home alone. Can you get her?”
My heart plummets. I feel sick. “There’s no one else?” I ask, and I can hear my mother’s tongue click against the back of her throat. She was expecting me to drop everything without hesitation. Why would she expect any less? That’s what I’ve always done. “I mean,” I hedge, “we’re slammed today. Of course I’d love to leave early, but I don’t know if I can.”
“I’d do it, but I’m in Manhattan with the twins getting their teeth cleaned.” In the background, I can hear someone—probably Ameerah—singing “Teeth” by Lady Gaga.
My mood has changed so fast I’ve got emotional whiplash. I know I can’t leave my little sister sitting on the curb as the sun goes down, dressed in nothing but a tank top and iridescent shorts. But going to pick up Joy means ditching Devorah. And there’s no way I can call or text or e-mail her to let her know what happened. She’ll just think I blew her off. And she’ll never come looking for me again, I know that much. She’ll be gone, this time for good.
“I . . .” I look down at the roses under my arm and at my grease-stained jeans. It’s 5:07. I won’t even have time to change now.
“Jax,” she pleads, “this is my baby girl. She’s waiting alone, and I can’t reach her. Please. Look—put Cora on the phone. She has kids, she’ll understand.”
I can hear the panic rising in my mom’s voice, and I realize I have no choice. It’s Devorah—a girl I’ve met twice—versus my own sister. It’s infatuation versus familial love. It’s the audacity of hope versus the reality of timing. And it sucks.
