by Adam Silvera
“If I can’t remember, I’m wasting her time. Dragging it out will just lead her on and stop me from finding someone new,” he says.
“Makes sense,” I respond. “I mean, if Romeo and Juliet didn’t think the other could offer ultimate happiness, the both of them would’ve survived.”
He laughs. “So basically make sure I find someone worth downing poison for?”
“Exactly,” I say. “Do you live around here?”
“Yup.” Thomas points to the Joey Rosa Projects.
“Do you want to play?”
“Isn’t manhunt for thirteen-year-olds?”
“Nah. We go hard, like tackle each other and shit.”
“How late you guys going to playing for?”
“Different games throughout the day, I don’t know.”
“I have to head home. Maybe I’ll find you later. It seems like you need someone to watch your back.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine from here on out.”
“How sure?”
“Bet-my-life sure.”
Thomas points behind me, and there goes Deon and Brendan. They’re winding down, but they’re close. Thomas pries open the gate and I sneak back to his side.
“I should probably run.”
“You should probably run.”
“See you later, Thomas.”
“See you later, Stretch.”
Ten minutes later, after making the stupid move of hiding inside the tunnel slide like an amateur, Deon catches me. Now I’m searching for others in staircases and the garage, when I feel magnetized back to the gate where I just was. No one is there. Not Baby Freddy or Nolan or that kid Thomas. I move on.
Not long after 4:30, Genevieve joins the Family Day festivities. The guys all cheer and whistle as she approaches. I half expect her to play-choke me like she did before we had sex last night, except for real. But as we hug she whispers, “I told my friends too.” Then she punches me. When my friends begin asking probing questions about how good I was, she and I ditch them for an unoccupied bench.
“How you doing?” I ask.
“Pretty happy, I guess.”
I stare at her bare neck until my eyes fall a bit. Normally I’m better at not staring at her cleavage whenever she wears these baggy-cut shirts, but my post-sex hormones are at a high. I’m weak to it all. She raises my chin until our eyes reconnect. “I’ve created a monster, haven’t I?”
“I swear I like you as a person too.”
She’s not smiling, though. “I’m going to miss you, Aaron,” she says.
She grabs my hand. I’m so fucking confused.
Then I see it in her face. It feels like someone has knocked the air out of me. She’s breaking up with me. She only wanted me for sex. Maybe the sex was bad. I was bad at sex because we rushed this. Maybe we should’ve never had sex, ever. It would be a hard life but an even harder life is one without Genevieve who never gives me shit whenever I run out of things to say at the end of a long day.
“What did I do?” I ask.
She places a hand on my cheek, a pity palm. “I enrolled to the art camp, dumb-idiot. I was a really late admission obviously, but I called and someone dropped out. But I don’t leave until after my birthday, so this doesn’t ruin whatever big plans you have.”
Yeah, I am indeed the biggest dumb-idiot this world has ever seen. But I’m also the luckiest dumb-idiot, because I have a girlfriend who gives so many flying fucks about her future. And she’s definitely not leaving because the sex was so-so.
Probably not.
“I think I’ll miss you too,” I say back, and it sounds really cool, like when Han Solo told Princess Leia “I know” after she said she loved him.
The pity palm clenches into a fist and punches my shoulder. If I told her I didn’t have any plans for her birthday yet, she’d probably punch me in the face. Whatever I decide on can’t be too expensive because I have to give my mom some rent money before the month is up. “You probably want to spend your birthday at the park waiting for stars to come out, don’t you?”
“That sounds pretty perfect, actually, yeah.”
“Nah. Too boring. Let’s go to NASA and try to fool around in a zero-gravity room.”
“Sounds impossible and messy.”
“I think it sounds outrageously fun.”
“You’re not winning this, Aaron.” She gets up, smiling, and walks away.
I chase after her. “I’m sure they have stars at NASA somewhere . . .”
The Great Argument of NASA vs. Park ended when Genevieve threw a “because I say so” my way. So, you know, it was never going to happen but it still sucks.
It’s darker out now, maybe after 8:00. Colorful ribbons surround us from our water-balloon fight as fireflies flicker gold around the barbecue grill we’re using to roast marshmallows. Genevieve has never had a roasted marshmallow before so I capture the moment on my phone’s shitty camera. Her face sours, and she gives me a thumbs-down. “Too burnt,” she mumbles, spitting it out.
“Real ladylike,” Nolan says.
Genevieve flips him off. “How about this?”
All the other guys burst into a chorus of “Ooooooooooh!”
I eat the rest of the marshmallow for her and we sit back. My brother is still playing cards with his friends underneath a streetlamp; my mother is trying to socialize over the pounding salsa; some dads are playing horse with beer cans, a trash bin as their basketball net . . . and that Thomas kid is here, lost and looking around.
I unwrap my arm from around Genevieve’s shoulders and run to catch Thomas. “Yo!”
“Stretch, thank God!” Thomas gives me a fist bump. “I couldn’t find you. What’s going on out here, someone’s birthday?”
I point to the shirt, which I guess he didn’t register earlier. “Family Day. It’s an annual celebration for us Leonardo Housing residents. You guys have something like this over at Joey Rosa?”
“Nope. Is it okay that I’m here? I can leave if it’s just a community party.” He looks around with this face that screams, I know I don’t belong.
“You’re chill. Come meet my friends.”
We make our way back to the crew. “Yo, this is Thomas.” Genevieve looks back and forth between us. “And this is my girlfriend, Genevieve.”
“Hey,” Thomas says. “Happy Family Day, everyone.”
They all give halfhearted waves and head nods.
“How do you know each other?” Baby Freddy asks.
“Bumped into him earlier. He just broke up with his girlfriend and I thought some games could cheer him up.”
“Wait.” Deon sits up. “Didn’t I see you outside the gate this afternoon?” He nudges Brendan with his elbow. “This is the dude that sent us to Dead Man’s Corner?”
“That what you call it?” Thomas places a hand over his heart and raises the other. “Guilty, by the way. I gave Stretch here a much-needed assist.”
“Where you from?” Fat-Dave asks.
“Down the block. Joey Rosa’s.”
They all glance at one another. Sure, we’ve had some BS with Joey Rosa kids over the years, always getting into fights whenever they invite themselves over to our block, but I can tell Thomas isn’t like them.
Skinny-Dave doesn’t care about the rivalry. “You know Troy? He still with Veronica?”
“I know him, but I don’t like him,” Thomas answers. “My neighbor Andre was pissed at Troy for some reason and I overheard him asking Veronica what she saw in him and she had no idea what he was talking about.”
“YES!” Skinny-Dave jumps. “I knew that fucker was lying. I should go call her.”
Thomas scratches his head. “I hate to break it to you, but she’s seeing Andre now.” We all laugh at Skinny-Dave who falls back into his seat.
“How’d the rest of the manhu
nt game go?” he asks me. “You win?”
“I got caught ten minutes later,” I say. I sit back down with Genevieve and hold her hand. She pulls away—and then I see why: she’s holding out her palm as a landing place for a firefly. It’s easy to forget it’s there when it’s not glowing, until all of a sudden it comes back and surprises you; it reminds me of grief.
“Did you know fireflies glow for mating purposes?” Thomas says.
“Nope,” I say. “I mean, I believe you, I just didn’t know that.”
“Imagine if we could glow to attract a mate instead of spraying on cologne that chokes everyone in a fifty-foot radius,” he says, which is weird since I don’t think his cologne smells all that bad.
“Aaron and Genevieve know enough about mating,” Nolan throws out.
Genevieve flips Nolan off, again. “Did you all know fireflies also glow to lure prey? It’s basically the equivalent of a girl who gets you to follow her into an alley with her great ass, and then eats you.”
“What a crazy fun fact.” I wrap my arm around her shoulders in the hopes she’ll never eat my head off in an alley because I never realized girlfriends existed in the same predatory universe as hungry fireflies.
Me-Crazy bullies Baby Freddy into going to Good Food’s to buy another handball since he knocked the other onto the roof earlier during the baseball match. They go back and forth for a while until Thomas reaches into his pocket, pulls out a dollar, and hands it to Me-Crazy. It’s a thank-you to everyone for letting him crash Family Day. Me-Crazy nods, doesn’t thank him, and hands it to Baby Freddy—who sucks his teeth, victorious enough that he didn’t have to buy another ball with his own money, but still enough of a loser that he has to go get it. When he returns from Good Food’s, he bounces the handball over to Me-Crazy.
“Now what?”
“Suicide,” Me-Crazy says in a low growl, which sounds fucking crazy even without the growl, but he’s not actually suggesting we all somehow use this handball to kill ourselves because that would be a) insensitive to me—not that he cares, I guess—and b) impossible.
Genevieve looks up at me as if we’re all some cult run by Me-Crazy.
“It’s a game,” I tell her.
How to Play Suicide: It’s every man for himself. Someone throws a handball against the wall, it bounces back, and if that ball touches the ground, someone else throws it. But if someone catches it, the original thrower has to race to the wall and shout “Suicide!” before anyone has a chance to bean them.
“ . . . and the game goes on until you’re the last one standing,” Brendan explains to Genevieve.
“Sounds barbaric,” she says.
“You can opt out of a beaning,” Baby Freddy says.
He’s right. There’s a rule we reserve for girls and younger kids, where instead of hitting them with the ball you try and throw the ball against the wall before they reach it and eliminate them that way.
“Or you can not play at all,” I offer. I don’t want to see what happens when she’s running to the wall when Me-Crazy is armed.
“I can handle it,” she says.
“You ever play this?” I ask Thomas.
“Been a few years.”
We walk over to the wall under my window. There’s a white residue fogging up one panel because of our shitty air conditioner or something. You can see a couple of my sketchbooks sitting on top of a pile of comics next to my dad’s trophies.
Me-Crazy throws the ball first. It’s possible no one caught it on purpose in case you hit him too hard and he flips out. Nolan throws the ball next and Brendan and Baby Freddy bump into each other trying to catch it while both making contact with the ball. Nolan is safe whereas Brendan and Baby Freddy book it to the wall. I quickly snatch up the ball and bean Baby Freddy.
He’s out.
Brendan shouts “Suicide!” before someone else can sweep up the ball and hit him too. But shouting “Suicide!” on Family Day is a poor move. Everyone, especially my mom and brother, are instantly hyperalert as to whether or not I’ve you-know-what’d myself. It takes a moment for them to realize we’re playing a game they’ve begged us to rename over and over through the years.
The game goes on. Fat-Dave manages to eliminate Nolan, Deon, and Skinny-Dave because, overweight or not, he has a pitcher’s aim. He throws the ball and Genevieve catches it.
“Don’t miss,” I beg her.
Genevieve throws the ball, and, well, it’s good to know if we ever get into a big fight where she’s threatening to throw a knife at me I won’t have to move a single muscle.
“Suicide!” Fat-Dave shouts.
It’s so tense right now you’d think there are mines planted on the ground.
Genevieve doesn’t run for the wall (like she should).
No one makes a move for the ball (like they should).
Finally, Brendan goes for it.
“Don’t do it,” I tell him. I should’ve grabbed the damn ball myself.
Genevieve runs and is a couple feet from the wall when the ball hits her in the shoulder. She spins around, rolls her eyes, and folds her arms. “Is that what you’ve all been so afraid of?”
“I went easy on you,” Brendan says as she takes a seat with the other losers. Brendan throws the ball and it rebounds right into Thomas’s hands. Thomas chases him and hurls the ball, but hits Brendan after he shouts “Suicide!” and is penalized. The ball rolls toward Me-Crazy, which is just terrifying for the newbie, so I race for it myself, falling onto my shoulder in an attempt to grab it. I get up and Thomas hasn’t run to the wall yet.
“You okay?”
“Throw it!” Me-Crazy shouts.
I throw the ball, but I fucking miss.
We both run for the wall, and Thomas shouts “Suicide!” and before I can call it myself, I’ve been beaned so hard I crash straight into the wall and sink to the ground.
“Aaron!”
Genevieve rushes over to me, but I’m fine, or should be in a few days, at least. She massages my temples and I turn to see Me-Crazy celebrating his hell of a hit. And Brendan is shaking his head, no doubt disappointed in my bad throw.
“You sure you’re okay, babe?” We sit the rest of the game out, my head still pounding.
“I could down a bottle of Excedrin right now,” I say, which are poor choice words for the guy with the suicide attempt on his life record. We watch the game while chatting about how she’s going to miss having someone tall around to reach for high things when she flies to New Orleans on Tuesday afternoon. I’m about to tell her something that would be rated NC-17 if it were a movie, when Thomas beans the hell out of Fat-Dave so hard, Brendan claims he felt that one. And sure, they all sympathize for the dude with extra poundage as a shield, but when I get hit in the fucking head, the only one who makes a move for me is my girlfriend. That’s gotta be contractual or something.
The game comes down to Thomas and Brendan and Me-Crazy. Between Thomas and Brendan, someone’s balls gotta drop sometime in the next few rounds so Me-Crazy doesn’t win out of fear. Brendan has a really bad throw (not that I’m going ahead and shooting him a disappointed look or anything) and it rolls toward my mom and our neighbors.
“I’ll get it,” I offer so I can test my motor skills after that hit to the head. To my relief, I don’t walk like some toy with bad wiring. My mom has the handball by the time I get to her and I throw it back over to Brendan. “Rough game over there.”
“I preferred the water-balloon fight,” Mom says.
“Even when we were throwing bottles of water at Me-Crazy?”
“I don’t think there’s any more damage that can be done to that boy,” Mom says a little too loudly, getting some laughs from some neighbors who I know without knowing, if that makes sense. But there’s one woman I sort of, kind of, definitely recognize, something to do with her piercing green eyes and tousled mass
of red-orange hair. That hair is like a candle’s flame.
“Hello, kiddo,” the redhead says in a light English accent that’s got a tinge of South Bronx flavor to it.
“Evangeline!” I practically shout. She’s my old babysitter and I had the biggest crush on her. It’s weird seeing her casually drinking when I never saw her drinking as a kid, which, you know, made her a good babysitter. “I want to hug you or something but I’m really sweaty and, uh, dude-like right now.”
She puts down her beer and hugs me anyway. She messes with my hair and looks me in the eyes. “So this is little Aaron Soto nine years later. You’re so handsome. I’m sure you have plenty of gorgeous suitors fighting over you, yes?”
“Just the one girlfriend, actually,” I proudly say. It’s sort of awesome being able to tell my first crush that I’m basically off the market now. She shouldn’t have turned me down when I asked her out after my Power Rangers marathon.
“One lovely girlfriend he snuck away to spend the night with yesterday,” Mom grumbles. “Behind my back.”
“How was London?” I ask Evangeline, ignoring Mom. If I remember right, she’s only nine or ten years older than me. “You broke my heart to study abroad, right?” I cried and cried after she left, not that I’m going to own up to that right now.
“I was studying philosophy at King’s College. Though if I could rewind time I would happily trade in courses about pre-Socratic ideologies in favor of playing race cars with you.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear.” I smile. “So you’re back. For good?”
“I am, I am. I need to figure out work now, but am simply relieved to be back in the states where I’ll take our God-awful subway traffic over the London Underground any day of the week.” She suddenly gives me the same sad look she used to have whenever she had to tell me my mom was stuck at work for another hour or two. “I’m sorry about your father. If you ever want to talk, kiddo, give me a holler, even if it’s just to tattle on your brother for not sharing the Player One controller.”
I pocket my hand so she won’t see my scar. My mom lowers her head. Better to chat with Evangeline instead of Dr. Slattery, the awful therapist I spent a few weeks talking to. “For sure.” I fake-smile because everyone wants happiness for me as much as I want it for myself. “Welcome back.”
