by Paloma Meir
I sat on the floor in the hallway aware of how greasy my hair was, how strong the scent of humans was on my skin was. I cradled my head in my hands and thought life would be far too long without the mesmerizing Caitlin in my life. I sat crumpled on the floor for what felt longer than I had been alive.
I heard a group of girls walk down the hallway. The group was lead by Rebecca, a chemistry major from Connecticut. She stopped to check on me. I looked into her smiling eyes, and knew I would survive. My life would go on because Rebecca had invited me out to dinner with her family the following night.
I stood up after the friendly banter smiling, almost laughing. I opened the door to my room embarrassed by my internal emotional theatrics. Arturo had his back to me as he tucked his crisp white shirt into his dark denim jeans. I opened my mouth to recount my thoughts for the previous twenty-four hours and closed it as he turned around with his smile that always curled up on the left side.
“You’re alive.” He laughed and waved his hand in front of his face as he put on his blue and purple checked linen jacket. He wore colors like no one else. He was a dapper, a very good-looking guy. If he weren’t such an epic womanizer, I was sure that Caitlin and Brianna would have picked him for their experimentation.
“Go take a shower. My family flew in early. They’re taking us to dinner at Bistro du Midi.” He ran his fingers through the waves of his hair that always wanted to pop up from the slicked back style he wore it in. “Danny came by looking for you. He looked a little sick. Invite him anyway.”
“Dinner good, Danny yes. I’m feeling pretty good Arturo.” I texted Danny.
I sailed through the following ten days with Danny and Arturo by my side. Our group growing larger every day as we went to graduation dinners, parties, even a ridiculously fun day at the Six Flags outside of Boston. A motley crew we were with Arturo’s South American friends, Danny BU “buddies” and, of course, my back to good friends again, Caitlin and Brianna.
And no we didn’t refer to our “experimentation” ever again.
…
Sleepy but otherwise feeling pretty good, I sat with Arturo against a wall in the gym waiting for commencement to begin. We drifted off to sleep in our little corner. The two of us had given up on the long line for the complimentary breakfast offered to us, the graduating seniors. Maybe that’s why everything went wrong?
I woke to Brianna tugging my arm and telling me to get up. I smoothed down my hair and readjusted my cap. Standing up I felt a little off as if I were still asleep. I followed her and Arturo to the procession line, trying to remember my place.
The mass of robe covered bodies moved forward in a blur. I rubbed my eyes and looked for my school group. I suddenly wished I had minored in Philosophy instead of my high school interest, Theoretical Physics. I followed the future sages outside to the field, standing with them as if I belonged. They pointed me to a different area. I nodded my head, not moving. It sounded like they were speaking a different language.
Caitlin’s arm tugged me away. She spoke, I continued nodding my head, but couldn’t make out her words. She put me with a group of people who looked familiar. I nodded at them as I had done with the Philosophy majors.
The line moved again. Like so many other times in my life, I wasn’t going to get a break. I meekly followed them out to Killian Court. I caught sight of Arturo’s pink shirtsleeve beneath his black graduation gown.
I ran ahead, stepping on feet, not bothering to apologize or even acknowledge my rudeness. Finally, I caught up to him. I put my hand on his shoulder for balance. He turned and smiled in a questioning way. I assumed he was looking for someone in the audience and turned around only to see my family, along with Danny and his family, sitting in the black plastic chairs.
I moved forward, hand still on Arturo’s shoulder with the rest of my body turned around. My mother and Danny’s mother were whispering to each other as my father stared ahead in his own world. Danny stared up at the sky with the elastic smile he had been wearing since the day before when Zelda had not come home for his graduation.
My sister was the only one aware of me walking by. She smiled to me and quickly stood up with a very worried expression on her face. She whispered something, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying over the noise of the crowd.
Arturo came to a sudden stop, causing me to bump into him. He turned to me speaking in Spanish, a language I spoke and understood, but it had an echoing quality as if someone had turned the bass up on his voice to maximum levels.
I smiled, and he shrugged. I followed him to his seat and sat down and finally realized what everyone had been trying to tell me. I was in the computer science area. The seat I was sitting in was not my own. The rightful occupant tapped me on the shoulder and asked me to move. I let him know I would not be moving in a way that clearly scared him, the frail-looking tech student. He shared the chair with the person on the other side of him.
I lowered my body into the seat as the sound of booming unintelligible voices came through the speakers. In my slumped position, I looked up at the dais to see a large group of professors, some who had been my own, but I couldn’t remember their names. My eyes finally found a familiar face on the stage, Professor Noam Chomsky.
The one thing I knew? That I had taken Zelda in her first year to one of his lectures. I thought that with her love of reading, she would enjoy his series of talks on linguistics. She might have if she had been able to stop poking me in the stomach and giggling. I smiled at the memory and felt calm for a moment.
I relaxed into my chair. A round of applause filled the air causing me to look away from Professor Chomsky. A mistake. I knew the commencement speaker was being introduced. I could see him standing not twenty feet from where I sat, but I couldn’t tell if he were Bill Clinton or Kofi Annan. I panicked and looked for the professor who had soothed me the moment before. Whatever oasis from my troubled mind he had provided had disappeared.
So I did what any sane person would do in such a circumstance. I turned completely around to stare at my family, knocking my knees very hard into the flimsy boy/man beside me.
My father sat with a prideful look as he gazed upon either an ex-President or the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Nothing to see there. I spoke to him dutifully every week for no more than two minutes before it all became too strained.
My mother was still discreetly whispering with a hand over her mouth to Danny’s mother. I could only assume they were talking about Zelda. They were careful around Danny not to speak about her, but with him three seats away it looked like they couldn’t hold back.
It had hit them hard. My mother loved Zelda and gave her all the care that Carolina sometimes angrily rejected. Back at home the two of them would spend their Sunday mornings together going to AA meetings and having long brunches, outside of our home if you could believe it, sometimes including Zelda’s friend Keith who she had met in rehab.
Zelda had grown close to my mother, and Carolina grew closer to Mrs. Moreau. She would take her shopping and from what I could tell, beautify her. It was if the two of them had cheerfully traded mothers. You wouldn’t believe what else they would switch in the future.
I glanced Ms. Goldberg’s way. I didn’t know if it was her youngest graduating from college, or her surrogate daughter not returning from her trip abroad, but she looked wiped out. The lines around her eyes stood out more than the startling blue color her and Danny shared.
My mother had been close to Zelda but nothing like the relationship shared by Ms. Goldberg and Zelda. Danny had always compared Zelda to a deer, with her long legs and wide eyes. I only ever saw the resemblance that first year after her bad day, the day she had been so hurt.
I closed my eyes to shut out the memory, but saw in my mind’s eye the way she clung to Mrs. Goldberg when she wasn’t with Danny. The way Mrs. Goldberg would walk with Zelda, her arm always around her as they would go off shopping or whatever they would do together. The tender way she treated her.
>
I pushed my logical mind to the forefront and tried to shake off my confusion. Zelda was fine, as I always knew she would be. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes to see Mr. Goldberg looking on at our esteemed commencement speaker, whoever he was, much the way my father was, but differently, engaged, caught up in the moment. Alive in a way my father would never be.
I took another deep breath as Arturo whispered some gibberish in my ear. I wondered for a moment if I were experiencing an auditory aphasia, if I were on the verge of a stroke.
I looked over at Danny bypassing my sister who stared at me, waving her hand in a way that made me think she wanted me turn around. Sorry Carolina, not happening.
My eyes took in my zombie-like friend who to anyone else would appear confident, dynamic like his father, wrong. He sat in his chair mostly staring up at the sky, occasionally looking down his row as if to check-in, wrong. His eyes met mine for a moment, and he nodded his head. His smile grew wider if that were possible.
I looked away from him annoyed to the chair beside him that was not filled with Zelda. My confusion turned to something close to anger. It was one thing for her to skip Danny’s graduation, but mine? No Zelda, that was not okay.
Not a word from her, nothing but graduation cards from her parents Carolina had given to Danny and I the night before at dinner. We ripped them open only to find handwritten notes from them with checks for five thousand dollars as a gift. Danny raised his letter to rip it up. I followed the motion, wanting to support my friend. He stopped as he saw my hands begin to tear the card, and said we weren’t being fair to her parents.
I knew he stopped it because he wanted me to have the money. I didn’t know whether to be touched or upset that he pitied my circumstances in some way. I went with touched because Danny was a good friend, a good person all around.
But that was the night before. This day was a new day and not such a great one considering it was the culmination of so many childhood dreams. I stood up very suddenly and knew the ceremony was a waste of time. We needed to get Zelda that very instant. Not one second longer could we wait. His plan was a failure. We would go get her together.
An arm yanked me down. It better be Arturo’s I thought to myself because taking down the anemic computer whiz kid on the other side of my seat seemed like a pretty good idea in that moment.
“We’ll be in Lima tomorrow.” He said to me in his lightly accented English.
He yanked my head down to his shoulder and held it down with his arm. He gave me a very loud kiss on the side of my head. The South Americans were very touchy feely in their own macho way. I took another deep breath and finally recognized the commencement speaker. Good job MIT. I was impressed.
Chapter Nine
Do you have some money? Do you want to live a rich life? Move to Lima. People were rich and lived well in Los Angeles. The same in Boston but nothing like Arturo’s family estate outside of Miraflores district in Lima.
Like most of Lima, that hadn’t been constructed hundreds of years before, his house was built in the late 60’s at the height of what culture had thought would be the future. White with a modern boxy feel, but big, nine bedrooms not including the servants quarters and several freestanding rectangular guesthouses on the twelve acre flat of grassy land that sat on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
The modern style mixed with colorful fragrant flowers that looked like the flora back at home in Los Angeles but with brighter, more unusual colors. The interiors had mostly white walls but with splashes of oranges and greens bringing life to what could otherwise be a cold esthetic. The furniture was the same, mostly mid century to fit the design of the home but the chairs in pink, the tables in red.
A big change from the mostly conservative feel of Boston or the flashiness of Los Angeles. Everything put together not just for the effect but for comfort. The whole family and all the friends would crash on to the sofas after long days spent outside.
I hadn’t seen much of Lima preferring to stay on the estate with Arturo’s large family. They came over every day for the endless meals served in different parts of their home. Soccer, we played all day long. We had more than enough people for sun up to sun down games with all the family and friends coming over to congratulate Arturo and by extension me on graduating from “the greatest University in the Americas”.
It was June which was traditionally winter south of the equator, and we felt it in the early mornings hours. Grey and wet was what the weather was reminding me of the Los Angeles June gloom, but that year it burned off by noon. The days were full of sunshine. I didn’t see myself ever wanting to leave.
I stood on the edge of the improvised soccer field as the opposing team made up mostly of Arturo’s younger cousins and some visitors from Japan took a break to have a snack of pork ribs coming fresh of the barbeque. I wondered how this lavish level of lifestyle was paid for. I knew Arturo’s father was high up in the government’s office of culture and diplomacy. I also knew he was the president of the second largest bank in Peru. It seemed like a conflict of interest to me, but what did I know? I studied physics not global politics.
I licked the tangy taste of the ponzu sauce and lemon off my lips. The carnivore diet I hadn’t indulged in for many years wasn’t something I saw myself giving up anytime soon. Arturo threw me the ball, almost knocking the plate out of my hand. I caught it on my knee, bounced it upwards and as it descended, I let it slide down the front of my leg and on to the ground where it landed by my foot.
Arturo’s sister ran towards me. She looked like she was going to try to kick the ball away from me. Good luck with that Jimena. She was the only reason I was relieved to be leaving the next day. Jimena, the very plain, most wide-eyed innocent eighteen year-old sister of my roommate, had developed a little crush on me. She followed me around all the time, bringing me snacks and playing soccer with us. My mild attraction to her was not something I wanted to indulge.
I tapped the top of the ball with my foot and moved over it as if I were floating making her laugh. I slammed my foot on top of the ball bringing it back up into my free hand and gestured my head to Arturo that lunchtime was over. Time to get back to the game.
We ran out to the field with the tennis skirted Jimena following not far behind as our group of spectators followed. Rallying all the players back into position, I took my spot as the attacking midfielder, the position I had been playing my whole life. The perfect position for a budding physicist with an innate mathematical understanding of trajectory. The fact that my entire being turned to brute when I played any sport didn’t hurt either.
Lined up ready to go, I threw myself into the game following the ball beating back my opponents including Arturo. We played with a different style than the others back home in the states. My time brutally playing with his family eclipsed the by the book approach I had always followed when I was on the MIT soccer team.
I wasn’t outside myself seeing what happened, so I don’t really know how the ball came to be at my feet with the other team surrounding me. I did know the dead ball was mine. They would not be taking it. I slammed my foot down on it as I had done earlier to impress the very sweet Jimena, bouncing it off me, and jumped high to rebound it off my chest. My impulsive move, that I had perfected in Danny’s mowed down front yard at the age of thirteen, threw off the charging players for a moment, and that moment was all I needed.
I threw my body down to the ground extending my right leg full force, catching the downward falling ball, and kicked hard, harder that ever before, executing the perfect bicycle kick. The ball flew with a gale wind force towards the goal. I didn’t even care if it made it in the net. I knew the execution was perfect, a thing of beauty I had done.
I jumped up in one quick movement to a standing position, the adrenaline pumping through my body, and pulsating in my temples. I threw my arms up in the air and screamed a battle cry that I hadn’t known I possessed. The opposing team surrounded me, drowning me in hard pats on my back and cheers, pr
actically lifting me off my feet.
So loud were we that I almost didn’t hear the screams and cries coming from the goal post. I turned around and saw over their heads a crumpled Jimena. Blood covered her neat white tennis outfit as she cried loudly into her hands.
I broke away from the group and ran to her apologizing. I ripped off my t-shirt to clean the blood off of her face. I hoped I hadn’t broken anything, but I knew I had. I wrapped my arm around her shoulder for support and smiled saying stupid things to downplay the damage I had caused.
She cried as I wiped away the blood and felt my shirt covered hand run over a nose that felt entirely too loose. Lifting the t-shirt away, I looked at her very ordinary face to see her nose tilted to the side. I felt sick inside.
The crowd of spectators led by Arturo and his Dad ran to us speaking Spanish so quickly that I was having a hard time differentiating the words from the voices. I assumed that they were cursing me, planning to send me home on the next plane. Wrong.
“Bicycle kick... National team...” It seemed they wanted me to stay and play soccer. I didn’t know then and this surprised me because Arturo knew that move came easily to me. I had done it at least a half dozen times over my years at MIT but the bicycle kick was a big deal in Peru. There was a rivalry over who had created it, Peru or Chile.
