He grunted. “Maybe I am hooked,” he said. “Did you know that Ritalin belongs to the same class of drugs as cocaine? You can snort crushed Ritalin for a rush.”
“Have you ever done it?”
He didn’t answer.
“When I eat Ritalin, I’m not watching the clock, counting the seconds,” he said.
Counting seconds was my forte.
“You don’t know what it feels like,” he added.
Yes, I did.
I chewed my lip. “Thayer, I want to tell you something.”
“Yeah?” His foot hadn’t stopped jiggling.
I yanked down the denim that had creeped up my thighs. There was no way to begin. I was ashamed of my “depression,” a word that conjured Monday-morning blahs.
Thayer tapped my knee. “So what’s crackin’?”
I was starting to get dizzy. “It’s weird,” I said. “You’ll laugh.”
Thayer tapped again, only this time, he didn’t let go.
“I won’t laugh,” he said.
I believed him.
“Talk to me, Fin. We’re buds, right?”
“Yeah. Sure,” I said.
If that was true, then why was I staring at his hand—all five digits curled like they belonged on me? My own hand was trembling, getting ready to match Thayer’s movement. That would mean evening out the gesture, in other words, skimming the hard shell of his kneecap.
So I did.
He didn’t seem to mind.
There was the wheeze of a door unlocking. All the lights snapped on.
Mr. Clemmons hustled inside. Students were funneling into lines. Their voices droned.
“What are we going to do?” I whispered.
“We’re gonna dip outta here,” Thayer said.
Before I could stop him, Thayer snatched my hand, plowing a path through the maze of chairs and music stands. Kids stared. Mr. Clemmons was so flabbergasted, he only managed to croak, “Frances? What are you doing here?”
I could’ve strung him a paragraph of lies, but he wouldn’t have heard it anyway. When we finally made it to class, Ms. Armstrong wrote our names on the board, a form of public humiliation.
I glanced at Thayer. He was too busy doodling to notice.
Tagging
I’ll show you how to drop a tag.” Thayer ripped a page from his notebook and drew: NERS.
When I asked why he tagged the girls’ bathroom, he said, “So you could see it.”
I shoved him. “No, really. I want to know.”
“I like it better in there,” he said. “It smells nicer. Has a nicer view, too.”
I sighed. No hope of getting a straight answer.
He scribbled graffiti the way I drew numbers, his hand squeezing the tip.
Thayer would tap my arm and say, “Check it.” He would stare at a fence, at the block letters in thick black ink. Or a mailbox trimmed in balloon-shaped tags. He would explain how an Aerosol Prophet had tagged a Metro bus on Biscayne Boulevard.
“If you’re gonna do a bus, then do it with style, man. Take it from me. When you go out to the street, hit it big.”
And he talked about South Florida legends, the crews with names like INKHEADS, 7UP, BSK, DAM.
“This guy, Elite, has got some mad style. I caught a few fresh panels by him, some pretty dope murals. I personally don’t like Krash’s pieces letter-wise, but I give him props on bombing.”
In time, I noticed. Everywhere I looked, there were codes in layers. If I spotted a tag, finger-traced on a dusty bumper, I was beaming.
An extravagant tag could send Thayer into such a dreamworld, he couldn’t move until he had painted one of his own. He had tagged the school’s metal bleachers near the football field. What he noticed, he wanted to copy. The bus tag, for example, could be better.
Thayer had seen me carving digits into desks. He asked me to show him my secret chain of numbers. So I snuck him into the girls’ bathroom during lunch. We had to wait for Sharon Lubbitz and her clones to finish smearing their mascara. Then I opened the door and he strolled inside like he owned it.
“You’ve got some ill skills. Why did you do this?” he asked.
The question surprised me. “I don’t know. It’s just something I do. How did you get into it?”
“Nothing special. I started writing NERS a long time ago. Back then it seemed short, which is always good in the graf world, and it sounded like a cool name.”
“Ever get caught?”
“Yeah, I was bombing in front of this store. Some security guards chased me around Sunset Place. I had to hide under a car until they rolled out. And I had red paint on my hands, like I had just murdered somebody.”
Thayer reached into his jacket. He gave me his Sharpie pen. His fingers brushed mine and an electric jolt shot through them.
“You try,” he said.
“I’ve never tagged here before. I just draw things.”
“So what?”
“I’ll get caught.”
“No, you won’t. I’ll keep watch for you.”
“I don’t know.”
“If you’re going to be a smart bomber, you’ll know what to hit and when to hit it.”
He left me alone in the bathroom. I uncapped the Sharpie and sniffed ink. I scribbled NERS over the walls, across the mirrors, and down to the petal pink floor tiles. The untagged surfaces seemed too clean. I couldn’t stop myself.
“Damn.”
I didn’t even notice that Thayer had returned. He stood back and studied my tags. He whistled. “That’s tight.”
For a while, we stood there, looking. Part of his unlaced Converse was bumping mine. Everything seemed out of the ordinary: His foot tapping my toe. The mere concept of toes.
I knew from his expression that I had done well. More than well. My tags looked solid, the edges outlined in thick halos. Already, I felt the urge to tag again.
“Yo, we gotta dip,” he said.
By the end of the day, the school was buzzing about the graffiti in the girls’ bathroom. Everyone believed that a boy had trespassed into that forbidden zone and left his filthy mark. The teachers questioned Thayer. His notebooks were infested with ballpoint NERS tags, just like those on the pastel tiles. Since nobody would come clean, the principal made Thayer scrub the stains with nail polish remover.
The NERS incident didn’t do much for Thayer’s popularity. But the four-letter stares and acid-laced insults rolled off him. He didn’t even pay attention.
On Saturday, we walked from our houses to the Metrorail station near the park, which dumped its passengers in a nowhere zone of treeless sidewalks. He brought his skateboard and I pretended I knew how to ride it. We went to the mall, where Thayer made up voices for the pigeons. Around him, I didn’t count so much anymore. Tagging kept my head and hands working in total constant order.
Just watching Thayer wind his streaky hair into a knot was a landmark moment—the same when he recited the alphabet in Spanish or when he ate a bowl of Cocoa Puffs for lunch, sipping the last drop of tinted milk. I liked the sight of him marching into our hideout, the music room, his banged-up skateboard at his side like a faithful steed. He’d wrestle it up the stairs and lean it against the wall. I couldn’t help wondering why he felt comfortable doing these things in front of me.
On the way home on Saturday, we were writing tags on each other’s hands.
“So what was your first impression of me?” he asked.
I didn’t know what to say. I thought about him sitting alone on the bench that day at lunch and throwing the tennis ball so hard, it broke the window.
“You seemed kind of angry,” I said.
“Huh,” he said. “It sucks that you saw me that way. Sometimes I get pissed when my Ritalin wears off.”
I was counting the syllables in his sentences. He spoke super fast, in 8/8 time, while most people talked in plain old 4/4 rhythm.
“So your emotions are, like, all over the place,” I said.
“Yeah,” he s
aid. For once, he was quiet.
“Hey,” I said. “So what did you think of me?”
He perked up again. “I thought you were a rock star.”
“Liar,” I said.
“Why would I lie?” he asked, genuinely confused.
“So what makes me a rock star? I can hardly play the violin.”
“But you have perfect rhythm. And you always wear that ’80s jacket. So hard-core. Nobody in the entire school looks like you.”
“That’s sad.” I covered my face in my hands.
“No. It’s good.” Thayer pulled my hands away. “Quit hiding.” He wrote a row of numbers on the inside of my wrist. “Now write yours,” he said. “Just in case.”
“Just in case what?” I asked, staring at those inky digits, half expecting them to float away.
“In case I need to talk to a rock star,” he said.
I scribbled my number on his skin.
A Perfect Day for the Answering Machine
I jumped every time the phone rang. And then, one weekend, Dad called.
He came to the house and picked me up as if we were on a date. It had been raining nonstop all afternoon. Mama didn’t say much besides, “Hello, David” and “Drive carefully.” Then I noticed Yara in the passenger seat of his brand-new BMW.
The restaurant, La Carreta, was a chain on Eighth Street with sugarcane sprouting all over the lawn. Dad took control of the menu so I’d know how sophisticated he had become since dating his girlfriend. She was wearing a low-cut sweater, the fuzzy kind that sheds like a cat. Mohair, I think it’s called. Yara’s big hair almost disguised the fact that she was closer to my age than Dad’s.
“I’m so excited to meet you, Frances,” she gushed. “Your father talks about you all the time.”
I didn’t want to know anything about this woman.
The coffee arrived and Yara sipped it. She tossed her hair and asked, “Don’t you want a taste?” The café con leche smelled good. At home, Mama never let me drink coffee because she thought it would stunt my growth.
I noticed a lipstick stain on the rim and pushed the mug away.
Dad beamed at us. He was dressed like a tourist—wraparound sunglasses and a pleated guayabera with the top buttons undone. I figured he had called to talk about Christmas vacation, but actually, he wanted me to meet his new girlfriend. I felt abandoned. Or worse: replaced by Yara.
“A toast,” Dad said. “To the ladies at my table: May the most you wish for be the least you get.” This was something he always said at family functions.
We clinked our mugs. Dad slung his arm around Yara and turned toward me. “So, grasshopper. How’s school?”
This is what Dad did best, torture me about my failures.
“It’s okay, I guess.”
At the mention of school, Yara perked up. “I still remember the dress I wore to my first boy-girl dance. I was a little upset that another girl wore the same thing, but everyone said I looked great in it.”
Of course she remembered. It wasn’t that long ago.
“You’re going to have so much fun. This is the time you’ll remember forever,” she said.
Anyone who uses those ad slogans is lying.
I nibbled a plantain chip. I thought about somebody’s dirty hands tossing them on my plate and my stomach flip-flopped. I was starving, yet I couldn’t eat anything. I tried to count my nausea away. The menu made no sense: Oxtail stew. Pigs’ Feet Andalusian. Midnite Sandwich. Tamale wrapped in a corn husk. Yuca fries. FuFu mashed potatoes.
Yara talked about who she hung out with in ninth grade and who she dated and I don’t know what else.
Counting wasn’t working at that moment, so I slipped a hand in my pocket, stroking the tweezers that I had stolen from Mama. I pushed on the sharp edges. One, two, three times. It hurt so bad, I winced.
Yara asked, “Are you seeing anyone special?”
My pulse thumped. “Not really.”
Yara tapped Dad’s arm. “I bet she has a secret boyfriend.”
“I hope not,” he said, drumming the table in 8/8 time.
“Are you sure?” Yara said.
“I’m sure I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“You’re kidding. A pretty girl like yourself should be out there, exploring life.”
Dad scraped back his chair. “You’re mature for your age. I don’t imagine many boys have the nerve to approach you.”
Dad didn’t ask about my love life. He never did. Instead he pestered me about school. What did I plan to do in the “real world”?
I pressed harder. The pain spread up my hand.
“I want to paint,” I said.
For a moment, nobody spoke. Then our food arrived. Dad grabbed a fry off my plate. I couldn’t stand it when Dad picked at my food without asking. He said, “You know, I went to school for music. That was a mistake.”
I’d heard all this before.
Back in our real house, Dad spent a lot of time hiding in the basement, which he called “the hovel.” He stored his telescope there, along with his college stuff, a shrine to the 1970s. The walls were painted jet black and perfectly matched the velvet paintings of tigers and astrology signs that he tacked all over the place. I used to stroke them with one finger, as if the big cats could actually purr.
Dad let me thumb through his psychedelic record collection, stacked to the ceiling in milk crates. We played them on his hi-fi. The FM stations were “on the fritz” but I’d sink back in Dad’s beanbag chair, clutching his Gandalf pillow, and listen to those lipsticked men locked inside the albums, wailing about soul survivors and spiders from Mars.
Best of all, Dad let me sit on his knee while he pounded on his drum set.
“You’re damaging her ears,” Mama said.
Not that it stopped him from teaching me the flamadiddle and open roll. With my fists gripping the sticks, his hands cupped over mine, we played along to his records. Of course, I thought it was me drumming instead of Dad.
A cork lamp with a fuzzy shade flickered near his drum set, stapled with the buttons he used to pin on his suspenders during his bartending days: “Kiss me! I’m Irish!” or “Smiling is an early warning sign of a stroke.” Dad pinned those buttons on my T-shirts. He stapled a moonish face to my collar. The button’s mouth stretched like an arrow. “Have a day,” the caption read.
I came home from school one afternoon and discovered that Mama had sold all the buttons in a box, along with a few of my plastic Breyer horses, at her annual tag sale. I didn’t speak to her for a week. I would communicate through Dad and say things like, “Tell her I left my book bag in the car.”
I wanted to ask Dad if he remembered any of this, but he was too busy cuddling up to Yara. I stared out the window, past my half-eaten chicken mojo, watching what Thayer called the “moving sidewalk” of waterlogged people. A man with a shaved head drifted past, trying to shield himself with a newspaper. He reminded me of a Hare Krishna who Thayer and I had seen in a coffee shop one day after school.
“But you hate coffee,” I had told Thayer. Why would the philosopher who doesn’t drink coffee take me out for coffee?
“Yeah, it’s very Zen of me,” he had said, slumped on the edge of the chair, swinging his long legs in circles. “Or we could play bingo,” he continued, on a roll. “Or try the dog track. Which do you prefer?”
“All of the above.”
Thayer said he’d write a song about me. Then he kissed my nose.
Nobody had ever smooched my nose before. I was so frazzled, I couldn’t look at him. So I stood in the doorway of the café and closed my eyes. And he kissed them, too.
I didn’t know what to make of these kisses. So what if he’d smooched every inch of my face except my mouth? In Miami, nobody shook hands. They pecked your left cheek—an invasion of personal space that made everyone seem far friendlier than they were in reality.
I thought about how I’d react if his lips landed on the lower hemisphere of my face. At first I had avoided him,
like Sharon and the other girls at school. But who was I to judge Thayer? I hadn’t risen to the top of the social totem pole. Kissing him couldn’t ruin my nonexistent reputation. That is, if he kissed me back.
These thoughts had never entered my head until recently. We were walking to the canal after drinking our coffees and the sun was splintering between the mangroves. I was rattling on about my Siamese fighting fish, a stubby-tailed female I had named Stella after an Interpol song. Thayer was listening so hard, I lost my concentration. He listened as if I were the most interesting person on the planet. I was looking at the sunlight in his eyes, and then I knew what I couldn’t admit before.
Any girl would be lucky to kiss him.
So what did he expect me to do? He was always laughing. Half the time, I couldn’t figure out why.
Maybe he was laughing at me.
“Chica, you’re bleeding,” Yara said. She was staring at the blood-spattered napkin.
I tried to wipe it off. The tweezers clattered on the floor.
Yara reached under the table. “Is this yours?”
“Thanks.”
Dad snatched my hand. “What did you do here?”
My throat clenched. Suddenly I was walking past two, three, four tables and I don’t know how many staring customers.
In the ladies’ room, a ponytailed girl was taking her time, washing at the sink. I tucked my hands behind my back, but she saw anyway. From the look on her face, I guess I must have scared her.
I had been thinking about Thayer. He had disappeared after that walk. Vanished. Bailed on me. On Friday, I waited in the music room, but he didn’t show up. I sat there like a loser until the bell rang. I imagined him making fun of me with his cooler-than-thou skater comrades. His nose kiss was a joke. I was the punch line.
The door banged open. It was Yara.
“Need some help?”
I pumped the soap dispenser, but it was empty.
“No paper towels, either,” she said. “But we can wing it.”
She smothered my cut in toilet paper. Before I could think about germs, she squeezed her fingers around mine, gripping so hard I could feel her pulse.
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