The Universal Laws of Marco

by Carmen Rodrigues

  Everyone but me.

  Okay, that’s not exactly true.

  I had thought about it for a second or two. In that way that your mind wanders and you see this other path. This one that would let me stay closer to my family, working my way through college while I kept an eye on Pop and Mom and my foolish brothers.

  But what about being free?

  “How long have you been with us?” Mr. Grendel asks.

  “Started in ninth grade, so almost four years.”

  “Well, I came on in 1975, when I was just sixteen. Brenda came on in 1980, when she was twenty. We’ve spent half our lives here, together. I always thought we’d leave here together. But life happens, right? Now that Brenda’s in her last year before retirement, I’ve realized that I don’t have a talent pipeline. That’s why I’m starting this program. I want to identify the Brendas, nurture them, keep them invested in Grendel’s.” He launches into a speech about Brenda’s best qualities: She is nice, and so when customers have complaints, she always listens empathetically and provides a reasonable and timely solution. She is trustworthy. You can tell Brenda the biggest secret in the world and she won’t say a word.

  I know all of this firsthand. The time Brenda caught me tearing up in the back room after one of Pop’s bad days, she patted me on the back and just listened to the few words I had to say. Afterward, she never mentioned it again, not to me or anyone else. But she always seemed ready to listen. And when she found out I was accepted to Wayne in March, she made sure to write up an announcement for the company bulletin, even slipping a gift card into my locker with a note that said, Best of luck! I really appreciated her acts of kindness.

  “So if Brenda thinks you should apply”—Mr. Grendel taps his hand on his leg—“I agree.”

  My mouth opens and shuts. If I could speak, I’d say, Wait? What?

  “I’ve been watching you for the last few weeks,” Mr. Grendel continues, a little smile playing over his lips. “You’re good at what you do. You’re on time, efficient, always willing to lend a hand. You smile a lot. I like a smiler.” He pauses to flash me his effusive smile. “I asked Brenda last month, who’s the best? And she gave me a few names, but at the top of her list was you.”

  “Me?” I finally push out, looking around like you do when you can’t believe that the thing happening is happening to you.

  “Yes,” Mr. Grendel says, that smile still holding. “You.”

  • • •

  “You?” Erika says, her eyes lighting up. “Brenda suggested you?”

  “Yeah. Me.” It’s about an hour after my meeting with Mr. Grendel, and we’re standing outside, next to her car, talking.

  “But that’s good, right? I mean, even if you’re going to Wayne and your plans are settled, it’s still good to know that Brenda really likes you and that Mr. Grendel agrees.”

  “No, it’s good. But Diego . . . It’ll kill his confidence,” I say.

  “If he knew, sure. But you don’t have to tell Diego what Grendel said.”

  “But I told Grendel I’d think about it.”

  “Because he wouldn’t take no for an answer. But you’re not going to do it, right?”

  “Right,” I agree.

  “So,” Erika continues, “why tell Diego at all?”

  She had a point. I smile, squeezing her hand. “You’re so smart,” I say, and she laughs.

  “Does this mean you’re not annoyed with me for showing up ‘unannounced?’ ” She raises an eyebrow, her part of the hand squeeze turning into a playful death grip.

  At least, I hope it’s playful.

  “I never said that.”

  “No, but you acted like that.”

  “Like how?”

  “Did you give me a big ol’ kiss?”

  “I’m at work.”

  “Did you give me a hug, then?”

  “Again, work.”

  She sighs, and I say, “I’m happy to see you, but . . .”

  “But what?” she asks, like she knew there was a “but” all along.

  “I’m at work. I have to really do a good job here.”

  “You do a good job at everything.”

  “That’s because I have to.”

  “Not because you want to?” she asks, veering toward one of those logic twist-ups, where she takes every little thing I say and examines it for the “deeper meaning.”

  But there’s no deeper meaning here. I’m at work, and work is sacred. The real problem is that she doesn’t understand that. This is her third visit in the last week. The first time it was, “I needed butter to bake cookies for track’s end-of-the-year party and Grendel’s is the only one that carries the vegan brand, and you know Kelsey’s vegan.”

  The second time, “I needed to find those all-natural eye drops, and Grendel’s is the only one that carries it. You know I’m allergic to the kind with preservatives.”

  And today it was, “Coach suggested that we keep track of our heart rate and blood pressure. She says that’s good for athletes. And the machine at Publix is broken.”

  “Oh, really,” I had said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Yes.” She had laughed. “Stop shading me. I don’t have any other motives.”

  Except to get me to walk her to her car so she could drop a loaded question on me:

  On visit one, she asked: Where did I see things going? How did I feel about graduation?

  On visit two: What would things be like when we lived away from everyone else?

  Today I didn’t offer to walk her to the car, but sure enough, when I turned to leave, she called out, “Actually, wait! Take your break. I want to show you something.”

  And that’s why right now I’m wiggling my bloodless fingers from her grasp while standing next to her car.

  “You know,” she says, “you’d think you’d tell me how awesome it is to have your girlfriend drive out of her way to break up your monotonous workday.”

  “So you admit that you’re coming here is a stretch from the usual path.”

  She scoffs. “I plead the Fifth.”

  “Humph.”

  “Anyway.” She clicks a button on her key chain, and the locks of her hand-me-down Honda Civic pop up. “I have something amazing to show you.”

  When she opens her passenger door, the overhead lights flick on, illuminating the back seat and a pale-pink dress sheathed in a clear plastic cover. I recognize it from one of Erika’s many Pinterest boards: mid-knee, silk, and form-fitting in a 1920s style. The neckline is the kind that resembles a heart—a sweetheart neck. Yeah, that’s what she called it when she showed me the dress in January.

  “Isn’t it perfect?” Erika raises the dress delicately to her chest.

  “Yeah,” I say, exhaling my relief that there are no questions today. Just this.

  “Perfect like us.” She swirls around, the plastic fluttering in her wind. Then she returns the dress to the car and wraps her arms around my neck, sidestepping a slow back-and-forth dance like we’re already at prom. “It’s all happening. Everything we’ve planned.”

  “Everything you planned,” I say with a smile, because there is a certain appeal in her unwavering belief that life can be plotted out moment by moment. That all you have to do to be happy is follow your plan. Step one foot forward after the next and everything you want will be yours in time. I lost that type of certainty after Pop’s fall. But sometimes, for the briefest of moments, I find it again when I lean into the feeling of Erika there in my arms.

  Middle School

  6. GOTCHA

  “DO YOU WANT TO CLIMB it?” Sally had asked when we arrived at the park.

  She pointed to a tower constructed of stretchy blue rope and silver joints that stood at the center of the park. We walked closer, passing the swing set, the jungle gym, and a small shelter. At the basketball courts, we turned right and continued up a narrow path until we stood at the tower’s base, our necks craned upward.

  At times, when we were younger, we’d pretend the tower
was a rocket about to launch into space. Back then we’d take turns being “Captain” and “Astronaut.” The captain was in charge and stayed at the very tip of the tower, focusing on navigation. The astronaut got to zigzag around the rope tower’s web, fixing all the things that could break.

  Since Sally was a more confident climber than me, she was mostly Astronaut. That left me with the cushy job of Captain, shouting out commands like, “Prepare to launch, Astronaut Blake. Ready the fuel tanks!” And Sally would scramble over to the right quadrant of the ship to ready the tanks, her hands working quickly to pull herself along the rope until she reached the imaginary panel with the imaginary buttons, completing all the imaginary tasks I had assigned her.

  We loved the game. We loved the imagination. But at some point we outgrew it. Probably around the time that we exchanged our toys for cooler clothes and Spin the Bottle.

  That night, I stared up at our tower, wondering if we could go to Mars or, like in another version of the game, discover an enchanted tree house that overlooked Camelot. Or we could pretend that we were eating dinner atop the Eiffel Tower. I could be Captain or Knight or Parisian. Or, I thought, glancing shyly over at Sally, whose hand I’d held until the minute we entered the park, I could be Marco, and she . . . she could just be Sally. And we could be alone, up there. Two stories higher than the rest of the world for miles around.

  I started to climb, and Sally followed, a little slower than normal because of her knee. Our hands worked quickly. Foot found joint after joint. Hands found new levels of rope. Before long we sat at the top of the tower, our feet dangling over a square platform just wide enough to hold two bodies. We contemplated the neighborhood below. Squat houses, simple block construction, yards that were mostly concrete, as if grass were a luxury only those with money could afford.

  “I wonder what next year will be like,” Sally said suddenly.

  “More of this,” I said without much thought.

  “More of what? What is this?”

  Looking back, I think she met philosophically, but I answered her literally. “This is us hanging out.”

  “Yeah, but what about the future?”

  “Oh . . .” I dug deeper, imagining that future being pretty much a continuation of the now. “Well, you’ll run track. We’ll take AP Geometry. Sookie will play chess. Jade will continue cheerleading. Diego . . .”

  I didn’t know what Diego would do. He had announced about a month ago that he didn’t want to play football anymore. “That was my dad’s thing, but I just want a real job, not some blown-up dream.” I guess Diego had come to some conclusion that his dad’s stint as a high school all-star who didn’t have the grades to make it in college wasn’t the path for him.

  “D,” I finished, “will do his best to be a law-abiding citizen.”

  Sally laughed. “Do you think high school will be hard?”

  “Nah. We’re smart. We can handle it.”

  “No. I mean, like, transitionally. Do you think the older kids will be mean?”

  I glanced at Sally, waiting for her to crack some joke, but her expression was pretty serious. “You’ll be fine,” I say. “Me? We’ll see.”

  “Wait. Why am I fine and you’re not?” She turned to me, her hand accidentally brushing my thigh.

  I took a deep breath. Because, you know, her hand, my thigh.

  “Marco?”

  “Um, sorry.”

  “Why am I going to be okay, and you’re not?”

  “ ’Cause.” I didn’t look at her, but I let my hand sweep up and down like I was saying, All this. But I guess Sally didn’t get it, because she said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well,” I hedged, “you’re taller than most girls, so they won’t bother you. Easier to pick on someone smaller, right? And the guys will . . .”

  I paused. I couldn’t exactly say what I was thinking. . . . The guys will find you pretty with your wide gray eyes and front teeth that lean in together like some kind of old married couple and the cute little bump on the bridge of your nose.

  “Guys will what?” She studied me.

  “Guys will . . . like you,” I settled on.

  “Why?” she pushed.

  “Because.” I stressed the full word to make it clear that was explanation enough. But Sally kept going. “Because what?”

  “Because you’re . . .” And then I decided we were on top of a magical world. Maybe some of that magic would rub off on us. “You’re pretty.”

  She smiled, the edges of her lips rising triumphantly toward the tips of her ears. “I knew it,” she whispered. “You think I’m pretty.”

  “You’re a jerk,” I said, and I did something else that was brave. I pinched her side. She laughed, expanding so that our thighs pressed together, her left hand just inches from my right. And then the magic kicked in and her pinkie extended, our fingers suddenly linked.

  I sighed.

  Even looking back, I’m sure that sigh was audible.

  It was a sigh of Yes. This. Is. Happening.

  Sally didn’t sigh. She looked out over Camelot. I watched her in the dim light from the streetlamps, finding us now that we were up here. A wrinkle rippled across her forehead as she worked out a new thought, then settled in that space between her eyes. She cleared her throat. “Actually, I’m thinking about not running next year.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was too surprised.

  “Does that count as another ‘gotcha’?” she finally asked.

  I laughed, unsure. “So, you’re joking?”

  “No.” She glanced at me. “I’m not. I mean, ‘gotcha’ because you’re surprised.”

  “Yeah, I am.” I tried to imagine that bookshelf in Sally’s house, the one lined with trophies, growing dusty. “But why?”

  “I know I don’t act like it, but it’s a lot of pressure.”

  “Would your dad let you quit?” I thought about earlier, how her dad had yelled at her on the bleachers until Sookie “had enough,” interrupting the tirade with instructions about the care and maintenance of Sally’s wound.

  “That’s the problem,” she said, her voice quieter. “I don’t think so.”

  “Could you . . . ? Could you talk to your mom—”

  “I don’t think she’d do anything about it.”

  “But I could go with you. I could help—”

  She sighed. “It’s dumb. I can’t quit.”

  “But you could. He can’t force you.”

  “No. He can just bother me every day.”

  “But after a while he’d stop.”

  “It would just be easier to try harder, to be better.” Her voice picked up speed. “If I’m better at it, it won’t feel so hard. And I won’t fall again. Maybe I could be just as good as my dad. Maybe even better if I trained harder.”

  I stared at her knee, the shape of the bruise somewhat like the outline of a cauliflower. Even though Mr. Blake couldn’t compete professionally now, he still trained, pushing Boone and Sally just as hard as he had pushed himself. In fact, I couldn’t remember a time past the age of eight that Sally wasn’t training.

  “Sally, you spent all of last summer training. You do work hard.”

  “Not hard enough,” Sally said.

  “Says who? Your dad?”

  “Can we not talk about this anymore?”

  “But—”

  “Please, Marco.”

  She let go of my pinkie and scooted to her end of the platform. I could barely make out the glimmer of her eyes through the curtain of wavy blond hair. All my words, all my solutions left me.

  I stared up at the moon, the moon that had thought to follow us all the way here, and then back at the world below. All those boxes on the ground filled with more boxes inside. Boxes that people slept in, their bodies resting on little squares and rectangles made of sharp corners, and all of this contained by a world that is round.

  I wanted to tell Sally that we could lose all our sharp corners and become round too—supreme
ly good, celestial beings with no clear beginnings or endings, always in orbit of each other. I wanted to tell her that she was Astronaut, unafraid of space or dark matter or being untethered from this rocket and floating toward the brilliance of the sun. And that as Captain, I would be there to make sure that wherever we were going, we got there okay.

  I wanted to tell her that she could quit running.

  But I didn’t say any of that. Because for all the things I could say—like you’re pretty—I still had an inability to vocalize greater truths.

  That’s what being young is all about.

  Instead, I said, “Sally?”

  And she ignored me.

  “Sally?”

  “What?”

  “I like . . .” I stalled. “I like . . . peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”

  It was another game we had played when we were younger. Hours and hours lost to listing everything in the world that we liked.

  “And chocolate,” I said. “And”—I imitated her voice—“summer rain.” I took a deep breath, adding in my own voice again. “The ocean . . .”

  “I don’t want to play,” she said.

  “Butterflies,” I said in her voice. She was still silent. “Try, please.”

  It took a while, but finally she sighed and said, “No. Moths. You know I like moths more than butterflies.”

  “Okay.” That rapid beat of my heart lessened. “Moths. And Pluto, for me.”

  “It is a planet,” she said, slowly inching her way back toward me and the safety of good things. “Thunder.”

  “Warm benches.”

  She laughed a crinkly laugh anchored in sadness, but still a laugh.

  “Mr. Snuffleupagus,” I said.

  “Bert.”

  “Ernie.”

  “Miss Piggy.”

  “Kermit.”

  She laughed again. “Always Kermit.”

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Almost. Oranges and bananas.”

  “Blueberries.”

  “Smoothies.”