SOOKIE
Well, I can’t do much this summer, turns out.
DIEGO
Yeah, yeah, you’ll be at the J. We know, Sooks.
SOOKIE
More like South Korea.
JADE
What?
SOOKIE
Yep.
JADE
Why?
DIEGO
I get it. Visit the motherland. Show you them roots. Be down with your OK people.
JADE
Her what?
DIEGO
Original Koreans.
JADE
My mom’s never taken me to Antigua, even though I was technically born there. But I guess I’ve been to Jamaica to meet my dad’s mom. Some of my OJ.
(beat)
Original Jamaicans.
DIEGO
(shaking his head at Jade)
But you also got some of your OP’s here. You live with them. Sooks doesn’t have any of that. She’s got her AP.
(beat)
Adopted People.
SOOKIE
(rolling her eyes again)
I like my APs.
DIEGO
For sure, but, you know, there’s more peeps. That’s all. I’m just saying. You adopt a Korean girl—
SOOKIE
South Korean—
DIEGO
Bring her here, make her Jewish, give her that bar mitzvah—
SOOKIE
Bat mitzvah—
JADE
That was such a fun part—
DIEGO
That’s just a whole lot of identity fusion if you ask me.
SOOKIE
You mean identity confusion?
DIEGO
(locking his hands together)
Nah, fusion. ’Cause you got all your identities fused.
SOOKIE
(laughing hard)
DIEGO
Me, droppin’ some hard-core truth bombs, but you laugh it up, Sooks.
SOOKIE
Sorry, D. It’s just the other day, my parents made this Korean Jewish fusion food.
JADE
There’s Korean Jewish food?
SOOKIE
Yeah. It’s a whole thing. But a lot of what my mom is doing is just, like, what can you put kimchi on? So far, there’s kimchi matzoh brie, kimchi hummus, kimchi latkes.
JADE
What’s kimchi?
SALLY
(sounding like she’s reading off a Webster’s dictionary)
A traditional Korean food made from Chinese cabbage fermented with lactic acid bacteria.
DIEGO
That’s disgusting.
SALLY
Says the boy who’ll always eat my leftover yogurt.
DIEGO
What’s that gotta do with it?
SALLY
(shaking her head)
Anyway, kimchi is really good. My dad buys it from this pricey gourmet store, which pisses my mom off, and we put it on our tacos for Taco Tuesday.
DIEGO
You guys have tacos every Tuesday?
SALLY
Yeah, because it’s Taco Tuesday.
SOOKIE
It really is good. But my mom is, like, on kimchi overdrive, so I’m a little burnt out. I feel like she might put it on my Bran Flakes next.
DIEGO
Sooks, you eat Bran Flakes? That’s so BO.
SOOKIE
What?
DIEGO
(winks)
Boring and old.
SALLY
There’s a lot of other types of Korean food. Maybe you can ask for something different.
SOOKIE
I know. That’s kinda the point of our trip, to “expose me” to all the types of everything that I’m missing.
(sighs)
Let’s just not talk about it anymore. Okay?
Sookie looked at the water. Silent. Jade sat up, grabbed a floppy hat from the beach blanket, one of several that my mom had bought just in case, and wound her curly hair into a bun. She shoved the hat onto her head, but her hair was so thick, the seams bulged. When she brushed the sand from her shoulders, Sally reached out to touch Jade’s shoulder blade, where there was a faint bruise the size of an apple.
“Does that hurt?” Sally asked.
“Nope,” Jade said. “It’s old. Cheerleading.”
“Cheerleading?” Sally said, looking confused.
“Yeah.”
“But isn’t that over—” Sally began, but Jade cut her off with, “So, do you want to go, Sookie? Sounds like it could be fun. I’d like to be anywhere but here this summer, especially on an adventure!”
Sookie nodded. “Yeah, but it’s a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. I’m just trying to figure out high school, and now I have to figure out this, too?”
“Could you not go?” Jade asked. “And then your parents could take me.”
“Ha ha,” Sookie said. “But seriously, I’m thinking that I’m not gonna go. It’s too much. And also, I still don’t want to keep talking about it.”
We were quiet, watching the others play in the surf. Calvin Thompson called to Diego to play football, but Diego waved him off and began to bury himself with the help of Jade and a plastic shovel, another offering from my mom. Sookie silently chipped away at her toenail polish. Sally watched the waves, sneaking glances at Jade.
I walked over to where my parents sat, closer to the water so they could keep an eye on my brothers as they played in the tide. Mom handed me a picnic basket, the brown wicker frayed from wear. “We got everyone subs from your favorite place, DeMatteo’s.”
DeMatteo’s was an Italian place off US 1. The owner was this guy from Buffalo, New York, who made subs based on recipes his grandmother brought over from Italy. My favorite was the classic meatball sub, which had the best red sauce I’d ever tasted.
“Mom.” I shook my head. “DeMatteo’s is . . .” I rubbed my fingers together.
Mom laughed. “It’s your last year in middle school. Today is special.”
Pop squinted in my direction. “We know how much that cost. Want us to eat it?”
“No.”
“Then?” Pop said as Mom tossed him a baseball cap. “And cover this great head of hair?” He ran his fingers through curls that tumbled over his shoulders. Mom’s eyes narrowed, and Pop begrudgingly put on the cap. “What are you waiting for?” Pop asked.
“Okay.” I hefted up the basket. Then I thought better of it and squatted down to give Mom a peck on the cheek.
“What about me?” Pop asked, throwing up his hands.
“Pop.” I looked around.
Mom raised an eyebrow.
“Fine.” I leaned in for a quick hug, but Pop wasn’t having that. He held on for a while.
“Damn, Pop.”
“Whoa.” Pop smacked the top of my head lightly.
“Yeah.” Mom laughed. “Watch that mouth.”
“I saw that.” Diego said when I got back to my blanket. He was flat on his back, buried up to his belly in sand.
“You saw nothing,” I said, and then as a bribe I took out the first sub and held it over him.
“Bueno, yo vi todo, pero no voy a repetir nada!” Diego popped up, sending sand everywhere.
“I was almost done,” Jade said, pouting as she brushed the scattered sand off her torso.
“And you got it all over my book,” Sookie, said, shaking out the pages.
“Girl, this is DeMatteo’s!” Diego exclaimed. “DeMatteo’s. You don’t eat this buried in sand. You enjoy it, sitting up like people do.” He unwrapped the wax paper. “I can’t believe your mom did this.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me either.”
Jade eased herself free, took the sub, and smiled.
“I think you should go,” Sally said when she took her sub.
“Go where?” Diego asked, mouth full.
“Sookie. To South Korea,” Sally said, and Sookie’s fingers froze.
“Dude.” Dieg
o groaned. “We’re trying to enjoy this meal.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No, Sals. This meal is so good I’ll lick the wax paper when I’m done.” He eyed everyone. “Seriously, you pass me that paper when you’re done.”
“What if I want to lick my own paper?” Jade asked.
“That’s good too. But don’t throw it out like that ain’t half the treat is all I’m saying.”
Sally placed her sub in her lap. “Okay, hear me out. You could wait, Sookie, but you’d lose time knowing more about who you are. And time isn’t infinite.”
“You sound like Marco’s dad with that infinite shiz,” Diego said.
And she did. But she also sounded like someone whose grandmother was in the hospital, doing better—yeah—but still recovering. “I wish,” Sally had said earlier that day, on the bus over, “that I had gone there for Christmas when she asked me.” But she hadn’t, not Christmas or Easter. Sally had waited for the summer. But this summer she wouldn’t have the same grandmother at all. She’d have one who sounded older on the phone. “Weaker” is what Sally had said.
“I just think,” she continued, “that we imagine that we can wait on things, but that’s you believing that those things will wait for you, too. But some of that could disappear while you’re waiting to be ready. Sometimes we have to do things when we’re not ready. Just think about it,” Sally said to Sookie, who was quiet, her fingers still frozen.
“She’s thinking. Now can we eat?” Diego said, and started on the second half of his sub.
“It’s good,” added Jade, and Sookie slowly unwrapped the wax paper while Sally took her first bite and chewed silently.
• • •
Later, Sally and Sookie joined Principal Johnson and Coach Sami in a volleyball game: chess versus track. Surprisingly, the chess team seemed confident. Something about “out-strategizing the jocks.” I was pretty sure it didn’t work that way, but Jade, who was the scorekeeper, said, “You never know. Strategy is everything. Strategy is how you win the long game.” And then her eyes drifted toward Diego, who was tossing a football around with some of his teammates in the waves.
On the sand, the twins built a mega castle. Mom used the distraction to covertly slather on more sunblock, keeping the pink away while their skin deepened into a darker brown.
Somehow, Pop convinced me to go on a run with him.
No socks. No shoes. Just bare feet hitting the shoreline.
“Very hard-core,” he’d said, and took off in a sprint, leaving me to double-time. When I finally caught up, he smiled, and his stride suddenly hit quadruple time.
I wished Sally had been there to take him on, because I never caught up until he stopped.
“Better,” he said when I collapsed beside him.
“Than what?”
“Your bisabuelo.”
“Than Lito? That’s super harsh, Pop.”
“Well, at this age. When he was in his fifties, he’d have smoked you.”
“Man, I’m charcoal here. You wanna keep going like that?”
He laughed, and I glanced back a few miles. Everyone seemed small in the distance. I couldn’t make out Mom, the twins, or the tribe, but I heard the faint shouting, the trills of laughter.
Pop smiled. “Seriously, you’re getting faster.”
“Thanks.” I smiled too. Pop wasn’t the type to lather on praise, and I decided to bask in his words, tilting my head up to him and the sun.
“A little more focus on your school, a little bit nicer to your brothers, a job after school,” he added a second later, and I rolled my eyes. “Okay, Pop. What is this, a to-do list?”
“Just a thought,” he said. “A path forward.”
“More like a push forward.”
“What? When I was your age, I would have liked someone to push me forward. Instead I had to figure it out on my own, but you,” he said wistfully. “You’re in this pretty great time in your life . . .”
I gave him a sidelong look, wondering what kind of talk was coming my way. I wanted today to be about sand and heat.
“What?” he said.
“Just don’t, Pop.”
“What? It’s not like that. Come on, now. I was reminiscing about, you know, where I was when I was your age, about to start high school.”
“And?”
“Took me back, that’s all.” He looked out at the water, like Sookie had earlier that day, all silent now.
It’s true this was a weird time, and even I felt myself getting nostalgic. Just yesterday I walked through the science wing of Seagrove Middle to stop by my sixth-grade locker to look for a little bumblebee that had been carved into the lower-left-hand corner of the metal. The tattoo would have been barely visible to the average sixth grader, but I was so small back then that the carving fell at my eye level. So every time I returned to my locker, there it was, waiting. I got into the habit of touching the indent, rubbing the pad of my thumb over the tiny circles that served as the bumblebee’s wings. I rubbed those miracle wings through a lot of bad.
That one time that Max Castillo tripped me on purpose, sending me sprawling in the middle of science class.
That one time an eighth grader snatched my backpack and I had to chase him up three flights of stairs to beg for it back.
The one time a pair of seventh graders pantsed me in PE and Diego gave the taller one a black eye.
And all the other times after that. There were more than I could count. More than I cared to remember. But what I did remember was how I’d come back to my locker and find that bumblebee there, those tiny wings raised in midflight, and feel better.
Pop had taught me about the aerodynamics that go into keeping bumblebees in the air—the wings’ stroking the air like a swimmer, backward and forward instead of up and down, the angle of the sweep creating the effect of “small hurricanes” above the wings that creates a low-pressure system that will send the bees up, up, up.
And, yeah, bees flying despite it seeming impossible, well, that made me feel hopeful.
And I held on.
Yesterday, though, when I looked, the bumblebee was gone, painted over, probably by my very own pop. And so I committed my first and last act of vandalism: I carved that bumblebee back into the metal.
“You’re welcome,” I said silently to all the sixth graders who would follow, because they deserved a little bit of hope too.
“Seagrove Middle was different when I was there,” Pop was saying. “It was different back then. Smaller. About four hundred, maybe five hundred students.”
“That would be like cutting my classes in half.” I couldn’t imagine what we’d do with all that space.
“We didn’t have portable classrooms. We didn’t need them. Believe it or not, Principal Johnson was in a few of my classes.”
“Which ones?”
“Let’s see.” He looked off for a few seconds, trying to scale back the twenty years since he had been a middle schooler at Seagrove. “We had advanced geometry and English together. Maybe science.”
“Were you in all advanced classes?”
“Yep, just like you.”
“And Mom?”
“Yep, although she was at Orange Grove until eighth grade. We met at Seagrove High.”
I had seen a picture from the year Mom met Pop. They were both gawky—skinny legs and arms and heads that were bigger than their bodies. Pop might have been a lady killer now, but he grew into that well after ninth grade.
“So, were you and Principal Johnson friends?”
“Hmm . . . not really. He was a little too popular for me.”
“You were a nerd?”
“I was a science nerd,” he said proudly. “Physics and chemistry clubs.”
“How many members?”
He laughed. “Before or after I recruited your mom?”
“After?”
“Three,” he admitted, “including me.”
I tried to imagine this other version of Pop. The one who alway
s had his head in a book, and then I tried to imagine the day all that changed, when he found out Mom was pregnant with me. I wanted to ask him about that day, but it seemed like something I should ask later, when I was older.
Looking back, I wish I hadn’t waited. I wish I had known that memory—like time—isn’t infinite.
“What would you have studied, if you had gone to college?” I asked Pop.
He sighed. “Who knows? One thing is this: People always think college is going to be one way and then it’s another. I don’t know that firsthand, but that’s what it was like for my friends who went on without me. Start off studying physical science and end up being an English or theater major. Who can predict who you’ll become, especially into your twenties?”
But Pop’s life was pretty much set by the time he hit seventeen. After having me, he was a dad and then, a year later, the youngest custodian at Seagrove Middle. Nothing much had changed for him in the last seventeen years.
That was the first time it hit me, what he had given up for me.
I’ve come back to that thought over and over again, but it was there, sitting with him on a beach in Key Biscayne, that I saw what his life might have been: Principal Johnson vs. Custodian Suarez.
And the thing is, what can you say to someone who gave up who they could have been so you could exist at all? How much gratitude is enough?
At the time I didn’t know the answer, but now I know that there isn’t enough gratitude in the world.
• • •
We returned to camp in two waves.
Pop arrived first, doing his best Rocky Balboa impression. You know, that scene where Rocky runs up seventy-two flights of stairs to stand before the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with his fist pumping in the air. (If you don’t know that scene, look it up.)
But the thing you need to know is this: In that scene, Rocky is triumphant.
And in that moment in my life, Pop was triumphant. Powerful. Strong.
I arrived minutes later, holding on to my side as I dropped to my knees in the surf, the sand creeping into places unmentionable.
(Seriously, don’t mention it.)
That’s where Erika found me. She crouched down, hands on knees, and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” I huffed. “Just playing it cool so Pop feels good about himself.”
Somehow I managed to get up. When I looked around, I saw Pop sitting on his towel, laughing and pointing at me. Mom was smiling like a goober.
Parents of the year.
The Universal Laws of Marco Page 10
