The Universal Laws of Marco

by Carmen Rodrigues

  But on that day that I left school—one of only two times that I would ever skip in my life—I couldn’t exactly find the why of my discomfort. I could only feel my failure. So I went to the rope tower and sat at the very top, in the exact spot where I had kissed Sally, and even without the why, I knew that I had gotten it wrong. I had gotten so much of everything wrong.

  Senior Year

  17. SHOULD I GO?

  “I THINK YOU’RE ON THE right track,” says Mrs. A. She peers over her laptop, reviewing my explanation of wormholes on our shared Google Doc. “Albert Einstein, Nathan Rosen, check. Description of mouth and neck, good, check. Problems with stability, possible use for time travel, exotic matter, size. Good. Good.” She pauses, glances up at the ceiling of the room, thinking. Then looks back at the screen, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. “Just going to add a few comments for you to review later—a few grammatical errors, and then take another look at Einstein’s theory of relativity. Make sure you’re explaining it so that a sixth grader could understand it.”

  “A sixth grader?” I tried to imagine explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity to Domingo and Lil’ Jay, but all I could see was one of them yelling at me, “Deez nuts!” Because that’s something they’d been doing lately.

  “Yep. That’s the goal. That anyone who reads your paper, even a sixth grader, could keep up with the content.”

  “Okay.” I watch the screen as comments pop up in the document’s margins.

  “What about your list of laws?” She clicks her mouse pad a few times to another page. “Do you have a separate doc for that?”

  “Um, yeah,” I hedge.

  “Oh.” She glances up from her screen, brown eyes waiting. “Did you share it with me? I don’t see an e-mail with the link.”

  “Um, no.”

  “Okay.” Her eyes widen slightly as she processes this. “Why not?”

  “Well . . . it’s blank.”

  “Oh.” She says this in the teacher language of Oh no Get it together. Come up with a plan.

  The project is due in less than a week, and I’m nowhere near a list of my universal laws. It’s not that I don’t have contenders. Yesterday I went by the library and stared at the wall of wisdom, all the sayings shouting out to me, like, pick me, pick me!

  But I couldn’t pick just one. In many ways I needed all of them.

  The thought of asking for an extension crosses my mind. I could tell Mrs. A about Pop being sick, about Erika and me . . . being . . . what? Something unknown? Presently unhappy? Presently taking a break is how she put it.

  I could tell her about Sally, the girl who was once my best friend (okay, more than a best friend), suddenly coming back to Seagrove in the last quarter before graduation and how that’s kind of messed with my head.

  I could tell Mrs. A about how life is what happens while you’re making other plans. A saying that should definitely go into my list of laws.

  But I don’t talk about any of those things. I wait, staring off at the whiteboard, like I’ve got a bad case of senioritis. Mrs. A flips through my notebook, stopping when she reaches a page titled WORMHOLE IV.

  “What’s this?” She’s points at the sloped handwriting, so fast of an outpouring that my cursive looks like scribbles.

  I grab the notebook and tuck it into my bag. “Nothing,” I mumble.

  “Looks like a pretty interesting nothing,” Mrs. A says, her tone even. “Maybe you’ll want to share that with your project.”

  “It’s just for me.”

  “Okay.” She looks like she wants to push the subject, but maybe my expression tells her that’s not a solid plan. “So, mostly, I think you’re overthinking the list of laws. Honestly, Marco, your grade is so solid in this class that I’ll let anything go. Give me a top ten list or something like that. Do it David Letterman style.”

  “David who?”

  She laughs and snaps the laptop shut. “Oh, do I feel old now. Just come up with ten of your favorites.”

  “But how do I narrow it down?”

  “Well, how about you think of the top ten people in your life and offer up one wise principle from each of them. The list doesn’t have to be definitive; it merely has to exist. Something for you to reflect on when you need it. But really give it some thought. If you had to hand this list over to someone else, say your brothers, what advice would you want to give them? Does that sound easier than what you’ve made it out to be?”

  “Yeah, much.” Although the assignment still seems a bit personal, more for English class than physics.

  “Good. Why don’t we give it a shot now?”

  “Now?”

  “No time like the present.”

  “Can I write that one down?” I ask with a smirk.

  “Ha!” She smiles briefly and then her face turns serious. “Nope.”

  “Okay.” I navigate to the blank document. “Let’s begin.”

  • • •

  Later that night, after my shift at Grendel’s, I drive past green lights and nearly empty streets. I drive past my house, where the rooms are dark. My whole family is asleep.

  I should go home, I tell myself. That’s the responsible place to be. I could get in some studying for my calc final on Friday of next week, or I could continue to work on my physics paper. Mrs. A had helped me come up with an almost-complete list of names—Pop, Mom, Diego, Sookie, Jade, Erika, Mr. Grendel, Old Mrs. B—and now I just needed to remember some piece of wise advice from each of them.

  No big deal.

  Or I could send Erika another e-mail, explaining that I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. That I’m trying my best over here to figure out what’s true and what’s not. That I don’t know what she means by “taking a break.”

  “Just a break, Marco,” she had said last night. “We need to figure out what we want.”

  “But we’re fine,” I had argued. I mean, sure, I was asking her to slow things down and there was something happening—a spark, maybe—every time Sally was around, but couldn’t that be explained as nostalgia? Shock? I needed time to work past that. And I needed Erika to give me less space, so I could remember all the ways we made sense as a couple.

  But she wasn’t playing that. She said, “We’re stuck, and I’ve already wasted four years waiting on you. And you know what? I don’t want to wait anymore.”

  And so I drive, circling the question as I circle the blocks in my neighborhood.

  At the stroke of midnight, I find myself in front of a house that’s not my own.

  I turn off my headlights and let the car idle across the street, like some kind of creeper. Then I take a few deep breaths and tell myself that I’ll leave in a minute or two. That I won’t replay another time I stood in front of this house when the rooms were empty, the For Rent sign posted defiantly in the yard. In my chest, the melancholy warmth of nostalgia is replaced with a much deeper ache.

  I can hear Diego say, That girl, that Sally—man, you’ve always been thirsty for her.

  Maybe in the before, but now? Still?

  The feelings that follow are so unwelcome that I shift my truck into gear and head home. I’m parked in my driveway when I’m startled by a knock on my driver window. I slowly turn my head to find Sally there.

  Two bodies in orbit of each other.

  She wears shorts and a tank top. An ancient iPhone is strapped to her arm. She smiles, almost apologetically, stepping back so that I can exit. When we stand opposite each other, she says, “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Did I scare you?”

  I shake my head and then slip my hand, left to right—a seesaw teetering. “Okay, a little. More like surprise. What are you doing here?”

  She pulls her earbuds out and coils the wires into a tight bundle she slips into her pocket. “I couldn’t sleep,” she explains. “And when I can’t sleep, I run.”

  “I thought you gave that up,” I say, surprised.

  “I did, competitively, but I could never give it up
entirely.” She laughs, a little hollow, “But don’t tell my dad. He thinks I gave it up completely. . . .”

  I mull this over, this not telling her father, who isn’t even inside state lines. Like even though he’s far away, his influence over her never feels far at all. “Were you waiting for me?”

  She shrugs, half smiles. “Maybe? I didn’t see your truck, so I thought you were still out. I wasn’t going to wait all night.”

  “Why were you waiting at all?”

  She rubs her palms on her shorts, drawing my attention to her thighs. Strong thighs. Smooth skin. I quickly shift my gaze forward.

  “I wanted to see how your dad’s doing,” she says.

  “You came to ask me about my dad now?”

  “I would have asked you in school, but . . .” Her voice trails off. She squints a little, like she’s studying something far in the distance, and then she turns those gray eyes on me and sighs. “You don’t really talk to me at school.”

  Which is true. After her birthday party, though, I’d begun to give head nods in the hallway and heys if we passed close enough to touch. It was an improvement, but not exactly friendly.

  “I mean.” She sighs. “I get it. I didn’t exactly end things between us in the best way. . . .”

  “No,” I say quietly. “I guess you didn’t.”

  She nods, swallows hard. “But I’d hoped that after you helped me with my car and also the . . . my birthday . . . thing . . .”

  Our eyes meet. I wait, and she finally says, “I wanted to talk to you about what happened after I left, but then everything happened with your dad. It just . . .” Her voice cracks for a second, and she takes a deep breath. “It kind of sucks.” She looks down at her hands and then up at me, steeling herself for the thing she’s going to say next, the thing she probably wanted to say all along. “It kind of sucks not knowing you anymore.”

  And then there is silence.

  Because I don’t really know what to say. I find my own something remote to stare at—a cat meandering around a bush.

  “Should I go?” she asks, her voice smaller.

  “No.” Because that’s the one thing I do know: that I want her here.

  I want her here because I have questions. But I don’t know how to ask them yet. I know that for sure too. I need to work my way toward them. So I decide to change the subject to something safer. I tell her about Pop, about coming home from the hospital today. I leave out other details, like how his return is part of my restlessness. That earlier that day, I carried his suitcase into his house and then watched his excruciatingly slow journey from the car to his bedroom, his unsteady gait causing him to take baby steps.

  “The new medication to control the seizures gave him some issues with his balance. We’ve switched to something else, but the side effects still haven’t worn off,” Mom had explained.

  Side effects.

  After Pop’s first injury, all we heard about were the side effects.

  The sudden agitation.

  The depression.

  The getting stuck on words, so that Pop repeated the same thought over and over again.

  I am tired of side effects. I am tired of trying to move beyond them. Of almost getting to the other side of it all. Because here we are again, square one: 2; Suarezes: 0.

  When Sally asks if he’ll get better, I say, “I don’t know. Better is a relative term. We’ll see.”

  “Give it time?” she suggests, and my heart gets stuck on her phrasing. Give it time, I can hear Pop say. Time will always tell.

  “You okay?” Sally steps forward. I step back.

  “Yep. Just tired.”

  “I should go,” she says again, but she doesn’t move. “This is weird.” Her fingers ripple along her thigh.

  “Life is weird,” I say, and her nose crinkles, a little smile like a bridge across her cheeks.

  “So you keep saying.”

  “Must be true, then.”

  “Must be.”

  That nervous hand slips into her pocket. She rocks on her heels as she glances around my street. I imagine she’s looking for differences, but there are barely any. The houses are still small, utilitarian abodes. Some have been repainted over the years—a teal house, now mango. A mango house, now gray. The sidewalk, still dimpled with cracks. A cat still meows urgently in the distance.

  Her eyes settle on the house next door. The yard is different, alive with flowers. Mr. Martell has lived there for the last three years, and all he does is garden and plant trees in his retirement. The canopy of his avocado tree hangs over our fence.

  “Did Jade start living with Sookie because of what happened?” Sally asks.

  “Yep, about the start of ninth grade.”

  Our eyes meet. “And her parents?”

  “Not there anymore.” I don’t offer a further explanation. Something in her body language tells me she already knows. “Who told you?”

  “I had tea with Old Mrs. B today.” Sally takes a deep breath. “She thinks that we should talk about that night . . . the night of the dance.”

  I lean against the truck, crossing my arms in front of my chest. Her eyes flash to mine, and she steps forward, a hand reaching out to me. But I flinch—because I don’t want to talk about that night. I don’t want to be comforted by her either. The hand falls away quickly, but Sally pushes on, determined. “That night . . . You couldn’t have known how it would turn out.”

  “You did,” I say quietly.

  “I had more experience.” Sally’s shoulders rise, hovering around her ears. “You did the best you could, okay?”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes . . .” She pauses, takes a deep breath. “I also regret what happened that night. . . . I didn’t have to put everything with Jade on you. I could have used my own voice, but I was so wrapped up in my drama with my dad and leaving to North Carolina. And I made some really bad choices, and I believe those choices hurt you.”

  I stare at the ground, taking my own deep breaths, wanting these parts of our history—the parts that she is trying to drag out into the light—to disappear.

  “Marco,” she says. “I am so sorry about your dad.” Her voice breaks. When I look at her, there are tears in her eyes. Her hand rises up again, bit by bit, until it rests on my chest. “Marco—”

  I step back. “You should go home,” I say, and the hand falls limply to her side. She nods. “Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

  I watch her leave, her head cast down, hands working to pull the earbuds out of her pocket, her silhouette growing smaller and smaller with every step she takes.

  Middle School

  18. LOOK HARDER

  THE NIGHT THAT I WALKED out of the Middle, I came home to Pop in the kitchen, cooking his signature combo of black beans, white rice, bistec, and tostones. Lito was there, too, sitting at the kitchen table, snacking on a little bit of pan with butter.

  “Hey, there you are,” Pop said when I walked through the door. “Where have you been?”

  It was after five, and I was sweaty, my hair plastered to my head, droplets clinging to my brow. Lito took me in, his lips fluttering, and then he went back to his newspaper, the kind you hold in your hands because “Tu sabes, con la computadora ellos pueden reescribir el pasado.” Which meant something like, On computers, you can rewrite the past.

  “So?” Pop said.

  “I left school early,” I admitted, not wanting to lie to Pop.

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  “I work at the school. You don’t show up to class, I get a messenger from your teacher asking if you’re sick. So, why’d you skip?”

  “I don’t know. I got . . . I got claustrophobic.”

  Lito looked at me then. “Mira, tu no puedes hacer niños a hombres en la escuela. ¿Pero en el campo con un machete? Bueno, sí.”

  “Abuelito, por favor,” Pop said, because Lito had grown up in the fields and was fond of saying you made men out of boys by sending them into the fields with a mac
hete.

  “Bueno.” Lito held up his hands. “Es verdad.”

  Pop cleared the steak from the skillet and set it on a plate. He picked up another piece of meat—slender and raw—and dipped it in a concoction of whisked eggs and spices, then bread crumbs. Front and back until the steak was coated brown. He dropped the steak onto the skillet, watching the steady sizzle. When he turned back to me, he repeated, “Claustrophobic?”

  I felt that pressure on my skin, that tightness in my lungs again. “Yeah, like I couldn’t breathe if I stayed there.”

  “Come here.” Pop opened his arms, a safety net to fall into. The truth is I cried for a while, all to the sound of Lito’s fluttering lips, a fluttering of approval, because Lito believed two things made a man:

  1. The ability to handle a machete.

  2. The ability to have a good cry.

  “A man can protect and be brave, but a man can also be sad. For what is any of this for if you can’t feel it?” he told me later.

  I didn’t know what any of it was for, but I knew, without a doubt, that I could feel it.

  • • •

  I wasn’t the hero, if that’s where you thought this was going. I didn’t march over to Jade’s house that night to confront her parents or to demand that Jade roll up her sweater and settle the mystery of the hidden bruises. Maybe, for a minute, though, my best self—that self you never quite are but imagine one day you could be—had intended to do that, but my real self sat on my bed, my patchwork quilt wrapped around my shoulders. The night was too hot for a quilt, but I needed that feeling of weight on my bones.

  My bones hurt.

  Really, my whole body hurt, a current of pain radiating outward from my chest. And for a long time I just stared at a poster of the solar system and tried to make sense of how we got on this planet. And why was this planet, of all planets, the only one that had life—at least life as we know it? We weren’t the biggest or the heaviest of planets. And yet all the elements aligned, and—bam—there we were! Life.

  And life was hard.

  Around seven p.m., there was a knock on my bedroom door, followed by the audible sound of wood scraping against tile. The lights flicked on and Sally entered, her T-shirt and running shorts sprinkled with sweat, a goofy smile on her face.