The Universal Laws of Marco
Page 17
“Boone,” Sally screams. “You’re crushing me!”
I set them upright, and Sally smiles at me gratefully. “Why is it so loud in here?” she asks.
“Because it’s a party! And . . .” Boone’s eyes focus for a second. He looks me up and down. “You are a big mother—”
“He’s really drunk,” Sally shout-whispers into my ear.
“I can see.”
“We should get him somewhere else. I don’t want to be here, but I don’t want to leave him alone either.”
“I’ve got him.” A hand clamps down on Boone’s shoulder, commanding yet gentle.
“Tuck?” Sally shouts.
“Yep. Hey, Sally Pearl.”
“My cousin Tuck!” Sally shouts at me. “He goes to UM.”
“Hey,” I shout back.
“I’m taking him upstairs to my place. I told him not to try the beer bong. That shit is only for amateurs.”
“Amateurs? I thought it was for the hard-core professional?”
“Professionals don’t impress others by killing off brain cells and stumbling around incoherently,” Tuck shouts back with a good amount of snark. He holds up a glass of brown liquid. “Whiskey neat, drink for enjoyment, taste, and quality. Thank you. This”—he points at Boone, who is now kind of weaving back and forth while Sally grips his shoulders—“is incredibly juvenile.”
I decide I like Tuck.
“Can you?” He points to Boone. Then playfully he adds, “Because you really are an incredibly big mother—”
“Let’s go,” Sally shouts as a girl stumbles forward, spilling beer onto her sandals.
I heave Boone over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Boone says, but instead of puking, he passes out.
• • •
Two floors up, I set Boone down next to purses and car keys tossed haphazardly on Tuck’s bed. Boone moans, curling up with a leather handbag. I take a blanket off the foot of the bed and drape it over him.
“You’re still thoughtful,” Sally says from behind me.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Do you do that for your brothers?”
“Sometimes,” I admit.
Sometimes I do it for Pop, too.
We head to the living room, a space slightly larger than our secret room at the library. Tuck lists off the names of his friends: “Gigi, Ravi, and Becks.” When he says Becks, though, he smiles, like that name means more to him than all the others, and when he plops down on the sofa, it’s Becks he wraps his arm around.
“Hey,” says Gigi.
“You guys come from downstairs?” asks Ravi.
“Tuck rescued them,” says Becks, smiling proudly at Tuck like he’s a member of an elite search and rescue team.
Gigi and Ravi sit on twin beanbag chairs. Sally makes a cozy space for herself on the shag carpet. I settle down beside her, about a foot away.
“We were going to play a game,” Becks says.
“What game?” Tuck asks, leaning in for a kiss.
“Again?” Ravi teases.
“Ravi hates ’cause he’s single,” Gigi explains.
Becks smiles; Tuck does too.
Sally leans over and whispers in my ear, “Becks and Tuck have been together for years. They always need a room. They’re basically cuddle bears.”
“Cuddle bears?” I whisper back, laughing.
“We can hear you,” Tuck says. “Yes, we’re a fan of the cuddle.”
“And the hand-holding,” adds Gigi.
“And the constant kissing,” gripes Ravi. “Which would be sweet if I were happily in love with my own person, which, as of now, I’m not.”
“I can be your person,” Gigi says with a wicked smile, and Ravi flushes all the way to the tips of his ears.
“Hmm . . .” Becks raises an eyebrow.
“So, what game?” Sally asks.
“Oh,” Gigi says. “It’s like a free association game. We played it in my theater class today. I say a word, and then the person to my right says whatever comes to mind, and so on, until we go all the way around the room—full circle.”
“For example,” Becks says, “if I say banana, Tuck says . . .” He nudges Tuck.
“Split?”
“Got it?” Becks asks.
We nod, and the game begins.
Yellow.
Sun.
Circle.
Universe.
Einstein.
Relativity.
Special.
Ice Cream.
Treat.
“Great,” Gigi says, after our second go-around. “That’s the warm-up. Part two is just like this, only it’s with questions. I’ll ask a question, and if I point to you, you have to say the first thing that comes to your mind. And if I want, I can say ‘explain,’ and you have to. Okay?”
Everyone nods but me, because this version feels personal. But when I look around at their faces—Gigi with her dark-brown eyes, Ravi with the tips of his ears back to an almond brown, Becks with the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen, and Tuck, with his habit of smiling, then puckering his lips—my hesitance starts to fade. I don’t know this tribe, but around them I feel okay.
“You want to keep playing?” Sally asks, her tone gentle.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Okay.” Gigi points to Sally. “Favorite color.”
SALLY
Blue.
GIGI
Biggest verbal tick.
BECKS
Actually.
TUCK
He actually says “actually” all the time.
BECKS
Actually, I do. But, actually, so do you.
GIGI
Last kiss.
RAVI
What?
GIGI
Rapid-fire, Ravi. Last kiss.
RAVI
Monica? Monique? Monica or Monique. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not . . . She kissed me, and it was a really loud party.
TUCK
Please, Gigi. You know I kissed a guy hours before Becks told me he liked me. It’s not a big deal.
BECKS
Wait? What?
GIGI
(sighs)
Okay! Moving on! First real kiss. Like with real . . . contact . . .
ME
. . .
GIGI
Come on. Rapid-fire.
ME
(glances at Sally)
SALLY
(looks down, smiles slightly)
TUCK
Oh.
ME
Um . . . Sally.
GIGI
Follow-up question. Favorite kisser?
ME
Um . . . safe space.
BECKS
Very interesting.
TUCK
My turn. Do you have someone special, Marco? Or are you like Sally? Free as the wind . . .
SALLY
Oh my God, Tuck. Seriously?
TUCK
What? It’s a legit Q.
SALLY
His girlfriend’s name is Erika. And I’m not “as free as the wind.” I am happily tethered to myself.
ME
(glances at Sally again)
Um . . . actually . . . We’re on a break. Whatever that means.
SALLY
Oh. Um, okay . . . I mean . . .
(coughs)
are you okay with that?
ME
It’s only been a few days, so yeah. I guess.
BECKS
Well, ex malo bonum.
(claps his hands)
From bad comes good.
ME
Um, it’s just a break.
BECKS
Exactly. Break is bad; figuring things out, good. Right? So figure things out, Marco. Figure. Them. Out.
Middle School
20. FOR RENT
IT WAS FOUR DAYS BEFORE I saw Sally again—another whole weekend of radio silence followed by a Monday when she
didn’t show up at school. This time I didn’t take it personally. Nobody had heard from her. “But,” Sookie said at lunch, “she’s alive.”
JADE
How do you know? She’s not texting back.
DIEGO
Nope, she’s not.
JADE
(narrows eyes)
ME
Yeah, I tried calling her and the house phone. And I might have done a little stalking.
DIEGO
Bro, there is no such thing as a little stalking.
JADE
Yeah, there is.
DIEGO
Example?
JADE
Like when you go a certain way to pass by someone’s house. That’s a little stalking.
DIEGO
Do that much?
JADE
(narrows eyes again)
ME
That’s kinda what I did. Yesterday.
SOOKIE
And?
ME
You know how sometimes you can go right up to their door, hear the TV on inside, and nobody answers when you knock?
THEM
(nod heads)
ME
That.
JADE
Okay, so I checked all her social media. No activity. And I checked Boone’s, too. Also no activity.
DIEGO
You don’t think they’re all dead inside their house from some weird carbon monoxide thing? That can happen. I heard that on the news.
JADE
Diego!
DIEGO
What? I’m serious. It can.
ME
Yeah, but they don’t have gas appliances or a garage attached to the house. It would be really unlikely.
JADE
And her cell keeps ringing, which means she must keep charging it. So she must be alive.
DIEGO
Wow. Impressed.
JADE
Thanks!
SOOKIE
I feel like a bad friend for not stalking.
DIEGO
Says no one ever, Sooks.
SOOKIE
Well, I have a JCC thing today, but I could try to after.
DIEGO
Since I don’t think it makes me a bad friend not to stalk, I’m gonna pass. My old man is getting me a fresh suit for the dance.
JADE
Isn’t that, like, not a good idea? With his . . . parole?
DIEGO
Girl, hush.
ME
(to Jade)
We could go. Right?
JADE
Nope. My mom wants me to clean the house with her. Says Dad’s coming back tonight.
SOOKIE
Was he gone?
JADE
(rolls eyes)
Never gone, just away.
When I got to Sally’s house after school, I found a few surprises.
Sally was sitting outside on her stoop.
At the edge of her lawn was a purple For Rent sign, the ground freshly turned at its base.
Past the sign was Sally, sitting on her stoop, staring blankly at the street. She wore running shoes, shorts, and one of her dad-issued MUSTANG SALLY shirts. Her skin was coated in its usual gleam of post-run sweat. I called out her name twice before she looked up.
“What’s that about?” I rested my elbows on the fence and nodded to the sign, waiting. I was pretty sure this was typical neighborhood nonsense. When you rented the way most of us did, families moved around like the silver pieces of a monopoly board. Heck, Diego had moved twice in two years, the houses right next door to each other. “Sally?” I said when she didn’t reply. “Do you have, like, family to stay with?”
She looked at me finally, confused. “What do you mean?”
“Where ya gonna stay when they put you out?”
“Who’s they?”
“The people who own the house.”
“Grandma Jane owns the house.”
“Did you ever tell me that?”
“Why would I?”
Grandma Jane was Mrs. Blake’s mom, and she was cool, not the type to kick family to the curb. But Grandma Jane didn’t like Mr. Blake. Every time I saw her, she was always complaining to Mrs. Blake about how hard her daughter had to work while her “artist” husband “ran around all day” with the kids. Maybe Grandma Jane was tired of Mr. Blake’s freeloading? But man, to throw your own family out was harsh. Still, I had to ask. “So Grandma’s throwing you out?”
Sally cleared her throat, her eyes coming into focus. “No. We’re moving. That’s what my dad says, and—” She pointed at the sign, making her way over to the fence now. “That’s what the sign says too.”
A ball settled into the pit of my belly. Another one of Mr. Blake’s grand plans, only I couldn’t figure out who would give them better rent than Grandma Jane. “Where?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Sally said.
“Where?”
“I said I don’t—”
“Where?”
“Fine.” She kicked at the fence, the metal clanging. “North Carolina, by my Grandma Pearl. She has a gallery there, an art gallery in Asheville. Her broken hip isn’t healing well, and my dad has this bright idea that he can take over the studio because he studied art in college. He acts like taking over Grandma Pearl’s business is his big break.”
I laughed reflexively, the sound sharp. Sarcastic.
Sally’s eyes narrowed. “This isn’t funny.”
“It’s not,” I agreed. “But you said his big break. It’s a pun. . . . Because it’s actually Grandma Pearl’s big break . . . you know, because she broke—”
“Yeah, I get it. Still not funny.”
“It’s not,” I said earnestly. “Just the pun part,” I whispered.
• • •
I couldn’t believe Sally was moving to North Carolina. Away from here. From us. From me. Inside the house, I said, “Maybe you could stay with Grandma Jane? Or if Grandma Jane says no, maybe Sookie . . . Or maybe, don’t you have a cousin? What’s his name?”
“Tuck?”
“Yeah, what about his parents? Couldn’t you stay with them?”
I was spinning. And with every spin, I tried to figure out a new living arrangement for Sally. For a second I wondered if I could house her in my closet, with blankets and a mini-fridge I’d procure from Diego’s father, and she’d only have to be in there for maybe eight hours a night and . . . I grew dizzy from my thoughts.
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about that. About asking Grandma Jane—not Sookie—maybe Aunt Ana but . . . My dad’s not gonna let me stay. He’s obsessed with my training.”
“Maybe he’ll forget about that with the store. Maybe that’s your silver lining.” I smiled hopefully. Wasn’t that what she wanted anyway? To be free of him?
She sighed. “I really can’t talk about this anymore. I feel sick. Like . . .” She put her open palm over her stomach and then contracted her fingers into a fist, moving the entire ball counterclockwise. Like that same weighted ball I had felt earlier had left me to twist deep into her abdomen.
I nodded. I understood. “Sorry.”
“Let’s just talk about something else. Anything else.”
“Okay.” I looked around and then I listened for a second. Nothing. No noise. “It’s quiet in here.”
“Mom went with Boone to the library. He has a final paper in history and zero out of ten parts done.”
“And your dad?”
“Gone. Left yesterday for North Carolina.”
I was relieved to hear that. It would have been hard to pretend to like Sally’s dad today. I glanced around Sally’s living room, wondering if I should sit. The space was much like mine, a decent enough couch made better with the help of a bright throw blanket. On the walls were pictures of her family—her mom and dad on their wedding day; Boone as a baby; Sally as a toddler, dressed up as a ladybug; her dad in college, holding up medals; Sally in middle school, also holding up medals. There was a
small TV on a stand, the second shelf holding a DVD player.
And, ironically, zero art on the walls.
I moved toward the couch and then stopped suddenly.
“What?” Sally asked.
“That.” I pointed to an arachnoid, brown and fuzzy, the size of a quarter.
“You mean Issa?” she said.
“I mean the spider.”
“Yeah, Issa the spider.”
“You named a spider? Shouldn’t you, like, kill it?”
“Not if you’re my dad. If you’re my dad, you become more attached to that spider than your own kids’ happiness. He’s the one who named it.”
“But he’s gone now.”
“Yeah,” Sally said, peering up at Issa. “But she really is harmless.” She glanced around the living room too and sighed. “Let’s go to my room.”
She headed toward the hallway, but I held back. Sally wasn’t allowed to have guys in her room. This had been a hard rule since the day I had met her, but Sally waved me forward and said, “They’re not going to be back for a while. Ten sections!” And for a second there was a gleam of familiar Sally, who didn’t sit on stoops and stare blankly at the street, so I followed.
In Sally’s room, I leaned against the wall, a foot or two from her doorway, telling myself that I could make a fast escape if her mom and Boone came home early. Sally’s room also mirrored mine—small, maybe six by six, with one tiny window on the wall that faced the front yard. My room was painted sea green from before time began or, at least, before my memory of time; Sally’s was a pale yellow, the color still rich, like it had been refreshed only a year back. Where I only had blinds, Sally had blinds and curtains—the sheer fabric hanging off the wall dramatically, as if air were trapped inside the panels, a perpetual billowing. On the bed was a plush white comforter that looked like something you’d want to sleep in forever. I wondered how Sally ever got out of bed. My comforter was a patchwork quilt that my dad’s mom had brought over from Cuba and passed down to him when he was born. He again passed it down to me when I was born, a ceremony of quiet giving from one to another.
I liked to imagine that mi abuelita had mended the quilt along the way. I could see the crooked stitches on different patches—a hand that wasn’t as steady as the first. And Pop said that when his mom was alive, she liked to sew but she wasn’t very good, not like his bisabuela or like my mom.
Sally sat on the twin bed, tucking one foot beneath her leg and letting the other dangle onto the floor. “You can sit on the bed,” she said, and scooted to make space, her back now flush with flowers etched into her wooden headboard. The headboard made her room look like it belonged to someone who was seven.