The Universal Laws of Marco

by Carmen Rodrigues

  Diego gives me the side-eye. “Marco, you better be careful, or your whole life could go by without you actually in it. You’ll miss a helluva lot if what you care most is not letting people down.” He stands, wiping off his jeans. When he speaks again, his voice is low. “You can’t fix your pop by being perfect now. No matter what you give up for him, he’s always gonna be like he is.” He watches my face, and maybe there’s something there, because he puts a hand on my shoulder.

  I look away, at the street and beyond. Sometimes it’s hard to see what’s there.

  “It wasn’t your fault, okay?” he says. And then he says it again. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  It wasn’t your fault.

  It wasn’t your fault.

  It wasn’t your fault.

  Over and over. And he doesn’t let me brush that hand away. Won’t let me step away. Instead, he holds on tight.

  And it feels the way it did when we were three, going down that slide, holding on to each other because we wanted to be brave when, really, we were just afraid.

  • • •

  It’s a good while later when he says, “Jade told me tomorrow has to work. That we can’t be, all, mortal enemies at prom. All right, Lloyd Dobler?”

  “So, we’re good?” I push out, my voice smaller than I’d like.

  “Bro, even when I hate you, we’re good.” He punches me on the shoulder, sending me back a step. When I look at him, he smiles.

  “What’s that for then?”

  “Them twelve G’s.” He puts his head between his hands, like he still can’t believe it.

  “I know,” I say. “But I did what I had to do.”

  “You were almost free, though.”

  I check him with my shoulder. “I can’t be free if they’re not free too.”

  • • •

  Even later, when I’m lying in bed, staring at that ceiling fan spinning around, I realize this: I didn’t lose my pop like Diego said. Pop is different, yeah. He’s quieter and slower to speak, but he’s still here, on the inside. He hasn’t gone away like Diego’s dad.

  He’s here.

  My pop.

  Middle School

  32. THE PACT

  TWO WEEKS AFTER POP’S INJURY, I left my mom in some neurologist’s office, cupping a mountain of tears as she tried to understand how much damage had been done to Pop’s brain by that one hit—not Mr. Acosta’s fist against Pop’s skull, but the bumper, the sharp edge of metal.

  I couldn’t take the look on Mom’s face, so I wandered the hospital’s pastel halls until I found the elevator bank, and I took the car up to the rooftop observatory. There I found my oldest and dearest friends—sky and sun and the faint white moon and the stars, which, on that day, also couldn’t be seen quite yet because of the sunlight’s glare. But they were present. They are always present.

  I walked toward the security rail, the blueness of the sky like an ocean above me. Below me everything was made for my brothers’ playsets: toy cars, toy ambulances, plastic people. Nothing seemed real, except for me, stretching upward, rising onto the balls of my feet, only my toes connected to the ground.

  This was when I made my first attempt to walk the perimeter of the rooftop, telling myself—for whatever superstitious reason—that if I could walk the whole edge on the points of my feet with my eyes closed, Pop would probably be okay. But if I could remember every name of every star that he had ever shown me, then without a doubt, he would surely be okay.

  I was grasping at some hope built on superstition. Like I could send a message to the universe that said: Look, I remember everything he ever taught me, so please help him remember everything that he taught me too. Let him remember me.

  I began by imagining the three points of the Summer Triangle—Altair, Denab, and Vega. Pop had taught me about asterisms like the Summer Triangle when I was very little, but I had a hard time pronouncing the word correctly. I’d call it “asteroids” or “asterisks.” By the age of eight, I was able to say the word with confidence, and I knew that an asterism was a series of unique stars that were both a part of one constellation or multiple constellations and pulled together to create something new. The same way Mom and Pop came together from their own constellation families to create me. (That’s how Pop explained it back then.)

  Tips of toes to the ground: Denab, from Cygnus, and Vega—

  “Um, Marco?” a voice said from the toy world.

  And Vega from Lyra—

  “Marco . . . ?”

  I opened my eyes, blinked in the daylight. And there was Erika—that other version of her, not the one in the now, the one who’s struggling to know me after five years of friendship and six months of dating. No, this was Before Erika—Sookie’s nemesis, Sally’s track teammate, the girl who once asked me to a middle school dance.

  I was my other version too: the still growing me. I had, except for the dance, never seen her outside of school. That was probably because she lived within walking distance of Seagrove Middle, while I took the bus with the tribe. But here we were together, and of all places at the hospital.

  I stared at her: messy, light-brown hair wrapped like a knob atop her head, mascara slightly smeared beneath the curve of her eyes. She kept swiping at her eyes, so I asked if she was okay, and she glanced up at the clouds and said softly, “My grandma died.”

  “Oh.” I rose back up, onto my tippy-toes, and tried to push away this new bad thing.

  “She’s been sick since forever and she was old . . . but still.”

  “Sick forever” would be explained much later. The day that forever began would be traced all the way back to the day she spit a loogie at Sookie, but on the day of our strange meeting at the hospital, she didn’t say much more, just waited for me to talk all her troubles away. But nothing I said mattered; she cried anyway.

  If Mom started crying, Pop would put his arm around her. I hadn’t put my arms around my mom, though, when she was cupping her mountain of tears in a neurologist’s office, and maybe it was my guilt that had me slipping my arm around Erika’s shoulders. But that’s what I did, and I said, “I’m sorry about your grandma. I really am.” Pat, pat, pat.

  She buried her face in my chest, and our bodies aligned, fitting in a head-to-toe way that left behind no remainders, no messy trail of fractions or decimals.

  After a while she raised her head and studied my face. “You’re crying.”

  I rested my ear against her hair, hoping she would let me be. But she said, “It’s okay. You can talk to me.”

  I didn’t know how to say it—My dad. My dad almost died . . . because of me—

  But she pushed, and finally I managed to say something that felt true. “I almost lost a part of my asterism.”

  She nodded. But if she had asked me to tell her more, I might have confessed my part in it, and maybe if I had that would have freed me. But the next question was, “But what’s an asterism?”

  “It’s all the pieces that make you whole,” I whispered.

  “Like my grandma,” she said in a crackly voice.

  And then there was this coughing, snot-running bit.

  Maybe she cried; maybe I did too. Maybe it went on for a while, and maybe that’s why after that day it felt like we had made a pact to be there for each other.

  A pact that was never spoken or written in words but still existed.

  A pact written in the language of loss, of the dead and dying.

  WORMHOLE V

  BUT IF I CHOSE TO travel down that wormhole, go back in time and “jump the track,” I’d have to accept the casualties.

  Lil’ Jay and Domingo would never come into the world.

  It’s possible that Jade, Diego, Sally, and Erika might not exist either. The ripple effect can be unpredictable. But even if they did exist, would we know one another? Is cosmic coincidence so strong that we would find one another in this new world?

  Or would all our stories—the ones that we’ve written alone, the ones that we’ve written t
ogether—disappear?

  Because in this new world, the one of self-sacrifice, my current life would be gone.

  And maybe I don’t want my life to be gone.

  Maybe I just want it to be better.

  Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to fix the past but to accept it, learn from it.

  Maybe mistakes make fertile soil.

  Because one of life’s other paradoxes is this: We want to change the past because we survived the aftermath. And in the process, we grew up.

  Senior Year

  33. PROM

  IF MY FRIEND MARTA WERE here right now, she’d probably say, “Marco, you’re messing everything up. Like everything.” And then she’d tell me a story about that one time she messed everything up, too.

  And that story would probably start months before the mess-up occurred, kind of like my own story started a month before prom.

  Before Pop got hurt again.

  Before I held Sally’s hand.

  Before those lies of omission.

  But maybe at the end of Marta’s story, she’d say, “Don’t worry, kid. We all make mistakes.”

  At least that’s what I hope she’d say. Right now I’m not sure about anything, except that if Diego is right, if I am living my life trying not to disappoint everyone while, somehow, disappointing everyone . . . Then I must be making mistakes—colossal mistakes.

  Typically, I’d bury these sorrows in work. But today is prom, and Mr. Grendel has given me the day off. So I have to be creative about finding work. And that’s why Old Mrs. B finds me shoving her mailbox into a fortified hole when she pulls into her driveway that afternoon.

  She smiles and waves as she continues on into her garage. A few minutes later she meanders out to the front yard to take in my handiwork. “This is a nice surprise,” she says, watching as I fill the hole with dirt, patting the ground with the blade as I go.

  “I’ll come back next week and drop some cement on top.”

  “Okay,” she says, “but shouldn’t you be getting ready?”

  “Plenty of time,” I say, thinking of Erika, already at some beauty salon. And Jade and Sookie, who started their prom prep last night.

  Me? I just have to shower and slip on the suit Mom pressed for me last night.

  “Sorry it took so long to find a permanent solution to the mailbox,” I tell Old Mrs. B.

  “Well,” she says gently, “it’s not really your job to find permanent solutions to my problems, but I appreciate your help. How’s your dad’s rehab going?”

  I lean against the mailbox (a test of its sturdiness) and say, “Same as last time—slow but, you know, some progress.”

  “And school?”

  “Got to finish a physics project, and then I’m free.”

  “Tea?”

  I follow Mrs. B into the garage, settling the shovel back into its spot beside a rusty backhoe.

  As I pass the hood of her Oldsmobile, I rest my palm on the silver metal, still warm to the touch. The garage door slides down, and Old Mrs. B motions for me to follow her into the house. There, a cold gust of air washes over our skin, and for a second I feel soothed.

  She turns the corner, heels clicking on the white tile, but I stay in that gust of air, flapping my arms up and down, an attempt to air out my armpits. Then I move on to the kitchen, a small, bright space with white counters and a good deal of light from the window above the kitchen sink.

  Outside that window, in a small garden, is a teak bench that sits beneath an oak tree. The tree’s arms are raised in a “hallelujah,” as if the tree is saying, “Let me just sit here in a state of eternal worship.”

  Old Mr. B used to like sitting beneath that tree when he was alive, which is why he put that bench there—“a memory bench” is what he called it—for their fortieth anniversary. When Old Mr. B died two years ago, at the start of my tenth-grade year, Old Mrs. B sat on that bench every day for a year. She said that it made her feel closer to him.

  Right now Old Mrs. B sets a mason jar in front of me. “What does it mean?” I ask, after my second long swig.

  “What?” She tips the pitcher of tea into the jar again, and the amber liquid rises above the ice cubes once more.

  “That saying?” I struggle to remember the exact quote Mr. B had engraved on the wood. If Sally were here, she’d recite that quote word by word—a photographic memory suddenly called to duty. “ ‘Love is a flower and friendship a tree?’ Something like that.”

  “Oh.” Old Mrs. B smiles. “That.”

  “Yeah.” I place my wet fingertips to my temples. “That.”

  “The quote is ‘Love is flower-like; friendship is like a sheltering tree.’ Well . . .” She grabs a glass from the shelf, fills it to the top, and takes a sip. “I suppose that it could mean a variety of things. You want me to tell you what it means to me?”

  I rest my elbows on the countertop and give her a nod. She takes another sip before saying, “Okay, well . . . ‘love is flower-like’—that’s the first part, right? So I take that to mean that love possesses the qualities of a flower—beautiful, fragrant, intoxicating at full bloom, but not constant.”

  “A flower that blooms but then wilts?”

  “Exactly. That’s the natural cycle of a flower’s life. If you’re patient with the plant . . . if you take care of it even out of bloom . . . you’ll see flowers again. But you’ll also come to realize that there’s an ebb and flow to the plant’s beauty. That, in my experience, is a lot how love feels.”

  “Ebb and flow?” I repeat, trying to visualize this cycle like there’s a concrete place where love’s ebb and flow lives. A place somewhere that has dirt and the sprouting bud of first love. And we’ll say that bud is tender, a fragile little thing that might make it, with protection, with time. When that bud becomes bold, thick, sturdy, it pushes its way into the world, knowing how to lean into the wind’s currents, instead of fight them. Knowing how to dance with the rain, instead of drown, to see the sun as a cure for hunger. It seems an impossible feat.

  I smile. “It’s kind of a miracle, huh? When a plant flowers.”

  “I’d like to think so.”

  “I wonder how many almost-flowers there are.”

  She laughs. “Probably a number near the amount of almost lovers. Things have an amazing ability to not stick.”

  “Yeah,” I say, thinking if Diego were here, he’d snap his fingers together and say, “Bro, mind blown.” A pantomime of a bomb blowing up over his brain. But I just grin stupidly.

  “So what about the part that has the tree?”

  “Oh, that part? ‘Friendship is like a sheltering tree.’ ” Old Mrs. B shakes her head, and little crinkles of amusement wave out from the corners of her eyes. “That’s what keeps love together. If your love is protected by a true friendship, then in the worst of times, the times when the wind kicks up, the rain pelts sideways, the flower or the plant that will one day carry the flower, will keep because the tree will shelter it through the storm. The flower can bloom and wilt and bloom again because of the tree.”

  “Because of the tree?” I repeat.

  “Yes.” She smiles, but her eyes are knowing. “So why the questions?”

  “Huh?”

  She gives me a searching look. “Why are you so interested in this quote now? It’s been there, on that bench, for years.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. It caught my eye.”

  “Today of all days? Prom day?”

  “Prom day.”

  “Still taking Erika?”

  “Yep.” I cough. “Why?”

  “Curious,” she says, and sets the tea back in the fridge. “How about Sally?”

  “How about her?”

  Old Mrs. B shrugs, like this is a question she’ll let linger. “It’s a good day for a dance,” she says, looking at the azure sky outside.

  “It is.” I down the last of my tea and set the jar in the sink. Then I take a few steps out of the kitchen. Thankfully, there’s a buzz in my pock
et, an indication that it’s finally time to get ready. “I have to go. It’s time now, I guess.”

  I glance back at the tree, stuck again by the miracle of it. So much so that I walk back to Old Mrs. B, wrapping my arm around her waist to pull her gently into a bear hug.

  It’s really an impulsive moment for me, but it feels right.

  She chuckles. “What’s that for?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, but then I feel that I do. “Because you’re part of the miracle.”

  She squeezes me tightly, “And so, dear Marco, are you.”

  • • •

  “So this is prom,” Diego says the minute we step into the hotel’s ballroom.

  The tribe pauses to look around at the gleaming chandeliers that hang from the high ceilings, twinkling above us like stars in the night.

  “It’s all right,” Diego says, and Jade laughs.

  “It’s more than that,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”

  And there is something beautiful about the spaciousness that comes with the room and all that light reflecting off particles of glass and silver, not just on the chandeliers but on the tables, on the necks of the girls, on the reflective material of their dresses. And look at all the dudes, polished up in sharp suits and shiny leather kicks. Erika squeezes my hand, and I squeeze back, caught up, too, in all this magic. Because I’ve given myself a free pass. A pass that says I don’t have to have all the answers. I only need to be here, in this now. And tomorrow I’ll start again, look at all the questions that still need answers. But for tonight I’m gonna be a kid. Just for one last night.

  “Where’d Sookie go to?” Jade asks, looking back.

  “She said she had to meet someone real quick,” Erika replies.

  “Who?” Diego asks, and does a head count. “We’re all here.”

  “Let’s snag a table, and I’ll text her,” Jade says. “But where?” She scans the tables. All of them are filling up quickly.

  “I got this,” Diego says, and beelines for a table in the center of everything.

  “What?” he says, when we bring up the rear. He nods to Jade and then taps a palm to his chest. “I’m not hiding all this brilliance in a corner.”