The Universal Laws of Marco

by Carmen Rodrigues

  I nod, slide the purple glow stick around my neck, and begin to count. I press my face into my hands and lean my weight onto the palm tree. It’s a perfectly legit posture, but I hear Jade yell out, “No peeking,” and Sally adding, “For real, Marco,” and Diego shouting in too, “Remember how he was always cheating and shit when we was little?”

  Little.

  Much earlier that day, at graduation, Erika had said something to me that was very similar. It was after the ceremony, when all the families were roaming about, and some students were saying good-byes like we’d never see one another again. That’s when we found one another. It was somewhere near the fountain at the center of Seagrove Park, a really ornate fountain of a manatee, launching into the air, water shooting out of its mouth. It was a strange fountain, and throughout our nearly four years of friendship, Erika and I had come here to stare at it in wonder, to laugh at it in amusement, and sometimes just to sit with it. I don’t know why except to say that we both found something comforting about that damn fountain, especially in the days after Erika’s grandmother’s death and my father’s fall. Maybe because Erika first started coming to the fountain with her grandmother when she was a little girl. And when I was little Pop would bring me there too.

  So it made sense that we saw each other there. Maybe I came there to find her. Maybe, she came to find me too.

  All I know is that we met at the edge of that fountain and sat on the concrete barrier, staring out at our classmates and their parents taking pictures and laughing.

  “It was a nice graduation,” Erika said.

  “Did you cry?” I asked. Erika had always said she would cry at our graduation.

  “Naw,” she said, but when I snuck a peek at her, I saw that her mascara was smudged beneath her eyes. I reached out to tap that space—the evidence—with my pinkie, and she flinched, and then I remembered that we couldn’t do that anymore. That our bodies didn’t really belong to each other like that. And while that felt right, it also hurt a tiny bit.

  I guess for Erika that was the case too, because she was silent for a few minutes, and then she said, “Just a little. You?”

  I laughed lightly. “Nope, but I felt it.” I tapped the center of my chest. “I felt it here.” And I was still feeling it—my chest was all tight and my arms all tingly. The graduation and everything that was happening, even standing there with Erika, felt surreal.

  She nodded, her eyes watching the crowd. “I’m not going to California. I’m going to FSU. I was able to fix it.”

  “How?”

  She smiled sadly and swung her eyes back toward me. “A miracle.”

  It was my turn to nod. “You deserve a miracle.”

  “Don’t I?” she said, cocking an eyebrow. “You? You going to Wayne?”

  “I am,” I said. “But not right away.” I decided to defer a year from Wayne. That would be enough time for Pop to finish rehab, for me to work full-time and save money, and to keep cracking the whip over my brothers while handing off the torch to Diego, who promised to fill in the gap once I left. My parents were conflicted about my change of plans, but in the end they understood my decision.

  Mom said, “Marco, that was almost everything you had—your college savings. And you gave it to us?” And then she cried for a bit.

  Pop said, “I’m . . . I’m glad to have more time . . . but don’t tell . . . don’t tell Mom . . . I said that.”

  My brothers said, “Wait! We have to keep sharing a room?”

  Old Mrs. B said, “ ‘Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.’ That’s what Desmond Tutu would say about this, and who am I to disagree?”

  And right there at the fountain, Erika didn’t say anything about my staying for that gap year other than this: “Next year will be my first year without you in a long time.” She paused and sucked in her breath. “I don’t want to stop knowing you. I’ve known you ever since we were little, and I want to know you even when we’re as old as Old Mrs. B.”

  She was about three feet from me, her pale arms sticking out of her royal-blue gown, her fingers tapping silently on the concrete. I scooted closer, and for the first time in two weeks, I let my hand slip into hers, and she held it there. We didn’t look at each other. I think we knew that we couldn’t. But I said to her what was true. I said, “I don’t want to stop knowing you either.”

  We were talking about life, that long road ahead—a road on which we were only reaching the end of the beginning. That thought hit me hard in the chest, with that same sentimentality that permeated my father and my father’s father before him and so on until time began. But you know what? I didn’t mind. Sentimentality makes the world livable. Maybe it’s sentimentality that made me decide to stay in Seagrove for one more year, to not go away to college yet, to take some extra time to be with my family and my closest friends. Maybe we’re not all meant to leave behind the people we love but to cling to them with both hands. I knew in that moment I couldn’t leave Erika behind either. Same as I knew in this moment of pressing my face into my hands at the bark of that tree that I would never leave behind Sookie or Diego or Jade or even Sally.

  “Ready or not,” I shout, having reached the magical number, thirty. “Here I come.” I spin around, scanning the horizon. It’s dark now. But the overhead lights that dot the park make it somewhat visible. Still, I don’t see any of the tribe—not behind the big tree that we circled endlessly as kids, or on the slide where Jade once snagged her finger so hard it bled for nearly an hour, or over by the swings where me and Diego would pump our legs until we reached the very top, shouting: “Jump! No, you jump.”

  At the edge of the park, I check behind the one-room wooden cabin where Sally and I used to tell each other our deepest secrets and then to the edge of the parking lot, where Sookie learned how to ride a skateboard. There I hear a giggle that is the length of a hiccup—definitely a Jade giggle. I spin around to find her frozen beneath a streetlight. A wicked smile steals across her face, and the giggle expands into laughter. She runs for home base, already so close that she beats me there by several legs.

  “Ha!” she shouts, hands on the bark. There is a rustle behind me. I spin around to see Sookie off to my far right, looping her way around the cabin. I decide to wait her out.

  “You can’t stay at base for longer than thirty seconds,” Sookie shouts. “You know the rules.”

  Rules we developed when we were, like eight, but still I count aloud to thirty, my eyes fixed on Sookie.

  “Oh, that’s how it’s going down?”

  “Yeah, Sookie, that’s how it’s going down.”

  “Then eat my . . .” She spins her legs like the Road Runner from Loony Toons, feet kicking up dust as she dashes off.

  It’s hard to stop laughing long enough to chase her. Two seconds in, I see Diego to my right, and then Sally somewhere behind him. We run, a nonsensical path past swings and cabin and parking lot and rope tower, and when all is done, I’ve missed each of them by fractions of a yard.

  “That was ridiculous,” Sally huffs, one hand on her knee while the other grips the base.

  “Bro, that was awesome!” Diego hops in the air and gives Jade a chest bump. She stumbles backward. “Stop, Sookie, or I’m going to pee my pants!” She wipes tears from her eyes. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  “What? The Road Runner?” Sookie winks, and finally stops her spinning. “I got jokes . . .”

  “You’ve got insanity,” Jade says.

  “I’ve got the spins,” Sookie retorts, and grabs for Jade’s hand.

  “No, seriously, I have a cramp!”

  “Don’t share ’cause I don’t care.” Sookie links her hands tightly with Jade’s, and this begins the pinwheel: Jade links on to Diego and Diego links on to Sally, who links onto me, until we are all spinning.

  And then we are falling—down, down to the ground—a tangled mess of legs and arms and hearts beating wildly against
one another’s bodies.

  And I think that finding this—this tribe—is one of the great miracles of my life.

  And I think about Sally, about her still, maybe, loving me.

  Ten minutes later, we’re lying on our backs staring up at the night sky. The giggling has subsided and all seems peaceful—even here, in the center of a city, there is a quiet.

  I turn my head so that my ear is pressed flat to the ground, the grass tickling the side of my face, and I marvel at Sally—stubborn chin, serious eyes, all of her here, beside me.

  My friend again. My friend Sally.

  She catches me staring at her. “What?”

  “It was a good night, right?” I ask Sally.

  “Yes.” She sighs and presses her hands to the center of her chest. “It was good, really good.”

  “The best . . . ?” I ask.

  She smiles and says sleepily, “Yes . . .” And then there is a pause, and she laughs.

  “What?”

  “The best yet . . .”

  “Yeah.” Jade also sighs on the other side of me. “The best yet.”

  “The best yet!” Sookie screams, and Diego follows.

  And me, I just laugh and hold tight to that promise of yet, as if more of this will come. As if more of this can stretch out into forever.

  AN ALWAYS SPARK

  THE TRUTH IS WE MIGHT not have gotten together again, but on the night of Sally’s second fall, at approximately midnight, I heard a tap on my window.

  She could have texted. I was up. The light was on in my bedroom. And at that point I didn’t have a curfew. (We were seven months into our freshman year of college—her at UM and me at Miami Dade College, taking classes that I would later transfer to Wayne.) Finally we were no-questions-asked adults.

  I didn’t even slip up the blinds. I just slid on my shoes, grabbed my keys, and headed outside. She smiled when she saw me, and I lifted up my finger—made the universal sign for shh—and motioned toward my truck.

  When we got in the truck, I said, “I thought you were at a meet in Orlando.”

  She said, “Yeah. We got back today, around ten.”

  “And now you’re here,” I said, smiling.

  We had grown closer in the past year, nearly as close as we had been when we were kids. The process had happened slowly—first group hangouts over the summer, but by fall we had begun texting each other directly. Little questions like, “Want to study together tonight?” Always the study sessions were somewhere public—the library, the coffee shop by UM’s campus, the picnic tables outside Grendel’s on one of my dinner breaks. And then last week a few things happened. It was her birthday, and I bought her a gift—a rose-gold necklace with a little mustang charm to celebrate her return to running.

  “Run, Sally, run,” she whispered as she dangled it in her hand.

  “You remember.”

  She smiled and looked at me, her serious gray eyes wide.

  “I’m nineteen today,” she said.

  “But you don’t look a day over fetus.”

  “Ah.” She laughed, then wrinkled up her nose. “That’s disgusting.”

  “That’s biology.”

  We were parked in her driveway. I had picked her up for her birthday dinner with Sookie, who was back in town for a long weekend, and Diego and Jade, who hosted the party at their new studio apartment—a mostly empty space with nice wood floors and plenty of natural light. “But imagine it, bro,” Diego said as we settled down for a candlelit indoor picnic, “with furniture.”

  Jade laughed. “You mean our blow-up bed doesn’t count?”

  “Oh, that counts,” Diego said, and winked at Jade, who rolled her eyes before smiling.

  Then Sookie took a deep breath, asking, “Okay, so are we ever gonna talk about it?”

  It was an e-mail Sookie had sent us earlier that semester, describing her new perspective on the word tribe or, more specifically, our use of the word to describe our friend group.

  At Northwestern, she had enrolled in a course that explored the histories of indigenous peoples, and that had led her to dig deeper into the history of the word—from its Latin root tribus, describing the three ancient Roman tribes; to the history of the twelve tribes of Israel, which Sookie was more familiar with; to the devastating effects of European colonialism/imperialism on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and beyond, and how their usage of the word downgraded independent nations to “primitive” societies; to the modern marketing of the word as a catchphrase found on T-shirts and coffee mugs across the country; to her uncle, of both Jewish and Native American ancestries, who worked for the Indian Health Services, and used the word solely to discuss issues of vital importance to the country’s indigenous peoples.

  “The history of the word is pretty complex,” Sookie had concluded in her e-mail and again in person, to which Diego replied, “Yeah, Sooks, especially when you bring up the OPs.” He paused for one dramatic beat. “Original peoples.”

  “I can’t even with you,” Jade said, sighing, and then the conversation went on. And yet for all that followed, our wanting to hold on to the word for what it had come to mean to us—a group who always stood together, who shared a unique way of being, a way of life—we knew that the word was beyond us now.

  When the debate was over, Jade said, “How about we just call each other family? I mean, you guys are pretty much that to me.”

  “Familia,” Diego said. “Hmm . . . I’d be down with that.” He waved his hand through the air like a showman. “A Tribe Called Family.”

  Sookie groaned. “Seriously? You just twentieth-century-pop punned me?”

  Diego smiled slowly before launching into a rowdy version of “Can I Kick It?” by A Tribe Called Quest, only stopping when Sookie gathered a handful of his ear-length dreads and yanked them.

  “Damn, Sooks, careful. I’m growing that out.” He touched his hair affectionately.

  “But seriously, though, I get it. Your uncle is out there fighting the good fight, and you want to show respect to him and the people he’s fighting for. I’m down with that.” He waited, another one of his dramatic beats. “That’s PCC—people correct choices.”

  Sookie laughed and all the tension broke. “So agreed? Family?”

  I nodded as Sally leaned in closer. “Yeah,” she said, her pinky tapping across the floor until I found it right next to me.

  “Family,” I said, because the new word felt right and good, like a reflection of a truth that had already made us whole.

  At the end of the night, after I had dropped Sookie off, it was just me and Sally, the motor running in my truck as I watched her unwrap the gift.

  There was a card, too, but I told her to open it in her house, afterward.

  “Will you put it on me?” she asked, handing me the necklace. She scooted closer, across the bench seat, and pulled her hair up so that the nape of her neck was exposed. I felt my heart shake, but my hands were surprisingly steady when I brought the clasp of the necklace together. “Thanks,” she said, and she turned to look at me, our faces only a few inches apart, and then the thing happened—I kissed her.

  On the cheek.

  It wasn’t meant to be on the lips, if you’re thinking that I missed. Still, it was a pretty big deal. I had been broken up with Erika for almost a year by then, but I hadn’t been out with anybody else. Erika had started dating some dude from track, but I had kept myself solo. I guess I had to fully let go of what was before I could see what might be.

  But that night in my truck, after that cheek-grazing kiss—the one that made Sally laugh this little nervous laugh—I knew for certain that what I wanted was to be with Sally.

  She didn’t say anything, though, about that kiss. She just slid out of the car with a wave and an odd smile. I hadn’t heard from her since that night. I wasn’t surprised. I knew she had a lot coming up—final projects and that last meet of the season. And even though we had started texting each other, we hadn’t begun texting each other on
the daily. Still, about four days into our radio silence, I cracked and did something else that was unusual: I called.

  She didn’t answer. I got her voice mail and left a message: “Hey, it’s me. Um, calling to wish you luck . . . I mean, it’s Marco . . . in case you hadn’t got that or . . . anyway . . . okay . . . um, bye.”

  I hadn’t heard back from her until now. This knock on my window, this girl staring at me with the biggest gray eyes I’ve ever seen. We’re in my truck, a full tank of gas, and all those hours of darkness where nothing can happen because the world is still, but everything can happen because we are not.

  “Our park?” I ask, feeling that catch in my heart.

  “No,” she says, and looks away, almost shyly. “Beach.”

  We drive north on US 1, the windows rolled down, the wind rushing over our bodies. When we approach the bridge to Key Biscayne, we veer east, stopping only for me to dig enough money out to pay the toll on the Rickenbacker Causeway. And then we are across the bridge, the navy waters of Biscayne Bay to our right and the Atlantic to our left. The roads are empty this time of night, dotted occasionally with streetlights that cast pools of bright white onto the gray concrete.

  “There! Go there!” Sally says about ten minutes later. “Right there.”

  I turn into the beach access and park the truck near the water. Sally hops out before I can even cut the engine. She’s left behind her shoes. I slip off my flip-flops and follow. I find her standing at the base of the water, the tide low right now. We draw closer so that the water slips over our feet and then away again.

  “I’m not like him,” Sally announces.

  “Who?” I ask, confused. We hadn’t spoken on the drive over, and I didn’t know what she meant. I didn’t even know why she had come to see me. But I look at her now and see that on her leg is a scrape. “You hurt yourself?”