“I do?”
“Yes. Convince Abby to change her mind.”
26
PUP RETURNED FROM HIS MEETING with Mr. Hughes, his portfolio under his arm and his face in his phone, composing messages to Abrihet without actually sending them. He had never been good with words—which was part of the reason why he loved photography—and every time he thought he had something good to say, something that would get her to change her mind, he second-guessed himself and deleted the unsent message. He was so preoccupied with this task that as he climbed the front steps to his house, he nearly tripped over the girl who was slumped, hugging her knees, on the top step.
“Izzy?” Pup stumbled backward and caught his balance on the iron railing.
“Sorry.” She looked up at him. Her eyes were red and mascara leaked across her temples. “I should have called first.”
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“A while.” She held up an empty glass. “Your mom brought me some lemonade.”
“Oh.”
She drummed her fingers on the empty space next to her on the step.
“Sit with me a minute?”
Pup hesitated. The way she’d humiliated him in the hallway after his Spanish exam still stung. It was going to sting, he thought, for a long time.
“I’ll totally get it,” she said, “if you don’t want to talk to me. And if you tell me to get the hell off your stoop I’ll totally understand. I just came to tell you that I broke up with Brody.” She burst into tears then, and buried her face between her knees. Seeing her cry like that dissolved Pup’s will. He sat down next to her, his portfolio balanced across his lap.
“I’m sorry, Iz.”
“No, you’re not,” she said, and sniffled. “You never liked Brody. I’m not blaming you. But you never liked him.”
“What are you talking about?” Pup objected. “I adore him. He has so many great qualities: He’s lazy. And pervy. And a liar with gross fingernails and corn-chip breath. I could go on.”
“He does not have gross breath and nails!”
“Can you honestly look me in the eye,” Pup said, “and tell me that he didn’t taste like Cool Ranch every time you kissed him?”
The corner of Izzy’s mouth twitched into an almost-smile.
“Okay, he did. Sometimes. Stop trying to make me laugh.” She hugged her knees tighter. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s over. He cheated on me. We were at a party at Cory Meier’s house, and he disappeared for a while. I went to pee, and just as I was about to flush, I heard this, like, fumbling, on the other side of the shower curtain. I throw open the curtain and who’s there? My boyfriend tangled up in a bath mat with Maya Ulrich. Who, by the way, was topless.”
“Wow,” said Pup. “Classy.”
Izzy nodded miserably. Across the street, the Nicholsons’ automatic sprinklers switched on. The late-afternoon sun slanted through the arches of water, making little rainbows all across their lawn. “Hey, look!” Pup pointed. “It’s the ghost of Kailyn’s mom.”
“Don’t make fun of Kailyn’s rainbows, Pup.” Izzy looked across the street at the sprinklers. “It’s like Mrs. Barrera says. We all have different ways of dealing with our grief.”
“True. She sees rainbows, you pick terrible boyfriends.”
“Well, he was a good distraction,” she said. “I’ll give him that. I didn’t even have time to be sad on the anniversary of Teddy’s death, because I was so busy caring for Brody and his infected tongue piercing that day.”
“He numbed it with a blue raspberry freeze pop and stabbed it through with a thumbtack,” Pup recalled. “What could possibly go wrong?”
Izzy laughed and then was quiet.
“I should have believed you.” She twisted her hands in her lap. “After all we’ve been through together, I should have known you’d never lie to me.”
“Yeah, Iz. You probably should have.”
A longer, somewhat painful silence followed.
“So what’s in the folder, anyway?”
“Oh.” Pup ran his hand over the plain cover. “It’s some photographs for this competition I’m in.”
“The art thing you were doing down in Champaign?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s great, Pup. Really. Not to sound like my mom, but it’s great to see you having interests. Can I see them?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re kind of . . . personal.”
“Personal?” She blinked up at him with her wet green eyes. “But you just said you’re entering them in a competition. Aren’t people going to see them then?”
“Yes, but . . .” He trailed off. He didn’t know how to explain it to her. Mr. Hughes had been the first to see his portfolio, and no one but Abrihet— who had been there with him the whole time, had worked alongside him, had taught him and critiqued him and helped him—could be the second. “Sorry, Iz. I just can’t.”
Her smile fell a little at the corners. “Not even a quick peek?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
“Okay.” She fished a tissue from the back pocket of her denim shorts and wiped away the smears of mascara around her eyes. “I guess I deserve that.”
“Nobody deserves anything,” Pup said. “We only get what we get.”
“One of Mrs. Barrera’s famous nuggets of wisdom.” She stood up and put the tissue back in her pocket. “Anyway. I just came to tell you about Brody. And to say I’m sorry. And I hope you win your photography thing.”
“Thanks, Iz.”
“So . . . friends?”
“Friends.”
She stuck out her hand. Pup took it, and her warm fingers wrapped around his. But he didn’t feel anything at her touch except a kind of distant affection, a bittersweet sadness. He understood that next year, senior year, his relationship with Izzy would be no different than his relationships with the other members of the Pity Party: hallway friends and nothing more. They would never be close again. And that was okay with him.
She gave him a little wave before descending his front steps and crossing the street. As she passed the Nicholsons’ front lawn, she leaned out of the heat and into the sprinkler. The water cascaded against her body, breaking up the rainbows into sparkling fractals of light. It would have made a great photograph, if Pup had been looking. But instead he had opened his folder to the shot he’d taken of Abrihet in the university hotel. Sepia, he was thinking. A warm brown color, best known for its uses in digital photography. He and Patrick had once had a conversation about sepia, a conversation that Pup had forgotten completely and now, for some reason, remembered perfectly. Before it became a color in its own right, Patrick had explained, it was the name of a dye first produced by the ancient Greeks from the ink of the cuttlefish and popular for centuries among artists for writing and painting. Leonardo himself had used sepia to create his famous drawings of the human body.
“And don’t be fooled by the name,” Pat’s lecture had concluded. “A cuttlefish is not actually a fish at all. It’s a mollusk.”
“Wait,” Pup had said. “Are you talking about Leonardo the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle? Or somebody else?”
Patrick had laughed and slung his arm around his little brother. “Oh, Pup,” he’d said. “I still have so much to teach you.”
Sepia. Pup closed the folder and looked up. Izzy was gone, and he knew what to do, now that he’d finally found a name for the color of Abrihet’s eyes.
27
TWO BUS RIDES LATER, Pup was in Uptown, walking down Broadway and nervously chomping on a breath mint. Abrihet had told him that she sometimes helped out at Shores of the Red Sea in the summer, when the small back patio opened up and doubled the number of tables in the restaurant. Showing up there unannounced had seemed like a great idea when he’d first boarded the Lawrence Avenue bus, but now that he had actually arrived and was standing on the sidewalk looking through the front window at Abrihet’s aunt, who was pouring tea for two old people at the only occupied table in
the whole place, his confidence dried up. Abrihet had said that her amoui liked Pup, but her father was a different story. He remembered, with a nervous shiver, the scowl on Mr. Tesfay’s face a few weeks earlier when he’d watched Pup laughing with his daughter across the room. Before her aunt could turn around and see him, Pup ducked away from the window to reconsider. Hiding himself in the narrow gangway between the restaurant and the chain-link fence that separated it from the alley, he took out his phone and dialed Annemarie’s number. She would know what to do, and she would give it to him straight: if this was a terrible plan, she would say so. The phone rang once, twice, three times. Four times. Then, her voice mail picked up. Pup couldn’t believe it. It was the first time in their long history that she hadn’t answered his call.
In a meeting, the text buzzed immediately in his hand. Sorry. Give me ten minutes?
Okay
Pup stood in the narrow passageway and waited. The wall was westward facing, and as the late-afternoon sun began to sink in the sky, the bricks behind him practically glowed with heat. He chewed another breath mint and wiped his face with the hem of his T-shirt. A minute passed. Then two. Then five. At the eight-minute mark, he heard, around the corner, the front door of the restaurant open and close, and footsteps heading in his direction. Panicked, he considered running, or even scaling the fence and disappearing stealthily down the alley, but before he could even get his first ungainly foot into a toehold in the chain link, Abrihet’s amoui was standing at the entrance of the gangway.
“Well?” she said. “Are you coming inside?”
As his phone began to ring in his pocket—Annemarie must have finished her meeting—he followed Abrihet’s aunt inside, stumbling a little over the red patterned rug at the entrance, through the mostly empty restaurant, and up to the counter. The elderly couple had looked up from their lunches to sip their tea and stare at him.
“Are you here to eat?” She pointed at the plastic-covered menus that were stacked in a neat pile next to the cash register.
“No, thanks, ma’am. I’m actually here to . . . uh . . . is Abrihet here?”
“In the kitchen.” She indicated the swinging metal door behind her with a small movement of her head.
“Can I talk to her? It will just be a quick second.”
“No.”
“No? Okay.” Pup backed away from the counter, feeling equal parts disappointed and relieved. “Thanks, anyway. I’ll just—”
“Wait.”
She stepped from behind the counter and plucked at a handful of napkins from the dispenser on the empty table next to him. Then, clucking her tongue in disapproval, she began dabbing at his forehead and cheeks. “Why do you sweat so much?” she demanded. “You can’t talk to my niece looking like this.” Pup was too surprised to answer her. He just stood there, perfectly still, as the napkin was pressed to the wetness beading his upper lip.
“Now,” she said, satisfied, tossing the damp napkins into the garbage can next to the counter. “Now you may go.”
On the other side of the swinging door, the kitchen was small, cramped, and stiflingly hot. The shelves were crammed with sacks of rice, lentils, flour, coffee beans, and big clear plastic jars of red and brown and yellow spices. The two small windows along the back wall were pushed open and a big box fan whirred in one corner, blowing the soupy air around. In the middle of the space was a six-burner stovetop. Abrihet stood before it, stirring something in a large metal pot, her face shining with sweat, her hair pulled back into a hairnet.
“James?” She looked up when he walked in, and the long wooden spoon bobbed in the pot. “What are you doing here?”
“Abrihet, I need to talk to you.”
She fished out her spoon and her eyes returned to her cooking. “About what?”
“Is that dorho you’re making?”
“Yeah. You want a taste?”
“Obviously.”
He stepped closer. She dipped a piece of injera into the pot and handed it to him. He folded it into his mouth, swallowing heat; flavor; rich, slow-cooked chicken; and tomatoes and berbere. A rivulet of sweat jettisoned down his back.
“That is so freaking good.”
“Thanks.” She cleared her throat. “So. What’s up?”
“I’m here,” Pup said, looking her in the eyes, “because I have a confession.”
“A confession?” Abrihet placed the spoon carefully on the counter. “About what?”
“Well, I—I lied to you.”
A hand moved to her hip. “About what?”
“About my Greek Mythology Day project.”
“What?”
“Remember that time we were in the darkroom together and I told you that I made my goat legs for my Pan costume from an old bath mat?”
“Um. Yes?”
“Well, I was lying. Half lying, anyway.”
She stared at him, waiting for him to continue.
“It wasn’t an old bath mat, like I told you. It was brand-new. I found it in the linen closet with the T.J. Maxx tag still on it.”
“Wow, James.” Abrihet sighed and picked up her spoon again. “If that’s the worst thing you’ve ever lied about, then you’re an even nicer person than I thought.”
“Let me explain,” he said. “Okay?”
She picked up a jar of berbere and shook some into the pot, tasting the results with the back of her spoon. “Okay.”
“See, there were a bunch of old towels and stuff in that closet. I could have used any of them. But I took the brand-new one on purpose because I wanted my mom to notice it was missing. I wanted her to get mad at me for taking it. Like, I wanted her to get pissed. To really yell at me, you know? Make me ride my bike all the way to T.J. Maxx right then and there and buy her a new one with my own money.”
Abrihet picked up the salt, shook some into the pot, tasted. She didn’t say anything, but he could tell by the stiff way she held her shoulders as she cooked that she was listening.
“See, my brother had been dead for two months, and my mom was disappearing right before my eyes. She, like, shrunk, Abrihet. She didn’t just lose weight. She lost height. Even her voice got softer. She stopped watching Dateline: To Catch a Predator with me on Saturday nights. She stopped bowling. She stopped grocery shopping and dyeing her hair and cooking. My sisters had to take over making Sunday dinner. She stopped doing pretty much anything. And in my family, you can’t just ask somebody if they’re okay. You can’t just talk to them. In Flanland, what you have to do is steal a brand-new green bath mat from the linen closet and hope that it provokes a fight. And then hope the fight will start a, like, real conversation.”
“Did it?” Abrihet’s voice was quiet. She stirred and tasted. “Provoke a conversation, I mean?”
Pup looked down at his Nikes. “She never even noticed it was gone.”
He glanced toward the swinging kitchen door, hoping Abrihet’s amoui wouldn’t come through before he finished saying what he needed to say. He went on, the words coming out in a rush. “You were right, Abrihet. What you said the other day. I don’t know you that well. I don’t know your life. And I don’t know your family. But I know your work. I know your talent. And I know what it’s like to feel invisible. Unnoticed. Sometimes even by my own mom. And even if photography can’t fix that feeling, it’s still the best thing that’s happened to me since Patrick died. It taught me to speak. And it led me to you.”
Abrihet looked up at him. The only sound in the kitchen was the gentle simmering of the dorho.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is that we should be doing this together. I don’t care about winning. I don’t care if I come in last place. I just want to do this one thing with you. I want it to be us. I want . . . sorry. Hang on.” She watched him as he shrugged off his bag, unzipped it, and pulled out the plain manila folder. He slid it across the counter to her. She wiped her hands on her denim shorts, picked it up, and opened it to the first image, the one he had placed at the top for her to see. It was the po
rtrait he’d taken of her, standing before the glass doors of the hotel lobby in Champaign. Pup watched her eyes move over and then linger on that photograph. He saw her see herself as he saw her. Abrihet. She who brings light. More precious than any mountain. She gazed at the photo for a long time before she finally looked up and into his eyes.
“I never even knew you took this,” she whispered. “It’s beautiful.” She placed the picture back into the folder, holding it carefully by its edges so as not to leave any fingerprints. “Do you really mean it?”
“Mean what?” The air was thick and fragrant with heat from the stovetop burners and the steaming pot of dorho, but Pup realized that he was no longer sweating. Instead, his nervousness had concentrated in the center of his chest and his heart began to jump and skitter. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, James.” She reached up and pulled off her hairnet. Black waves tumbled around her shoulders. “Yes, you did.”
Her hand was against his cheek, first one, then the other, and she was cupping his face in the palms of her hands. She was reaching up and he was reaching down, to the soft curve where her waist flowed into her hips, and when she touched his lips with hers it was nothing like Spin the Bottle in Izzy’s basement. That kiss, Pup knew now, had been nothing at all. But this: this was something totally different. When Abrihet kissed him, the jumping and skittering in his chest calmed, then stilled. Afterward, he could not remember how long it had lasted. It could have been a minute. It could have been an hour. His heart had become water, and she had found her way inside of it, running her fingers through its soft, sandy bottom, shining her light on all the buried things no one before had ever been able to reach.
28
“YOU’D BETTER GO,” SHE SAID GENTLY, pulling away to put her hands on his shoulders. “If my auntie walks in on us, I’m dead.”
“When will I see you again?” He leaned his head to the side, resting it on her hand.
“Remember when I said if I helped you pass art, you owed me one? Well, I think it’s time to cash in on that.”
Sorry for Your Loss Page 16
