With my duffle settled in the tiny backseat, I wonder why Tristen isn’t here. Why he hasn’t said goodbye to me.
I’m glad I don’t hear the rest their conversation. I remind myself again that this is the getaway I asked for. The fresh start I need. I remind myself that they don’t get it. That the box is tucked inside my canvas duffle and waiting for me to pick it apart. To find the truth.
Merrick drives like he just mainlined eight grams of cocaine in as many minutes.
He texts while he drives. I’m pretty sure he’s supposed to lecture me about not doing that exact thing. He catches me staring and smiles, holds up his phone. “Had to cancel some plans.”
This news makes me feel weird. Like chewing a spoonful of sugar. Unexpectedly unenjoyable. “Okay,” I say. Thought that’s what he had two days for.
It explodes out of my mouth when I ask, “How old are you?”
“Forty-three,” he says, and grins big. According to that grin, forty-three is the new twenty-one, but I’m having trouble buying that, and he can tell, I think. “What? What’s that face?”
“What face?”
“I don’t know, like you just watched me blend up raw hamburger meat and drink it like a smoothie.”
When he says this, my face doesn’t change, so I know he’s right. I shake my head.
“All right. You like this song?” Merrick says. He turns it up as the streetlights appear and then disappear, appear and then disappear in the car’s dark interior.
I don’t even know this song, but Merrick says, “The B-52s, man.”
I want to laugh a little; he just called me “man.” Like we’re friends. I do laugh, because why shouldn’t I? Then Merrick looks at me like we’re in on the same Ponzi scheme and laughs a little too. I know he feels good about the fact that he made me laugh.
“You eat yet?”
No, and I’m so hungry, I’m about to start chewing on his leather seats. “Yes.”
He hesitates. “Well, I gotta see a guy about some tacos. Think you’d be interested in that?”
“I like tacos.”
“We have confirmation. Apparently you are my kid.”
We don’t actually hit up a taco place. I mean, this is Los Angeles and there are a ton of them. Open at all times of night and day. It would be relatively simple to find one and eat our body weight in carne asada tacos. Instead, we head down the hill, into the Valley. Merrick stops at a Whole Foods and loads up a cart with taco-making goods. A brick of cheese, carrots, which is weird, chicken, steak (“You eat meat, T?”—to which I nod), cilantro, an onion, some sort of bottled sauce, sour cream, avocado, and an orange—also weird.
He grabs a beer—some IPA Blasted Pointer or something—and then asks me if I want one.
I look at him like he’s nuts.
He is.
And he laughs hysterically, just to prove it—so loud that other shoppers stare at us—before telling me to grab whatever non-alcoholic thing that I want, so I grab a jug of aloe water.
Merrick’s apartment is weirdly homey. Nothing like a bachelor’s apartment ought to be. It smells a little sweet, like laundry washed in too much detergent, and I like it.
He holds everything—my bags, the groceries—depositing our uncooked food on the counter before leading me to the back of the apartment, down a long hallway. He navigates the space in the dark and when I walk—thud—into a wall, he laughs and flips a switch on the wall to illuminate the space.
Merrick’s guest room is a storage space, pretty much. There are boxes and gym equipment and easels—most of them are broken down—and the metal legs and wheels that go under a bed and, just so much stuff, including six guitars, a saxophone, and a cello. It’s overwhelming.
“I really wasn’t expecting you” is all he says.
I don’t mention that he had two days. I suspect he was drinking himself silly and trying to grasp this new reality.
“It’s okay.” I don’t beg him not to send me back, but I want to. Even though we’re so not #north anymore. We’re more west, actually. Northwest, technically, in the least Kimye way possible.
Even though Merrick is a stranger, I want to stay with him. He’s my key to figuring out the unexplained parts of myself. He calls me “man” and offers me tacos and listens to cool music. He’s musically inclined and he smells like the Citrus Spice fragrance of Downy and he makes me laugh and I just want to get to the part where I trust him already or have some more answers or know who sent me this package that flipped my life on its 3C head.
“Let’s leave your stuff here. We’ll make up the sofa bed in the living room for you until I can clear out this space. I have a bed in storage you can use. I’ll move it in tomorrow while you’re at school.”
“I’ve a week of excused absence. Can’t go back till Monday.”
He’s quiet. “Oh.”
“I’m concussed.”
“Oh,” he says again. “That’s right, your mom mentioned. Okay, then maybe you can pull your weight and do the heavy lifting?”
And just like that he’s made me laugh again. And I hug him because I feel like I can do that even though, probably, we’re not there yet. But I wonder if this is step one on the trust scale. Like, maybe if there were a manual, this interaction would be listed first.
He hugs me back immediately. He hugs me back tightly. And then he pushes me away from him and says, “Let’s make you some street tacos.”
With his arm draped around my shoulders, we walk back into the kitchen, pinging against the hallway walls like we’re inside a pinball machine.
My hypothesizing about how he spent his two days is basically confirmed when I glance over at his trash can and next to it is a fruit box filled to the brim with empty beer bottles.
At least he recycles.
But we do make the best damn gentrified street tacos I’ve ever had.
When Merrick pulls out the mystery bottle, I see it’s peanut sauce and I stop him before he opens it. “I’m, like, deathly allergic to peanuts. Like, you would actually kill me if you opened that.”
I can see the confusion happening for him.
I try very hard not to think about the fact that I left my EpiPen in my haste to come here. It’s the kind of worry I wouldn’t have an issue telling Mamma or Daddy about. But I can’t open my mouth to say anything to Merrick about needing it.
But maybe that’s unnecessary now, because in under a second, the bottle is tossed—closed—into the garbage. “Close call,” Merrick says. “Sometimes you can do a bit of a fusion thing, with chicken and the carrots and peanut sauce. Sort of a bastardized bahn mi taco.”
I shrug.
“No problem,” he says, and he cooks up everything with sesame oil instead, and we don’t talk about my family life or my allergy or Mamma or any of that while we eat.
Instead, we talk football. “Cornerback? No shit?”
I shake my head, no, none.
“The kid plays cornerback!”
I want to ask him who he’s yelling this to. I don’t think he even knows what a cornerback does.
“I love that. How hard was it to get them to let you play?”
“Hard. I had to do all this research on past cases, look up the laws and stuff. It helps that Daddy is a lawyer becau—” I stop.
Merrick smiles. “It’s okay, T. It’s all right. He’s still your dad, okay? Solomon is still your father. So, what’s the worst battle wound you’ve gotten from playing?”
I peel my knee-high sock down to show him the sick green-blue-purple-yellow bruise on my shin.
“Gnarly.”
“Yep. It’s not the worst, but it’s the worst I’ve had in a while. You paint?”
“I do paint, yeah. Or I’m trying to. They say it’s a good stress reliever.”
“Are you stressed?”
“Isn’t everyone?”
I shrug. Did I do it? Is it my fault? Does my existence stress him out? “Is that your job—painting?”
“It is not m
y job.”
“What is? You still teach? Or is the music thing, like, it.”
He shakes his head but says, “I compose film scores. So, yeah. The music thing is it.”
“Mm. Music for movies.”
“Film scores, yeah. Mostly for movies, but … you’ve seen the website.”
Awkward. Yeah, I have, haven’t I.
Still, it’s weirdly impressive. He’s so right-brained, whereas both my parents are left-brained.
“What’re you working on now?” I pile the leftover onions and cilantro on my plate with my index, middle, and thumb fingers.
Merrick smiles into his plate. “I’m not actually—”
He’s interrupted by a knock at the front door. And before I even have enough time to wonder if it’s Mamma come to bring me back or Tristan come to verbalize all his disappointment with me, Merrick taps my wrist twice with his fingers.
Without waiting to be let in, a boy enters. Or, he’s that awkward cross between a boy and a man in the same way that I am the uncomfortable cross between a girl and a woman. He’s not terribly tall, though at five-foot-four myself he’s easily five or six inches taller than I am. The perfect candidate for any My acne was so embarrassing commercial, his face is curiously clear of it. Dark brown hair, though it’s shaved close to his scalp and mostly covered by a cap, and skin the color of whiskey diluted with tepid milk.
It’s not until he comes fully into the room that I notice what a frickin’ weirdo he is.
His eyes are two different colors, like they couldn’t pick just one before the womb spit him out, the right one blue and heavy, the left, broken and hazel. He’s got four different earrings in each ear, gauges at the lobes, and a hand-rolled cigarette tucked behind the right side. A backwards pink cap on his head, a fur-lined vest over his tie-dye tee, and a blue bandana around his neck.
I’m painting a picture here that even I couldn’t dream up. At least the black jeans and boots are kinda normal.
He pops the hand-rolled into his mouth. “Who’s the broad?”
I hate that his voice is so yes when, with every word, I’m a little more annoyed. And, like, when he speaks and that little vein pops out in the side of his neck, I want to salute him and say, “Keep up the great work, sir.”
I don’t, though. Because attractive boys think they get to have everything and say whatever they want, and that’s just not the way I’m operating.
Merrick stands and takes our plates to the kitchen. “Call my daughter a broad again, Kai. I’ll kick your ass down that flight of stairs you just walked up.”
“Since when do you have a fucking kid?” The boy laughs. “Merrick. Merrick,” he says, following Merrick around the kitchen island. “I have to tell you something.”
Merrick’s undivided attention is a little intimidating, but the boy takes it head-on. “Yeah.”
“Your daughter is Black.”
“Get out.”
“What?” he yells. “C’mon. I was joking. I mean, not about her being Black—she is seriously, actually that.”
“Get the hell out, El Khoury.”
“El Khoury?” I say.
“Kai El Khoury. That’s my name. And, listen, I’m just here to see a man about some tacos. I was only kidding. Mulatta.” The boy turns to me. “Tell your sperm donor I was only joking.”
I laugh. Easy on the eyes, yet annoying and politically incorrect. Add to that, entirely ridiculous. He’s his own person, that’s for sure. Dancing to the beat of his own timpani and all that.
What the hell kind of drugs does he do?
“I’m clean. I don’t touch drugs ever. Crack is whack, yikes no pipes, and my Adderall is prescribed.”
Damn. Did I say that out loud?
“Yeah,” Merrick says. “You talk to yourself often, T?”
“No, I don’t.”
“T like Tease? Like, coc—”
“Go home, Kai!” Merrick shouts.
“After tacos.” And the boy, Kai or whoever, walks into the kitchen and makes himself a plate of like fifty tacos. “What’s your name, mulatta?”
“If I tell you, will you stop calling me mulatta? That’s a slave reference.”
“Not in my country it’s not.”
I scoff. “Where’s your country?”
“What’s your name?” he volleys back.
Merrick returns to the table, pulls the hand-rolled out of Kai’s mouth, and rips it in half. “He doesn’t have a country. Asshole’s adopted. Doesn’t know where he’s from or why he’s so goddamn ethnic.”
The way these two talk to and about each other. Jesus.
“The reports strongly suggest my origins are Turkish.”
“Strongly suggest,” Merrick mouths at me.
“You can call me Uncle Kai.”
“Uncle?”
“That’s not funny, Kai. My parents adopted him,” Merrick adds helpfully.
“I … have grandparents.” I shake my head. It’s so weird to think about having this whole other set when I’ve so recently lost a set. Figuratively.
“You do. Mémé and Pépé. It’s French for grandmother and grandfather.”
“I figured.” Then, “Think they knew about me? Do they know about me now?”
“Not a chance they knew. And, uh, no, not yet. Haven’t been able to sit them down and … you know,” Merrick says. “I was born there, you know.”
He’s no good at changing the subject in subtle ways. “In France?”
“Yeah. We lived there awhile before my parents decided to move here.”
I raise an eyebrow and twist my curls up into a topknot. Kai’s eyes follow the movement.
“Really?” I say.
“Ouí,” Kai says. “But they’re severely French. Kinda. I mean, considering how long they’ve lived in America. So, your name, infime?”
I glance at Merrick to be sure Kai’s not calling me a soul-sucking bitchcunt or something.
Merrick clarifies: “Tiny.”
I nod. “Taze.”
“Who?” Kai says.
“No. I’m not asking you to Taze anyone. That’s my name. Tasia, but Taze.”
“Well, that’s dope,” Kai says with a mouthful of taco.
Damn right it is.
Chapter Fifteen
At night, I fall asleep to a recording Merrick’s put together for a new film coming out later next year. His biggest job yet, he says. But when he tells me the name of the film, I don’t know it. Apparently, most of the music he’s composing either goes unused or gets paired with an underwhelming film or some witching hour infomercial. “That’s showbiz, but money is money,” he laughs.
“Fall asleep” is probably a reach. I toss and turn for long hours and only think about the box. I can’t bring myself to get up, walk into the other room, and get it. Not yet.
I’m frozen by how close I might be to figuring things out. Can’t decide if it’s good or not, even after spending the past few days thinking all I needed was answers. And now that I’m this close, I’m not sure if that’s all I’ll need.
Maybe answers are just the catalyst.
Maybe I should be reaching for more.
Am I even allowed to ask for more at this point?
The springs in his couch poke into my ribs, but despite that, I do fall asleep eventually.
Salt to a paper cut, I have weird dreams that speak to my abandonment issues in spades. In one of the dreams, me, Trist, Mamma, and Daddy go to the park for a picnic. Mamma unloads the basket and hands a drink to everyone except me.
She tells me she forgot. Forgot to bring my drink.
I wake up crying and nothing about it feels like a release.
Merrick is a light sleeper, so he wakes up with me. He hugs me awkwardly and I sit stiffly in his arms until my muscles begin to ache and I fall asleep again.
In the morning, Merrick makes what he calls “eggs in a basket.” A slice of toast with a hole cut in the middle. Then you coat a skillet in butter and crack an egg in th
e middle of the bread until it’s fried enough to flip.
It’s amazing: the sweetness of the butter, the just-enough salt and cracked black pepper Merrick adds—it doesn’t need anything else. Mamma would love it, and I wonder for a few minutes if she’s ever had Merrick’s eggs in a basket.
I shove in a too-big-to-really-call-it-polite bite and hollow out my mouth to cool it. “So I was thinking maybe we could have coffee or something with your sister.”
Merrick drops an egg just as Kai walks in again. He left so suddenly last night, right after he wolfed down his second plate of bahn mi tacos, offering nothing more than a solid “See ya later, Taser.”
“Well, good morning, fam,” Kai says. He’s got on a baby blue hoodie today with a graphic of an anime toast girl, and brown corduroys.
“Is that OMOCAT?”
Kai glances up from the fidget spinner in his hands. “Yeah! You know their stuff?”
“I love their stuff.”
He nods, a smile ticking up the right side of his too-wide mouth.
Go away, blush. Go! Get outta here. God, he’s cute.
“You want eggs in a basket, Kai?”
He sits on the barstool next to me. “Yes, please. But can we discuss a name change for it? ‘Eggs in a basket’ is so—”
“Juvenile,” I say, just as Kai says, “Suggestive.”
Huh. Opposite sides of the coin.
Much like Kai and me. I kinda like that about people. It’s why I love Slim so much. We’re so different. She’s everything I’m not.
I wonder if Kai could be that too.
I wonder if Slim will burn all the clothes she’s ever borrowed from me when she learns I’m thinking things like this. When she learns I’m keeping things from her. The guilt sits in my stomach like a gas station burrito.
My brain needs a redirect. “So, Merrick? Coffee? With dear old sis?”
Kai nearly falls off his stool with laughter.
“What the hell is wrong with him?” I say.
He can’t contain himself. He might be having a heart attack induced by laughter. The feeling that sets up shop in my chest isn’t anger per se. It’s, like, mild embarrassment mixed with some amusement? I think?
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, then turns to Merrick. “But, please, do not give her to Emily!” He grabs his head as if Emily’s in there attacking his brain meat with a pick-ax.
Home and Away Page 8
