The Secret Side of Empty

by Maria E. Andreu

  We walk halfway to the theater and Chelsea stands in front of me. “My work here is done,” she says. “You look awesome.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you’ll have him drop you off at my house, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you can tell me every little thing. I would hug you, but I don’t want to mess up any of this perfection you’ve got going on.” She waves her hand in a big circle in front of my face, then hands me one of the bags from the makeup counter.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “The lip gloss. Some eyeliner, I don’t know, a couple of things. In case you need to refresh.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “You can’t show up there empty-handed. You have to look like you were having a busy day and then just happened to pop over to watch a movie.”

  “You’re funny.”

  “Go!” she says, turning me around and giving me a little shove.

  “See you later,” I call over my shoulder.

  I see Nate before he sees me. God, he’s cute. He’s wearing a button-down shirt, which I didn’t expect, and a leather jacket and jeans.

  “Hey, Facebook friend! It’s nice to finally see you in person again,” he says.

  “Yeah, it’s cool.”

  “You ready for some exploding aliens?”

  “You know it.”

  He buys our tickets and waves away my money when I try to offer it. I watch him and hope he doesn’t pick up on me staring at him. If he was staring at me that way, I think I’d feel it with my peripheral vision. But he seems intent on being nice to the ticket lady. Inside, he buys me popcorn and a soda, plus Twizzlers to share.

  He hands me the tickets and picks up all our stuff.

  “You want me to get some of that popcorn?” I ask.

  “Nope, just lead the way.”

  “Okay,” I say. No one has ever carried my popcorn for me. I’m in a little bit of a fog until I’m standing by the front row of the movie theater.

  He wrinkles up his nose a little. “Do you really want to sit this close?”

  I look around, finally noticing where I am. “No, not really. Just wanted to see . . .” I don’t even want to explain that I was too busy thinking about how he was carrying my popcorn and being so nice to me and totally forgot to look for seats.

  I walk back about ten rows. “How about here?”

  “Perfect. You like it in the middle?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cool. You sit down and I’ll hand you your stuff.”

  There is a little part of me that is expecting a camera crew to jump out and everyone to start laughing because I am the unwitting victim in a show called, “Did You Really Think He Was Being This Nice to You for Real?” But he waits while I take off my jacket and sit down before gently handing me my popcorn and drink and letting me hold the Twizzlers.

  The trailers start and I have no idea what any of them are saying. I am throbbing with the proximity of this very sweet, very polite boy. I can smell the laundry detergent on his clothes and something else . . . what is that? Is that cologne? Or maybe just his deodorant. I do a slight swoon at the idea of him getting all nice-smelling for me.

  This is a date, right? It’s officially a date. It’s only the two of us here. I shovel popcorn in my mouth. God, he must think I’m a pig. I wonder what I smell like. I hope I don’t smell sweaty and disgusting. I hope I’m not breathing funny from my heart pounding this way. I hope I . . .

  I finish the popcorn by the first explosion, right before the opening credits. I put my hand on the armrest. I feel electricity shooting from my hand to him, like those glass balls you put your hands on and the plasma makes shooting purple streaks to your hands. I can feel him, the cells of him. Can he feel me? He seems very cool and collected.

  He moves his hand and intertwines his fingers with mine.

  “Is that okay?” he asks.

  Oh.

  My.

  God.

  I briefly consider whether my heart will stop from all this galloping.

  “Yes.” I smile.

  We hold hands for the whole movie. I have no idea what the movie is about. But that hardly matters. He picks up every bit of trash and walks it over to the garbage can when the movie is over.

  THE NEXT MORNING AFTER COMING HOME FROM CHELSEA’S, I am sitting at the kitchen table watching Jose stare at his dry toast when my father walks in and says to me, “So I guess you’re not going to school anymore.” Almost like he’s happy about it.

  “What?” I say. It makes me so mad and scared I forget that my usual way of dealing with him is to ignore him all together.

  “Jorge, let’s not start with this again,” says my mother, not looking up from the stove that she’s scrubbing to oblivion.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask.

  “Those nuns raised the tuition again.”

  “Yeah, so?” I say.

  “So we haven’t paid them since last April. So they’re threatening to not let you take any more tests until we pay.”

  I feel the magma rising up my legs and my belly and to the spot where my ribs meet in the middle.

  This is not a new phenomenon, my parents being behind on tuition. In fact, I can’t remember a single year of Catholic school that I haven’t been called down to the principal’s office over the intercom and given a letter with red late stamps to give to my parents. But somehow, they’ve always figured it out.

  This seems different.

  “I don’t understand. So what’s going to happen?” I ask. My torso starts to shake.

  “Jorge, not now,” says my mother, with a bit of a growl I’ve never heard in her voice before.

  He says, “Why not now? What’s going to happen?” Then he turns his head to me. “You’re going to stay home. That’s what’s going to happen.”

  “It’s my senior year. I can’t stay home.”

  “Or you can go to Argentina now.”

  “I’m not going to Argentina.”

  “Listen, you better not start smart-mouthing me.”

  “I’m not smart-mouthing you. I’m telling you I’m not dropping out of high school.”

  “High school? What good is it going to do you? What do you care if you stop going to school now or six months from now? School is over for you. You’re done.”

  “Jorge, if you just picked up another shift—”

  He raises the volume. “No, I don’t need to pick up another shift. What shift? There are no more shifts.”

  “Another restaurant, then—”

  “Listen, I don’t need you nagging me. And you.” He looks at me. I brace for the smack, but it doesn’t come. “You little spoiled brat. Demanding things.” He turns back to my mother. “It’s this country, you know. This country makes kids snotty and disrespectful. In Argentina, if you acted like this you’d learn really quick who’s the boss.”

  “I’m not demanding anything.” Maybe if I stay calm. Maybe if I reason with him. “I’m just saying that I can’t drop out of high school. I . . . what would I do?”

  “Oh, please, you don’t need the garbage those nuns are poisoning your mind with. You can learn on your own. Education is not about school, let me tell you that. You don’t need a fancy degree to be somebody.”

  “It’s not that, it’s . . .” If he doesn’t get it, I am out of words to explain it to him. I consider screaming, too, but this is beyond screaming.

  I go stand by my mother, who is scrubbing the stove like she’s about to peel off the paint and find a treasure map under it. “Are you just going to let him do this?” I ask.

  “Don’t worry about this, Monserrat Thalia, okay? Go to your room.”

  I don’t trust that I will be able to control myself if I start yelling, so I listen to her and go to my room. I am too mad to kick things, or to move. I look at Jose’s SpongeBob pillow, the one I bought him with my tutoring money. He’s written his name on it in
marker on one corner. It makes me want to cry.

  I hear the front door slam. I sit on my futon on the floor. I like that I sleep on a futon on the floor. It makes me feel like I could fold it up and carry it away by its handle. Take it somewhere better.

  I get a piece of paper and start writing a list.

  Towels

  Sheets

  Hair dryer

  What else will I need when I go? It occurs to me that I have no idea what kinds of things one needs to live alone. Or how one goes about living alone. But I know one thing, something I’ve known since I was about fourteen. My days in this place are numbered.

  Suddenly I see my mom standing in the doorway. I fight the urge to throw something at her. She comes into the room.

  “Monserrat Thalia, I want to tell you something.”

  I say nothing.

  “Remember I told you I dropped out of high school when I was in my second year?”

  I stare at a puff of dust on the ancient baseboard. The model airplane sways softly in her wake. She must have bumped it on the way in.

  “My father was sick and he couldn’t work.” By “sick” I know she means alcoholic. “My mother sold vegetables door to door. But it wasn’t enough. So I got a job in the city. It was a good job, in a shoe store. It paid well. I bought us our very first television with my money from that job.” She smiles, looks out the window. I glimpse at her, but turn my eyes away whenever I think there’s a chance she’ll look in my direction. “Even before I met your father.”

  She stops for a minute. I can feel her looking at me, but I wish I never had to look at her again. “I know we don’t have much here,” she says. “And I don’t know what will happen to us. But I’m going to tell you one thing. Monse, can you look at me, please?”

  When I do, her face looks firm. “I didn’t finish high school, even though I always promised my mother when she was alive that I would go back one day. I didn’t keep that promise. But I promise you this, and this one I will keep: you’re going to finish high school. And I have a feeling you’re going to do much more than that, too. Can you please remember this? Even when things seem most hopeless, there is always a way out.”

  Her self-revelation feels embarrassing, like I just saw her naked or something. I want to say, “That’s stupid and a sorry attempt at a pep talk.”

  Instead I say, “I hate when you call me Monse. I especially hate when you call me Monserrat Thalia. It’s a really horrible name. My name is M.T. now. You should call me that.”

  “Okay,” she says. “But you have a beautiful name. Your grandmothers were so proud when we named you after both of them.”

  “You’d figure you would have checked to see if the two names matched together before naming me that. Or if anyone at all could ever pronounce it in America.”

  “It was a way to honor them. We named you for back home, not for here.”

  Ugh. She gets nothing. I just shake my head.

  “I am going to fix this school thing, M.T.,” she says. When she says it, it sounds like Emme-Tee. And then she leaves.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sunday morning Nate calls. “I wanted to tell you I had a really nice time.” “Me too.”

  “And so I know I’m supposed to do this whole masculine mystique thing and two girl days are supposed to be like fifteen boy minutes and I’m supposed to, like, not call you for a week to give you the opportunity to powwow with your girlfriends and ponder the inscrutable question of why guys are the way they are, but I thought instead I’d call you and ask you if you wanted to hang out today.”

  “Twice in one weekend? Beware the overeagerness.”

  “I’m eager, yeah. It remains to be seen if it’s overly so or not.”

  “I’ll have to check my calendar.”

  “Oh, good, follow the rules.”

  “Okay, I checked.”

  “And?”

  “Meet you at Summer Park in half an hour?”

  “Sounds good.”

  I run upstairs and take the world’s fastest shower. I change into a V-neck Maleficent T-shirt, which I like because a) she’s one of my favorite Disney characters, and b) it happens to show off just a smidge of cleavage effortlessly, like you aren’t really meaning to show it, because, you know, you’re wearing a Disney T-shirt. Record-time mascara and lip gloss, deodorant, shove the leftover gum from Friday in my pocket, deodorant again, and then off I go to the park.

  Because he is on wheels, he makes it there before I do. It is an unseasonably warm day, and he’s wearing cargo shorts that reveal some chicken leg action, plus a royal blue golf shirt that makes him look more adorable than ever, if that’s possible.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “Hey.” He hugs me, and I feel the same sparks from the movies, but all over the front of my body. This guy is like electroshock therapy.

  “Let’s sit by the swings.”

  It’s still early on a Sunday morning, and most people are either at brunch or at church or wherever it is that families go on Sunday morning. Plus, Summer Park is the less busy park in town, so if anyone is out with their kids, they are likely to be at the bigger and newer Coover Park with its giant fake-fossil climbing wall and enough swings to swing a small army. My plot is working perfectly so far.

  I sit on the swing and he sits on the one next to me, which is a little lower than mine.

  “You got the good one,” he says.

  “But my feet barely reach.”

  “I’ll push you.”

  I haven’t swung on a swing in, like, ten years, but the idea of him pushing me makes me tingly.

  “Okay,” I say.

  He grabs the chains on the side of the swing, pulls me back, and lets me go. I swing forward, then swing back toward him. I feel his hands, strong, at the bottom of my back, close—oh so close—to my butt when he pushes me. I zip forward faster, higher, the wonderful millisecond of weightlessness and of knowing that I am about to start heading his way and he is going to touch my back. Then forward, higher. Then back toward him. It goes on like this, the dappled sunshine making me squint, the leaves brown on the ground, red and yellow and green and orange on the trees.

  “Any minute now I’m going to buy you ice cream and take you home for your nap.”

  “You’re silly.”

  “More swinging?”

  I think he wants to stop pushing. “Nah, I’m good.” I drag my feet to stop the swing. He sits back down next to me.

  “So how are your classes so far?” he asks.

  “Pretty good.”

  “Which one stinks the worst?”

  “They’re all an abomination,” I joke. “I don’t mind school, actually. Is that weird?”

  He laughs. “A little, yeah. But it’s kinda cool.”

  “How about you?”

  “I do AP Math. Writing and stuff, not so much. I play tennis on my school’s team. You like to play basketball?”

  “What?”

  “Basketball? I have a ball in the car.”

  “I . . . uh . . .”

  “Weird, right? Weird thing to ask a girl on like a . . . whatever this is? I’m sorry. I’m not exactly smooth and . . . I don’t know. Don’t hang out with many girls. I mean, I know lots of girls, you know, but not, like, just at a park, just . . . I’m a little nervous and I thought maybe playing basketball . . .”

  “I love basketball.” It’s not exactly true, but it’s not exactly a lie. When I’ve played basketball in gym, I’ve liked it.

  “Cool, I’ll go get it,” he says. I don’t have a sports bra on, but I should be fine for a little bit of basketball.

  We walk over to the court and start a game of one-on-one.

  He dribbles to half-court. “What else do you like to do?”

  “I don’t know. I hang out with my friends. Read. Play soccer. Go to the movies. You?” He turns his back to me, and I press the front of my body into his back to try to snatch the ball. His arms are longer but his dribbling is kind of bad. I get it.
Take it. Score.

  I dribble it to half-court. I dribble right, then left—somehow I pull off a pretty good fake-out—then dribble to just under the basket and do an easy layup. He never touches me while defending. I catch the ball and throw it to him. He takes it to the half-court.

  “Well, I . . . what I like to do is I . . .” He tries to turn and dribble, then turn, then the ball hits his sneaker and bounces away. “Damn, hold on.” He gets it and tries again. I press against him to defend again.

  “You are definitely fouling me,” he says.

  “Am I?”

  “Ummm . . . yeah,” he says.

  “Take a free throw.”

  He stands at the free throw line. He makes like he’s going to shoot. Every time he does, I jump up like I’m going to rebound.

  “You are ignoring several key rules,” he says.

  He looks so nervous. He looks at my face and, for a split second, almost involuntarily, at my chest.

  “Yeah?” I say. “Well, I think you’re looking at my chest.” And laugh. There goes my mouth, saying stuff before my brain can figure out if I should.

  “I . . . uh . . . I . . . um, I’m sorry. I’m not like some perv or something.”

  “Well, that remains to be seen.”

  “It’s just that . . . can I say this and then we will stop playing and never speak of it again?”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s just that they’re really beautiful and I kind of can’t believe and I . . . I guess I’ve never seen any bounce like that.”

  “Surely you’ve had gym class with girls before.”

  “And I have two sisters. But it’s just that . . . I am really sounding like an idiot here, and you are clearly smart and fun to talk to and I don’t think you’re just an object or anything and I really want to get to know you, but . . . they are so beautiful.”

  “Just your standard issue thirty-two Bs.”

  “Fascinating and random bit of information. Fascidom? No, doesn’t work as a word combo. Anyway, now that I know your bra size, I feel like our relationship has gone to a new level.”

  I laugh and reach my hand out to him and he puts the ball under his other arm. We walk to the bench under the willow, all the way at the end of the park where the lightning bugs light up the little stream when summer first starts.