They Could Have Named Her Anything

by Jimenez, Stephanie

  Mr. Willoughby inhaled like something smelled really good.

  “Whatever, Maria,” he said.

  Maria felt a firm tap on her shoulder. Rocky was sitting behind her wearing a pair of dark sunglasses. An extralarge cup of coffee made a brown ring on the desk. Rocky was a chocolate brunette who had such heavily bleached golden highlights that they sometimes looked white, giving her the appearance of a comic book superhero. A pack of cigarettes peeked out of the breast pocket of her black denim jacket.

  Maria had always known Rocky was different from the other popular girls in the grade. The rest of them all wore matching ballet flats and Tiffany hearts. Rocky had a Planned Parenthood sticker on her laptop, and she rubbed black eyeliner under her eyes. Rocky had never paid any attention to her before, so Maria tried not to, either.

  “Nicely done,” Rocky said. “That was professional.”

  Maria smiled. “You either got it or you don’t.”

  “Rocky,” Mr. Willoughby said, interrupting them. “Your sunglasses, please.”

  The whole class turned around in their seats. Rocky lifted her head and looked around, as if regarding her audience.

  “Rocky,” he repeated. “Now.”

  Rocky straightened her jacket. She brought her fingers up to her face so they framed her right lens. Slowly, seductively, like a French movie star, she looked at Mr. Willoughby and pulled the sunglasses off her face. All the girls in the room started giggling, including Maria.

  “Let’s talk later,” Rocky whispered, leaning over her desk. Her breath was hot on Maria’s neck. “We can learn from each other.”

  Maria nodded and turned to face the front of the room, trying to contain her surprise. Near the whiteboard, Karen was staring, puzzled. Maria shrugged with her face, then took out a pencil. For the rest of the class, she looked at the clock every couple of minutes. Rocky had never spoken to her before. Maria wondered what they would learn.

  By the end of the day, Rocky had renamed her.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Rocky commanded. She leaned against the lockers with her arms crossed. It was late, and the sound of lockers slamming reverberated down the hallway. “Where do you live? What music do you like? What do you like better—chocolate or vanilla?”

  “Strawberry,” Maria replied, which made Rocky laugh.

  Although Rocky was just now learning about Maria, Maria had always known about Rocky. She was an outlandish presence at the school. Rocky wasn’t like other girls—defined by a rigid and particular sense of elitism, by opera and theater at Lincoln Center and weekly copies of the New Yorker. Instead, she used her wealth to circumvent rules; on one day she might wear Dior flats, on others she stomped into class in combat boots paired with a J.Crew V-neck, and on still others, she’d look just like Maria—in Chuck Taylors with hearts drawn all over the rubber sides. Nobody ever thought any less of Rocky for all her flamboyant multitudes. Rocky laughed at other people’s goals, and she often told her classmates that greed is good. Maria had long been fascinated by all of these things about Rocky, who was really only a girl named Rachelle who had gotten every one of her teachers to call her by what sounded like a stage name.

  Maria, who had spent three years at Bell Seminary studying and observing her peers, already knew all of these things about Rocky. Rocky hadn’t seemed to know anything about Maria, though. Now, she was playing catch-up.

  “I have a friend crush on you,” Rocky confessed. “But it’s your turn. Ask me anything.”

  “What’s your favorite food?”

  “Oysters,” Rocky said. “But I can’t even eat them. I’m allergic to shellfish.”

  “Shellfish? I’ve never eaten that fish.”

  Rocky burst into laughter. “You’ve never eaten that fish?” She looked at Maria doubtfully. “It’s long and white. It tastes like tuna. Fillet of shellfish? You sure?”

  “No,” Maria said. “Haven’t had it.”

  Rocky bent over at the waist in laughter. When she finally got up, she clapped Maria on the shoulder. “That’s it. From now on, you’re Shelly. That’s perfect because it’s like Rachelle, like my name. Shelly never suited me.”

  Maria wasn’t sure it suited her, either, but because Rocky made it seem like a wonderful gift, Maria accepted.

  “Shelly, why don’t you come over? I’m meeting my math tutor now.” Before Maria could answer, Rocky rolled her eyes. “I know,” she said. “So lame. It’s only because he’s helping me get through these finals.”

  Maria could use a math tutor. She had always been jealous of the girls who could afford them. Her grades in math hovered between a C and B minus, which always made her anxious. To keep her scholarship, she needed to keep her grade average at least at a B.

  Maria rolled her eyes, too. “Fuck math.”

  They walked away from the lockers. Rocky took Maria’s arm in her own. Maria had seen how the girls at Bell Seminary often linked arms, and usually, she didn’t like when people touched her, but at the feeling of Rocky hanging off her elbow, she tried her best not to tense up.

  On the first step of the spiral marble staircase, a twenty-dollar bill was transformed into a small bird. Maria stooped to pick it up and undid its edges so that the panels came apart in multiple origami folds. She had never seen a piece of currency so beautiful; her heart fluttered in her chest.

  “Nice spot!” Rocky said.

  Maria looked around. The hallway had already emptied.

  “We’re running late,” Rocky said. “Keep it.”

  Maria fingered the bill. She could stretch it so it lasted four or five days on afternoon pizza and soda. Or she could use it tomorrow morning on cupcakes with stabilized frosting and specialty coffees with whipped cream and cinnamon pearls, the way other Bell Seminary girls did before coming to school.

  “Greed is good,” Rocky said. “Let’s go, Maria.”

  Maria felt the tube in her inner ear constrict once, then again at the sound of her proper name. The paper cranes that Karen gave her were always made out of notebook or printer paper, and she’d never seen Karen fold money before. But the wings fit perfectly into the lines of her palm, and Maria recognized Karen’s handiwork. Maria could put it near the windowsill in her bedroom, along with all the others that Karen had made her. Or she could take it apart, unfold it and spend it, and no one would know the difference.

  “It’s Karen’s,” Maria said, leaving Rocky behind on the stairwell as she darted back down the hall.

  Maria hadn’t taken longer than a minute to tuck the bill into Karen’s locker, but when she returned, Rocky’s face was twisted. Maria pushed past her onto the staircase.

  “Don’t act like that,” Rocky said, taking the flight two steps at a time before she caught up. “How was I supposed to know it was hers?”

  Rocky’s parents weren’t home. The girls had only needed to walk six blocks from Bell Seminary before reaching Rocky’s apartment. Leading up to the building was a long velvet red carpet, as if they were entering a movie premiere. The lobby had been enormous, too, and the doorman had followed them to the elevator to press the button up to the fifteenth floor. When Maria finally stepped into the unit that Rocky lived in, her jaw dropped. From the massive sunlit living room overlooking Fifth Avenue, Central Park shrank like an overgrown hedge outside of a two-family house, like the hedge outside Maria’s home. Rocky’s apartment was dead quiet, which was different from where Maria lived, where silence was rare among the sounds of pans clinking, the shower running, her mother yelling her brother’s name from the next room—the space always clean but so cramped you could feel the air like a body, huffing over your shoulder and reading the words from your book.

  Rocky went around each room, switching on lights. When she returned, she placed three tiny bottles of sparkling water on the table. They sat there, alone, waiting for the tutor. Rocky explained that the doorman would let him upstairs.

  “Where are your parents?” Maria asked.

  “Not here,” Rocky said. “M
y parents can’t stand each other.”

  “Are they divorced?”

  “They want to wait until I graduate.”

  “That’s stupid,” Maria said.

  “Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Are your parents divorced?”

  “No,” Maria said. She felt her cell phone in her back pocket. On the walk to Rocky’s apartment, she had texted her mother that she would be home late. Her parents didn’t like when she got on the train past dark, but they wouldn’t give her that hard of a time if the reason had to do with school.

  “So what’s your deal?” Rocky said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Yes,” Maria said.

  “Have you had sex?”

  Maria’s eyes widened. How did Rocky know she’d had sex just that week? Maria hadn’t told anyone yet, and she didn’t know how to tell Rocky that sex with Andres didn’t seem worth recounting. Maria’s family had made sex seem monumental, and in Sunday school they’d told her to wait until marriage, but Maria couldn’t understand why. That week, her mother continued washing the dishes, Ricky kept playing video games in his room, and nobody seemed to notice Maria, or that she was now, supposedly, irrevocably changed.

  “Only once.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Andres.”

  “Oh my God,” Rocky said. “Was it amazing?”

  Ever since she’d been called a corpse, she’d been yearning to ask someone for advice. But Rocky, who wore red lipstick to her classes, had definitely never been called a corpse before. What if Rocky laughed at her now? She chewed on her lip, deliberating.

  Rocky seemed to understand Maria’s silence—that she was wrong, and nothing about sex with Andres was amazing.

  “Oh no,” she said. “That’s a shame. But aren’t Hispanics supposed to make the best lovers?”

  Maria’s face crinkled up like a ball of paper.

  “It’s Latino. Latino lovers.”

  Rocky giggled. “The phrase is Latin lover, Shell. And what do you mean, anyway? I’m not supposed to say Hispanic? I’m supposed to say Latino? Why? What’s the difference?”

  “I don’t . . . It just sounds better.”

  Rocky cocked a doubtful eyebrow. Suddenly, Maria felt completely frivolous, as if she were trying to separate a kidney bean from a pinto bean.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “That’s him,” Rocky said, jumping up from her seat. “We’ll talk more later about . . . Andres.” She giggled again and darted out of the room.

  To Maria’s surprise, Rocky had rolled the r in his name perfectly. Maria reached for her backpack under the table. When she pulled out her algebra notebook, the crumpled working papers fell out, too. Everyone knew what those looked like. They were rectangular and bright yellow. She quickly stuffed them back into her bag.

  The tutor’s face was paler than Rocky’s. Peering behind his glasses and beard, Maria couldn’t put an age to him. He seemed to her a person who spent time in libraries, and Maria wasn’t usually shy around strangers—only people she thought might be smarter than her. It was the same when the school dean came down the hall and glared at her Sharpie-stained school skirt. Whenever that happened, Maria worried about arriving home to parents who sobbed as they told her that the school realized their mistake, after all, and decided Maria wasn’t a good fit for Bell Seminary.

  “Hi,” the tutor said, extending his hand. Maria took it and shook—firmly, like her teachers always told her.

  “Hi,” she said, willing herself to look into his eyes. They were brown and wet, and Maria thought they must look like hers. She was heartened. “I’m Maria,” she said, a bit loudly.

  “I call her Shell,” Rocky said.

  Maria’s shoulders stiffened.

  “Thank you,” the tutor mumbled as Rocky pushed the seltzer toward him. They waited for Rocky to fish a pencil whose tip wasn’t broken out of her bag. Only after the tutoring session started did Maria’s shoulders finally loosen, because it was then, as the tutor pointed at Rocky’s textbook with his eraser, that Maria saw he had no interest in knowing how she had earned her nickname.

  There was only one unopened bottle of seltzer left on the table, motionless among the textbooks and pens, after the tutor was gone. Rocky reached for the cigarette carton she had laid on the table at the beginning of the session, alongside her algebra textbook. Again, the girls were alone.

  “It’s late,” Rocky said. “Why don’t you stay over? I can give you clothes to sleep in.”

  Maria looked at the time. It was already past eight, and it would take over an hour to get home on the train. She hadn’t been expecting Rocky Albrecht, of all people, to invite her over, much less to stay the night. Maria was flattered. Rocky had this whole apartment to herself, it seemed, and Maria could be sure that she also had things like cable TV and pay-per-view. She probably even had a whole collection of music that wasn’t even downloaded illegally—Rocky Albrecht probably purchased it all, on iTunes. Maria texted her mom again. Her mother didn’t like when she walked down Queens Boulevard alone at night, anyway.

  “Where’s your mom?” Maria asked as they walked down the hallway to Rocky’s bedroom. At the bedroom, Rocky stopped and pointed down at Maria’s shoes. Maria looked at her Nike sneakers, blunted at the toe, and white, if not for the occasional brownish spot. Maria kicked them off by the heels and saw her socks, one striped green and one yellowed white because she could never find a matching pair, and decided to take those off, too. Her toenails were flaked with stray pieces of nail polish, detritus of a home pedicure she’d done months ago, but now, with both sneakers and socks stripped off, there was nothing more Maria could do. Barefoot, she proceeded into Rocky’s bedroom. The carpet was the softest she’d ever stepped on, but Rocky led her around the queen-size bed, past the walk-in closet, and ushered her into the bathroom.

  The mirror cabinets were flung open. Inside, there were small armies of bronzer. Finally, Rocky took off her jacket, and Maria understood they’d reached their destination. Rocky leaned out of the open window, and the light from the street made her closed eyes look like two thinly veined petunia petals. There was something about Rocky that seemed to be flowering; when she spun her head, she smelled like gardenia and honeysuckle, and her arms were covered in soft woolen fuzz, the way that leaves of some plants are.

  “My mom’s staying at the country house this week,” Rocky said, but by then, Maria had forgotten she’d asked.

  “Do you have siblings?”

  “A little brother. He’s also hardly ever home.”

  Rocky repositioned herself on her enormous black granite sink so that she came into a low squat, and took a new cigarette out of her pack. She put the filtered side into her mouth, connected it to the glowing red end of the one she’d already started smoking, and then puffed incessantly. She then offered it to Maria.

  “Thanks,” Maria said. Because of Andres, she’d smoked a few cigarettes before.

  From where they leaned out the window, Maria could see cars racing below. Three fire trucks sped by and Maria heard nothing. Rocky lived on the fifteenth floor, and the noise would never be strong enough to scale all those stories and climb into the window the way it did at Maria’s house. Maria watched as Rocky flicked the ash off her cigarette into the newly set night sky, where it floated in place before descending. Maria’s chest hurt, and she couldn’t tell if it was the cigarette or something else. She thought of her mother cleaning apartments. She wondered if she’d ever been inside one as beautiful as this.

  When she checked her cell phone, her mother had answered. OK. Did u get the working papers, she’d asked. Maria hastily typed.

  “Shelly, you’re not in love with Andres, are you?” Rocky asked, exhaling and speaking at the same time. “I think love is a sham.”

  “Not always,” Maria said. She placed her hand over her belly. It felt more swollen than usual. At the thought of being pregnant, her soul shrank like a sundried grape. There was nothing that s
he needed more than to go to college. Even though her parents were asking her to take off the year, it didn’t seem like something she could actually do. It was impossible to give up college after getting so close—just as impossible as becoming pregnant seemed. Both would be a death sentence—of the Maria she knew herself to be, anyway.

  “Yes, always,” Rocky said. “Don’t you know you shouldn’t trust anyone?”

  They sat in silence. Rocky’s cuticles were so neat they looked like the pressed edges of a laminated page. But when she hoisted her skinny arms over the ledge, Maria couldn’t see her fingernails anymore.

  Maria suddenly felt the enormity of the apartment, of those vast, empty rooms. She thought of Rocky sitting here on most nights, staring out her bathroom window with no way for anybody below to recognize her. She knew that Rocky couldn’t mean what she was saying. For one, she’d trusted Maria. Showing a person your home was one of the deepest expressions of trust. There were very few people who had seen Maria’s.

  “I don’t agree with you . . . ,” Maria said, softly. “Emerson said, ‘Give all to love . . . / Plans, credit and the Muse.’” Maria paused. “‘Nothing refuse.’”

  Saying the words made Maria’s eyes water. She frantically blinked the tears away. Backlit against the harsh bathroom lights, Rocky’s cheeks were faintly shadowed in tiny blond hairs. She stubbed her cigarette on the brick siding of the building.

  “I used to like art, too,” Rocky said.

  She floated away into her bedroom, so that Maria was now alone. Maria threw her cigarette down the side of the building and followed Rocky out of the bathroom. From her closet, Rocky pulled out an air mattress, a big blue sausage, and hurled it to the ground at the foot of her bed. Then, Rocky turned off all the lights, just as Maria found the wall outlet, and the mattress began to inflate with a roar.

  “I used to act,” Rocky said, yelling over the sound. “In eighth grade, I was the star of The Wizard of Oz.”

  Maria tried to find Rocky’s eyes in the darkness. “Dorothy? Can I see pictures?”