“Oh! Look at that!” Her face was buried behind the foot-long menu. “Can I get a banana split, too?”
Rocky’s dessert menu lay flat on the table. “How are you still hungry?”
“Nick and I can share it, right, Nick?” Maria laid down the menu and leaned over the table. “Come on! Get me one!”
Rocky gave her a funny look. The edge of her lip twitched. “Can you at least say please?”
Maria blinked before she smiled. She noticed Rocky’s fingernails tapping against the table. Suddenly, Maria realized that the two had gone all day without smoking a cigarette. It was the first time Maria thought about it, but for Rocky, maybe it wasn’t. The only thing she could think of was that Rocky didn’t want to smoke in front of Nick, but even if Rocky was on edge now, at least her concern for her brother was endearing. “Ha,” Maria said. “Sure. Please?”
When the waitress came around, Rocky ordered for the table. “Two spoons,” she clarified, meeting the waitress’s eyes. “I’m not eating any of it.”
The ice cream came out, and Rocky looked on with disdain as Maria and Nick scooped big globs into their mouths. By the time there were five or six bites left on the plate, Maria glanced up to see Rocky staring. “Do you want,” she said flatly, holding out her spoon.
“You ask me now? All that’s left in there is a puddle of spit.”
“But you told the waitress you didn’t want a spoon.”
“That didn’t mean you couldn’t offer,” Rocky answered.
Maria looked at her in confusion. “Sorry, Rocky,” she said, but Rocky was waving her hand, trying to flag down the waitress for the check.
When they stepped back out on the Strip, Maria was engorged. As she walked, she saw a giant illuminated ad for a rendering of The Wizard of Oz, starring a busty, blond-haired Dorothy. “Look at that,” Maria said, pointing. “Hey, you never did show me your pictures as Dorothy!”
Nick looked up at the sign. He turned to his sister. “When were you ever Dorothy?”
“For a school play,” Rocky said.
“I thought you were the scarecrow.” Nick turned his whole body toward his sister.
Rocky stared at her brother. Her mouth seemed to be shrinking. “Shut up, Nick.”
“You had triangles painted on your face!”
“Nick, will you just shut up? Seriously?”
Maria looked from Nick to Rocky, and then back again. Even in all that light, she couldn’t tell if Rocky was joking.
“You weren’t Dorothy?” Maria asked.
“When did I tell you that?” But even though Rocky was smiling now, it didn’t sound like a question she wanted an answer to.
Nick laughed. He wasn’t going to let up.
“You told her you were Dorothy? As if you’d be good enough to be picked as the lead actor!” Nick put his hand to his face in a mock burst of laughter. “You’re not good at anything!”
“Thanks, Nick,” Rocky said with a surprising degree of calm in her voice. Her mouth was full size again. “Neither are you. Neither is Maria. That’s why we’re friends.”
Maria was taken aback. She would have stopped right there, but the light changed, and they were now crossing the sparkling boulevard. By the time they reached the other side of the curb, Nick had finally stopped laughing. Maria came up so she was standing side by side with Rocky, and even their steps were in line.
“Hey,” she said, facing Rocky. “I thought we were friends because we liked each other.”
“Obviously,” Rocky said. “Isn’t that a given?”
A line of black limousines came down the pathway as the three made their way up to the entrance of the hotel. With the enormous fountain roaring outside, Maria waited before answering Rocky’s question, so that she wouldn’t have to strain to hear. A group of women in tank tops and magenta lip gloss tapped Maria on the shoulder and asked if she’d take their picture. They posed over the ledge, some climbing up on their butts, others thrusting their legs and elbows out, all with their lips pouted, their long blond hair looking so bleached it became almost white against their leathery skin. Maria fumbled to find the viewfinder, which stayed black even though she kept holding down on the button. By the time the photo was taken and she was sure it wasn’t awful, she had to sprint to catch up to Rocky and Nick. She entered the casino and found the siblings, but by then, there was no use in bringing up what already had passed.
At the hotel room, the lights were all off. On the couch, a cardstock brochure with leather binding was splayed open on its spine, where a variety of breakfast items were listed in looping cursive. Beside them, digits were listed without dollar signs, which had a disarming effect on Maria. The prices were made into numbers, the kind she and Rocky were used to plugging into their TI-83 calculators for math. It was so striking to Maria how something that usually put her on edge could be deweaponized so easily and made innocuous.
“Wanna watch TV?” Rocky asked as they walked into their side of the suite, the bedroom where two queen-size beds were arranged side by side.
“I wanna go back to Dad’s room,” Nick said at the same time that Maria said “Sure.”
Rocky looked at him as she unlaced her sandals, one foot at a time.
“That’s fine by me. Do you know what room you’re in?”
“Nineteen eighteen. What number is this?”
“Nineteen eighty-nine.” Rocky collapsed into the bed by the window, the one she had claimed first.
“Does that mean I’m seventy doors down? That’s so far!”
Rocky looked at Nick blankly and then turned to Maria with a sigh.
“Can you believe this kid, Shell?” Rocky said. Maria, who had been fishing for her phone charger, didn’t look up from the suitcase to meet Rocky’s gaze. Nick saw how Rocky had failed to co-opt her friend’s approval. He snorted, narrowed his eyes at his sister. Rocky cleared her throat.
“Do you need me to come with you?”
“I can find it myself.”
“Mom would get mad.”
“Who cares?”
Maria plugged the charger into the wall, and her face glowed as the light on the screen turned on.
“Maria,” Rocky said, requesting her attention for the second time.
“What?” Maria was standing with one hand on her hip, leaning against the dresser drawer. With her eyebrows furrowed on her face, she looked like she was ready to argue, and Rocky forgot why she had said her friend’s name in the first place. Hadn’t she only wanted to ask her a recommendation for something to watch on TV? Feeling Nick’s gaze on her, and hearing the chortle under his breath, her hand twitched from under the cover.
“Go with Nick. Take my key card so you can get back into the room.”
“Sure.” A springiness returned to Maria’s voice, and the furrowed look was gone.
Nick went to the door. He held it open for Maria to pass. Rocky scrolled through the pay-per-view menu.
“Be back soon,” Maria said. She ignored Nick’s gesture and motioned for him to go ahead of her, taking care that the door didn’t slam.
The hallways were wider than any others Maria had ever seen, and they were so silent and empty that immediately, as if trying to fill a vacuum, Nick and Maria began to run. Glimmering chandeliers sped by, and they only ran faster, laughed harder, throttling and gasping, making as much noise as possible on the beige carpeting that did everything in its power to muffle their heavy footsteps. They stopped only after noticing they had come down the wrong way. Nick pointed it out first.
“I won’t tell my sister,” he laughed when he saw how Maria went silent.
Tremendo, Maria thought.
When they reached room 1918, Nick’s key card swiped green. She peeked inside as Nick barged through the door. Aside from what looked like a set of house keys that rested atop the glass dining table, the suite looked identical to the one she and Rocky shared, and it was also identically empty. Maria felt her heart rate slow. Her giddiness split into two and was r
eplaced by one part disenchantment and another part relief. Nick and Charlie shared a room, but Charlie was clearly not here. She hated the duality of what she was feeling, torn between going back to her hotel room and wanting to seek him out. Maybe, she thought, feeling conflicted like this was something particular to girls. Whenever Maria went to her father with questions about politics or the things that she read in the news, he always answered without hesitation to tell her which side of the story was right.
When Nick said good night, Maria realized there was nothing to do but go back in the direction she came from. In the enormous hallway, so empty Maria could hear the hidden pipes and hardware thrumming inside the walls, Maria imagined what the people of Vegas were doing. Downstairs, they wouldn’t be asleep. There would be international billionaires eating late dinners at restaurants that overlooked the Strip, clinking wineglasses and paying in cash, bills newly converted and still pressed flat from the machine. There would be midlevel businessmen picking up pieces of raw fish with chopsticks from the bodies of West Coast–born girls, sake dribbling out of their belly buttons and slurped up into stubbly mouths. Maria could go downstairs and try to find him, but she was sure Rocky’s father couldn’t be one of those guys. He had wrapped his arm around Rocky’s back that morning, drawn his daughter in for a hug. He lingered even after Rocky pushed him away. He couldn’t be the kind of man that collected those porny cards off the street. He knew literature.
Maria stood at the elevator and watched the buttons light up, trying to decide what to do. Eleven eleven, the clock above the elevator read. Maria pressed her eyes shut. When she opened them, the elevator doors opened and Charlie came barging out, and Maria’s wish, before she was through even thinking it, abruptly came true.
“Well, hello!” As he approached, he seemed to be bouncing rather than walking. Maria didn’t know if it was because he had seen her or from something he’d just finished up, but it was clear he was excited. “What are you doing over here? Did you come looking for me?”
Maria felt her face swell in embarrassment. It was obvious she’d been expecting him. She could imagine herself through his eyes, waiting outside his door with her eyes closed, picking split ends as if they were petals, blowing on them like dandelion hairs. She straightened her back as tall as she could in her little black flats with no heels.
“Of course you didn’t. Ignore me. ‘The miserable have no other medicine / But only hope.’” He smiled. “I bet you know who that is.”
Maria blushed. “Emerson?”
“Almost. Shakespeare.”
“Well,” Maria said, trying to maintain her composure. She tilted her head to one side like she did whenever she was going to say something true. “I’ve definitively decided that my favorite poet is Emerson. I’ve been reading more of his work recently. I think he’s wonderful.”
He chuckled in one syllable. She had never heard her parents laugh like he did. Her mother still giggled, like a little kid. Maybe her mother didn’t count as an adult at all, especially when she often bragged to strangers about being confused for Maria’s older sister.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“We went to Denny’s.”
“That’s too bad. A great mind like you deserves better than Denny’s. I would’ve brought you to the best steak house in Nevada.”
Maria blushed. She looked down at Charlie’s shoes—still polished, the richest leather.
“I would have rather gone to the steak house with you.”
Even she was surprised at how the words stirred her. She saw him hesitate. Too much, she thought, too soon. In fear, her heart held off on beating.
“I would have liked that,” Charlie said.
“Take me next time.”
“How about next summer?” He took a step backward, as if to appraise her. “‘Beauty is God’s handwriting’. . . have I told you that before?”
Maria giggled. Only now that she felt her jaw go slack did she realize she had been clenching it.
“You’re leaving tomorrow, aren’t you?”
“Yes. We only came for two nights. Our flight leaves at four thirty.”
“Right, right. And have you seen the casino?”
“Not really. Well, we’ve walked through it.” Maria was confused by the question. Of course she had seen the casino; it was massive, and there was no other way to get upstairs but to walk a solid five to eight minutes, depending on the crowds, past all the tables and slot machines that adorned the hotel’s first two floors.
“’Cause I’m thinking,” he said. “I can show you how to play.”
“I don’t know how to gamble.”
“How about the pool, then?”
Maria smiled, baring all of her teeth. “I have a bathing suit in my room.”
“No,” he said, in a harsher voice than before. “We’ll just sit by the water.”
CHAPTER 12
Maria was disappointed. She had wanted to swim.
She didn’t excel at any physical activity on land. Clumsy and a little soft, she ran pigeon-toed during relay races in the gym and gazed at the wall distractedly whenever they sat at machines in the weight room. When she signed up for the swim team during her first year at Bell Seminary, her gym class teachers discussed and discussed until they came to the conclusion that one of them ought to call Maria’s home to speak with Mr. or Mrs. Rosario, with the intention of explaining that the swim team was one of the most competitive sports at the private all-girls school. None of them had seen Maria swim, but based on her performance in the weight room and how she always walked through the semestral one-mile test, they knew she’d never qualify. They’d never seen her swim, but they assumed she didn’t know how to—most kids who grew up in the outer boroughs didn’t. There weren’t, they chortled among themselves during their planning periods, any events dedicated to the doggy paddle.
On one Wednesday night in October, the Bell Seminary seventh- and eighth-grade swim coach was on the phone with his landlord, threatening to call the New York City housing department for still not having sent someone to fix a leak that had created a bubble like a big plaster pimple that hung from his living room ceiling. At the end of the phone call, he was frazzled and distracted, but that same night, finally, someone did come. For no other reason did he neglect to call Maria’s parents the night before the first practice of the season, and so when Maria showed up with her swim cap and one-piece and sank into the pool with a clap, he had nobody else to thank for the blessing than his negligent landlord. Within seconds of sinking into the water, she propelled herself forward with a force that only Grace—the swim team captain who, at only fourteen years old, had developed certain physical characteristics and vocal intonations that prompted mean rumors that she was a lesbian—could surpass, and even so, only marginally. As the swim coach looked on, he shook his head in disbelief. Maria Rosario, newest addition to Bell Seminary’s eighth-grade class, could swim. And not just that—the coaches agreed that she’d be set to make varsity as soon as she entered upper school. And all because of those summer afternoons that her mother left her at the YMCA pool, where they fed her chocolate milk and chicken medley for lunch, free for any family who showed up willing to eat it.
But within three weeks, Maria had quit the team. She’d been genuinely sad to tell them it was because making a practice that started at 6:30 a.m. required her to wake up at 4:00 a.m. and get on a public train. But when the Bell Seminary coaches continued to approach her, stopping her in the hallway, going on about dedication, she traded her sadness for anger instead. What was the point of competition? What did they even care? She’d never swum on a team before; no one had ever cheered her on. If she’d ever continue, it’d be the same way she learned: in a pool by herself, with nobody watching. Nobody but the lifeguard—and even he was irrelevant. Maria knew she would never drown.
The hotel pool was lit up by fluorescent panels that beamed brightly from under the water. As Maria descended a wide flight of stairs, she gazed out at t
he long chairs that were arranged in careful formation around the pool edges. Some were empty and others were speckled with bodies. She noticed their clothing first, their midsections draped in slinky white garments that fell below the collarbone and bunched at the hip, and then noticed the glasses they waved as they spoke, coated with rims of salt or garnished with flowers and fruit, sticks of cinnamon twisted into art. Maria knew Karen would love all those details. Music thumped apologetically, low enough so that conversation could carry on, and as Charlie walked through the crowd, Maria felt awkward around so many women who towered above her in stiletto heels.
“Everyone’s dressed up.”
“Overdressed. You look great.”
“I would’ve changed if I knew I were coming down here,” Maria said, which was not wholly untrue. There was nothing she had packed in her suitcase that was appropriate to wear past 5:00 p.m. in Las Vegas. Her suitcase overflowed with tanks and blue jeans and a pair of sneakers, and the flats she was wearing now. Even so, she could have managed to look nightclub ready by means of Rocky’s wardrobe, whose contents Maria felt as comfortable sorting through as the food in Rocky’s family’s fridge. Rocky would undoubtedly have a pair of leathery pumps to spare.
They walked past the swimming pool and the bodies that were posed around it like mannequins until they reached a platform, where the chairs made way for cabanas. Even though the sun was down and there were fewer lights here than there were by the pool, Maria felt that she could see everything very clearly as if it were still midday. This bothered her, not because she didn’t want to look at Rocky’s father, but because she worried about how she looked to him in such strong and transparent light. Didn’t she have a pimple in the space right between her eyebrows, and hadn’t she forgotten to shave her upper lip for days? She felt a hair sprout from one of her moles just then, like a sprig from the eye of a potato.
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