Jonathan sat up a little straighter and then slouched back down. He was so obvious about everything, and Maria could tell he was trying to hide his concern. Maria loved this about him, how impossible it was for him to repress his emotions. He could never get his face to express what he wanted—it simply did whatever it felt like.
“I was kidding about that, Maria.”
“I know. But in general, I just don’t know if age matters that much.”
“It depends on the girl and the guy, right? Like, how mature they both are.”
Through the blinds, Maria could see the first spalls of sunlight slice across the room. She went to the window—there were already birds chirping. It was early enough for her to go home. She knew she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep here again.
“I think it’s simpler than that,” she said. “I think the reality is that it’s all just transactional.”
From the corner of her eye, she noticed Jonathan perk up again.
“Like nobody our age has a car yet. Let’s say my friend Rocky dated you, you could drive her around.”
Jonathan laughed. “What does she need me to drive her around for? She probably already has her own driver.”
“Maybe.” Maria smirked. “But not one as good-looking as you.”
Maria walked from Jonathan’s apartment to her doorstep, taking the long way home on the boulevard where six lanes of cars menacingly stretched away from the curb. When she reached the house, she sat for half an hour on the front porch until she brought the key to the door. It was locked from the inside, so she called her mother’s cell phone three times. Maria’s mother stood with her hands on her waist and let Maria walk past her without so much as “good morning.” The sky was pewter, paling with sunrise, when Maria opened the door to her room.
She kicked off her sneakers. Without taking her jeans off, she threw herself onto the bed. It was a nuisance. Only one person comfortably fit on it at a time—even though Maria said she preferred to have a double-size bed rather than a twin, her parents had scoffed. The room was much too small for that, they said, and besides, she needed a desk and a dresser, too. One of her plans for college included stripping her room of all furniture. At the center of the room, there’d be one giant bed, and in this bed, she would do everything—eat her cereal for breakfast, write poetry until lunch, invite friends and boyfriends to sit on its pillows and smoke pot. It was the kind of thing that made up her dreams.
But she hadn’t always hated the bed, whose headboard was painted pink by her father. He had constructed the frame himself from pieces of wood he salvaged from work. He had been so proud to install it, to show her how it was still small enough for her to fit her desk right next to it. The sheets were patterned with Disney princesses, and when she was lying down on them, she could see how the ceiling was still populated by synthetic stars that by now had lost whatever property that had made them once glow in the dark.
Maria pulled the sheets up to her shoulders and within seconds fell asleep. If it were up to her father, Maria would sleep in this bed forever. She knew because he had told her. She would still be the six-year-old girl who jumped up and down when he announced that it was finally ready and showed her how the closet doors in her new room opened so wide that she could fit her whole body inside them. If it were up to him, even now Maria would still be a very little girl, and this was a dream that was simply impossible, one that she knew she was getting further away from every day.
CHAPTER 17
Maria looked at her bookshelf, deciding. She spread out on her bedroom floor with several books to decide between.
Her dad had relaxed a smidgen from his last outburst. Maria knew her dad would calm down a little—Analise always managed to get him to be reasonable sooner or later. Now, things seemed to be relatively normal in the house. Ricky had started his job at the phone store, too, so that helped take some pressure off her to find one. But she was still banned from going out after dark, and staying over at anyone’s house was out of the question.
It’d been two weeks now since she’d come back from Vegas, and every day her hope diminished. She was still checking her phone compulsively, but Charlie never texted or called her. When she walked down Queens Boulevard, she didn’t know she was thinking of him. When she quit her job, she didn’t know she’d been thinking of him. She was thinking that soon, this life wouldn’t be the one she was living. But she realized now that she had stopped despairing a little too soon, before anything had actually changed.
Reading helped dull the pain that had settled in Maria’s stomach, but Emerson was too painful these days. Last year, her English teacher had suggested that Maria read an anthology of work from Latina poets from the medieval ages to today. They’re inspiring Latina women, just like you, her teacher had said as she gave her the book. Maria was so embarrassed that she had rolled her eyes, but now she took the collection from the shelf.
That afternoon, Maria had plans to meet Karen, and if she didn’t stop reading, she would be late. Maria knew Karen hated waiting. They agreed on the Dunkin’ Donuts near Queens Center Mall. There were cuter cafés a little closer to Karen’s house in Forest Hills, but Maria insisted that it was only fair to meet halfway, and Maria secretly liked ordering the Vanilla Bean Coolatta, even though Rocky had called it a ghetto Frappuccino the only time she’d seen Maria with one at school. She had found the perfect spot for her purple sunglasses atop her purple poetry notebook, and she grabbed them now as she dashed out of the room and opened the screen door. “Meeting Karen,” she called out, “in Queens!” just as her mother started to ask where Maria thought she was going.
Maria shouted and waved as Karen approached. It felt like a long time since they’d last seen each other. When Karen got close enough, the two hugged. Karen’s hair smelled like blueberries.
“Hey.” Karen’s voice was level as she held the door open. In line, they stared at the donuts behind the magenta-painted counter. Some were pink, and others were white, and almost all were covered in sprinkles, but the colors couldn’t masquerade the way that the dough still drooped into itself, like a bicycle tire deflated of air. In measured steps, they shuffled closer to the register.
“Can I tell you about Vegas, Karen? We stayed at the nicest hotel, the most expensive. There was this fountain outside and they did this whole light show. It was the fanciest place I’ve ever seen.”
“Have you tried the Chocolate Glazed?” Karen wasn’t looking at Maria because her head was still angled toward the wire racks behind the register. Karen’s eyes looked heavy lidded and puffy.
“I’m getting a Boston Kreme,” Maria said. “But yeah, there was a pool, too. And cabanas. And a fake New York! And a fake Taj Mahal!” Maria paused. Karen had her back to her now, and as Maria hovered behind her in line, she could see how Karen’s braid was weighed down, the ends of it slick and pointed, like a stamen.
“Why is your hair so wet? Did you just take a shower?”
“Yeah.”
They were at the register. Karen stepped aside to let Maria order first. Maria dug around in her tote bag, the one she used on the weekends, and felt around for a quarter. Nothing but specks of dirt and a burst fountain pen came up in her hand. She turned to Karen.
“Do you have eighteen cents?”
Karen handed her a dollar bill, and Maria passed her the pennies and quarters she got back in change. After they both ordered and were given their food, they sat at a table near the window, where they could watch as swarms of people, some with strollers and others with backpacks, climbed up and down the stairs of the train station. They pulled out tin chairs, whose feet squealed along the tiles like a fingernail on a chalkboard. Maria ran a napkin over the table’s surface to clear the crumbs that the last customers left there.
“Also,” Maria said, crumpling the napkin into a ball. “Did I tell you about Andres? Do you know what he told me the other day?”
Karen put the donut down and rolled her eyes.
“Is it any
thing new? Andres is a fucking asshole. At this point, you’re the one who’s an idiot for staying with him.”
Maria stopped sipping from the Coolatta. It was so dense it hardly came up the straw without an inordinate amount of concentration.
“And what happened with Charlie?” Karen tore off another piece of her donut and held it tentatively in her hand. “Was he in Vegas, too? Did you decide to hook up with him?”
Maria stared into her chocolatey drink. She had wanted to wait until they were settled and sitting before telling Karen about the offer Charlie made to her by the pool. She wanted to ask Karen what she thought, if it were crazy that she was thinking of actually taking him up on it. If an entire college tuition—or even a mortgage on a house—was really the kind of thing a person like Maria or Karen wouldn’t exchange anything for. Or, and this thought made her shrink in shame, was it only Maria? She wanted to slip inside that narrow space of her straw and slide down into the syrupy mixture.
Karen was devouring her donut, and there was now less than a quarter of it left. When Maria still hadn’t answered, she didn’t wait to swallow to start talking again.
“Do you even like Rocky?”
“Of course I like her.” Maria unfolded the flap of her paper bag. Half of the frosting had already come off the donut, smeared onto a square of parchment paper. She couldn’t look at Karen anymore, even with her sunglasses obscuring her face, so she directed her question into her lap. “Are you saying I’m a bad friend?”
“This thing with Charlie, it’s so fucked up. Anyone would be upset if their friend was hooking up with their dad!”
Maria’s neck snapped up like a reflex. “Karen!”
“I’m not calling you a bad friend, Maria, so don’t get all offended. But a good friend would ask how my grandfather is doing.” Maria saw that Karen’s eyes weren’t just red and puffy anymore—now, they were glossed over. “A good friend would at least ask.”
Maria felt her body clam up. She twisted her leg around the other, and then strained to get her ankle across the other ankle. Maria had only seen Karen’s text about how her grandfather was in the hospital after landing in New York and switching off her phone’s airplane mode. That was at least a week ago. Or was it already two weeks now? As Maria brought her elbows up to the table, her hands cradling her face like she wanted to hide, Maria remembered that she never responded.
“Fuck.” Maria lifted her sunglasses off her eyes so that she could show Karen her face. “Karen, I’m sorry. I was getting off the plane. Things have been so crazy.”
“Yeah.” Karen’s fingers traced the lining of the bag. There was nothing there now but crumbs.
“Is your grandfather okay?”
“Yeah. He’s being discharged tonight.”
Maria took another bite of the donut, but it didn’t taste like anything. When they stood up and Maria suggested they go to the mall, Karen didn’t protest. They went into Urban Outfitters with eight dollars total between them, and with the intention of not buying anything. As they walked from aisle to aisle, Maria kept pointing to different articles of clothing. All her comments felt pained, stupid. She had a hard time saying goodbye to Karen when they had to get on opposite sides of the train platform.
“I’m sorry, Karen.” Maria was reluctant to go down the stairs to catch her train.
Karen hugged her, but her arms were so stiff, Maria was reminded that under the skin they were made up of bone.
When Maria got to her house that night, she took her books out again. She texted Karen, something inconsequential, and waited for her to answer. She tried lying down on her belly to make the terrible feeling at the center of her chest go away. When it didn’t work, she knew there was nothing she could do, no medicine she could take to get rid of the stinging. It had been selfish for her to not answer the text immediately, and she realized it was fear that made her feel so terribly now—the fear of losing Karen’s friendship. It was a feeling that she realized, with some degree of sadness and wonder, she didn’t feel toward Rocky.
The next day, nobody was home. Her father had gone to work as usual, and her mother was gone, likely at the supermarket or Laundromat or to clean someone’s apartment in Manhattan—if it wasn’t one, it was always the other. Waking up at noon to find the house empty, Maria had left before anyone could return and ask where she was going, before anybody could try to stop her.
Andres’s mother had been making lunch when Maria arrived. Andres led her into his bedroom, and to the muffled sound of plates clattering in a sink, Andres fingered her with one hand and changed the channel of the TV with the other. Maria was vying with an episode of MythBusters for his attention, and although she knew this would never work for her, she made the requisite noise, anyway. What he was doing to her body felt nothing like what Charlie had done to her by the pool, but she thought that if she moaned loud enough, maybe the feeling would follow the sound.
“Do you hear yourself?” He looked like he wanted to hit her. “Shut up, Maria. My mom is home!”
Maria pulled her denim skirt down. “Why have you been so mean to me lately?”
“Maria,” he said, “we can’t do this anymore.”
Maria wished she had her sunglasses on, like Rocky always did. She felt the seams to her heart fly open, and her eyes became clouded with tears. Andres hadn’t looked back from the TV yet to notice, so she hastily wiped them away.
“We can work it out,” she said, her underwear still slung round her ankles. She pressed her knees together to ennoble herself. If she were still able to make use of Andres—Andres who left the borough of Queens at most once a month, who was trying to find a job as a parking valet—then surely he could make use of her.
“No.” He turned around to face her now and grabbed her shoulder with the hand that had just been inside her.
“Why not?” Maria held herself up on one elbow. She wondered if he was wiping his fingers clean on her T-shirt. What is wrong with him? It was stuff like this that convinced her that she had seen the very worst of Andres, and instead of repulsing her, it only convinced her that their love could survive anything she was willing to put up with. And even if that weren’t true, Andres was still just another neighborhood boy from Queens, and he had no right to get rid of Maria. He was the kind of boy she imagined would be around for her bidding whenever she came home during breaks from college, which would be on a campus far from New York, while Andres scraped by at a local commuter school. Andres couldn’t break up with her, Maria reasoned, because that was something she was supposed to do, whenever she was ready. At Bell Seminary, senior students applied to both reaches and safeties, and Maria had decided that, on a ranking of love, Andres was a solid safety. He got a 400 on his PSAT.
“I’m seeing someone else,” Andres said.
Maria was reclined and half-naked on his bed, but her eyes became telescopes, and her vision was transported to an amplified image she’d never inspected before. It was the crystalline picture of her brother and uncles wagging their fingers, telling her she’d been wrong: Andres had put bodies between them. Maria next saw the doctor with her clipboard, scoffing under her breath. She saw Karen, vicious like a dog, tearing the flesh of a donut. They were all right: Maria had been blind as a kitten, and now Andres was ripping her eyelids apart, staking them so they couldn’t blink closed.
“Who is it?” Her throat was dry.
“We met at the end of the year. At school.”
Maria didn’t know what to ask next, so Andres continued, unprompted.
“She’s beautiful.”
Maria’s mouth fell open. She felt it hang there, gaping, and closed it.
“Beautiful?”
“Listen, remember how you used to talk about the guys at your school when we first started dating?”
“Yeah,” Maria said, even though she knew it wasn’t fair of him to mention the boys from Bell Seminary’s brother school. She exaggerated about the few white guys she’d ever danced with. She had always assumed
Andres knew those boys never liked her, anyway.
“Well, I’ve always been kind of resentful of that, and I had always known Chastity, even before I met you. Last semester we were in the same class. We started talking—”
“Chastity?” Maria asked. “Her name is Chastity?”
“Yes,” Andres answered, with a completely straight face. “She’s fucking perfect,” he added, as if Maria weren’t lying right there with her panties scrunched up at her feet, as if his mother hadn’t put out an extra plate on the table so Maria could join them for lunch. Her neck stiffened up like a dry sponge. Andres had a distinct twinkle of the eye—there was no denying it—and she had spent all afternoon with him, so she knew there were no drugs in his system. That starry-eyed look when he spoke Chastity’s name was real unfettered admiration.
The pot in the kitchen crackled with oil. Something was frying, almost ready to eat.
“But don’t you love me?” she ventured, and when he didn’t answer, there was no more courage left.
Outside his bedroom door, his mother called them to lunch, and even though the air was so thick with food that Maria already knew it tasted delicious, she knew she wouldn’t be able to eat. Her tongue was papery and she was unable to swallow, as if her throat was clotted with sand. Andres coaxed her into getting dressed, but as soon as she did, she couldn’t contain herself.
“You can’t leave me!” Maria yelled as soon as Andres sat down at the table. His mother had put out place mats for both of them, but Maria refused to sit down. She would not stay here as Andres humiliated her. She wouldn’t tolerate him cheating on her. She would leave him, the way she’d always envisioned it, the way she always knew she would. Usually, she gave a polite and formal hello and goodbye to Andres’s mother, but Andres didn’t deserve Maria’s civility anymore. Today she ran past both of them, letting the door crash as she fled, so that the whole apartment shook in her wake.
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