by Lizzy Mason
I tilted my head curiously. “You okay?”
He shrugged. “Bored, I guess. As usual.” He took a drag. The cigarette’s cherry glowed, spotlighting the crease between his brows. “Now that school’s over, I don’t do anything all day, and I have no one to hang out with.” He sighed a stream of smoke. “I’ve met some people at the NA and AA meetings I go to, but it’s not the same. My old friends had known me for years. They knew all the good and bad and I didn’t have to do this whole ‘getting to know you’ thing. It’s just . . .”
“Exhausting,” I heard myself say. I knew exactly how he felt. Making friends had never been easy for me. I wasn’t a recluse or anything, but I just couldn’t expend the energy to be “on” all the time, especially when I was thrown into Mike’s social scene. It was always easier to just hang out with Cassidy.
Raf nodded, his expression softening. “Do you want to hang out?” he asked.
I found myself nodding back, even though I was already in my pajamas: yoga pants and a T-shirt that said Eat Nuts, Kick Butts. I’d been wearing them for three nights (and some of the days). The yoga pants clung to my thighs tighter than I was comfortable with. Dusting myself off, I also found a Froot Loop stuck to my butt that I couldn’t be sure was from tonight.
Mom and Cassidy were on the same page, for once. I needed to snap out of this hygiene slump.
I followed Raf in through his basement door and found myself in a room I didn’t recognize. It was no longer the brown-carpeted playroom with a plastic kitchen in the corner where I’d played as a kid. There was a crisp white carpet and a sectional sofa in the center facing a flat-screen TV. It was smaller, too. Raf led me to the other side of the new wall, to his bedroom.
His door was covered with tags written in black Sharpie, most of which read “Cheech.” Or at least I thought they did. They were hard to read. But I didn’t bother to try to decipher them further because my eyes were drawn to the huge paintings on his bedroom walls. They were life-size cartoonish images: a piece of bacon frying in a pan that was saying, “I smell delicious,” a blonde girl with a ponytail and bangs in a Catholic school uniform kilt giving the finger, and a puppy sniffing a kitten’s butt.
“When did you move down here?” I asked. Last time I’d been in his bedroom, it was on the second floor, next to his sister’s.
“A couple years ago,” he said. “I couldn’t stand living next door to the mausoleum that was Allie’s bedroom anymore. It was too quiet, too empty.”
I was beginning to know exactly how that felt.
Looking closer, I could see that someone had installed frames around the art. The frames were just pieces of decorative wood painted to contrast the walls, but it looked nice.
“Did you frame these?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nah, it was my mom. She thought it would make it look less like graffiti.”
It did. It looked deliberate, almost like she approved of the paintings. If I’d done something like this in my room, my mom’s version of support would have been to hold the paint can while I repainted the walls a pristine white.
“She hates this part, though,” he said, pointing to the smaller wall next to the door. “The ‘Wall of Fame.’”
A poster board hung here, smothered in tags written in permanent marker. Not all were Raf’s.
“These are my friends’,” he said pointing out a few. He paused for a second, as if to grieve their loss. “It’s not like we could go out and tag the houses on the block or anything. The best we could do was write our tags on stickers and put them on lampposts and mailboxes all over town. So, instead, we ended up tagging our own walls,” he explained. “Or we used to anyway.”
“I can kind of see why your mom hates it,” I said. It looked like just a big mess of ink. Raf’s tags were pretty good, actually, and so were some of the others. But most were essentially scribbles.
“You wound me,” Raf said, clutching his chest in mock pain.
“What does ‘Cheech’ mean?” I asked, ignoring his histrionics.
“It’s short for Chicharrón.”
“That’s you?”
He nodded. “I’m Latino and Southern. And chicharrón is like the Latin American version of bacon or pork rinds. And I’m just as salty and delicious.”
I raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Virginia’s not really the south.”
His smile slid. “Okay, fine. My friends came up with it. Typical white boys, nicknamed me after the only Latino stoner they knew, Cheech Marin. So I looked up where he got his nickname and started telling people the Chicharrón thing.”
“Oh,” I said. I was glad he wasn’t hanging out with those friends anymore. “We should come up with a new nickname for you to deface your walls with.”
Raf’s smile returned. “Yeah. Maybe.” But he didn’t seem over it.
“Do you do regular art anymore?” I asked to change the subject, then suddenly realized how insulting that sounded. “I mean like sketches, portraits, oil paintings of fruit bowls, whatever . . . I’m not an artist.”
Raf was laughing now, too. He bent down to rifle through one of his desk drawers, pulling out a couple of sketchbooks and handing them to me.
The first one was completely full, cover to cover, with pieces that read “Chicharrón” and “Cheech.” They were colorful, with multiple outlines and 3-D effects. They looked like they should have been spray-painted on a wall.
Interspersed with those were more of his cartoonish drawings of people, all equally as skilled as the ones on his walls, though some were obviously rough sketches.
The second book, however, was full of realistic sketches of people. Sometimes close-ups, of their eyes or their hands. A few featured several people in a scene of some kind. A grandfather holding an ice cream cone for his grandson. A little boy and girl kissing under a willow tree. This was a completely different side to his art. The sentimental side, I guess.
“Wow,” I said. I could feel Raf’s eyes on me, watching my reactions as I flipped the pages. But I didn’t care that he could see how in awe of his talent I was. He deserved the praise. Still, I wasn’t expecting the pain that sliced through me when I turned the page and saw an incredible rendering of his sister, Allie. She was bald from the chemo, with a scarf wrapped around her head and dark circles under her eyes. But she was laughing at something, and her grin was the same as it always had been.
“You make me feel inadequate. I’m not good at anything like this.”
“You don’t have hobbies?” Raf asked. It wasn’t a judgment, just surprise. But it was also a way to brush aside my compliment. Calling his incredible talent a “hobby” was like calling a lion a “kitty cat.”
I gave it some real thought before I answered. I’d never really considered my hobbies. Well, I had, but only when Mom asked me about college applications and what I was going to say about how I’d spent the last three years of high school. Sometimes I wrote poetry for the literary magazine, but I didn’t want to be part of the club. I just wasn’t big on joining activities. I only went to parties when Mike or Cassidy made me and that was a commitment of mere hours.
“No, I guess not,” I said finally. “Except reading comics. But my mom doesn’t think that’s going to help me get into college.”
“Comics?” he said, quirking an eyebrow. “I remember now that your dad used to bring us Archie and Tiny Titans and things like that.”
“I’ve since moved on to slightly more sophisticated fare,” I said. I could feel the scowl that formed any time I felt challenged about reading comics.
He held up his hands. “I’m not making fun of you, Harley,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said, trying to force my face to relax. “I get a little defensive about it.”
“Why? Did Mike make fun of it or something?”
“No,” I said, suppressing a smile at Raf’s protective tone.
“It was one of the only things he and I had in common actually. But his friends were less enthusiastic. So are mine.”
“I get it. I was lucky that my passion was something I could study at school. At least part-time. But that didn’t mean everyone respected it.”
I glimpsed the small flicker of sadness behind his smile, but he shook it off.
“At least the things you’re good at are tangible,” I said. “You end up with a piece of art. But what does reading comics get me? Sharp reading comprehension skills and a superhero complex? How do the hours I spend bingeing shows that aired years ago help with my social skills? I’m a waste of space. You create beauty.”
Raf was grinning at me, this time with no tinge of sadness or pain at all. “So what else do you do? Aside from comics and TV?”
I shrugged, legitimately stumped. “I don’t know. I hang out with Cassidy. Mostly, I just did whatever Mike wanted to do.” A whirlpool of guilt swirled in my stomach. “I wasted three years of high school doing whatever he wanted, hanging out with his friends, being who he wanted me to be.”
A lump had risen in my throat, and tears were now burning in my eyes. I took a deep breath and tried to will them away.
“It’s okay to be upset,” Raf said, laying a hand on my shoulder. “Although, in the program, they say that ‘upset’ isn’t actually an emotion. They want you to say you’re angry or anxious or resentful. Mostly powerless. That’s the big one.”
“I’m not any of those things,” I managed to say. But my voice was tight. “I’m fine.” I sat down on the bed next to him.
“They also say that ‘fine’ stands for ‘fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.’”
“Yeah, well, ‘they’ can bite me,” I said. “Because that spells FUINE.”
Raf burst out laughing.
I turned to face him, frowning at first, then fixating on his eyes. His lashes were still so long, the way they’d been when he was a kid. But I’d never noticed the golden flecks in his irises.
“You know what I find surprising about your lack of interests,” Raf said, snapping me back into the moment. “You’ve always seemed so sure of yourself. I feel like you could do anything you want.”
I turned away. “Yeah, right. You’ve obviously never seen me in gym class.”
“Very few people look good in gym,” he said. “But don’t worry. We’ll figure out what would make you happy.”
“We?”
“You and me.”
“Why would you want to figure that out?”
“Why not? What else do I have going on right now?”
“Okay,” I said skeptically. “But not tonight. I should go.” It was late and I didn’t want Mom and Dad to worry.
“Hang on,” he said, standing. “I’ll walk you home.”
A smile tugged at my lips. “Remember how we used to walk each other home, back and forth, for as long as we could? We kept doing it until our parents practically dragged us away from each other.”
Raf grinned. “Yeah, they really had their hands full with the two of us schemers.”
“It’s probably a good thing we stopped hanging out,” I said, as I opened his bedroom door. “You were a bad influence. Still are.”
Once again, Raf made a show of being offended. “Me? I am pure as the driven snow! How dare you imply that I would ever try to corrupt you?”
I pointed at the unlit cigarette he held between his thumb and forefinger.
“If I recall correctly, you were the one who was smoking first that night,” he said.
For some reason, it pleased me that he remembered. I turned away to hide my smile. But when we stopped at my front porch, I asked, “Are you going to smoke that?”
He nodded. “Yeah, but I’ll wait until you go inside. I wouldn’t want to be a bad influence.”
Now I didn’t feel the need to hide it when I smiled at him. “You’re a good friend. I take back what I said.”
“We go way back,” he said with a shrug. Then he pulled out his phone. “Hey, give me your number. Friends have each other’s numbers.”
“Fair point,” I said, adding my number. A few seconds later, my phone buzzed with an incoming text: Sleep tight, xo Raf
“You, too,” I said and then closed the door behind me.
Floyd wasn’t waiting at the door, so I assumed, gratefully, that my parents must be asleep, but Dad was in the kitchen when I rounded the corner on tiptoes. He glanced over at me and then went back to spooning out one of the omnipresent neighbor-provided casseroles onto a plate. Floyd, the traitor, was staring eagerly at the spoon in his hand.
“Did you just get home?” I asked.
“Yeah, I got called in for a pretty nasty compound fracture of the tibia,” Dad said.
I sidled up next to him.
“Come on, kid,” he said, sniffing near me. “Smoking?”
I shrugged. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just . . .” But there wasn’t anything to say.
“Who were you talking to out there?” he asked.
I looked up from the Post-it note I was shredding. “Raf,” I said. “He bummed me a cigarette.”
“Rafael?” Dad said, raising his eyebrows in the direction of the dish. “What’s he up to?”
“I think he’s just figuring that out,” I said.
“I remember those days,” Dad said wistfully. “Before college and bills and kids who made my hair turn gray.”
“Totally worth it, though, right?” I asked as I hopped up on the counter next to him.
“Hm, that depends on your definition of ‘worth it.’” Dad put his plate in the microwave and turned to me. “Did you pick up this week’s issue of The Walking Dead yet? Your dear old dad is waiting to find out what happens.”
“Yeah, do you want me to tell you?” I said, trying to look innocent. Dad hated spoilers and would run from me if I tried to talk to him about something he hadn’t read yet.
“Do it and you’ll get a plate of hot chicken divan to the face,” he said. He took his plate out of the microwave menacingly.
“Your loss,” I said, jumping down from the counter. I stole a piece of chicken from his plate before heading for the stairs.
“Leave it for me in the hallway, will you? And wash your hands and face before you go upstairs,” Dad said. “Your mother is still awake, and if she smells that smoke on you, she’ll put you in a coma.”
“Boo,” I said, deadpan. “Too soon.” But we were both smiling.
I took it as a good sign that Dad was joking again. The man never met a pun or a joke he didn’t like, but he hadn’t been particularly funny (or unfunny) since the accident. Progress.
One Year Ago
Mike and I were in the basement watching a movie when Audrey and Neema came downstairs. They were lucky we were clothed, since “watching a movie” was usually a euphemism for “having sex.” But it was early and Mike didn’t have to leave for a while and, frankly, I hadn’t felt like it that night, so Audrey and Neema were more welcome than they normally would have been.
We were watching a horror movie, one of those ones where people get killed in the goriest ways, which at any other time would have sent Audrey running for her bedroom. But this time, she and Neema settled in on the love seat next to the couch Mike and I were cuddled on. They whispered to each other occasionally, sneaking glances at us every now and then.
Finally, I grew tired of their furtive looks. “Is there something you guys wanted?” I asked.
Color bloomed in Audrey’s cheeks. “No, we just wanted to watch the movie with you,” she answered.
I rolled my eyes. “Audy, you’re totally lying. It’s because that guy you like is in this movie, right? What’s-his-name from that movie you made me watch a few months ago.”
“Bradley Cooper,” Audrey and Mike answered in unison.
&nbs
p; I snapped my head back to look at Mike. “How on earth do you know that?”
He only looked mildly embarrassed. “It’s a decent movie,” he said. “I watched it with my mom.”
“You saw Silver Linings Playbook?” Audrey asked.
Mike nodded. “Yeah, I liked it.”
“Even the dancing?” Neema chimed in.
Mike sat up, nearly pushing me off the couch as he extricated himself from being the big spoon.
“Totally the dancing. My mom made me take cotillion when I was in middle school in Atlanta, so I can do the waltz, the fox-trot, the jitterbug, even a little cha-cha.” Mike stood and demonstrated his cha-cha, sending Audrey and Neema into fits of giggles. They were freshmen, after all, and neither had even kissed a boy.
“There were so few guys there that I had to dance constantly,” he said. “I got pretty good.”
After a few cha-cha-chas, Mike pulled me up off the couch and tried to get me to dance with him. I tried to keep up, but I wasn’t a dancer. I wasn’t much of anything that required coordination.
He gave up quickly and pulled Audrey up instead. She actually was a dancer. Not ballroom, but ballet, tap dance, jazz, hip-hop. She was the type of kid who had to be perpetually in motion, and dance got some of that energy out.
For a second, when Mike held her waist, I wished my stomach were as flat as hers and wondered if he thought the same thing. But it didn’t matter because I was absolutely not the exercising type. I’d take my muffin top with a side of muffins, thank you very much.
Audrey looked so happy and graceful, even while doing the jitterbug with Mike that I almost didn’t feel jealous of her. She laughed out loud when he spun her out and pulled her back in against his chest. And I laughed with them.
That might have been the first time Mike saw her as more than my little sister. She was more fun than me, prettier than me, thinner than me. How could I blame him?
Chapter Seven
Very early the next morning, the faint ring of the landline pulled me out of bed and sent me running for my parents’ bedroom all over again. I stood at the foot of the bed watching Dad’s face. Mom sat close to him, squeezing his shoulder. As his features relaxed, my heart leapt. He put the phone down and turned to us.