I smile. It’s not quite my mom’s chicken soup and the down comforter in my old bedroom, but it feels good to be babied by my roommates. I promise each of them I’ll take care of them the next time they get sick too. They hush me with more tea and extra pillows before leaving me to sleep off my cold.
Just as my eyes are starting to close, my phone buzzes on the desktop. I pick it up—it’s a text from Nico. He doesn’t usually text much––neither of us do, since it’s an extra cost on top of our cell phone bills.
Nico: just wanted to make sure u got home ok
I should just leave it alone, but I can’t help it. Quickly I text him back:
Me: Im home thx.
A few minutes later, the phone buzzes again. My eyelids are really heavy by this point, but like an addict, I pick it up again.
Nico: Im sorry Layla please.
Please what? Please forgive him? Please take him back? Please believe that he’s sorry? I don’t know what he’s trying to say, and my brain feels too thick to figure it out. Without sending a reply, I set the phone to silent and place it back on the desk, letting the fog roll over my senses until I fall asleep.
In the morning, the fog is still there, and everything feels about ten times worse. My throat is sore, and my fever remains along with a pounding headache. After more than fourteen hours of sleep, I still feel completely exhausted; even the trip from my bed to the bathroom is tiresome.
The girls are all asleep still, so I shuffle into the kitchen to make another cup of tea, moving as quietly as I can. A knock at the door tells me it’s seven-fifteen—the time I normally catch the shuttle up to campus with Vinny for our eight o’clock classes. Shit. There is no way in hell I’m going to class feeling like this.
I trudge to open up the door, and sure enough, Vinny is standing there, looking particularly lanky in a pair of skinny jeans under his puffy jacket.
“Whoa,” he says, looking at me still in my t-shirt and yoga pants.
My hair is still in a messy bun, flyaways probably rioting around my face like a lion’s mane the way they do when I’ve been rolling around in my sleep. At this rate, I’m going to have dreadlocks by the end of the week. It’s a far cry from my normal school attire, which is usually office-appropriate for the afternoon.
“I take it you’re not ready for class,” he says with a smirk. “Rough night?”
“You could say that,” I say, turning my back to retrieve the boiling kettle from the stovetop. “And yeah, I’m not going.”
When Vinny makes to enter the apartment, I hold a hand out to stop him. “You don’t want to come in here, dude. I’m sick.”
Vinny’s a total hypochondriac, so that halts him in his tracks, and even sends him a few steps back from the doorway. He immediately starts searching through the pockets of his messenger bag for hand sanitizer.
“Bummer,” he says as he digs through the bag. “Sorry, man. You want me to talk to your professors or anything?”
It’s a nice offer, but I shake my head as I pour my tea. “No, I’ll just email them. They probably won’t believe me anyway without a doctor’s note, so I’m not going to stress about it. I’ll be better by tomorrow, I hope.”
“Okay. Ah, yes! I knew I had this in here!”
Triumphantly, Vinny pulls out a bottle of sanitizing gel and squeezes a much larger amount than necessary onto his hands. The smell of alcohol stings my nostrils all the way inside the apartment.
“Dude,” I say as I watch him. “Going a little overboard, aren’t you?”
“Don’t nobody want your germs, L-Boogie,” he says as he finishes rubbing his hands together.
He sticks the sanitizer back in the front pocket of his bag, then takes a few more steps back into the hallway. I can see the desire to cover his mouth and nose with his jacket sleeve flickering across his features.
“I guess I’ll see you later. Feel better.”
“Thanks,” I say as I walk up to the doorframe.
Vinny dances a few more steps down the hall, clearly focused on keeping a perimeter. I roll my eyes and shut the door. I don’t have time to be sick, so I really hope I’ll be better tomorrow.
Unfortunately, I’m not better at all. In fact, I’m much worse, tired to the bone and feverish. I can hardly talk because my throat hurts so badly, and for the second day in a row, I have to skip classes and call in sick to work, much to Karen’s obvious irritation. I don’t even have to fake the sick voice on the phone—my sore throat gives me an inimitable scratchiness that I couldn’t have created better if I’d tried.
At six-thirty the night before, right after he would have dropped off the packages at Fox and Lager, Nico texted me again.
Nico: everything ok? where have u been?
I didn’t respond. I don’t have the energy to deal with how he makes me feel. All day I’ve been falling in and out of feverish sleep and trying my hardest to gulp down glasses of water and zinc-vitamin C supplements. My stomach is starting to act up too, so I’m not always able to keep everything down. In short, I’m in hell.
Sometime around nine o’clock the next night, there’s a light tap on my bedroom door, and I stir out of another restless nap as it opens and Quinn pops her head in.
“Hey sickie,” she says. “You look like the prettiest picture of death I’ve ever seen.”
“Thanks,” I croak and yank my covers over my head.
“No hiding, Sleeping Beauty. There’s someone here to see you. You up for some company?”
“Tell Vinny that hand sanitizer isn’t going to solve this problem,” I grumble. Oh, the dark feels good on my eyes.
“Vinny? That skinny kid down the hall?”
The sound of the deep voice has me batting the comforter from my head with energy I didn’t know I possessed. Quinn enters the room gingerly, having avoided it for the last two days while sleeping on the couch. She’s followed by Nico, who’s still dressed in his FedEx gear. The sleeves of his navy uniform are rolled up to his elbows, exposing his powerful forearms. I sigh, amazed that I can even notice details like that in this state.
And then I remember that he’s leaving and pretty much taking my heart with him.
Lacking any shame about being a third wheel, Quinn flops down on her bed, clearly unwilling to leave me alone with the “shit-eating bastard,” as she’s called him since Sunday. Nico glances at her, then pulls his cap off his head and comes to sit in the desk chair next to my bed.
“Hey,” I squeak out, sitting up on my elbows. I know I probably look like a gargoyle, but I’m honestly too tired and too shocked to care. “What are you doing here?”
“I heard you were sick,” Nico replies softly. “Karen was all bent out of shape because her assistant had to man the front desk.” He reaches out a big hand to touch my forehead briefly with his knuckles. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”
I squirm uncomfortably under my sheets, suddenly feeling even hotter under his gaze. God, how could I have forgotten how gorgeous this man is in two days? Oh, right, a hundred-and-three-degree fever might have had something to do with it. I reach up to smooth back my hair, which is still tied in a bedraggled knot, frizzy tendrils sticking out from my temples and around my neck.
“Stop,” Nico says, pressing my hand back down. “You’re beautiful.”
Behind him, Quinn’s expression softens at his words before she re-hardens her sharp features. She is really determined to dislike Nico. But it’s difficult to hate a guy who’s taking the time to visit a girl on her sickbed.
“How did you get up here?” I ask. Visitors have to be signed in by residents of the building; otherwise they aren’t even allowed in the front doors of the building.
“He called me,” Quinn says behind him, clearly disapproving. “About thirty times until I finally agreed to go down there. How did you get my number anyway, you wily bastard? Drug the security guard?”
Nico smirks over his shoulder at her. “I asked around until I found someone who knew you. You poor coll
ege kids’ll do anything for twenty bucks. Some blonde girl was very helpful.”
“I’ll bet it was Darla,” Quinn says as she lies back on her pillow to ruminate. “That bitch has been trying to stick it to me since first semester last year, when her boyfriend hit on me at a party.”
I have to smile at the idea of Nico stalking the kids entering and leaving Lafayette until he met someone in the building—which probably houses about two thousand students—who knew me and my roommates and who would give one of our numbers to a complete stranger. No doubt his charm helped tremendously.
He looks back at me and flashes that smile I just can’t resist, and it’s then I recall why I left Hoboken to begin with. He’s leaving. There’s nothing I can do about it. And there’s no way I can avoid getting hurt if I keep seeing him until it happens. Underneath the fever, the sore throat, the headache, my heart breaks all over again.
“Well, as you can see, I’m sick but on the mend,” I say a little too curtly. “I’m tough. I’ll be better soon.”
I lie back down on my pillow and turn my head away from him as if I want to go back to sleep. Behind him, Quinn looks on with concern.
“Listen, Layla,” Nico says. “I don’t want to keep you from getting better. I just wanted to say hi, and—” He cuts himself off, suddenly aware of Quinn’s imperious stare behind him. He turns around to face her. “Uh, Quinn? Do you think I could have a second alone with your roommate?”
Quinn doesn’t answer, just looks at me for a reply.
I nod. “It’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
She stares back at Nico purposefully and stands up, brushing imaginary creases out of her jeans. “Okay, Casanova, you get your way. But I’m warning you—you make her cry again, and I’ll cut your balls off and serve them to the pigeons for breakfast.”
She strides out of the room without waiting for a response, leaving Nico and me watching the door close with our mouths hanging open. I’m the first one to laugh, and Nico looks back at me with a sheepish smile.
“You know, I think she’d really do it.”
We share a laugh that almost immediately gives way to awkward silence. Things aren’t easy between us anymore. They’re weird, I’m weak, and I want him to go.
“Soooo…” I say. “I’m kind of tired, you know.”
“I know, I’m sorry,” he says. “I just…I didn’t have the time to tell you this before you left K.C.’s, but listen. I might stay. It’s a long shot, but I sent in another application to the fire department. So, you know, maybe three’s a charm, right?”
He looks so hopeful as he says it, his eyes shining, obviously willing me to smile and be hopeful with him. And I can’t lie—some small flicker of hope does alight inside me. But he knows and I know that that same application has already been turned down twice already, and he’s already committed to the job in LA My head still feels cloudy, and I don’t know what to think.
I snuggle farther into my sheets. Is he expecting me to invite him into my bed with open arms for this? Hope. What does that even mean?
My head hurts so much.
“I can’t really think about all of this right now,” I tell him, effecting a yawn and closing my eyes a few times. It’s not an act—I’m incredibly tired.
Disappointment plays over Nico’s dark features, but he just gives me a smile and a nod.
“Sure, baby,” he says, standing up. “I’ll see you at work, okay? Feel better, beautiful.”
“Mmm,” I answer, barely cognizant of the fact that he is leaving as I fall headlong back into another feverish dream.
I was so tired I forgot to tell him not to call me “baby” anymore.
Chapter Twenty
Nico
The blare of my alarm clock wakes me at nine a.m. on Wednesday, and my head is fucking pounding with it. It took everything I had to walk away from Layla when she was lying there, weak and sick. She looked like a ghost. The most beautiful ghost I ever saw in my life, but a ghost of her usual vivacious self.
Normally I’d be running. I have too many things on my plate, too many people who depend on me. I can’t afford to get sick. But every bone in my body was telling me to stay and take care of her. Take her back to Hoboken where she can have a real bed to lay on, fuck pad or not. Take the next day or the week off and just help her get better.
But she didn’t want me there—that much was obvious. And despite the fact that she’s a five-foot-two white girl, Quinn kind of scares me.
So I left. Since I couldn’t really handle going back to my place with Maggie and her kid, and the idea of sitting around K.C.’s place smelling Layla on my sheets made me feel fuckin’ miserable, I called Flaco and met up with him at the Traveler for one or eight beers.
And now I am fuckin’ paying for it.
God, I hope she’s better.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand next to my futon. I clap my hand on it and open it up without checking who it’s from.
“Yeah?”
“Papito Nico?”
I sit up straight at the sound of my mother’s voice. She’s not usually one to call. She doesn’t even have a cell phone, and the phone in her apartment is in the kitchen, rather than a decent place to sit and chat.
“Sí, Mamá, que pasa?” I answer, and she continues to rattle on in Spanish.
“Did you forget?” she asks me, her voice insistent. “Did you forget about the Mass this morning?”
“Did I forget about...” I rub my forehead viciously, wondering what the fuck she’s talking about. I usually take my mother to Mass on Sundays, not Wednesdays.
“It’s Ash Wednesday, Nico. You were supposed to be here thirty minutes ago to take me to the church. Now Gabe is missing his classes this morning to go.”
Ah, shit. That’s right. I was supposed to bring Ma to Mass this morning and have a bunch of dirt smeared on my head so she can believe I’m a good Catholic. I’m not. The only time I go to church is with my mother, and I fight the entire time not to fall asleep. I’m not even sure if I believe in God anymore, not when I look around and see the shit deal he gives people who don’t deserve it.
But if it helps my mother to think I’m a believer, I don’t mind kneeling with her once a week to keep her happy. And she won’t go anywhere these days without one of us with her.
“So?” she’s saying. “You will go?”
“Huh? What?” I rub my head again. Fuck, I do not like being this hungover during the week.
“Wake up, Nico! I said church. I want to see that you got your ashes today, okay?”
I grumble to myself. It’s too late to get to a morning Mass, and standing in line with thousands of other New Yorkers is not really how I want to spend my lunch break. But my mother is waiting, and she will seriously wait all day until I stop by her apartment to show her my dirty forehead.
I sigh. “Yeah, Ma, I’ll go. And then I’ll come by after work, okay?”
I can pretty much hear her smiling over the phone.
“Bueno,” she replies. “Okay.”
Four hours, a couple of Advil, and some cold Chinese food later, I’m taking an early lunch just off Park while Flaco gets ahead on our route. My head isn’t feeling as awful anymore, and I keep looking around for Layla as I approach St. Andrew’s, which is just a few blocks from her office. I hope she’s feeling better. I hope she’s good enough to get back to work, where, even if I can’t talk to her around her boss, at least I can flirt with her a little behind Karen’s back.
I can respect that she doesn’t want to see me anymore. But I don’t want her to hate me. I don’t think I could handle a world where Layla Barros hates me.
The good thing about being Catholic in New York: there’s a church a few blocks from everywhere. I read somewhere that the Catholic Church is the largest landowner in New York City, and I don’t doubt it.
It’s not a process I like. I’m not a good Catholic—I ask too many damn questions. Every time the priest declares some kind of truth supposedly rooted i
n scripture, I always want to raise my hand and ask how he really knows about heaven and hell, about mortal sins, and on and on. How can anyone really know? And what’s wrong with a little ignorance anyway? Maybe the world would be a better place if sometimes people just said “I don’t fuckin’ know” instead of insisting that they do all the time.
Or maybe it’s just guilt that keeps me away from the Church. I haven’t always been a good man. I try to do the right thing now, but there was a long time, especially when I was younger, when I did wrong without thinking twice. Too much stealing, too much fighting. When it feels like the whole world has more than you do for no real reason, it’s easy to justify a lot to yourself: I’ll do what it takes to survive. For fifteen-year-old me, that meant too many nicked bags of chips at the bodegas, too many dime bags sold at the school yard, too many fights at the basketball courts or down by the river.
This priest isn’t much of a public speaker, so I spend most of the short Mass thinking about Layla and the conversation I had with K.C. last night after I got back from the bar. One thought keeps coming back to me. It’s better she knows now. Not just about my move to California to get away from this life, but about my past too. Because no matter how hard I try to rise above it, in New York, I’ll always be just another bad egg from the barrio. I’ll always be a bad idea.
Except to her, this little thought keeps saying in the back of my mind. And, apparently, K.C.
“Why didn’t you just tell her the truth?” K.C. asked me last night when I got back from the bar. “Tell her what you’re thinking, or just move the fuck on.”
Apparently, Flaco texted him while we were out, told him I wouldn’t shut up about Layla. I don’t even remember. I had too many beers trying to forget her helpless face. They didn’t work.
So K.C. called me, half-drunk himself where he was out at another hot party in LA Another party, another room full of actresses and models. But he still calls me—that’s friendship.
Bad Idea- The Complete Collection Page 18