I frown. I’ve read Invisible Man. I’ve read Kate Chopin. Most of my life I’ve barely considered myself Latina because other than a few oblique references to my “exotic” black hair or curvy physique, I mostly “present” or “pass,” as my professor would call it, like I’m white. I checked the Latino/Hispanic boxes on my college applications mostly to be considered for scholarships and affirmative action, not because I really thought of myself a part of that category.
Until now. Still, I’m not sure that I agree with Nico about everything. Identity isn’t just skin-deep, and it’s not something I could choose like a mask either because I have light skin. It’s hard to claim a trauma I’ve never personally experienced. Not in the ways that Nico, his sisters, or even my father surely have. But I’m not just written through with my mother’s privilege either, totally oblivious to these issues because I don’t experience them at all.
I really don’t know. But the whole question does make me understand more why my father works so hard to distance himself from people of color. I just wish he had shared those hardships with me instead of pushing me away. Maybe we could have borne them together.
I shake my head. “Tell me about your test,” I pivot. “I’m so excited for you.”
Nico brightens, clearly happy to change the subject. I don’t blame him. It’s complicated––maybe too complicated for an afternoon still. If he was paler, I’d be able to see him blush, but Nico just shoves his hands in his pockets and pushes a nonexistent rock aside with his toe.
“Um, yeah,” he said. “It’s no big deal. It just sounded like...” he sighs, like he’s trying to decide whether to tell me something. “I just don’t want to do the same old shit for the rest of my life. You know what I figured out this summer? That I fuckin’ hate nightclubs. I hate everyone there except K.C. I hate the people. I hate the music. I just want to do something I actually like. And saving lives sounds pretty damn good.” He shakes his head and runs a hand over his beanie. “I don’t know. I’m not much of a student. I’m not smart like you, baby.”
I don’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he looks at me, his eyes big and nervous.
“What?” he asks. “You think it’s a bad idea?”
His face is full of doubt, and I hate it. I want him to see himself like I see him. I want him to see how smart he is, how kind, how full of joy, full of so much to offer the world. This is why we need each other in our lives. Nico buoys me, makes me think in ways no one else does. Maybe I can do the same for him.
“I am so fucking proud of you,” I tell him solemnly. “You are super smart—way smarter than me. And I think it is awesome you are doing this. You’ll kick ass if you give it your best. I know you will.”
Slowly, as my words sink in, warmth flows into the endless black of his eyes. I press a gentle kiss to his full lips, but his arms snake around my back, and he holds me close as he turns the kiss into something much more intoxicating. When he lets me go, his face is a curious mix of desire and gratitude. He blows out a long breath.
“Thanks, baby,” he says. “I needed that.”
We get up and continue walking, circling back down through the Flatiron District and back to the Village. It’s a good place to walk. The affluent neighborhood is full of quiet, brownstone-lined streets with trees that still have the last of their fall foliage. Eventually the conversation rolls around to our personal lives. Nico keeps looking around as we pass other men, and he stiffens a little whenever someone with glasses walks by.
“So, your new man,” he says, like it’s totally normal that he’s bringing this up after we just had sex and spent a good part of the afternoon together. “What’s he like?”
I give him a funny look. “Well, like I said, he’s not my man. We hang out sometimes. Second of all, do you really want to hear about this?”
Nico’s face darkens. “No,” he admits. “But I probably better. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
“Just...in case,” he says cryptically. He presses a kiss to the back of my hand and gives me a smile that’s tinged with pain. “Look. I’m not going to pretend I like it. But...it is what it is. And I need you in my life, Layla, which means I need to hear about what’s going on in yours. You’re so beautiful...” He hooks my chin with a finger. “Of course you’re gonna have a boyfriend. I’m honestly surprised this joker hasn’t tried to lock that down yet.”
I sigh. Nico shrugs.
“So, who’s the bum?” he jokes.
I roll my eyes. “He’s Argentinian. A student at City College.”
Nico perks up. “Yeah? I wonder if Gabe knows him. What’s his name?”
I narrow my eyes. “Giancarlo. Why would Gabe know him?”
Did Gabe tell him about seeing me uptown that one time? Nico hasn’t said anything about it, but you never know...
Nico gives me the biggest, fakest, widest-eyed look I’ve ever seen. “Maybe they have a class together or something. Maybe they can be friends. We could invite him to Thanksgiving too. You, me, my crazy family, and your new boyfriend.”
“Only if we invite Jessie.”
We’re both laughing, and it feels good to joke about this, even if the idea of each other being with someone else makes both of us kind of sick.
“Okay, okay,” Nico says after a bit. “Maybe not. I’m not sure I could sit across from Jack in the Box—”
“Giancarlo,” I correct him.
“What’d you say? Evita?”
“Stop.” I nudge him in the shoulder, but I can’t help but laugh a little.
“Whatever. El Tango Shithead.” Nico grins. “You know I’m never gonna like anyone you go out with, baby. Nobody’s good enough for my NYU.”
My smile falls, but before I can say anything, Nico slings a heavy arm around my shoulder and lays a thick kiss on my temple.
“What next?” he asks.
I shrug. “I need to study some more this evening. Boring, I know.”
He immediately turns us back in the direction of the dorms. But I’m surprised to find another silly grin on his face.
“What?” I ask as he steers us back down Broadway.
“You need to study?” he repeats. “Me too.”
I never realized how much fun that sentence could be before now.
Chapter Twelve
Layla
On Thursday afternoon, I’m standing nervously on a corner in Hell’s Kitchen. For the rest of the week, Nico and I haven’t been able to see each other as much as we wanted. He was busy with family stuff on Tuesday and Wednesday while I finished a few midterm papers on top of my normal coursework. We were able to grab dinner together (okay, and a bit more than that in my room), but that’s about it.
My roommates all left for their various holiday destinations last night, and Nico is staying with me tonight before he goes back to LA in the morning. After dropping his stuff off at my dorm, we left for Thanksgiving dinner. At his mother’s place.
Even in the cold, his palm is a little sweaty as he holds my hand tightly. He’s nervous too.
“Have you ever brought a girl home with you before?” I wonder as we walk down Forty-Ninth Street. Nico stops in front of an ordinary brick apartment building.
I’ve heard about this place a few times. You wouldn’t know by looking at it that it’s breaking down from the ground up because the landlord doesn’t bother to do any maintenance, forcing the residents to fix their own broken pipes or electrical problems...or not. Nico doesn’t talk much about his childhood, but I know it was hard. I know that his mother moved here when she was young and raised her kids, four of them from three different fathers, in a tiny apartment in an expensive city. I can imagine how hard it was for a single working mother to keep track of her kids in a city like this. There’s a reason why Nico got into enough trouble as a teenager to land himself in a detention center.
He squeezes my hand again.
“You’re the first,” he admits as he looks at the building.
> “Good thing we’re just friends, then.”
For that, I get a strange look, something crossed between confusion and irritation.
“Yeah,” he says finally. “Good thing.”
I haven’t been around this part of the city much. Times Square is only a few blocks east, but once you cross Eighth Avenue, it’s a completely different world. Hell’s Kitchen is a neighborhood that’s changing fast. The street we’re on is an even mix of fancy new restaurants and mom-and-pop shops that you know have been there forever. A tapas bar next to a barbershop. A cigar store next to a boutique. Across the street from Nico’s building looms the red-brick walls of the local church, along with a fenced parish school.
“Did you go there?” I ask, nodding at the playground equipment locked on a blacktop behind a chain-link fence.
Nico follows my gaze and shakes his head. “Private school? Oh no, we couldn’t afford that, NYU. My school was about six blocks from here.”
Oh. Of course. I want to smack myself for even asking.
“We’d go to church there, though,” he says, nodding at a sign for a Spanish Mass posted next to the church doors. “Every damn Sunday.” He winks at me. “You better be careful. If my mother likes you enough, she’ll start dragging you with her.”
I smile. Is it weird that doesn’t sound so terrible? I’m no fan of Mass, but I spent enough time kneeling with my parents at St. Anne’s at home that the familiarity sounds...nice. Maybe even nicer if Nico were with me.
“Don’t forget,” Nico says as he leads me up the steps of his building. “Every bite on your plate.”
“Got it. You’ll have to roll me out of here.” I bare my teeth in a silly grin.
That finally earns me a smile. Nico smacks a loud kiss on my cheek and nuzzles me. “Come on, baby. Let’s go eat.”
The apartment is at the top of a third flight of narrow stairs, and the building has no elevator. It’s not nice by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not as bad as I thought, considering the way he’s referred to it. The white walls are dingy, sure, littered with scrapes and stains, and the bottom floor bears more than a few graffiti tags, but it’s not like the walls are literally coming down around us or anything.
Even though it’s not as loud as the street, the building is far from quiet. Music vibrates from several doors we pass, and beyond one comes the sound of shouting voices. The halls are narrow, and privately I wonder if Nico’s mother, whom he said has had some back problems, has trouble walking up and down these stairs every day. Managing them with four squirrelly kids...eesh.
We stop at an unassuming door, and with another shy smile, Nico unlocks it.
Despite only having six or seven people in it, the apartment feels packed. The front door opens directly into a room that’s maybe four hundred square feet. In one corner, an open door peeks into what I assume is the bedroom; through another clamors the sounds of pots and pans.
This is it: the place where Nico became Nico. The furniture has been pushed to the walls to make room for two card tables that take up most of the center, covered in a white lace tablecloth and surrounded by folding chairs. There’s barely enough space to fit the setup in front of a faded orange couch, which is covered with plastic. The walls, which look like they haven’t been painted in a long time, are littered with posters and paraphernalia: postcards of saints and other Catholic iconography, a few framed, yellowing photos of what looks like Nico and his siblings when they were kids, an ornate, bronze-framed mirror above the sofa. An open closet to my right reveals a stowed Murphy bed and some shelves covered by thin curtains.
Even my dorm room, which I share with Quinn, is clearly split between the two of us. She has her half, which she decorates the way she wants, and I do the same with mine. Things are separate. Neat. This room is completely different. I don’t know this family, but I can tell that all of them are scattered throughout the small space. I doubt that anyone but Gabe is a J. Lo fan, just like I’m pretty sure that a poster of an unfamiliar male singer on the opposite wall probably belongs to one of his sisters. I’m guessing that the signed Yankees baseball in the tiny curio shelf by the door belongs to Nico. This apartment isn’t just his mother’s—it belongs to everyone who was raised here.
“Tío!” A loud shriek erupts through the chatter, and a tiny, black-haired girl shoots out from under the table, smack into Nico’s legs, which she proceeds to climb like a tree.
Laughing, Nico helps her into his arms and peppers her face with kisses until she falls apart laughing.
“Stop!” she cries, giggling helplessly. “Keep going! Stop! Keep going!”
With one last smack on her cheek, Nico turns the little girl toward me. They look alike. She has his same latte-colored skin and sparkling black eyes. He gazes at her with obvious adoration.
“Mamita,” he addresses her, “this is my friend, Layla. Layla, this is Allie, my niece. She’s my sister Maggie’s daughter.” Looking up, he scans the room for Maggie, who raises her hand from the couch. Her face is hard, but it softens a little as she looks at her daughter.
I wave back shyly, then turn to Allie. “Encantada,” I say to her.
Her entire tiny face grins, and she addresses her uncle. “Ella habla español?”
I can barely understand her, but Nico turns to me with a half-grin that brings out one of his dimples. “You speak Spanish now, baby?”
I flush. “Um, a little. I’m trying to learn.”
The half-grin turns to a full one, both dimples puckering his cheeks, and I blush. Across the room, Maggie’s eyebrows pop up. Gabe stands up from his seat at the table and sidles around to us.
“Hey, NYU,” he greets me with the same nickname his brother sometimes uses. He looks at me knowingly. I wonder again if he’s said anything about our awkward meeting.
He kisses me lightly on both cheeks, and I relax into the familiar gesture. My mom’s family never does this—they barely touch anyone—but my dad’s family does. When I visited them a few years ago, I thought I’d never get all the lipstick off my cheeks. Then again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
I think of my dad then, and wonder where he is right now. What he’s doing. If he’s happy now that he’s home.
Nico jokes a little more with Allie before he puts her down and pulls out a chair for me at one of the tables.
“You want a drink, baby?” he asks, holding up the paper bag of beverages he brought.
I shake my head. “I want to give your mother the appetizers I picked up. Also, I need to use the restroom.”
Nico gives me a funny look and points at the kitchen. “Just through there.”
I walk into the kitchen, where two women who could be sisters are arguing in Spanish as they lean over a sauce pan full of rice and a cooked half-turkey. They both are short and slight, barely clearing five feet tall, and with identically pulled-back hair that flies out around their temples. The younger, whom I’m guessing is Selena, Nico’s youngest sister, speaks in rapid, irritable Spanish with the other, waving around her long, painted fingernails and making the costume earrings that hang almost to her neck swing wildly. The older woman, obviously Nico’s mother, listens stolidly, occasionally clicking her tongue and shaking her head at her daughter’s opinions.
They silence immediately when I walk in.
“Hello-hola,” I venture, holding out a hand. “Um, yo soy Layla. Un amigo de Nico.”
“It’s una amiga. You’re a girl,” Selena says as she shakes my hand. “And I speak English.”
I flush. “Oh, um, I know. Nico just told me that your mom doesn’t.” This is weird. I don’t like talking about the woman as if she’s not right there.
Selena smirks. “She can speak a little. And she understands everything, so you don’t have to worry.”
I flush. “Oh. Right. Okay.”
I turn to Nico’s mother and hold out my hand. She looks at it for a moment, then shakes it lightly, her hand barely moving.
“Carmen,” she says, continu
ing quietly in heavily accented English. “Nice to meet you.”
I nod shyly and hold out the food I brought. I am Cheryl Barros’s daughter; I know better than to visit someone’s house empty-handed.
Carmen accepts the bag and pulls out the selection of French cheese and baguettes that cost me about half of my budget for the week. I didn’t know what to bring, so I just bought the kinds of things my mother would. Carmen takes out a Saran-wrapped lump of bleu, then looks at Selena and says something in Spanish that I can’t understand.
Selena examines it. “It’s cheese, Mami. The good kind.” She looks at me, and there’s a little kindness in her brown eyes.
“Oh. Thank you,” Carmen says to me. She holds up the cheese, and then hands it and the bag to her daughter, who moves around the tiny kitchen looking for a plate.
“Of course,” I say. “Thanks for having me.”
We stand awkwardly until I remember the other reason I came in.
“Um, could you tell me where the bathroom is?” I ask quietly as I look around and see nothing like it. “El baño?”
Both women look at me strangely, echoing that same expression I just got from Nico. Okay, I know my Spanish is bad, but is it really that bad?
“Over there,” Selena says, pointing to the corner.
I follow her gesture and immediately realize why I missed it. The door to the “bathroom” looks like a cabinet, a flimsy stall made of painted plywood that surrounds a toilet installed in the middle of the kitchen. No sink, unless you count the one in the kitchen. A door that would only provide privacy if you’re sitting down. That’s it.
I swallow and meet both Carmen and Selena’s faces straight on. I know then what they’re expecting—what they’ve all been expecting since I walked in. I’m the rich white girl, someone who should think she’s too good for this place, for them.
Bad Idea- The Complete Collection Page 47