He lifts and drops his hands: Felice notes the way his shoulders flare behind his shirt. “I could take you to the gym . . .”
She presses her lips together skeptically and kicks off on her board again. “Ever you say, Chief.” They pass a bank of police cars parked half on the curb. Cops standing around in tight black uniforms, hands on their hips, narrowly eyeing Emerson and Felice. Once they’re well down the block, she tosses her head so her hair flips across her back. “No, fuck the gym. You strong guys supposedly drag anchors and crap around, right? Can’t you, like, break a branch in half with your bare hands or something?”
“Depends on the branch.”
“Okay.” She jumps off her board abruptly and stomps the end, flipping it into her hand. “So go pick up that car over there, how about?” She gestures to a Hummer that looks like it’s been dipped in black lacquer.
“That car? It weighs like five tons,” Emerson says. “Plus it’ll totally have a car alarm.” He gazes at her, her haughty chin. “Wait.” He heads toward the line of parallel parked cars and picks a rusting lime-green Impala convertible. “All right,” he says grimly. He stands in front of the car, rubs his hands together, huffing a little as if hyperventilating, and drops into a squat. “All right, all right,” he mutters.
Felice watches in silence as Emerson bends and the big muscles in his back fan out, and she sees—even before he’s fully gripped the car—that he really can do it, and then he’s lifting the front end of the car, one, two feet off the ground, up, holding it in place, then he or the car is making a deep, shuddering moan, lowering quickly. He lets go and the car falls, its frame bouncing with a crash. He turns, his face red. “Okay?” Then, gasping, “That—right there—called a power clean.”
Felice wasn’t aware of her hand drifting to her mouth, a flash of adrenaline.
He recovers sufficiently to smile, his face red. “You see that? Now you know. If that car there ran over you, I could save you. Nobody else could do that.”
Felice thinks of saying, Yeah, as long as it wasn’t a Hummer. Instead she nods. “Yeah, I guess.”
HE LIKES TO TALK this Emerson, unlike pretty much any boy she’s ever met. The punks and skinheads Emerson hangs out with get drunk and loud, their shouting and cursing like smashing windows. Emerson talks like a boy who’s been stranded in his thoughts—coherent yet odd, twisted into abstract designs.
“Just, the way I look at it is I think the mind is like a muscle, too,” he’s saying, ducking under the crimson spray of a bottlebrush tree. They circle an elderly couple, shuffling, facing the ground, hand in hand. “You just got to train it—like any other part of your body. I mean, like, you have to, if you ever want the other muscles to respond.”
“You mean, like—” Felice scowls at the sidewalk. Somehow Emerson got her to get off her board and go on foot—her least favorite form of locomotion. She won’t let him carry her board. “Like, your actual brain is a muscle? Can you move it?”
Emerson stops on the sidewalk, then starts again. “I like that. I don’t know the answer, but I like the idea of it. Moving your brain. But no, I mean, more like, the mind, consciousness, thought.”
“How could thoughts be a muscle?”
He slides his hands into his pockets. “I know, but they are. And also, your muscles are a mind. Muscles feel stuff and think stuff and sense, all of that, and they, like communicate with the main mind and tell it stuff. So everything in you, every part of you is mind in the end.”
“And your mind is a muscle,” she repeats in a low inflection, not quite a question.
“That’s right.”
She glances uncertainly at Emerson’s smiling, preoccupied profile. Felice can’t tell if he’s a little bit scary and mental, or maybe a lot smarter than she’d thought. Back at the House, she’d seen him roaring with his stupid friends, ripping open beers and smashing cans on his head. “Where do you get this crap?” She is carefully dismissive.
He shrugs. “Everywhere. All that lifting gives you time to think about how things work. That’s when I do my best thinking. Picking up heavy stuff and putting it back down again? After a while it’s boring.”
Felice and Emerson enter the busier commercial area of South Beach: passing rows of pastel apartment buildings, hotels like old toys, glimpses of azure ocean floating in the distance, the sidewalk filled with tourists. Doddering elderly, like shipwreck survivors. “So . . . so,” Felice fumbles to redirect things, unwilling to try to keep up with Emerson in his mind terrain. “. . . So, if you’re thinking about all this smart crap, then why do you hang around with a bunch of skinhead losers?”
The hand returns to the top of his head. “Skinheads?”
“Duh, like Peckham, Earl, Moe,” she goes on in a pitiless, dry voice, surprised that she even cares. “Axe, Derek . . .”
Emerson frowns. “Naah. Skinheads are a bunch of jackasses—I’m not into that.”
Her laugh is bright. “Well duh that’s kind of exactly what you look like with your head all shaved—those guys in their stupid wife-beaters and tats and piercings and shit. Like a bunch of Hitler Youth assholes.”
He laughs too. “Heil. Right, heil.”
“You do!”
“Yeah, Heil Hitler, man,” he whoops. Two sunburnt tourists slide their eyes in his direction as they pass; one old woman in a floral top and skirt gives him a bright, venomous stare, her face hard as a walnut. “Whoa!” Emerson sputters.
Felice cringes. She’d thought the old woman was going to spit at them. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, man?” she snaps.
He quiets then, his smile diminished, and shrugs.
“I don’t know if you’re stupid or crazy or whatever you are.”
“Both maybe. I’m whatever,” he says lightly, but his head is ducked.
“Such stupid shit. Stupid fucking-ass thing to say. What are you, twelve years old?”
He doesn’t say anything. She wonders then if she should be more cautious: something comes back to her—something about Emerson being “away.” It occurs to Felice that Emerson was frequently absent from the Green House. Whenever he reappeared, the other skinheads made remarks about him escaping, escaping that place.
They cross the wide busy mess of Seventeenth Street, scrolls of driveways and entrances, pass girls in platform espadrilles, baby doll shirts, shirtless boys with cargo shorts like Emerson’s hanging loose around their hips; a couple pushing toddlers in a wide stroller; two ladies with big, ridged breast implants, Botox-sleek foreheads. Felice studies the women critically as they approach—one looks like she’s had a face-lift, a faintly demonic rise to the outer corners of the eyebrows; both of them are wearing halters and kick-pleat miniskirts; one has a quilted Chanel purse on a chain sinking into her shoulder. They cast intent glances at Felice as they pass and Felice looks away. Youth beats money.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Emerson says as they pass another clutch of tourists; a squat boy goes by on a skateboard wearing a T-shirt that says Lost in Margaritaville and nods at Felice, noticing her board. “Really. I’m not a skinhead. I’m not like that. I’m not a Hitler-guy or anything. I guess some of those guys might be, but they’re morons. I was just goofing around.” His voice lowers. “Stupid.”
“Fine,” Felice pulls the wind-pasted hair from her face. “Get a grip.”
They cross Lincoln Road where Felice recalls—swift drop—she’s supposed to meet her mother today. Fuck. Felice had called her, hadn’t she? What time was that supposed to happen? Noon? She tries to make out the time on a neon clock in one of the shopwindows, but it’s in the shape of a flamingo, impossible to read. They cross Sixteenth and almost get hit by a stretch jeep pulling into Lowe’s; a gang of teenyboppers standing in a Bentley convertible shriek at them, their voices like shredded ribbons. “I so hate this place,” Emerson says.
“It’s fun,” Felice says defensively. She shields her eyes, then relents: “It’s more fun if you don’t live here.”
He glances a
t her. “Yeah.”
They head back to the smooth brick boardwalk, cutting between hotels, the white cabanas and silver bellhop carts, past cheap jewelry vendors, soap bubbles spiriting over the walkway, to their right, sprinklings of salsa music, oiled bodies on massage tables. Prisms hang in a silvery mist from the hotel fountains. To their left, walls of jasmine and sea grape trees, the beach perimeter plumed and swaying with sawgrass and sea oats. They turn into the Fifteenth Street entrance, set off by keystone pillars, white ropes protecting the sparse patches of sea grass. In the distance, beyond the royal palms, blue umbrellas and awnings flap in the breeze; the sand is already scorching. She can feel it kicking up under her flip-flops. There are kids sprawled on towels all over the sand, listening to radios, drinking beer; a Frisbee arcs through the pale blue.
Turning north toward the Cove, they run into Reynaldo and Berry. They’re lying in a drifting spot of shade under a stand of palms, stretched out on smuggled hotel beach towels, a gold interlocked DH embroidered on the edge. Both of them are so diminutive, with the same blue-black eyes, they look like brother and sister. Sometimes they get hired to do gigs together—they did a series of TV commercials in Spanish for a local car dealer and Reynaldo had to teach Berry how to pronounce everything so she sounded like an authentic chica, not a Jewish girl from Rutherford. They probably spent most of the night there after the beach patrol slacked off. Berry gazes at them languidly, her hair spilling past her shoulders to her elbows. Scents of coconut and apricot drift over from one of the hotel spas. She props herself up on the towel, knobby legs glistening with oil. “Babe,” she says, “what’s going on?”
Reynaldo is yawning hugely; he shakes back his long black hair, catches it up in one hand, finger-combing. “Felix, you should’ve gone with us last night. You’ll never believe—we went to Tantra. Guess who was there. Calvin Klein. He looks like he’s made out of wax. Didn’t he?” He looks at Berry, who lies back on the towel and nods. “Just a teeny white man made of wax. He had slave boys with him. He took us to the Raleigh, then he wanted to go on his yucky boat.” He gives a horrified shudder. “Eugghh!”
Berry smiles again, eyes closed. “I don’t mind boats.”
“I do.” Reynaldo finally seems to notice Emerson. He looks at Felice. “Miss Kitty Cat, what’s going on? Where’d you get this big nasty thing?”
Emerson stares over Reynaldo’s head.
“That’s not nice,” Berry says placidly.
“I’m not a nice boy. I don’t care.”
Felice and Berry are narrow enough to share the board and Reynaldo and Emerson take the towels. Reynaldo produces a thick, half-smoked joint from his pocket, along with a silver lighter. He flicks it open and lights the joint, dragging delicately, then hands it to Felice. She tokes the earthy, grassy smoke, looks up through her exhale to watch a series of tourists filter onto the beach holding Starbucks cups like ritual offerings. A row of frat boys with beat-up surfboards. A young woman with a fat pug on a studded leash. The pug genuflects in the beach grass while the girl checks her cell phone: they stroll away, leaving the glistening droppings. Four girls come down the walkway as far as the line of sand, then stop. They are groomed and painted, hair ironed to surgical linearity, brows waxed clean. Not especially pretty, just beautifully kept. College girls, Felice thinks scornfully. She gazes after them.
Emerson refuses the joint, saying that he’s in training—he has to keep his mind clear—and Reynaldo starts to mock him again for being Mr. Muscle, but Berry and Felice both tell him to shut up. The pot tastes rancid and she doesn’t like the burn on the back of her throat. “No more.” She waves it away.
“Oh, bullshit, darling,” Reynaldo says. “That’ll be the day.” He turns away from her and takes another drag. Reynaldo’s neck and shoulders have a silky drape, his skin—like Berry’s—is tanned almond-dark and even in this light it’s hard to discern the coils of a mahogany-colored serpent that spirals over the upper quadrant of his chest, down the bicep, to the crook of an elbow. He and Berry have posed for Tattoo and Skin Art magazines, done party ads for local clubs, and worked as party-fillers. Felice thinks they’ve hired themselves out for other purposes at these events (they’re always broke, cadging drugs and drinks), but if she doesn’t ask, she doesn’t have to know. “Little Miss Innocent,” the outdoor kids call her. Berry smiles at her again, her mouth long, angular, and dimpled. “They’re doing go-sees for V.S. today over on Washington. You wanna go?”
“Like I’ve got the boobs for that.” Felice crosses her arms.
“Shut up. Like you never heard of airbrush,” Reynaldo says.
They seem to live on virtually nothing, yet Berry and Reynaldo are the most pretty and stylish of all the outdoor kids. Keep your little ear to the big ground, Reynaldo always tells her. They’re the ones Felice has admired, the ones she likes to be near. After Felice ran away, she tried to look older, more like a model. Like she belonged there. Out on the beach or in the clubs, it was all models and tourists. The kids who looked scared, their skinny shoulders tucked up, eyes searching, they were the ones who ended up with “boyfriends,” older guys who always needed money. At first Felice wore makeup and was careful with her hair and clothing. But she quickly realized that the outdoor kids saw prettiness as a kind of weakness—just the opposite of the way it was in school. In the rougher places like the Green House, her prettiness seemed excessive: she noticed kids watching her like she had cash spilling out of her pockets. They called her “Face” or “Girlface,” and stole her skateboard and clothes; one night some older girls pushed her down in a church parking lot, pulling her hair and tearing at her clothes until Felice screamed, swung back with all her might, kicking and shoving, slapping one girl across the eye and cheekbone, knocking the other one to the ground, breaking her nose.
Reynaldo and Berry showed her how to use her looks without attracting too much attention. The trick was to wear stovepipe jeans and T-shirts, nothing fancy or frilly, no jewelry, high heels, or purses. Black was best. “It’s the West Coast thing.” Berry showed off a chunky pair of black platforms. “It’s Seattle.”
Now Emerson sits with his feet gathered up, arms around his knees; neither he nor Reynaldo has anything to say to each other. After a few minutes, Emerson stands, whacks the sand off the back of his shorts and his palms. “I better get a move on.”
Who says that? Felice thinks—he sounds like a dad.
Reynaldo says something over his shoulder to Berry, possibly, “Nasty redneck.” Berry laughs, her mild, musical chuckle, her eyes filmed. Felice glances at Berry and there’s a bad moment where she wonders—as she has lately—if Berry and Reynaldo are all that wonderful. She gets to her feet.
“Where you going, Kitty?” Reynaldo asks, shielding his eyes with the flat of his palm. “That boy’s too ugly for you.”
“Don’t go, Felix,” Berry says. “Why?”
Emerson is already trudging away, head lowered. Felice hesitates, she looks past him, down the beach: tourists mill over the sand, the air sepia-toned: a sense of heat and distance cast over everything. This is the end place—where people go to get erased. “I don’t think there’s any work coming today,” Felice says.
“Good. Thank God.” Berry lets her head droop back against the towel. She closes her eyes and looks so lifeless that Felice just grabs her board and goes after Emerson.
FELICE AND EMERSON walk along the surf. Emerson seems to understand that her presence at his side at this moment is something of a miracle, and he must not say a word against Reynaldo or Berry. Her board gets heavy after a while, so she hands it to him.
They pass topless girls in thongs, men in slacks and lace-up shoes, Jax with his pet iguana and straw hat; old guys covered in silvery flat chest and back hair sitting in lawn chairs with laptops or shouting into cells, trying to be heard above the surf. Just a few boys with dark, Caribbean faces and glassy hair are out in the water. The lifeguards drowse in their wooden shelters. Most people slumber or stare, beache
d on the sand under slices of umbrella shade—there’s hardly anyone near the waterline—and Felice plods through the wet, compacted sand in a state of relative contentment: it’s been ages since she’s touched the water. Occasionally Emerson will pick up and dispose of an empty coffee cup, broken comb, broken sunglasses—detritus swept in from cruise ships or left behind by sunbathers. Felice is barely able to contain her impatience with this pointless activity—appalled at the grossness of touching a sodden diaper.
They cut up the beach to a food stand. Emerson tells her to get anything—really. By now, her hunger pain has vaporized—as often happens, so she just orders a Diet Coke. Emerson gets her a cheeseburger anyway; he gets himself four burgers and an enormous chocolate shake. They find a place on the sand and this time Felice lets him squeeze partially onto the board, his body damp and hot beside hers. She eats slowly, but she is hungrier than she’d realized, studying the burger after each bite. Usually she subsists on cans of tuna, oranges, chocolate bars, and rum and Cokes. Sometimes she lets herself think about her mother’s crisp little pizzas, the salty pretzels, the croissants stuffed with Nutella and a thin layer of marzipan. After the burger, Emerson peels the orange Felice took from the Green House, pushes his thumbs into the center, and they split it. It’s shriveled but still sweet. She sips the diet soda but it burns the roots of her teeth, under her gums. She hasn’t seen a dentist since she left her parents’ home and sometimes she feels sharp spikes inside her molars. She tosses the soda and starts drinking Emerson’s milkshake.
“When’s the last time you ate?”
“What?” she asks crossly, frowning at two dimply, middle-aged women strolling past in bikinis.
Emerson eats another burger in a few bites, like a cookie. Then he gazes back at the stand. “I should be in the gym right now.”
“Hell, don’t let me stop you.” Instantly defensive. Why does she care? The burger sits in her stomach: she feels drugged and groggy and wipes a line of sweat from her hairline.
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