“Tosh?” Emerson half shrugs. “I don’t totally know. He works as some kind of assistant in a medical lab at MIT. I’m too much of a waste product for him. He’s really into, like, motivation and incentives and excellence and shit.”
“And pot.” Felice smirks and Emerson nods and laughs. He pulls a ragged frond from a banana tree and fans her with it, the dry edges flapping against her hair. She swats it back at him, laughing.
DEREK LIVES IN A big house, mid-beach, behind an ornate iron gate on Pine Tree Drive. Felice admires the place, its vaulted ceiling and big fir beams, an entry filled with flat rugs and beaded vases and wooden sculptures that look vaguely African to Felice. She immediately recognizes the young, beefy boy with the shaved head who answers the door. “Wow.” She touches a curved lintel as they enter the main room. “You live here? I thought you lived at the Green House.”
Derek looks around the expansive room with distaste. “My so-called dad lives here when he’s not out with his ho. I’m not supposed to even be here when he’s not. But, like when is he here?” He knocks on a waist-high silver sculpture of a elephant with human arms and legs. It writhes on its wood base on the floor. “Conk-conk. You wouldn’t believe what this fucker cost. Steve-o got it like in Pakistan.” He picks up a small dark carving of a woman’s body with a bird’s head, a sharp, open beak. “Here”—he thrusts it at Felice—“it’s for you—take it.”
“It’s your dad’s, dumbass,” she says, scowling, and replaces it on an empty bookshelf.
“Whatev.” Derek picks up a half-dollar-sized flat silver heart with a dagger through its center, then an old watch that was positioned in an artistic display of timepieces. He slips them into his pocket. “I’ll sell all this crap eventually. He always gets more.”
They follow him through the room into a bright doorway. It’s been years since Felice has been inside a nice kitchen—granite counters crowned with chrome appliances, clean glints of untouched things. Like the kitchens of her school friends’ mothers. Her own mother’s kitchen had a big convection oven and fans—the counters glowed but her appliances looked battered and industrial. Felice sniffs, half hoping for the flour vapor of her home, but the air here is flat and empty. Her hands tremble as if with reawakened muscle memory: she tugs on the heavy fridge door—its tomblike chamber spilling milky light. Expensive, nearly empty shelves: film canisters, six cobalt bottles of water, a package of bacon and carton of eggs. “What a waste,” she mutters.
Derek and Emerson prowl around, rummaging through the cupboards, pulling out jam, peanut butter, macaroni, Oreos. They fry all the bacon and eggs, stirring in ingredients—olives, onions, cocktail franks—apparently at random. When it’s done, the boys half stand, half sit on tall stools pulled up to the counter; Felice sits across from them, knobby elbows on the counter, and watches them eat hunched over their plates, a bar of light cutting across the kitchen from a blue-veined window in the back wall. Felice nibbles a strip or two of Emerson’s bacon—refusing the eggy mess—imagining, with some pleasure, her mother’s revulsion at such food. Her mother didn’t entirely approve of food anyway. Felice thinks of her poking at a steak with her fork, saying, It’s sodden. The food is gone within minutes. Emerson makes an attempt at stacking dishes, but Derek waves them down. “Leave it, the maid’s around somewhere.”
He leads them out a back door to the polished slate patio and a racked assortment of iron weights, dumbbells, and two padded benches. The boys peel off their T-shirts: both of them are big and broad, but Emerson’s back and biceps are defined, anatomical. Derek points a remote, turning up the volume on a portable player; music pulses, drumming the air, a Teutonic frenzy. “Rammstein!” he crows at Felice. “ ‘Du hast,’ ha!”
Felice slides into a painted Adirondack chair under an umbrella and watches the guys clatter on and off the benches. They laugh and clap: Derek shouts, “You got it! You got it!” slapping his hands together while Emerson swings the weights up and into his chest. Felice is used to boys showing off for her, but she notices a sort of concentrated seriousness of purpose in Emerson, as if he is focused on a point buried inside his own body. Derek drops the weights, clanking loudly, groaning while he lifts the bar, then hectoring Emerson, standing over him at the head of the weight bench, arms outstretched, ready to catch the bar. Emerson lifts in near-total silence, his neck flattening and his veins bulging in dark seams beneath the surface of his skin. Derek’s sets taper off but Emerson keeps going, sliding one, then another set of thick plates on the bar. Mesmerized by the rivulets of sweat trickling along his brow and neck, Felice loses track of the amount of weight Emerson is lifting. The sun climbs to a steeper, hotter angle, approaching 90 degrees—but Emerson continues with single-mindedness.
As she watches Emerson in his silent exertions her thoughts feel sharp, her emotions honed on a hard edge. Felice hasn’t seen this sort of focus since the days when her friend Hilda flew down parking ramps on her board, hair whipping, her arms aloft, pulling out nose grinds, rails, flips, drop-and-grabs. Emerson in movement is like a new sort of beauty: she’d always thought of beauty as a kind of passivity. Felice has never pursued anything so passionately herself. She grew up taking admiration for granted—eyes all turning toward her—soaking the air with a goldenrod-colored aura. She didn’t have to do a thing to be loved: by her family, their friends, the teachers at school.
Derek dutifully assists Emerson, jotting down weights and reps, racking his weights, helping him to chalk his hands. Emerson switches from barbell to dumbbell, through overhand and underhand grips, shoulders, biceps, triceps, deltoids, pectorals. He’s flushed all over, glowing, panting, hair glittering, swigging from a pitcher of water Felice refills from the tall blue bottles in the refrigerator. Felice watches the whole session—two continuous hours of methodical training—her long, thin legs drawn up beside her on the chair, her black hair flared across her back. Emerson finishes his workout by gulping the water straight from the pitcher, then dumping the rest over his head. He waves at Felice as if too tired for words, then wanders to the outdoor shower around the side of the house. His sweat-soaked shorts flap over the edge of the wood stall. She hears the hiss of the water and wonders what he would do if she joined him. Then Derek appears. He sprawls in the chair across from hers, dragging an arm across his forehead. “Awesome, right?”
“I guess.”
“You hungry yet? You want something?” he asks. “Or you one of those air fern-type girls?”
Felice shakes her head, eyeing the shower mist.
Derek grins at her, shoulders jutting, straight arms, palms flat against the seat of his chair. “I’ve seen you around the Green House, right?”
Felice looks away, lifting her chin. “If I had a house like this, I’d be home all the time.”
He bobs his head. “Hey, you can come over, like, whenever.”
“What does your dad do?”
“He’s a psycho-the-rapist.” Derek’s smile reveals a crooked incisor and bicuspid. “He talks, talks, talks, then he gives his clients nice painkillers. He says it’s ‘therapeutic.’ ” He makes air quotes with his fingers. “We’re all best friends with the shipping department at Merck around here.”
Felice glances over his shoulder at the shower again; frilly green shrubs and bougainvillea surround the yard. A single palm branch arches above a white rope hammock almost hidden among the trees.
“You can even live here, if you want. For real.”
She crosses her arms, the long bones pressing against each other. “We’ve got another plan.”
“Yeah? What?”
She can’t help herself: she wants to tell someone. “We’re going to Oregon. Maybe.”
Derek doesn’t say anything for a moment, studying her, his eyes still and small. “Oh yeah? Since when?”
“He’s going to train at a special gym out there. I’m going with him.” She thinks: I’m going to do it.
“Right.”
“We are.”
“Oregon? Do you have any idea how far that is?” A leaf shadow bobs over his face. “How’re you gonna go?”
“We’ve got some money.”
“Yeah? How much?”
“Plenty.” She hesitates. “Almost a grand.”
He sagely gazes over her head, evidently digesting this information. There are premature lines running from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth, a divot between his eyebrows. He’s no older than Emerson, but his skin looks weathered as sandstone. Finally he says, slowly, judiciously. “That’s enough to get you there—maybe—depending—but not much else.”
Felice shrugs, sensing he’s right—a band of anxiety encircling her ribs—because now she feels invested in the plan—but she won’t let him see this. “We’ve got other . . . sources.”
“Uh-huh. Like?”
She examines the cuticle of her index finger. “My brother Stanley maybe. He owns Freshly Grown.”
“Pff! No he doesn’t.”
She lifts her chin and peers at him through lowered lids.
Derek’s grin disappears. “No fucking way. The store? In Homestead? Are you shitting me? My dad is, like, obsessed with that place. We get all our protein mixes and eggs and stuff like that there. No, really, I gotta admit, that place rules.” He angles his face to one side. “You just mean he runs the place, right? He doesn’t actually own it?”
“He owns it all right. Came up with it, started the whole thing out of nothing,” she boasts.
Derek’s face softens with a pleased wonderment. “Wow,” he says. “That is too cool. I gotta say, I love that place. Do you hang out there a lot?”
“I don’t know.” She doesn’t want to admit she’s never actually been to the store. Stanley opened it after she left; her mother told her about it. She knew he would: he used to talk about his market as if it already existed. Stanley always did exactly what he said he was going to do—he was different that way from everyone else.
“So he must be pretty fucking loaded now, right? I mean, he could blow old Capitalist-Stevie here away.”
Felice doesn’t respond. She pulls the backs of her ankles in close to her butt and rests her chin on the flat of one of her knees. She thinks of Stanley’s colored pencil drawings of theoretical businesses: a café, a bookshop, and, always, a grocery store. When she was ten and he was fourteen, he was already working as a bag boy at Publix, reading what their father called “hippie books.” He talked about stuff like citrus canker, the Big Sugar mafia, and genetically modified foods and organisms. He got his store manager to order organic butter after Stanley’d read (in the Berkeley Wellness newsletter) about the high concentration of pesticides in dairy. Then, for weeks, the expensive stuff (twice as much as regular) sat in the case, untouched. So Stanley used his own savings to buy the remaining inventory and stashed it in his mother’s cold storage. He took some butter to his school principal and spoke passionately about the health benefits of organic dairy: they bought a case for the cafeteria. He ordered more butter directly from the dairy co-operative and sold some to the Cuban-French bakery in the Gables, then sold some more from a big cooler at the Coconut Grove farmers’ market. He started making a profit and people came back to him, asking for milk and ice cream. The experience changed Stanley—he was sometimes a little weird and pompous and intense before, but somehow, he began to seem cool and worldly.
Their mother, however, said she couldn’t afford to use his ingredients in her business. They’d fought about it. Stanley said that Avis had never really supported him. Avis asked if it wasn’t hypocritical of Stanley to talk about healthy eating while he was pushing butter. And Stanley replied that he’d learned from the master, that her entire business was based on the cultivation of expensive heart attacks.
Derek sits back in his chair, gnawing meditatively on the corner of a thumbnail. He lifts his eyebrows. “How come Sonny’s never mentioned this plan to me?”
“Emerson?” Felice feels a pulse of satisfaction: she busies herself with raking back streaks of loose hair. “I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t have time.”
Derek interlocks his fingers over his stomach and narrows his eyes at Felice. “He tells me everything. We go back, man, like before you were fucking born.”
“We’re the same age.”
“Fine,” Derek utters in an exasperated whisper, looking over one shoulder. He swings back, his face tight. “Listen—I already know what you think of me.”
“You do?” Felice can’t suppress her smirk.
“Yeah, I do. I know you think I’m an ugly faker loser. And like I hang out with street kids and I’ve got this great big fucking dandy mansion where I can get drugged and beaten and generally fucked up as much as I care to let myself be . . .”
Felice blinks, dropping her eyes to her knees, reflexively gathering her calves up to one side.
“Okay—sorry—sorry.” He lifts one hand, fingers spread. “Not to freak you out, like, oh, I’m so messed up. Just to say that you might think that kind of shit about me, but we’re not so different, Felice. I mean, yeah, you’ve got this hair and these legs and this face and you could be living in a for-real mansion, up in like, Palm Beach, if you worked it a little and went to the right yacht parties—or at least pulling down some obscene fucking amount of green as a model or something—if you weren’t such a lazy piece of shit.”
The bones in her face loosen. She hears a whining in her right ear.
“Come on—don’t give me that stupid look. You know it already. Don’t act astonished. You’re so pretty you’re practically a different freaking species. And yeah, how exactly did you accomplish that? Well, fuck you—you didn’t. You were l-u-c-k-y. Your daddy fucked your mommy and your genes lined up in a nice pattern. Well, hooray for you. I’m rich, sort of, and you’re stupid-gorgeous, and Sonny over there? He is insanely smart and honest, and in every way known to man, he is so much better than you or me. He beats his ass working. He is gonna go everywhere. I know. He started from absolute nothing—less than nothing—no parents, no money, begging for freaking food out on the street, okay? And here’s my point—” Derek slides forward, his stomach folding and his elbows digging into his knees. “It’s fine if you want to screw around with him and torture him out of his mind. Dump him. All the usual girl bullshit. But I want to emphasize that you gotta stay the fuck out of his way. Right? Because he does not need some scrawny bitch dragging him around to hell and back, messing up his training, fucking up his plans. Okay? Capisce?”
Felice releases her breath in a thin stream, almost a laugh.
“We cool?”
“Jesus—get the fuck away from me.”
“What? We can be friends—you don’t have to get messed up about it.”
Emerson emerges from his shower, a bath towel wrapped around his waist, and says to Derek, “Hey man, let me borrow some clothes?”
“What’s wrong with your own crappy clothes, asshole?” Derek stands and kicks the sweaty pile of shorts and T.
Emerson darts a glance at Felice. “I’m not going back to the Green House anymore.”
“Oh, right, the big plan,” Derek drawls. Still, he comes back with some clothes and Emerson turns away modestly, pulling shorts on under his towel. He drags over another Adirondack chair and sits across from Felice, their knees almost touching, his borrowed T-shirt draped over one shoulder like a waiter’s towel. Felice is angry, but now she has to stay, to stake her claim on Emerson. She felt a burst of competitive adrenaline after Derek’s dumb little speech, recognizing some element of truth in it. Emerson sits back, showing off his sloping chest and arms, gleaming with drops of shower spray. He smiles at Felice, one arm resting along the back of his seat, a cavelike space between his forearm and chest. She notes the even lift of his smile; a note of lilac soap drifts from his skin. She moves to perch on the flat arm of Emerson’s chair and places her hand experimentally over his: a kind of startle runs through his body. He lifts one thumb, claiming her fingers.
The sk
y grows overcast with mounting summer thunderheads but there’s no rain, just a dense, hot curtain of air. The afternoon is pure languor. Derek lights a crackling joint, which Emerson waves away—Felice leans toward the joint, then smiles coolly at Derek. “Better not.”
“So your brother owns Freshly Grown?” Derek says, as if none of the earlier conversation happened, his expression once again meditative. “He actually owns it.”
Felice looks away.
“I wonder if he’d like to expand his operations, carry some, like, new product . . .”
“Jesus.”
“That store has got major clientele. Man—all those old hippies, fuck.”
“Forget it,” Felice snaps.
Emerson’s gaze turns from Derek to Felice. Derek gives Emerson a lift of the brow, then disappears into the house to make his calls to “associates.” “So what’s all that?” Emerson asks. “What’s Freshly Grown?”
Felice crosses her arms in a scissor over her chest. “Why do you even hang out with that guy? Such an asshole.”
“What?” Emerson turns toward the house. “Derek? Nah. He’s just, like, a businessman.” He explains that Derek sells drugs to other people who sell drugs—all kinds, amphetamines, cocaine, pot, but mostly he specializes in MDMA, “otherwise known as Ecstasy,” because, Emerson continues gravely, “he believes in it.”
Felice shakes her head, studying the bouncing, calligraphic flight of a black wasp. “Whatever.”
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