by Seth King
“Is she still insisting?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“And we have no choice?”
“Nope. Not really. Her best friend saw us walking by that restaurant, and she’s saying I have to bring you. She doesn’t understand why I didn’t want to.”
“And why are you this worried?” I asked. “I still don’t get it.”
I felt him tense up against me. “Because she’s my father’s daughter, and she makes him look like the Dalai Lama.”
I spent an hour or two dressing him up in some of the clothes I’d gotten him, and for some reason I had more fun doing it than I’d ever had doing anything in my life. He was my fantasy – my own personal male model to style (and boss around.) I’d never even told anyone about my love of fashion before, much less messed with clothes in their presence. And the best thing was that he didn’t care – he just acted like fashion was a detail about me, which it was, I was learning more and more every day. He looked hot as shit in anything I put him in, too, which was the best part of all. I could remember crying in my bed alone as a little kid, praying for a friend I could share all this stuff with. Now I got to share it with my best friend, whose body I also got to touch in the shower sometimes, too. Life was a dream.
After I dressed Nicky, I threw on some random outfit. Then I remarked that I was going to throw away an ugly old T-shirt that’d fallen on the floor, since I had no more space in my suitcase.
“Don’t,” he said, throwing up a hand, genuine concern in his eyes. I paused, holding the shirt.
“Um…why?”
He bit his lip. “Because it’s what you were wearing the day I met you.”
Just before nine, we finally met Nicky’s sister and her friends in the back garden of a restaurant downtown – and Victoria Elizabeth Yarelis Santos Flores was awful. (I peeped her ID on the table just to creep on her.) I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. Judging by the family pictures I’d seen, she had all of Mrs. Flores’ imperiousness and none of her warmth. I knew her type the second I put eyes on her: she was one of the popular girls, the tennis girls, with hair the color of champagne and eyes like galaxies. She’d had her life handed to her on a tray, and she had the posture to show for it. She was almost beautiful, in a way that was all sharp edges and icy glares, and when she looked at me, I could tell she expected an introduction. Because who wouldn’t want to be introduced to her? I saw her take in my tight-ish jeans and then flicker over to her brother for a second, but only a second. She recovered immediately, but it was too quick.
It was then that I suspected she knew about us.
He looked away, the overhead Christmas lights shining in his eyes. He was a coward, and still I loved this coward of mine. “Hey, Toria. This is…my friend,” he said, and then went silent again. Ouch. I’d never expected how bad it made me feel to be his secret. This felt different from all the other times – this was family. Here Victoria was, the closest person in the world to him, probably, and I was being kept hidden right in front of her. It made me feel like less than nothing, a negative integer. But I swallowed it down.
Victoria stared me down with those luxurious snake eyes. “Okay, Friend. Hi, Friend. Tell me, what were your parents smoking when they decided to name you Friend? This was the 90s, so I’m gonna guess crack rocks?”
I didn’t even know what to say, but thankfully Nicky smoothed things over for me. She did glance at me several times while I made accidental magic eyes at him, but after a while I just stopped caring. She knew. She had to, right?
But seeing him through the eyes of his sister was still a revelation. Here, he wasn’t a wounded, beautiful, autonomous head case – he was someone’s little brother. She was so proud of him, so fussy with him, and seeing him through her eyes was the cutest thing I’d ever known. It made me want to grab hold of him and hold on for a long time – forever, probably. It also reminded me of how young he was. He acted totally different around her, and even his body language changed – his shoulders dropped a bit, his head lowered, and he deferred to her in every way. How had I forgotten that he was only a teenager?
All this also made me sad, partly because I had never had that “family” thing for myself. I felt so guilty sometimes for banishing my mom, but I still couldn’t let her in. I was embarrassed of everything she’d done, but at the end of the day…I still wanted to love her. I wanted to forgive her. I just didn’t know how.
Eventually Victoria fell in with her other friends at the next table. Nicky and I ordered another round of shots, and soon we were somewhere between drunk and wasted. Alcohol was the only thing that ever cooled the hot anxiety of our being seen in public together, but this was too much. Sober Me knew we were getting too public, but Drunk Me didn’t give a shit.
A straight couple in the corner in the back was being totally over the top, making out and whispering loudly about their love, and Nicky and I kept sharing disgusted glances about it. Then we started this game where we’d try to out-cheese each other, just to make fun of them. We’d always done it, on and off, actually, because that’s what this generation was about, wasn’t it? Surpassing the Joneses?
“The Earth is four billion years old, and yet I was lucky enough to be alive at the same time as you,” I said in a dramatic but quiet voice, so nobody would hear. “Everything you do amazes me.”
“No I don’t!” he said with mock theatricality. “I amaze nobody!”
“Bet me.”
He leaned closer. “My turn. I can’t feel my face when I come across your smell.”
Suddenly it didn’t feel like a game anymore. “Well I can’t feel my body when I see you.”
“Good, then. I don’t have a face, you don’t have a body. Even Stevens. We’re like a cubist painting – a regular Picasso. Your turn,” he said, and I scooted closer, too. This wasn’t hard, as I was drawn into him naturally all the time, anyway.
“You’re like my favorite book. I wish I could go back to the first page and read you all over again, just to enjoy you twice.”
“Not bad,” he said. “Very meta. A book-related quote about love, and books, coming from a book lover who is in love.”
“Hey, who said I was in love?”
He leaned forward, took a breath, bit his lip. “Your eyes did.”
I just stared at him, my shoulders rising. It was the strangest thing – he just made me feel like there was more of me.
“I really like you,” I heard myself say, and I sort of swayed in my seat a bit, caught off guard by the intensity of the emotions bursting up within me. “You made me like my life, and that is so weird.”
“Prove it,” he smiled, but I was sick of the words, I was sick of the declarations – they would never be able to convey how much I liked him, how proud I was of him, how much it turned me on just to freaking call this beautiful creature mine. So I just stared at him again. I didn’t know how to say what I needed to say, that he was everything and more to me, that he shined like nothing else did, that if the world was sinking into the Atlantic I would still believe in him. I had not seen enough of the world, nor accessed enough of myself, to be able to really put all that into words, not again. So I just reached over and rubbed him through his pants instead.
“God, I want you,” he whispered, not even caring if Victoria was looking anymore.
“Same here,” I whispered, the alcohol hitting me in shimmery waves. “It’s all so crazy. Your eyes look like disco balls and you make me feel insane.”
He smiled that smile of his that burned my stomach, overloading me with longing. He scooted even closer so nobody would see, then traced a line down my body. “First, I’ll go here, and then I’ll go…”
And that’s when I looked over and realized his sister was staring right at us.
I lurched my eyes away like they’d landed on a hot plate. I tried to stay calm, like I hadn’t just accidentally outed the boy I was starting to love, but my face felt hot and red and twitchy. The next time I glanc
ed over, she was glaring at me like I’d killed a puppy. And she wouldn’t stop.
Shit shit shit. I’d blown it. The one chance to impress his family, to fall into the fray – that was done. I just couldn’t win in this game of grace. Never could.
I fled to the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face to punish myself. On the way back, Victoria passed me in the hallway, making me absolutely panic. First she just stared at me, not so much daggers in her eyes as heavy artillery. Then she walked closer.
“Be careful with this,” she said, shoving me in the shoulder a little. I stopped moving. She was wasted, and it terrified me.
“With…what?”
“You know what. You like him, don’t you?” she asked, and I was shocked into silence. “What’s going on? Why does he look so different? Why is he so happy and smiley and stuff? And why aren’t I allowed to tell my mom that he’s here?”
I stared down at her shoulder, which was bony like Nicky’s. “This really isn’t my issue to talk about, but I don’t think he wants her to know,” I finally said. “That he’s here, I mean. He’s his own person…”
She sniffled and then started crying right there in the hall. I felt her breath on my face, and it smelled like cinnamon whiskey. This was bad. Really bad. I had to protect Nicky, but I didn’t know how.
“I knew it,” she said to nobody as she wiped her smudged eyes. “I knew it I knew it I knew it…you’re doing something with him,” she accused, throwing me another hateful glance.
“No,” I said. “No. He’s…he’s my friend.” Then my temper took me away again. “And even if we were…doing that, which we’re not, I don’t know if that’d be any of your business.”
She composed herself and then looked me up and down like a bad girl out of some ‘80s movie. Something was flimsy in it, though – more than anything, she just looked scared. Desperate. Nicky was the showpiece of her family, and he was messing around with guys. And that’s when I realized I was afraid of this girl, truly scared of her. Because she wasn’t necessarily evil or out for blood or anything, she was worse: she was just a misguided girl trying to protect someone she loved. Some of the worst things of my life had come from uninformed people thinking they were trying to do the right thing and help me. Nicky was clearly the pride and joy of the Flores name, and if Victoria knew about us and thought ending us would be in her little brother’s best interests, she could do anything…she could tell his parents, she could tell his friends, she could hold it over his head and use it to drive me away and take away everything I wanted…
“He’s my baby brother,” she said very softly. “His business is mine.”
And then she did the scariest thing of all: she walked away.
14
I was silent for the rest of the night, and I knew Nicky could tell something had gone wrong. I’d been so stupid to think we could do this. We were horrified of ourselves, of each other, of the world, of our love. As soon as we got back to the hotel I broke down and told him everything. His eyes filled up with something between panic and sadness, just like I knew they would, and then he left.
“Where are you going?”
“Ubering to her townhouse,” he said over his shoulder as he disappeared.
I slept alone that night. It was cold and lonely like January or heartbreak. And soon my dreams took me back…
After my parents’ marriage fell apart when I was a teenager, a concerned family friend brought me to Miss Irene, a hippy-dippy therapist from my church who smelled like cheap incense and whose suburban home was filled with tacky travel paintings from moderately expensive home-décor stores. What she told me struck fear into my heart forever.
“So, there’s one thing I want you to remember,” she’d said after our awkward introductions, a terrible print of a Venice sunset lording from over her left shoulder. “You have witnessed dysfunction all your life, and when you grow up, you are going to chase after it. You won’t even know it, not on the surface at least, but you will. You’ll search for people to fix, because that’s what you know – you thrive on chaos, even if you don’t know it yet, and you’re going to try to replicate your childhood. So find a sane person with no issues and stick with them. If you run after destroyed people, all you’ll do is destroy yourself in the process, too. You’ll undo each other. And I know you think I don’t know what I’m talking about,” she said after a minute. “I know your family, though, and beyond that, I’ve seen all this myself. My first husband, Todd? Bipolar and borderline personality disorder. Crazier than a bat straight out of Satan’s asshole. And one day, I was hiding under the kitchen table while he threw various kitchen utensils at me, one after the other, including a Panini maker, and it hit me: my life didn’t have to be like this.”
“So you left?”
She lit a Virginia Slim and shook her head. “No. I wish. I stayed with him for three more years until I found him hanging from a laundry pipe in the attic. He killed himself during a low in his mania cycle.” Her eyes filled up with ghosts. “I could’ve gotten out of there earlier, though. I could’ve listened to the bells and whistles before they became Panini makers flying at my face and then bodies hanging in my house. But I didn’t. I didn’t love myself enough to remove myself from the pain I was still chasing from my childhood. Everyone thinks they can find a broken person and love them back together, when in the end, both are usually casualties of the broken one’s implosion.”
Then she fidgeted for a minute and then told me never to confuse the two, to confuse love with pain. She said that dependence was seeking out something from someone, while love, on the other hand, was offering someone something because you were already full. “In the end,” she’d told me, her cigarette burning low, “the best gift you can ever give the people around you is your own happiness, because you can never be there for anyone else if you’re gone, yourself. So take care of yourself. Make sure you find some good love, and not the bad stuff. Or else you’ll be caught up in this cycle for the rest of your life.”
Looking back, I recognized Nicky in this situation immediately. We were both empty and broken, and our assault on each other was just sinking us deeper into misery and dependency. We were suffering together and we didn’t know why. But maybe this was it. Maybe he was the pain I was chasing.
When I woke up I thought of Nicky, beautiful and essentially broken. He was supposed to be the big, strong man, the hero, the dream boy. But this was the truth: he was terrified, running, hiding, desperate to conceal himself from a punishing world, all because he was scared. He was a coward, and I understood that cowardice better than he would ever know. Because I was just as scared. We weren’t up against the world, we were just up against the worst ten percent of it, the ten percent that wouldn’t change, and that ten percent was so loud and hateful and effective, they’d maybe already won.
But still, I knew I didn’t want the sanity anyway. Sanity bored me. Here was Nicky, my Panini maker, telling me at every turn that he was broken, that he was crazy, and it just made me want to love him harder. And I guessed that was the problem, wasn’t it? I wanted to run to him, to have him take me in with open arms, hold me until my world wasn’t broken open anymore. Even though he was the one breaking it.
And this was when I knew I loved Nicky Flores, really loved him: because he was awful for me, poison in my veins. I guess I officially couldn’t tell the difference between love and pain anymore. I’d probably always looked for poisoned love – I’d always been drawn to the ones with the empty eyes and the aggressive attitudes and the vacant hearts. I was always just chasing heartbreak. My family had made my bed with their chaos and now I was forcing myself to sleep in it forever. My childhood was over and now I’d become my destiny. I was already Me, incurably.
Or was I? Could I still change? Did I really love Nicky, or did I just need to love him? Could I still walk away from this toxic shit-storm of a relationship, if I got strong enough? And did I even want to?
I guessed it all came down to this
: was Nicky Flores really a tortured, damaged creature doing everything he could to overcome his issues and love me in the way I deserved, or was he just a dickhead?
My Panini maker showed up at around ten in the morning.
“So how was it?” I asked him as he started gathering his things. He was blank, moodless, all grey. And I knew what it meant: he’d shut down. He was a million miles away again, and maybe he wasn’t coming back this time.
“Eh. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been better. I think I contained it, though. For now.”
“What does that mean? Tell me.”
He stopped. “Well, I denied it all.”
“Everything?
I watched him. He looked dead.
“Everything,” he nodded. “I’m sorry, but I had to. It was basically an ultimatum-type situation.”
I just stared at him.
“Stop whatever this is,” he said in an approximation of Victoria’s cut-glass voice, “or I tell Mom and Dad what I suspect, and all hell breaks loose.”
“She…she blackmailed you?”
His eyes revealed nothing. He turned and headed for the bathroom.
“No,” I said, following him. “No. Don’t just walk away from this. All you do is walk away. Why do you keep walking?”
“I think we should take a break,” he said, so casually I wanted to die. “This is moving too fast. I’m not sure I’m okay with it.”
I wanted to cry right there. In the beginning I’d wanted an epic love story out of this. I’d wanted epic love, in epic settings, under epic conditions. Because that was the crazy thing about Nicky – he made the epic seem possible. But this was all so not epic, and it was all so far below the grand scale I’d wanted us to love on. We weren’t on the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset, or atop the Empire State Building, or in any other place I used to read about in my books. This was our ending: we were alone, in the dark, in a stupid hotel room.