“I believe God watches us the way we watch plants grow. We put a plant in a window so that it gets light, and we water it from time to time, but sometimes plants grow like wild, they shoot up, flowers blossom… and sometimes they just die for no reason. There’s not much we can do to convince the plant to do what we want,” he finally said. “We watch helplessly and then we throw our hands up. We gave it everything it needed to thrive, and sometimes… that’s not enough.”
“So, you believe in God?” I asked.
“Of course I believe in God,” he replied. “I mean, I don’t follow all of the rules of Judaism. Some of them I just don’t agree with. Like these tattoos, for instance. My mother hates them because I can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery now that I have them. But I don’t think God cares about my tattoos. He has bigger concerns for me than what kind of art I put on my arms. Why did I choose to sit on the same train car as you and your brother the very first time I ever saw you? Why did I agree to go to Jake’s show in Williamsburg even though I had to take a night off from work to go there, and it’s so far from home for me? Something kept putting you in front of me, and I don’t believe in magic.”
I was humored. “You think God wanted us to meet.”
Felix put his right hand over my left hand and locked his fingers in between mine.
“How do we know anything is real? How do I know you’re real next to me on this bench right now? How do I know I haven’t just imagined this beautiful girl who I keep running into in the strangest of places? How do I know my dad is really dead and I didn’t just imagine all of those months at the hospital? How do I know I have any artistic talent at all, and I’m not just wasting my time and a whole lot of paint?”
“Felix,” I said quietly. It was baffling to me if he doubted his talent. He was hugely talented. I could easily imagine his work hanging in a museum. For someone like Felix, success and recognition wasn’t a question of if, it was a matter of when.
“My point is, you have to choose what you believe. There’s no such thing as proof. You create your own reality and you have to decide what comes in, and what stays out,” he told me.
“So… am I in your reality?” I asked. I think I knew the answer. I mean, I had told him I had lost my job, and he had gone out of his way within a matter of days to not only build me a website, but then to ask his employer to hire me. No one, as far as I knew, had ever taken that much of a personal interest in me before. Would he have recommended me to Andy if he didn’t believe that I had talent? I doubted it.
Felix didn’t look at me, but instead looked out over the water. I was starting to get the impression that despite his untraditional appearance, he was kind of shy.
“Come on,” he said, standing up, still holding my hand. “I’ll show you how much of a part of my reality you are.”
We returned to the park, and as Felix had predicted, the police had departed and the painting was undisturbed, waiting for him to complete it. The skateboarders were vanishing one by one for the night, departing for various parties and apartments. I helped Felix spread the drop cloth again, as he was meticulous about not wanting to drip paint on the grass. He dragged a picnic table over to the wall and stood on top of it to finish elements in the thought bubble that he couldn’t reach on his own.
As Felix added details to the painting and it took form, I realized the he was taking huge liberties with the collage he had assembled in his notebook. The face of the glamorous model in his collage on the wall was replaced with one that looked just like mine. In Felix’s mural, I was gazing out toward the ocean, lost in thought, with fireworks of color erupting in the comic strip-like thought bubble over my head. I watched quietly, smiling to myself, and was especially humored when Felix then drew an enormous thought bubble around me in the painting, and below that, painted himself.
So the overall painting was of him, thinking about me, and me thinking about a million things at once.
“Would you do me the honors?” he asked, handing me the can of black spray paint.
I looked at it in my hand, dumbfounded. “What should I do?”
“My glasses,” he said. His face in the right corner of the painting was missing his thick black frames.
“You should do it,” I urged him. “I don’t know how to use spray paint. I don’t want to mess it up.”
Felix laughed. “It’s an original piece of art! You can’t mess it up.”
I was terrified as I took the cap off the can, shook it, and carefully began spraying a pair of black glasses onto Felix’s face on the wall. My amateur strokes stood out plainly as the work of someone other than the main artist’s. Felix had precision over spray paint, knowing exactly how far to hold his hand from the wall, how much pressure to apply with his finger while spraying… whereas I was just winging it. I realized after I was done trying to paint the glasses onto the wall that I had just consciously broken the law for the first time.
“Ugh, it looks awful,” I said, examining my butchering. It was clear what I had added was a pair of glasses, but it looked like an afterthought that another artist had applied on top of Felix’s work, almost as if to deface his masterpiece.
“It’s perfect,” he said. With a can of silver paint, he jotted an “F” in the lower corner of the painting, signing his work. “Add a G.”
At his insistence, I painted an uppercase “G” next to his “F.”
“Do you like it?” he asked me as he stepped back by a few feet to review his work.
“I love it,” I assured him. I wasn’t exaggerating. Not only was it an artistic masterpiece, but also, more romantic than I could even believe. There we were; the two of us, with me on his mind, painted on the side of the wall for the whole world to see.
“We should work on a collaboration,” he said.
There was something about this mural that was all too familiar, and then it hit me: the style in which he had painted the people, like photocopies, was just like the painting of the couple outside my bedroom window in our apartment.
“Felix, have you ever done a painting on Baxter St.?” I asked.
He scratched his head. “Maybe. Sometimes I find a wall and I don’t bother really figuring out where I am. I just go for it.”
“I think one of your paintings is right outside my bedroom window,” I confessed. “It’s a couple on their wedding day.”
Felix looked at me in disbelief, and then said, “Yes, that’s mine. It’s based on my parents’ wedding picture. They were married on my mother’s nineteenth birthday.”
The coincidence that he had painted such a personal piece right outside the bedroom that would one day become mine was enormous. We both stood there, silently, for a moment, until I said, “That’s crazy.”
“This was meant to be,” Felix said with a smile, teasing me. But his smile faded quickly and he checked my reaction.
“Your parents really got married when they were that young?” I questioned. Nineteen wasn’t so far off at all. I wondered if I would be ready to commit myself to a husband in just three short years. My own parents got married when Mama was twenty-two, which didn’t seem all that much further off in the future for me.
“They were ready,” Felix said, shrugging. “My father saw my mother from across a courtyard on her very first day at university and he said to himself, I’m going to marry that girl. And he did.”
As much as being married at nineteen seemed crazy to me, I imagined taking the subway train home with Felix to the apartment, and that it was our apartment instead of one that I shared with my brother. I imagined us taking turns cooking dinner and cleaning up, and turning the second bedroom into an art studio. It all seemed like it could be real, just as real as we were standing in the park beneath a street light.
“Do you believe in love in first sight?” I asked.
He ran his hand through my hair and looked directly into my eyes without shying away.
“I do,” he said.
I had never been kissed by a boy on
the lips before that night, and of all the boys I had ever imagined kissing (ranging from famous singers to Colby McKay), none of them had tattoos or lip rings. But if I could have picked from any other boys on my Would Like To Kiss list, even the celebrity ones, I wouldn’t have changed a thing about my first kiss from Felix in the park. He kissed me slowly, as if he’d been looking for me for a long time and never wanted to let me go again.
Our kiss was less like a dramatic step off a ledge into a freefall, but more like landing after being in freefall for a while. For the first time in two months, I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. The kiss was romantic and exhilarating, but more than anything, it was a relief. It was such a relief to just be standing in one place with someone who just liked me, plain and simple. So many unpredictable, horrible events in my life had happened in succession in order to bring me to that moment with Felix beneath the street lamp that I wondered if maybe there was a divine order to all of it. If Heather hadn’t disregarded my brother, if my parents hadn’t disowned Aaron, if my mother hadn’t been so dismissive of me on the phone the night I had confronted her, Felix and I never would have met.
And by that point, Felix was so familiar to me that I couldn’t imagine what my life would have been like if we had never introduced ourselves. I never imagined that the first time I would kiss a boy, I would trust him so completely, but I did with Felix. I didn’t have to wonder if I was in love. I just knew that I was.
We ended up staying out late, very late. We ate scrambled eggs at a diner and got off the subway near the Brooklyn Promenade to take a moonlit stroll. Fortunately, Felix didn’t ask to crash at my apartment even though I was pretty certain at that point he wasn’t going to pressure me for anything, physically. I just wasn’t sure how my brother would react to waking up and seeing a dude with tattoos in my room or on the couch.
I lay awake on my floor until the sun began to lighten the sky, looking out my window to the building next door upon Felix’s wedding portrait. All these weeks, he had been with me, and I hadn’t even known it.
Chapter 15
It was Christmas Eve.
I walked over to Holy Trinity around eleven to help Father Wong and his secretary, Dolores, sort the prizes and ship them to winners. The entire operation of Quian’s raffle was extremely lowbrow. We put the entrants’ halves of the tickets in a Payless shoebox, and Dolores, with a huge grin on her face, rolled up the sleeve of her floral polyester blouse and selected each prize, one by one. I matched up the numbers on each ticket pulled with the list we printed out from the website of those purchased online.
All in all, we had made over fourteen thousand dollars. The number was staggering, and as we labeled prizes and placed gift certificates in envelopes, I was almost moved to tears of joy that what had felt like endless trips into stores and restaurants, humbling myself to ask for help, had resulted in such an outpouring of charity for the Chan family.
I did this, I told myself. I made this happen.
It seemed impossible that I, Grace Mathison, a person failing Spanish II, a person whose track records were being smashed by Alyssa Ackerman, had raised so much money to help a little girl in need. Me. The girl who had thought about running for Treasurer of Student Council her freshman year, and decided against it because no one would vote for her. Me. I had raised enough money to pay for all of Quian’s hospital bills to date. My heart swelled with pride when I clicked the button on the website that would generate a check to be mailed to Mr. Chan.
By two o’clock we had sorted all of the prizes, and stacked boxes that would have to be picked up by UPS on the Monday after Christmas. Thankfully, most of the prizes were small enough to be mailed in an envelope with a simple stamp, so we didn’t have to spend much of the money raised on shipping costs. The newspaper coverage of Quian’s story had resulted in us receiving online entries from all over the country. I found myself lingering around the parish rectory even after all of the envelopes had been licked and stamped out of a reluctance to go back to my somber apartment and spend Christmas Eve watching re-runs with my brother. But Father Wong began preparing for his big Christmas Eve mass, so I volunteered to take the envelopes to the mailbox and thanked him and Dolores again for all of their help.
God and I were still on uncertain terms. No way was I going to attend Christmas services.
I couldn’t help but get a little nostalgic as I walked through the church on my way out. Volunteers were hanging garland from the pillars and tacking red velvet bows at the end of each pew. A magnificent Christmas tree, filling the entire church with the intoxicating smell of its pine needles, was decorated on the altar in ornaments that the children who attended the Holy Trinity elementary school had made in class. An enormous advent wreath, with purple candles in three corners and a fourth white one in perfect form in the fourth corner, also decorated the altar beside a wooden nativity scene. My parents had a huge life-sized nativity scene that our grounds crew assembled at the edge of our property near the highway every December. When I was a little kid, local high schoolers would steal the baby Jesus out of the cradle and send my parents asinine ransom notes, offering to trade baby Jesus for bottles of vodka and bags of cash. That hadn’t happened in a long time. Probably all of those kids grew up and went off to college and stopped finding humor in smuggling wooden figurines off private property.
I kind of missed the formality of celebrating Christmas. We hadn’t spent money on a tree and my brother hadn’t shown any kind of interest in doing something special.
The way in which Holy Trinity was decorated was just like the way my parents would decorate the cathedral where my dad used to tape his daily show, and the chapel on our grounds where we had Christmas services. I hadn’t tuned in to see if Daddy was still broadcasting the daily show from wherever he was, but I was guessing that re-runs were airing. To be honest, I was having such a difficult time processing what Tony Michaels had suggested to me about my father’s fraudulent financial practices, I had stopped wondering so often what Daddy and Mama were doing from minute to minute. I suspected there was going to come a day in the future when I was going to have to confront my dad, and I hoped I was going to have the strength to be honest with him about how disappointed I felt.
Outside, it was bitterly cold. Last-minute shoppers were bustling around Chinatown carrying shopping bags and shuddering in their heavy coats. I took a long, winding route home, dropping the stack of envelopes in the mailbox outside the post office.
I thought about spending the ten dollar bill I had in my wallet on a cute gift for my brother, but knew all too well that I couldn’t buy much for ten bucks. I had already counted days on the calendar application on my phone about fifty million times and knew that it was just totally unlikely that I was going to be paid at Blue Phoenix any time before Friday, December 30, and even that was a long shot. It was more likely that I would have to wait until January 15, and we would be two weeks late with rent, and by then we’d be eating our fingernails for lack of grocery money.
The whole situation was much, much too horrible to think about on Christmas.
So I went into a drug store, just to look, and spent about an hour walking up and down the toiletry aisle, trying to decide whether or not to buy my brother a cheap bottle of cologne or a soap-on-a-rope, just to have something to give him. Ultimately I decided against buying anything. My heart literally hurt, I felt so badly that I was going to wake up on Christmas morning and have to greet my brother in our living room, empty-handed.
As I rounded the corner two blocks from Baxter St., I was nearly knocked off my feet when I looked up and saw myself standing before an enormous dilapidated church decorated for the holiday. Its graffiti-covered exterior and roof in need of repair were almost entirely obscured by the beauty of the white lights adorning it, glowing softly through the soft snow fall. Inside, an evening mass was singing, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” It was both so unexpected and so beautiful that I was moved to tears.
A yea
r earlier, at exactly that time, I had been at a service at the chapel on my parents' ranch. I had vague recollections of a band from Phoenix playing rousing guitar hymns and everyone clapping hands, singing along. Afterward we had all put on aprons and served Christmas dinner in the large soup kitchen near the gate. An actor dressed as Santa passed out toy trucks and baby dolls to the children in attendance. The next afternoon, we had boarded an overnight flight to the chalet apartment we kept in Kitzbuhel.
My attention was caught by my own reflection in the snowy window of a parked cab on the east side of Pitt St. At first I didn't recognize myself. My hair was bright pink, and in that split second before I realized that the girl in the reflection was actually me, I felt a tiny pang of jealousy toward the girl whose image I saw because she was so much cooler than Grace Mathison. I looked tired, and circles under my eyes made me appear older than my sixteen years. I had lost weight and my jaw was sharper; the baby fat in my cheeks had disappeared. What a difference two months had made. It had been my intention to disguise myself, but Tony Michaels hadn’t been kidding. I was unrecognizable.
At the Blue Phoenix, Andy greeted me warmly the day after Christmas and patiently showed me how to operate the autoclave machine, where the needles and grips were stored, how to order more ink, and how to ring up sales on the credit card processing software. Andy lived in constant fear that the state was going to spring a sneak attack on him and drop by for an assessment on short notice. Felix and the other tattoo artists teased him about this paranoia, but were also maniacally clean because it could happen.
The employees of the Blue Phoenix were a small family, and Andy was their doting father. I came quickly to learn that Andy and his husband lived in Montclair, New Jersey, and had two little boys, five-year-old twins. Everyone on staff at the Phoenix had been out to the house in Montclair at some point or another for a home-cooked meal.
Finding out that Andy was gay, and not only gay but married, and not only married but an adoptive parent blew my mind. But I just accepted it. Naturally, my parents’ church had preached that homosexuality was wrong. I couldn’t even count on two hands the number of times my father’s daily television show and podcasts had specifically been about the dangers of children adopted by gay couples being told from a young age that homosexuality was natural and fine. As far as I knew for sure, Andy was the only openly gay person I had ever met (Mr. Ferris didn’t count, because I didn’t have any actual proof that he was gay), until Jacinda corrected me.
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