Before we could say much else, Shane came back carrying a grease-stained brown paper bag and announced, “Okay yo, let’s roll.”
We walked over to the Seaport and boarded the back of the small, free “Connection” bus that did a looped route from the Seaport, to Wall Street, to Bowling Green Park, and to Battery Park City. As we waited for it to leave, Vin and I sat in the back and talked about how much we loved certain rap music, and he was impressed by how much I knew about the genre. I learned, that he was an eighteen-year-old, almost-high-school-dropout who lived with his adoptive single mother, who was Italian, in Gateway Plaza. He had originally been born in Chile. He was overweight, acne-ridden, and wore his clothes about four sizes too big. He was the one with the weed, which he sold. When I spoke, he nodded, his eyes fixed in front of him, too nervous to make eye contact again.
We filed off of the bus and walked a few blocks in the snow over to a building in Independence Plaza, another housing cooperative two blocks from P.S. 234. It must have been Shane’s building, or else, it was one of Vin’s friends’ buildings. He directed us into the staircase, where we all found a seat, as if we were taking our places in a movie theater. I watched as Vin gutted a cigar, ripped it, then licked it, like an artist at work. He sprinkled weed along its hollow shaft like he was doing something as routine as squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, something he did every day (which, actually, he did).
“Do you want to smoke?” he asked me.
“Sure,” I shrugged.
Of course I wanted to smoke. When I smoked, I felt protected by this frosted glass bubble that I was all snug inside, protected from the loud roar of my normal thoughts. For those first few minutes that I was high, it felt like everything would be okay, no matter what was going on around me. After we passed the blunt around, in a fit of downplayed coughing and laughing, the other guys, seated in twos and stacked on the steps above us, got up to leave.
“I’m not going to be a cock block,” said Jordan.
I leaned into Vin like a bed I finally felt relaxed in, resting my head on his shoulder. We talked a little more, and I learned that he liked the Yankees, the movie Shawshank Redemption, and a rap group called “The Diplomats” that also referred to themselves as “Dipset” and sometimes as “Purple City Byrdgang.”
Maybe it was the weed, or the new, elating feeling of a mutual connection with a human being, or maybe it was just the alluring scent of fabric softener on his sweatshirt. Whatever it was, I felt at peace for a few heavenly minutes, just resting my head there, adoring the warmth of another person in a way I never had before. As I nuzzled into his neck, I could feel his pulse quicken as he wrapped a big arm around me and held me gently, like I was a fragile teddy bear suddenly in need of protection by a complete stranger.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that, but eventually, I lifted my head up, like waking up from a dream, taking in the surroundings of concrete and chipped white paint and smiling at him directly.
“I’d better catch the bus back home in time for dinner,” I said.
“I’ll come with you,” he said, holding out his hand to take mine. “Let me make sure you get home safe.”
As we walked, the snowflakes gathered onto his billowing heather-gray sweatpants and dissolved, leaving tiny dark flecks that eventually grew into giant dark patches.
We waited for the bus by the World Financial Center, and, when it came, he gestured toward the steps, saying, “After you.”
I climbed on as he said from behind me, “Wherever you want to sit,” which I thought might have been a joke, since the bus was totally empty. We went straight to the back, and took an ear bud each from my iPod.
“I like this song,” I said, putting on “Jenny was a Friend of Mine” by the Killers.
A couple of days later, I went to see Movin’ Out on Broadway with my mom. It was a musical based on the songs of Billy Joel that had no real plotline and a lot of emphatic dancing. This foreign, happy feeling came over me that night as I watched it all unfold, imagining that the dancers on stage were Vin and I, acting out our upcoming love story. Every song made me think about him. I was in this happy fog, absorbing the songs, enjoying myself, not wanting the show to be over.
When the show did end, I didn’t even mind that someone had accidentally whacked me in the mouth while putting their coat on, or shoved me in the shoulder as everyone did a painfully slow shuffle toward the exit doors. I had whipped out my phone as soon as the last curtain call ended and was actually smiling, prompting my mom to ask, “Who are you texting?”
“Nobody,” I said, stuffing my phone and the rolled-up Playbill into my coat pocket.
The next day, Vin told me that his grandmother had been admitted to New York Downtown Hospital, and was not doing very well. He visited her every day, and then came to visit me right across the street. I offered to go up to visit her with him, but he told me he didn’t want me to see her in that condition.
A week later, he wrote me a long poem on two pages of looseleaf paper, in perfect penmanship that surprised me. He gave it to me before we parted ways, and said, “Read it when you get home.”
I was captivated until the last line, You don’t have to say it back, but I’ll wait for you to feel it, too. I love you.
I called him immediately in the few seconds I had before dinner.
“I love you too.”
He began taking the train all the way uptown just to pick me up from school every day. When the train stopped in the tunnel, or there was “police activity,” we’d pop in a headphone each, he’d lip sync to me, and the fear would relent into the furthest corners of the subway car.
“I will never let anything happen to you,” he promised.
I believed that more than I believed the promise that came with those armed guards with guns, more than I believed in homeland security or the police. I believed that he, with his focused effort on me, would keep me safe. And if he didn’t, then at least I wouldn’t die alone. We fell in love with the reckless, all-encompassing abandon that teenagers do, able to make life mostly about one another, everything else coming second. For me, that would bring serious consequences. Because when the world changes—which it always does—it’s natural to look for something solid, stable to grab on to.
What I wish I knew then was that another human being is the worst possible thing to reach for, because they, too, are always changing.
* * *
My inner world may have been looking up, but things at school did not. I started skipping entire days without my mom knowing. At least, until the school caught on to the fact that it hadn’t, actually, been my father calling me in sick after all.
On those days, we briefly met up with Vin’s friends, from whom I soon protectively lured him away. They, too, were drug dealers—not the type of crowd Battery Park City or Tribeca is known for, but there they were.
There was a pale guy nicknamed “Bill” for the twenties he used to snort coke with, and a hard-jaw Dominican named Rio who was always smoking a joint, which would cause his beady eyes to become smaller and redder with every puff. Bill would dip his cigarette in cocaine and called it a “freeze,” offering it to me as I shook my head, sticking with the “safer” version of my menthol cigarette. Eventually, though, I would start to smoke those “freezes.”
I started to dress like Vin, like someone who had grown up on the wrong side of town. I’ve since destroyed all photographic evidence of this phase of my life, but I remember with crystal clarity the fitted caps I wore, the big hoop earrings, the Nike sneakers I began to favor over black shoes, the jeans that were so tight they looked like they were painted on. I still painted on liquid eyeliner, but less dramatically, because he liked me “natural.” I only put on one coat of mascara, and on days I wanted to wear a little more, like black eye shadow, he got angry.
“You don’t need that shit,” he’d say.
His high school—which I encouraged him to start going back to, to graduate—was right next t
o Ground Zero, and it was not a good school to begin with. Again, surprising for the neighborhood, based on its current reputation, but cops often stationed themselves outside of the building. On the days that Vin got out later than I did, I went to pick him up, taking the 4/5 train to Wall Street and stood outside, listening to love songs on my iPod as I stared down the revolving doors he’d eventually bound through. We’d walk over this rickety bridge they’d installed over Ground Zero to connect the East Side to Gateway Plaza, and spend a few hours alone in his room, just being together. His mom was in her bedroom, or still at work, and the floor of the living room was lined in paper that had his dog’s poop all over it.
I would have been content to spend my life curled up with him in his room, like a dog with literally nothing else to do, nothing else to care about. To me, that was bliss. That was all I wanted. I could barely stand to be away from him and out of contact during the school day, and I started getting my phone taken away during class after unsuccessfully hiding it under my blazer to text him.
Our bliss rubbed up against reality in a very uncomfortable way. I still had to deal with the horrors of the outside world, and the other people in it—and so did he—which meant the threat of his being around people who could “steal him” from me or “poison” his mind, somehow, in some way that was never quite clear to me. Like a kid tugging on the sleeve of my sweater, the invisible girl inside me began pointing out the seemingly real “what ifs?” creating a fearful, clinging obsession in me, the same one that had driven Max away, but stronger. If Vin didn’t pick up the phone, I thought he was dead, or cheating on me, or lying bleeding in a gutter, or on a subway car that had been hijacked, or being held hostage at a bank.
Meanwhile, at his encouragement, I had auditioned and landed the role of Lucy in You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown, Loyola’s school musical. My rendition of “Take Me or Leave Me” from the musical RENT had blown the teachers away, sending me straight to the top of the running, past a senior who was the “head canter” in choir, and ultimately shocking everyone when the list was posted in Loyola’s common area.
When I called Vin to tell him the news, he answered, but I could barely understand him between sobs. His grandmother had died.
* * *
How I experienced New York City outside of Vin depended on my state of mind on any given day.
On a good day, when everything was okay between us, the city was rich with laughter and choices, with warm patches of sunlight that peaked through the tall buildings and shined right on me, just for a sweet, fleeting moment. It was full of more food options than I could count, and quick ways to get from one neighborhood to another. These neighborhoods were like tiny cities in their own right, with their own set of unique smells, architectural elements, groups of people, restaurants, and stores, all of which I suddenly wanted to explore.
In a darker state of mind, the city was chaotic and dank, a place where people almost got hit by cars, where crazy people yelled at everyone and themselves and nobody at all. The landscape looked like one big frown, reflections from orange streetlights splattering violently against car hoods, constantly emitting loud, unsettling sounds that I never knew the source of. It was the same old shit, the grime, the shoving, the traffic jams, the homeless man carrying a knife who’d stab me straight in the eye before I could even see him coming.
I had started to see a new German psychiatrist, Dr. R, who decided that, in addition to depression, I also had ADD, because I couldn’t concentrate or focus on anything.
For that, she prescribed me Wellbutrin, which made me almost faint during class, so I stopped taking that.
Then, she prescribed me Ritalin, which didn’t do anything to change the way I felt or behaved, just made me feel tired all the time, in fact, so we stopped that too.
All the while, my mother made her opinion very aggressively clear.
“You don’t need to take all of these medications.”
“We should trust the doctors,” my dad would say.
And so would begin another fight between the two of them, over me.
Most of the fights now were about medication, but sometimes they were about Vin.
The first night he came over for dinner, she immediately sized him up.
“Well, that’s nice, Helaina.”
“What do you mean, that’s nice?”
“He’s trash, ugly, stupid. Not for you.”
She somehow found out that the elementary school he went to had a strong program for kids with disabilities, so she started calling him “a retard,” too, which my dad strongly resented.
I was like an appendage to her, one that she was now simultaneously bruising and nursing, constantly attacking me for spending “so much time with him” or any time with him at all. Ironically, the more she tried to reign me in and keep me away from him, the more she pushed me away, and the more I pushed back. Behind her polished appearance my mother was flat out exhausted, always on edge and exasperated; no amount of expensive makeup could conceal the fact that her eyes were rimmed by dark, puffy circles.
My mom tolerated Vin coming over for dinner, because she never liked to turn anyone away, just like she never liked to cancel play dates when I was little, because she didn’t want to “punish the other kid.”
I was still mean, irritable, jumpy, and reactive to her, she was reactive twice back, her voice growing shriller and sharper by the day. Our apartment was a chorus of slamming doors, me shoving my body hard against it as she tried to force her way in. We were both so fragile, fighting like children who were desperate to communicate what they needed but couldn’t find the words. My father often found himself in the middle of these fights, but he was temperamental and reactive himself, and so there was always a war, everyone switching sides, feeling betrayed.
When my dad tried to break up one of these physical fights, he accidentally knocked me into the door. The next day, when my parents were supposed to come in to meet with me and the headmaster, I slipped straight past the office, out the door, and to Vin’s school, where we found a couple of cops and said we wanted to file a report for assault.
We got in the cop car, drove to the First Precinct, sat in a room, and filed a report against my dad. Soon, a social worker came to our apartment, asked us a bunch of questions, which I answered with such phrases as,
“I hate them.”
“I don’t want to live here.”
“They’re horrible.”
My father sat there, cooperating and patiently answering her questions, until, sooner than later, the social worker found that there was no reason not to simply close the case.
When I decided to “run away” one cold day, Vin and I sat under the Manhattan Bridge, just minutes from home, watching snow fall onto the green, murky water of the East River.
My therapist called, and I sighed, looking out at the orange Watchtower in Brooklyn that let us know the time and temperature, in both Fahrenheit and Celsius.
“Your parents want to talk to you,” he droned. “They want you to go home.”
I don’t give a fuck about what they want.
“That’s not going to happen,” I said, looking at Vin, who nodded. It was like I was speaking with a hostage negotiator.
“They said they’re going to call the cops and have Vin arrested for kidnapping if you don’t,” he explained. “He’s eighteen and you’re a minor. They can do it.”
I stood there, almost literally frozen, not knowing what to do, and at the same time knowing that I could never really run away, because I wouldn’t be able to survive, and I wouldn’t be able to leave Grandma behind.
The echo of the little girl inside me who used to say I want to go home was shaking her head. Home was scary, now, too, because everyone was always fighting.
After entertaining the idea of jumping into the East River with Vin and freezing to death together, depicting a more realistic ending to the movie Titanic, I looked at him helplessly and he took my little hand in his big, softer one
and lead me home.
I remember getting home and dramatically declaring, “I love him! And nothing you do is going to change that!” before going into my room. We were in very close quarters in our apartment, so my mother continued to just shout outside the door.
Later that night, when I emerged for a snack, my dad was perched in his usual place on the couch, the flashing white light of the TV flickering across his face.
“You’re her best friend and she’s losing you,” he said.
That made me feel both angry and guilty, emotions that were usually fighting each other—although they were on the same team, they worked together to rail against everything around me.
* * *
A couple of weeks before the school play’s opening night, out of the blue and some time after I completely stopped talking to him, I got an Instant Message from Max’s ex-girlfriend, or on-again girlfriend, or whoever she was, telling me that I was a psycho, and that I’d better back off because “he was hers” and she was going to “slap me in the face.”
I told the guidance counselor and the “school psychologist” but they sort of just nodded and listened.
“Nothing we can do,” they may as well have said in unison, on a split screen.
They didn’t seem to think this was cause for alarm, but I sure as fuck did, so I took the matter of protecting myself into my own hands. I encouraged Vin—who didn’t need much persuading, when it came to this sort of thing—to bring a couple of friends to school and “address” the problem to Max directly.
I stayed home “sick” that day, and, almost on cue, around 4:00 p.m., the headmaster left a voicemail for my parents telling them to come in the next day for a meeting after school wrapped up. I went about the school day as usual, went to rehearsal for the musical, where we were supposed to be fitted for costumes, and was quickly pulled out of the auditorium and asked to go down to the office.
“We can’t have this kind of behavior at our institution,” the headmaster explained from his red leather chair. He was joined by the dean of students, who was seated in an identical chair, and who was wearing an identical blue suit.
After 9/11 Page 19