But if I’m not ready to bring Leigh home to that rainbow cake just yet, I am starting to wish for a label, just between us. Because that’s, like, the main difference between a relationship and a Jake, right? When you can’t be contained inside a single night or a truck bed or bathroom stall, so you spill over into real life. And what if Leigh won’t stick around town for a nebulous, unlabeled whatever? With the start of August tomorrow, the deadline is looming.
Bottom line: If Leigh’s my good thing, then we need to be . . . something.
I need to be enough.
My phone chimes, and I check the screen.
Leigh: dude, can we just hang out at the house?
By “the house,” she means Chris’s place, and by “dude” she means no chance—I speak Leigh fluently enough to understand this. Frustrated, I send back some affirmative combo of emojis and drop the phone into my lap.
Lucky me, I get another chance the next morning during my shift at the Lagoon, when a rainstorm washes out the park for a half hour. The mermaids and I are in the locker room, wringing ourselves out and refastening plastic starfish and flowers and turtles into our hair. Then Kristian stands on a bench to announce her twenty-first birthday on Friday, and the whole squad’s invited to her birthday party with plus-ones.
Which seems like the perfect place to finally affix a label to Leigh and me.
Kristian lives with her boyfriend in Santa Fe, in this freaking adorable one-story house they’re renting on Agua Fria. Turquoise doors, strings of sea glass in the windows, rough stucco walls, ceramic kitchen tiles printed with birds and flowers. It’s an Airbnb wet dream.
The birthday girl, tiny and gorgeous in this flowing purple maxi dress and flower crown, rockets into my arms when she sees us in the front room. “Vanni, YAY, you came!”
“Your place is great!” I shout over the untz-untz-untz of the speakers turned way up.
Leigh stands a little awkwardly at my side, shrinking from the crush of party guests. She’s wearing a baggy long-sleeve button-up with the sleeves rolled to her biceps, and she just got a haircut this morning, with the soft sides cut close, and the hair on top a little longer and fluffed up. She looks so tight, I want to drag her back out to the van and peel off her shorts (which are khaki and almost knee-length, so I don’t understand why it’s sexy, but whatever, there it is). But I’m here on the mission. Instead, I take her hand in mine and pull her in close so she can hear me.
“This is my girlfriend, Leigh!” I yell into Kristian’s face. Except it’s the first time I’m saying the word aloud, unrehearsed, and technically without permission, so it comes out in a hiccup, like “g-urrrlfrin.”
Leigh’s fingers twitch in mine, and I clamp down.
Kristian blinks, eyes rounded with surprise and an excellent shade of blue eyeliner. “Oh! Cool, that’s really cool!”
Though I’m afraid to look sideways once Kristian moves off to mingle, Leigh doesn’t seem upset. At least she keeps her hand in mine on our meandering journey toward the drinks set up in the backyard. As always, it feels different from a boy’s—small knuckled, she takes up much less space between my fingers, and her skin is cooler somehow—but it doesn’t feel wrong. Of course, I’ve held hands with girls before, because Marilee was always touchy-feely, hooking arms, kissing cheeks, mounting us for piggyback rides when she was high. We even kissed on the mouth once, pursed fish lips to fish lips, in a game of Truth or Dare that was obviously for the boys around us, and not for us girls. But it wasn’t a storm inside my body, the air suddenly dense and hot, my blood crackling electrically.
People are piled into the dusty backyard surrounded by an artfully jagged wooden fence. There’s an outdoor bar at the picnic table, assorted snacks and bottles glittering on top, with the keg beside it. I grab a fistful of tortilla chips out of a bag—I’ve been freaking starving lately, maybe because I’m skipping a meal here and there to make time for Leigh—and lean in close to ask her, “What do you want?”
She shrugs one shoulder, eyeing the crowd. “Depends. How long are we staying?”
Just then, Camila A spots me from across the yard, flaps an arm and shrieks, “Vanni! ¿Conoces a mi novio?”
Leigh raises an eyebrow.
“She wants us to meet her boyfriend,” I explain.
“Us?” she murmurs, reaching for a cup.
I tug on her sleeve. “Hey, is it okay that we’re here? And what I said—”
“Yeah, it’s fine, it’s a good party. I just want to get to the after-party.” She kisses my jaw where my hair’s pinned back, just below my ear, and the air inside my lungs sizzles.
A few of the mermaids stand together by the fence, the Camilas A and C and Iris and the Kardashian-esque Nicole, along with a scattering of boyfriends and Nicole’s cousin, equally dark haired and plump lipped. The circle expands to fit us in. We talk about the Lagoon, our common denominator, retelling stories we all know about getting hit on by pubescent park guests, worshiped by little girls, shouted at by Eric, scowled at by Naomi. It’s a warm night and I’ve got a warm buzz going from the beer that Leigh periodically disappears to fetch. She and I are holding hands while we say these perfectly normal things and talk about the epic party we’ll throw when the Lost Lagoon closes for the season in September, and debate whether we’ll come back next year. Though we bitch about the havoc chlorine wreaks on our hair, and joke about burning our fins so we’ll never again have to squeeze inside like processed meat into sausage casings, we all say yeah. We’ll do it again for sure. As little as I like thinking about the future, the promise of having a home next summer at Mermaid Cove makes me feel warmer still.
Leigh untangles her fingers from mine to make a trip to the keg, but I turn, wrap my hand around the soft, short hair at the back of her neck and pull her in for a kiss.
“Yeah, girls, that’s hot!” some pendejo on a flyby toward the bar shouts in our ears.
I feel every part of Leigh tighten. The small tendons in her neck, her skin, her shoulders, her fingers hooked inside the front pocket of my shorts, her teeth. She snaps around to look at this guy’s pink, round face bobbling above the collar of his navy-and-teal-striped polo shirt, and snarls, “Did we fucking ask?”
Our circle of mermaids and mer-quaintances hushes, but I bite the inside of my cheek to hide a smile. Because even I, who’s never before publicly kissed a girl I actually like, know that this dude’s attitude is some tiresome shit.
What should happen:
This guy apologizes for being a sexist jerk and assuming that every girl wakes up, gets dressed, puts on lipstick, strolls down the sidewalk, and moves through the world all so he can get a boner. Just like every asshole around here who’ll honk at anything with tits as he blasts by in his truck pumping reggaetón, no matter if you’re wearing sweats or have a nasty cold or your dad just got diagnosed that morning, and you need to get some air and some peace. Or like every tourist who comes into Silvia’s, eyeballs Estrella and Mom and me and declares, “They sure grow them pretty in these parts!” as if we were planted and watered and picked just to delight him on his vacation. Realizing all this, the guy immediately says he’s sorry, backs away from us, and shuts himself in Kristian’s bathroom to reevaluate his life.
What does happen:
The slabs of his cheeks darken and splotch like raw marbled beef. Rooted to his patch of dust by shock or shame or both, he stares back at us. “Chill the fuck out,” he murmurs, then takes a deep drink from the plastic cup crinkling in his fist. His razor-burned Adam’s apple bobs violently as he watches Leigh over the rim . . . right until the moment she reaches up and palms it out of his grip.
The cup spins away toward the ground.
Unidentified alcohol drips down his chin, soaks his polo shirt, splashes the dirt around us.
Untz-untz-untz, the bass pumps from inside the house.
He stands there, bug-eyed, before stumbling toward us.
I doubt he means to throw
a punch or anything, probably wants to get in her face, like any big guy used to getting his way just by existing in as much space as he does, but Leigh’s already slipping away from me, out of my grasp. I’m clutching at the air where her shirt was as she slams forward, driving her shoulder into his chest, her fist into his sizable stomach with a thick whoomph. Bellowing “What the fuck?” he raises a forearm and knocks her across the cheek.
There is murder in Leigh’s eyes as she winds back for another punch, but then Camila A’s boyfriend swoops in and wraps his arms around Leigh’s waist, holding her off, and I’ve got my hands on this guy’s sweaty T-shirt, shoving him back, and people are shouting, and his friends are tugging on him, except he’s not fighting to get at Leigh or anything, just bellowing, “What the fuck, I didn’t do anything! What the fuck? I didn’t even want to touch the bitch, what the fuck?”
And Iris is standing right behind me, saying, “Oh my god, Vanni, oh my god.”
And I’m telling her, “I don’t know,” just “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
FIFTEEN
“Not going out, mi corazón?” Dad asks as I flop down beside him on the sofa. It’s early on Sunday afternoon, the restaurant’s closed and Mom’s home too, outside weeding the rock mulch with her phone un-coolly clipped to her belt in case Dad needs her. Why she bothers, I don’t know—will overgrown chicory stunt the growth of our luxurious pebble crop?—except that Mom’s like me. She feels better when she’s moving.
Tonight, though, I’m not going anywhere. “I’m vegging with you guys. See?” I gesture toward my pink Tinkerbell sleep shorts that Marilee brought me back from Disneyland three years ago. The seams now strain against my hips, but they’re still perfectly veg-appropriate.
So is Dad’s outfit: a loose-necked T-shirt and loosely cinched drawstring pants bulging slightly over his knee supports, so he won’t have to fumble with a button and zipper, and shoes without laces. Anything to save him a little time. Sometime in the winter, I overheard Mom talking to Chris Zepeda, who’d come to visit. I passed through the kitchen where they stood, Chris with a beer, and a wineglass dangling lightly from Mom’s fingertips. She smiled at me, but when I paused in the hallway I heard her say that the extra moments it took Dad to brush his teeth, to find the TV remote, to answer the phone, to slide into a car, were losses more painful to Dad because they were so small. Time that should’ve been his being whittled from his life. She sounded so un-Mom-like. And Dad had never said anything like that to me. My parents don’t talk about Dad’s HD that way. “It’s not the end of the world,” Mom always says, “it’s just a different one.”
Sure it is.
Dad and I spend the afternoon watching reruns of a sitcom, the couch shaking slightly beneath us as his body rocks against the back cushions. I pay close attention to this show about people in luxury apartments in the city, who seem to spend all of their time frantically pairing off and none of their time working. In one episode, the second-best-looking boy takes the best-looking girl to the aquarium, then falls into the shark tank to the compulsory laughter of the audience. To the girl, this is adorable, and not a troubling brush with Darwinism.
Mom finishes her yard work, showers, and joins us just in time for the end of the episode about the second-best-looking girl losing her crappy day job, experiencing a short montage of interviews for even worse jobs, and then immediately landing her dream job with the help of her friends and also a capybara that’s escaped from the city zoo.
“What kind of show is this?” she asks, toweling her long hair.
Seconds later, Dad answers, “Fantasy.”
I forget he’s sometimes funny, even if his jokes are on a bit of a time delay. Like when Dad used to do the grocery shopping by himself, he once tripped into this beautifully constructed, eight-foot-high tree of stacked paper towel rolls—it was right around Christmastime—and I’m not saying it was hilarious. I’m sure Dad was pissed and embarrassed and scared in the moment, and I took over the shopping soon after. But later, when Mom fake-casually asked how the trip had gone, Dad half smiled when he told us that at that very moment, in the song being piped over the store speakers, Miley Cyrus sang, “I came in like a wreeeecking baaaaall . . .”
An episode or two later, I pry myself away from this laugh-tracked masterpiece to help Mom with dinner. It’s leftover tacos de pescado from Silvia’s. Mom peels back the lid on the plastic tub, spoons the cream-and-halibut filling into a pan to reheat according to Martin’s scribbled instructions. I tear open a salad bag, pausing to wipe the crumbs from prepackaged croutons off my hands when I get a text.
Leigh: You around?
Me: Gotta stay in tonight. People are coming over. Sorry!!!
For the record, I am not avoiding Leigh.
She’s said she’s sorry, and true, that pendejo probably deserved it, for general crimes against womanity if not specifically for being rude at a birthday party. So she didn’t take his shit; I love the non-shit-takingness of Leigh. I love that she knows exactly who she is and exactly what she wants.
Except that Camila A’s boyfriend almost had to fireman-carry her out of Kristian’s backyard, at which point it was obvious that all she wanted was to punch, and anybody with a breakable nose would do. And that, I didn’t like quite so much.
The kitchen timer beeps. Mom takes out the pan and spoons the filling onto tortillas warmed in the microwave, because she gets too frazzled using the stove for two purposes at once. Dad would flip tortillas in the pan with his bare hands like it was nothing. For him, she puts the filling directly on his plate, then rips his tortilla into quarters so he won’t have to worry about his taco splattering into his lap. “Food’s ready,” she says. “Go help your father up if he needs it, mija.”
He doesn’t, and makes his way stiffly to the table. It’s a dinner like any other. Mom talks, Dad nods and bobs, I ignore my phone as it vibrates in the pocket of my Tinkerbell shorts.
“Chris sent a picture of his little niece.” Mom launches into a new topic, her cooling taco hovering between her plate and mouth. “¡Que bella pequeña! She reminds me of you, Vanni, when you were little. All that baby fat, like dumplings! He says his father’s on the mend, too, so he’ll still be back by the end of the month, he thinks. I told him everything was fine at home, of course, with you doing such a good job looking out for the place.”
Guiltily, I stuff the rest of a steaming taco down my throat. I cough, and Dad prods the pitcher across the table with both hands. I gulp water, stuff down my last taco, and stand to bring my plate to the sink. “I’ll clean, okay?”
“Thank you, mija.” Mom smiles quickly and warmly, and then she’s off again, repeating some story Mr. Paiz told her yesterday afternoon about the increasingly aggressive pigeons in the town square.
I scrape food into the trash and wash the dishes while Mom helps Dad shave in the bathroom, then makes sure he’s settled in his shower chair. There’s the sputter and spritz of the water, and Mom joins me in the kitchen, still toweling her hands.
“So, no plans at all on your free evening?” she asks. “Not even with your friend?”
I glance up from the sink to see Mom studying the towel intently. In this exact moment, I realize she’s figured out that my “friend” count is down to one. Here, I’ve been scattering white lies like super-obvious bread crumbs for the past year and a half, such as: “Sorry I stayed out so late. I went to Diana’s to watch a movie and we fell asleep.” Because my mother doesn’t care much for Mrs. Reyes, and they run in as opposite circles as possible in a three-traffic-light town, Diana is occasionally my go-to excuse. But I haven’t had her or Marilee around in all that time, and as it turns out, Mom’s neither too tired nor too optimistic to have noticed. I’m not happy that she knows, that she’s probably been worrying . . . but.
The fact is that my mother’s not too busy or tired or blindly optimistic to understand this truth about me, at least.
“Nope,”
I say for a third time, though I have to squeeze it out around this strangling little lump in my throat.
She frowns and presses damp knuckles against my forehead. “You’re not feeling sick?”
“I’m okay.”
“You and Leigh didn’t have a fight, did you?”
“We’re not in a fight.” I almost laugh. “Mom, do you, like, ever want to go somewhere else? Or, like, wish you were someplace different right now? Or . . .” This is not a normal conversation for us. We don’t talk much about my mom, how she’s feeling, what she wishes. Maybe we used to, but not in the past few years. Still, her undivided attention’s unsettled something, questions stirring way at the bottom of a deep, still lake. “Where would you go right exactly this second, if you could go anywhere?”
“I’m happy here.” She folds the towel neatly against her body. “Your dad’s having a good night. He’s calm and enjoying himself with his family. He has everything he needs.”
“I’m not asking about that, I’m just asking what you want.”
She sets the towel on the kitchen counter and frowns at me, a rare sight. “Love isn’t always about that. Asking ourselves what we want all of the time? That’s the way children love.”
This makes zero sense. “So what, you don’t get to have anything, ever?”
Mom opens her mouth to answer, when from the other room comes the thud of something falling.
The look on her face—pale panic mixed with resignation. The same old disaster. I follow her down the hall to the bathroom. Mom raps one knuckle against the door and raises her voice to be heard over the hiss of the shower. “Gabe? ¿Estás bien, querido?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, cracking the door and ducking inside. Steam billows in my face before the door shuts again. While I wait I taste something sour and familiar, my heart trapped behind my teeth.
A moment later, Mom pokes her head out and flashes a tight smile. “Vanni, get the first-aid kit out of the kitchen, can you?”
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