The Lucky Ones

by Julianne Pachico

  As the subway car pulls out of the station with a groan, he turns to her. “You have something on your nose,” he says. He reaches out, fingers fluttering by her nostrils like a blurry peach moth, and she ducks.

  “There’s no need for that,” she says, taking out a folded square of toilet paper. The baggie is in the ladies’ room at the club, licked clean and crumpled, crammed in the disposal can for sanitary pads.

  “Sorry,” he says, not sounding that upset. He crosses his legs and wraps his fingers around his kneecap, as if cuddling it. The wrist poking out of his jacket is still a New York winter pale.

  She dabs the toilet paper against her nostrils, sniffing loudly. Sitting across from them is a group of three girls. They’re wearing flower-patterned dresses, shiny American Apparel leggings, long dangly earrings, brown oxfords. One girl is leaning forward with her head bowed, cradling a giant green backpack in her lap like a baby. Without staring at the girls too directly, she can tell that their eyeliner isn’t smudged, their hair is smooth and straightened, their concealer still effectively hiding any blemishes on their upper jawlines. She swallows and rubs the toilet paper against her nose even harder, letting out a cough for good measure.

  “So what are your plans for today?” Tony says, reaching for an untied shoelace. Hours earlier, she mistook it for a long black worm drowning in a puddle as they stood smoking outside the club entrance.

  She almost says, Watch porn and masturbate, but instead answers, “Just chilling, I guess.” Was it a thick clump, clinging to her nostril hairs? A delicate crust around the rims? Did she look like the Dormouse, waking up with a start after falling asleep in the sugar bowl at the Mad Hatter’s tea party?

  “I might cook some steak, if I go to the store.” His eyes are bloodshot, but his pale skin is clear.

  “Cool,” she says, furiously digging in her nose as deep as she can. One of the girls, the one with perfectly straight bangs, is staring at her, or maybe she’s just looking vacantly at the subway map behind her head.

  “Maybe some chili con carne. Chili with flesh.” He laughs.

  Carne means “meat,” but she doesn’t correct him. She’s about to tell him that sounds good when something thin peels away from her nostril wall. It makes a faint crackling sound beneath her fingernail. She tries to stay calm as she yanks it out, ripping some nose hairs, cupping it in her palms as her eyes water. She can hear the girls’ voices in her head, sees their mouths forming Os and eyes bulging as they stare and nudge each other: OMG, look at her, she’s totally Michael Jackson–ing!

  It’s a dry leaf. Disintegrating in her hand, crumbling into thin brown flakes. She can suddenly feel the stem, shoved high up her nasal cavity, scratchy and tickling. She smashes her nose against her cardigan sleeve and blows hard.

  “Whoa!” Tony says. The girl with the green backpack looks up, and one of her friends makes a noise that could either be a cough or a choked laugh.

  She squeezes the leaf bits tightly in her fist and drops them onto the floor, wiping her hand off on her bare leg. For a second, she thinks she hears giggling, but when she looks up, the girls haven’t moved. She makes eye contact with the backpack girl, who raises her eyebrows and pulls her lips inward, the classic American expression of feigning indifference.

  As the subway car slowly whines to a stop she says, “This is me,” at the same moment that Tony says, “So, I’ll see you around?”

  —

  She’s calling Paco the second she steps into her apartment. When his voicemail beeps, she’s already speaking, her recording starting in midsentence: “—some nerve. I don’t know what you’re doing, but that’s some serious bullshit, man. That shit is not okay. And I know that you know what I’m talking about, so please don’t bother to pretend otherwise.” She likes the way her voice sounds as she moves around the kitchen, picking up and putting down dirty glasses streaked with the grainy smears of ancient smoothies. She can hear New York in her voice, the years of arguing with Brooklyn dealers, the smirking college boys at Upper West Side house parties. Her head suddenly fills with an image of her grandmother, the way she’d lean against the kitchen doorframe back home, brow furrowed as she reprimanded Nellie with kind, expansive hand gestures: I just don’t understand, you see. What is so hard about following the menu that I specifically wrote up for you? Do you think you could maybe explain that to me?

  She hangs up and tosses her cellphone onto a puppy-shaped pillow on the floor. Paco is Guatemalan, so every once in a while when speaking to him she’ll slyly throw in the odd Spanish word or two, a curse word or even a dicho, just to show that yeah, okay, she’s lived in New York for what, fifteen years now, but she still knows how to conjugate verbs, knows which nouns are feminine versus masculine. She’s not like those Bogotanos she keeps meeting at warehouse raves, those Barranquillan trust fund babies or Caleña sugarcane plantation heirs, who spent their whole lives in Houston or Miami and now try to pretend they’re bicultural-bilingual when she knows the truth, that they’re no better than any common gringo. (Something that she herself most definitely is not. No way. Not a chance. Gringo is a word she’s always hated, fat and puffy and pastry-shaped in her mouth.) “I’m not the cow that shits the most,” she’ll say to Paco on the phone, keeping her voice as casual as possible, hands shaking with excitement, or “I’m not the kind of girl who gives away papaya, if you know what I mean.” This one time, against her better judgment, she even told him her childhood nickname, dropping it in casually as though it was nothing, meaningless. “You can call me ‘Flakis,’ if you want,” she said to him in Spanish, laughing too hard, almost hysterically. “ ‘La Flaca’ is a bit of a mouthful, I know!”

  Paco still calls her by her full name, though—the one she’s used since moving to New York. And he never responds to her in Spanish, only English. It makes her feel strange. Once while on the phone, she abruptly hung up on him, and when he called back she pretended she’d lost the signal.

  She lets herself flop forward onto the bed. Her fashion history class isn’t until two P.M. At this point, she usually takes a clonazepam and puts on a YouTube video of a girl showing off what’s in her bag or applying concealer to hide her acne. Either that or power through—keep the party going, as Tony said earlier, eyes fixed on her purse as she rapidly zipped it open—take an Adderall and finish her reading, maybe even sketch out some dress designs, post on her blog. Instead she just lies there with her eyes closed, fingers tugging gently at her hair.

  Paco. Most likely he’d have been in his overcrowded apartment in Queens, a dying potted plant in the middle of the table. There must have been a dead insect somewhere too, dangling from a dry leaf or something. Paco busy in front of his scales—pouring out, weighing, sorting, maybe even sniffing from time to time, his son crying in the bedroom. He must have knocked the plant with his elbow. Or maybe his kid snuck in while Paco was in the bathroom and started messing around, shaking the plant until its leaves fell off, giggling maniacally. Did that make sense? Is that how it could have happened? Did Paco have to measure it into baggies, or did they arrive as is, neatly lined up in suitcases? Did they come in bulky FedEx packages, bundled in brown packing tape and bubble wrap? In beat-up cardboard boxes? In secret compartments of carry-on athletic bags?

  She rolls over and opens the desk drawer. There they are. Snuggling in the yellow envelope he handed to her in the Whole Foods parking lot. What once were five now are three. Lined up like stuffed animals, waiting for their turn to be picked up and held. She can’t help smiling as she remembers the stuffed-animal sleeping schedule she made when she was little. It took up at least two pages in her purple Barbie diary, three weeks’ worth of plush creatures, a different one every night so that they could all get a turn. Her favorites were Perrito, his Labrador tail sticking out of his candy cane pants, hand-sewn by Leticia; Chinchilla, with the purple silk ribbon tied tightly around his neck; and Honey Bunny, gray-eared and floppy, smelling faintly of mothballs.

  She reaches into
the envelope, pulls out a baggie, and automatically starts rubbing it between her thumb and middle finger, breaking up the chunks inside. Just like she learned to do in boarding school upstate. She opens the baggie slowly, but of course there’s nothing there that’s out of the ordinary. Of course.

  From where she’s lying, if she slides her eyeballs as far to the left as possible, she can see it: the orange suitcase, sitting placidly on top of her armoire, under the extra sheets and towels she never uses.

  The smell hits her hard: the steam of chicken broth bubbling on the stove, warm and salty.

  She abruptly shoves the baggie back into the envelope and slams the desk drawer shut. Lies down on the bed, eyes closed and palms pressing against her temples. The back of her throat is still dripping.

  —

  She’s in the elevator going up to her friend’s apartment. The doors close behind her as she unzips her purse with one hand, reaching the other deep inside, her fingers nimbly detecting the sparkly unicorn key chain. The keys rattle slightly as she pulls them out. Her purse today is covered in yawning jaguars, purple and orange and pink, their stitched bodies stretching and leaping across the black cloth background.

  As her hand plunges back inside for the baggie, she imagines raging-hot infrared vision blasting from her fingertips, zooming in on the required materials with the expertise of Luke Skywalker’s computer detecting the Death Star. All forces ready! Mission accomplished! There it is, hidden in the tiny side pocket, next to her lipstick and lighter. Wrapped in a thin square of toilet paper. She loves keeping it tucked away like that, curled up in the darkness like an animal in a cave, taking it with her everywhere she goes, without anybody having any idea that it’s there. As she pulls it out, the fluttering in her chest moves down to her stomach.

  She’s already poking the key inside the baggie when she sees it. Half-buried in the powder, but unmistakable.

  An insect wing. Brown and translucent. Oval-shaped. Faint veins like the underside of a decayed leaf. Like the wings that dangled from the orange flyswatters wielded by the maids back home. What were their names again? Nellie and Rosa. Pastora and Leticia. They’d shake the dead insects into the tanks of tropical fish while she watched, pressing her nose against the glass. The fish would rush toward the surface, mouths plopping open and shut. It got to be so that whenever anybody picked up a flyswatter the fish would go crazy, eyes bulging as they clustered at the surface, frothing the water with their desperate hunger.

  The elevator dings and her hand shoots forward, pressing hard on the CLOSE button. She pulls out the wing and throws it on the floor, jamming the baggie and keys back into her purse. Before letting the door open again and stepping outside, she looks down at the shiny elevator floor. All she sees is a blurry reflection of her high heels, the ones she likes to think of as her Beyoncé shoes. It looks as if she is swimming on the opposite side of a mirror, upside down, shoes barely skimming the surface, on the verge of breaking through to the air above.

  At the party, whenever she introduces herself, she makes sure to pronounce her name with an American accent (her full name, of course—not her childhood nickname. She would never refer to herself as anything so silly as that). Two girls from the New School admire her purse, touching the jaguars’ stripes. “It’s so cute,” the one with braided pigtails says. “Where did you get it?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says. “It was a gift.”

  She excuses herself to go to the bathroom.

  —

  She doesn’t mention it to Paco. Not the wrinkled flower petal at the bottom of the third baggie, found as she was crouching behind a tree in Central Park, poking her spit-dampened pinkie finger in for the very last crumbs. Not the Communion wafer in the fourth, sticking out like a sundae decoration. (She remembers the visiting Jesuit priests, bringing tiny plastic bags filled with these bland white disks as gifts, how she would steal them to eat in her room with orange marmalade and feed them unblessed to her dolls, until her grandmother caught her and, with a shaming frown, put an end to the sacrament.) The fifth one she poured out onto a dinner plate so that she could use her eyebrow tweezers to pick out the crumbling fragments of moss and bark.

  She doesn’t bring it up—not a word as she sits in Paco’s Honda, her back ramrod straight, squeezing the jaguar purse between her knees, resisting the urge to look for split ends in her hair that she can break off with her teeth. Paco’s wife is driving them around the Whole Foods parking garage while he digs into his bag in the front seat. His son is sitting next to her, backpack tucked between his legs. His Spider-Man shirt has a white stain on the front that might be toothpaste, and his eyes are fixed on his Game Boy, mushrooms and turtles flying across the screen.

  “So,” she says to Paco’s son. (Did he go by Paco too? Or was it Junior?) “Where do you want to go to college? Like, when you grow up?”

  “What’s that?” he says, eyes still on the Game Boy.

  She doesn’t ask him any more questions.

  “Here you go, mija,” Paco says, turning around and passing her the yellow envelope. She leans forward and shoves the fistful of bills into his hands. She had it all counted out fifteen minutes before they were supposed to meet, her H&M heels clicking against the concrete floor as she paced.

  “I have some Adderall too, if you’re out,” he says. “OxyContin. Molly.” He lists the names like World Cup team members.

  “That’s okay.” Now that she has the envelope, all she wants is to get out of the car as soon as possible. He hasn’t brought up her voicemail yet, but if he does she has a plan: She’ll just say, “Oh, ha-ha, the stuff just wasn’t as strong as last time. No big deal, it happens.” If only she could force the door open with her shoulder and roll across the parking garage floor like an action hero, chin tucked into her chest and arms wrapped around her torso, hugging the envelope close. She has to take a deep breath to stop herself from breaking into a wide grin at the thought. Beside her, Paco’s son lets out a lusty yawn.

  “It was good to hear from you,” Paco says as his wife pulls into a parking spot that says CUSTOMERS ONLY. “It’d been a while—I was worried!” He laughs as his wife twists around, unlocking the back door.

  She opens her mouth to answer him in Spanish, but the words don’t come, her tongue thick and helpless, hesitating against her teeth. So she has to say it in English instead, slowly: “You don’t ever have to worry about me.”

  When she gets out she doesn’t shut the car door hard enough, so Paco’s wife has to rap on the window and signal for her to do it again. She waits until they’ve turned the corner before ducking behind a concrete pillar. Her fingernails are too shredded, so she rips the envelope open with her teeth.

  Checking one bag is enough. This time there’s a tiny gray drumstick bone, smothered in powder, as if ready to be dropped into spitting-hot frying oil.

  It’s easy to identify the feeling as she seals the baggie and shoves it back into the envelope. It’s an unmistakable sense of relief.

  —

  She crawls into bed that night with numb lips, her body shivering, dressed in her lime-green miniskirt and ballerina flats. The apartment has smelled like a smoky wood fire for two days now, with the faint undertone of stale powdered milk. She let number six flutter away on the subway tracks (the blast of air from the incoming train made it dance around like a transparent butterfly); number seven, half-full, hibernates for now in her purse, jaguars again.

  “You got it from where?” one of her classmates said at the restaurant. “Wait, did you go there on vacation? You’re so brave!”

  “I went to Cartagena last year,” another one said as the waiter brought a second bottle of wine to the table. “Everyone there was so friendly.”

  She reaches for her laptop, pulls it across the mattress until it bumps against her chin. Instead of watching a makeup tutorial, though, she starts surfing Google Earth. She can’t remember the name of the street she grew up on, but she manages to find the international private
school she attended from kindergarten to third grade. There are hardly any blue dots on the screen linking to Street View photographs, so the tiny orange Google man keeps refusing to be dragged onto the map, rushing stubbornly back to the compass again and again. She clicks on the school website link and scrolls through pages of photos of three-walled classrooms, the kiosks with palm-thatched roofs, gymnasium murals of floating peace signs and multicolored citizens holding hands. It makes her dizzy. It’s the same feeling she gets when she passes Mexican families on the street, speaking rapid slang-filled Spanish, or when Puerto Rican construction workers catcall her with words she doesn’t recognize, as if they are speaking to her from a parallel universe, one she should understand but just doesn’t. The feeling gets stronger with every photograph she clicks through, the parallel reality brushing up against her, sleazily pressing its weight against her torso, breathing wetly in her ear.

  She drags the cursor across the screen, clicking on whatever pitiful scattering of dots she can find. It makes her feel as though she is surveying an apocalyptic wasteland, searching for the tiniest signs of life. She finds the traffic light where the black man from the coast sold mango Popsicles and tiny bags of salt out of a Styrofoam plastic cooler, and when the school bus stopped, the kids would lean out the windows to hand him five-hundred-peso coins. She finds the metal gate of the Jewish country club, where her grandmother would take her on weekends for tennis games on red clay courts, swimming lessons, lunches of grilled cheese sandwiches brought by a scraggly-haired waitress she secretly called Mafalda, after the comic book character. She finds the nature park filled with lagoons and herons and cicada-covered trees, where she would walk her grandmother’s poodle in circles, the bodyguard and chauffeur sweating under the acacia and ceiba trees at the entrance, eyes never leaving her.

  And then she finds a photo of a gray stone wall with shards of glass jutting along the top and an enormous automatic gate. The country house of one of her classmates. A giant ranch on the city’s edge. She zooms in. She went there in kindergarten once for a birthday party—she and her classmates gathered at the airport to take the short helicopter ride. They stayed all day: swimming in an enormous blue-tiled pool, chasing one another around angel statues and marble fountains. There were colorful balloons tied to a swing set and charred-black hot dogs grilled over a barbecue pit. And then there were the animals: a wooden birdhouse full of macaws and peacocks, a parrot that could recite the names of all the players on the national soccer team, a spider monkey that could kick a football, and a lion that slept in its iron cage all afternoon, no matter how loudly they shouted at the gardener to let them pet it. And the rabbits, snuggling in their metal hutch with their nests of knotted white fur, noses nervously quivering. She and her friends pushed blades of grass in between the bars for them to nibble on, calling out, “Hey, little guy, sweet little thing,” wiggling their fingers at the blinking pink eyes.