Althea and Oliver

by Cristina Moracho

  On the floor by the couch, Althea eats a bowl of brown rice doused with sesame oil and soy sauce. The cat is at her side, his little motor running, trying to nose his way into her dish. An avid reader of fantasy novels, Gregory’s routine is laced with jokes about griffins and lycanthropy. As he’s going for a punch line, Leala’s avatar dies and she throws her controller to the ground, narrowly missing Mr. Business’s head. “Let’s go out. Let’s go do something,” she says.

  “Wanna make out?” suggests Kaleb.

  Gregory is annoyed. “I was in the middle of a fucking joke.”

  “Everybody up. Come on. You, too, Ethan.” Leala leans over him and gently pries the book from his fingers. “Is it not Friday night?”

  “I don’t want to,” Ethan says.

  “You heard her,” Kaleb says. “Up. We’re going out.”

  “To do what? We don’t have any money.”

  “Money? Money?” Leala shouts. She and Kaleb have Ethan cornered in his chair. “Money is for people with money! Since when do we need money to have a good time? All you need is a commitment to fun. Where’s your commitment to fun, Ethan?”

  “It’s cold outside—”

  “What a fucking joke you are.” Kaleb shakes his head. “‘It’s cold outside’? Seriously?”

  “What are we doing?” Matilda asks, tearing open the shirt with a seam ripper.

  “I haven’t gotten that far yet,” Leala says.

  The drummer, the dropout, and the tattoo artist stand in the doorway. “We going out?” the tattoo artist asks.

  Half the room says yes, half the room says no. Kaleb starts to undress.

  “Oh, come on,” Ethan says. “Why do you always have to get naked for no reason?”

  Kaleb unbuckles his belt. “Right now I’m getting naked so I can slap you in the face with my dick.”

  Gathering the final grains of rice with her chopsticks, Althea speaks. “Y’all ever thought of having a scavenger hunt?”

  Everyone turns to stare at her. “Goddamn,” says Kaleb, down to his boxers. “She can talk.”

  “A scavenger hunt?” Leala asks. She and Kaleb exchange a lustful glance. “Someone get me a piece of paper.”

  • • •

  Hours later, a tipsy Althea straddles an enormous bronze bull in the desolate Financial District, clutching one of his horns to avoid falling off, while Matilda snaps a Polaroid. Temporarily blinded by the flash, Althea blinks furiously, her eyes tearing in the harsh winter wind. Her ass is freezing from sitting on the bull for five minutes while Matilda searched for the camera in the messenger bag filled with their night’s acquisitions. Steam rises from several manhole covers, and there’s no one on these streets except for her teammates, hooting and hollering, drinking forties of St. Ides out of paper bags—“wino sacks,” Gregory calls them.

  “It really does feel like Gotham City down here, doesn’t it?” Ethan helps her down off the sculpture.

  Matilda’s hands, like her feet, are delicate and undersized. She needs both to hold a forty properly. Bringing it to her mouth, she looks like an unhinged toddler sipping from her bottle. “Good work, Gemini. Let’s check it off the list.”

  “What’s next?” Gregory asks.

  “We’re right by the 4 train,” says Dennis, the tattoo guy. “We can go up to Astor Place and spin the cube.”

  “Yes,” Matilda cries. “Let’s go, go, go!” She sprints toward the green globe above the subway station. Everyone follows. The cobblestones are unforgiving under Althea’s sneakered feet.

  All the enthusiasm in the world can’t make the subway come. Underground in a train station as deserted as the streets above them, there’s nothing they can do but wait, compulsively check the time, and drink. Matilda, Gregory, and Dennis confer over the remaining items on the list while Althea paces the platform and Ethan leans out over the tracks, looking down the tunnel for any sign of an arriving train.

  “Could you not do that?” Althea says. “You’re too close to the edge. It’s making me nervous.”

  Setting down his bottle, Ethan jumps onto the tracks. “There’s nothing coming. It’s not a big deal.” He waves his arms for emphasis, a conductor in an unlikely orchestra pit.

  “Get back up here!”

  “It’s fine, I’m telling you.” A gigantic rat carrying half a bagel runs across the tracks not far from Ethan’s foot. “I think I’ve made my point.”

  Briefly overwhelmed by vertigo, Althea sits on a bench while he hoists himself back onto the platform. She’s pretending to show great interest in a discarded issue of that day’s Daily News when he joins her. Althea turns over the paper. Though baseball season is long over, the Yankees are still on the cover of the sports page, aglow from their World Series victory. Farther down the platform, Matilda is getting hysterical about the minutes slipping by. Gregory has her by the shoulders, trying to calm her down.

  “I don’t want to lose! I fucking hate losing!” she’s saying, her voice enormous in the empty station.

  “I’m sorry I was a dick when you first moved in,” Ethan tells Althea.

  “Did Management tell you to say that?” she asks, nodding in the direction of the errant blonde girl shouting a soliloquy on the merits of being a winner.

  “She doesn’t control my every move, you know.”

  Althea considers this. “Have you known her a long time?”

  “As long as I’ve known anyone, I guess.” He takes a long pull from his bottle, then offers it to her. Althea drinks several swallows of flat malt liquor, wiping away a trickle that escapes down her chin. It tastes like the gas station where they bought it. “It was me who started the Brooklyn chapter of Bread and Roses. I bet you didn’t know that. I bet you just assumed that it was her.” Althea doesn’t say anything. “It wasn’t her. It was me. I found the house. I started the chapter. Then she dropped out of Vassar and moved in.”

  “Are you saying she took over?”

  “No,” says Ethan sharply. “I needed the help. And she’s good at it. Probably better than me. But she gets—you know that day when you first came to the park? I knew it. I fucking knew it the second you walked up to that table, that you were going to end up staying in our house. And it was a stupid thing for her to do.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Althea says, draining the rest of his forty.

  “People aren’t cats. You can’t just take in the strays. We’re only supposed to serve meals. It’s not fair. You’re a young, cute white girl, so you get to come home with us. Everyone else gets a meal and we send them on their way.” He fills his cheeks with air and lets it out thoughtfully. The ink from the newspaper has blighted her fingers; she wipes them on her jeans, almost worn through at the knees. Ethan cleans his glasses on his shirt, and she watches his blue eyes unfocus without them, his face hollow and incomplete. “And I know,” he says, replacing his glasses, sharpening his gaze on her face, “that you are not a stray.”

  An approaching train rumbles unseen down the tunnel, a hint of thunder gaining momentum. Althea starts to get up, but Ethan catches her elbow. “It’s coming from the other direction.”

  It sounds like the noise is coming from everywhere. “How can you tell?” she shouts as the subway bursts into the station across the tracks. The brakes engage with a metallic shriek; she plugs her fingers in her ears, but again Ethan touches her arm.

  “Don’t do that,” he shouts. “It makes you look like a tourist.”

  The nearly empty train sputters to a halt and performs in a perfunctory opening and closing of doors. No one gets on or off. When it pulls away, she suffers through the tumult.

  “How did you know?” she asks when the station is quiet again. “Which way the train was going?”

  “I can just tell.”

  Althea scrapes away the St. Ides label with a fingernail. “Why did Matilda take me in?”

&
nbsp; “When we were in high school, Matilda made a real point of not getting stuck in any one clique. She had punk friends, she had square friends, she had friends who did theater and friends who skipped class to do acid in Washington Square Park. I don’t know, she just likes collecting people. She’d make a great politician. But, you know, she’s great. She wouldn’t take you in if she didn’t like you.” He glances at the newspaper again. “You know why I hate the Yankees so much? Because even in December, they’re on the cover of the sports page. It’s like their fucking season is never over.”

  “You sound like a bitter Mets fan.”

  “There isn’t any other kind.”

  “I hate it when Mets fans complain about the Yankees,” she says. “You’ve got two teams in this city. You could have chosen the team that always wins. But you didn’t. So sack up and quit whining. It’s the price you pay, rooting for the underdog.”

  “I’m from Queens; I didn’t choose to be a Mets fan.”

  “So if you could have chosen, you would have chosen the Yankees?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then shush.”

  A stale wind blows through the tunnel, ruffling the pages of the News. Matilda whoops.

  “Now our train’s coming,” says Ethan. “Let’s go.”

  • • •

  After turning the cube at Astor Place and making a crayon rubbing of the plaque outside the Eleventh Street baths—“A bathhouse as a historical landmark?” Althea asked, prompting a brief treatise from Ethan on its significance—and completing a number of other tasks, all documented by a hell-bent Matilda, the exhausted crew returns to the Warrior house. They arrive as the sky is lightening, but before the sun has risen over Coney Island.

  The other team—Kaleb, Leala, the drummer and the dropout—has not yet arrived. Only Mr. Business greets them, nibbling at the cuff of Gregory’s jeans as Matilda dumps the contents of her messenger bag in the center of the living room.

  “Fuck!” she shouts. “This means they’re still out there scoring points while we’re sitting around here waiting!”

  “Actually,” Ethan says, “it probably just means they’re stuck on the D train.”

  “Is there anything else we can do before sunrise?” Dennis asks. “Isn’t there something on the list we can do here?”

  Matilda skims the remaining items. “What do you think constitutes a ‘radical change in appearance’?”

  “A new tattoo?” Dennis says eagerly.

  “We don’t have time for that,” she says, looking at Althea. “Listen, Gemini. We’re going to have to cut off all your hair.”

  “Excuse me?” Althea says, clutching the black tangles with both hands.

  “We’ll get a lot of points,” Matilda says. “It’ll put us over the top. It’ll secure our victory.”

  “You’ve got to take one for the team, dude,” Dennis tells Althea.

  “It’s my fucking hair!” she yells, backing away.

  “Your roots are coming in anyway! You’ve got a hairdo like a skunk. Look, sometimes you have to cut off a finger to save the hand.” Matilda rummages in her sewing box for a pair of scissors.

  “Or the hair, in this case. You’ve got to cut off your hair to save the hand!” shouts Gregory.

  “Your roots do look pretty terrible,” Ethan admits.

  “With your cheekbones and that long neck, a nice pixie cut will be a good look for you,” Matilda says, changing her tactics. “Now come upstairs! The sun will be up any minute. We don’t have much time.”

  “Skunk hair,” Dennis says.

  The four of them circle around Althea, Matilda making snipping motions with the scissors, everyone hissing skunk noises—“Psssssss”—and shouting that winners have to pay the price, that champions have to be willing to make sacrifices. She’s only known these people for a month, and now they’re edging toward her, Matilda brandishing the scissors in a vaguely threatening manner, demanding to scalp her so they can win a scavenger hunt, and Althea asks herself if she should be afraid. She imagines the headline on the cover of the Post—WAYWARD TEEN SLAIN BY BROOKLYN SLACKERS—and the accompanying sidebar, listing statistics about runaways and the trouble they find in New York City. Matilda reaches for a lock of Althea’s hair.

  “Get away from me with those goddamn scissors,” Althea shrieks, her clammy hands clenching into fists at her sides, that familiar racing feeling returning as they surround her, hemming her in.

  “The whole scavenger hunt was your idea in the first place!” Gregory shouts. “You can’t let us down when we’re in the home stretch!”

  Dennis, who looked so menacing at first with the three black birds tattooed around the base of his throat and the fat plastic plugs in his ears, is doubled over with laughter, and Gregory’s skunk imitation is so ludicrous, and even Ethan is snickering with a hand over his mouth, and Matilda’s determination isn’t grim but joyful. In their secondhand clothes and their slipshod living room, presided over by Saint Cajetan, it’s clear they’re not a throng of would-be wrongdoers or a company of aspiring mavericks, but just another pack of kids looking to make their own fun. Still, Althea feels her nostrils flaring, gets a bitter, metallic mouthful of what she used to think was adrenaline, but knows now is the flavor of an impending bad decision. She grinds her teeth. A brief, unearned hatred flares in her for all of them, as bright and hot and soothing as a match against her skin.

  “Don’t fight us,” says Matilda. “It’s easier if you don’t fight us.”

  “You’re only making this harder,” Ethan says.

  Imagine Minty Fresh, she thinks, imagine Valerie, imagine their jealousy if they could see her here, with the exact people they were trying so hard to be; and those people are begging Althea to help them win their game. Imagine even Oliver, inventor of the Non-Stop Party Wagon, urging her to stop fighting everyone and just say yes. And if he were here, she would ask him, the person who knows her best: Do you think so, Ol? Do you really think it’ll help? But he isn’t here, and never will be, so instead Althea takes her best guess.

  “Fine!” she yells. “Fine! Cut off my fucking hair!”

  Picturing Oliver, taking his imaginary advice, Althea realizes it’s the first time she’s thought about him for hours. At least since the start of the scavenger hunt. What about before that? She must have thought about him at some point today.

  But then Matilda is dragging her upstairs, sitting her on the closed toilet, and wrapping a towel around her neck. Gregory stands in the tub snapping Polaroids while Matilda hacks away. Ethan brings a can of Natural Ice to anesthetize the patient. She accepts this act of kindness with what she hopes is grace.

  “I’m sorry about what I said when I first moved in,” she says, chunks of hair falling into her lap. “That thing about your mother.”

  “Just shotgun it,” he counsels, and she does.

  chapter thirteen.

  OLIVER’S NOT INTERESTED.

  “Your mom’s on the phone,” Kentucky says from the doorway.

  “Tell her I’m busy.”

  “What could you possibly be doing?”

  “I don’t know, make something up,” Oliver says.

  Kentucky returns a minute later. “She says if you don’t take her call, she’s going to get on a plane and come up here.”

  “For Christ’s sake.” He lurches into the hallway and picks up the pay phone’s receiver, dangling from its serpentine silver cord. “What?”

  “You’ve been ignoring my calls.”

  “I haven’t really been in a talking mood.” He’s been awake for a day and he’s spent most of that time rereading the same chapter of Hyperspace, staring at the ceiling of his room, and trying to remain curmudgeonly in the face of Kentucky’s relentless overtures.

  “Manuel says you’ve barely come out of your room since you woke up,” Nicky says.

&
nbsp; “Did he tell you the rest of it? Did he tell you about the lithium?”

  “He mentioned you two had a heated discussion. Oliver, this is exactly what I warned you about. I didn’t want you to be disappointed. These people never promised they’d be able to help you right away.”

  “Oh, they can help me, all right. They can dope me up until I’m a shuffling zombie who can’t put together a sentence. I’m just not sure it sounds like a real improvement to me.”

  “If you’re that unhappy, you can come home, you know. He can write you a prescription and recommend a doctor in Wilmington to monitor you when you start to take it.”

  “I haven’t decided if I want to do it or not.” The receiver smells harshly of the all-natural cleanser the custodial staff uses on everything. Purportedly made from a top-secret blend of herbs, the concentrated liquid resembles Jägermeister in odor and appearance—only the cleanser’s claim to be nontoxic sets the two apart. Oliver gags into the phone.

  “You could just try it, you know,” Nicky says. “It might be fine. You might not have any side effects at all.”

  “This was supposed to be it, right? Coming here was the last resort, the Hail Mary. And what do I get? Another shitty Would You Rather. I don’t want to have to decide between the lesser of two evils. Haven’t I lost enough already?”

  When he hangs up the phone, he heads straight for Kentucky’s room. He’s sitting up in bed, reading Noam Chomsky.

  “Let me ask you something else,” says Oliver.

  Reluctantly, Kentucky closes World Orders Old and New. “Yeah?”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Will.”

  “Will, what do you say we make a break for it and get the fuck out of here?”

  • • •

  It’s snowing outside. Oliver is taken aback, although it is not the first time he has slept through a change in seasons and been caught unawares upon waking. The flimsy jacket he wore in early November is woefully inadequate for late December in New York, this deviously cheerful, almost-New-Year’s weather that has filled the streets with hordes of tourists and tired children and forbiddingly beautiful women in knee-high boots with impossibly high heels and cheekbones that remind him of Althea’s. It’s full-on evening now, but weirdly bright, streetlights and brake lights and lights from the windows of bars and restaurants and department stores turning the soft patter of snow into a kaleidoscope of shimmering, metallic colors.