No More Us for You

by David Hernandez

  “You call this art?” he asked me.

  “It is what it is,” I said.

  “Don’t you have an opinion…” He leaned in close to read my name tag. “Carlos?”

  “Please, step back,” I said, lifting my hand up. “Your cologne’s making me nauseous.”

  The man jerked back. His eyelids rose a fraction of an inch.

  “What is that, anyway?” I said, slapping the air in front of me. “Gorilla Piss No. 5?”

  The man spun around on his expensive shoes and headed toward the exit, his soles clicking fast on the hardwood floor.

  Others came and went—men and women, teenagers and kids. I tried not to look angry or irritated or depressed, which made me feel even more angry, irritated, and depressed. A boy reached with his little hand toward the black painting of the war dead and his mother quickly grabbed his wrist. “You can’t touch, sweetie,” she said.

  “Listen to your mommy,” I told the boy.

  The woman looked at me and pushed up a phony smile.

  I showed her my teeth.

  “I’m doing your job,” she said, laughing nervously.

  I stopped smiling. “Parenting isn’t my job.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind.”

  She steered her child away from the painting and together they made their way toward the exit. I waved sarcastically, my hand swinging wildly above my head like I was hailing a cab.

  I laughed and laughed.

  Then I thought about Snake, the soda can that held on to his shoe when he’d stomped down on it. How he’d limped across the basketball courts. How his foot had clanked with every right step.

  Then my face crumpled and I cried.

  I dragged my sleeve over my face and took a deep breath and sat some more, but now with the added bonus of a headache throbbing between my eyes.

  My shift was almost over when Nadine walked in from the east wing of the museum. “Who knew sitting in one spot could be so exhausting,” she said, yawning. “I need a coffee IV drip hooked up to my arm.”

  I said nothing. My head was somewhere else.

  Nadine stood before Richard’s neon sign, her glasses reflecting the buzzing pink words. She pulled out her ponytail and held the rubber band in her mouth, then tipped her head back and shook her blond hair loose. It swept across her shoulders like velvet gold. By the time she pulled her hair back through the O of her rubber band, I was standing beside her.

  “Hey,” she said.

  I stared at a single blond strand swaying lazily next to her ear, above the blue shoulder of her coat.

  “Your eyes look red. Have you been crying?”

  “My friend’s in a coma,” I said.

  Nadine stepped forward and gave me a hug. “I know,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” Her hair brushed against my cheek and smelled of honey. My arms hung limp at my sides, dead weight. Then my hands rose to her waist and I pulled her in, I tilted my head and moved my mouth over hers. Her body stiffened. She leaned back and brought her hands up to my chest, pushing me away. “What the hell are you doing?”

  I looked at her shoes, the hardwood floor between them. “I wasn’t…that wasn’t…” I stammered.

  “You can’t do that,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know you’re upset about your friend and all, but still.”

  “It’s not just him,” I said. “It’s everything.”

  Nadine folded her arms. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t give you license to kiss me.”

  “I promise it won’t happen again.”

  “That’s for damn sure.” Nadine wiped her mouth and headed back to her post.

  I sat back down and tried to erase what had just happened from my mind.

  I patted my coat pocket again.

  I chewed on my fingernails even though there wasn’t much left to chew.

  Soon it was seven o’clock and the sun angled its spotlight through the glass doors of the museum, illuminating the front desk. I walked through the sunlight’s particles of dust, out the glass doors, into my car, and headed home—up Alamitos and down 7th, past the golf course and the Daily Grind with its large pink doughnut propped above the roof like a life preserver floating in the sky. At home I shucked off my uniform and threw on a T-shirt and jeans. I ate spaghetti and meatballs with my parents and answered their questions. I’m okay. The funeral’s tomorrow. No, I don’t have to work. Yes. I haven’t decided yet. They won’t let me see Snake, I told you already. No, I haven’t talked to her. Stop bringing her up. No thanks, I’m full. I rinsed my plate in the sink and watched television in my room and fell asleep in the middle of America’s Most Wanted.

  I was in Ms. Wagner’s health class again, sitting in the back row with Snake. The lights went out and the video came on. I turned to Snake and said, Don’t watch this. He grinned in the blue shine of the TV. I tried to move my arms, but they were like two sandbags lying on my desk. On the screen, a man’s lower leg ballooned, the skin stretched and blushed to purple. Snake, I said. Please don’t watch. A scalpel went through the man’s leg and it popped, the skin flapped open and the bone showed itself, white as chalk. Snake toppled over, his body slammed onto the floor, the lights came on. I stood with the other students around him while Ms. Wagner caressed his forehead, then she lightly slapped his cheek, then threw a glass of water in his face, then screamed at him, then punched him in the mouth, then brought her leg back and kicked his head violently. I guess he doesn’t want to wake up, she said. Class dismissed. Once we were all outside, Ms. Wagner locked the classroom door and squirted ketchup on her key and swallowed it. Minutes passed, maybe hours, maybe days. I stood at the classroom window and framed my hands around my eyes and peered in. Snake was still on the floor, but older now, with short hair and a beard and a gut, sleeping with his head on a pillow.

  I woke up with the television murmuring, a snail trail of drool on my chin. According to the digital clock it was a quarter past midnight. I flipped on my computer and saw that Mira was online. My hands hovered over the keyboard and mouse for a while before I decided to send her an IM:

  CarlosD: cant sleep?

  I turned on my stereo and tapped the volume low and leaned back in my swivel chair, my fingers threaded behind my head, waiting for her response.

  MiraGirl89: Hey, I was just thinking about you. How are you?

  CarlosD: just woke up from a nightmare

  MiraGirl89: I’m sorry.

  CarlosD: about snake

  MiraGirl89: I feel so bad for you. I know he was one of your best friends.

  CarlosD: is

  CarlosD: he still IS one of my best friends

  MiraGirl89: That was dumb of me. I can’t believe I typed that.

  CarlosD: forget it

  CarlosD: so how are you doing?

  MiraGirl89: Okay, I guess.

  MiraGirl89: Actually, not okay.

  CarlosD: whats going on?

  MiraGirl89: Steve made a comment about my tits being small.

  CarlosD: he is already on my shit list

  MiraGirl89: Like I needed to be reminded how small they are.

  MiraGirl89: But that’s all trivial compared to what happened this week…with Snake and everything.

  MiraGirl89: You still there?

  CarlosD: im here

  MiraGirl89: How are your parents?

  CarlosD: they’re good. my mom asks about you every now and then

  MiraGirl89: She’s sweet. Tell her I said Hello. And your dad.

  MiraGirl89: Hello?

  CarlosD: i miss you

  MiraGirl89: I miss you too.

  MiraGirl89: I think about you all the time.

  CarlosD: can i swing by?

  CarlosD: i want to see you

  MiraGirl89: Are you kidding? It’s almost 12:30.

  CarlosD: i know

  CarlosD: i have a clock too

  MiraGirl89: Smart ass.:)

  CarlosD: well?

  MiraGirl89: Leav
e in twenty minutes. I look like hell.

  CarlosD: thats impossible

  CarlosD: youve always looked beautiful to me

  CarlosD: where did you go?

  MiraGirl89: I’m crying now.

  CarlosD: why?

  MiraGirl89: What I did to you was so shitty. You deserve someone better than me.

  CarlosD: stop it

  CarlosD: im leaving in 5 minutes

  MiraGirl89: Okay.

  MiraGirl89: *kiss*

  I knew what was going to happen before I even snuck out of my house and drove the five blocks to Mira’s, before I hopped the gate like I always used to and knocked lightly on the window and climbed into her bedroom, before we talked and she cried and I stroked her hair and she tilted her wet face to mine. I knew that we would kiss, that we’d slip out of our clothes and kiss and I’d touch her and kiss and she’d moan as I went inside her, that afterward we’d lay panting, trying to catch our breath. But what I didn’t expect was that I would end up feeling worse, like my heart was full of dirt and worms, and I wanted to run, put on my clothes and jump out the window and drive back home, my mind already making the trip as Mira’s hand slid back and forth across my chest, my mind spinning like a carousel ride until it settled on Nadine’s face, the neon pink squiggles on her glasses, her puzzled expression after I kissed her, and her question came back to me.

  What the hell are you doing?

  ISABEL

  Sometimes I believed that all my obsessing over death had somehow caused what happened to happen. I had to keep reminding myself that I not only imagined Vanessa dying, but Heidi too, my mom and dad and little brother, everyone at Millikan, my next-door neighbors, strangers I passed on the street. From car wreck to murder (gun, knife, strangulation) to plane crash to electrocution and all the other ways listed in the “Risk of Death” chart, and in ways that were not listed—dog attack, shark attack, terrorist attack. And look at all those people. They were still breathing.

  Of the hundred or so people who gathered around Vanessa’s gravesite for the burial, Heidi and I stood in the outer circle. The sky was overcast and the air as still as the inside of a closet. Not even the trees moved, not one leaf.

  Although I couldn’t see the preacher, I could hear his words through the wall of black coats and dresses, over the sobs and whimpers. “Man hath but a short time to live and is full of misery,” he said. “He cometh up and is cut down like a flower.”

  I thought, A woman too. A woman also dies. And a girl just as she’s becoming a woman.

  I looked down at my dress that my mom helped me pick out on Thursday. I looked at the handkerchief in my hands, my dad’s initials stitched with green thread in one corner. He’d left it on my dresser in the morning and said I could keep it, that he had plenty more.

  Heidi wept uncontrollably. She was a running faucet. I gave her the hanky and she mouthed Thank you before lifting the folded cloth to her face.

  “O holy and merciful Savior,” the preacher continued. “Suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”

  A woman with a large black hat moved her head from side to side like she was looking for someone. A man glanced over his shoulder and shifted his weight. Then I smelled it, the putrid stench of a fart, like a plate of sardines lifted to my nose. I glanced over at Heidi and her face was already scrunched in disgust. She covered her nose and mouth with my dad’s handkerchief and I was reminded of the footage from the brush fire a couple weeks ago, of a middle-aged man walking through the haze with a dishtowel held to his lower face.

  I tried not to laugh, I really tried—I bit my lip, closed my eyes, pushed my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth. I remembered a conversation I had with Vanessa about the giggles, how one day she couldn’t stop herself from laughing during a Spanish test. She had glanced up from her exam for a brief moment and saw her teacher twitching his nose spastically, his thick mustache jumping up and down. I lost it, Vanessa said. I couldn’t not laugh, you know?

  That’s happened to me so many times, I told her.

  Everyone was shushing me, she said. Finally, Mr. Morales told me to please step out of the class, that I was distracting the other students. He said I could come back in and finish the test when I could control myself. But whenever I reached for the doorknob, I thought of his hopping mustache, and I’d laugh all over again.

  Imagine if you had the giggles in church, like at a wedding or baptism.

  Oh my God, that would be awful. A funeral would be even worse.

  You’re right, I said. That would be the absolute worst.

  And there I was, at a funeral, trying to swallow a giggle that was shimmying up my throat. My shoulders quivered, I made a strange noise in my mouth like a chair leg scraping across the floor. It was as if Vanessa were saying hello to me. Or good-bye.

  “Earth to earth,” the preacher said. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  Then I stopped laughing and my heart felt heavy like a bag of cement. Next thing I knew I was sobbing like everyone else and Heidi was holding on to my hand.

  Before long, people took turns dropping handfuls of dirt onto Vanessa’s casket—her mother, her father, a brother I never knew she had, cousins and aunts and uncles I never met, some friends from Wilson High. Basically, people who knew her longer than me, which was pretty much everyone who was there. Vanessa had been in my life for only two weeks. What was I supposed to do with that?

  Heidi and I were heading down the slope of the lawn, back to my car, when I saw Carlos in the cemetery parking lot talking to the woman with the large black hat. She was pinching the bridge of her nose right between her eyes like she was pushing away a headache.

  “Isn’t that Carlos?” Heidi asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I want to talk to him.”

  “Come on, Is, let’s just get out of here.”

  I grabbed my keys from my purse and handed them to Heidi. “Wait in my car, okay?”

  Heidi clicked her tongue. “This place depresses me.”

  “I’ll just be a couple minutes.”

  Heidi took my keys and marched toward the car, obviously annoyed.

  I stood on the sidewalk and waited for Carlos to finish his conversation. I overheard the woman say something about a mailing, about stuffing envelopes and catering and painting the walls and hiring another receptionist. I glanced up and saw Vanessa’s brother walking quickly down the lawn, a lit cigarette spooling blue threads of smoke from his hand. His mother and father, their arms hooked together, trailed behind him, taking careful steps down the steep lawn. When the brother reached the sidewalk, he took one last drag from his cigarette before dropping it to the ground. He moved his shoe over it and hesitated—his foot at an angle, the smoke rising underneath—until finally he brought it down.

  “Hey,” Carlos said to me. “Sorry about that.”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “That was my boss. She wants me to work even though I have the day off.” He looked off to the right, up the incline, as if he was watching people coming down it.

  “I haven’t seen you around school,” I said.

  “I’ve been there.”

  “I heard Snake’s still in a coma.”

  Carlos put his hands in his pockets and glanced the other way, over my left shoulder. “Yep.”

  “Have you visited him?”

  “I’m not allowed. Only relatives.”

  He was being short with me, avoiding eye contact and fidgeting. I wondered if he was mad at me, if there was something I’d said or done that was making him act this way.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope he comes out of it soon.”

  Carlos nodded. He scratched behind his ear with one finger.

  “I thought maybe we could talk about what happened,” I said.

  He jingled his car keys in his pocket and moved his gaze downward, at his shoes. “What’s there to talk about?”

  “What happened that night. Snake, Va
nessa.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “We both lost someone.”

  “Snake’s not dead.” Carlos sighed and shook his head. “I’m tired of people talking like he is.”

  “Sorry, that’s not what I meant.”

  He glanced at his watch.

  “What I meant was…”

  He began fidgeting with his keys again.

  “We were there, the four of us. You and me were the last people they saw before they took off.”

  Carlos finally looked at my eyes.

  “Where do you think they were going?”

  “I don’t know,” Carlos said. “I really don’t know.”

  “I haven’t been able to sleep.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if we’d both stayed inside the car.”

  “But we didn’t.”

  “I know, but if we did—”

  “You can’t start thinking that way,” Carlos interrupted. “It doesn’t do any good.”

  “But none of this would’ve happened if we’d all stuck together.”

  “They wanted to be alone.”

  I thought about not saying it, but then the words came out: “So did we.”

  “Look, Isabel…” He paused, as if he was trying to find the right words, as if they were right there on the sidewalk and all he had to do was pick them up. “My life’s really complicated right now.”

  “Okay,” I said. I watched the cars pulling out of the parking lot, some turning left onto the main street, some right. “I understand,” I told him.

  “Good.” He glanced at his watch again. “I need to get home and get ready for work.”

  “I guess I’ll just see you around school then?”

  Carlos nodded and walked back to his car. His head was bowed at a slight angle as if he was studying his own shadow sliding in front of him like a dark fish.

  A car horn blared. I recognized its sound and pitch. I turned around in time to see Heidi leaning away from the steering wheel of my car.

  Once I was in the driver’s seat, I let her have it.

  “I can’t believe you just did that,” I shouted.