Once I finish my shower, I hobble back to my room, catching a concerned glance from Quinn as I pass. Nico is still passed out on the floor—considering how worried he was, he was probably up more than I was. I manage to put on one of the t-shirts he’s left behind on some other, much happier day and creep back into my bed without waking him. All of the drama running through my brain is suddenly replaced by complete and total fatigue as I drift off to sleep, to a place where none of this can harm either of us.
~
Nico
After spending an hour or so in the morning making sure Layla’s going to be okay, I finally have to leave in time to meet my mom and brother for noon Mass. I didn’t want to leave. It went against every instinct I had letting her stay by herself. But she has three other girls to check on her, and Quinn actually promised to send me updates if there were any changes. Rest and water. That’s all the doctor said she needs. Having me hover isn’t going to help.
Gabe meets me outside the church, holding one of his button-up shirts for me to shrug on before we run into the church.
“I don’t know why you bother,” he says as he watches me struggle to roll up the sleeves. “She’s still gonna be mad you’re wearing jeans.”
Gabe’s taller than me, but skinnier, and sleeves that button around his chicken arms won’t even come close around mine. Forget about the collar.
“Whatever,” I say as I finish with the sleeves. I smooth down the shirt and glance at my worn Converse. “I’m here, aren’t I? I’d rather be sleeping.”
“With your girl?” Gabe says. “I don’t blame you. She’s fine as hell, Nico. You lucky I didn’t see her first.”
I snort. From anyone else, the idea of some other guy looking at Layla like that would be enough for some serious words, but from my goofy-ass brother, it’s just funny.
“Last time I wore a t-shirt, she wouldn’t stop with it for like a week,” I say before shaking my face a little, like I’m preparing for a fight. “Let’s go in before Ma interrupts the priest to come get us.”
We shuffle toward our customary pew in the middle of the old church as quietly as possible while a lector is intoning one of the liturgies in Spanish. Shit. I knew I was late, but not that late.
My mother guilts as many of her kids as she can into coming to church on Sundays, and this week she managed to snag all of us. She’s on the end of the worn wood pew, followed by the short, round silhouettes of my sisters, and my niece Allie. I nod at everyone as Gabe and I slide into the pew behind them. Allie twists around with her tiny-toothed grin. I grin back, and she giggles.
“Tio!” she half-squeals, half-whispers.
“Hey, linda!” I whisper with a wink. “Turn around, mamita, okay? Otherwise you’re gonna get the chancleta from Abuela.”
Allie’s eyes pop open in fear––all kids in this neighborhood grow up worried about getting the chancleta, the house slipper that doubles as a weapon when kids misbehave. She turns back around, but I’ve caught the attention of her mother instead. Great. The priest announces the Gospel, and the entire church stands with echoes of hundreds of feet on the stone floors.
“Where you been? Allie and I came to the apartment last night, but you never came home.” Maggie stares pointedly at me over her shoulder, even as her hands are clasped in front of her like she’s caught up in the prayer. I know better. My sister is the least penitent person on the planet.
I just nod my head toward the talking priest, as if to tell her to pay attention. She just screws her round face into an even deeper scowl––honestly, I’m not sure I’ve seen my sister’s smile in about five years.
“You been downtown again? With that young girl?” She says it with a snarl, like spending time with Layla is the equivalent of doing coke or running around with a bunch of hoods.
“Gabe said that’s all he’s been doing,” says Selena, my other sister, in a loud whisper behind our mother’s back. “Nico’s too good for the Kitchen these days. Spends all his time downtown now.” She whistles lightly and chants, “chavos, chavos” under her breath.
I roll my eyes. Selena gives me a sly smile before she re-clasps her hands in her lap and bows her head like she’s listening really hard. The action makes her giant earrings jangle a little.
“You’re just jealous you ain’t got a man,” I retort, but a little too loudly, since my mom’s head pops up.
The priest ends the Gospel reading, and all at once, the entire church says “Gloria a ti, Señor Jesus.”
“Mira!” hisses my mother as we all sit back down. We obediently look up, but instead of saying anything, she fixes us with The Look, the one I’ve seen all my life, especially in church. It’s a look that, if we were little, would tell us we better shut up. It’s a look that tells us she’s got something for us when we get home, something we’re not going to like. It doesn’t matter that we’re grown adults. The Look never changes, and it always hits your bones.
All four of us quiet immediately.
I glance at Gabe, who’s suddenly looking everywhere but at me, like the little snitch he is. He’s the only one who knew about Layla, and the little shit’s been blabbing to the two biggest busybodies in Manhattan. Now I don’t just have to spend the rest of my day fixing shit, but I have to listen to my sisters nag at me while I do it. Fuckin’ great.
~
By three-thirty, the novelty of interrogating my love life has worn off, and Selena and Maggie have finally left our mom’s apartment. She’s having me check the electrical work on the stove, which has been acting funny. The landlord needs to replace it, but Ma’s too scared to ask for anything like that. It doesn’t matter that Robbie’s name is on the lease now and that we have legal rights to decent living conditions. She’s lived for too long in this place doing whatever this fucking slumlord wanted because she was terrified he’d evict her, or worse. Half of this building lives in fear of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). So I still to do what I can to help.
“Okay,” I say in Spanish as I shove the stove back against the wall. “That should hold the wires together for now until I can find someone to replace the whole system. But you need to be careful until then––just run one thing at a time in the kitchen. Otherwise it’s gonna blow a circuit, and then you won’t be able to watch your telenovelas.”
Her mouth twists into a smirk at the little joke. She doesn’t even like telenovelas, even though they are the only things she watches anymore. I speak in Spanish, not because she can’t understand English, but because my mother still doesn’t speak it back. I used to wonder how my mother could live in this country for thirty years but never learn English, but as I got older, the answers became clearer. Even though she came from Puerto Rico and lived there since she was a little girl, my mom wasn’t a citizen because she was born in Cuba. She’s lived her entire life in shadows, terrified of deportation––and for a long time, we hid with her. Now we’re more like her shields.
Back in the day, our building sounded more like San Juan than the mainland, but that’s changed a lot as the neighborhood has started to gentrify. Still, most of the people here are still like Ma––people who came here scared, many of them maybe legal, maybe not. People who never quite shook off that fear and the hardness that comes from it. I know that at some point we’re going to have to figure out a different situation for her. One day this place will be sold out from under her to some high-rise developer, just like all the other buildings in Midtown, and she’ll have nowhere to go. I only pray I’ll know what to do when it happens.
But things are a little better now. For one, she doesn’t have to worry about raising kids anymore now that we’re all grown. There’s no more asking K.C.’s mom to sign parental consent forms as our guardian, or latching onto less-than-nice dudes to make ends meet when she was in between odd jobs. The first thing I did when I started at FedEx was to transfer her lease under my name and start paying the rent. But she still won’t open the door to people she doesn’t know. Which means w
hen things break, it’s still up to me to fix them.
“Ven, papi,” she beckons me to a spot on the couch, the same faded, flowered sleeper we’ve had since I was a kid. For a long time, this couch was my bed.
I sit down. “Que pa’o, Mami?”
“This girl?” she asks. “The blanquita Gabe was talking about? Who is she?”
I frown. Blanquita isn’t exactly the nicest word for what Layla is: a rich girl, probably a white girl. Someone who thinks she’s better than everyone else. Stuck-up. “Did Gabe call her that?”
Ma shrugs, but shakes her head. Which means it was probably one of my sisters. Maggie, I’m guessing.
I chew on my lip, a habit I get from my mother, but I can’t will away the tight feeling in my chest when I think about Layla. We’ve texted a few more times today, and honestly, I’m dying to get back down there, even if it’s just to kiss her goodnight. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to go without telling her just how I feel.
“I see...” my mother says as she watches my face.
I sigh. My mom’s always been able to read me like a book. So I shrug. There’s no use hiding it.
“She’s nice,” I say. “She’s smart.”
Ma doesn’t reply. Not all Puerto Rican women are loud and obnoxious. My sisters have no problem fulfilling that stereotype, but my mother is the quiet type. Her silences speak just as loudly, and right now, this one is screaming doubt.
She hums a little under her breath and nods. She pushes back her hair, which is coarse, threaded with gray through the black, and tied into a little knot at the back of her head. It sticks out around her face a little, just like always. She could never afford to have it done when we were kids, and she refuses the money I give her for it now. “Stupid,” she says. “Waste of money.”
“Gabe said that she goes to college,” Ma states. “She’s white?”
I swallow roughly. “No. She’s Brazilian. Her dad’s from Rio, I think.”
I don’t answer the question about her family’s money. I know my mother. She’s had a hard life. Her whole life, she was the kind of person who cleaned other people’s houses instead of having hers cleaned. Layla hasn’t said much about her dad’s family, but she said she drove through the slums in Rio. She didn’t get out and stay.
Ma just wrinkles her nose. “They don’t speak Spanish.” It’s not a question.
I roll my eyes. “No, they don’t. But she doesn’t really speak Portuguese either, so...”
My mother’s big eyes flash dangerously. Fuck, that was the wrong thing to say. To someone like my mother, that right there is a sign that Layla really is a blanquita, no matter where her dad was born. And from what Layla has told me, her dad is exactly the kind of man my mother despises––the kind of man who turns his back on his own people.
I sit silently. There’s no use arguing about it with her. My mother is stubborn, completely immovable. I know she’ll love Layla when she meets her––one day, maybe, in the very distant future––but for now, maybe it’s easier to just pretend things don’t matter.
“It’s no big deal,” I mutter in English, sitting forward and examining my hands.
“‘No big deal’,” Mom repeats in her thick accent before reverting back to Spanish. “What does this mean? Is this ‘no big deal’ the reason you are not going to Los Angeles?”
I look up sharply. When I broke the news earlier today that I was staying, Ma was so happy she cried and made arepas. No one else knows yet, but it’s different with her. She’s my mother.
“She––I––”
The words won’t come out the way they’re supposed to. I want to say no, say I decided I was better off staying here. I want to say Layla had nothing to do with it, even though she had everything to do with it.
My mother puckers her lips and makes a sort of squeaky sound between them while she raises her almost non-existent eyebrows. It’s a look I know well. It means I’m full of shit.
I hang my head.
After a few moments, I feel a hand on my back, urging me to sit up. Ma cups my face with her hand and runs her coarse thumb over my cheekbone.
“My beautiful boy,” she says. “If you reach too high for the stars, you’re going to fall.”
My throat feels thick. This is not what I was expecting her to say, but I shouldn’t be surprised.
“But––” I start.
“Mira,” she commands. “I didn’t want you to go to move away, but I knew it would make you happy. This girl, I don’t know her, but I don’t think she will. Too different. You need to be your own man now. You don’t need her to hold you back and hurt you later when she becomes tired with you.” She clasps my hand. “Believe me, papito. I know. That’s what they always do.”
A hundred things fly through my head. That Layla would never do that. That she’s not like the assholes that used my mother and left her worse off than she was before. That when I’m with her, I don’t feel like some loser from the barrio, or some brown-skinned guy she wants to get off with, but just me, just Nico.
But Ma has always had the ability to puncture fantasies. If I’m being honest, it’s probably one of the reasons I’ve been trying to leave for so long. As much as I love my family, I wouldn’t mind taking a break from people who have a tendency to shoot each other down, even if it is out of a sense of survival.
“Okay, Ma,” is all I have to say in the end. “I gotta go. I have to be at work in a few hours.”
I lean down and deliver kisses on both my mother’s cheeks. She clasps my face tightly before letting me go. We don’t say I love you before I leave. Those are not words my mother uses lightly, if at all.
Long after I leave, her words echo through my head. Somehow, someway, they hit their mark. And when I get on the train, I go uptown to my empty apartment instead of downtown, where Layla sleeps, thinking I’ll be back.
~
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Layla
“Oh, shame take all her friends then! But howe’er
Thou and the baser world censure my life,
I’ll send ‘em word by thee, and write so much
Upon thy breast, ‘cause thou shalt bear ‘t in mind:
Tell them ‘twere base to yield where I have conquer’d.
I scorn to prostitute myself to a man,
I that can prostitute a man to me:
And so I greet thee.”
Quinn intones another quote from the massive English study packet. My British Literature exam is next week, and it won’t be easy. I’m terrible at memorizing texts verbatim, and it’s ten times worse when it’s for a class that, up to now, has focused almost solely on medieval epic poetry and Renaissance literature. I thought that Nico would be upset that I had to forgo our usual Friday night date, but he immediately switched nights with the other doorman at AJ’s so we could go out tonight instead. Seriously, he’s almost as bad as Quinn about making sure I do my schoolwork.
The last few weeks haven’t been as bad as I thought. I spent a little over a week recovering and forcing Nico to stay at his place instead of mine, and since then, I’ve taken an extra week off on the doctor’s orders to avoid a relapse. No late nights. No long days walking around the city. Class, studying, and only on the weekends is Nico willing to hang out for more than an hour, usually bringing me up to his place to hole up for a movie night. It’s been nice. And then it got boring. Fast.
Seriously. I didn’t move to New York to watch reruns of You’ve Got Mail. And there is no way that Nico’s not bored either. I’m pretty much done with him treating me with kid gloves, and I think it’s been affecting our normal rapport. I can’t really tell you why, but something’s different. Little things. I’ll catch Nico looking out the window, gazing off into space in the middle of a conversation. Or maybe his mom or one of his siblings call, and he looks like he’s in pain. Nothing big. But I can’t help but feel like I’ve only added to his burdens.
Well, no more of that.
“Ooh,
an easy one,” I say. “That’s The Roaring Girl, by Middleton and Dekker. Published in 1611. It’s about a crossdressing chick named Moll, and that’s the scene where she basically tells the guy to fuck off, that she can be the seducer, and then they swordfight. I love that play.” I chuckle. “Some days I’d love to toss these stupid binding things we have to wear, and be all, fuck you, I can be a man too! I could even get a sword and take up dueling.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing you wielding a rapier,” Quinn remarks as she marks the passage, indicating I know it. “You probably shouldn’t say ‘fuck’ in your exam, but otherwise you got it. That’s the last one. You’re getting better at this, babe.”
“And it only took me two whole days!”
I’m finally starting to feel caught up with the classes I missed while I was sick. Quinn and I have been quizzing each other on and off for the last forty-eight hours, and we’ve earned a much-needed night out. I’m rallying with an extra Diet Coke while I wait for Nico to pick me up. My doctor gave me the okay to drink caffeinated beverages again (thank God), but I’m supposed to keep it to two a day for a while. I’ve been saving this one.
Nico and I haven’t really been able to go out go out since I was in the hospital, so tonight he’s taking me to one of those huge midtown clubs where celebrities are always in the VIP rooms, and where I never go simply because I can’t afford a thirty-dollar cover. He used to work there, so we can get in for free. I’m excited to see what this kind of place is like, considering I’ve generally stuck to the small bars and cabarets that proliferate downtown Manhattan. But mostly I’m excited because K.C., the K.C., is spinning there tonight, and I finally get to meet Nico’s very best friend.
That is, if Nico actually shows up.
I glance at the clock on my desk, which reads 10:09. Nico’s very late, over two hours, in fact. According to a rushed call at eight, he had dinner with his family and lost track of the time. He had to take the train back up to his apartment, and then he was coming back downtown to pick me up. There have been no phone calls since.
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