Smash It!

Gloria pinches my butt—I’ve said it a thousand times, the Santoses are handsy people. “Avocado is that good fat, baby. Makes you juicy. Eat it all.”

  I love Gloria. She’s my second mom. She’s the first person to cheer me on when I’m running through the house about to throw down with Dré. Get him, baby! To be honest, she and my mom are a lot alike, and it’s not weird to find Gloria at my house with a bottle of wine and food.

  The big difference though—Gloria never calls me fat. She says I’m thick. It wasn’t until sometime last year that I started trying to figure out what that meant, because, for forever, I thought it was a nice way to say fat. I found a whole world of girls online that look like me—models. They’ve got big thighs, breast, ass, and a waist like me. But there are girls with way more body than me who are sexy and confident—maybe it’s not about body as much as it is about attitude—so I guess I could be kinda sexy like them, too. It’s just hard to remember those girls when my mom watches me eat a waffle-bacon-egg-with-a-little-bit-of-that-maple-syrup sandwich and says, Damn, if you made better choices, you could lose those ten pounds.

  I’m sitting at the counter putting back chips and guacamole like it’s my last meal when Gloria sets the rice to simmer. “Oh, congratulations.”

  I’m chewing and trying not to look like a pig. “Hmm?”

  “On the play. Your mom said you got a part. Dré was telling me about the auditions. He’s proud of you.” Gloria’s smiling, and it’s that you’re good for my son smile. She’s banking on us for the long haul. I’m talking she’s openly discussed throwing us a beach wedding. She said she was joking, but only because Dré yelled at her and threatened to sit on the nice couches.

  It all started on Dré’s last birthday. Every year on his birthday, I make him something stupid. Last year I used all our movie stubs and photobooth pictures to make his card, and I wrote a really basic poem in it. It was funny, and he keeps it on a string, hanging on his wall above his dresser.

  She said it then—Ustedes son perfectos. Y’all are so cute. And then I knew she meant it like we’re two halves of a puzzle. We kinda are—but Dré’s this wild half that drives me crazy. We’re straight passion. We laugh and we fight. There is no in-between. He also doesn’t talk about what’s in his head. When he’s pissed—my god, it’s like he’ll just force himself to be happy so he doesn’t have to acknowledge the problem and talk about it. It’s different than Eli’s avoidance though. With Dré, it’s like he’s scared to be anything but what he thinks you want to see in him—like he never stops performing.

  I’m pretending the guacamole is too good to comment when Eli’s dad shouts from the front door. “Gloria!” He’s got an adorable accent, and everything he says sounds kind and gentle.

  “We’re in here, Yosef.” He comes in with a box of tools, and now Gloria’s hugging him instead of me, but her hands are lingering and I try not to stare. The Santoses are handsy, but Yosef’s a married man, and I can’t imagine Eli’s mom would be cool with her man coming over to fix the single, sexy Puerto Rican lady’s...whatever.

  “Olivia!” he says, smiling. Eli’s got his hair and his big smile. “I hear congratulations are in order.” His hand is only just now leaving Gloria’s back, and I know I’m reading into this, but all of a sudden, I’m full and ready to take some chips and guac to the garage to share.

  “Thanks, Yosef.”

  He pats my shoulder and says my name again, in that way that I know means he’s going to say something important—or at least something he thinks is important. He does that a lot. “You’re a talented girl. This is just the beginning for you.”

  I hate this kind of attention—I know it’s the Year of Fuck It and I’m supposed to learn to take a compliment. But god, it’s so embarrassing it hurts. I do what I always do to release the tension in my head—I reach up and pat his shoulder, too. “Thanks, dude. I’ll remember you when I’m famous and too rich to remember things like people and names.”

  “Oh?” Yosef laughs, and I swear as I take the food out to the garage that his hand has moved back to her waist and—holy fuck.

  I know I’m putting more into it than there is. If they were cheating, they wouldn’t do it in front of me.

  Chapter 14

  Band auditions are over, and we’re in Dré’s room. He’s copying Eli’s chemistry homework while I straighten up his stuff. He’s got books and papers on every surface, a ton of clothes on his bed, and wires everywhere. Eli’s organizing old aux cables, new ones, and a laptop cable—Dré is the most unorganized person I know.

  Except for his desk—that’s always in working order, as if a nuclear blast happened and his desk was spared.

  The mess is worse than usual now that they’ve been doing more gigs, and Gloria won’t let him out of the house again until the room is back to normal-messy and his homework is done. Which is where Eli and I come in. I know it looks like we’re his personal slaves, but this is how we keep Dré from being a complete delinquent who lives in a dump—and unlucky for me, whoever provides the homework gets out of the heavy cleaning.

  Hence why Eli gets to wrap cables on the bed while I make sense of the papers Dré has stuffed in his bookshelf. Most of them are sketches—doodles of people or places I’ve never been. Talent rolls off him in insufferable waves. Tidying is helping me work up my nerve to this conversation we need to have about me—and boys—and them not being dicks about me and boys.

  “So,” I start and then stop.

  Dré’s chewing on his pencil when he looks up from his desk. “Huh?”

  Eli pulls out an earphone and eyes me.

  “Nothing.” I’m such a punk. I don’t know why this is so hard to say. Maybe because I should have said something in the car. I’ve waited too long, and now it’s weird.

  Dré shrugs and points his pencil at Eli. “Brah, you fucked up on the question about molecular bonds.”

  Eli leaves the wires to hunch over the desk and they argue about electronegativity.

  I need to boss up. Channel my inner Beyoncé. Tell these dudes what’s up. I’m reaching under Dré’s bed to collect all the stray clothes when I touch something hard and...crunchy?

  I scream, pulling back my hand, and out comes a crusty hand towel. I know what it is. I’m gagging and running to the bathroom to wash my hands and my soul.

  Dré’s laughing and Eli’s choking on a laugh saying, “Dude that’s nasty, use a Kleenex like the rest of us.”

  I go back in the room, wearing yellow cleaning gloves from under the bathroom sink and point at Dré. “Fuck your laundry and fuck your messy-ass room.”

  Dré’s shoving the pencil behind his ear, and his brown cheeks are tinged red, so I know he at least has some shame even though he’s laughing. I notice the towel is gone. Dré holds up his hands in surrender. “I’ll do the clothes and under the bed. I promise, no more surprises.”

  I’m still eyeing him, because, ew. But I take off the gloves and work on organizing the books on his bookshelf. Dré used to read a ton of fantasy, and I used to borrow his books and never return them—probably have more of his books than my own, but since he’s too busy to read, he’s never complained about it or stopped lending them to me.

  He and Eli go back to arguing over molecules and the weight of elements until Eli throws his hands up. “I don’t complain when you fuck up all the answers on the history homework.”

  Dré sighs, squishing his face like he can’t compute. “Who gives a fuck about history? That shit is subjective at best. This is factual. I can’t argue my way around a wrong decimal placement.”

  “Dude, don’t complain when you’re copying off my homework.”

  Dré laughs, but it’s the mean one. “Oh, okay. Thank you for passing along shoddy work. My humble apologies.”

  Eli shrugs and puts his earphones back in. He lays back on the bed, scrolling through his phone. The fact that he’s no
t wrapping wires is his silent and passive-aggressive way of winning. They’ve been really irritable with each other since they couldn’t agree on anyone during their band auditions. To be fair, everyone sucked, and they’re holding another audition tomorrow, so it’s not the end of world. They just need a drummer and, if they can find one, a bass player.

  But since Dré’s being an unrelenting asshole and I’m still salty about the towel, I say, “Don’t be a douche.”

  Dré’s still scribbling on his paper, but he throws me a glance as I put a few of his sketchbooks on his desk. “Those don’t go there.” He points at the bookshelf, but it’s full so I don’t give two fucks where they go as long as I’m the one cleaning.

  I flick the back of his head, and he flinches. “Did you not hear me? Don’t be a douche.”

  He’s got a small, tight smile on his face. He’s mad about something, but because he’s not the kind to talk things out, he’s just staring at me like he wants to say something slick instead.

  But then, he looks at Eli and then back at me. “He won’t give on anything, Liv. It has to be his way or nothing. If he doesn’t want to do Battle of the Bands, he should just say it.”

  And here we go—World War III all over again—and here I go, sliding into the middle like I didn’t learn anything from the YouTube debacle. Back before ninth grade, they fought over whether we should post our Harry Potter skits online. Dré wanted to, and Eli was against it. I didn’t care, as all the shots with me were a tad fuzzy and no one would ever recognize me.

  Dré called Eli a punk, and Eli said Dré was a self-obsessed wannabe. It was two weeks of hell, but finally they got over it—by ignoring it long enough and realizing we had two months of summer and only each other to make any fun of it.

  I lean on Dré’s desk looking at Eli. He’s got this look on his face like he’s still arguing in his head.

  “Technically...” I say, but as soon as Dré’s glare shoots up at me, I want to just plug in my own earphones and wait it all out—but something is different now than it was that summer before ninth grade. Dré’s got more friends than just Eli and I, and he might choose to be with them instead of us. “Okay, hear me out.”

  He frowns, but he’s listening.

  “Eli did say he didn’t want to, and he’s doing it because you want to.”

  Dré lets out this breath like he’s been waiting for me to say that so he can tell me how wrong I am. “He said he wanted a band. I didn’t. I compromised.”

  Eli pulls out his earphones again. I have suspicions he was listening the whole time, and when he looks at me, I know for sure the earphone thing was a ruse. “Like I compromised with doing cover songs.”

  Dré’s back to that tight-lipped smile where he pretends he’s being civil but things are about to get ugly. “I’m sorry I want us to be famous and not infamously whack.”

  Eli sits up. “Fuck you, Dré.”

  And here we go.

  “Eli, you won’t write anything that actually beats. I told you, we can do one or two slow-as-fuck songs, but people want to bump, not cry.” Dré’s looking at me for backup, and I get what he means, but Eli looks like he’s just been backed into the corner and might start firing from all ends.

  I hold up my hands. “You guys are just different.” I rub my head because this is about two seconds from going to the place where they start attacking each other’s taste in music, and there really is no going back from telling Eli his playlists are trash, so I physically stand between them so they can’t stare at each other. “Different isn’t bad. You want a band. You want to do covers. You want originals, and you want to grow the audience.”

  “Thank you, Captain Fucking Obvious,” Dré says.

  “Don’t talk to her like that.”

  Dré smirks. “Oh, you wanna bring Liv into this, too?”

  I don’t know what the hell that means, considering he’s the one who brought me into this in the first place, but they’re both being petty, so I flick Dré hard on his arm because he’s a dick, and I hold up a finger to Eli. “Chill. My point was you can find a way to make it all work. Instead of approaching it like a war, look at it like a puzzle—like a way to make the best thing out of a bunch of ingredients.”

  Eli’s got his arms crossed. “I can do that. The question is can Dré do that.”

  Dré looks from Eli to me and back to Eli for a long time. The silent code, where they leave me hanging in the balance of what could happen and what I hope happens.

  Dré lets out a small breath and leans back in his chair. “I’m flexible.”

  “We’re good then?” Eli says.

  Dré rolls his eyes. “We’re always good,” he says, but he looks at the floor when he says it, like he’s too embarrassed to be kind. These two are so fucking dramatic I can’t stand it.

  I move from between them. I feel like my mom, because I’ve got a hand on my hip and I’m pulling this face that I know is the exact face I see when she’s sick of my shit. “Good,” I say. “Now finish your damn homework so we can do something today.”

  I didn’t spend all last night writing a paper just to spend today cleaning Dré’s room. We’re supposed to go to a dinner show—the Medieval Times Dinner Show. I got four free tickets last year for playing Christmas songs with the flute quartet. They’re about to expire, and we need something not school related to do.

  Low-key—I’m excited for it. I love dinner shows; they’re always extra as hell and sometimes the food is bomb.

  Both Dré and Eli are looking at me, and they start laughing.

  “She’s going so hard for this medieval shit,” Dré says to Eli.

  I point out that half the books on his bookshelves are about elves.

  “That’s not the same thing,” Eli says. “Elves can exist outside of the medieval I pee in a pot and bathe once a month era.”

  “Well, fuck you both, I can leave you here and go by myself,” I say, offering Eli aux cables. There are so many, I can’t believe Dré even needs them all.

  Eli’s up and taking the cables from me. “You can’t leave us. We’ll disappear into the black hole that is this room without you.”

  It’s lines like that that pull me into Eli’s game of does he or doesn’t he? The rational part of me knows he means that in a very platonic way, because Dré and Eli are like oil and vinegar—they don’t mix, but with the right tweak they make magic. But the totally-lost-my-shit in love part of me wants him to mean something way more. I’d blame Eli, but he’s always been like this and said stuff like that—it’s me who’s making everything out of nothing.

  “Besides all that,” Dré scoffs, “I’m your ride.” He waves his paper in the air. “And I’m done.”

  We all spend the next twenty minutes speed cleaning, then while Dré changes out of his sweats and T-shirt, Eli and I wait outside. It’s starting to heat up again, a last-ditch effort for the sun to fry us before it sinks into the horizon. My sweater has become a tad uncomfortable even though the leaves are falling off the trees; as I sit on the porch, I crunch a few with my shoe.

  Eli sits next to me, and before I can ask why he’s leaning toward me all slow and intense-like, his eyes go from focusing on me to my hair, and he pulls out a piece of paper from my curls. “No one escapes Dré’s room unscathed.” He holds out the paper between us.

  “Nope.” I’m doing something weird with my eyebrows—they’re jumping up and down, and I should have more control over my own facial expressions, but apparently I really am the most basic of the basics.

  “I meant it,” Eli says. He’s back in his personal space and staring at the road, or the house across the street, I can’t tell. “We’re shit without you.”

  I pat his leg, because me doing that is normal and also because I’m the thirst queen and I love touching him. “Yeah, all drama queens need a steady Eddie.”

  He laughs.
“I don’t know what that means.”

  I laugh, too, because neither do I. I just needed to say something to ease the tension building in me. He’s always telling me he needs me, but does he actually want me?

  Eli stares at me, and I think he’s about to say something, but Dré busts out of the front door jingling his keys and the moment is lost.

  * * *

  Florida tourists are predictable, and the ones staring wide-eyed and taking selfies in front of everything at Medieval Times are no different. We’re waiting in the lobby for the show to open its doors. There is this woman with a British accent—her cheeks are red, so I know she spent all day at one of the parks—who is waving her family from one suit of armor to the next, calling everything ghastly inaccurate.

  The woman’s trying to get her daughter to hug a knight for a photo when the girl says, “Boundaries, Mum!”

  My stomach turns. I know I need to do it. I need to draw a line in the sand about me and Kai. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I turn around and clear my throat.

  They don’t even notice.

  “Guys.” I should have practiced what I wanted to say, because I’m already drawing a blank.

  Dré’s attention falls to me, and Eli turns to look at me.

  We’re staring at each other—actually, I’m swallowing spit and shrugging my shoulders while they’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.

  “Okay,” I blurt. “If one of us likes somebody, we shouldn’t be dicks about it.”

  Eli makes a face, and I realize he has no idea what I’m talking about because I just dropped this out of nowhere.

  Dré bites his lip, and I think he knows. Then they’re looking at each other.

  Oh. My. God. I don’t know why I do things like this. Why didn’t I just leave it alone and ignore it, like we do everything else?

  Dré nudges me. “Okay. If you like Kai, I won’t be a dick about it.”

  I can’t make eye contact. I can barely keep my mouth from making this grimace I do when I’m super uncomfortable. “I didn’t say anything about Kai.” My eyes dart to Eli, and I have never felt more betrayed by my body parts. “I’m just saying we shouldn’t do that. Code of friendship or something.”