Why is he seeing Mrs. Hamilton without me?
I tell her about riding to the station; the inside of the squad car covered in plastic wrap; me and my thick, slimy, wet second skin; and the female cop cutting me out of my clothes.
“She sliced through them with scissors, and I kept thinking, ‘Who’s gonna pay for this shirt?’ I wanted to know if I could get a refund for it.” My good-enough-for-the-popular-kids shirt. “Who thinks about that stuff when someone has died?”
“You were in shock,” Mrs. Hamilton says. “You still are. It’s your brain’s way of dealing, to focus on smaller things. You can’t help what you were thinking, and it doesn’t make you a bad person.”
Easy for her to say.
“But now I’m confused,” she admits, leaning toward me and tapping her chin with her fingertip. “Whenever you’ve talked about the diner with me, you say you were under the table the whole time.”
I nod. “Right.”
Low to the ground is comforting; standing up is bad.
“But the cash register was several feet away. If you were under the table the whole time, then why were you covered in blood?”
I pinch my eyes shut, but nothing comes in; no images form a bridge between under the table and not under the table. There’s just shouting, and gunshots, and me in the police car, covered in blood.
“I guess I wasn’t under the table the whole time. I guess it just felt that way.” I look at her. “I mean, I know I wasn’t, but—” I rub at my arms, moving the skin back and forth, trying to push away my blood-soaked T-shirt, the red tarp of cotton sticking to me. “The blood was real. The blood was real …”
She places a hand on my wrist before I can do any damage to my arms.
“It’s okay. I know it was real. You don’t have to try to remember right now. But I think in the future, remembering will help you recover.”
For the rest of October, Ricky and I practice three times a week in the garage, sort of like my old Tae Kwon Do schedule. I don’t know what he sees when he looks at me. Our only rule is no marks above the neck or any place a sleeve doesn’t cover. When we spar, we don’t wear any padding; it’s bone against bone. My shins and arms are the color of plums at first, and then rotten mangos. All the bruises of the rainbow.
The “no face” rule isn’t much better than the rules of Tae Kwon Do, but I have to live with it if I want Ricky to continue. Sometimes I wonder what the point is, though, if we’re not fighting for real. If we’re still holding back.
He told me he feels nervous unless he sees me at least once a day, because if he doesn’t know firsthand I’m okay, he’ll spend his classes wondering if something’s happened to me. He’s a senior, so we don’t even get lunch together. But we pass in the hall at the halfway mark, by my locker, and we look each other in the eyes, just a quick moment that says, “I’m here. You’re not alone.”
“Mrs. H. asked me something weird,” I tell him when we take a break from practicing in the garage. I’m still confused about seeing him in her office without me, and maybe he wonders the same thing about me. I quickly explain. “I had to see her on my own because I’m failing Current Events.”
I pause, giving him the chance to reciprocate and tell me why he was leaving her office when I showed up. But he doesn’t take me up on the offer.
“She said, ‘If you were under the table the whole time, why were you covered in blood?’”
Ricky doesn’t answer right away. “You don’t remember?” he says at last.
“It’s like I do, but I don’t. There’s a gap. I was under the table, and then I was in the police car. I know it was bad. I know it all went wrong. I just can’t picture it.”
I’m standing at the mirror, which faces another mirror on the opposite wall. Ricky stands behind me and murmurs in my ear, “Maybe you shouldn’t try. Maybe it’s your brain’s way of protecting you.”
We stare at each other in the wall mirrors, and all our images on down to infinity stare at each other, too. I keep thinking one pair of them might be brave and break away from the rest; maybe one of the Imogens, just one of the hundreds, will turn around and kiss one of the Rickys. I picture the rest of us looking on jealously. If only one pair of us does it, it won’t count, it won’t have to change anything, it won’t risk what we have—our closeness. One version of us could kiss, and the rest of us could still be safe.
I’m wondering if the person to break free of the mirror images will be me or a different Imogen, when—supreme mortification!—Dad interrupts us. At least we have fair warning and can back away from each other as he wheels in.
Dad’s wheelchair isn’t a sleek, high-tech motorized one. It’s all metal footrests and squeaking rubber, because it was supposed to be temporary.
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Ricky says, hand outstretched.
Most people become paralyzed around the wheelchair-bound; I’ve seen adults in the mall overcompensate by pretending they don’t see Dad. They’re terrified that if they glance over and their gaze lingers for a fraction of a second, it’ll be rude. So instead they ignore him, because that’s realistic. Even though you’re half our height, twice as wide, and blocking the aisle, we don’t notice you there. Why would we?
But Ricky looks right at Dad, the way I wish I could.
Dad shakes his hand and says, “Nice to meet you, too.”
“The gym is really well equipped. Thanks for letting me use it,” Ricky says.
“Well, that’s entirely Imogen’s doing. She picked everything out.”
“Dad, can we chat later?” I ask, giving Ricky a “Don’t contradict me” look. “We’re in the middle of something.”
Ricky ignores me. “Mr. Malley, I was wondering if I might have your permission to take Imogen out to dinner on Saturday.”
Is this actually happening? What are we, an 1800s family?
Dad cracks a smile, removes his glasses, cleans them, and places them back on. His eyes are tiny and then huge again. “Sure. Assuming that’s okay with you, honey?” he says to me.
“Uh. Yeah. Sounds good.”
And that’s how Ricky Alvarez asks me out.
ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, HUNTER INVITES GRETCHEN over to dip me in the beauty vat before Ricky picks me up. Her zillion younger sisters are apparently always begging her for makeovers. Hunter probably thought he was being helpful, but I want Ricky to like me as I am, not as some Franken-girl sewn together by one of Hunter’s exes.
“How are you doing these days?” Gretchen asks, flicking through her makeup bag and selecting an eye-shadow brush.
I shrug. Maybe it’s too much to hope for, but I want to spend one evening without images from the diner infringing. They’re always on the edge of my consciousness, fighting to tear through. If my brain’s the arena, my thoughts are the rabid caged dogs in the wings, whipped into a fury. As long as I don’t acknowledge them, I can keep them at bay until I go to bed, at which point they show up as nightmares and tear themselves apart.
But while I’m awake, I can drug their food.
Gretchen offers me a couple of outfits to borrow, an InStyle magazine, and some perfume samples. My own mascara and blush are good, but I end up borrowing a lipstick and some earrings from her—small enough items so I don’t feel fake, but also so I don’t make Gretchen feel like her visit was a waste of time.
“Congrats on winning class president,” I say as she gathers her items and heads for the door. “I think Hunter voted for you twice. I definitely would’ve voted for you if I was a senior.”
“Thanks,” Gretchen says. “It’s been good for me, staying so busy. Have fun on your date and don’t be a stranger, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious. We should hang out, meet up at Dairy Delight again some night Hunter’s working.”
Aha. She’s still hung up on Hunter. Can’t say I’m surprised, but I am a little sad. For a second there, it felt like we might become friends on our own terms.
I shake off the
familiar disappointment and try to focus on my date.
By eight o’clock, Ricky and I are seated in a booth at the back of Mr. Yang’s Chinese Bistro, inhaling the scent of orange chicken and kung pao peppers as they float by.
Ricky’s kind of rocking back and forth in his seat; I don’t think he realizes he’s doing it.
I immediately flag down the hostess. “Can we get a different table?” I ask.
“Where would you like?”
“Over there,” I say, pointing to a spot by a window.
The awkwardness started when Ricky picked me up tonight, because he’s never formally rung the doorbell or even come inside the house except to grab water after our garage workouts. I wasn’t sure how to act, or why anything should feel like an act to begin with, and I also wasn’t sure how dressed up he was going to be. I didn’t want to look (a) too casual or (b) not casual enough. I wanted us to match.
He’s in jeans and a blazer and a skinny tie, and I’m in a dark-wash jean skirt, tights, and a sweater. I think we look pretty spiff together, but so far the awkwardness hasn’t abated.
We sit down at our new table and get our menus. The silence between us is unbearable.
“So! What are you going to order?” I ask, after a prolonged moment spent looking at, but not really seeing, the specials and appetizers. I hate this conversation; it’s not even a conversation. It’s what people say when they don’t know what else to say.
“Not sure yet,” he mumbles back.
We should’ve stayed home. We should’ve stuck to the pattern. We should be working on sidekicks and palm-heel strikes in our sweatpants and tank tops, not playing dress up and pretend. We’re no good at this.
What scares me is how upset the thought makes me. I wanted us to be good at this.
I bet there are no lulls when Hunter goes on a date, maybe because their tongues are busy in other ways. But who wants to kiss if the rest of it’s missing? With Ricky, we had “the rest of it” down pat. Or, at least, we did before.
His eyes flit around the room, darting this way and that—and any time the door opens and another customer walks in, he watches them for a while, his leg bouncing.
At this point in the evening, the female dater supposedly sets the tone for the night, based solely on what she orders. Salad? Lame; possible eating disorder. Lobster? Expensive, which means either bitchy or slutty. It’s so unfair and ridiculous.
I tell this to Ricky, and he squints his eyes. “You better choose the right thing,” he says fake menacingly, snapping his menu shut. “Or this night is over.”
I suck some water into my straw and pretend I’m going to squirt it at him. He barely reacts. What’s happening to us?
Right after we order, there’s a crash in the kitchen; someone’s dropped a bunch of plates. Ricky jumps, knocking over his water.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
A waiter comes by to mop up the spill, and Ricky bolts out of his chair.
“I can’t—I can’t sit here anymore,” he says.
I stand, too, tossing my napkin to the table. “It’s all right, it’s—”
“I can’t be here anymore.”
“Let’s go outside for a second.” I turn to the waiter. “We’ll be right back.”
I take Ricky’s hand in mine, and we move outside. That’s how easy it turned out to be: grabbing onto his hand as an impulse, without thinking. In fact, I don’t even realize what I’ve done until he lets my hand go so he can drag his fingers through his hair.
“Sorry,” he says, the word a puff of white in the cold night air. “Fuck! This isn’t how I wanted this night to go. This was supposed to be normal. I wanted to give you a normal night.”
“Hey,” I say gently, looking at him until he looks back. Strange how we spent minutes (hours, years) looking at each other at the diner, giving strength to each other, but now he has trouble and I have to coax his trust out of him. It’s my job to coax it out of him.
Our eyes meet at last, and a jolt of longing—to see him better, to see him okay—gives me confidence to speak. I can do this for him. Maybe I’ve been waiting to do this the whole evening. “It’s us. It’s you and me. I don’t care about any of this stuff. We can go home; we can go back to my gym and just work out if you want. I don’t care. We don’t have to do ‘normal things.’ We can just be us. What we have isn’t normal, and I don’t see why it should be.”
It’s better than normal, I think.
He sits down at the curb and I join him. He reaches for my hand, and I stroke his knuckles with my thumb until he relaxes. His hand is warm, a comfort against the chilly air.
I guess once you hold hands that first time, it’s never strange to keep doing it. (Would kissing be the same?)
“I haven’t eaten in a restaurant since that night,” Ricky says. “Have you?”
“Not really,” I tell him. “Just Dairy Delight, where my brother works. But I freaked out at the movies.”
“Well, that’s better than me. I don’t go anywhere anymore. Just school, home, and your place. I even stopped playing basketball with my friends. I don’t go anywhere, and I don’t do anything, and just making myself walk in there was like … I don’t know. Like tempting fate, like saying, ‘Come and get me. I’m a sitting duck again.’ Every time the door opened, every time I saw a guy come in, didn’t matter who it was, I thought, He’s packing and he’s going to open fire, and we’re all just sitting here.”
“Ricky …”
“I know,” he sighs. “It’s stupid.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Mrs. Hamilton told me teenagers are resilient, that we’ll bounce back,” he scoffs. “And I’m thinking, Okay. When?”
I don’t remember Mrs. Hamilton saying that, but I’ve heard the theory before. That the younger you are, the quicker you can normalize an event and move on, because you don’t know any other way of life. It just becomes a small part of your narrative as the years go by. But it seems to me the younger you are when something bad happens to you, the longer you have to carry it with you.
Why couldn’t we have witnessed a shooting when we were, like, seventy-seven?
“She also said it could get worse before it gets better,” Ricky mutters. “But how could it get worse? Like, what, I won’t be able to leave the house at all?”
I have no answer for him.
“Are you hungry, or should we ditch this place?” I ask.
“Do you mind if we take the food back to my abuelita’s?”
“Are you kidding? I love her.”
After we grab our coats from the hooks at the front of the restaurant, Ricky holds the door open, and DJ, Philip, and DJ’s parents come in as we’re going out. DJ stares right at me, and her eyes widen. She looks like she’s about to say something, but then she glances at her parents, who are staring straight ahead, and doesn’t say a word.
“Hi, Imogen,” says Philip, nodding to me, and DJ elbows him. “What? Oh, sorry.”
“You were really nice to my dad,” I tell Ricky once we’re settled in at his place, unpacking our takeout bags at the kitchen table. Cashew chicken for me, crab Rangoon and noodles for him.
Halloween decorations dot the fridge, small things like black cats and pumpkin magnets. Ricky looks much better now that we’re back in familiar surroundings.
“Are most people mean to him?” Nervous laughter.
“No, not exactly mean, but … a lot of people look past him or try to get out of the conversation as soon as possible.”
He shrugs. “I’m kind of used to seeing guys in wheelchairs. Some of my dad’s friends are war vets who’ve lost limbs and things like that. What happened with him?” Ricky’s voice is kind, more curious than anything else, but then his mother walks in, so I’m saved from answering.
Mrs. Alvarez is shorter in person, but otherwise her campaign photos are accurate: she’s this well-lit poster come to life, all cascading, curly dark hair, with Ricky’s same brown-and-gold-flecked eyes, and she has t
he biggest, friendliest smile I’ve ever seen.
“You are Ricky’s novia, yes?” she says, leaning down to kiss my cheek and give my shoulder a squeeze. “So nice to meet you.”
Am I his novia? Ricky’s girlfriend? The thought makes me giddy for a second. The nicest part is that Ricky’s apparently felt that way for a while, long enough to tell his mother so, even though this is our first date and we’ve only held hands.
“Hi, Mrs. Alvarez. Nice to meet you, too.”
“My mother says hello, by the way. She’s at her book club.”
“Sorry we missed her.”
“I’m curious, how are you guys eating that, exactly?” she says.
Ricky and I are sitting at the same side of the table, our plates and chairs smushed together, holding hands beneath the table. In our free hands we’ve got one half of a pair of chopsticks each, and we’re working together to scoop the food up and into our mouths, one piece at time. It’s taking forever, but we refuse to stop holding hands. We’re like those paper dolls joined at the hand, and to separate us would require a severing of limbs, and you couldn’t even say whose because they’ve merged.
“It’s a synchronized, coordinated effort,” I say. “Want some?”
She looks down at our plates, all the food mixed together in a messy pile, and demurs. “I was going to make hot chocolate, so I think I’ll pass.”
I worry she’s going to ask about my suspension, but either Ricky and his abuelita have kept that fact from her, or she considers it old news.
After we clear our plates, Mrs. Alvarez pours hot chocolate into a mug for me straight from a saucepan. I learn hot chocolate doesn’t mean warm chocolate; it means hot peppers, like eye-popping caliente-hot. It’s rich and delicious and makes my tongue throb and my pores sweat. I feel like running out into the cold air and spinning around with my mouth open.
“What are you working on tonight, Mom?” says Ricky.
She chuckles. “Translation: ‘Go back to what you’re working on, Mom.’”
“I didn’t say that,” Ricky protests.
“It’s okay. I’ll leave you be. I’m putting together an outreach program for the women’s center on Halstead.” She turns to me. “You have any older siblings?”
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