by Natasha Díaz
She saunters out of the room and a small rush of cool air hits me as the door closes behind her. Like a true ice queen, she’s always leaving a trail of biting wind in her wake. I wish I had it in me to say something back, but it’s easier to just settle into her absence and pretend it doesn’t hurt.
* * *
—
“She said what?!” Stevie screams as I fill him in on the way to the subway.
“I just feel like natural selection should have done away with people like her by now,” I go on. “Plus, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. If Jordan or Janae heard her call my hair nappy, they’d laugh their asses off.”
It’s odd how sometimes these comments bother me, and how at other times I can’t help but chuckle at the absurdity. I guess I’m just used to never being enough of anything.
“Who needs her dumbass party? We’re hangin’ with Jesus tonight!” I proclaim loud enough for some Hasidic women pushing strollers to turn around and give us dirty looks.
We head up the stairs to the 242nd Street station; it’s the last stop on the 1 train in the Bronx, and the entire station is aboveground. There’s usually a train waiting to be dispatched on the platform, which means we almost always get a seat.
Stevie practices his rusty breakdancing skills through the empty car. A man joins us and throws a dollar at Stevie’s feet, which Stevie pockets before grabbing the seat next to me.
“So, what kind of party is this, B?”
“I dunno, like a regular party,” I say, as if I have any real sense of what that means.
One of the consequences of having only one close friend is that you don’t get to flex your social skills very often. Outside of the slew of bar and bat mitzvahs that Stevie and I were forced to attend a couple years ago, we haven’t been to many parties, and I don’t want to text Jesus with questions that will reveal how utterly unsocialized I actually am.
The train pushes forward—238th, 231st, 225th, 215th, 207th—and fills as we go with students and men and women ready to go home after a long day.
“WHAT TIME IS IT?”
A young man followed by three friends walk onto the car with a ’90s-style boom box. They are shirtless, with sweat dripping down their flushed brown skin. I look over at the man who gave Stevie the dollar; he’s about to figure out he used his cash on the wrong performer.
The guys turn the music up loud and begin to two-step and clap in unison in a semicircle.
“IT’S SHOWTIME!” the rest of the crew respond to the question before one of them hops up and climbs the center pole. He grabs onto the higher handrails on the ceiling and flips off them, landing gracefully on the ground and spinning himself around like a basketball on an NBA star’s finger.
The troupe performs an array of skills: body contortion (the smallest guy puts both his arms behind his back and then dislocates both of his shoulders before pulling his arms over his head in front of him and popping both of his shoulder blades back in); breakdancing (what Stevie was trying to do just moments before their performance began, but with success); and gymnastics (the tallest guy does backflips up and down the entire subway car without stopping, defying the laws of space and dizziness).
After they finish, the little guy comes around with a worn Yankees cap for donations. I’ve been trying to figure out why he looks so familiar, and then it hits me: he goes to my grandfather’s church. Embarrassed that I don’t have cash, I hide behind my cell phone, hoping he doesn’t recognize me. Luckily, Stevie gives up everything he has, including the dollar donated to his lackluster performance earlier.
The group hops onto the platform at the next stop and onto the next car, where they begin the routine all over again.
The sounds of the train amplify as we lurch forward into the darkness of the subway tunnel, encapsulating us in a dissonance of metal wheels on metal tracks. Dyckman is the last stop aboveground until 125th, and as we adjust to the shrill mechanical noise that fills our immediate space, a faint echo punctuates the inhuman shrieks as the train barrels toward 191st Street.
“WHAT TIME IS IT?” the echo asks, challenging the chorus of steel and electricity for their audience.
“IT’S SHOWTIME!”
Chapter 16
With the little information I have from Jesus about the party, Stevie becomes my default stylist, and the result is a jumbled ensemble that most closely resembles the attire of a young female with a 1990s self-titled sitcom. Essentially, I look like Stevie.
“Where do you think you’re going, Thing One and Thing Two?” Anita says as she materializes by the front door just before we sneak out.
“Just to a friend’s house,” Stevie interjects with enough confidence that I let him go for it. “Abby Jackson. She’s in our grade and she’s a total witch, but if we don’t show, they’ll torture us, and we’re already the weird, racially ambiguous kids. Honestly, Auntie,” he says, placing his hand on his hips. “You’d hate it.”
Stevie pats Anita’s arm like an old friend.
She looks around. Janae and Jordan are out, Jerry went with Uncle Zeke to a movie, and my mom is in bed like a slug. A quiet, empty house is a rare treat for Anita, who works the front desk of an orthodontist’s office nine hours a day. Her raised eyebrows relax and she taps her left foot as she makes her final decision.
“Be home by ten-thirty,” she says, before cautioning, “I’ll be up.”
Outside, the sun has only begun to set, casting swirls of rainbow sherbet through the sky. I swear it adds a sweet taste to the air—the same sweet taste as when you are dehydrated and you finally get a few drops of water on your tongue.
The change from summer to fall in the city is drastic and sudden. One day, the temperature goes back to being manageable. The dust in the air stops floating through the humidity and returns to the ground until the rain washes it down the gutters. The women selling flavored ice on the corner trade their freezer on wheels for a cart or a table, where they sell churros or sprinkle chili powder on expertly sliced mangoes to spear with a stick. The city breathes again.
We wait until we’re around the corner to put the address Jesus sent me into the map on my phone. There’s no way to know how far my aunt’s supernatural sight extends, and after our narrow escape, I’m not willing to take any risks. Luckily, the party is only a ten-minute walk away.
We head up Lenox Avenue. I am immediately grateful that Stevie chose my high-top sneakers as opposed to sandals or anything with a heel, because the ground is littered with shards of glass that crunch under our feet. We stop in a bodega to grab a couple sodas and some chips as an offering and then turn the corner toward the party. A group of kids stand on the stoop of a brownstone, holding brown paper bags with bottles in them. My legs stop functioning, as if Medusa just turned them to stone.
This is a mistake. I don’t know how to act at a party, or how to drink. The only time Stevie and I have ever gotten drunk was in his basement last year when we were the only people in our class not invited to Abby’s freshman year welcome-back party. We both ended up green and immobile, me vomiting in the sink and Stevie in the toilet, respectively.
“Nevaeh?” a familiar voice shouts as we start up the steps.
Janae and Jordan stare at me. Jordan wears a halter dress and a jean jacket, and Janae sports a crop top with high-waisted vintage denim jeans that are no doubt a hand-me-down from Anita. Both of them look beautiful yet understated, especially in contrast with Stevie’s and my explosion of colors and layers.
“You look like a radiant Nubian queen,” Stevie declares, lunging forward in an attempt to take Jordan’s hand in his. She pivots toward the open entrance and shoots him a look of disgust usually reserved for me.
“I’ll meet you inside, B!” he says, trailing her with zero shame.
“I didn’t know you were here this weekend,” Janae says apologetically.
We enter a brownstone with a layout that mirrors ours. A face I can’t quite place stares back at me from a wall of portraits.
“Seventh grade—but don’t judge me. I hadn’t found my swagger yet.”
Jesus stands behind me, the current version of the kid I knew I recognized. The photos stop in middle school, before he grew his hair out, bulked up, and had his braces removed. We walk over to a table nearby where a bunch of alcohol is set up—Heinekens and forties of Old E next to bottles of Smirnoff and Hennessy. I place my Diet Coke on the table with the rest of the mixers. Jesus hovers over the drinks, searching the bounty to refill the red Solo cup already in his hand. Surprisingly, he goes for the Diet Coke I brought.
“Can’t get messy if you’re hosting,” he whispers. “I just stumble around a few times and no one can tell the difference.”
He pours the remainder of the soda into a cup for me.
“You didn’t tell me the party was at your house,” I say, more confident in my ability to flirt now that the expectation of drinking has been extinguished.
“Or what, you wouldn’t have come?”
We both know that is not the truth.
I follow Jesus through the house, toward the back. My grandpa’s brownstone has a backyard, but it’s the only part of the property that has remained untouched. As it stands now, the whole space is just a plot of overgrown weeds and trash flung over from the neighboring homes. Jesus’s parents, however, have made their yard a priority, so even with twenty teenagers milling around, it looks immaculate.
A metal fence separates this yard from those on either side, with expertly manicured shrubbery that weaves between the links to create what looks like a wall of floating leaves and flowers. A path of slate stones leads to a small gazebo that rests at the far end of the yard. It’s decorated with Christmas lights, each bulb glistening in the night sky like a fallen star caught in a spider’s web.
Tonight, the air is crisp, and as we walk down the stairs of the deck, I see Jordan chatting with one of the guys that Jesus hangs with on the corner.
“So, Lightskin, whatchu been up to?” Jesus asks me just as we pass her.
Her disdain stings even though she hasn’t so much as looked in my direction in weeks. As we move down into the garden, the air is rife with oversprayed cologne, cigarettes, and warm beer. Jesus guides me through the crowd, and people stand or nod or pat his back as he makes his way toward the gazebo. Inside, there’s a bench just large enough for two people, as long as they don’t mind being pressed up together. Jesus walks in first and holds his hand out, inviting me to join him.
“Have you always lived here?” I ask, awkwardly placing myself beside him.
“Yep. My dad grew up in Harlem ten blocks away, across from the Hamilton Houses.” He points in the direction of the cluster of public housing buildings that tower above the short brownstones, which make up the majority of the residential buildings in Harlem. “He’s never left Harlem, not even through law school.”
“My mom grew up in Harlem too,” I say, glad to point out something we have in common. “But she went to college in Chicago and never came back…until this summer.”
“And your dad?” he pushes.
The lie I told about my father being dead makes me hold my breath, and I make a mental note to never take my phone out in front of Jesus. It would just take one photo or text message to pop up and reveal the depth of my deceit.
“Um. He was actually a lawyer too. My mom says that’s what killed him, the stress,” I lie as convincingly as possible. Jesus places his strong arm around my shoulders, protecting me from my feigned grief and I take a sip of my soda, desperate for a change in subject.
“This backyard is amazing. How did you get these lights to hang like the floating candles in the Great Hall?” I ask to deflect him.
His brow raises so high it blends in with his hairline.
“Great Hall?” he asks.
“Have you not read Harry Potter?” I ask, with the sinking realization that even Jesus is not perfect.
He reaches over and takes my face by the chin and brings it closer to his.
“Nah, ain’t been to the Great Hall either, but we’re both here now,” he whispers, so close that I can smell the Diet Coke on his tongue.
And then he kisses me.
He kisses me so slow and soft that I don’t know if this is the pace at which people usually kiss or if he’s easing me in, a starter package you have to max out before graduating to the next level. Time stops as we begin to breathe in sync and pull each other closer, leaving the party and the people around us miles away. It’s amazing how easy it is to forget my problems when I have the taste of Jesus and his cherry ChapStick to distract me.
The soft pink velvet
Between your lips is enough
Forever. Again.
If it weren’t for
The moon’s eyes, I think we could
Live here in the dark.
“How will I ever
Sleep?” I ask. “I guess to dream
Of us,” you suggest.
Chin stubble rubs hot
On my soft skin, leaves me with
Scars to prove you’re real.
An explosion of cheers interrupts our love swaddle, sending us back down onto the hard bench. I pull away to find a throng of partygoers clapping and taking photos. The phone flashes blind me as people document my first kiss like amateur paparazzi.
“You should probably go out there and host,” I say, ready to be out of the spotlight.
“But I like it here witchu,” he teases, and kisses me one more time. Then he nods at my empty cup. “You want a refill?”
Even though I am sober, a lightness has taken over my body, as though just being in Jesus’s presence has the same effect as cheap, illegally purchased booze.
“I’m okay,” I say with a giggle, and look around, positive it was Stevie who led the charge on the barrage of photos.
He’s never going to let me live this down, I think, but I don’t see him anywhere.
* * *
—
Inside, the gathering has mutated into a dance party three times its original size, and I have to shield my nose from the musty air. Janae seems to be on DJ duty, perched on the windowsill with a laptop sprouting wires that reach all over the room to their respective speakers.
The floor is covered in a layer of sweat and dirt at 12 percent proof, but Stevie weaves through the grime with ease, dancing with so much excitement he is practically center stage. People around him half rock, half watch as he moves the way he was meant to: with the perfect balance of grace and grit. Stevie is blind to the suggestive eyes and body rolls coming at him from all angles, because his eyes are locked on Jordan, who’s dancing not too far away with the guy she was talking to outside on the steps.
The guy has greased-back hair and wears his shirt with the top two buttons undone, something out of the late-’90s Marc Anthony videos Anita makes us watch because “that’s her celebrity crush and she can do what she wants.” He must be at least twenty-five, way too old to be at this party, and he looks at Jordan the same hungry way my dad looks at Ashleigh.
The music stops midsong. The silence startles me, but people just file out of the room to get drinks as Janae hops down from her perch to figure out which cord was accidentally unplugged.
I wave at Stevie, but he marches past us to the drinks table, where Marc Anthony is pouring Hennessy into Jordan’s red cup. She bites her thumb and giggles at what he says, batting her eyelashes so vigorously she might give herself a migraine.
“Hi, Jordan!” Stevie says.
The creepy dude moves back as Stevie shoves himself between th
em.
“What do you want?” she asks through her teeth. “I’m busy.”
“You think you’re slick,” the guy says. At what looks like six foot five, he towers over Stevie. “We was talkin’.”
Stevie turns to him, his nose hitting six inches under this guy’s chin.
“Well, now we’re talking,” Stevie challenges, taking a step back as the giant raises a fist.
Jesus swoops in just then and grabs the guy by the shoulders.
“Aye, Marcos, chill. Tu ta bien?”
Marcos’s breathing normalizes as an evil grin spreads across his face. He brushes Jordan off with a wave of his hand.
“Yeah, bitches like her always got something to complain about anyway. I need a little cream in my coffee,” Marcos says with a wink in my direction.
Jordan storms past us and slams the front door, wiping her eyes as she goes.
Stevie takes a power stance in her wake. Legs wide, elbows at perfect ninety-degree angles. From the back, he looks like Superman, if Superman lost a hundred pounds.
“What did you say?” Stevie yells, clawing at the air between him and Marcos.
Marcos takes a step forward and kicks his foot back on the floor like a bull seeing red, ready to charge.
“You better get ya man, blanquita,” he says to me, spit flying out of his mouth.
Marcos easily outweighs Stevie and me combined, but Stevie is not going to back down; it’s not in his DNA. Jesus throws his arm over Marcos’s shoulder.
“You been out back yet? There’s nutcrackers. Jeff brought a fresh batch from the bodega on Two Forty-First and Matilda.”
Marcos hesitates, weighing whether Stevie can step to him without any sort of consequence with the need to refill his Solo cup.
“Those Wakefield nutties are what’s up,” Marcos says to Jesus, turning his back to us, enticed by the promise of alcohol more than he is by the prospect of pummeling Stevie to a bloody pulp.