Hell no I don’t want to go back to Babci’s right now. I don’t want to sit in the quiet house in the floral print bed, when I know that Lena would be down the street, all alone.
“Well, what’s the alternative?” I ask.
“What’s your favorite place in the city?”
“What?”
“Your favorite spot.”
“That’s tough.”
Lena’s staring up at me with those big, bright eyes that fill me with nervous pressure to make my choice good.
“There has to be somewhere that you go when your day has been total crap and you need to forget everything,” she says.
She’s rubbing her hands together to keep them warm, so I reach over and hold them in mine. It’s how we started the day in my garage. Me trying to warm up her hands.
Maybe we’ve got a shot and turning the night around after all.
“Okay, yeah. I know a place—” I’m smiling along with her and nodding my head.
“Take me there,” she says, and steps off the street. “Let’s go.”
“Lena—are you sure?” I pull her back to me.
She nods and flashes a wide smile. “I want to. Really. For once I want to do something stupid. For once I want to live a little. And I want to do it with you.”
My grandmother buys me a journal every year for Christmas. I’m not sure why, it’s a nice gesture, I just don’t really have anything to fill them with. I have a plastic tote under my bed with at least ten of them.
Some are wire bound, some have thick covers and intricate designs, some have inspirational quotes or pictures of famous places. I do have one that I started when I was a kid that lists all of the times I ruined things for Kaydi because I, and my health took precedence. I stopped writing in it a few years ago, though.
We may be Catholic, but even that seemed a little heavy on the guilt.
Anyway, on the cover of one, there is a quote that asks: ‘When was the last time you did something for the first time?’
In my case, up until tonight, the answer was never.
I hadn’t done any normal teenage things like ride the subway into the city, even if it was with a guy I’d never met before. I’d never tried to help someone who didn’t want my help. And I’d never explored a beautiful city in the moonlight.
But tonight, tonight I can make all about trying things for the first time. Seeing things the way they were meant to be seen—by someone who lives and loves them, rather than on a rushed train just trying to make it to the end.
Part of the reason I think this night went to crap was because I was trying to be too cautious. I wanted to experience things, but wasn’t open to letting things happen on their own. And when they got complicated, or ugly, I shut down.
So now, I let Gabe keep his arm around me and don’t ask where we’re headed, and it’s amazing how much lighter my step feels and how much more relaxed the mood is now that we aren’t in such a rush. Now that we’re not trying to hurry up and figure each other out.
Now that we’re free.
“I really am sorry about back there,” he says.
“It’s not your fault,” I say. “It was sort of mine.”
“Nah, you can’t help it if you have a big heart.”
“It is miraculous,” I joke.
“I’m also—I’m sorry for shutting down on you. In my mind, once you told me that you hadn’t been into the city in so long, I had this idea in my head that I was going to show you everything and we’d have this awesome time—”
“There’s still time,” I say.
A quirk of a smile forms in the corner of his mouth.
“You’re right, we do have plenty of time now.” Gabe nods with a laugh. “Aren’t you going to ask where we’re going?”
I shake my head and let him lead on.
***
We end up in a park.
A park is fine. A park is great, even.
If this is legitimately Gabe’s favorite spot in the city, then I’m happy to be here with him. It’s just not exactly what I expected when I told him to take me to his favorite place.
The sprawling green space has several statues of historic figures, a memorial of some kind and an amphitheater.
It’s nice. It’s a park.
“Is this okay?”
“Yeah, it’s great,” I say.
“But?” he asks.
I rub my hands down the length of my jeans. “It’s not what I expected from you, I guess. Then again, I don’t really know you, so—”
“That’s true, you don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, pulling back. “I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“No, it’s fair. Tell you what, the rest of the night, anything you ask, I’ll answer.”
“That’s not necessary—”
“Lena,” he says, turning to me. “I want to.”
“Okay,” I say. “So far, all I know about you is that you’re an only child, your mom wouldn’t take your dad’s last name, and you like cars.”
“And my ex is maybe stalking me,” he adds with a laugh.
“That too,” I smile.
“What else do you want to know?”
“Gabe, I appreciate the effort, but isn’t getting to know someone supposed to be—I don’t know, a little more organic than just a Q and A session?”
The ring of a bicycle-type bell interrupts us.
“Hot chocolate?” Gabe asks. There’s a man walking along the path with a white push cart and some thermoses.
“Yes, please,” I say.
Gabe buys two cups and hands me one. The warmth in my hands is heavenly. I press the hot cup to the side of my face.
“Are you too cold? We can go find somewhere indoors to hang if you’d like.”
I shake my head. “No, this is great. Thank you for this.”
“You sure?” Gabe narrows his eyes at me.
“I’m sure. Let’s sit. I want to know all about what makes this Gabriel Martinez’s favorite spot in Boston.”
My jeans are little protection from the cold cement bench, but the warmth of the cup in my hands, and the way Gabe scoots in close to me, make it more than bearable.
“Well, for one, awesome hot chocolate,” he says, tapping his cup to mine.
“That is true,” I say with a laugh.
“Also, you see that memorial over there?” Gabe points to a granite wall. “It’s in honor of lost Marines. Lots of people come to pay their respects, leave flowers and notes, say prayers. Some of the visitors are family members. They get emotional and sometimes it’s hard to watch.”
It’s beautiful, and touching, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t confused as to why that somber act makes it his favorite.
Gabe continues, “And then right there, you’ve got a playground and a splash park for kids. During the day it’s full of kids screaming and laughing and their parents chasing after them.”
“So, you like…the playground?” I ask, hoping it doesn’t come out rude.
Gabe shakes his head. “You asked me where I go when I’ve had a crap day. This is it. This park, this spot right here. It—” he leans back on the bench and wraps his arm around my shoulders. “It captures the whole range of humanity. Kids are playing right over there, people are grieving over there. It’s the one place in the city I’ve been where you can see the dark and the light side of life this close together.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Gabe continues to surprise me.
“And there’s also the fact that my dad and I used to come here every weekend. Before…”
He lets his voice trail off and even though I’ve been pressuring him for answers all night, now, suddenly, I don’t want them. I don’t want him to have to feel the pain that I know he’s dealing with.
“I don’t know why he took off the way he did. Maybe he just couldn’t handle the pain. I get it. Maybe he couldn’t risk sticking around to see if things got worse.” Gabe takes a long pull from his cup then shrugs
. “I just don’t know. And that’s probably the hardest part.”
“And you have no way to get in touch with him?”
Gabe shakes his head. “Nope. He took off on one of the boats from Gloucester. Some of those are gone for months at a time. Guess I’ll see him when I see him, right?”
He tries to play it off like it’s no big deal, but I can feel little chips of him shattering next to me when he talks.
“What about you, Lena?” he says, slapping a hand lightly on my leg. “You ever run off? I mean, other than tonight, obviously.”
“Nope,” I say. I take a sip of my hot chocolate and savor the warm, thick liquid as it floats down my throat. “Wait. That’s a lie.”
“Tell me more,” he says with a smirk and edges in closer to me. “When I was eight, my best friend Lily and I were in Sunday School—”
“This is riveting already,” Gabe snickers.
“Shut up,” I say, swatting at his arm. “Anyway, we heard that they were putting in a new playground at the private school across the street. We both asked to use the restroom and ran off—”
“Across the street?”
“Hey, we can’t all be as rebellious as you. So Lily and I went across the street and played on the slides and swings for an hour. We didn’t hear the bells ringing at the church. We didn’t hear the sirens when the cops showed up—”
“Holy shit, Lena is a criminal.”
“Hardly. But it did take them a long time to find us—or until we got bored of playing and wandered back.”
“And you were in deep shit, huh?”
“Yep,” I say, stretching my legs out in front of me. “Probably not as much as I’m going to be tomorrow morning, but yeah.”
“Don’t think about it right now,” Gabe says softly.
“I do remember how much sand was in my hair, which was a nightmare all its own. And I never heard the end of how I could have contracted some gross bacteria or parasite from it. Do you know what kind of germs are in playground sand?”
“Never really thought much about it,” I say. “But thanks for ruining my favorite spot for me.”
“Oh,” I slap my hand to my mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m kidding, Lena.”
I lean forward on the bench and look off to the side.
“What’s that, some kind of party?” I ask. The sound of trumpets and saxophones cut through the quiet of the night on the other end of the park. “Isn’t it a little late for that?”
Gabe shrugs. “Guess if you know the right people you can get a permit for anything.”
A big gust of wind kicks up. My teeth chatter, so I drain the rest of the hot chocolate from my cup, savoring every last drop.
“Can we walk a bit?” I ask, rubbing my palms up and down over my cold arms.
“Yeah, of course.”
We walk up a short flight of steps and under a trellis covered with bright blue lights. A few steps in and I have to stop and stare up. I can feel Gabe’s eyes on me rather than the lights, though.
When I was ten, we went to the Grand Canyon. We didn’t camp, but we stayed in a cabin in the National Park. We can see a lot of stars in Gloucester where we live, but one night in the cabin, Kaydi woke me up. We grabbed our robes and went and sat on the wooden porch swing of the cabin and stared at the stars. It was the first time I understood the term ‘blanket of stars’ because that’s exactly what they were. There was hardly any dark space in the sky, just huge clusters of the brightest stars we’d ever seen that were so bright and so close, they looked like you could reach out and touch them. I remember feeling so small under that massive sky. I felt like all of the things that worried me were so minute compared to the vast universe and all of those stars above.
I get the same feeling standing under this canopy of lights with Gabe. They’re packed together so that you can hardly see any of the night sky around them. Outside the canopy is the city, its skyscrapers and old buildings still illuminated. Gabe and I are just these tiny specks in something so much bigger than we could ever wrap our minds around.
“Gabe, this is amazing,” I say, staring up at the lights. “No wonder this is your favorite place. They’re like stars.”
“Pretty cool, right?”
I tip my head back down and his realize his gaze is still focused on me.
“So, any question you’ll answer?” I begin, and Gabe nods. “About Jemma…”
“Ah, yeah, I figured I owed you a better explanation than I gave earlier,” Gabe says.
I shake my head and say, “You don’t owe me one, but I’d like to know what’s going on. Are things finished? Like, over this time?” I don’t know why, but the tightness of hope in my stomach that they’re really done outweighs the nervousness of asking for the details.
“Jemma—I think she gets it. I hope she gets it.” He rubs a palm across his cheek and says, “It’s definitely over whether she gets it or not.”
“What happened?”
“Tonight, or in general?”
“Whichever,” I say.
“You been following the news? Israeli-Palestinian conflict? All that?”
I nod slowly. “I guess. A little.”
Probably not as much as I should be, to be honest.
“Well, that’s all that Babci watches—even if she isn’t paying attention half the time, the news is always on in her house. And I still have trouble making sense of it all, or figuring out who’s right or wrong, or if either side is. But Jemma, Jemma is one of those people that likes to attach herself to causes. She doesn’t care if it’s anti-fur, anti-guns, anti-money, you give her a cause, she’ll back it.”
“Okay…” I say. “Isn’t she a little young for all of those big opinions?”
Gabe shrugs. “Her mom was super into it too before she married her dad, so I guess it maybe runs in her blood. She’s super passionate which is good—but also bad. Jemma had this habit of pulling me into her drama, just to get a reaction out of me.”
“She got you into trouble?”
He nods. “More times than one.”
“Ouch.”
“Her family owns a group of successful restaurants here in the city, and you didn’t hear it from me, but it’s widely known that they may-or-may-not be mob related.”
“Like, mob-mob. Are you being serious?”
Gabe nods slowly and grins.
“Yep. So someone narc’d on her family for buying illegal oysters with fake tags for their seafood restaurant and they assumed it was me—that I told my mother about them. And Jemma let them go on believing it. I didn’t, but the cops showed up and they got fined.”
“Oh, shit,” I say.
“Lena Pettitt, I didn’t know curse words came out of that sweet mouth of yours,” he says, staring at my mouth, his own face plastered with a wicked grin.
“Very funny. But if they’re mob—what’d you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. Her uncle came to our apartment one afternoon to talk to me. I wasn’t home, but Mom was. Turns out, she knew who he was because the cops were already keeping an eye on Jemma’s family for all sorts of illegal crap. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jemma did it all—if she ratted out her own family so that they’d turn on me— so that she could get back at me.”
“Wait, get back at you for what?”
“For not showing up.”
“What do you mean?”
Gabe lets out a deep, throaty laugh. “Sorry, I’ll back up. Jemma always made it seem like she didn’t want to ask her family for any help when she was scared, or in trouble or whatever because their reactions would be too big, you know? So she always made it seem like she only had me. That she could only rely on me.”
“You seem like a pretty decent guy to have on your side.”
“Yeah, just wait until you get to know me,” he jokes.
“Anyway, she was always crying wolf, and I’d had it one day. After getting her out of her pretend trouble every night for a week, for once, I didn�
�t answer the phone.”
“And she didn’t like that?”
“Ooooooh,” Gabe hoots. “No, she didn’t like it at all. In fact, she broke up with me.”
“She broke up with you for not coming to her rescue one time?”
“She did. And she quickly rebounded. A guy from my philosophy class.”
“And that—”
“And that is called getting your heart trampled on. I wasn’t there for her, I get it, but I had a lot of my own shit going on, too.”
“But what does this have to do with Israel?
“Ah, see, she gets my brain all jumbled,” Gabe says.
I narrow my eyes and he says, “That’s not a good thing, Lena.”
“Israel?” I repeat, feeling relief that Jemma doesn’t have a hold on him anymore.
“Okay, so the last time I saw her before tonight was at Harvard.”
“Harvard,” I say. “She’s why you’re banned from being there?”
“Yep,” he says, raking a hand through his gorgeous head of hair. “She texted me and said she was in trouble. Some protest over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some of the protesters were getting out of control, she was scared it was going to turn violent and she needed help getting out of the crowd.”
“So you went?”
Gabe sucks a breath in through his teeth. “What can I tell you? I’m a moron.”
“Not a moron, you just give a lot of chances.”
“Oh, I wasn’t looking for another chance. I was looking to prove her wrong. When she broke up with me, she told me I’d never cared about her, and that’s just not true. I did. I guess I probably still do. Just not in the way that she wants. But I don’t want to see people I care about in any kind of trouble. My mom has been itching to put one of the Randazzos behind bars since before the oyster incident. Now that one of them had dared to come to her house, she was waiting to pounce. Minor or not, she’d jump at the chance to throw the book at any one of them—even Jemma. I was just trying to do what I could to make sure that didn’t happen.”
“Were things bad at the protest?”
Gabe shakes his head. “They weren’t, but I think they were getting there.”
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