I shouldn’t read it, she thought, but the more she tried to ignore the questions, the further they multiplied. Was Nazarenko skewering Samuel’s private life the same way she was skewering Laila’s? Was she making him grapple with some deep, private shame?
Laila caved. She dropped his story and flattened the fragment to decipher Nazarenko’s handwriting.
This draft is an improvement, but barely. The narrative hinges on the behavior of a “female character” cobbled together from the weariest of clichés about what supposedly comprises female behavior, an exhausting and stunningly shallow parade of hysteria, jealousy, two-timing, and hypersexual allure. Perhaps something upsetting has happened in the student’s personal life?
Either way, the piece suggests that the student sees women as paths to validation, receptacles for sexual frustration, or metaphors for the psychological state of men, but certainly not people in their own right. I cannot recommend strongly enough that the author spend time with a girl in whom he has no romantic interest, ideally a girl he finds unattractive. A hearty conversation with a female relative could do. Perhaps the experience will give him insight into expecting something of women besides sexual contact.
Laila looked blankly at the paper for a long time.
Finally she slipped the note back into his story, and the story into the folder. She left, walking right past Samuel Marquez, who was saying, “I’m done, I’m not kidding anymore.” He didn’t notice.
The next day, Laila slid into the lunch booth beside Hannah with the latest draft of her story folded open to the last page.
“This is why I wanted to go out,” she said. “Okay?” She turned the paper to face between the three of them.
She felt like she’d stripped half-naked. Her friends all stared at the story. Leo gave his best effort not to look repulsed, but Laila could tell the sight of the 55/100 made him want to shield his eyes.
She explained how the entire class was failing, explained Nazarenko’s assignments and how Samuel had received them, too. The only thing she omitted was his lie, “Make friends with a stranger.” She had no idea how she’d believed that. As if Samuel Marquez, one of the crowd who went out every weekend, would ever need to expand his horizons by meeting somebody new at a bar.
“Look,” she said, “I’m on your side, Felix. Not his. That was never even a question. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.”
The only thing that made Felix more uncomfortable than giving apologies was accepting apologies. He muttered something that involved the word “sure,” waved a hand, and took a long draw from his slushy, so that for a long moment, she saw a circle of wax-coated white paper instead of his face.
“Truth is,” he mumbled, “Sebastian told me Imani was just going out with me because she thought I was cute and wanted to make Samuel jealous.”
Felix looked so dejected that Laila almost reached across the table to squeeze his hand. Sometimes he acted so bulletproof that she forgot just how badly he wanted what Leo had. They all wanted what Leo had—until he and Angela went through a rough patch, anyway, and then they remembered why they were all varying shades of single.
“At least she thought you were cute?” Laila offered.
“Yeah, but I knew that,” Felix said, his full bottom lip pushed out in a surly pout. Laila looked at Hannah, and for the first time in too long, Hannah was looking back with their usual barely concealed amusement. Laila felt a rush of relief.
Felix dropped the pout, seeming to remember something. “Wait, you know why I was actually mad? Half the school hunts down every rumor trying to land at one of those Knight Gard shows, and you just waltz into one, first try. How?”
“She’s magic,” Hannah said. “We should bring her everywhere now that she’s fun.”
“Now that I’m fun?” Laila said, indignant.
“Idea,” Leo cut in.
“Yeah, space cadet?” Hannah said.
Leo spun his phone so they could see a map of the world, half darkened by a loop of gray. “The lunar eclipse is two weeks from Saturday. What if we went up to your place in the Catskills, Hannah? I’ll bring my telescope.”
“Probably a bad time to tell you I turn into a rare breed of werewolf during lunar eclipses, but sure. I’ll make sure Molly and her friends aren’t trashing it that weekend.” Hannah glanced to Felix and Laila. “You two in?”
“In,” Felix said.
“In,” Laila agreed, and then the four of them were exchanging irrepressible grins, looking away, throwing out plans for the weekend, joking furiously back and forth as if the lapse in their friendship had never happened. This, Laila remembered, was why she and Leo put up with all the fights. Because the sensation as they clicked back together, like the tumblers in a lock, was a sweeter relief than any other.
Hannah was halfway through listing which The Rest episodes they needed to rewatch in the mountains, a best-of reel, when a hand sank into Felix’s hoodie, formed a fist at his collar, and yanked him to the side. Laila saw two vertebrae jutting out from his upper back as he twisted out of the booth, on his feet at once.
Felix twisted out of Samuel’s grasp. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
“How about you don’t touch my girlfriend?” Samuel said. “You don’t touch my girlfriend, you don’t look at her, you don’t—”
“I don’t want to touch your lying-ass girlfriend.”
Now they were yelling over each other, leaning in, a dangerous inch separating them. A heavy weight had dropped at their table, and ripples of impact were spreading across the cafeteria. Tiny freshmen two booths down looked openly overjoyed, as if this were just the thing they’d needed to turn the week around.
“Stop,” Laila said, sliding out of the booth. “Stop it!”
Felix met her eyes. She saw him the way they’d met in freshman year, when he was hardly bigger than Hannah, boasting with such enthusiasm he seemed to think the words could make him physically larger. Now he and Samuel almost looked like strangers, two guys she might see getting into a fight on a subway platform before shaking her head and pretending not to notice.
“Teacher,” hissed one of Samuel’s friends at his back. “Teacher’s coming.”
Samuel spared a look to the woman flouncing across the linoleum, her forehead crumpled up beneath flyaway gray hair. He gave Felix a hard shove before taking a step back. As Felix caught himself against the lunch table, Samuel said, “See you Saturday,” and then to his friend, “Este hijueputa.”
Felix snapped, “Yeah, you’d better bring a fucking doctor, asshole.” By the time the teacher arrived at their booth, Felix was slumping back into his seat, and Samuel was gone.
14
That Saturday, Laila woke up at 8 a.m. She couldn’t sleep any later, genetically. Her parents and sister had already finished breakfast by the time she emerged.
She spent the morning brainstorming for her next draft. When her dad sent her out for groceries at noon, Laila walked out of the building to find the street was green, the dead winter trees having evolved overnight into living things. Spring always lifted a weight from her, with the freedom of summer vacation as bright as water immediately ahead. The neighborhood rose from its long hibernation, too. Barbecues had already smoked into life down every block, the hazy smell of marijuana mixing with the juicy, full-to-bursting scent of sausages newly sleeved. At the bodega two blocks toward Bushwick Ave., Mr. Cabrera, the grumpiest man for a mile in any direction, had propped the door wide open and was humming—humming!—as he stacked single toilet paper rolls on the top shelf. That said, his cat, the grumpiest bodega cat for a mile in any direction, looked just as pissed-off as usual, prowling past the canned foods like an assassination of Chef Boyardee was in the works.
As Laila walked back home, somebody called to her from a simmering grill. “Laila, chica, how have you been?”
“I’ve been good, Mr. Reyes,” she called back over the half-fence into his concrete front yard, scanning the dozen people perched on steps and in yard
chairs. Mostly she was just looking for the dominoes. Mr. Reyes’s friends played dominoes like some people played slot machines: incessant, high-stakes, dead serious.
“How about you?” she asked.
“Never been better,” he said, waving a browning ear of corn. A drop of hot butter flew off its tip and landed on his wife’s neck. She let out a little shriek and swatted the spot like she’d been stung by a wasp. Mr. Reyes started laughing, and she rounded on him with eyes blazing.
Mr. Reyes was one of her father’s best friends, a big Afro-Dominican guy, six-two at least, who still looked tiny next to her dad. His daughter, Clara, went to the high school a half-mile away. She and Laila had been close in elementary school but started to drift apart in middle, and now Laila hardly saw her around the neighborhood without her squad of three other gorgeous Dominican girls. The most Laila could do when they passed was wave and feel self-conscious. And try not to notice their curves.
Laila wondered if, in some parallel universe, she had a squad like that. She wouldn’t have traded Felix, Leo, and Hannah for anything, obviously, but sometimes she felt like her choice of friends was some weird signifier that she wasn’t Latin enough. When her dad took her and Camille to the Ecuadorian Day Parade in Queens every fall—a small affair compared to the massive Puerto Rican Day parade in the spring, but still enough to overwhelm—she felt adrift. Or worse, like an impostor. Even there, her family was an anomaly, her father half a head taller than anybody else, her sister conspicuously pale, all their extended family absent. All around were clusters of cousins and siblings, half-hunched grandmothers laughing along with great-aunts, matched sets of brothers cracking Pilseners. And here were the three of them, an island.
The sight of so much family made Laila sneak glances at her father, wondering if he missed home. He was the only one of five siblings to leave Ecuador, and he’d left young, too, barely nineteen when he flew halfway up the globe. Laila knew he’d originally intended to go back someday, but then he’d gone and landed himself a life here. There seemed to be something wistful to the way he guided her and Camille through the parade, calling out to the friends he’d made since then.
But Laila never wanted to miss it. That day was always highs and lows. There were those rushes of pride every time she understood a snatch of Spanish, even if more often there was incomprehension. There was the relief of knowing nobody would assume she was Mexican or Indian, that everybody else there would look at her and see an Ecuadorian girl, no explanation needed, no justification. But just as often, there was the feeling that they shouldn’t see her that way. Laila couldn’t shake the suspicion that she didn’t count in some fundamental way, that her looks were enough to distance her from her white half but not nearly enough to make her belong with her Latin half. If anybody were to ask her how it felt, being mixed, she knew how she would answer. It was the feeling that even in the quietest and most personal place, a score had been assigned to her, a mark calculated to gauge authenticity or ownership, and just as in every other coldly numerical analysis, 50 percent would never be a passing mark. But who was going to ask?
She sometimes wondered how blonde, white Camille felt. Her little sister’s friends were mostly white. Laila wasn’t sure whether this was because of subconscious racial behavior or because Camille’s ballet studio was the whitest place in the world besides Iceland.
She wished they had thousands of dollars to spend on a family trip to Ecuador. Maybe there was some answer down there. Maybe when she touched that soil, she’d feel some clicking mechanism underneath her skin, and she’d realize how to engage with who she was in a way that was all natural, no performance, pure instinct. Sometimes she dreamed about it. Not rhetorical dreams. Vivid, 3-D, Prismacolor dreams that dragged rainbow contrails into the morning hours after she woke up. She and Camille gave her father crap for all his reminiscence of Ecuador, but they loved it, he knew they loved it. Her father talked poetry about mountain air. He bragged about the Galápagos and described the monumental carvings of Quito’s cathedrals, their gold-brushed insides. Home makes you believe in God, he’d told her once. But she knew that first she had to believe in home.
Laila passed another barbecue on the way down her cross-street, but this time, people were sucking their teeth, glancing up at the quickly gathering clouds. All week, the air had been choked with charge, as if the city were holding its breath for Felix’s fight just like Laila.
The thunderstorm came during midafternoon, and Camille, cooped up inside, took on the energy of a golden retriever. Malak skittering anxiously at her heels, she paced the hall with her hair glued inside a flatiron. The instrument looked like it needed reinforcements to finish the job. Camille’s hair was even more uncooperative than Camille.
In the afternoon, Hannah showed up at Laila’s apartment wearing combat boots and work gloves, her hair soaked.
“How’s the construction site?” Laila asked as she let Hannah in.
“Rife with code violations.”
“Seriously, what’s with the outfit?”
Hannah shouldered into Laila’s room. “I found out where Samuel and Felix are planning on fighting.”
“Okay,” Laila said, shutting the door. “So how do we stop him from going through with this, because he’s going to get the crap kicked out of him.”
Hannah kicked off her boots and leapt onto Laila’s bed, a movement so familiar that Laila leaned forward knowingly to compensate for the well Hannah stamped into the center of her comforter. “Yeah,” Hannah said. “All of the crap, kicked right out. By the way, do people cuss in your stories, or do they all talk like you?”
“It’s a mix,” Laila said. “Some of them cuss. Some of them care about being linguistically creative.”
“Objection! God. Three-plus years of being friends with me, and you still don’t think cussing can be linguistically creative.”
Laila grinned and lay on the other side of the bed, looking over at Hannah, who was scowling at the ceiling. Laila remembered, suddenly, a fragment from a story she and Hannah had written together, such a filthy, detailed bit of profanity that Laila had ripped up the note and flushed it down the toilet out of an irrational fear that some teacher would fish it out of a recycling bin. They’d done this sophomore and junior years: They would write stories back and forth in ten-word segments, leaving them stashed around the school in places only they knew to look. Tucked beneath the bathroom sink on the third floor. Wedged into the broken locker near the biology room. Mostly they ended horribly; Hannah had a penchant for cutting a story off with a sudden explosion:
So the girl walked to the top of the building
And discovered that Dr. Doom had been planning for this
The entire time, and she quickly took out her blaster
But then unfortunately his Doom weapon decimated the whole city.
“So,” Laila said, “the gloves.”
Hannah’s scowl melted, replaced by her usual bored skepticism. “Okay, yes, let me explain. Felix and Samuel have decided that the best place to fight is this busted-up warehouse by the Ridgewood border, because they apparently want to get tetanus as well as indulge in unnecessary masculine posturing.”
“So you’re skirting the tetanus with those.”
“This is the plan,” Hannah said, tugging the work gloves off. “They smell like ass, though.”
“That’s probably just your hands.”
Hannah shoved the gloves toward Laila’s face, and Laila yelped, swatting them away. Hannah laughed and chucked the gloves onto her boots, taking the ridged neck of her sweatshirt into her mouth, chewing contemplatively. “So?” she said, mouth full. She looked shy, as if it embarrassed her even to ask Laila along. “You in, or what?”
“Is Leo coming?”
“We’re going to meet up there.”
Laila hesitated, but the doubts had hardly crept in when Hannah said, “I know it’s kind of risky, so I get it if you want to stay home.”
She couldn’t have convinc
ed Laila faster if she’d tried. “I’m in,” Laila said, already planning how she would graft this shudder of adrenaline onto a page.
When Laila was nine, her father had still been clinging to his first car, a Toyota from the late eighties that he worked on during weekends. Not work toward any discernible end, to fix the perpetually blinking “Check Engine” light or to keep the tubes beneath the car from drooling flammable-looking fluid every time it clanked to a halt at stop signs—just work to keep his hands busy, and to have an excuse to blast Julio Jaramillo’s boleros so loud that the whole block could hear. Laila had walked past the car once as he threw open the hood and had been met with an acrid scent of metal that seemed somehow to have gone rancid, like it had been infected by some mechanical version of gangrene. This warehouse smelled the same way.
Hannah vaulted through a broken window, having pushed an ancient metal frame halfway up and swatted aside corners of glass that spiked from the bottom. Laila crawled in after Leo, feeling ungainly, and staggered when she hit the concrete floor. Outside, the dusk was a burnt periwinkle, so clear in the aftermath of the rain that the promise of stars pressed in at the light pollution, but the warehouse’s interior was a soup of storm light. Greenish scum had clouded into the windows and dyed the whole place the ominous color of coming lightning.
“Nice-looking place,” Leo said mildly. With his sneaker, he nudged an iron bar that passed over half an old advertisement. BUY ONE GET, it said.
Laila checked her phone. They were half an hour early. “You think Felix is going to be late to this, too?”
“I hope not,” Leo murmured.
“Okay, but if he is,” Laila said, “how are we going to ward him off?”
Final Draft Page 13