I Will Be Okay

by Bill Elenbark

  I will be okay. Everything.

  “Get some goddamn clothes on and come outside,” Dad says when I open the door. “Now.”

  My neighborhood is segregated, that’s the only way to explain it—to the right is the Latino side and to the left is the Indian section, and near the back around the corner are the rich white families with rear decks and pools instead of cracked patios but they don’t really interact with us much, Trevor and Gavin did during the school year but not really this summer. The Latino families are all outside on their lawns, putting up their tents and their tables and red-white-and-blue decorations, salsa music cranked to unnecessary levels from a sound system parked in between us and the Indian side. One of my neighbors has a nephew who’s a DJ, this big Dominican dude setting up the equipment—speakers and amps and mixing board and mics—struggling to lift the heavy gear into place.

  “Help me with this pole,” Dad says.

  Some guests have arrived already, parked out on the street leading into the development, past the open field where Stick and I watched the fireworks last night. He still hasn’t texted so I know he’s upset, and the only thing I can think is to fake it, pretend I was so wasted I don’t even remember the kiss. I’ve thought before that Stick might be gay, the way he doesn’t talk about girls too much and the way he lets me touch him, but I couldn’t ever ask him, I couldn’t risk it.

  “Sammy’s coming over soon.”

  “Good. He can help with the tent.”

  Dad’s always pissed when Mom’s family comes over. He likes to spread that anger around.

  “Come on come on come on, get the connector.”

  He points to the intermixed pile of metal posts on the lawn, motioning with animation at some specific location but I’m searching as he’s straining and he’s getting upset that I can’t read his mind.

  “Oh, for Christ sake,” he says and drops the pole to grab the connector. “I need a beer.”

  I’m not out to my parents yet. I don’t even think they suspect. But then I didn’t think anyone suspected, and Trevor and Gavin are going around talking about Stick and me maybe, which is annoying. I mean, I’m okay with being gay, but I’m not about joining the Gay-Straight Alliance at Woodbridge High, and I’d rather come out at my own pace, after I’ve left my father’s house. Not that he’s homophobic, not outwardly, I’m just not sure how he’d react, and I want to keep it a secret between Stick and me. Just us.

  “Let’s get this done.” Dad returns from inside and sets an open bottle on a folding chair near the sidewalk. “Your mother’s parents are already on their way.”

  We live in Avenel Green, which isn’t very green but it is in Avenel, part of the sprawling suburb that is Woodbridge Township, a group of townhouses carved out of the woods between the highway and the train tracks. Nothing much happens here, or nothing all that interesting, not since that woman died in a car crash that split her in half, her top through the windshield splatted onto the pavement, with the bottom still inside, underneath the seat belt. They say she must have worn the restraint hanging off, like some people do, to avoid messing up their shirts or their skirts or their pretty summer tan lines, but I say it must have been some kind of crash to split her in half.

  Dad and me aren’t really talking, we’re just working, setting up the posts and the connectors and slamming the anchors into the grass, wet from the rain and the morning humidity, too loose to hold the posts in place. The Dominican DJ’s beats get louder as Dad’s beer gets emptier and he finds some concrete blocks from the shed to steady the structure. We pull on the tarp just in time for Mom to come outside.

  “You put it here?” she says.

  “Yeah. Where the hell were we supposed to put it?”

  “I thought on the side,” she says, pointing to the edge of the house. “Toward the back.”

  “It’s sloped over there. All the tables would be slanted.”

  Mom looks over at the grass then back at the tent, the one we’re standing underneath, sweaty and frustrated. She sighs.

  “Now everyone has to come through the tent to come inside.”

  “So?”

  “That’s stupid,” she says. “Can you move it?”

  “Nope.”

  Dad’s already doing the folding chairs, opening one and motioning for me to assist.

  “Matty, you want to help me move it,” Mom says, sickly sweet and desperate. She knows he’s not going to change his mind and she can’t do it herself.

  “Matt is busy,” Dad says, pulling another beer out of the cooler, but I’m just standing here. In the middle.

  Mom waits for a minute, in the silence of the blaring salsa, then she gives up and goes inside “to cook for you like I’ve been doing all day.” Dad doesn’t care, he’s taking a slug of his beer and setting up the chairs so I step over to help him.

  “How’s your ankle?” he says.

  “It’s okay.” My ankle’s been a mess ever since a nasty slide this spring that caused my shin to buckle and ripped the bones into shattered shards that sliced through every muscle and tendon from my foot to my knee, although the doctor said it was just a sprain. “A little sore but it’s okay.”

  “Are you wearing your compression socks?” He looks across at my bare legs as we unfold the last table.

  “Now?”

  “No, I mean when you run, dumbass.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I haven’t been running that much or doing any of the drills he set up for me, but he’s been working late and Mom’s been teaching summer school so they don’t know. Stick and me have just been hanging out, every day since summer break, sometimes with Sammy but mostly on our own, wandering the streets of Avenel on our bikes, avoiding our families.

  “Well, make sure you bring them to camp with your brace in case you need it. I already talked to the coach and he said they’re going to see how you respond to a full workload.”

  “Are you sure I should go? I mean if I hurt my ankle again it would cost me the fall season. Maybe I should rest.”

  “You’ve rested long enough.”

  He finishes his beer and surveys the lawn, the tables askew and the chairs haphazardly placed, the tent sagging in the middle. We’re not known for exacting standards in my family.

  “I was just thinking of the cost of the camp and all the hours it’ll take and maybe I should work instead.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? You don’t want to go?”

  “I told you that.”

  “When?”

  I told him two days ago, with the Yankees game blaring, but I guess he didn’t listen, or maybe he didn’t want to hear. He was on a baseball scholarship when he was in college, before he busted up his knee and gained a lot of weight and never made it back to the team.

  “It doesn’t matter, you’re going. There’s a deposit down already and we’re not losing it.”

  “What if I pay you back the deposit from my summer job? It still saves you money in the long run.”

  That’s my only hope to get out of this—to appeal to his aversion to spending money, and I should have thought of this before he signed me up, but it wasn’t like he asked if I wanted to play. And that was before I spent three straight weeks alone with Stick. Before we kissed.

  “What summer job? You got a job all of a sudden?”

  Stick started working as a busboy and I thought I could join him, spend more time with him, skip baseball camp to rest my ankle and spend every waking moment with Stick. Okay that might be a little sick.

  “No,” I say. “Not yet.”

  “Are you afraid of playing now or something? That you’re going to get hurt again?”

  His tone doesn’t waver but he’s looking right at me, into my eyes, like it’s some kind of sympathy, and maybe I should agree because the money thing isn’t working and I don’t know how to answer, it’s not about my ankle and it’s not about baseball, not really, I just want to be around for Stick. And I can’t tell him that.

  “I don’
t know.”

  “Well you have to try sometime,” he says, stepping forward to reach out, about to tussle my hair like I’m a little kid but he stops and shakes my shoulder, which feels as awkward as it sounds. “You’ve got a shitload of ground to make up for this season. The only way you’ll be a starter in the spring is to do the work now.”

  I feel a sudden swelling in my throat like I’m about to cry, I don’t know why, it’s real all of a sudden that the next four weeks will be all about baseball and not about Stick—after the very first kiss with the only boy I’ve ever liked, before he ran away and hasn’t texted all day and maybe after camp he won’t even speak to me.

  “I have to take your brother to practice,” Dad says, heading up the walkway toward the house. “And don’t you dare help your mother move this goddamned tent.”

  THREE

  “TE HE ECHADO DE MENOS, MI HIJO.”

  I don’t speak much Spanish. I know I should and I know a little, but I don’t speak it in any normal situations and my parents don’t either—they were both born here, the United States I mean, New Jersey for my mom and Long Island for my dad, which has its own unique way to communicate but it isn’t Puerto Rican. I took Spanish in school this year but it’s different than the way my relatives speak, it’s more formal and less natural and we spent half the semester on accents instead of common phrases that would help me understand my nana’s sister when she hugs me to death and pours out her love in a foreign language.

  “How are you, Auntie?”

  “Ah you know,” she says, no attempt to hide the fatigue in her pause. “Sin quejas sin quejas. Did you eat?”

  The party has started, but none of the food is out—my family practices Puerto Rican time for meal preparation as well. The main courses get cooked all day in pots and pans simmering on the stove and in high-backed dishes crowded into ovens and when it’s finally ready you wait three more hours because all the adults are too busy drinking or talking to remember the eating and I get so starved at our parties I can literally feel my stomach clawing at my spine.

  “No, I’m okay.”

  “You should eat something un pequito.” She used to call me her “little one” when I was younger but when I got older she started to call me un pequito, which means “a little” I think, or maybe I’m misunderstanding. “Let me get you a hamburger.”

  Our front lawn is packed with my aunts and uncles and cousins and some of the neighbor’s guests—somehow our house is the most crowded on the block, maybe because of the tent. My uncle is manning the grill, prepping burgers and hot dogs to keep the masses from starving while the main courses simmer in the kitchen. There’s a table by the stairs set up with wire frames to hold the dishes. They won’t be filled for hours.

  Auntie hands me the burger and finds another relative to smother so I head into the house past my cousins—some of them officially related and some just friends but we call everyone our cousin for shorthand in my family and this is who I grew up around, at holiday parties and trips to New York state, these cabins by the lake we used to visit every summer. One time all the aunts and uncles who still live in Puerto Rico flew in for a reunion and I got smothered in hugs by strangers speaking Spanish, with intense fragrances covering their faces and plates of pernil popping out of the kitchen at all hours of the evening. I didn’t want to sleep, intoxicated by the smells and the tastes and the sounds of celebration, the salsa music blaring. I used to complain about the length of the drive upstate, but I sort of miss those family vacations.

  I finish my burger in three hearty bites and move past Nico and a couple cousins watching baseball in the next room. Dad must have picked up fireworks on the way home with Nico because I caught them setting some off at the side of the house and Nico’s still dressed in his baseball clothes. I thought about biking over to Stick’s to catch him before he went to work, but I didn’t want to scare him. I think I already scared him. I’m thinking too much and this is way too tough and I can’t believe we haven’t talked since the kiss.

  “Matty!” Titi shouts from the kitchen, fighting with my mother over the stove, because all their conversations drift into screaming and she gives me a hug around the waist. I smile and move over to greet my grandmother, looking on amused.

  “Hi Nana.” I hug her gingerly. “How you feeling?”

  “Hi sweetie,” she says, rocking her slur. She had a stroke last summer and lost all sensation on the left side of her body, but she made it through, she “scared the shit out of death,” Uncle Willie said, and she sounds better every time I see her.

  “When did you and Poppy get here?”

  I’d been hiding out in my parents’ bedroom for the past hour, staring out the window in the direction of Stick’s house, not that he’s home or that his house is close enough to see from my house but I was hoping to use my chakra to spiritually summon him to text, which didn’t work, my prowess at ninjutsu is about as advanced as Naruto’s in the first weeks of his training under Jiraiya. I may have also watched a mini-marathon of Naruto Shippuden on my parents’ television.

  “It’s two now, Mommy,” my mother says. “You got here an hour ago.”

  Nana blinks and strains to find the clock, across the room by the table where my cousins are fixing sangria. Mom and Titi have quit arguing and are now laughing loudly over the stove, stirrers posed like weapons on the counter, in a row beside the pots.

  “You want to taste the rice?” Mom offers.

  “Sure,” I say, and she shoves a long wooden spoon into the oversized metal pot to grab a chunk with her greasy fingers.

  “Eww,” I say.

  “Relax, I wiped your butt with these hands.”

  “Oh god, Mom. That’s gross.” I lean back to avoid her hand and she tries to force it on me, so I jump further away, swatting her arm away, dancing back around the kitchen, and I hear Titi laughing.

  “I knew I liked this kid,” Titi says as she reaches out to rub my head. I hate when people rub my head, like I’m still a little kid, but I don’t mind when Titi Alana does it. She’s my favorite.

  “And he’s so handsome,” Nana says. I cringe.

  “Yeah, well clearly he gets the looks from our side of the family,” Mom says and it’s true, or I mean it’s true that Mom’s side is the attractive one—Titi used to be a model when she was younger—but I don’t look anything like the women in my family.

  “Does he have a girlfriend?” one of the cousins from the table asks, the Sangria pitchers filling at a slower rate than their glasses. “I bet all the girls at school are after him.”

  They’re not. They’re really not. I don’t think a single girl has looked at me for half a second since we moved to Woodbridge. Not that I’ve looked at them either but I’m not tall or remotely muscular and I need braces for my teeth—my mouth is so crowded now that the two front teeth to the right of the middle are growing over each other, beaming out like a lighthouse every time I smile. I try not to smile much.

  “He doesn’t tell me about girls,” Mom says. She keeps her grip on that spoon like a sword but I’m hiding behind Titi.

  “He’s waiting for the right one, I’m sure,” Titi says, trying to save me.

  “I wish he would grow his hair out,” Mom says, retreating to the stove. “He looked so good with longer hair.”

  “No. I didn’t.” I tried to grow out my hair this year, the way Stick lets his hair grow out, but my Puerto Rican curls went into full bloom—what Titi calls the “rainy day fro”—so I shaved it off like it’s been since I was thirteen, close and tight with a little peak at the front like a little freak I think, too hideous for the girls in Woodbridge and probably for Stick, he must have been so high he lost his mind when he let me kiss him. When he kissed back.

  “Oh crap, the fish,” Titi says and pushes my mother out of the way to rip the oven open. Steam comes streaming out.

  “What the hell is that?”

  My mom reaches out to slap me, but I avoid her again and there’s a whol
e freaking fish lying on a pan by the stove, head on, eye sticking out and staring at me from across the kitchen. I dive behind Nana.

  “It’s the sea bass,” Titi says.

  “Nope. Nooooooooo,” I say as she spins around with the sizzling pan and steps closer, the fish’s purple eye following mine, and its lips—it has freaking lips!—pink and puckered and pressed in my direction.

  “See …” Titi says.

  “Get that away from me!”

  The Sangria women start laughing and Titi steps closer until I’m all the way in the corner behind Nana and she’s laughing too. The stench of the sea bass shoots straight through my senses, killing the flavor of the rice and the hope that I might ever enjoy food again.

  “Why is that in our kitchen?”

  “It’s for dinner,” Titi says. “It’s really good.”

  “That’s it. I’m not eating,” I say.

  “Oh god, you’re so dramatic,” Mom says. “It’s not that bad.”

  “Not that bad?” Sangria-ville is cracking up in their chairs. “That’s a whole live fish right there. Right there!”

  “It’s dead!” Titi screams and she can’t hold her laughter in.

  “Noooooooo.”

  More roars from everyone, even my mom through her glowering, Nana holding on with her good arm as I duck behind her tiny frame to keep the sea bass away. I hate fish—Mom knows I don’t mess with seafood in general and I’m talking about the stuff they serve at restaurants, filleted and breaded and never with the heads attached. There’s a whole entire fish with its gross stinking head and its bulging eye following me around the kitchen.