He finds himself singing to himself. One of his songs. Not “In My Corner,” because that’s too bleak for this gorgeous moment.
If we had to be apart
For a very long time
I’d count the days that you were gone
Inside I’d never let you go
He sings softly at first, but then the feeling builds inside him. It feels like a victory lap, like he’s succeeded. Like he has a new lease on life, and the second verse and the chorus come out with a little gusto, like he doesn’t care who hears. And he doesn’t.
Because to me you’re the sun
I cannot shine without you
And all of our memories
They’re all that I ever do
Because I can’t forget your smile
You know it’s all that I can see
I never will forget your smile
Now you’ve become a part of me
And the be-come part, from D to G, takes him right to the top of his vocal range, and sometimes his voice cracks when he does it; it’s the highest part of the song. But crossing Eighty-Second Street, he nails it, hitting the G right in its center, and feeling it in his core. Be-COME!
“Sing!” this guy shouts. He’s on the corner of Eighty-Second, waiting for the light to cross to the east side of West End. He’s kind of hippie-ish—maybe thirty, maybe less, white, with a bushy ponytail and a bright, blissed-out smile. Old Aaron might have thought he was weird, but new and improved Aaron has such goodwill toward humankind, so he guffaws—actually guffaws—to the guy, who holds up his hand for a high five, which Aaron gives him.
“That sounds awesome. What song is that?” the guy asks.
“I actually wrote it.”
“What? Are you serious? That there’s a track! Retro. Like singer-songwriter stuff from the eighties or nineties. I miss that shit.”
“Naw,” Aaron says, but the guy shakes his head like, C’mon, man, no need for modesty! Own it! So Aaron adds, “Thanks.”
“Singing on the street. Do you know that they say it’s impossible to sing and be unhappy at the same time? True fact.”
“That makes sense,” Aaron says, and the light turns green.
“I admire when a person isn’t afraid to show their happiness. That’s how things will change,” the guy says, and he starts crossing the street while he says it, so Aaron crosses with him.
“Yeah,” Aaron says. “I always feel like I can make the world a better place by just being nicer to people. Like on the street.” Despite the fact that he’s never felt that way before today, nonetheless it feels true to him now.
“Right! And you know what? New Yorkers? We get a bad rap but we’re friendly people. You just have to get out the way, but you know. That’s just common sense there.” The guy laughs, so Aaron laughs, too, and Aaron feels like he knows this guy, like he should know this guy. He can tell he’s good. Inside and out. Just good.
“I’m starting something new,” Aaron says. “Like trying a new way. I used to be really shy, so today I’m like, no. No more shyness. From now on, I will, you know, sing on the street. And talk to people. Because how do you get to know someone without talking to them? Taking the chance.”
The guy stops walking, turns to Aaron, and upturns the left side of his upper lip into a kind smirk.
“I really like the sound of that, man. Maybe it’s time to start a movement. Of people who talk to other people on the streets of Manhattan.”
Other people might be walking by. They might be looking at this odd pairing of adult and kid. They might not. For once, Aaron simply does not care.
“Yes. That. We should do that,” Aaron just about yells. He feels like he could jump out of his skin, he feels so damn good.
“And that song! I produce. Haven’t in a while, but I used to, I mean. What if … nah.”
“What?” Aaron says.
“What if we get that song going? Work in some percussion, add some guitar. That’s the kind of song … I’m just saying.”
Aaron imagines going up onstage and accepting his American Music Award for “Can’t Forget Your Smile.” It’s too juicy to imagine. He thanks his dad, and his friends, all his great friends, especially Marissa and Wylie, the Jones-Joneses, and then this guy—
But no. “I actually have a better one,” Aaron says.
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s called ‘In My Corner,’ and it’s kinda sad, but—okay, I’m gonna let you in on my idea. Can I trust you?”
The guy nods, looking like he’s on the edge of his seat.
“Dance dirge,” he says.
“What?”
Aaron thinks he may have lost him, so he starts talking really fast.
“Maybe it’s stupid, I don’t know, it’s just like, a new genre, like depressing lyrics but dance beat? I don’t know, that’s dumb.”
The guy laughs. “That’s not dumb. I like that, actually. What’s the song like?”
Aaron’s heart flutters. Someone wants to hear his song. “Really?”
“You were singing a second ago. C’mon. Let me hear it.”
They’re on Broadway and Eighty-Second, in front of Barnes & Noble, and people are rushing by because it’s just about rush hour, and somehow none of it matters. So Aaron takes a deep breath and sings the slow version.
“Holy shit,” the guy says when he’s done.
Aaron blushes and looks down at the concrete beneath his feet. He kicks at an ancient gum stain. “It’s terrible, I know. I’m terrible.”
The guy surprises him by touching his arm, and a shiver travels up Aaron’s spine.
“It’s not even in the same zip code as terrible. I really fucking love it. And with, like, a beat? Like a hundred twenty BPM, like house, maybe? I think you have something amazing there, really. What’s your name?”
“Aaron.”
“I’m Darrell. I’ve been kinda looking to get back into the game, and you know what? The best things are by chance. Like this. Know what I mean?”
“Totally,” Aaron says. “Like random.” And they both laugh.
The guy smiles and puts out his fist for a bump. “So. Are we gonna do this?”
Aaron is knocked out. Utterly. Every dream he’s ever had, everything, everything, has led to this moment. And you wouldn’t believe it but it’s true. It’s happening, and he just lets his face go and the widest smile he’s ever made feels like a victory, like a moment that’s so juicy that it’s just. It’s wrong enough to be so right. And he’s always thought he was the ugliest guy in the world. But he’s sure, in this moment, that his smile is expressing his essential inner beauty in a brand-new way.
“We are SO doing this,” Aaron says.
CHAPTER 7A: APRIL 25
On Thursday morning, Aaron wakes up well before usual and jumps right onto his phone.
You up? he texts.
Darrell hits him right back. Yeah, dude. Totally buzzing about everything.
Aaron lies in bed fantasizing about six things at once. Is Darrell gay? How do I find out? What if he isn’t? What if he is? What is his place like? What will everyone at school think when I become famous? Will I still be nice to them or will I be all, You guys had no time for me before, and suddenly you’re like my best friends? I don’t think so! Except Marissa and Wylie, of course. They’ll be invited to the American Music Awards for sure. And the winner of the Best New Artist Award is … Aaron Boroff!
This thought makes him giggle and writhe in bed. He hasn’t taken his Petralor yet, but, Jesus, he wants to, because this is what life should BE like!
Lexington Avenue feels particularly cold and lonely on the morning Amir is supposed to head back to school.
He’s been chilly for hours now. Ever since he got home and his mother gave him the silent treatment, going so far as to take her dinner into her bedroom and not even leave anything for him. And then, this morning, as they both scurried around—his mom getting ready to show an apartment and Amir preparing for what was certain
to be a weird return to school—he might as well have been invisible.
So many times he thought about saying something, making sure his mom was okay. Apologizing, even. Because if he could take it back? If he could take back the momentary insanity that led him to come out to his mom? He would. In a heartbeat.
And then, as he gets on the subway, of course he sees Stu Beesmeyer and his gang, and he braces for the assault of stupidity. After all, it was Stu who saw him at Oath Pizza the day of the fight, before it all went down, who said some stupid shit about halal food and then mistook Pakistan for Iran. Amir braces for whatever idiocy is coming, and then—nothing. They ignore him, don’t even notice.
He’s not sure why that’s worse, or even if it is worse.
All he knows is that when the train gets to the Sixty-Eighth Street stop, he doesn’t get off. Instead, he stays on, then transfers to Penn Station. Numbly, knowing what he’s doing but also not allowing the seriousness of the moment to fully penetrate his consciousness, he thinks of his aunt Nava, and what she’ll say. What he’ll say to her. All that stuff. Too much for one brain to really conjure.
“One one-way for Washington, DC,” he tells the ticket guy.
At lunch Aaron rushes up to Marissa and Wylie’s table, slams down his tray, which holds two slices of pizza with pineapple on them, and gives them an uncharacteristic “Hey!”
“Hey, Aaron,” Marissa says, her smile earnest and kind.
“I am SO on a roll,” Aaron says. “I crushed my essay on Toni Morrison. I actually understood what Sengupta was saying, which is a HUGE win given my usual level of physics comprehension, and my texting game is at a new level. Do you know I never, ever texted in class before today? And now I’m, like, comprehending shit AND staying in touch with … well, someone really cool, actually. I feel like I found the keys to the castle, you know?”
The table is silent for a while. He knows Marissa and Wylie now because of the great talk yesterday, but the others are people he only knows in theory, like Jonas Campbell, who is one of those quiet kids—like him, like he used to be, oh, he could mentor him!—and Dora Sanchez, who he once did a project with in ninth-grade English. They got a C-plus.
“That’s … awesome, Aaron,” Wylie says. “You’re like a different person!”
“I know! It feels like all this time I’ve been holding back on letting people know me, and I don’t actually know what I was afraid of. I mean, we’re all just people, right? And I think part of life is about saying hello to people on the streets. I mean, can you imagine if we did that? How the world would change? I think we should do that. From now on, that’s my plan. No one’s a stranger. No one.”
“Well, that’s … good,” says, Marissa, but something in the way she says it makes him laugh, more like guffaw, as a thought rushes into his brain.
“Oh my god. People are going to start to realize they liked me better depressed!” he says, and this gets everyone laughing, and that makes him feel better because, yeah, so he’s hyped up and it’s a lot. Better than jumping off a bridge or being unable to move in his physics classroom, and his new friends know that, and they will be with him now, and he’ll never be alone, and that’s beautiful.
Aaron laughs more at lunch than he ever has before, and he just about snorts milk out of his nose at a story Wylie tells about him and Marissa getting carded at a club, and it’s so, so good to be part of something, and how many times did he sit alone, and oh! He should text Darrell, no. Oh! He should … yes!
“So can I show you something? It’s a secret, and it’s pretty outrageously exciting. It’s probably the reason I’m like this right now. And I haven’t told anyone!”
Everyone leans in. Aaron has them in the palm of his (beautiful) hand—that’s a song he wrote once—and he loves loves loves it.
“What is it?” Wylie says. “Tell us.”
“So I met a producer …”
“What?” Marissa says, nearly matching Aaron’s excitement.
“I know! I was actually, like, singing one of my songs on the street—”
“Like you were busking?” asks Dora.
“No! Ha! No. I was just … singing. Because I was so happy.”
“Aw,” says Marissa.
“So his name is Darrell, and he’s a freaking producer! And he heard me singing, and he wants to help me put music to it and record it. He thinks it’s, like, singer-songwriter retro nineties or eighties or something. I don’t know. So then I sang a different one, the one I’m working on now, which is definitely better, and he got that one, too, plus the idea of dance dirge. So tomorrow, after school. Or, I don’t know, during school. We haven’t exactly figured out the specifics. I’m going to his studio on Forty-Fourth and Ninth, and we’re gonna lay down some tracks.”
The table is awash with looks. A little like yesterday with the Jones-Joneses, but Aaron’s head is spinning too fast to really read them, or maybe it’s that he’s more confident today, he’s not sure. He just … waits.
“What’s dance dirge?” Dora asks.
The church is freaking freezing when Molly Tobin enters it, and she finds she has to bundle herself in her pink tweed coat.
Some of it is the temperature, sure. But it’s also just massive inside, with towering stained-glass windows everywhere she looks, staring down at her. She feels miraculously little there.
Molly is not religious. Her family thinks God is for weak people, and she’s basically taken that belief and run with it. But today, right now? She feels like one of those weak people. Particularly weak, and even though she’s not Catholic, it feels like confession time.
The confessional is small and red-velvety, and it smells like salty soup. There’s a tiny window between her and the priest—she guesses? She’s not sure how it all works—and momentarily, when nothing happens, she wonders how this is supposed to work.
“Um,” she says.
The window slides open. She exhales.
“Yes?” the voice says. It’s old and somewhat impatient.
“I, um.”
“Is this your first confession?”
“I’m not, um, Catholic,” she says.
“Do you wish to convert?”
“Um? Maybe? I don’t know?”
The voice behind the screen exhales dramatically. “So why are you here?”
Molly feels tears in the back of her throat. She sucks them down. “I did something,” she says.
“What did you do?” the voice says.
And Molly runs out, slamming the door behind her, sprinting out of the church and not looking back.
Winnie arranges for Britt to hang out at her friend Carly’s place after school and uses the extra time for an emergency session at Marie France’s.
“I just can’t be with people right now,” Winnie says.
“Why not?”
Winnie throws her hands up in the air. She thinks of Luna, who called to see how she was holding up.
“I’d be happy to make you an appointment with my acupuncturist. When my mother died, I went to her and I swear I felt better so much faster than I would have otherwise,” she’d said.
Or Carly’s mom, Patti, who had said, “At a time like this, it’s important to remember you have a second child. This is a chance to remember what a blessing Britt is. Pour your love into Britt.”
Winnie looks at Marie France and says, “Everyone has an answer. I don’t want a fucking answer. Everyone wants to make me better. I know they mean well, but in reality, I’d like to mow them down with an SUV.”
Marie France nods. “I totally hear that.”
“Thank you. That’s actually all I need. It feels like everyone is telling me not to feel, or how to fix it. I don’t want to fix it. I want to mourn her. Tillie. She was … a lot. She was always struggling, but she was … she was everything. Everything. How do I go from having everything to nothing and then just have it be okay? Fixed? I can’t. I won’t.”
Marie France smiles in a way that make Winnie feel u
nderstood.
“So beyond that, it’s over. With Frank. He’s just … totally checked out. Disappeared, and no, it’s not a business trip. I know it isn’t. He insists on using credit cards I have access to, so I’m well aware he’s at the Trump International.”
“This is a pattern?”
“He’s done it before, but frankly I don’t care if he needs a little staycation once in a while. Who doesn’t? But our daughter just died, so. No. Not okay. Not even a little. I love Britt to the moon and back, and in the end, is it really better for her to have him around? I mean, he’s not here. Literally.”
Marie France nods and nods. “Well. That’s big. Are you sure?”
Winnie runs her hands through her hair and bites her lip. “I’m sure.”
“Sounds like you know what you need to do,” Marie France says.
Winnie laughs. “Well, a week ago I had a daughter—two daughters—and a husband. Now I have …” She starts to cry.
Marie France hands her a box of tissues.
Aunt Nava’s persona makes her more like an older sister than an aunt. So perhaps it’s kind of fitting that when Amir arrives, she and her girlfriend, Ciena, are basically in nightshirts, watching Netflix in the middle of the day.
“Of course you can crash here,” Nava says, enveloping Amir in a strong hug. “We have a futon.”
So Amir gingerly sits next to Nava and Ciena on the couch, and the three of them watch some sort of true crime story thing.
For a long time, Amir doesn’t say anything. Until it feels weird. Because, um. He’s a teenager and he lives in New York, and here he is, having shown up unannounced at his aunt’s house, where he hasn’t been since he was seven.
Amir finally says, “She found out I’m gay and she’s ignoring me.”
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