The Universal Laws of Marco

by Carmen Rodrigues

  For my mom—one of my best friends and my first champion. I love you.

  Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

  Everything changes, but nothing is truly lost.

  —Ovid, Metamorphoses

  FIRST SPARK

  THE FIRST TIME I KISSED Sally Blake was on a hot summer day.

  In early August.

  The summer before my last year in middle school.

  And it mostly happened because of a bottle, glass and old-fashioned—a classic Coca-Cola bottle, not too hard to find in Little Havana. The older Cuban men, the ones who wear guayaberas and play dominoes in the dusty streets of Calle Ocho, are fond of such novelties. And living near Miami, I had a Cuban great-grandfather who brought me such things, and I, in turn, brought them to my next-door neighbor Jade’s house on that hot summer day.

  And, damn, it was hot. The air was heavy with buttons of dew that floated in the way cotton-like fibers of dandelion seeds float when you make a wish.

  A wish flower. That’s what my mom had called it the first time I’d picked a dandelion seed head on a trip to visit her people in Ohio.

  Make a wish? I had asked.

  Yes.

  I puckered my five-year-old lips and released a stream of air, never realizing that eight years later one of my wishes—a wish I didn’t even know to have—would come true.

  A kiss with Sally.

  “Spin the bottle,” Jade had announced.

  We were thirteen and huddled behind a shed in her backyard: Sally, Jade, Diego, and me. Sweat dripped down my back, and Jade laughed nervously, running her fingers across the side of her jaw like she did whenever the shouting inside her house spilled into her yard.

  “I don’t know.” Sally looked at me and then at Diego, Jade, the bottle.

  “Why not?” Jade replied. She set the bottle in the middle of an old piece of cardboard we had pulled from behind her shed and gave it a spin. The gaping mouth pointed to me, and Jade leaned across the grass, her curly brown hair curtaining her face. She gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “That’s just a demonstration. When we do it for real, it has to be an actual kiss.”

  “Like . . . ?” Sally’s pale skin turned pink. Her freckles rose to the surface, little warning lights. “Like . . . with, you know . . . ?”

  “Tongue?” Diego finished dryly.

  Jade studied the bottle, unsure. “No, not tongue. Not”—she glanced shyly at Diego—“not unless you want to. Just, you know, it has to be on the lips. Not on the cheek, like I just did with Marco.”

  Everyone nodded, and Jade licked her lips. “Okay, so you go first, Marco.” She pointed at the bottle, long neck still aimed at me. I also licked my lips, excited and nervous.

  We were all best friends back then: Me and Jade and Diego and Sally and even Sookie, who that day was at her Jewish day camp, because that’s what she did every summer. (“No, not Jewish Day Camp, Marco. Stop calling it that,” she’d say to this. “It’s called the Jewish Community Center, or the JCC, or really, everyone just calls it the J.”)

  I flicked the glass and the bottle spun again. I kept my eyes on something inconspicuous, like the tip of the bottle. I heard my heartbeat, heavy and reckless in my chest, and my mom, one yard over, singing as she washed that afternoon’s dishes.

  And then the bottle landed.

  On her.

  On Sally.

  I shifted my gaze to her mouth: Pink. Chapped. Scooting closer. “It’s me,” her mouth said.

  “Go on,” Jade said, her brown eyes stuck on Diego. “Go on.”

  I scooted too. Time sped up, or rather, my view of time distorted. My body’s tempo became at odds with my thoughts—one measurably increasing while the other slowed down. The rest was hazy, condensed. The images spottier the closer Sally came.

  Too much licking of the lips before—me.

  Too much shaking of the knees—hers.

  Jade said something I couldn’t make out, and then Sally’s lips blurred into bits of her face: the bridge of her nose, wide; the sweep of her ash-brown eyelashes, tinted blond at the edges; and, finally, the corner of a gray eye.

  I heard a little sigh.

  Hers.

  Then our lips clashed, the moment too quick. Way too quick. Barely enough time to marvel at the softness.

  Time unfolded, widened, stretched out like a cat trying to get a back rub. Then, somehow, I returned to the circle. Again the bottle spun with ferocity.

  Sally kissed Diego while I looked away.

  Diego kissed Jade.

  Jade kissed me. Quick. More like a peck.

  All possibilities exhausted, we stopped.

  We stopped.

  But the story didn’t stop.

  The story of how I came to kiss Sally a second and third time would continue on. I just didn’t know it back then.

  Senior Year

  1. I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND

  FOR THE LAST SIX MONTHS, in fact. And right now she’s sitting on my stoop, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, hair up in a ponytail, makeup at a minimum. Basically, she’s just the way I like her, but if I say that, she’ll be like, Are you serious? Liking me when I’m a disaster is not a compliment. So I don’t say that. I keep it simple with a kiss.

  She tugs me down so that I’m sitting beside her. Her finger slips across my skin, the skin moistened by my sweat. She turns to give me a tight hug, her hands resting on my shoulders. “You’re sexy today.” She touches the hem of my tank top. Normally I’m covered up, T-shirts or hoodies. But today is hot, summer-right-up-against-us hot, and it hasn’t rained in days. I tell her that. Then I put my finger to the bridge of her nose, a place where her makeup has run thin, and whisper, “Besitos del sol.”

  She touches her face self-consciously and pulls away. “I just don’t know why you love them. They’re like little pieces of lint I can’t get off my face. You should love yours more instead.” She taps my nose and cheeks, touching the ten freckles that wave across my brown skin.

  “Do you love mine?” I ask her.

  “Yeah,” she says, and smiles.

  “Then I’ll love yours.” I connect the dots with my fingers, trailing light kisses across her face until arriving at her mouth. “Corona Borealis . . . ,” I say into her lips.

  “What?” She pulls back.

  “The crown of Ariadne . . .”

  “Marco.” She groans, shoving me away. She returns to the stoop.

  “It’s a compliment.”

  “It’s a what?”

  “Comparing you to a constellation is a compliment.”

  “What’s with you always finding constellations on my face?”

  For the past four years of our friendship and even into this “new stage of our relationship” (as Erika calls it), she has insisted on sparring with me like this. I’m easy bait, she says. Like even now when I see that mischief in her eyes, I’m still quick to offer an explanation. “Really. She helped Theseus—”

  “Very romantic and also not listening anymore.” She glances at her phone and then holds up the device as evidence. “I’m too busy waiting for your text to arrive. But it doesn’t.”

  “Oh, man, I’m sorry. I got distracted.”

  She raises an eyebrow, because for as long as Erika has known me, I haven’t gotten distracted, not when she texts, not when she talks. So today is kind of unusual.

  But I can explain. I was thinking about wormholes, which I’ve been trying to get down on paper for my final physics assignment. Or maybe—and I realize this is it—I was traveling down a metaphorical wormhole, returning to that first kiss with Sally, and I forgot to reply at all.

  Either way, I never make Erika wait on replies. She says that’s what makes me “different�
�� and “mature” and a bunch of other superlatives. Which is bizarre. That being punctual through the rapid tapping of two fingers can earn me bonus points. But it does.

  “So what was it?” she asks.

  “Huh?”

  “That distracted you?”

  “Huh?”

  She sighs. “You said you were distracted when I texted.”

  “Wormholes?” I offer up.

  Erika rolls her eyes, and in her predictable way of zoning out most things that have to do with cosmology, says, “Okay, then, fight over.”

  “Wait, that was a fight?”

  Because Erika and I don’t fight. That’s why Erika says we’re “perfect” and “meant to be.” I say we like to “avoid conflict.” But Erika says we don’t have to “avoid conflict” because “we’re not conflicted.”

  Anyway, fight avoided, I pull her back to that space on my chest. That space that feels better when she’s there.

  “You’re sweaty,” she says.

  “I’m purified.”

  “So I’m absorbing your outcast toxins?”

  “Possibly . . .” I squeeze her in tighter, and she struggles to break free. Finally, I let her go. We’re both smiling. “So what’s going on?”

  “Oh that. My mom.”

  “Your mom what?”

  “She’s . . . I don’t know. Her sister, you know the one who always has some boyfriend drama . . . ?” Erika lowers her voice so my mom won’t hear, not that my mom could hear over the “twin nightmares” (that’s what Erika calls them), who are yelling at each other inside the house.

  “What is it this time?”

  “It’s always the same—he said this, but then he does this, and then he didn’t come home, but then he said he was working late. I think I should trust him, but is that naive? It’s naive, right? And blah, blah, blah, nonsense.”

  “Sounds fun.” I squeeze her hand.

  “Yeah. I was around the corner at Gabby’s, trying to wait it out, but her mom kicked me out because family-only dinner and more blah-blah-blah nonsense. So, now I’m here . . . Are you glad to see me?”

  “Yeah,” I say, but she hears the hesitance in my voice and replies, “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m surprised, that’s all. I was in the middle of doing this . . .” I hold up my hands to mean, my thing. My I’m-not-working-or-running-ragged-from-homework-so-I’m-going-to-sweat-it-out routine. I get to do this thing maybe once or twice a week. “I still have to—”

  “Hit your bag?” She laughs, her hand returning to the edge of my tank. “And you know I don’t care if you’re Mr. Six-Pack Abs. That’s not my thing.”

  “It’s not that. You know it’s not that.”

  A long time ago, I had been small. And small in middle school meant easy target. I was okay if Diego was nearby. Even back then he was Mr. Six-Pack Abs. But when he wasn’t around, which was most classes in the sixth and seventh grade, I felt my smallness like rocks in my pockets or a splinter beneath my skin. The burden followed me everywhere—up the school stairs, into honors classes, into restrooms, (especially restrooms, where someone could easily force your head under sink water), in the corners of the PE locker room (where I was pantsed on the reg).

  I hated being small.

  “Oh, so that’s why you’ve been eating left and right,” Pop had said back then, the one time he caught me staring plaintively at the scale. “Trying to bulk up like me?”

  “Not left and right,” I had mumbled, stepping off the scale and staring at him—six one, two hundred and twenty pounds, rippled with muscles, and a smile that most of the ladies around the block couldn’t withstand. At least, that’s what Mom always said.

  “Nothing wrong with being skinny,” Pop said, using his toe to slide the scale beneath the bathroom sink.

  “Pop.”

  “You know, Bruce Lee was skinny.” That was Pop’s thing, referencing people and places that you’d never heard of before. But I knew about Bruce Lee. When I was five, Pop introduced me to his sick martial art moves through a bunch of old films. Bruce Lee could kick ass. I couldn’t kick a stick.

  “Pop, that’s like comparing a steak to a potato.”

  “And you’re what? The potato?” Pop turned me so that we faced the mirror. “You’ve got a good symmetrical face on your shoulders, just like him. The ladies dig a symmetrical face. And you know, you got my eyes.” He offered me his signature wink. “You should practice that move. It works. Got me your mom’s engagement ring at half off.”

  My mom’s solitaire was so microscopic that half off must have meant free.

  He winked his left eye, followed by the right. He was an ambidextrous winker. “Go on,” he urged. “Try it.”

  I glared at him. “No.”

  “That’s a mistake,” he said, and gave me the wink version of the wave—left, right, left, right. I became dizzy. “That wink is perfection, but it’s your call, my man. If you don’t want to harness the power of the Suarez wink, you can travel down your lonely road alone.” He stepped back and sized me up from a distance. Then he lifted my shirt and stared at my concave belly. I tried to squirm away, but he held on to my shoulder. “You know what? You could be a little more athletic, a little more like Bruce Lee, especially here.” Again, a tap, tap to the belly. “Why not?”

  “Because Bruce Lee had training. Bruce Lee had skills,” I muttered.

  “You could get those things.”

  “How?”

  “What about that studio my buddy runs down in South Miami?” he said, letting me go.

  “Pop, that costs money.”

  “Yeah. True.” His foot tapped the tile floor as he gave that part of the plan some thought. Then he smiled.

  “What?”

  “You just gotta get the money on your own.”

  It was nearly the summer between seventh and eighth grade. And for weeks after that talk, I let the conversation slide. Pop was always coming up with these ideas on how to “be better” and “maximize your potential.” That’s because he was always reading books on self-improvement and jotting down possibilities for the future in one of the many journals he kept.

  “Third act,” he used to say when I watched him scribbling away, palm smudged with still-drying ink.

  By “third act” he meant when we were grown—me and the “twin terrors”—he’d follow up high school and parenthood by taking himself back to school. College. Pop was big on always having a next act.

  But sometimes Pop tried to push me into my next act before I was ready, and that was just what happened when, a few weeks after finding me on that scale, he walked into my bedroom with a stack of papers. Each was the size of a postcard, the wording laid out like a bad advertisement.

  Helper for Hire ($8/hour)

  Lawn mowing

  Babysitting

  Light housekeeping

  Tutoring for elementary kids

  Call Marco at 305-555-0112

  “Pop, what’s this?”

  “Acceleration. You’ve got to pick up speed to push past the friction and into your future. Use the momentum you gather along the way to take a few breaths, but acceleration is the only way to start from point A and make it to point B. And trust me, you need to keep moving, because life is now.”

  He was speaking in riddles, but that was another way Pop talked. He loved telling me about acceleration and momentum and friction, and I loved listening. But right then it didn’t exactly tell me what I was supposed to do—not in practical terms.

  “Okay,” he said, sensing my confusion. “Take that around. And, hey, don’t just leave it in the mailbox. Okay? You gotta knock on the doors. Talk to the people inside. Sell yourself.”

  A good plan, except I was pretty quiet back then. In many ways, I still am. Everyone knew that, especially Pop. “I can’t.”

  “You can’t? Or you won’t?” He turned to glance at Mom, who had slipped into the doorway, wrapping her arm around his waist. She looked small next to him—barely five three,
all hips and curves, a mouth almost always open in a smile.

  “What are my guys talking about?” she asked.

  “Pop wants me to accelerate.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a bad thing,” she said, and Pop kissed the crown of her head, squeezing her in closer.

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Accelerate,” he commanded.

  But I didn’t. Not that summer—the summer of Spin the Bottle. Eventually, I’d make good on Pop’s command, just not then.

  “Hey, you don’t have to stop doing your thing. I’ll be fine,” Erika says, sensing the “dark thoughts” hovering. That’s what she calls it, when my face “closes off” and my eyes “look somewhere far away, like you have a stormy cloud dropping dark thoughts into your head.”

  Erika knows this sweat-it-out routine helps keep the dark thoughts away.

  “Yeah?” I say, relieved that I don’t have to figure out a way to make us both happy. I try to be that way with Erika, give her what she wants. It seems only fair, since she’s been such a good friend to me for all these years.

  “Girlfriend,” I could hear her whisper, but only in my mind. Ever since we switched things up before winter break, Erika likes to remind me of her new title. “It’s just different,” she’d explain.

  “Like you’re a friend I can now kiss?” I’d tease her.

  “No.” Her face would screw up. “That’s the least of it. It’s like a best friend you can kiss, and you never want to kiss anyone but me, and we become closer and closer until who knows?”

  “We disappear, like you’re a black hole that sucks me in like a ray of light?” I sorta joked, because, to be honest, sometimes what she said about our growing closer reminded me of one object disappearing into the other the way light disappears into a black hole.

  “You’re ridiculous with your universe stuff!” Erika said, laughing. “But you get it, right?”

  “Sure,” I said because that seemed to make her happy.

  Now she’s trying to make me happy. She slips her hand into mine and leans up, onto her tippy-toes, her mouth right there. Oh man, right there, at the curve of my earlobe.

  I know what’s coming. It’s the maneuver that makes me sign over power of attorney.