The Universal Laws of Marco

by Carmen Rodrigues

  “Hey, they’re calling you.” He points upward, to the speakers.

  The Supermarket God says, “Marco Suarez, Mr. Grendel would like to see you.”

  “Ooh. Do you want that ass of yours sliced thin?” Diego snaps.

  “A deli pun?” I slide my box cutter into my pocket and tidy my shirt.

  Diego smiles crookedly, shrugs. “Yo, just remember when you get in there, you got to deny, deny, deny.”

  “Deny what?”

  “Everything. Prisoner’s dilemma. They’ll always say someone’s ratted you out to get you to confess, but if everyone just denies, denies, denies, it’s all good, see? My old man taught me that before he went to the resort.”

  Diego’s dad went to “the resort,” aka prison, four years ago. Not really the best example to follow.

  “Well, I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Just trying to help,” he says sincerely. Then he turns his back to the cameras and mouths, You dick.

  Middle School

  4. AT MIDNIGHT

  ON THE NIGHT OF SALLY’S fall, she came to my house at midnight. I had just finished a big project for physical science and couldn’t sleep with all that accomplishment buzzing around me. So I snuck outside and sat on our front stoop. Just a quick look at the moon was all I wanted because I liked the moon. Have ever since I was four years old and Pop explained that the moon wasn’t creeping on me.

  “But . . .” I had pointed up at the silver globe during a long car ride. “It never goes away!”

  “No, kiddo.” Pop had laughed. “It’s not following you. It’s following everyone.” And he explained that because the moon was so far away—about 230,000 miles—that it seemed like it was always in sight, no matter how far we traveled. “See, we’re traveling around a curved earth and the moon is orbiting the earth. So the moon is really following the earth, not us specifically.”

  “Or-butting?”

  “Orbiting. It means that the moon is circling a celestial object.”

  “Cel-cel-es-tel?”

  “Celestial,” Pop corrected. “That’s something for later. Just keep checking to see if the moon is following us.”

  I’d learn what celestial meant a few years later: “an object in the sky or heavens”; “heavenly”; or “supremely good.” I liked the last definition best. A planet was obviously supremely good. And in this case, the moon was orbiting the celestial object of our planet earth.

  What a weird thing, to go in circles around something else. But I guess that tied in to ideas of gravity, the earth and the moon pulling toward each other the same way our family—Mom, Pop, me, and the twins—did, the world a series of large and small orbits: the earth orbiting the sun (large) and the moon orbiting the earth (small). The tribe orbiting school (large), Jade orbiting Diego (small).

  Me suddenly orbiting Sally.

  So my mind was pretty much all over the place that night as I thought about orbits and Sally and how ever since that first kiss, that first spark, I wanted to be around her more than any of our other friends.

  Just us. Alone

  That’s what I was thinking about when out of nowhere a voice whispered, “Gotcha!”

  A few seconds later I sank back into my skin and found Sally there at my gate, laughing. “I gotcha. Didn’t I?”

  “What? No. No, you didn’t.”

  “Puh-lease. I crept up like a ninja.” She pantomimed ninja moves, but she looked more like Scooby-Doo trying to sneak away with Shaggy.

  This was one of our things: a never-ending game of “Gotcha” that began in the second grade and had escalated in the last year with some pretty elaborate pranks:

  Springing up from behind a car during her walk home from track practice—Gotcha! (She fell backward.)

  Jumping out of my closet one random Sunday afternoon—Gotcha! (I ducked and slid under the bed.)

  “Falling” out of a tree one Saturday afternoon to suddenly block her path as she and Sookie walked home with ice cream—Gotcha! (She tossed her ice cream so far it landed in the street.)

  We were “Gotcha” fanatics.

  And if I were being honest here, she had gotten me. But that wasn’t how the game was played, so I said, “That was lame.”

  “Score 444, me; 442, you.”

  “That doesn’t count.” I walked over to the gate, keeping my voice low so I wouldn’t wake my parents. “I . . . I wasn’t expecting anyone. Besides, you didn’t know that I’d be outside. That was an accidental gotcha. They don’t count.”

  “Nope. That was opportunistic. And that always counts. That’s practically the essence of gotcha. Carpe diem de gotcha!”

  I held in my laughter. That would give her too much satisfaction. Instead, I asked, “So, what are you doing out this late, anyway?” I stepped onto the sidewalk and glanced at the quiet street: just a bunch of parked cars and darkened houses and the occasional stray cat sniffing around for scraps.

  “What I just did. Prank you.”

  “Ugh, stop.”

  “You stop.”

  “Okay. Fine,” I admitted. “You got me.”

  “Thank you.” She bowed, and I realized that she was wearing her pj’s—shorts with sheep on them and a matching tee. But on her feet were running shoes. And in her right hand was—

  “Is that Mace?”

  She glanced at the small black plastic cylinder strapped around her palm, the nozzle in the off position. “Oh, yeah. My mom got it for me. You gotta be safe, and it’s late.”

  “It’d be safer not to be out.”

  “Gramps, I am not even here for that.”

  “Do your parents know you’re out?”

  “What do you think?”

  I made a face. “What’s going on?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, almost like she was hugging herself. “Nothing.”

  “You don’t do this, though.”

  “What?”

  “Sneak out.”

  “Oh, you’re so after-school special with that sneaking-out bit. I didn’t sneak. I climbed out the window loudly.”

  I laugh. “Because . . . ?”

  She sighed. “Because my parents are having a pretty epic fight right now, and Boone never came home. Or maybe he came home, heard them fighting, and just didn’t come inside. Which would be smart.”

  “What are they fighting about?”

  “The usual. My dad dreaming up some wacky plan that’s never gonna happen anyway, that’s for sure.” She smiled her wry smile. That was the smile she gave whenever she wanted to communicate that life was fine. That she could manage. That she wanted to get off the subject of her parents and on to something more fun. “Anyway, how’d you get out?”

  “I walked out the door. My parents fell asleep at, like, ten.”

  “Asleep,” Sally said suggestively.

  “Stop.” I knew where she was going with this. Last year, when Sally stayed over for dinner, she walked in on my parents in the kitchen, sharing a “passionate kiss” and had insisted ever since then that my parents still “did it.”

  Which was true.

  Also true was that Sally’s parents didn’t do it much or at all. They were the kind to hold hands every now and then, maybe kiss on the cheek, but they didn’t rub each other’s backs. Or stand in that half sway, half hug as they asked about your day. They didn’t have inside jokes that stretched across the dinner table, leaving them with goofy smiles on their faces. I couldn’t imagine my parents apart, but Sally’s parents? Who knew?

  I glanced at Sally. Her gaze was focused on the far end of the street. “What?”

  “See that?” She pointed to something in the distance.

  A few seconds later I saw a car driving slowly toward us with the headlights off. Sally gripped her Mace a little tighter, straightening up into what seemed like a fighter’s stance, but I wasn’t a fighter. I had more experience running. So I took a more practical approach and dragged her into my yard, pulling her back into the shadow of a tree, the bark r
ough against my neck.

  I was holding her.

  One hand around her waist, no air between our bodies.

  I noticed her breathing deepen. Mine too. A tingling that began in my chest spread across my body.

  The car crept closer. At Jade’s house, it swerved left, the engine revving as it mounted the curb, stopping two feet from her fence. The driver’s door flung open, and her dad stumbled out.

  We watched him stagger up their walkway, falling into the front door as he fumbled with the knob. The porch light flicked on. Then the door opened, a hand pulling him inside.

  “Was that Mr. Acosta?” Sally asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Was he . . . ?”

  We heard a voice yelling (Mrs. Acosta) and unintelligible slurs (Mr. Acosta).

  I let Sally go. But for a second she didn’t step forward, the two of us as close as books on a crowded shelf. And then she took a deep breath and moved back into the yard.

  We didn’t speak for a few seconds, but finally Sally said, “Can’t she hear them?” She pointed to Jade’s room at the front corner of the house. The light was still off, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t listening. If we heard them out here, she had to hear them in there.

  “Probably.”

  Sally cocked her head to the side, all her earlier playfulness gone. “I didn’t know.” Her eyes widened. “Did you?”

  “It’s kind of how they are,” I said quietly. I had lived next to Jade the whole fourteen years of my life, and for all of those years Jade’s parents had fought just like this.

  “She never told me.”

  I waited a while, thinking about that. “Well, that’s just Jade.”

  “I’m always telling you guys about my wacky parents.”

  “Well, that’s you.”

  At the time I didn’t know how to explain the difference, but later, when I thought back to that night, I realized that it came down to escape velocity.

  In physics, escape velocity is the minimum speed an object needs to gain in order to break free of a planet’s gravity. And the greater the mass of a planet, the greater the speed needed to escape. On earth, for example, an object needs to reach seven miles per second to break free, but on the sun, a star that is about 333,000 times the mass of our planet, that same object would have to accelerate to 384 miles per second.

  That’s a big difference in escape velocity.

  But it makes sense. The sun is huge, and all that mass means it has more gravity to pull objects back to it. The shorter the distance between the two bodies, the more powerful the attraction.

  I’d like to think that back then Jade lived in a house filled with mass.

  The mass of shouting and fighting.

  All that a short distance from Jade’s body.

  Sally’s house had mass too, but where there was anger, there was also laughter. Even Sally’s dad, on his better days, could surprise you with a joke, or Sally with a genuine hug. Those were the days that her parents clasped hands and Sally came to school with an easy smile. And so, yeah, while Sally’s home life had a lot of mass, more mass than mine, those good days meant that not even she had had the escape velocity Jade needed to break free of the gravity of her parents’ messed-up relationship.

  Sally kicked at the pavement with her shoe and then looked up at me, her eyes uncharacteristically sad. “But if we can’t tell each other, who can we tell?”

  I nodded my agreement. It wasn’t right—what Jade had to go through—but there also didn’t seem a lot that could be done about it. How many times had neighbors, even my mom and pop, called the cops on Jade’s drunken father? But Jade’s mom never pressed charges and Jade’s dad was pretty good at playing sober enough once the cops showed up.

  So why talk about it at all?

  Except I did try to talk about it a few times, but Jade would always shut me down with, “So? They fight. It’s not all the time. It’s only once in a while . . . when . . .”

  When he had been drinking.

  And for a while his drinking had been every now and then. But when he lost his job, the drinking became more and more, until we started talking about it in that language of neighbors.

  “But what can we do?”

  “It’s not our problem.”

  “You can’t fix the world. You just take care of your own.”

  My parents said to me, “It’s not like we don’t see it. We do.”

  Mom added, “I’ve talked to Jade’s mom a few times, when I got her alone, but she says it’s under control.”

  “I feel bad for Jade,” is what I said.

  “We feel bad for her too, but there’s no law against fighting loudly.”

  Mom and Pop tried to be good to Jade in their own way. They invited her over for dinner and movie nights. On parent-teacher nights, they took both of us around the school. When report cards came, Jade showed my mom and pop first and then her parents. She always got good grades. She had to.

  “People like that, they look for reasons to be angry,” my mom had said. “But you hear me, Marco: There are just as many reasons not to choose your anger.”

  I watched Jade’s house until I couldn’t take it anymore. Until I needed to get out of there more than anything. So another singular thing happened that night: I took Sally’s hand. I took her hand and tugged her toward the end of the block. And while, at some point, the tugging stopped, I never let her hand go.

  I’d like to say that the walk felt romantic. That all I wanted was for the world to disappear, so that we could be alone. But looking back, that moment felt more like an act of survival, an act of staying in my own skin, an act of forgetting about Jade and all that I couldn’t do. An act of being with another person and that other person being there, with me.

  WORMHOLES II

  IT WAS SOOKIE WHO RETRIEVED me from my time travel.

  Sookie who finally nudged me forward with a finger poke to my back until my feet began to move. Until I began to breathe again, returning to the now of the cafeteria from the then of that first kiss.

  The tribe talked around me.

  JADE

  Is she taller?

  DIEGO

  No, but didn’t she used to have blond hair?

  JADE

  It’s only been four years. You remember that she had blond hair.

  DIEGO

  I remember nothing.

  JADE

  Yeah, not even how much you used to like her.

  DIEGO

  Nothing.

  SOOKIE

  You okay, Marco?

  ME

  Huh?

  SOOKIE

  Are you okay?

  ME

  Yeah, why?

  SOOKIE

  Because

  (another poke in the back)

  you stopped moving again.

  The second nudge shoved me into full motion. Like Lot’s wife, I tried not to look back. Because, you know, when she does, she turns into a pillar of salt. Look it up.

  But when I was at the front of the line, I turned my head to the right. Just a simple flick of my chin, and our eyes locked.

  And I didn’t turn into salt.

  But I stumbled back down that wormhole—back again to that first spark.

  Somehow, despite the laws of physics, still alive.

  Senior Year

  5. PERFECT LIKE US

  WHEN I TAKE THE SEAT opposite Mr. Grendel’s desk, all I can think about is Diego’s advice: deny, deny, deny. Only problem is, I’m not sure what I’m denying. I haven’t done anything wrong, but I also haven’t done anything right enough—at least, nothing out of the ordinary—to be called into Mr. Grendel’s office.

  So, yeah, I’m nervous.

  Truth is, I haven’t had many one-on-one interactions with Mr. Grendel. Like most, I see him at group functions—monthly meetings and holiday parties—or around the store, his hobbit-size body bustling here and there while he smiles broadly at everyone. I get dosed with that smile as soon as I s
ettle into my seat. That makes me think that this thing—this being-called-to-the-office thing—isn’t bad.

  “So, I noticed that you’ve been picking up a lot of shifts in the last few months. What’s going on? Do you need more hours?” is how he begins.

  Eh, so not a good start.

  I’m scheduled for thirty hours a week, but I try to hustle closer to forty, always keeping an eye on the employee board for the telltale Post-it notes.

  Can anyone cover cashier tomorrow? I have to go to the doctor.—Mike

  Trying to sneak away this weekend. Can anyone take my bagger shift on Sunday night?—Jesenia

  I’m the king of the pickup game, plucking Post-it notes off that board like they are sweet-and-sour candy.

  “I help out with my family,” I explain to Mr. Grendel. “So I like to pick up shifts. Is that okay?”

  Mr. Grendel nods. “Well, I appreciate your work ethic, but I just want to make sure you don’t go into overtime like you did last week. Okay? Overtime is expensive. So I need you to be a bit more careful.”

  “Oh, sorry. We had a last-minute emergency with a delivery, so I stayed late to take care of it, but I won’t let it happen again.”

  “Good, Marco. I’m curious, though. If you always need the extra hours, why haven’t you signed up for the interviews? It’s a full-time job, so you wouldn’t have to pick up hours. They’d be guaranteed. And it’s a huge bump in salary, plus full-time would mean benefits. You’ve seen the new sign, right? At the employee station?”

  “The management-trainee sign? Yeah, I saw it.” Of course I saw it. The sign was big news from the moment Mr. Grendel tacked the flyer to the bulletin board. The interview sheet had filled up so quickly that Brenda, the operations manager, had to post a second sheet the next day. Besides Diego, there were a ton of hopefuls: Callie, in produce, who’d started wearing long shirts to cover up her tattoos and Pax, in the meat department, who’d taken to shaving off his daily scruff and Stefania, who was a new mom going through a divorce. It was a sweet deal. Even the year spent training came with a bump in salary, and afterward, a new title and even more pay. Everyone wanted a shot at that trainee spot.