She nods sagely. “Best to not breed false hopes.”
“False hopes that I’m ready for that step?” Because who knows about the future? Maybe Erika is the one, whatever that means.
Old Mrs. B raises an eyebrow. “Best to live in the reality of your situation, as one who runs away from a Pinterest board.”
“That? Again?”
“That is everything.”
Old Mrs. B is talking about Erika’s San Francisco Pinterest board, the one she began weeks ago, when her application to San Francisco State jumped from wait-listed to accepted.
“It’s gonna be great,” Erika said when she started the board. Two days later she said, “Just check it out. You’ll love it!” On the seventh day, she moaned, “Have you looked yet?”
I hadn’t. I was still busy processing. Had been for months now, ever since I had been accepted early decision to Wayne and Erika had immediately started applying to schools nearby.
“That’s normal, right?” I asked Sookie back in January. “Erika says it’s important, if we, you know, want to, like, have a future.”
“Erika says?” Sookie sighed. “I mean, if you guys break up, that’s going to be uncomfortable.”
“But it’s a big city.”
“Yeah, but . . .” She rolled her eyes. “It’s the same city.”
“Well,” I said optimistically, “we won’t break up.”
“Never ever ever?” Sookie deadpanned.
“Maybe?”
“So, you’re saying she’s the one?”
“No. No. No,” came out fast. Then I backtracked, “I mean, who knows, right?”
“Um . . .” Sookie shrugged. “I’m thinking Erika knows if she’s willing to move to the same city for you. Wasn’t Florida State her dream school? What happened to that?”
Sookie was onto something—I knew that—but I also argued that it couldn’t be that bad. Erika was just thinking ahead. Planners do that. Nothing was locked in.
When I shared that with Sookie, she snapped, “Just look at the board! If it’s terrible, at least you’ll know and you can stop talking my ear off about it!”
So last Monday I looked. I was at Erika’s house, checking my grades on her laptop, when I took a deep breath and navigated to her Pinterest page. Maybe I should have asked. Or used the specific link she sent me. But then I wouldn’t know this: Erika also has a wedding board.
With wedding cakes.
And lacy white dresses.
And flower arrangements.
And a new section of “Happily Ever After” banners that she had started earlier that day.
That day!
I reasoned that Erika had fallen prey to Happily Ever After Disney Princesses Wedding Culture and this was her version of playing dress-up for the very, very faraway future. But then I remembered something else. Something that happened a few months earlier.
We were at her house, rewatching For Keeps, a late-eighties film that was part of her mom’s ancient VHS collection, when Erika cuddled into my chest and whispered: “Don’t you think it’s sweet that your parents got married at eighteen?”
ME
Please don’t be seduced by preggers Molly Ringwald and this fluffy-haired baby daddy.
ERIKA
(laughing)
Oh, c’mon! They fall in love, have a baby, get married. It’s cute. And your parents did it too. That’s sweet, right?
ME
No. Teen pregnancy is not sweet.
ERIKA
It can be. Don’t be so judgy.
ME
What’s sweet about my mom dropping out of school?
ERIKA
Yeah, but that’s because you were a difficult pregnancy. Teens don’t always have to drop out. You just made her throw up all the time. And she did get her GED.
ME
She didn’t want a GED. She wanted her actual diploma and to go to prom and to not have an episiotomy at the age of seventeen.
ERIKA
What’s an episiotomy?
ME
That’s when the baby is too big to come out so they . . .
(makes snipping motions with fingers).
ERIKA
That’s disgusting.
ME
That’s having a baby.
ERIKA
Well, no matter what, I think your parents got married because they loved each other. . . . And you can get married and not have a baby right away.
ME
But they wouldn’t have.
ERIKA
You don’t know that.
ME
Yeah, I do. They’d have gone to college, traveled, and had more—
ERIKA
More what?
ME
Options.
ERIKA
Well, all I know is, they are still married.
ME
What does that prove?
ERIKA
(kissing me)
That young love wins.
“I just needed space,” I tell Old Mrs. B now. “I couldn’t breathe.”
“You ran.”
Technically, when I found the wedding Pinterest board, I walked. To the kitchen, where Erika was making us grilled cheese sandwiches. And then I made a reasonable excuse—“Oh crap, I forgot I picked up a shift at Grendel’s”—and took my grilled cheese to go.
I headed straight to Old Mrs. B’s house. I needed a safe space to rant about how seventeen’s too young to get married or to think about getting married or even to be creating boards about getting married. Seventeen is for sneaking out of the house. Bombing tests. Making mistakes.
OLD MRS. B on that day
But you haven’t done any of those things, Marco.
ME
I want the . . . the . . . possibility.
OLD MRS. B
Do you?
ME
Yeah.
OLD MRS. B
Maybe . . . Or maybe you just want possibilities . . .
ME
What’s the difference?
OLD MRS. B
I’ll let you figure that out.
And then she smiled that sage smile of hers. A smile just like the one she wears now. She runs a wrinkled, brown hand over her 1950s dress, probably one of her own from that time period, before patting her silver hair appreciatively.
“Aged like a fine wine,” Pop’s abuelito has said about Old Mrs. B. So smitten that he gets his younger neighbor, Marcelo, to drive him to the library on Sundays, so he can give her the “the chit-y-chat.”
“You mean chitchat, Lito?” I always ask him.
“Sí, eso fue lo que dije, the chit-y-chat.”
An octogenarian love story waiting to happen, I tell you.
Old Mrs. B stands. “I should get back. As always, Marco, a lovely bit of respite. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Sure,” I mumble, rising. And then I see her—that her—in the parking lot. She is there because she is everywhere these days.
Old Mrs. B smiles at me slyly. “Apparently, she was practically a full-time library aide in North Carolina. Obsessed with books is how the librarian who called put it. So I’ve hired her to be an aide here. Today is her first day.”
“Sally?”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” Old Mrs. B says softly, but I am. Between running and school, when did Sally ever have time to be obsessed with books? “People change, and it’s important to see someone as they are and not as they used to be.”
Sally stops a few feet from us and smiles tentatively.
“Excited for your first day?” Old Mrs. B asks, and Sally nods. Her bag slips to the crease of her elbow, and a dog-eared book tumbles out, landing on the pavement with a thud. She quickly drops to her knees and slides the book back into her bag. When she stands, her eyes are on the floor.
“Ready?” Old Mrs. B asks without missing a beat.
“Yeah,” Sally says. Her eyes dart to mine for just a second.
Just a second before she is gone.<
br />
Middle School
8. YOU LOOK BEAUTIFUL TODAY
A FEW DAYS AFTER OUR second kiss, I noticed Sally’s hand shaking.
The first sighting was on the morning bus, as her fingers hovered above the strap of her backpack. The second sighting was in English class as she turned the pages of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time during sustained silent reading. Even at the end of the day, her hand shook. This time, in math class.
Maybe Mr. Weaver, our algebra teacher, couldn’t see the shaking from the front of the classroom, because he called on her, fingers in mid-pulsation.
“Yes?” Sally replied after a second.
“The answer?”
“Oh . . . um . . . I don’t know.”
The class’s laughter bounced around the room.
“Hey now,” Mr. Weaver said to the class. “Just give it a shot, Sally. Begin by simplifying like terms.”
She stared at the board—the sharp blue lines of Mr. Weaver’s sloppy but best handwriting—like she couldn’t make sense of it. I stared at her hand; the shake had increased to a tremor.
The class laughed again, and I waited for Sally to go cross-eyed or something, giving others a reason to laugh at her antics, not her, but she didn’t do that this time. Instead, she stared at the board going, “Um . . . um . . . um . . .” under her breath.
“Twenty-one,” I coughed.
“Twenty-one?” Sally repeated meekly.
“Yes . . . that’s correct,” Mr. Weaver said, looking at me. Then he began narrating a new problem on the board. “And so, as you can see . . .”
“Hand,” I whispered. When Sally’s palm slid back, I pressed a piece of paper into the pad of her hand, holding for a second like I could absorb whatever was making her tremble. She brought the note around to her desk, head dipping as she unfolded the creases and glanced at my drawing of the rope tower before flipping the note over to read:
1. Sneaking out is kinda fun.
2. I drew this b4 I realized u might not be OK.
3. R u OK?
She glanced at Mr. Weaver before jotting down her reply, balling the paper, and tossing it lightly over her shoulder. The ball landed at the center of my desk. Her note said:
4. I did 2. A LOT.
5. I’m ok.
6. Am I being weird?
I scribbled back:
7.
8. Not weird.
9. + u look beautiful today.
Number eight was a lie. She was definitely acting weird, but I wanted to make her feel better. Number nine was true. That day she wore a white dress, dotted with blueberries; her hair was up in a sloppy bun, her eyes “wide and dipped in tragedy.” Those aren’t my words. I had read that somewhere in some book that Mrs. Bartell had assigned us. But those were the words that struck me when I looked at her eyes. And I knew then that this was what that same book had called “a tragic sort of beauty,” the beauty “of a heart laid bare.” I know. I know. Who talks like that? But, damn, if it weren’t true about Sally on that day.
She never saw number nine. Right before I slipped the paper into her hand, I tore the words away.
I tore the words away because, back then, I suffered from the middle school worry that you could say too much, do too much, show too much. And writing down that I saw her as an exquisite creature definitely qualified as too much of something. I thought I was being slick, but after she read the list, she twisted in her seat, her fingers running across the frayed edges.
The bell rang, and the class shifted. Some hurried toward the door. Others stopped at Mr. Weaver’s desk to ask questions. We were used to traffic jams, so we took our time packing up. Sally was slower than me, and while she pulled and prodded at her backpack, I worried at the slip of paper in my pocket and stared down at my clothes: the best pair of jeans I owned, a collared shirt that didn’t have a hole. On my feet, last year’s pleather kicks, shiny from lack of use but tight as hell. I’d even used Pop’s date-night hair gel, so that my hair had what the bottle called “body” and not “frizz.” To me, though, it gave me what my mom called “helmet head.”
And the biggest reveal: I plucked the field between my eyebrows.
“About time,” is what Jade had said that morning at the bus stop. “I’ve been bugging you about that forever.”
“Dude.” Diego chuckled. “What’s up with all the manscaping?”
“YouTube has a really good tutorial on that,” Sookie said.
Thankfully, Sally wasn’t there yet, because she might have asked me why I had done all this. And the answer would have been: to ask you a big question—would you . . . ? Could you . . . be my date to the last dance of our middle school lives?
More and more I knew I wanted a chance with Sally. A chance to sway with her on some stupid dance floor, even if everybody was watching. A chance to kiss her a whole lot more. A chance for her to be my girlfriend.
My first girlfriend.
Yeah, this was pretty serious stuff.
So I followed her out of the classroom, the question clogging my throat. I hardly paid attention to where I was going until—
“Ow!”
I stumbled backward, a direct hit to my head. Tears stung my eyes, but I sucked them back, focusing on squeezing my fist in and out.
I glanced up at Erika, standing a foot away, rubbing her brow.
“Sorry,” she said quickly.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ve had worse hits,” she said, smiling slowly. “I played soccer in elementary school, remember?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, even though I didn’t. Later, after we started hanging, I would see pictures of her in her soccer uniform—the green and gold jersey—and form those memories secondhand, but back then Erika was nearly a blank to me.
“That was really cool of you today,” she said.
“What?”
“Giving Sally the answer.” She smiled. “You always do things like that.”
“What? Give answers?”
“No, like, nice things . . . for your friends . . . I’ve noticed that . . .” She blushed, looking embarrassed, and I thought about what Sookie had said, about the love eyes. Maybe, maybe there was something to that. I glanced back at Sally, who had pressed herself against the far wall, trying not to be swept away by the exodus.
“I should go,” I said to Erika.
She laughed nervously. “Okay, but hey, I . . . I want to ask you something.” She tugged at her lip. “It’s . . . it’s about the dance. I’m going with a group. And we got a Hummer, and it’s with my cousin and her boyfriend and some of the other girls from track. They all have dates, but I don’t. . . . Do you . . . have someone to . . . ?” She gulped. “Like a date?”
“Me?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t wait for my answer. “I mean,” she backtracked. “Like, it could be . . . We could, you know, go just as friends, but you’d be my date is what I mean. . . .”
“You and me?”
She paused, her cheeks flushing red. “Yeah . . .”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Yeah? Really?” She grinned ear to ear, suddenly rambling on about texting and pickup times and the colors of her dress.
“Wait,” I said. “I mean no, I can’t. I’m . . . I have . . . I meant, yeah, there’s somebody . . .” My eyes shifted to Sally, who was waiting in an almost patient daze.
Erika’s gaze widened. “With Sally?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, I haven’t asked, but yeah. I’m going to.”
“Oh. Okay.” She was obviously disappointed. She started to turn, and this time it was me who called out, “Wait!” Because I realized that Erika might tell a friend who might tell another friend and so on. And everyone would know before I even had a chance to ask Sally. “Would you not say anything? ’Cause . . .” I searched for the best way to explain it. “ ’Cause it could be weird.”
“Would you not say anything either?” she asked. I nodded, and to this day we’ve both kept our wor
d.
Sally and I hustled to the bus, boarding just as the driver reached for the door lever. Once settled, Sally asked, “What did Erika want?”
“Um . . .” I stalled, trying to think of a not-lie but also a not-truth. “She was just sorry about hitting me on the head is all.”
“That was a long apology.” Sally’s gaze slid to the window. When she looked back, she asked, “So what did the rest of that paper say?”
“What paper?”
She took out the note, ironing the creases with her palms. Her hand was steadier now, a slight tremble but nothing compared to the little earthquakes that had been happening all day.
“Are you okay?”
“Why?” She glanced at me.
“Because, you know, before, you were . . .” I didn’t want to say shaky, but I didn’t have to exactly.
She offered up, “Spacey?”
“Yeah,” I said, even though it was obviously more than that.
She glanced out the window again, her lips moving in a silent count—one, two, three, four, five—until she turned to me with her usual smile. “My grandma in North Carolina fell. She broke a hip. Because . . .” Sally laughed. “That’s what old people do. But seriously, I was really worried. My dad was talking about going up there, and he and Mom are still fighting, so things have been kind of a mess. But I decided in math that I just can’t think about it anymore. I decided she’s going to be okay, right? And my parents will just do what they always do, get over themselves.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t know much about either. Lito was steadier than a cat with nine lives, and my parents never had to get over themselves. “She’ll get better. For sure,” I said. “And your parents will stop fighting. They always do.”
“Right?” Sally said, and then she made one of her faces: lips suddenly inhaled into a twist, eyes bulged until she looked like a goldfish. She crossed her hands in front of her chest, fingers waving like fins swimming through the ocean.
I laughed. And then I made my attempt, but my lips wouldn’t form the fishy X. I ended up with a pout instead.
“That really sucked,” Sally said with a smile. “So, what did that last bit say? The part of the paper you tore off?”
“Nothing,” I said. My tone was light, even though I was still trying to push her away from that vulnerability that had stuck a turtle-like head out in math class.
The Universal Laws of Marco Page 7