Time stopped measuring itself as I sat there, unmoving, the water glass gradually warming in my hand. Suddenly I was reliving the entire summer in my head. I saw the beginning, with Maritza and JaKory and my brother, and I saw the night everything changed, with Ricky by the trees. I looked down at my feet, my stomach, my hands, and wondered if they were really mine. I wondered if they were the same now as they had been in May, before everything began.
I didn’t figure anything out, not like Lydia had promised I would; instead I just got to this point, after sitting out there for a while, where I knew what I wanted and needed to do.
Ricky screened my first call, but when I tried him again, he picked up on the second ring.
“Everything cool, Codi? I’m out with Tucker.”
“I need a really, really huge favor,” I said, springing up from my chair. “How do you feel about driving to Alabama?”
20
The text came at a quarter to midnight.
Ricky Flint: On your street. Two houses down. My lights are off.
I was already down in the basement, waiting to sneak out the back door, and I didn’t wait a second longer. My heart lurched as I crept up the back walk toward the driveway. It was after I’d stepped onto the street, my head already turned to search for Ricky’s truck, when an idea tugged at my brain. I stood there for a long second, fighting an internal battle, wondering what the consequences might be if my parents found out.
Then I turned around and crept back into the house, up through the basement, and onto the second floor.
My brother’s light was on. I knocked very softly, hoping my parents were already asleep.
“Go away,” Grant said.
I knocked again, and then again, until he finally opened the door.
“What?”
I almost felt stupid, now that I was standing here in front of him, but I took a short breath and plowed ahead. “I’m trying to fix things with JaKory and Maritza. I’m sneaking out, and Ricky and I are driving to Alabama. In his truck. Do you want to come?”
My brother looked hard at me. He seemed confused, and after a second he went to the window.
“I don’t see him,” he said, his voice doubtful.
“He parked down the street so Mom and Dad wouldn’t notice.” I felt my phone vibrate and knew it was Ricky, wondering why I was taking so long. “You don’t have to come, but I just wanted you to know you were invited.”
My brother paused with his hand on the window. After a second, he asked, “Can I ride shotgun?”
* * *
Ricky and Grant took to each other immediately. Ricky loved all the questions Grant asked about his truck, and Grant loved all the questions Ricky asked about basketball, and they agreed that my taste in music was nothing short of deplorable.
“Oh, ’cause your music taste is so much better, Mr. Nickelback?” I asked.
“Don’t listen to her,” Ricky told Grant. “She’s making shit up.”
“Oh, yeah, no question,” Grant said, sitting taller in his seat.
There were very few cars on the road, and we reached JaKory’s neighborhood within minutes. “Turn up here,” I told Ricky. “Grant, show him where to go.”
Grant proudly guided Ricky to JaKory’s house. Ricky shut his lights off immediately, and I left the two of them sitting in the front while I crept out and snuck up JaKory’s driveway. It was after midnight now, and the only sound was the sprinklers in the front yard.
I’m in your driveway. I have a car. Let’s get you to Alabama.
JaKory slipped out the front door a minute later. He squinted through the dark at the truck in front of his house, then looked back to me with his eyes practically bugging out of his head. “What in god’s name did you smoke tonight?”
“I don’t have time to apologize like I want to,” I said hastily. “Especially because you deserve a very eloquent apology that I wish I had the words to say. But I know you want to meet Daveon, and I know today was the day you’d planned on, and Ricky and I are totally game to drive you there, if you still want to. Can we make it happen?”
JaKory stood rigid for a long beat. Then he snapped out of it and made a phone call.
I stood a few feet away from him, listening to the spritz spritz spritz of the sprinklers, my mind still filing through the logistics of this plan.
“He can do it,” JaKory said, his voice urgent now. “Give me five minutes.”
He dashed back inside, and when he reappeared at the door of Ricky’s truck a full seven minutes later, he was dressed in a linen button-down shirt and that goddamn fedora.
* * *
JaKory directed us out of his neighborhood and down the roads that led to the interstate, but there was one more thing we needed to do first. I told Ricky to make a left, and JaKory sat back and shrugged like he already knew what I was planning.
It didn’t feel right to go without Maritza. Somehow I knew that if we went to Alabama without her, our friendship would never recover. She would want to be a part of this, and she deserved to be.
The lights were off in her house. I didn’t bother texting since her parents still had her phone; instead, I slipped to the back door, felt in the birdhouse next to the overhang, and pulled out the Vargases’ spare key. I thought I must have been crazy—after all, I was technically breaking and entering—but I turned the key in the lock anyway.
The house was dark and silent. Mr. Vargas’s fish tank was illuminated in the family room, the electric pink and orange fish darting around in the blue light. I crept past it and up the stairs to Maritza’s room, my heart thudding. When I reached her door, there were TV noises coming from behind it, and I breathed: Maritza watching Netflix was something I knew how to handle.
My knock was too soft. If I tried any louder, I might wake up her parents. I nudged the door open slowly, sticking my head out so she’d see it was me right away.
Maritza was sitting on her bed, frozen with her hands around her laptop, her expression freaked out and pissed off at the same time.
“What the fuck?”
I closed the door and moved to stand in front of her bed. She kept looking at me like I’d gone crazy, like I was scaring her a little bit.
“JaKory’s meeting Daveon tonight,” I whispered.
She didn’t say anything. We looked at each other, waiting for something to happen.
“So?” she asked finally.
“So I’m going with him … and we want you to come, too.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re driving JaKory to Alabama? Right now?”
I tried to bite down on the answer, knowing she would hate it, but it rushed out of me anyway. “Technically, Ricky’s driving us.”
For a fraction of a second, she seemed to wilt—but then her eyes flashed and she snapped her laptop closed.
“Ricky,” she said, snorting meanly. “Of course. Your new best friend.”
“He’s not my best friend.”
“Oh, are you reserving that spot for your girlfriend now?”
“Maritza…” I began.
“You’re deluded if you think I’m about to go on this little adventure with you after you lied to me all summer.”
I was trying really, really hard to look at her, but at this point I had to turn away. I wasn’t sure what to say next. For about the millionth time that summer, I saw myself as if from far away, standing pathetically in the middle of my old friend’s room, wondering how things had gotten to this point.
“I know I messed up,” I said finally.
“Understatement.”
I took a deep breath. “Look. This isn’t about you and me right now, it’s about JaKory. He has one chance to meet Daveon, and we haven’t taken him seriously about it, and I think that’s really shitty of us. You can go back to hating me when we get back from Alabama, but for tonight, I think we should help him.”
Maritza stared me down for a long moment. Then her eyes flitted away. “I’m grounded right now.”
“S
o am I.”
“I have Mass in the morning.”
“I have a nine-o’clock shift.”
She looked away again, but I could see her calculating in her head, weighing the correct answer.
My phone started buzzing in my pocket. It was JaKory, yelling at me to hurry up.
“I know, I know, we’re coming,” I told him. “We’ll be right down.”
Maritza’s eyes were narrowed when I hung up.
“‘We,’” she said. “That’s presumptuous.”
I merely looked at her, waiting.
Finally, after a long pause, she rolled her eyes and threw the covers back.
“This is so dramatic,” she said, hopping in place as she pulled on her sneakers. “Leave it to JaKory to get his first kiss this way.”
* * *
It might have been the strangest car ride of my life.
Maritza and JaKory sat next to me in the back seat, neither one of them talking, JaKory fidgeting and checking his phone every minute. Ricky and Grant had gone quiet, sitting up front with the GPS illuminated between them. Grant kept his elbow on the console like Ricky did, and every few minutes he turned around and scanned our faces. He never once asked what we were going to Alabama for.
We took the downtown connector through the heart of Atlanta, past Georgia Tech and The Varsity, past the exit for Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, around the curving skyscrapers and golden-domed capitol building, the city lights real and beautiful and bright. There were cars speeding past us in either direction and I wondered where all these people were going, and what they would say about five teenagers sneaking off to Alabama so one of them could kiss the boy he’d been dreaming about all summer.
The interstate took us south of the city, past the airport, onto dark highway lanes with fewer cars and streetlights. We were somewhere between western Georgia and eastern Alabama, and there was nothing but trees and exit signs. I lowered my window and let the air brush my face, breezy and soft, still warm. I waited for the others to ask me to put the window back up, but they simply lowered theirs, too, and that’s how we drove for a whole rolling hour, no talking, no music, just the air rushing past our open windows.
After a while, JaKory checked his phone and leaned forward into the center of the truck. “He says they’re almost there. They hit some late-night construction, but it only added five minutes.”
“Aren’t we going to his house?” I asked.
“Different house,” Ricky answered. “Waffle House.”
Maritza snorted next to me.
I’d only been to Waffle House twice before: Once on a family road trip to Virginia, when we couldn’t find any other breakfast places off the interstate, and once with Maritza and JaKory, on our way home from a varsity basketball game where Maritza had danced at halftime. Both times I’d eaten greasy hash browns with ketchup and accidentally stuck my elbow in the syrup stains on the table. But I could see why JaKory and Daveon would pick Waffle House as their meet-up point: It was the kind of place where people were always coming and going, even in the middle of the night. You could be anyone you wanted to be, and no one would look twice at you.
We pulled off the interstate near a place called Opelika, Alabama. It was a dimly lit exit with a few streetlamps and a 24-7 service station. Ricky drove slowly, carefully, he and my brother leaning forward to scout the area. JaKory was silent as a mouse, but his fingers drummed manically against his leg. I caught Maritza’s eye and looked pointedly at him. She hesitated, then grabbed his fingers and squeezed.
“There!” Grant said, pointing up ahead.
The bright yellow roof loomed into view. We stared at it like we’d never seen such a place before. Ricky rolled quietly into the parking lot, where a handful of cars were scattered unevenly. He took the long way around the building, doing a loop of the whole lot.
“He’s in there,” JaKory rasped, ducking in his seat. “Oh my god, oh shit, he’s really in there.”
“Where?” Maritza and I said.
“In the left corner, by the window!”
Maritza and I craned our necks, trying to see. I could just make out a red shirt and the top of a boy’s head.
If my brother had caught on to what was going on, he didn’t acknowledge it. He glanced at JaKory, and then at Maritza and me next to him, but said nothing.
Ricky parked in the second row of spaces—far enough away that JaKory and Daveon would have some semblance of privacy, but still close enough that we could make a quick getaway if anything went wrong. He shut the engine off, and suddenly there was no sound at all.
You would have thought that Maritza or I would speak first, prompting JaKory to get out of the car, but it was Ricky who turned around and spoke to him.
“Are you ready?”
JaKory nodded. He got out of the truck without looking at anyone, but then he hovered by the door, smoothing down his shirt.
“Do I look okay?” he asked.
He wasn’t looking at us, but it was clear who he was asking.
“You look awesome,” I said.
“Like Prince Charming,” Maritza said earnestly.
“What if…” he asked in a small voice. “What if it doesn’t work out?”
I met his eyes. “What if it does?”
JaKory took a long, deep breath. “I don’t know what to say to him.”
Maritza reached forward and straightened his fedora. “Say hi,” she said. “Quote some poetry if you want to. Just get in there.”
* * *
It was after two A.M. now, but everything felt timeless and still. Ricky and I sat on the curb together, with Maritza a few feet down from us. Grant was walking back and forth on the curb perpendicular to us, his hands in his pockets and his eyes straining to see the various kinds of cars in the lot.
Ricky was watching Maritza, whose tenderness had evaporated the moment JaKory had gone inside. She now sat with her arms hooked around her knees, her face turned resolutely away from me.
“Do something,” Ricky whispered, knocking my elbow.
I looked at Maritza again. She was still turned away, but I stared at her long enough for her to feel it.
“What?” she snapped, glaring at me.
I stood up and went over to her. “Can I sit?”
“I’m not in the mood, Codi.”
I stepped over the curb and onto the grass behind her. There was scattered litter here and there, a paper fast food cup and a dirty napkin, but the spot where I stood was clean. I plopped down onto it and rubbed a blade of grass between my fingers.
“So your dad noticed the missing rum?” I asked.
She ignored me.
“How long are you grounded for?”
Still nothing.
“Are they at least letting you work at dance camp?”
This time she answered.
“I’m quitting dance.”
I stared at her. “What?”
She pulled her knees tighter but said nothing else.
“Maritza, you can’t quit dance, it would be such a waste! Is this because of Rona?” She stayed silent. “Come on, dude, I’m sorry for lying to you, but you have to talk to me.”
She turned halfway around. “Something happened and I really want to talk to you about it, but I don’t trust you anymore.”
I fell silent. Maritza was the type of person to lord that over somebody, but that wasn’t what she was doing. She was hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I’m really, really sorry. I can’t imagine how you felt walking into my house last weekend.”
“Like someone had punched me in the stomach and then told me I should’ve expected it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Yeah, you keep saying that, but it doesn’t mean anything anymore. You made me feel like I was the stupidest, smallest person in the world, like I could never compare to all those people standing in your kitchen. You must’ve had so much fun with them this summer, drinking and partying and all kinds of
stuff you never did with JaKory and me.” She paused, and her voice quivered. “Are you ashamed of us?”
Now I felt like someone was punching me in the stomach. “No, Maritza, of course not.”
“Then why?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Why did you do that?”
I was silent for a long, long moment. Then I asked, “Can I tell you the whole story?”
She neither nodded nor shook her head. I started talking before she could decide.
I told her about the night I’d come upon Ricky in the trees, and how he’d been upset, though I didn’t explain why. I told her about everything that grew from there: the night at Taco Mac when I’d first met Ricky’s friends, the conversation in Lydia’s room when I’d first suspected she liked me, the moment on the swings when I’d missed my chance, and the moment on the front steps when I’d gotten it back.
“But why couldn’t you tell me all this before?” Maritza asked, looking pained.
I hung my head. “I just—I wanted it for myself. You know how much I love you and JaKory, but sometimes it feels like you try to tell me who I am based on what you see. I met Ricky that night, and suddenly it felt like I could be whomever I wanted to be because he wouldn’t know the difference. I needed to know I could do that. And I needed to know I could do it without you and JaKory. I wanted to feel like I was becoming myself, not ourselves.”
Maritza was quiet. She breathed in, slow and deep.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “It was selfish.”
Maritza swallowed. She shifted on the curb so her feet were now in the grass with mine. “It wasn’t selfish.”
“It wasn’t?”
She sighed. “Remember last year when you asked if you and JaKory could come to Panama sometime?”
“Yeah. I was serious.”
“I know.” She paused. “A few months ago, Mom and Dad told me I could invite you guys this year. They said I could bring you for a whole week, even two if you wanted. They’d already cleared it with my grandmother and everything. Mom was so excited; she kept saying, ‘Aren’t you going to call your friends and share the wonderful news?’”
Late to the Party Page 23