by Mia Mckenzie
Faye is watching me, waiting patiently for me to tell her what I’m feeling, the way Viva always does, the way Tasha used to do.
“I shot pool with my friends at June’s sometimes,” I say, “when I didn’t want to be at home. It was kind of a refuge for me. Losing it feels devastating in a way I didn’t expect.”
“This is the wrong popcorn!” Vicky yells from the basement.
Faye ignores the kid. Her hands are still on my arms and she rubs them, gently squeezing. The warmth of her palms on my skin is deeply comforting.
My tears have stopped. I lean back against the counter. Faye leans beside me. We stand there like that, our shoulders touching. After a couple of minutes, she asks, “Have you really not cried in three years?”
I sigh a long sigh. “Yes.”
Nick walks in through the back door. Ugh, I thought he went home already. “Grill’s clean,” he says to Faye.
“Thank you.”
When he sees my face, which I’m sure is a mess from crying, he looks worried. “What are you two whispering about?”
“We’re not whispering,” I say.
“We were just talking about gentrification,” Faye tells him.
“Oh. Yeah. I can’t believe how bad it’s getting in some parts of the city.”
“Whatever,” I say, shrugging. “It was just a pool hall. I mean, arcade. It was just an arcade.”
Vicky comes trudging up the steps, a big bag of popcorn and another of chips in her arms.
“It’s never just an arcade,” Nick says. “Places like that provide something to a community.”
Yeah, drugs, usually.
“Even places that don’t seem like much end up meaning more to a neighborhood than places that look like a bigger deal on paper. Arcades. Candy stores. The corner cheesesteak spot. Those places are part of the fabric of the community. Without them, it starts to fall apart. And without community, you have nothing.”
Why is this nigga talking so much, all of a sudden?
“What?” he asks, seeing the look on my face, I guess. “You disagree?”
“That’s just not my experience, is all.”
He frowns. “Well, it’s definitely ours.” He looks at Faye. “Community is the most important thing. Right, babe?”
“Sure,” she says. “Top three, anyway.”
“Exactly! And Philly community is the best. But I was born here,” he says, as if everyone in the room wasn’t, “so maybe I’m biased. I grew up in these streets. But it wasn’t until I went to college out West that I realized how special Philly is.”
I really wish he’d shut up.
“What’s special about it?” Vicky asks, looking interested.
“The people. They’re real.”
I smirk. “As opposed to pretend people?”
“You know what I mean. As opposed to fake. As opposed to putting on airs, pretending to be somebody they’re not. We’re also the friendliest people in the urban northeast. Maybe the friendliest anywhere outside the South.”
Well, Nick is certainly “friendly.” I’ll give him that.
“You can meet somebody at a bus stop in Philly,” he continues, “bond over the twenty-one always being late, and be best friends by the time it finally shows up. Real friends, too, not that fake shit they do out in Cali.”
“I love California,” I say, even though I’m actually pretty meh about it.
“Me, too!” Vicky chimes in.
“You’ve never been to California, Vicky,” Faye says.
Vicky takes a six-pack of root beer out of the fridge. “I know but I think I’d like it.”
“You wouldn’t,” Nick says. “The people are fake and passive-aggressive. I hate California. So does Faye. Don’t you, babe?”
Faye shrugs. “It’s not my favorite place. But lots of people love it.”
“With all the places you’ve traveled,” Nick says to me, still talking, “you don’t think Philly is the best city in America?”
I don’t, but it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t wait for an answer.
“I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.” Then, looking at Faye, “Would you, babe?”
“Probably not.”
“Probably not? You always say you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Why you frontin’?”
“I’m not,” she says. “I just think you’re laying it on a bit thick.”
He frowns. Then he puts his hands up in a yielding gesture. “Okay,” he says, smiling now. “I do get carried away sometimes. Sorry if I’m coming off like a dick, Skye.”
“Language, please,” Faye says, nodding toward Vicky.
Vicky shrugs. “I like ‘dick.’ ”
“Vicky.”
“What? It’s a funny word!”
Nick takes Faye’s hand and kisses it. He pulls her close to him, wrapping her arms around his waist. Before now, I’ve never felt envious of him. I’ve always felt better than him because, whatever I am, I’m not a cheater and a liar. But watching them now, I’m jealous.
Jealousy is yet another intense emotion on top of the sadness and grief I already feel over losing June’s, and for a second, I think I might start spilling out again. To stop that from happening, I squeeze my butthole closed. Because tears are like farts, I guess? To my surprise—and yours, no doubt—it works.
“You ready?” Vicky asks.
I look over at her. She’s holding up the snacks and cold sodas. She’s happy, excited.
“Yeah. Let’s do it,” I say, and follow her out of the kitchen.
26
I make it through Ninotchka without crying again. I accomplish this by not letting myself think about June’s. At all. Not for a second. I let myself be immersed in the undeniable charms of Greta Garbo and her surprisingly convincing Russian accent. The second the credits start to roll, I tell Vicky how great it was, how psyched I am that she shared it with me, and how I ate too many snacks and have a stomachache and now have to bounce.
I walk to the B and B in a kind of stupor, my brain heavy, weighed down by memories of June’s, and places and times now far out of reach. At some point, I almost get hit by a bright yellow bike that’s covered in I Heart Philly stickers. “Watch it!” the cyclist yells at me as he comes to a hard stop a foot away from me in the bike lane.
“YOU watch it!” I yell back, because fuck him and his bike.
I spend the evening eating mini powdered donuts and sipping bourbon straight out of the bottle while watching a TV show about the worst cooks in America. I fall asleep with the TV on. I dream I’m on a cooking-type show, coming in last in the simplest challenges, like spreading butter on sliced bread and cracking eggs.
Around seven the next morning, I go down to the dining room, still in the clothes I fell asleep in. I can’t remember if I brushed my teeth. Probably not, considering how my mouth tastes.
When Viva sees me, sitting in her pristine dining area with my powdered-donut-flecked sweatpants and wayward hair, she looks low-key horrified for a second. She recovers quickly, though, her horror replaced with a look of worry. She points a finger at my general person and asks, “What’s all this about?”
I tell her that June’s closed. That there’s a coffee shop there now.
She sits down. “That was our spot,” she says, sounding sad.
A lump is swelling in my throat. I feel my threads coming loose again. Tears tingle at the corners of my eyes. I will myself not to cry. Not to spill out all over this dining room. It’s no use.
“I miss us,” I say, quick and sudden, like a sneeze.
Viva looks surprised. Then her eyes soften and she reaches over and grabs my hand.
And I sob. Right there at the table.
Viva comes over and puts her arm around my shoulders. “You don’t have to miss us,” she says.
“We’re both still here.”
I shake my head. “It’s not the same.”
“Claro que no,” she says. “It was twenty years ago. It can’t be the same. But it can still be good. It can still be what we need it to be.”
Which is a nice idea. But the unnamed person here is Tasha and I doubt she feels the same.
I take a deep breath and pull myself back together. “I can’t believe I’m melting down over this damn pool hall again. I already cried about it at Vicky’s.”
“In front of la nena?”
“In front of Faye.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. Then, “It was actually okay, though. She was…comforting.”
Viva smiles. “Eso es bueno.”
“It was. For a minute.”
“And then?”
“And then I realized Faye and her meat stick are soulmates.”
Viva sits back down in her chair and sighs. “What are you talking about?” She sounds a little bit annoyed now.
“I’m talking about shared values, Veev.”
“Girl,” she says, “what does that mean?”
“It means Nick belongs with Faye and Vicky, and I don’t,” I tell her, shrugging.
Her jaw tightens. After a long moment of silence, she says, “You still haven’t told Faye about Nick. ¿Por qué?”
“I’m going to.”
“¿Cuándo?”
“Soon, probably.”
“Do you want her to marry that pendejo?”
“Of course not.”
“Then why don’t you stop her from marrying him?” she asks, more annoyed, almost angry. “It might make things awkward, pero at least she won’t be married to a man she can’t trust. Isn’t that more important?”
“Yeah, but…”
“But what?”
“Why do you care so much about this all of a sudden?” I ask her, annoyed myself now.
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she says, “Maybe you do want her to marry him.”
“Okay. Um…any idea why?”
“No sé. Maybe if Nick were out of the picture, you’d have to rethink your policy about serious relationships.”
“Why?” I ask. “It’s not like if she broke up with him, or he suddenly dropped dead—fingers crossed—I’d have to marry her in his place. She and I could still just fuck.”
“You’re really going to sit there and pretend that sex is the only thing you want from Faye?”
“No. But there are many levels between sex and a serious relationship, Viva. There’s friends with benefits. Love affairs. Situationships.”
“Situationships?” She looks horrified.
“It’s a thing,” I tell her. “Ask the millennials.”
“That sounds like some cishet nonsense. But, as usual, you have an answer for everything. Which is how I know que estás hablando mierda.”
“Why do you care so much about Faye all of a sudden?” I ask again.
“I care about you. You, who was just sitting here, five minutes ago, crying about not having any friends.”
“That’s not exactly—”
“I’m tired of watching you live this disconnected life. I’m tired of you showing up here, more of a shell of your former self every time, more self-centered and…” She searches for the right word. “…foreign to me with each visit. And all the time you’re pretending that everything’s melaza, no hay problema, and you’re not completely fucked up.”
Well, shit.
“If you don’t want me here, you could have said so, Viva.”
“Ay bendito, you know that’s not what I mean.”
“I’ll leave today,” I say, getting up from the table. “Checkout’s at noon, right?”
“And go where?” she asks. “¿Pa’ donde tu madre? Maybe you can have your old room. Maybe Slade will save you some of those damn Pop-Tarts he’s always eating.”
“Okay, Viva.”
“Or why not Faye’s? Maybe you can sleep between her and Nick. Take turns sucking his bicho.”
“Okay, Viva! You made your point. I have nowhere else to go. Here. In Philly. But, guess what? Philly isn’t the only place that exists.”
“So, just leave?” she asks. “What was the point of staying in the first place, then? What was all that shit about not dying alone?”
“All that shit was about Vicky. She’s the one who’s going to rub arthritis cream on my knees when I get old and probably even cry at my funeral. My relationship with Vicky is the reason I canceled my trip to Brazil. Remember?”
Viva nods. “Sí. I do remember.”
“So why are you busting my balls about Faye?”
“Porque I think you’re in love with her.”
“Ugh,” I say incredulously, standing up. “Whatever. I’m going back to bed.”
“It’s seven-thirty. You’ve only been up half an hour.”
“Half an hour too long,” I tell her and take the back stairs two at a time to my room.
* * *
—
For the next few days, I try really hard to hold my shit together. I avoid Viva. I communicate with Vicky only via text, so I can steer clear of Faye and Nick. I work on the smallest details of the Bali and Sydney trips, and the New Zealand, Indonesia, and Malaysia trips that will follow it. I do not cry. About June’s or anything else. Mid-week, I find myself at Philadelphia International for the third time in as many days.
PHL isn’t the worst of major U.S. airports, but it’s bottom five, easily. It’s ugly and dirty and the customer service is like if drunk Mel Gibson had angry sex with drunk Russell Crowe and they had a baby who worked in customer service at the Philadelphia airport. And yet, here I am, sitting in a faux-leather seat in terminal F, watching through fingerprint-and-possibly-snot-smudged windows as anonymous international flights take off. Late, probably.
I used to come to this shitty airport when I was a teenager. I sat in seats like this for hours sometimes, watching planes, daydreaming about being anywhere but Philly. Back then, buying a ticket and boarding a plane to wherever I wanted to go wasn’t an option. Now, if I wanted to, I could whip out my passport and my credit card and disappear. I think about doing just that. About meeting up with Toni and our Nicaragua group, which is in Granada right now. Or flying somewhere else entirely, somewhere I can be alone for a few weeks—or months or years—somewhere I don’t have to self-reflect or show up or belong because I’m a foreigner, a stranger.
An Airbus A321, an Aer Lingus, is taxiing down the runway. I hear a boarding call for a flight to London. I could do it, I think. I could just…go.
But then I remember how crushing the loneliness can be. How that crushingness sometimes sneaks up on me, at night in my hotel room, or smack in the middle of the day, at Callejon de Hamel or the Arc de Triomphe, surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people, pulling me at my loose threads.
I’m tired of watching you live this disconnected life. I guess I’m tired of it, too, because I don’t buy a ticket. I don’t get on a plane. I watch a few more flights take off and then I leave to pick up Vicky from therapy.
* * *
—
Vicky’s shrink has an office a few blocks from where June’s used to be, near Penn, on the second floor above a florist. The stairwell smells of flowers. At the top of it, there’s a door leading to a small waiting area with bright yellow walls, chairs upholstered in colorful patterns, and, in the center of the room, one of those toddler activity centers with blocks and shapes and buttons that light up. There’s a shelf full of toys and, higher up on the wall, out of a little kid’s reach, another shelf full of pamphlets about depression, anxiety, abuse, and other mental-health-related issues. On one wall, there’s a small painting of a Black child eating a mango.
The waiting room is empty a
nd quiet, which I didn’t anticipate. I guess I expected the muffled cries of traumatized children confronting their demons, or whatever. But there’s none of that. Just a handful of closed doors. A big clock on the wall tells me it’s quarter to four. I sit in one of the colorful chairs and wait for Vicky to appear.
I can’t help but think about the therapist waiting rooms I’ve been in before. In college, the counseling center’s waiting area had been awash in fluorescent lighting. That’s all I really remember about it. The other time I went to therapy, the time I didn’t tell Vicky about, when I was fourteen, the waiting area was bright and colorful like this one, but still somehow depressing. Our family had mental healthcare coverage through Medicaid, like the rest of the poors, ever since my parents broke up and my father refused to pay child support, so our options for therapists weren’t exactly stellar. Spoiler alert: Nobody really cares that much if poor kids go crazy. Least of all the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Anyhoo, I remember sitting there, staring at the bright orange walls and feeling depressed despite them, and also a little bit enraged, which was the norm for me then, waiting for my name to be called. Every time it was—by my therapist, who was medium-brown and skinny, with a high-pitched voice, short, kinky hair, and bangle bracelets that looked too heavy for her thin wrists—it took every ounce of self-control I had not to scream. I remember holding the sound in the back of my throat, tight, like it was a mad dog on a too-short leash, telling myself that if I let it go there in that waiting room, they’d drag me off to one of those nut joints like in the movies. What I don’t remember is any of the actual sessions, of which I think there were four or five total before I stopped going. But I probably talked a shit ton about my father and how deeply I despised him. The therapist, whose name I don’t remember, probably asked me why I hated my father so much. I probably said, “He’s a dick.” I mean, that sounds like something I’d say.
“When you say ‘dick,’ what exactly are you trying to say?” she probably asked me.