I do, and Hector barely waits for me to shut the door before he hits the gas and takes off down the street. It’s quiet in front of the school, so it’s pretty obvious that Marcus and I are late and I should be running to get to class, but neither of us moves in that direction.
“Shit,” Marcus says, maybe to me or maybe to himself. “Ain’t nothing around here stays the same, is there?”
I tuck the crystal ball into my armpit so I can untangle my hair from one of my earrings. “You didn’t dress up for Halloween. That doesn’t seem like you.”
He glances at me for maybe the first time this morning, takes in my costume. “I am dressed up,” he says. “I’m a monster.” He smiles at me, but it looks leached of its usual charm. “What kind of store is your brother talking about?”
“A liquor store. A fancy one to match some of the changes around here.” I’ve heard him discuss it plenty of times with my father, though I had no idea it was so close to being a reality. A recession-proof industry, my father calls it. What Hector hasn’t told Pai is that he thinks having a storefront in place will set him up to make mad cash if recreational weed is ever legalized in New York.
“Should have thought of that myself. T’s gone, now Hector, too. I’m losing my edge, Caballito.” Marcus puts his hands on top of his head. He’s breathing funny, like the air in front of him has turned liquid, and I know it’s stupid, but the thought of seeing him cry, of seeing him laid so low, makes me feel like the world is breaking apart, and I’m sure I won’t be able to take it.
“Hey. Let’s go somewhere. I’ll finally read your cards properly.” I try not to let any pity creep into my voice, and when he looks at me… I won’t say there’s gratitude in his face, exactly, but there is relief.
“You talked to T since the haunted house?” I ask as we wander toward Eastern Parkway, not too far from the park where Marcus used to set up games for T. I try to steer us in a different direction, but Marcus seems drawn there, and I feel its pull, too.
“Nah,” he says. “I don’t know. Sometimes I want to tell him I’m sorry about how things went down, because I miss him, for real. And then I think of all the lies, and my brain gets hot, and I want to hunt him down at that fancy new school and hurt him worse.”
“Yeah,” I say. “His face is sort of punchable.” Because that’s just the truth.
Marcus smiles at that, a real smile this time, but it starts to fade almost immediately. “It doesn’t matter. Auntie Patrice is all over me, worse than a prison guard, and she’s got my mom riled up, too. They swear they’ll turn me in for dealing if I step out of line, some sort of ‘scared straight’ thing. Now my supply dried up, so joke’s on them, I guess. Still… I don’t know, Brianna. I’m tired of the way they look at me, like I’m a dog that pisses on the carpet all the time.”
Marcus has never said this many words to me at once. I’d like to bask in that fact for a few minutes, but there’s also something nagging at me, and the next question jumps to my tongue.
“What about Izzy?” I ask as we enter the south end of the park.
“What about her?” he says, anger suddenly brightening his voice. Then he shrugs, shakes his head. “Aw, shit. The stuff she said to me, it doesn’t seem right. And what, I’m supposed to just let it all go?” We reach the statue of a long-dead astronaut, the one the park is named for, and stop walking. Marcus slides down onto the concrete base, and I sit down next to him, pull the scarf off my head to spread out between us. When I look at him, he’s fiddling with his necklace.
“Where’d you get it? The house pendant?”
“It’s stupid,” he says, but I hold his gaze, shake my head, try to let him know that even now, nothing he could say would be stupid to me, and maybe it works because he sighs and keeps going. “I bought it off one of those tables by Union Square years ago. It’s cheap, fake, nothing special. But the guy who sold it to me, this guy with dreads and no teeth, said, ‘I see you. You’re headed for greatness.’ And so greatness became… I don’t know, a real place to me. A place I was going to reach, a place I was going to live in, like it was a house. And this necklace represented that.” Marcus closes his eyes, lets the chain go slack. “But now, shit. That’s all over.”
“It’s not.”
“I think you’re wrong, Caballito. But go on.” He nods at the tarot deck. “Tell me what to do.”
“Hold the cards and think of a question,” I tell him. “Concentrate on it.” He closes his eyes, and when he does, he looks less like a tough neighborhood kingpin and more like what he really is: a barely-adult trying to figure out what comes next. I take the deck from him and lay them out in a star guide formation: only six cards, so simple, but good at getting to an answer.
The Tower, the Two of Pentacles. At first glance, the cards give me the shivers.
“I see a lot of change. Loss, too. I’m not going to lie. There’s some scary stuff here, and there might be more conflict before things are resolved. But there’s the Star, which can mean healing and transformation. And in the final position, there’s the Five of Cups, which can represent some sort of forgiveness.”
“More conflict and then forgiveness?” The look that Marcus gives me is raw and searching. “Like maybe this is about Izzy and T? Come on, Brianna. Are you just messing with me here?”
“No,” I say. “I’m only telling you what I see. Not what I want to see.”
And for once, it’s true.
THE KNIGHT
HERE’S A STRANGE TURN OF EVENTS: I’M COOL NOW. Me, nerd among nerds! It makes me laugh out loud whenever I think about it. The other day, my roommate, Patrick, a scrawny computer science genius with a minor lisp and a deep and abiding affection for early-nineties hip-hop, actually said it out loud: “I’m glad I ended up with a cool roommate.” At Sagan, even as the new kid, I was immediately a known entity: Marcus’s cousin. But here, I’m a man of mystery. I showed up with a murky background, a distant girlfriend, and a still-busted lip. And I’m black. Everyone wants to be my friend.
Don’t get me wrong—there was still a little bit of culture shock when I rolled onto the scene. My fears about feeling different weren’t completely unfounded, and I’d never been around so many kids who acted almost like adults, who had as a presupposition their own eventual success. But in other ways, it was as easy as slipping into a warm bath. High school is such a closed system, such a biodome, that if you stay in one place, you can get it in your head that you and the people around you are inventing the world. But that’s not the case. When I got to Westcroft, most everyone already looked so familiar, like I could see their whole stories before I met them. Some of them seemed like people from my old school, only inhabiting different bodies: Oh, you’re the quirky kid who digs space and sci-fi, just like R. J. Oh, you’re the girl who commands the drama club and dreams of being on Broadway, just like Roxanne.
Even the chess club meetings are peppered with moments of déjà vu. Eamon is a classical musician like Anaïs, though he plays the upright bass instead of the clarinet. Dan is a quiet white dude with dreads who always has a paperback book called something like The Dissident’s Guidebook sticking out of his back pocket, but sometimes he gets rattled at matches, and his nerves remind me of Pankaj.
And there’s Dorie, of course. Living at the same school as Dorie is far more intense than seeing her once in a while at a chess tournament. Beneath the sparkles there are some dark shadows that I’m careful not to mess with. One time when I was sitting next to her in class, she was absentmindedly scratching at the long cuff of one of her gloves, and I saw what looked like scars under there. I don’t ask questions, and I don’t have any desire to go toe-to-toe with her in terms of traumatic histories. But I can’t deny that the girl is magnetic. All of the popular kids, the charmers and the athletes, hang out with her because she confuses them and so it’s easiest to label her as cool. I hang out with her, not because she reminds me of people at my old school, but because she reminds me of no one.
Aside from chess practice, which is every day at Westcroft, what Dorie and I do together is go to political events around the city, at least several times a month. She’s an ace at getting permission to go off campus; she knows when the administration will buy an event as an “invaluable learning experience” or when it’s better to dream up a cover story or leave the details fuzzy. If it’s the kind of thing that sounds interesting, then she can usually get a small crowd of people to come along. If not, if it’s a demonstration for the rights of oysters or a rally to save a statue she’s never seen before, then it’s typically me and Dan. Dorie goes because she loves to yell and “finds it cathartic to do it for a good cause”; Dan goes because he’s a true believer; I go because I like wandering the city, even if it can’t be with Izzy at the moment.
So I guess you’d call the two of them my best friends, here in this strange, alternative life that I’m living. They come close to filling the space that Marcus left behind, but it’s an awkward fit, gaps in the corners and bulges at the sides. I refused to see Marcus before I came here, despite Auntie Patrice wanting me to do so, and when I speak to her now on the phone, we avoid the subject of Marcus, though it’s always right there, bubbling under the surface of our words. Sometimes I think of those last words he said to me, right after he punched me in the face, See you later, cuz, and I tell myself that I will see him later, that this is only a pause. Even so, it’s hard not to feel like the best solution I could come up with, uprooting my life and moving it to Westcroft, wasn’t enough. I’ve picked up the phone, scrolled down to his name, toyed with the idea of touching that one green button that will connect us again. But then I put the phone down, thinking later, later, without wanting to consider how much later that might be.
Here at school, I never talk about Marcus, and I don’t say much about Izzy, either. It’s not because anything illicit is going on between me and Dorie, any more than there is between me and Dan, though people around here tease me about her all the time. All the same, I’m not sure that Izzy and Dorie would like each other very much. One’s a strawberry jelly doughnut, and the other’s a perfectly ripe strawberry. One’s a tinsel-covered Christmas tree, and the other’s a bonsai. One is Isadora and the other’s Izzy.
THE QUEEN
ALL OF THAT LATE FALL AND EARLY WINTER, TRISTAN got even better at chess. Mr. K still loomed as the seminal and formative teacher of Tristan’s chess career, and they still talked on the phone sometimes, but his new school had resources to spare: several coaches, a perennially strong team, the money to travel to tournaments, some of them far-flung. Tristan soaked it all up like a sponge. He had broken free of his plateau and was closing in on grandmaster level. For the first time, he wasn’t viewed as merely a promising contender for the adult tournaments that would take place in the spring; he was among the handful of favorites. I still didn’t understand chess much better than I ever had. On the few occasions when I watched Tristan in competition, however, I didn’t need to know much of the game; it was almost as though I could sense him getting better and better, more sharply focused. More ruthless, in a way.
“I thought that kid from Stuyvesant was supposed to be good,” I said to him one Sunday over Skype. “You ate him for breakfast yesterday.”
It was hard to tell on the laptop screen, but I’m pretty sure he was blushing with pleasure. “Tasted like scrambled eggs,” he said. We spoke over Skype constantly, and we met up whenever we could, but more often than not, we ended up studying side by side in a coffee shop rather than staring into each other’s eyes. No more sneaking out, because Tristan couldn’t afford to get in trouble. But the distance didn’t weaken our emotions. When my feelings no longer had an easy outlet, they collected inside of me; my love for him gathered and pooled, grew deeper and deeper.
“When we make it to Yale…” I told him.
“Or Stanford, maybe.”
“Right. My point is, you have to try not to intimidate everyone too badly with your chess skills. We’ll want some friends.”
“What’s wrong with putting a little fear in people? We’ll be notorious. The first celebrity couple made up of a surgeon and a chess expert: Dr. Izzy and Grandmaster T.”
Confidence looked so good on him. I wanted to bask in his happiness and achievement, enjoy it with him, and yet I couldn’t prevent my mind from churning out a chain of other thoughts: 1) Putting fear into people sounds more like something Marcus would say. 2) Maybe I don’t know anything about what Marcus would say. 3) Those perfect future versions of ourselves: How did they manage to fix everything that was broken about the past?
With all of the distractions of my first few weeks at Carl Sagan, I had ground to make up. So I hit the books. I aced all of my classes that semester, including the APs. I joined the Spanish club. I helped build sets for the school play. I wrote some preparatory drafts of college application essays in which I tried to capture some of the dark, slippery feelings that appeared after my discussion with Marcus in the library.
I did eventually tell my parents a version of what had been going on, leaving out the dicier bits, and they looked alarmed, possibly disconcerted by how much had escaped their notice. When they took Tristan and me out to dinner for the first time, they seemed unable to get over their surprise that I had a serious boyfriend, even though they swore to me later that night and ever after that they liked him.
Hull, the new Hull, started to seem sturdier, less like a floating apparition, but he was getting more eccentric as well. After one of his friends showed him a documentary about David Lynch, he got really into transcendental meditation. My mom thought it was a good thing and paid for him to take a class. Maybe it was. But he also decided to switch his focus from politics to business, reading massive biographies of Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett. He started a young investors club at Hope Springs. Philip wrote me an email about a presentation Hull had done, idolizing the bankers who made tons of money on the 2008 housing crash, and though Philip meant it to be a funny story, an isn’t-Hull-so-wacky kind of story, it made me deeply uncomfortable. It was pretty easy to imagine Hull as a CEO out in Silicon Valley, the kind who wears sandals and an unnervingly calm smile and goes surfing on the weekends.
In short, our lives kept grinding along, and the rest of the world did, too. ISIS was in the news, doing unspeakable things in the Middle East. The new pope was making waves. Protests and then riots continued in Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of Michael Brown. When the court decided not to indict the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death in Staten Island, a mere ferry ride away, the protests spread to New York, too.
Things got so heated that we started having long discussions about Black Lives Matter in Government class, and everyone took part in them enthusiastically, either because they felt passionately about the issue or because they were excited about the break in our usual routine. There were lots of personal stories about the NYPD and how they would stop and frisk you for nothing at all. For the most part, I stayed pretty quiet while Ms. Rathscott tried to wrangle the debate into some kind of teachable moment. And then, one day, feeling more talkative than usual or maybe just lonelier, I raised my hand and told the story of being with “a black friend,” of being stopped by a cop and asked if I was “all right” while he systematically harassed my companion. “It was because I’m a white girl, obviously,” I said. “I wish I’d said something, but I didn’t. I don’t know… it feels hopeless to me, too. I guess my only plan is to pay attention to how I’m treated differently and recognize that it’s wrong and get better at speaking up when I see it.” R. J. got up and walked over to my desk and gave me a fist bump, and the rest of the class laughed. The attention made my face burn, but from that point on, I felt like R. J. and I were friends by more than association, and he started inviting me to the astronomy club meetings.
In the midst of the upheaval over the Eric Garner case, I went with my parents to a demonstration in Washington Square Park: a Sunday morning, a painfully blue sky, thousands of peopl
e waving signs and chanting “No justice, no peace!” Hull, predictably, opted out, but it felt good, actually, to be there with my parents, listening to them try to chant their way back to their raucous, dissident youth.
It was my mother who spotted him first, pointing to a clump of teenagers with their hands in the air. A girl wearing, inexplicably, a chartreuse tutu, a long lavender scarf, and sparkly white Michael Jackson–esque gloves was shouting “Hands up!” into a bullhorn, and the group was answering, “Don’t shoot!”
“Look,” my mom said. “Isn’t that Tristan? Want to ask him if he wants to march with us?”
It was, indeed, Tristan, and while I pushed my way toward him through the crowd, I felt a twinge of irritation. He hadn’t told me he was coming. I reminded myself to be reasonable; I hadn’t mentioned it to him, either, because I’d thought of it as parent-daughter bonding time. But then, as I was calling his name, the girl dropped the microphone and with a strange, catlike leap, jumped onto Tristan’s back and pumped her fist in the air. I called his name again.
If I was jealous (I was), the envy disappeared when he saw and recognized me. There was no guilt there, only joy at my sudden appearance. He dropped the girl’s legs, depositing her back on the asphalt, and greeted me with a kiss.
“You’re here,” he said, as if it was a wonder.
“I’m here,” I said. “With my parents. Do you want to…?” I pointed toward them, where they were waving at us. They looked old in that moment, so out of place.
“Sure,” he said, but then one of the kids with him, a big red-haired guy built like a football player, jostled Tristan with his elbow.
“Dude, you can’t bail on us.”
“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “No big deal.”
Izzy + Tristan Page 20