We were driving across town. Six iced cakes. Trying to preserve them in that humidity. All that frosting, gliding. Occasionally some gold crust cresting. It was sunny. All the way to the lake club. One hour round-trip—or eleven hours, when you factored in the hospital.
No air-conditioning inside that beat little beige Volvo either. (RIP, Volvo. Sorry.) Mom, distracted and driving. Me, frustrated, sulking. Thinking about how all those poets died.
The cakes.
Tight little Yonah Ave & street parking.
Compadres—
all graduating seniors half off empanadas! congrats!
As far as stop signs go, poor visibility.
Some shadow from overhanging brush, obscuring it.
We ran it, in the hot car.
Hit another car.
Or, well, it hit us. But it was our fault.
Door impounded.
Patellar tendon thrashed. Right behind the knee.
I didn’t feel a thing
at first.
“Was she drunk?” Who was asking?
“No, um, I don’t think so.”
“She seemed a little tired really, and that was all I noticed.” It was Babs asking. “I mean, I realize I’m not a human breathalyzer, but I’m pretty confident.”
Babs shook her head.
“You’re protecting her.”
We were all okay. Everyone. Except for the six cakes. Some icing on the windshield. Looked like a joke. I was home again.
I had a cast, not plaster, but heavy on the padding. “Was she drunk?” Déjà vu. Except this time it was Luca who was asking.
“I don’t want to tell you. It’s nothing personal.”
“You don’t want to tell me? I’m your best friend in the whole world, and you don’t want to tell me?”
He was hurt. But I hurt worse. Which doesn’t mean I was trying to hurt him more. “It’s nothing personal,” I swore. It’s just that he would blab.
And so he got up and left.
When he came back, he was wearing a tank top, gym shorts. I could see his penis outline. A little sunburn on his face. I had lashed out, he explained. But it was fine. I was going through a tough time—he understood. He knew exactly how I felt. He had an alcoholic mom too, in case I didn’t recall. He was carrying a new mix CD too, Feel Better Mix—Songs Sia Wrote But Did Not Record. Spears, Dion, Perry, and Aguilera—they all figured, as well as a few artists I hadn’t heard of.
“You’ll like this,” Luca said, nudging it against my set knee. “It’s high pop.”
Our moms’ history together: bender buddies, and then best friends. Gia Abbaticchio + Krissanne Fowell in a heart shape. Birthed more friendship too, when Luca met me, same age: 7.
We got our toughness from our moms.
And Gia, when she quit drinking, got even tougher. Built a henhouse in their backyard, despite city laws, and harvested their eggs.
Luca got even tougher too. Big, proud muscles from all the protein.
Gia became Mom’s AA sponsor, and then it was like Luca became my sponsor, got on my nerves sometimes when I felt a little condescended to.
He and I remained and would remain. Steadfast, he assured. He had talked it over with Gia and then gone on a run to decompress. He felt better now. He sat on the edge of the bed, and I looked at his lap.
“I aced Bio,” I said finally, and his face lit up.
Our bargain was that if we both aced Bio, we would finally have sex, for our first times each, with each other.
“So did I! That was my news I was trying to tell you on Friday, but you wouldn’t leave Ms. Poss’s room.…”
Luca, as a fourth grader, asked if I could stay his same age when it was my birthday. I thought that was so radical.
“… I got kind of nervous, like you were … unsure or something.”
“I can be unsure.”
How we compromised: We had his secret birthday, like an elopement. We aged him by a few months to ten, so we’d be ten together. Shit, I was relieved. Ten looked lonely without him.
“I know! I know you can be unsure! That’s not what I’m saying, I just … I feel comfortable with you, and … and I love you and … you know. You’re my best friend.”
“You’re my best friend too, and I feel comfortable with you.” I had to laugh. “Now, the having sex—like having sex sex—part is …”
“Well, we’ll just start at the start, you know? A little mutual jerkage, a little—”
Radical.
There was a knock on the door. “Come in!” Luca called, like he had some authority. It was Mom. “Hi, Kris,” Luca went, which I’m sure was annoying. She had a scented candle. Green, palm-sized, palm(tree)-scented candle; when I made the association, between palms, I laughed.
“You are laughing at me. I feel helpless,” she said. “I don’t know what else I can say to you now, except I am sorry, and I have already said that.”
When she walked out, Luca looked at me, eyebrows raised. I couldn’t meet him. I was too bummed out.
He kept talking. “I mean, I guess eventually we’ll have to talk about other things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, like, you know, we’ll have to talk about who wants to bottom and who wants to top.”
“Yeah,” I said. “At some point.”
“Like, do you have a preference?”
“Um.” I thought about it. I thought about Mom being somewhere in the house, even though the door was closed.
I was looking at his boner. He started laughing, because we were suddenly so exposed. I shushed him. I was laughing too, but quietly. It felt surreal to be talking about sex in a real way—when it had been jokes, mostly, beforehand. Even the deal, when we struck it, had felt like a joke. Luca picked up the Feel Better mix and slid it into the computer drive. The first song—“Pretty Hurts,” by Beyoncé—started. “Want me to leave it playing for you?”
“Are you about to leave?”
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “But I’ll be back.” And I couldn’t believe he was just leaving. Like we had just talked about that stuff, and now it appeared we were done, so he was leaving, and it felt a little like abandonment, even though it wasn’t—at least not any real kind of abandonment. I knew what the real kind was. But it got on top of me. And in a little while, I started to ache. I couldn’t locate it all the way, at first. But it was real and full, like when Sia belts out, “I’m aliiiive!!” in that song. Thrilling because, beneath the pain of it, you get the sense there might be something else. Whatever the thing is that pushes. It’s urgent and unstoppable, and it holds you. It’s the same with masturbating, when you get to that point. And even after, your head’s in that quiet place—you’ve come from the sun, so this must be the ozone—and in that state, it hits you: I’m alone. And you think, If I could just bring this back with me.…
A squirreled dirty pair of gym shorts beneath the mattress. I fell asleep—“Ave?” I woke up. Mom was outside the door.
“I’m going to a meeting in a little while with Gia, okay? I’ll be back tonight.”
“Okay.” I shut my eyes. Sleep again.
I woke to Pal’s heavy steps in his rubber-soled boots coming up the hallway, and behind his footsteps, his grunting.
he was always, sort of, grunting
He opened my door and crossed my room and, bless him, I know he was trying to be quiet. He sat at the computer desk. We shared the computer. This was not a violation.
He jiggled the mouse. Began to click a little, type a little, click a little, type a little, clicked some more and typed some more, and then got quiet while scrolling.
I rose up, loud—“Pal!” (“Pow!”) Pal jumped.
“Ho—!” (“Ho—,” as he said it, was short for “Holy” maybe, but if that’s true, then the “Holy” was short for nothing, because Pal never cursed.)
He tried clicking out of whatever webpage he was on (so frantic). The window kept minimizing, maximizing. Again and again, at such high speed (I couldn’t begin to tell what he was looking at). When it finally disappeared, his hand went to his chest. His arm trembled.
“Partner …”
He gasped.
“Mom!” I yelled. “Help!”
But then Pal started laughing, not dying.
“Teach you to ease up on me a bit,” he said.
“I’ll ease up when you’re eighty,” I said. “Can’t be too careful when you’re eighty.”
“You mean I’m not eighty yet? You mean, that wasn’t the birthday we had the stuck pig?”
Now he was joking again. He knew—
“That was your seventy-fifth. Your seventy-fifth and don’t remind me about that pig.” Charlotte, I remembered, the pig’s name—and it bugged me how they got it wrong, if they were making a Charlotte’s Web reference. Charlotte was the spider. Wilbur was the pig.
“Why is it so quiet in here? Seems like every time I come in here, there’s some music playing.”
“There was some playing when I fell asleep. It must have played through, already. Luca dropped off a new mix.”
“What’s on it?”
“Songs Sia wrote but didn’t record.”
“She didn’t record them?”
“No, she sold them to other artists for them to sing. Like ‘Pretty Hurts’—did I ever play that one for you? The Beyoncé song?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, here, put the mix in. It’s track one.”
a thing I got to know about Pal that I feel lucky to know, that not everyone who knew him got to know, was that he had a real pop music sensibility
(some people laughed)
he just had really good taste in pop music
(a few people nodded their heads, knowing, but they didn’t know)
(he subscribed to HBO, so we could all watch Lemonade, for instance)
(how I learned about Warsan Shire, the poet)
(whose work Beyoncé reads in all the voice-overs)
(woke something inside of me)
“How’s the old patellar?”
“It’s fine. I’ve got that good medicine.”
“For two more days, then we quit it. That stuff is strong.”
“I hate to mention this, but I peed earlier.”
“You peed, huh? You use your thing?”
“I used it, all right. The worst.”
I stretched to open the big bottom drawer of my desk. Inside it, The Alibaba sat capped, a third filled.
“ ‘The Alibaba.’ Gotta wonder what white person decided to call it that. I mean, the hero of a classic work of Middle Eastern literature, and they go and name a urine receptacle after him? Why not name the urine receptacle after an American? How about a straight, white, cis, American dude? Name the urine receptacle after him—”
“What classic work did they name it after?”
“ ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’ you know, from One Thousand and One Nights. Like, they could have gone with ‘The Gatsby’—I mean, it looks like a cocktail mixer, for crying out loud, a clear cocktail mixer. ‘The Gatsby.’ That would have been genius!” I was nervous-talking, sort of loud. Embarrassed about having to pee in the container all the time, and Pal having to empty it out, and all.
“Well, it’s clear, so the doctors can check real fast and see if you’re hydrated … I think you’re fine, by the way! Ha-ha!”
He looked at me, a corner of his mouth lifting. Something leapt into my throat, jagged like a piece of rubble. I swallowed it back.
“Piece of Doublemint?” Pal asked. He pulled a pack from inside his pocket. “Chew on this, help you get back into rhythm.”
“You want to split one?” My hands shook as I unwrapped the foil.
I ripped it in half just the same. I’d chew the second half later. As I started to smack the first half, Pal instructed, “Go on and chew it slow, now.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, like I just forgot.
“Laid up like this, you’ll have time to think. Some mornings I just lay there and think of my granddaddy, my grandma, my sister, my daddy, my mama, Nell … You could watch your whole life in your mind like it was a movie.”
Or not. Why would I want to watch that?
Pal took the silver wrapper from the gum and folded it into a silver jighead. He put it on the nightstand beside me.
I smacked on the gum.
“Chew slow, remember?” he said.