USING SCIENCE AGAINST ME is pretty smart.
Four Observable Facts: He’s perfectly silly. And too optimistic. And too earnest. And pretty good at making me laugh.
“Number one’s too hard,” he says. “Let’s start with question two: Would you like to be famous and how?”
“You first,” I tell him.
“I’d be a famous poet in chief.”
Of course he would. Observable Fact: He’s a hopeless romantic.
“You’d be broke,” I tell him.
“Broke with money but rich with words,” he counters immediately.
“I’m going to vomit right here on the sidewalk.” I say it too loudly and a woman in a suit gives us a wide berth.
“I’ll clean you up,” he says.
Really, he’s too sincere by half. “What does a poet in chief even do?” I ask.
“Offers wise and poetic counsel. I’d be the person world leaders came to with nasty philosophical problems.”
“That you solve by writing them a poem?” The skepticism in my voice cannot be missed.
“Or reading one,” he says, with more unflappable sincerity.
I make some gagging sounds.
He bumps me lightly with his shoulder and then steadies me with his hand on my back. I like the feel of his hand so much that I speed up a little to avoid it.
“You can be cynical all you want, but many a life can be saved by poetry,” he says.
I scour his face for a sign that he’s joking, but no—he really does believe it. Which is sweet. Also stupid. But mostly sweet.
“What about you? What kind of fame do you want?” he asks.
This is an easy one. “I’d be a benevolent dictator.”
He laughs. “Of any particular country?”
“Of the whole world,” I say, and he laughs some more.
“All dictators think they’re benevolent. Even the ones holding machetes.”
“I’m pretty sure those ones know they’re being greedy, murderous bastards.”
“But you wouldn’t be that?” he asks.
“Nope. Pure benevolence from me. I would decide what was good for everyone and do it.”
“But what if what’s good for one person isn’t good for another?”
I shrug. “Can’t please everyone. As my poet in chief, you could comfort the loser with a good poem.”
“Touché,” he says, smiling. He pulls out his phone again and begins thumbing through the questions. I take a quick look at my own phone. For a second I’m surprised by the crack in the screen, until I remember my fall from earlier. What a day I’m having. Again, I’m thinking about multiverses and wondering about the ones where both my phone and headphones are still intact.
There’s a universe where I stayed home and packed like my mom wanted me to. My phone and headphones are fine, but I didn’t meet Daniel.
There’s a universe where I went to school and am safely sitting in English class instead of almost being hit by a car. Again, no Daniel.
In another Daniel-less universe, I did go to USCIS, but I didn’t meet Daniel in the record store, so our chatting didn’t have a chance to delay me. I arrived at the crosswalk before the BMW driver showed up, and there was no near-miss accident. My phone and headphones remain intact.
Of course, there is an infinite number of these universes, including one where I did meet Daniel but he wasn’t able to save me at the crosswalk, and more than just my phone and headphones are broken.
I sigh and check the distance to Attorney Fitzgerald’s office. Twelve more blocks. I wonder how much it will cost to fix my screen. But then, maybe I won’t need to get it fixed. I’ll probably need to get a new phone in Jamaica.
Daniel interrupts my thoughts, and I’m kind of grateful. I don’t want to think about anything having to do with leaving.
“All right,” he says. “Let’s move on to number seven. What’s your secret hunch about how you’ll die?”
“Statistically speaking, a black woman living in the United States is most likely to die at the age of seventy-eight from heart disease.”
We come to another crosswalk and he tugs me back from standing too close to the edge. His gesture and my response are so familiar, like we’ve done it many times before. He pinches my jacket at the elbow and tugs just slightly. I back up toward him and indulge his protectiveness.
“So the heart’s gonna get you, then?” he asks. I forget for a moment that we’re talking about death.
“Most likely,” I say. “What about you?”
“Murder. Gas station or liquor store or someplace like that. Some guy with a gun will be robbing the place. I’ll try to be a hero but do something stupid like knock over the soda can pyramid, and that’ll freak robber guy out, and what would’ve been your average stick-’em-up will turn into a bloodbath. News at eleven.”
I laugh at him. “So you’re going to die an incompetent hero?”
“I’m going to die trying,” he says, and we laugh together.
We cross the street. “This way,” I tell him when he starts heading straight instead of right. “We need to go over to Eighth.”
He pivots and grins at me like we’re on an epic adventure.
“Hang on,” he says, shrugging out of his jacket. It seems weirdly intimate to watch as he takes it off, so I watch two very old, very cranky guys argue over a single cab a few feet from us. There are at least three other free cabs in the immediate vicinity.
Observable Fact: People aren’t logical.
“Will this fit in your backpack?” he asks, holding the jacket out to me. I know he’s not asking me to wear it, like I’m his girlfriend or something. Still, carrying his jacket strikes me as even more intimate than watching him take it off.
“Are you sure?” I ask. “It’ll get wrinkled.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he says. He guides me off to the side so we’re not blocking the other pedestrians, and suddenly we’re standing pretty close. I don’t remember noticing his shoulders before. Were they this broad a second ago? I pull my eyes away from his chest and up to his face, but that’s not any better for my equilibrium. His eyes are even clearer and browner in the sunlight. They are kind of beautiful.
I slip my backpack off my shoulder and place it squarely between us so he has to back up a little.
He folds the jacket neatly and puts it inside.
His shirt is a crisp white, and the red tie stands out even more without his jacket on. I wonder what he looks like in regular clothes, and what regular clothes are for him. No doubt jeans and a T-shirt—the uniform of all American boys everywhere.
Is it the same for Jamaican boys?
My mood turns somber at the thought. I don’t want to start over again. It was hard enough when we first moved to America. I don’t want to have to learn the rituals and customs of a new high school. New friends. New cliques. New dress codes. New hangouts.
I scoot around him and start walking. “Asian American men are most likely to die of cancer,” I say.
He frowns and double-steps to catch up. “Really? I don’t like that. What kind?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We should probably find out,” he says.
He says we as if there’s some future of us together where our respective mortalities will matter to each other.
“You really think you’ll die of heart disease?” he asks. “Not something more epic?”
“Who cares about epic? Dead is dead.”
He just stares at me, waiting for an answer. “Okay,” I say. “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this. I secretly think I’m going to drown.”
“Like in the open ocean, saving someone’s life or something?”
“In the deep end of a hotel pool,” I say.
He stops walking and pulls me off to the side again. A more considerate pedestrian there’s never been. Most people just stop in the middle of the sidewalk. “Wait,” he says. “You can’t swim?”
I shrink my head down into my jacket. “No.”
His eyes are searching my face and he’s laughing at me without actually laughing. “But you’re Jamaican. You grew up surrounded by water.”
“Island heritage notwithstanding, I can’t swim.”
I can tell he wants to make fun of me, but he resists. “I’ll teach you,” he says.
“When?”
“Someday. Soon. Could you swim when you lived in Jamaica?” he asks.
“Yup, but then we got here, and instead of the ocean they had pools. I don’t like chlorine.”
“You know they have saltwater pools now.”
“That ship has sailed,” I say.
Now he does make fun of me. “What’s your ship called? Girl Who Grew Up on an Island, Which Is a Thing Surrounded on All Sides by Water, Can’t Swim? Because that would be a good name.”
I laugh and thump him on the shoulder. He grabs my hand and holds my fingers. I try not to wish he could make good on his promise to teach me to swim.