31 December 2015
Mom decided to celebrate New Year’s Eve with her girlfriends at the Hard Rock Casino, leaving the house to me and Charlie with explicit instructions not to throw a party, which we obviously planned to ignore.
We weren’t going to host a rager—just Zooey, a few of Charlie’s friends who were home from college, Audrey, and Diego. I told Audrey she could go to Marcus’s party if she didn’t want to hang out with us, but she said she’d rather eat a flaming cockroach, which seemed a little dramatic. And gross. Marcus had been bragging about his New Year’s Eve bash on SnowFlake all week. He even texted me an invitation, but I never responded.
After I finished moving Mom’s breakables into her bedroom and locking the door, I checked on the snack and alcohol situation. Between Diego’s Christmas gifts and the picture frames for Nana, I’d blown most of my meager savings. Mom had given Charlie her engagement ring, which was a family heirloom, but remodeling the baby’s room meant he was also broke. Hopefully, no one would notice we’d bought the off-brand sodas and chips, no dip, and liquor so bottom shelf it was practically on the floor. Charlie filtered the vodka through our water purifier—a trick he’d learned from his college-going buddies—and paired it with the off-brand sodas that had names like Pop! and Lemony-Lime Fresh. I checked on the cocktail wieners baking in the oven. Those, of course, were nothing more than a family pack of hot dogs cut up and wrapped in croissant dough. The only thing worse would have been if we’d served ramen, and don’t think we didn’t consider it.
“Charlie! Charlie, where are the cups?” I searched cupboards for the stack of red plastic cups I knew we’d bought.
“In here!” Charlie yelled.
Why in the world did Charlie have them? People were going to start showing up in a few minutes, and I still needed to shower. I stomped back to his bedroom. The plastic sheeting was gone, and Charlie stood in the doorway, grinning. “I wanted to finish before everyone arrived.”
“Finish what?”
“The baby’s room.”
“Oh.” Even though I still had a ton to do, I knew he wanted me to ask. “Can I see?”
Charlie nodded, manic and proud. He stood aside and motioned for me to enter. What had once been his bedroom was transformed from a smelly, dreary man cave into a simple, neatly organized room. He’d replaced his lumpy twin bed with a new full-size mattress, added curtains to the windows, and bought a new dresser. They’d settled on painting the walls a soft blue. On the baby’s side of the room, they didn’t have much in the way of furniture, but they’d found a crib, a changing table, and rocking chair.
“Isn’t that Nana’s old rocking chair?”
“Mom got it out of storage.” He was beaming. I wondered how many generations of our family had been rocked in that chair. Around the time my mom was rocking Charlie in it for the first time, light from the star Delta Pavonis was beginning its journey toward Earth. From its point of view, Charlie was still a colicky baby who barely slept for his first few months of life. In the triple-star system 26 Draconis, Mom was the baby and Nana the beautiful woman nursing her.
I walked deeper into the room. A mural of a tree decorated the far wall. Its branches reached high and stretched wide, and under it sat a little girl who resembled both Charlie and Zooey, staring at the stars overhead, a secret smile on her face.
“Your boyfriend did that,” Charlie said.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Whatever.” He smacked my arm playfully. “He says it’s not finished, that he’s got to paint stars on this wall, and the sun on the other side. Zooey knows all the details. It’s supposed to be, like, the turning of a whole day or some shit.”
“Jesus, Charlie, I can’t believe you did all of this.”
“It’s not permanent, you know, but it’s a start.” I stood there admiring the work my brother and Zooey had put into creating a perfect little corner of the universe for their family. My brother wasn’t a kid anymore. I don’t know that anyone is ever ready to have a baby of their own, but Charlie was as prepared as anyone could be.
“Hey, so what do you think of the name Evie?”
“Evie . . .” I said, trying it out. “I like it.”
“Good.”
“Evie Denton.” The more I said it aloud, the more real it felt. She wasn’t the little parasite anymore. She had a room and a mural and a crib to sleep in. She had a name. My niece and goddaughter, Evie Denton.
• • •
It was still an hour until midnight, but I was drunk. No, drunk isn’t the right word for it. I was blitzed. Blitzed and surrounded by the best people in the world.
“I love you, Audrey.” I hung off of her while Diego and Charlie tried to light the cheap firecrackers Charlie had bought from Target as a surprise. Charlie kept trying to light the whole box, and Diego was doing his best to make sure no one blew off their fingers, while Zooey watched from a lawn chair, her belly big and her ankles swollen. “I do. Love you. I was an ass.”
Audrey looked stunning. She’d worn a simple black shift dress that highlighted how beautiful she was. Sometimes I forgot. “I love you too.” I didn’t know if Audrey was drunk, but perspiration beaded her upper lip, and she sipped her vodka and Pop! through a Krazy straw.
A bottle rocket zipped through the air, over Diego’s shoulder, narrowly missing his ear, and exploded with a frantic crack. Charlie’s buddies hooted and crowed. He seemed to have reverted to his teenage self in their presence, but he deserved this time to be dumb—parenthood offers no vacations or sick days. Diego silently begged me for help before telling off my brother for shooting fireworks at his face. I suppose I should have been glad his aim wasn’t as good with a bottle rocket as it was with toast.
“I think I love that guy too.”
“Yeah?” Audrey said. “Does he know?”
“No. Maybe.” Diego wrestled the lighter from my brother and then lit three Roman candles, which sent streamers of blue and red and green sparks into the air. Charlie pumped his fist and hollered. “It doesn’t matter, though. We’re just friends.”
“You’re obviously more than that, Henry. Any idiot can see it.”
I couldn’t look at Diego and not see Jesse. I couldn’t think of the future and not imagine all the ways it could fall apart. Maybe Diego wouldn’t kill himself, but he could end up back in jail or find someone better or move home to Colorado. Only, those weren’t the reasons holding me back. “I don’t think I deserve him.”
Audrey shrugged. “Probably not. But he doesn’t deserve you, either. Maybe that’s why you’re perfect for each other.”
“Do you think it could last?”
“Who cares?”
“I care.”
Audrey sucked up her drink and tossed the empty cup onto the ground. There was no way we were going to be able to hide the fact that we’d had a party from Mom. Fuck it.
“You like bacon, right?” Audrey asked.
“Duh.”
“So, when you’re offered bacon for breakfast, do you refuse because you’re worried about what’s going to happen when it’s gone?”
“No.”
“No!” Audrey smacked me in the chest. “You eat that bacon and you love it because it’s delicious. You don’t fret over whether you’ll ever have bacon again. You just eat the bacon.” Audrey stood in front of me and held my face between her hands. Her expression was so solemn that it was difficult not to laugh. “Eat the bacon, Henry.”
A roar erupted from Charlie and his friends. Audrey and I turned in time to watch a plume of fire and sparks shoot into the air and explode like a supernova. Diego winked at me from across the lawn.
“I’m assuming Diego is the bacon in that analogy.”
“I need another drink.”
• • •
Diego and I stood in my bedroom, the lights off, our arms wrapped around each other. The TV blared in the living room. It was still ten minutes to midnight, but it could have been ten seconds, and I wouldn’t have cared.
The bright moon shone through my window, and I froze Diego’s face in my mind, committing to memory the curves of his cheeks and the scar on his temple and the way he shivered when I touched him.
Diego’s skin pressed against mine as he kissed my lips and my neck, lingering only long enough in one spot to make me want more. This was prolonged euphoria, better than the carrot the sluggers used to turn me into their trained monkey.
“It was my mom.”
I stopped kissing Diego. “Is this really the best time to talk about your mom?”
“She’s the reason I came to live with Viv instead of going home when I got out of juvie.” He spoke so softly that I felt his words vibrate against my skin. I stroked Diego’s hair but didn’t move otherwise. “It was self-defense—even my lawyer said so—but my mom refused to testify against my dad. It was my word against his, and my father had a silver tongue when he wasn’t tweaking. I needed my mom to back me up, but she refused. He’s going to kill her one day, and she chose him over her own son.” His voice broke.
“You don’t have to talk about it.” I tried to imagine being betrayed by my own mother, but I couldn’t. Despite her flaws, my mom was always there for me.
Diego rested his forehead against mine. “I wanted you to know.” He pulled me to him and kissed me as if that might erase his memories of the past. He slid his hands under my shirt and pulled it over my head. I couldn’t unbutton his shirt fast enough. I lost track of time. We were arms and legs and lips, fearless and frenzied.
“Is this all right?” he asked as if I wasn’t the one who’d wrestled him out of his black dress pants. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”
“It’s good,” I murmured, tipsy but not drunk. “Is it okay for you?” I looked into Diego’s eyes, feeling self-conscious now. I’d been poked and prodded by aliens, wandered Calypso without a stitch, but standing in front of Diego was the most naked I’d ever felt.
“Better than okay.”
“Have you ever done it with a guy?” I asked. Diego shook his head. “Not even in juvie?”
“It’s not like that,” he said with a chuckle.
“I have . . . with Jesse. And Marcus.”
Diego laughed. “So much for just being friends.”
“We can stop.”
“I don’t want to. Unless you do.”
“I don’t.”
I led Diego to the bed, and we eased under my sheets, letting instinct and hormones take control. I thought it must’ve been midnight because I heard shouting, but I ignored it. Only Diego and I existed.
My bedroom door burst open. “Henry! Henry, you gotta come quick!”
I scrambled to cover Diego and myself with the sheets. “Jesus Christ, Charlie, we’re fucking busy in here!”
Charlie was crying. I didn’t notice that at first because I was freaking out about my brother walking in while Diego and I were naked and about to have sex. But when I did, I knew something was wrong. “Henry, please. It’s Zooey.”