1996
Kelly crouched over, a single finger against my lips, her breath humid and sickly sweet from the Sour Patch Kids we’d stolen from the Indian deli down the street. She pressed me down onto the ground of the abandoned overgrown lot next to her family’s home and whispered in my ear.
“You can still smell her cigarette.”
She was right. Above the fresh scent of overturned soil and empty Doritos bags, it lingered heavy around the two of us. If I waited, if I searched for it, I could still smell the smoke from her mother’s Virginia Slim wafting toward us on a breeze that barely tickled the heads of the tall weeds surrounding us. I blinked at her in recognition of the danger we were in, and she flopped her skinny bones next to mine with a distracted huff.
My bare shoulders still flattening the patchy grass of the sloping earth behind me, I turned my head to hers and saw that her eyes were clear and focused on something straight ahead, in the sky. I inched my pinkie finger inside her clenched, clammy fist, and she squeezed it. Digging my jelly sandals into the gravel to lift my hips, I shifted over quietly so that no one could detect us hiding there. To our left, trucks barreled down the road and onto Queens Boulevard, rolling metal doors clanging against iron bumpers. In the distance, we could hear plastic skateboard wheels growing closer as the new kid, Brian, sped down the hill.
“How long you think we’ll have to wait?” I asked. But before Kelly could answer, I heard Brian scrape his skateboard against the sidewalk in an abrupt stop. Through the weeds, we could see him crouch down and squint toward us.
“¿Quién está allí?” he asked. “Who’s there?”
Brian and his mother had been introduced as newcomers during mass one Sunday, having recently arrived in New York from La Paz.
“Shh,” I whispered over Kelly’s body, emphatically shooing him away with my hand. “Go away!”
I could make out the shape of his shoulders shrugging before his skateboard clattered once again against the sidewalk as he sped away. Kelly didn’t move.
I nudged my head closer to hers on the ground and searched the sky to find what Kelly had been watching. It was a plane. Two planes, in fact, crisscrossing the clouds, and from our vantage point, seemed to only narrowly avoid crashing into each other. It was hypnotizing to zero in on the space between the flashing red lights underneath the aircraft, each beat taking longer than the last.
I blinked and refocused my eyes on Kelly’s dry, cracked bottom lip.
“Coming or going?” I asked.
“Coming,” she said. She’d been looking at the other plane, descending into LaGuardia.
“From Cancún,” she said, nodding.
Her older brother had gone there on spring break a few months ago. He was the first person in either of our families who had ever flown somewhere on an actual vacation, besides our fathers. Kelly’s left often to return to family she had never met in Colombia, and mine never looked back when he left for Puerto Rico via Miami when I was three. As far as kids, Patrick was the only one who’d ever had the pleasure of seeing his name printed on a boarding pass except for Timothy, the high school senior who lived in the spare bedroom of Kelly’s house, and from whom we were now hiding.
“How do you know?” I whispered.
I felt her bony shoulder shrug beside me in response.
I turned my attention back toward the plane that had by then nearly disappeared in the distance, and I imagined all the waves in the Atlantic Ocean it would have to cross over to get to Italy, or to France, or to Greece. All countries I’d only run my stubby fingers over on the topographical globe in our elementary school library.
From the shallow grave we dug ourselves to hide inside of in this abandoned Woodside lot, it was hard to imagine tiny little people inside those tin birds, always leaving, always coming. In this neighborhood, people seemed to always be arriving anew or moving away. But never us. No, we had been planted there right from the start on Clement Moore Avenue.
* * *
Her house always smelled of ferrets and melted butter. It was one of the few old, yellow clapboard homes on the street that predated the expansion of Queens Boulevard. When the city widened the road, they dumped the rubble at her grandmother’s doorstep, forcing the family, newly arrived from Cork, to build a steep set of concrete stairs to the new hill paved along Clement Moore, which became home to more and more three-story, red brick apartment buildings.
The steps had become chipped and worn by the generations of Irish, and then Irish Colombian, schoolchildren running up, away, and always back down again. Inside, their sponge of a sea-green carpet hid stains created by animals and kids alike; in addition to the two kids, her mother, Frances, took in every stray, human and nonhuman, she could find. The rolling French pocket doors that separated Kelly’s bedroom from the living room had long ago bounced off their tracks, allowing gray feathers to float from Frances’s living room birdcage and land on the colorful ruana—the sole gift her father had brought her from Colombia—that lay across the foot of Kelly’s bed.
“Some women are like that,” Mami had said once after suffering through a coffee with Frances, straining to hear her over squawking birds. Mami kept her purse clamped shut in her lap the whole time.
“Like what?” I’d asked as we walked back to our one-bedroom apartment down the street.
“Scared to be alone.”
The latest stray to arrive at Casa Morales (Frances kept the name after the divorce) was Timothy. Timothy was a senior on winter break at Monsignor McClancy when his parents kicked him out for getting a blow job from a sophomore girl in their basement. Patrick, who spent a year with Timothy on varsity before enrolling at Baruch, convinced Frances to offer him a room in their house so he could finish out the year and graduate high school.
“He told her it was the Christian thing to do. As if.” Kelly had rolled her eyes when she first explained the new housemate sleeping in their converted old utility closet.
Frances took to Timothy right away, I could tell. She saved him the biggest baked potato, served him iced tea first. He was attractive, but as an eleven-year-old only child to a single mother, the presence of any man, really, was reason enough for excitement.
Timothy had a thick neck that had tanned peach by June, and wore scuffed Timberland boots as if he already knew he was destined to work construction. He had curly brown hair that he kept cropped close in a fade and offset with a sparkling blue stud earring. It was his birthstone, he had told us.
“Virgo,” he’d said. “Like a virgin. Do you know what that means?”
Kelly and I broke into a rendition of Madonna’s song immediately, swinging our neon, Lycra-clad hips and running our hands through our frizzy hair.
He smiled and his healthy pink lips curled at the sides. I would spend hours in the mirror that summer staring at my own pale mauve lips, Herbalife commercials and lead paint contamination PSAs blaring between Ricki Lake segments in the background, wondering if I might be sick or deficient in some kind of vitamin, because mine weren’t the same color.
Sometimes he would sit with us on the shaded back stoop of the house that overlooked a steep, littered valley of freight train tracks that rumbled to life every twelve hours like clockwork, at 2:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. The tracks were separated by a fence along the cracked asphalt of the Moraleses’ driveway, at the end of which sat the sole tree on their property. Timothy had built a swing in woodshop and installed it on one of the tree’s branches to thank Frances for letting him stay at her house. Kelly and I took turns pushing each other on it as high as we could, reaching for the tracks all spring.
Timothy had a harmonica that we thought was stupid.
“Who do you think you are, Blues Traveler?” I asked him once while he played.
He flourished the end of his song with what looked like big, fat, turkey-tail hands flapping against the instrument and strained to widen his green eyes.
Kelly, her bony, narrow thighs and hips too tiny for her hand-me-down shorts, slid in close to sit next to Timothy and rested her hand on his knee.
“Can I try?”
He looked at her and, for a second, I could see that he was nervous. He raised a scarred eyebrow at me briefly, but then quickly flashed that strawberry-pink gum smile at us both.
“Nah, I don’t think so, Kels.” He tugged on her right earlobe and brushed her cheek, freckled by the sun, with the back of his hand.
“It’d be like we were swapping spit,” he had said. “Like we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Kissing or something.”
Kelly took her hand off his jeans.
“You don’t want to kiss me, do you?”
We both erupted in nervous laughter and Kelly screamed, “Gross!” as she leapt up from the pebbled steps, but not before discreetly swiping the harmonica sticking out of his jeans pocket. She shot out across the concrete yard and swung the broken chain-link gate open, and it bounced back on its hinges with a loud whine, as she ran into the empty lot next door. I followed closely behind, not wanting to be left alone with Timothy, and found her in the plot of soil we’d excavated to be our hideout. The dugout, we’d called it, long before we knew all that much about baseball.
She lifted the large, flat rock under which we hid a hand-me-down Spider-Man lunch box full of chica chica cards, matchboxes and loose cigarettes, and a cubic zirconia ring we found on the schoolyard. She popped the lid and tossed Timothy’s harmonica inside with a loud clatter.
“Shh,” I giggled. “He’ll hear it!”
Kelly slid the cover back on and smiled without teeth. Her eyes were just a little too far apart, and sometimes when she had this calm, satisfied look on her face, she looked like a frog that had swallowed a fly.
“Let him.”
* * *
On the third straight day of a New York City heat wave that July, Kelly and I retreated to the cool, damp air of her basement to read the latest installment in my fan fiction saga based on The X-Files.
Kelly flipped the last page closed, revealing dollar signs and zeros; the manuscript was printed on the backs of old medical bills from Mami’s job at St. Vincent’s. The maintenance men always knew to save a box for her to take home before trashing them.
“So,” Kelly said, blowing silky strands of black hair from her face, “the chick is Mulder? Or—”
I snatched it out of her hands.
“Never mind,” I said, rolling it up and shoving it into my back pocket.
“No, no,” Kelly said. “I liked it!”
I tugged at the hem of my shorts, which were already too tight from the beginning of the summer, and sat down. I’d grown several inches taller—and fuller—than Kelly in the last few months.
“Forget it.”
Kelly humored my fan fiction, especially when I wrote her into it, but couldn’t be bothered to watch much television beyond what was on at my house when she came over.
“I’m a liver...
