“Maybe you understand now why he’s convinced your mother is dead. If he believed she was alive, he’d have to admit she chose not to come back to him all these years.”
I snapped to attention. “So you think she could be alive?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “What else do you know about my mother?”
Coop helped himself to yet another slice of lasagna. “Hence talks sometimes. He tells me things.”
“What things?” I could hear my voice rising with impatience. It hurt to think Cooper might know things about my own mother that I didn’t.
“All kinds of things. Some would maybe be more useful to you than others….”
“It’s all useful. You’ve got to tell me everything. You don’t understand.” I could hear that I sounded a little bit unhinged, but I kept going. “Until I got here, I hardly knew anything about my own mother. My father kept everything important from me.” Barely realizing what I was doing, I reached over to squeeze Coop’s arm, as if to keep him from running away. He looked up from his plate, and I let go.
For a long moment, we sat in silence, until Coop finally got up to rinse his plate. “I don’t know what time Hence is coming home. I don’t want him walking in on us while we’re having this conversation.”
So I held back my questions until we were finally up in my mother’s apartment, sitting on her blue plaid love seat. “Now tell me everything you know.”
“First you have to swear not to let Hence know I’ve told you any of this.”
“I swear.”
So Coop told me about how sometimes Hence would wake him up when he couldn’t sleep and needed someone to talk to. The conversation always went pretty much the same: Hence would start out lamenting how my mother had betrayed him, how she’d bought into society’s expectations that a rich girl had to go to an Ivy League school and marry into wealth. He’d thought she was above all that conventional bullshit, but he’d been wrong.
“That’s seriously messed up,” I said. “She wasn’t a snob. My dad isn’t remotely rich.”
“The way Hence sees it, that’s what must have happened. Why else would she marry your father?”
“Because he’s not insane.” I grabbed a throw pillow and squashed it against my stomach. “Keep going.”
Hence would drink as he talked, getting angrier and angrier. Once he’d lost it completely and punched a hole in the apartment wall. Most nights, though, his rage would give way to sadness, and he’d talk about how beautiful and brave my mother had been, how fiercely she’d protected the people she loved. How she was brilliant and talented, how blue her eyes were, and how she’d saved his life by taking him into her father’s club. (Was that the corniest thing I’d ever heard or the most beautiful? I wasn’t sure.) Once, after a lot of whiskey, he’d even said he didn’t understand how my mother could have married some eggheaded college professor when she and Hence shared a single soul.
“Whoa,” I interrupted. “He said that?”
“Maybe not those exact words. But something that over-the-top. I know he comes off as a cynic. But after hearing him go on and on about your mother, I think the Hence most of the world knows is really made out of… I don’t know… scar tissue. All tough and gnarly to cover up the hurt.”
I made a face. “He’s gnarly, all right. Oh, God—am I going to have to like Hence now? I’m not sure I can.” I gave my mother’s throw pillow a punch. “So I’m guessing he doesn’t have a girlfriend?”
Coop grabbed the pillow from me and tossed it onto the bed. “He has girlfriends. Or maybe you’d call them groupies. Women who hang around him at the club. He never brings them up here, and I don’t think it ever gets serious. I imagine it’s pretty much just sex.”
I couldn’t help grimacing in the face of too much information.
“You want the whole story, right?”
“I’m pretty creeped out right now. But don’t stop. I need to know everything. Please.” You’re the only person I’ve got on my side, I thought.
Coop went on with the story, telling me about Hence’s marriage to Nina Bevilaqua, the woman I’d seen on the Infamous Groupies website. Despite the fact that Hence barely even liked her, they’d eloped after Mom had sent him her wedding picture to show him she’d moved on.
“Are you serious? He married her for revenge?”
Coop’s cheeks glowed red. “He’s made some mistakes.”
“Um, yeah. Why do you stand up for him?” I could feel myself on the verge of getting carried away with my own argument the way I sometimes do, but I kept going, trying to wrestle Coop’s loyalty out of Hence’s hands and into mine. “I know he was a great rock star once upon a time….”
“Not exactly a rock star. Riptide only had the one hit.”
“And now all he is is some guy who owns a nightclub.”
“Who completely shapes the New York music scene. Hence has broken more acts than you can imagine. And he’s serious about the music. He’s a genius.”
“He’s a stalker.”
Coop winced. “Not technically.”
“I don’t get it. You’re just his employee. He doesn’t even treat you all that well.”
“He’s been good to me. When I got to the city, I didn’t have a place to stay, and I was running out of money fast. He took me in. Gave me work. He’s been teaching me about the music industry….”
“Oh! You’re hoping he’ll help make you a star?” I recalled the guitar leaning against Coop’s cot.
“He’s mentoring me. He’s always doing that—finding promising musicians, helping them develop their talent.”
“You’re a promising musician?” Why did everyone seem to have a special talent but me?
“Hence seems to think so,” Coop said, blushing again. “I just know I have to try.”
“What does it feel like?” I asked. “Knowing what you want?”
He laughed. “You’re the most determined person I’ve ever met. You tell me.”
“I’m not. This thing with my mother is different.” But I couldn’t help wondering if Coop was seeing some part of me that I couldn’t see. “It doesn’t count.”
“Of course it counts,” he insisted.
After that, we shared an awkward moment, with him wiping his hands on his jeans and me not knowing what to say.
“Would you play your guitar for me?” I asked, in part to break the silence and in part because I was curious.
But something in his eyes stopped me short. He looked startled, even shocked. It took me a few seconds to realize he wasn’t reacting to my question, but to something he’d heard: the elevator creaking up to the fifth floor and coming to a stop outside the apartment door.
It could only be Hence. He knocked on the door once, twice. I froze, not sure what to do next. The look on Coop’s face told me he’d been caught doing something that would displease his boss. Would Hence realize Cooper had been giving his secrets away? Would Coop lose his job over me?
“I know you’re home,” Hence growled on the other side of the door. “I’m looking for Cooper. Open up or I’ll break the door in.”
I looked at Coop for a sense of what he wanted me to do.
“Open it,” he said in a resigned voice.
I unlocked the door, and Hence looked past me into the room. His gaze came to rest on the love seat, where Cooper sat upright, his position oddly stiff. “What is this?”
“We were talking,” Cooper said quietly.
“He was telling me about the New York club scene,” I lied.
But Hence wasn’t worried about his secrets. “In her bedroom?” he demanded of Cooper. “You know how this looks, the two of you alone up here at midnight? I don’t pay you to sneak around with girls, and especially not with her.” He pointed at me like I was Exhibit A.
“I’m not on the clock. This is my free time,” Cooper said, which struck me as way beside the point.
“We weren’t sneaking around,” I protested. “Hooking up with him is the last thing on my mind.?
?? I gestured toward Cooper and saw the expression on his face, like he’d been slapped. Too late, I realized how mean that last part must have sounded, even though it was the truth: I hadn’t been thinking about hooking up with Cooper. We’d only just met. And I did have other things on my mind.
But Hence had barged in on our conversation, sneering down at us, acting morally superior. Once again I was struck by the strangeness of it all. How had my mother ever loved someone so horrible? With his pathetic wall of ancient photos, who was he to judge me, anyway?
So many thoughts were colliding in my head that all I could do was sputter and fume as Cooper stomped off past me and Hence hurried behind him out the door. I heard yelling from the floor below mine, and a slamming door. Then, for a long time, silence.
Catherine
After Hence and I kissed, the world seemed to stand between us, keeping us apart. As usual, I would hang around the club after school, pretending to do homework but completely unable to concentrate, and sometimes our eyes would meet, but with Dad or Q or the bartenders around, that would be it. I was starting to think I’d imagined the other day, that I’d invented the current in the air between us ever since. Then, one afternoon when nobody was looking, Hence passed me in the hallway and pressed a tightly folded note into my hand. I waited until I was alone in the elevator to read it, my heart fluttering: CHRISTOPHER PARK, 4:15 PM TOMORROW.
As a meet-up spot, Christopher Park wasn’t foolproof. As far as I knew, none of Q’s friends lived near there, so he was unlikely to be passing through, but anybody from Idlewild Prep could wander by and see me. I disguised myself in sunglasses and a trench coat and stood as deep in the park as I could get, leaning against the wrought-iron fence near the garden. At 4:17 he showed up, coatless, rumpled, and breathless, and we stood there for a moment, shy and unsure of what to do next.
He broke the silence. “I’m so glad you’re here. I wanted to be alone with you again… but I didn’t know where or how.” Then, before I could think or speak, he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. A heartbeat later he was kissing me, the park around us—the people walking their dogs, two shrieking toddlers chasing a red rubber ball—all evaporating into mist.
We didn’t have long together. Hence was on his break, and if he was late getting back Q would hear about it and get suspicious. “Tomorrow?” he asked. “Same time, same place?”
I nodded. After he’d hurried off toward the subway, I lingered on a park bench, savoring the tingle on my lips—the only sign that our kisses had really happened, that I hadn’t simply imagined them.
A few days later, I took Jackie aside in homeroom. “I need your help. Hence and I have been meeting at Christopher Park, and yesterday two of Q’s friends from high school passed right by us. If they had seen us, it would’ve been the end.” I had told Jackie about the promise Q had extracted from me, but I’d left out his comment about Hence not being white because I knew how much it would hurt her feelings, and because I was embarrassed my brother was such a cretin.
“But Christopher Park is so public. Why are you meeting there?”
“Where else could we meet? Q will catch us. It’s just a matter of time. One of his friends, or one of these people”—I made a sweeping gesture at the room full of our classmates—“will see us and start gossiping. Hence could lose his job and his home, and it would be all my fault.”
Jackie jiggled her foot like she knew there must be more to my request.
“But if I could meet him at your house, it would be so much safer. Your mom will be at work, and—”
“At my house?” Jackie sounded exasperated. “You mean you want the three of us to sit around together and do what? Watch TV? You, your boyfriend, and Jackie the third wheel? Are you going to make out in front of me?”
I inhaled sharply for courage. “You wouldn’t have to watch us.” When Jackie started to protest, I grabbed her hand in both of mine. “Shhh! People will hear.”
Jackie lowered her voice to a hiss. “They’ll hear that you want to use my bedroom—”
“Your guest room.”
“Wherever. To make out with your boyfriend.” A moment later, almost in disbelief, she added, “You’re going to have sex with him.”
“Since when are you so judgmental? We’re in love, Jack. This is totally it.”
“What if you get pregnant?”
“We’ll be careful.”
“What if my mom comes home early? She does that sometimes, you know.”
“We’ll climb down the fire escape. Listen, Jack. I’d do it for you.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.” Jackie straightened in her seat and stared at the blackboard. I knew she was thinking of all the things I’d done for her. Helping her spy on Q when we were little and he was still her Prince Charming. Standing up for her when the girls at school made fun of her less-than-stylish shoes. Not to mention being her best friend when she was the new girl at school.
Just then, Mrs. Farley started taking attendance.
“Think about it,” I whispered. “That’s all I ask. I promise I won’t change.” I added the last part because I knew Jackie. She wasn’t worried about my getting pregnant or her mother coming home early. Or maybe she was, but she was more worried because I was moving ahead, starting a new phase of my life, and she wasn’t there yet. She was worried my feelings for Hence would change our friendship.
Jackie shot me a narrow-eyed look and folded her hands in the perfect imitation of a prim schoolmarm. We didn’t talk to each other again until lunch, when I was relieved to see her sitting at our usual table. I slipped in beside her. “Want my cookie?”
“You can’t buy me with oatmeal raisin,” Jackie grumbled, but something in her voice told me she was about to give in.
“It’s chocolate chip,” I said, giving her side a gentle you-can’t-stay-mad-at-me poke.
“Sometimes I hate you.”
“But mostly you love me.” I threw my arms around her and squeezed. “Is that the new perfume your mom bought you? Très, très chic. I like it.”
“Quit buttering me up.” But Jackie was hugging me back. That’s how I knew for certain she was on our side.
When I reached the front steps of Jackie’s town house, Hence was already there, wearing a shirt I’d never seen before, a crisp white button-down that looked gorgeous against his skin. He still didn’t have a jacket on, and when he took my hand, his touch, usually so warm, was ice cold. Without a word—not even a hello to Hence—Jackie unlocked her front door and flung it open for us to go in first. “Why do I feel like a pimp?” she muttered under her breath as I passed her.
“Shhh,” I whispered in her ear. “You’re Cupid.”
I led Hence up two flights of stairs to the sunny guest room, with its itchy plaid bedspread. It smelled like potpourri and lemon Pledge.
Hence stood in the middle of the room, looking to me to make the first move, I guess. I clicked the door gently shut behind us.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Jackie will warn us if her mother comes home early, but she hardly ever does.” I went over to him and took both his hands in mine. “You’re so cold,” I said. “Were you waiting long?”
Hence nodded. We’d both been waiting—whole agonizing days—for a chance to be alone together. Still, we hesitated, unsure how to begin. In Jackie’s room, just under ours, the stereo switched on, playing death metal—a kind of music Jackie didn’t even like. Well, if she thought she could ruin the mood for us, she was wrong. I smiled up at Hence apologetically, and that was the moment he chose to kiss me, his lips softer than soft and tasting of the cold afternoon air.
“You don’t have to feel like a pimp,” I reported to Jackie after Hence had left for The Underground. “All we did was kiss. He didn’t even try to touch me.” I sat beside Jackie on the bottom bunk of her bed, where we’d once built pillow forts and I’d helped her write love letters to my brother, where she’d made me laugh so hard I’d fallen off the top bunk and needed stitches in
my head.
“Humph.” Jackie scooted over to make room. The heavy metal had been replaced with the Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy”—probably a commentary on me, come to think of it.
“Nice music,” I said. “Much better than before.”
Jackie humphed again.
I sang softly in her ear. “I drive you crazy, ooh, ooh, like no one else, ooh, ooh.” Then I sprang to my feet and did a little dance to make her laugh, which it did. I yanked her to her feet, and we did the moves we’d perfected in middle school, and that’s how Mrs. Gray found us, giggling and doing the Safety Dance and the Electric Boogaloo till our sides were sore.
For the next few days, Hence and I met at Jackie’s guest room hideaway. Hence had only an hour-long break each afternoon, and he had to get back and forth from The Underground, which left us with forty minutes alone together. Even so, he was late getting back to work once, and Dad gave him a friendly talking-to and a warning that it had better not happen again.
At night, as I tried to fall asleep, I swear I felt actual pain at being away from Hence, especially knowing he was just five floors away, missing me, too. But being alone together for that little chunk of time each weekday was like heaven, even if the guest room door didn’t lock and we could hear Jackie’s clever musical commentary wafting up from the floor below. “Like a Virgin.” “Keep Your Hands to Yourself.” “Another One Bites the Dust.” When Jackie fired up that last one, I couldn’t help myself; I burst into giggles, and couldn’t bring myself to explain to Hence why I was laughing.