After we’d finished shopping, we retired to the food court for a couple slices of greasy pizza.
“My God,” Zelda said after her first bite. “It’s every bit as deliciously disgusting as it looks.”
You act like you’ve never eaten mall pizza before, I wrote in my journal.
“I’ve been abroad for the past few years. Not much chance to visit malls.”
Abroad? For real?
“For real,” Zelda confirmed.
All right, I wrote. Be serious with me. Where’d you get all this money?
Zelda feigned shock. “Are you asking me about my finances? How gauche. I refuse to discuss such things sober.” She took a small leather flask out of her purse and poured some of it into her soda. “Coke without rum is like toast without butter—utterly pointless.” She mixed the cocktail around with her straw. “And to answer your question, I am neither rich nor not rich. And the point is moot now anyway.”
Why?
“You know why.”
It took me a second to figure out what she meant.
Because you’re going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge when that phone call comes in.
“Bingo.”
But you agreed not to do that if I applied to college.
“Those were not the terms of our agreement, Parker Santé.” She sipped at her drink, smiling mischievously, and I realized she was right. The deal we’d ended up shaking on wasn’t “I apply to college; you don’t jump.” It was “You spend all your money; I apply to college.” Zelda had taken the whole Golden Gate nosedive thing off the table without my even noticing. And though I still didn’t think she’d actually do it, I didn’t appreciate being tricked. I’d have to keep a close eye on the cash from here on out. By the terms of the deal, she couldn’t disappear on me until we’d spent all the money (“Every cent,” as she’d put it), and I was going to make sure we never did.
“So tell me, Parker, what do you and your friends do next, after you go shopping?”
I don’t have friends. And if I did, we wouldn’t go shopping.
“You don’t have friends? Don’t be silly. Everyone has friends.”
Not really. There are kids I talk to at school, but no one I actually hang out with.
“Then I suppose you’ll have to pretend. Imagine you’re the most popular kid in your whole class, all right? You have friends and girlfriends galore. A jam-packed social calendar. Now, what would you and your vast coterie do after a morning of retail therapy? Remember, I’m looking for the authentic teenage experience here.”
Once again, I had no idea how to answer Zelda’s question, because I wasn’t really living the authentic teenage experience. But then I realized it didn’t matter how I answered, because if she really was this clueless, she wouldn’t know if I was right anyway. I could’ve told her that after a few hours of shopping, most kids liked playing laser tag, or spray-painting the insides of churches, or freestyle walking at the nearest retirement home. So I decided to go with the most romantic thing I could think to do in the middle of the day at a mall.
M-o-v-i-e, I finger spelled.
Zelda’s face lit up. “Of course! Something frightfully bad, I hope. About superheroes, maybe, or young idiots falling in love.” She clapped her hands together in joyful anticipation. “Perfect! Let’s do that!”
I knew she meant Let’s go see a movie, but a part of me heard it differently, as if what she’d really meant was Let’s go fall in love.
WHAT YOU DO AT A MOVIE THEATER
YOU SIT IN THE BACK row. The nearest other people are two rows away: an elderly couple who will spend the entire movie slowly unwrapping hard candies. You have a large bag of popcorn so drenched in butter it smells a little like paint thinner. You have big waxy red cups full of rum and Coke. Your arm rests at your side, not daring to step up to the actual armrest, which is a fraught location not unlike the no-man’s-land that existed between the trenches during World War I. This is the first time you’ve ever been alone in a movie theater with a girl—a critical adolescent milestone, you are well aware—and you’re terrified of screwing it up. When you reach for a particularly juicy kernel of popcorn and find a couple of greasy fingers waiting for you, you pull away so fast she asks if you’re okay. But eventually, you let your elbow creep onto the back portion of the armrest, where it meets another elbow. You wonder if she knows that she is touching your elbow, because it might be that she just hasn’t noticed yet, and the film has started now and it’s sorta funny, so it’s always possible that she’s just not focused on her elbow at the moment. (Because how often are we ever really focused on the sensations in our elbows?) So you move your arm just a little bit—“I’m here!” your elbow announces—but she doesn’t move, which means she must know that your elbow is there, and more importantly, that it is touching her elbow. Of course, you aren’t sure if elbow contact really has any meaning, romantically speaking. Elbow contact could be a form of friend contact, like the way athletes are always smacking each other’s asses, or the way the drama kids at school are always giving each other back massages on the steps in front of the theater. But fortune favors the bold and all that shit, so after twenty minutes or so, you put your whole arm up on the plush pillow of the armrest and let it lie against her arm. There’s no denying this, then. It’s skin against skin. Only a moment later, she moves her arm off the armrest, and the whole world begins to collapse like an imploded building, except then she picks up the tub of popcorn and puts it on the floor, raises the armrest, and nestles herself into your side. There is no hesitation or doubt in her movements, and you wonder how it is she manages to do everything this way, with such extreme confidence. She stays there for the rest of the movie, so close that you’re afraid you’ll dislodge her if you breathe too heavily. Then, as the credits begin to roll, she tilts her head toward you, and you feel her hot breath on your neck, and you think how strange it is that the body runs at 98.6 degrees, day and night, summer and winter, hotter than the city of San Francisco ever gets, the kind of heat that makes people want to take off their clothes and jump in the ocean.
“Take me to a party,” she whispers.
You don’t want to move to get your journal, so you can only stare at her, waiting for elaboration. For the first time, you notice that she smells a little like almonds.
“It’s Friday. Halloween, even. My phone hasn’t rung yet. I want a big party. Can you find me one?”
You nod, because how could you say no to her now? She nestles back into your shoulder.
“Marvelous.”
And that’s what you do at a movie theater.
KILLING TIME, PART 1 (SCHOOL)
I’VE ALWAYS HATED SCHOOL. I know that’s a cliché, and probably a really stupid thing to tell you, of all people, but it’s the truth. I mean, what’s not to hate? I have to get on a bus at an hour of the day that shouldn’t even be allowed to exist, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, and I’m just waking up by the time it’s all over. Between these bookends, a bunch of adults try to get me excited about the things they can only vaguely remember being excited about themselves, and that was years before they were hired to teach those things to roomfuls of kids who were unlikely ever to get excited about them. The only thing I really enjoy is this after-school elective I take called Chess & War, in which we read about chess, read about war, then play chess. Probably the best thing about it is how nobody there cares that I don’t speak. See, usually, people who don’t speak are considered rude. But if someone tries to talk to you while you’re reading, or while you’re thinking over a chess move, they’re the one being rude. I am the least rude person in Chess & War.
After Zelda and I got out of the movie, I told her I’d have to go back to school if I was going to find her a party. She called a car, and we made it to campus just a few minutes into the last class period of the day.
“Here’s my number,” she said, keying it into my phone. “Text me the details when you have them.”
What if your dreaded call comes in before then? I wrote.
She shut the cover of my journal before I could write anything else. “Then you’ll just have to go without me.”
I got my collection of shopping bags out of the trunk, then stood in the drop-off as the car drove away. Though I’d implied to Zelda that it would be a piece of cake to secure a last-minute Halloween party, I wasn’t very confident about my chances. Truth is, I’m not exactly the partying type, and it’s not just because I don’t speak. Even before the accident, I preferred spending time on my own. I think I got that from my dad. He was a crazy-hard worker; when he wasn’t teaching classes or grading papers, he was in his office, trying to write. My mom called him an absentee father, which was sort of a joke, because technically he was home all the time. But in another way, it wasn’t a joke at all, because even when he was around, he wasn’t really there, if you know what I mean. I think maybe he liked the worlds in his head better than the real one. As far as I ever knew, he didn’t have any close friends, and his whole family (other than us) was back in Colombia. Once, when I was about nine or ten, I told him I wasn’t very popular at school. He told me that friends were overrated, because the only person you could ever really count on was yourself. Weirdly, that answer actually made me feel better.
My point is that I learned how to be antisocial at a young age, and that tendency only got worse after I stopped talking. Oh, and then I think I freaked out a lot of people when I got in this big fight in eighth grade and a kid almost ended up dead. (It’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds, but I’m gonna hold off on giving you the details just yet. You’re still getting to know me, and I’d rather not totally poison you against me this early in the game.)
The result of all of this was that, at the time I met Zelda, I really didn’t get out very much. Sure, over the years, I’d been invited to a few Christmas parties and bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras—always the kind of semipublic events where the guest list was about as selective as the hiring process at a KFC—but I almost never went. I knew that nobody really wanted me there, standing around, silent as a monolith, reminding everyone of death and sadness and mental illness. If I was compelled to go (i.e., when my mom got teary-eyed and melodramatic about my “self-imposed isolation”), all I did was stand in the corner and kill time with some cell phone game until I felt I could leave without seeming rude or weird. (Side note: I’ve always liked that phrase, “kill time.” As if time were some kind of evil dragon that needed to be slain. Unfortunately, like everything else in the world, time dies of natural causes, year by year, hour by hour, second by second. It’s a veritable time massacre going on out here.) Dances, I quickly learned, are particularly bad for the speechless. The only way I could ask someone to slow dance involved a whole humiliating mime act. And if you weren’t going to slow dance, there was really no reason to go to a dance at all; everyone knew that the fast songs were only there so you could scope out the geography and choose a target for when the slow jam dropped.
Still, in spite of my utter lack of popularity or plausible social contacts, I would have to make an effort. If I didn’t find a party, I’d probably never see Zelda again, and that thought was enough to make me want to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.
I waited out eighth period and then went to the only plausible party-reconnaissance venue I had: Chess & War.
As Mr. Tower began to describe the best responses to the Queen’s Gambit, I cased the room as if it were a chessboard. As always, there were plenty of pawns—the dorkiest kids from the freshman and sophomore classes, happy to have found a place where they could spend forty-five minutes at a stretch without getting shoved or slammed or dissed. Obviously, they were useless to me. Then there were Danny Wu and Gabrielle Okimoto, the king and queen of the room, who co-captained the chess team and had been responsible for making Chess & War happen. Though they were gods in here, their influence didn’t stretch far beyond the doors, and the only parties they got invited to involved dressing up like characters from the Lord of the Rings. No, what I needed here was a knight—the rare kid capable of jumping the border between the cool and the not-so-cool.
Such a creature did in fact exist, in the form of Alana Rodriguez. Alana was one of those people who had banked up enough social cred by being cute that she could get away with doing dorky shit in her free time. It didn’t hurt that her boyfriend was Tyler Siegel, who fronted the only high school band that anybody cared about (they were called Möbius Stripper). He’d drop her off at Chess & War sometimes—kissing her just outside the door in a full-on, this-is-my-woman sort of way that you couldn’t help but watch—then make some crack like “Hope you don’t find yourself a better boyfriend in there.” It was insulting, but also fair enough.
Alana and I weren’t exactly tight, but we did have something of a bond, being the only Latino kids in the room. She was a few moves away from checkmate when I sat down next to her and a sweaty, aggravated Brian Suchland.
“You want next, Santé?” she asked.
I nodded.
“All right. Just let me finish wasting this bitch.”
“Hey,” Brian said, “I’ve still got a chance.”
“A chance at getting wasted like a bitch,” Alana said.
Though he was only down a pawn, Brian had totally lost control of the board. His bishops were blocked, one of his knights was still undeveloped, and his queen was stuck protecting his king. They were playing timed, of course, but Alana almost never gave more than a few seconds’ thought to her moves. Her clock still had a minute and a half left on it when Brian finally conceded.
“Good game,” he said, putting out a hand.
Alana didn’t take it. “No, it wasn’t,” she said. Then, as he was walking away, “Pinche baboso.”
“What?” Brian asked.
“Nothing.” She smiled sweetly.
I sat down in his still-warm seat.
“Does it smell like losing over there?” Alana said. “I bet it does.”
I need to ask you a favor, I wrote, then spun my journal around so she could read it.
“Yeah? Is it not to wreck your face at this game we’re about to play? Because the answer is no. I am most definitely going to wreck your face at this game we’re about to play.” Suddenly she reached out and grabbed hold of my wrist, pulling it up toward her face. “Hold up, P-Funk. Is this what I think it is?”
She was staring intently at the watch Zelda had just bought me. I nodded.
“I know what these things cost.” She dropped my wrist and pointed at the little pileup of shopping bags just inside the classroom door. “Those are yours too?”
I nodded again.
“So what, you went on a shopping spree in the middle of the day?”
Sorta, I wrote.
“Damn, Santé. Are you Jay-Z or something?”
It’s complicated.
She let out a long whistle as she began to set up the board. “And now, after a hard day of spending money, the big man wants a favor.”
I need a party to go to. Tonight, if it’s possible.
“That’s interesting, see, ’cause I didn’t know you went in for that kind of thing. You always seemed more the lone wolf type.” She put her rook down, held it there a second, then lifted it up again and pointed it at me like a switchblade. “There’s a girl involved, isn’t there?” I shook my head. “A guy, then?” I shook my head again, more emphatically. “So it’s a girl. Nice one, Santé!” She reached out for a fist bump, but when I went to bump her back, she slapped the back of my hand hard enough to sting. “But I’m not bringing you anywhere unless you beat me at this game. That’s called stakes. I’ll even let you go first.”
But I’m black.
“You’re Latino is what you are, son. And that whole white-goes-first bullshit is straight-up racist. Now hurry up and make your move. I’m only putting three minutes up.”
I opened e4, and Alana went Sicilian—her favorite response. She also kept up a nearly nonstop monologue
as we played. “They say that at, like, the highest levels, white wins about fifty-six percent of the time. Can you believe that shit? I mean, we’re looking at a world where white folks win, like, ninety-five percent of the time. At least in chess, we could create a more equitable situation, you know what I’m saying?” Both of my knights were out now, putting their symmetrical pressure on the center of the board. “And what about gender distribution? How many of the pieces up in here are women? I don’t even know what kind of genitals a rook’s rocking, but knights are definitely dudes. Bishops? Dudes. The king? Dude. Pawns could go either way, I guess, though they sorta look like little dicks. All we ladies have for sure is the queen.” Bishops were developed. Kings castled. Alana went right on talking. “Now, I know what you’re thinking: The queen’s the most powerful thing on this board, right? But you see, that’s even worse, because men are always putting us ladies on a pedestal. A woman can’t just be a person, can she? We gotta be some kind of superhero or else we’re nothing at all. Oh, you wanna play it like that?” I’d taken her queen; she took mine back. “See? That’s what I’m saying. First chance you get, you’re taking the only woman off the board. Look at this sausage party we got going on here now. It’s like a boys’ locker room up in this piece.” We traded knights and a pawn. Things were still pretty even in terms of material, but I could feel Alana building up momentum. “Speaking of which, you know what I’ve always thought was weird? Checkers. Because anytime you make it to the other end of the board, you say ‘king me’—’cause God knows you couldn’t say ‘queen me,’ right?—and that means you put another dude on top of your dude. That’s some weird sauce right there. Oh no, P-Funk, you should not have done that.” She was right; I’d let my king and bishop get forked. “So here’s a question for you: Is it harder to lose to a girl than a guy? Do you feel emasculated by my absolute dominance of these sixty-four squares? It’s okay if you do, by the way. I probably would too.” I was on the run now, my pawn structure in utter disarray. Finally I knocked my king over. Alana threw her hands up in the air. “Victory! Mmm, yeah. It tastes so good ! It’s like filet mignon.” She licked the tips of her fingers.