“So you’re smart.”
Marilyn shrugs.
“And you’ve done your research.”
“I’ve pretty much memorized the Fiske Guide to Colleges…”
“Do you have a copy?”
“I used one from the library, near where I used to live.” Marilyn pauses. “We could go together sometime, if you want? I mean, to a library around here.”
“I’m down,” he says, and they walk into the cool, air-conditioned store. He picks up a basket and heads for the produce section, where he grabs three apples.
“You didn’t even check them,” she says.
“Huh?”
“You have to test them first.”
Marilyn picks up an apple, places it by his ear, and gently presses on the skin with her thumb.
“If you hear a snap, you know it’ll be crispy. If it’s just more of a thud—it’s gonna be a shitty apple.”
He laughs, but tries it.
She lifts her hands into a frame to take a picture of James listening to the apple in the produce aisle. She blinks her eyes at the moment he turns to her.
“I think this one’s good,” he says. And then, “You’re so fucking weird, but I like you.”
Marilyn grins.
* * *
On the way home, James puts in a tape, and Otis Redding begins singing midsong: burning, from wanting you … As he pulls up to a light, he tips his head back, his face softening as if to allow the sound in. After so many nights of listening to his music drifting up to her, seeing him like this disarms Marilyn completely.
“I don’t wanna go home yet,” she says softly as they park outside the apartments on Gramercy.
James hesitates for a moment, but he gets out of the car. Marilyn follows, only to find he’s still holding the driver’s door open.
“Let’s see what you got,” he says.
“Really?”
“Get in!”
Marilyn glances up toward Woody’s apartment and sees the light in Sylvie’s bedroom window is, luckily, still off. She steps in and moves the seat forward, carefully adjusting her mirrors the way she remembers learning in the class. She glances over at James, to find him watching with amusement. He reminds her of where to put her feet—gas and brake—and she pulls off down the street, ever so slowly, and a little shaky at first. She stops at the stop sign several yards too soon. James laughs. But after a few circles around the block, she gets the hang of it, and has to keep herself from pushing the gas pedal all the way to the floor; she wants to fly.
As she carefully parks against the curb and shuts off the ignition, she turns to James. And all at once his hands are in her hair, his wide, dark eyes searing. She feels her heart beating in her throat as he twists her long hair into a ponytail that he uses to gently tug her face toward his. His mouth is on her mouth now, and it’s not a safe kiss, not a gentle one. It’s a hungry kiss, full of a deep need.
He releases her suddenly and runs his fingers along her cheek. “Fuck.”
She’s still breathing quickly, longing for the touch he’s withdrawn.
“You’re my neighbor…” he says. “This is a bad idea.”
Without thinking, Marilyn leans forward, this time placing her mouth on his, her hand on his chest. He puts his hands on her waist, and pulls her closer to him. He turns her, so her back is pressed against the seat, his body pressed against hers.
“You taste like ocean,” he says.
She smiles. “Salty?”
“Not exactly—you taste the way the ocean looks.”
She stares into his eyes. He leans back, away from her, against the other seat. “I’m not trying to get into anything too serious, alright. I’m focused on doing what I gotta do, keeping my grades up, college apps and all that.”
Marilyn ignores the part of her that feels like it’s drowning and wants to grasp onto him. “Yeah, me either,” she says. “I’m counting down the days till I can leave.”
He gets out and opens her door for her before unloading the groceries. They walk up the sidewalk together in silence, until they reach the steps that lead to Woody’s.
“Good night, Miss Mari Mack,” he says, and her stomach flips.
* * *
Marilyn gets in bed that night, her body still humming. She listens for the sound of James’s music, and eventually, hears the first chords of the Fugees’ “Ready or Not.” She imagines he put the song on just for her, that he can picture her hair splayed over the pillow as she stares out at the night, still burning from his touch. A helicopter circles overhead. She gets up to see that the door of her bedroom’s locked.
As Lauryn Hill sings make you want me … she slips back under her sheets and lets her hand move under the elastic waistband of her mesh shorts, the soft worn cotton of her underwear. James was so sure of his movements, as if he was able to read the space of her desire and fill its form perfectly. She can still feel his mouth, his hands … but most of all she can feel the thing he woke up inside of her, her body alive and disorderly and irrevocably hers. As if she were, for the first time, aware of her own presence. As the last notes of the song play, she gasps with release and falls slowly back into the world—the sound of a dog barking, the hum of the helicopter overhead, the day’s heat gone soft with the night, coming in through the window and brushing against her skin.
Marilyn wakes on Saturday morning to the sound of knocking on the metal screen door. She rolls over and reaches for her shorts crumpled by the side of the bed, pushes the tangled hair out of her face.
“Oh!” she says, when she opens the door to find James standing right in front of her.
“Late sleeper?” he asks with a smile.
She glances at the clock and sees it’s already eleven.
“I’m jealous, I’ve been up since seven. You wanna go to the library?”
She looks back at him, distracted by the fact of his body so close to hers. “The library? Sure.”
“… We were gonna work on college stuff, remember?”
“Um. Yeah! Let me just—I’ll just get dressed real quick.”
“Cool. I’ll be downstairs.”
Marilyn had hardly noticed Woody, planted in front of his computer, but when she shuts the door and turns around, she finds him watching her, a deep frown etching itself into his face.
“Sorry,” she says quietly, remembering his admonishment to keep out of sight. Since Sylvie’s already at work at Macy’s, Marilyn gets ready and slips out of the house.
* * *
As soon as they enter the central library—three stories, sprawling, packed with what feels like an infinite number of books—Marilyn’s in her element, soothed by the order, the idea that any information you could need is readily accessible, organized neatly into card catalogs.
She’d spent many evenings in the refuge of the smaller public library in the OC, and had even had a special spot, next to a window looking onto the courtyard where gulls fought over apple cores and other lunch debris left behind. It was there that she’d read the Fiske Guide to Colleges, front to back and back again. At the description of each school—“lovely path-laced campus set amongst trees and lush green hills”; “students are academic and proud of it, even discussing Max Weber at their parties”—she’d close her eyes and imagine herself in the “there” of her possible future.
“So,” Marilyn asks James as they ride the escalator to the top floor, “where are you thinking of going? What do you want in a school?”
“I don’t know,” James answers. “I’ll hopefully get into UCLA.”
“What do you have in the way of extracurriculars and stuff?”
“You playing college counselor?” he teases.
Marilyn blushes. It’s true—she’s eager to show off the knowledge she’s acquired, to help him find his perfect match.
“Sorry,” she says, following him to a table tucked into the corner.
“No, it’s cool. I’m a runner. A sprinter. I placed in state last year, but my numb
ers aren’t enough for a scholarship. I could probably run at a D3 school, but they don’t give money for sports. I do it ’cause I love it—keeps me sane. When I’m running, I don’t have to think of anything.” He looks off. “And, unlike with almost everything else, there’s such an obvious goal.”
“Well, even if you’re not getting a scholarship, it can still look good on your apps. How about your grades?” Marilyn asks, playing the part now.
James frowns at her and lets out a half laugh. “My grades? Isn’t that kinda personal?”
“Well, you know—I’m just trying to see where you’re at.”
“My grades are good.”
“Really good?”
“I’ve gotten straight As since I was a little kid … My mom was big on school. She used to, like, figure out who were the best teachers at my elementary and pester the principal till he put me in their classes.”
Marilyn smiles. “So, I mean, you could probably do even better than UCLA. You could go out of state if you wanted.”
She senses the tension gathering in his body as the words leave her mouth.
“Look. I’ll be the first one in my family to go to college. UCLA would be a huge deal. It would be a success.”
“I know—I didn’t mean that—”
“And tuition is more affordable for residents, obviously. I don’t just, like, have money. My grandparents have already bent over backward to send me to Immaculate Heart, even with the aid we get. I can’t take any more from them next year.”
“But there are scholarships, and loans. You don’t wanna get out of LA?”
James shrugs. “We live in the version of LA that we live in, which is not even the same city as the one in which UCLA exists. You know that as well as I do.”
A long moment of silence passes.
“I will be too,” Marilyn says. “The first in my family to go to school.”
He nods.
“I haven’t talked to my mom about any of it,” she confesses. “I think if it were up to her, I’d stay with her forever. If she even agreed to college, I’m sure she’d want me to go somewhere local, study acting. But I want to—need to—get out of here.”
James stares at her. “Well, you don’t need her permission. You’ll be eighteen,” he says eventually.
“I know,” Marilyn says. “But it’s gonna break her heart. She still thinks I’ll be a famous actress who can buy her a mansion … I mean, maybe I can help her, eventually, after I graduate and get a job, and … it might not be the fame and fortune she imagines, but it would be something…”
“What are you gonna study?”
“Art history, I think … I want to be a photographer.” It’s the first time she’s stated this out loud. Perhaps the likelihood of her actually becoming a photographer, she worries now, is not much more than her mother’s fantasy of her becoming a famous actress.
But James smiles. “Right, the ‘mind-pictures.’”
“It’s probably dumb,” she says. “But, I mean, at least I could work at a museum or a gallery or something if it doesn’t work out.”
“If you know what you want, you have to go for it. You’re lucky. I have no idea.”
“What’s your favorite subject?”
“Right now? History. We’re carrying it with us either way, so it’s nice to at least know what’s on your back.”
“Maybe you could be a history professor or something?”
“Sounds boring, though.” James laughs. “I can’t really imagine myself staying in a classroom forever. I like history ’cause it helps me understand the world we’re living in, which I guess is really what I’m interested in.”
“So maybe you’ll become a journalist? Or write books—have you ever read Joan Didion?”
“Who?”
“Joan Didion. She’s a journalist, kinda—she writes like nonfiction essays and things. They’re amazing. I have one of her books you could borrow? Actually, I wanted to check out another while we’re here.”
“Cool.”
“Are you taking AP US?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
“We should study together,” James says. “We probably have the same reading and stuff. American Pageant?”
“Indeed.” Marilyn smiles.
“Have you done the SAT?” James asks. “I’m taking it on October twenty-fourth.”
“Oh. Cool. Me too. Well, I haven’t signed up yet, but I obviously need to.” Marilyn grows anxious at the thought of it. She needs fifty dollars to register to take the test, but after the failure of her last audition and their return to Woody’s, she hasn’t been able to bring herself to ask Sylvie for the money.
“Maybe we could study for that together too?” she suggests.
“I’m down.”
And so that’s what they do. Marilyn pulls out the vocab flashcards she’s made, and they take turns quizzing each other. She’s impressed by James—after twenty words, he’s missed none.
“Talisman?”
“Lucky charm,” he replies, without a beat.
“Laconic?”
“Brief, like to the point.”
“Covert?”
“Hidden.”
“Abstruse?”
A pause. “Hard to understand,” he says finally. “Like, ‘The inner workings of her mind are abstruse.’”
Marilyn grins. “How do you know all these already?”
James smiles back, playfully smug. “I’ve been studying all summer.”
“Me too, but still!”
After vocab, they move on to grammar, and Marilyn allows herself to show off the tricks she picked up at the free after-school classes she and Tiffany took at Orange High.
Eventually she gets up to find Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the shelves and, upon James’s request, reads the first essay to him: “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” She loses herself in the story, hardly aware of time passing, until she sets down the book and sees the sky paling outside the windows, the underbellies of scattered clouds going pink, the gulls that arrive with evening.
“She’s a dope writer,” James says, and Marilyn senses that he’s been affected by something in the book beyond what he can—or will—express right now.
After she gets a card and checks it out, Marilyn offers to let him take it, but he says, “No, let’s read it together.”
* * *
On the way home, there is the music on the stereo—the Roots singing “You Got Me”—warm air through the windows; the city cast under the sunset sky; streets crowded with liquor stores, bakeries, nail shops, boys riding bicycles, children holding on to the hands of their mothers, men in cowboy hats smoking cigarettes, women in hoop earrings and heels stepping carefully out of cars.
“She’s sharp,” James says abruptly. “Her writing. That’s the word for it.”
“Yes!” Marilyn agrees. “… Those are the sorts of pictures I want to take, the kind of pictures of people she makes with language. Nothing fuzzy or too pretty—I want my pictures to capture that way something can be beautiful because it’s human, even if it’s all botched up.”
As James stops at a light he looks at her. “She can keep her cool even while she gets right into the heat of something. It feels like you’re in good hands—like you can trust her.”
Marilyn feels her fingertips tingling—literally—with the desire to touch him, and tucks them under her thighs to avoid the temptation as James pulls onto Gramercy Place. He parks the car in front of 1814, but doesn’t turn the ignition.
“I guess maybe the idea of UCLA stuck,” he says eventually, “’cause my mom took me to visit the campus when I started first grade. She told me I was gonna go to college when I got older, that I could be whatever I wanted to be … It’s weird, to finally be at this moment—makes me wish she was here to see it.”
Marilyn can feel the heaviness of his words, the way they shift the charge of the air.
“It’s like when she used to loo
k at me, she saw this amazing thing. Sometimes I feel like I’m still clinging to that image of myself in her eyes, but it’s so hazy now. The further away she is, the further away it is, the further away I am.”
He turns away, stares out the window at the purple flowered tree across the street.
“I remember this one time, I got into trouble at school, and she sat me down and told me, ‘You can’t afford mistakes, James. Some people inherit a future, but you’ve got to make your own.’ Even then, as a little kid, I understood what she was getting at … Anyway, I try to keep it tight and be good, so that if she is, somehow, looking down on me, she could be proud.”
“She’s so proud, James. She must be.”
James nods, and it’s like he’s pulling the flood of emotions he’d let loose back into himself. He opens the door to get out of the car, and then turns back to her.
“Thank you,” he says, “for listening.” To Marilyn, those words gleam.
“Let’s study together again next week, yeah?” he asks.
“Yeah.” She smiles, and already the next Saturday cannot come soon enough.
* * *
When Marilyn goes inside, she finds Sylvie on the couch in front of Unsolved Mysteries, a glass of white wine in hand, the open, half-empty bottle beside her.
“Where have you been?” Sylvie asks.
“At the library.”
“Well, you know, Mari, your uncle doesn’t—he’s not really fond of the neighbors, which I didn’t know when James helped us out a while back.”
Marilyn feels stunned into silence. “Why not?” she finally stutters out.
“I don’t know, Woody’s not always a reasonable man, obviously, but we’ll be out of here soon anyway. Until then, it’s just better if he doesn’t see you hanging around with them. James can’t be coming up here and knocking on the door. We’re guests and I don’t want any trouble. Besides, you’ve got other things to focus on. We have another appointment with Ellen this week, and hopefully she’ll arrange for new photos.”
Marilyn clenches her jaw. James is the one good thing about their move here, about anything in her present life. She will not give that up. She will not let her uncle get in the way of that. She forces a swallow. Takes a deep breath and gathers the heat of her anger into a tight ball.