The Secret Side of Empty (13 page)

I hear the front door slam. I sit on my futon on the floor. I like that I sleep on a futon on the floor. It makes me feel like I could fold it up and carry it away by its handle. Take it somewhere better.

I get a piece of paper and start writing a list.

Towels

Sheets

Hair dryer

What else will I need when I go? It occurs to me that I have no idea what kinds of things one needs to live alone. Or how one goes about living alone. But I know one thing, something I’ve known since I was about fourteen. My days in this place are numbered.

Suddenly I see my mom standing in the doorway. I fight the urge to throw something at her. She comes into the room.

“Monserrat Thalia, I want to tell you something.”

I say nothing.

“Remember I told you I dropped out of high school when I was in my second year?”

I stare at a puff of dust on the ancient baseboard. The model airplane sways softly in her wake. She must have bumped it on the way in.

“My father was sick and he couldn’t work.” By “sick” I know she means alcoholic. “My mother sold vegetables door to door. But it wasn’t enough. So I got a job in the city. It was a good job, in a shoe store. It paid well. I bought us our very first television with my money from that job.” She smiles, looks out the window. I glimpse at her, but turn my eyes away whenever I think there’s a chance she’ll look in my direction. “Even before I met your father.”

She stops for a minute. I can feel her looking at me, but I wish I never had to look at her again. “I know we don’t have much here,” she says. “And I don’t know what will happen to us. But I’m going to tell you one thing. Monse, can you look at me, please?”

When I do, her face looks firm. “I didn’t finish high school, even though I always promised my mother when she was alive that I would go back one day. I didn’t keep that promise. But I promise you this, and this one I
will
keep:
you’re
going to finish high school. And I have a feeling you’re going to do much more than that, too. Can you please remember this? Even when things seem most hopeless, there is always a way out.”

Her self-revelation feels embarrassing, like I just saw her naked or something. I want to say, “That’s stupid and a sorry attempt at a pep talk.”

Instead I say, “I hate when you call me Monse. I especially hate when you call me Monserrat Thalia. It’s a really horrible name. My name is M.T. now. You should call me that.”

“Okay,” she says. “But you have a beautiful name. Your grandmothers were so proud when we named you after both of them.”

“You’d figure you would have checked to see if the two names matched together before naming me that. Or if anyone at all could ever pronounce it in America.”

“It was a way to honor them. We named you for back home, not for here.”

Ugh. She gets nothing. I just shake my head.

“I am going to fix this school thing, M.T.,” she says. When she says it, it sounds like Emme-Tee. And then she leaves.

S
unday morning Nate calls.     “I wanted to tell you I had a really nice time.”     “Me too.”

“And so I know I’m supposed to do this whole masculine mystique thing and two girl days are supposed to be like fifteen boy minutes and I’m supposed to, like, not call you for a week to give you the opportunity to powwow with your girlfriends and ponder the inscrutable question of why guys are the way they are, but I thought instead I’d call you and ask you if you wanted to hang out today.”

“Twice in one weekend? Beware the overeagerness.”

“I’m eager, yeah. It remains to be seen if it’s overly so or not.”

“I’ll have to check my calendar.”

“Oh, good, follow the rules.”

“Okay, I checked.”

“And?”

“Meet you at Summer Park in half an hour?”

“Sounds good.”

I run upstairs and take the world’s fastest shower. I change into a V-neck Maleficent T-shirt, which I like because a) she’s one of my favorite Disney characters, and b) it happens to show off just a smidge of cleavage effortlessly, like you aren’t really meaning to show it, because,
you know
, you’re wearing a
Disney
T-shirt. Record-time mascara and lip gloss, deodorant, shove the leftover gum from Friday in my pocket, deodorant again, and then off I go to the park.

Because he is on wheels, he makes it there before I do. It is an unseasonably warm day, and he’s wearing cargo shorts that reveal some chicken leg action, plus a royal blue golf shirt that makes him look more adorable than ever, if that’s possible.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey.” He hugs me, and I feel the same sparks from the movies, but all over the front of my body. This guy is like electroshock therapy.

“Let’s sit by the swings.”

It’s still early on a Sunday morning, and most people are either at brunch or at church or wherever it is that families go on Sunday morning. Plus, Summer Park is the less busy park in town, so if anyone is out with their kids, they are likely to be at the bigger and newer Coover Park with its giant fake-fossil climbing wall and enough swings to swing a small army. My plot is working perfectly so far.

I sit on the swing and he sits on the one next to me, which is a little lower than mine.

“You got the good one,” he says.

“But my feet barely reach.”

“I’ll push you.”

I haven’t swung on a swing in, like, ten years, but the idea of him pushing me makes me tingly.

“Okay,” I say.

He grabs the chains on the side of the swing, pulls me back, and lets me go. I swing forward, then swing back toward him. I feel his hands, strong, at the bottom of my back, close—oh so close—to my butt when he pushes me. I zip forward faster, higher, the wonderful millisecond of weightlessness and of knowing that I am about to start heading his way and he is going to touch my back. Then forward, higher. Then back toward him. It goes on like this, the dappled sunshine making me squint, the leaves brown on the ground, red and yellow and green and orange on the trees.

“Any minute now I’m going to buy you ice cream and take you home for your nap.”

“You’re silly.”

“More swinging?”

I think he wants to stop pushing. “Nah, I’m good.” I drag my feet to stop the swing. He sits back down next to me.

“So how are your classes so far?” he asks.

“Pretty good.”

“Which one stinks the worst?”

“They’re all an abomination,” I joke. “I don’t mind school, actually. Is that weird?”

He laughs. “A little, yeah. But it’s kinda cool.”

“How about you?”

“I do AP Math. Writing and stuff, not so much. I play tennis on my school’s team. You like to play basketball?”

“What?”

“Basketball? I have a ball in the car.”

“I . . . uh . . .”

“Weird, right? Weird thing to ask a girl on like a . . . whatever this is? I’m sorry. I’m not exactly smooth and . . . I don’t know. Don’t hang out with many girls. I mean, I know lots of girls, you know, but not, like, just at a park, just . . . I’m a little nervous and I thought maybe playing basketball . . .”

“I love basketball.” It’s not exactly true, but it’s not exactly a lie. When I’ve played basketball in gym, I’ve liked it.

“Cool, I’ll go get it,” he says. I don’t have a sports bra on, but I should be fine for a little bit of basketball.

We walk over to the court and start a game of one-on-one.

He dribbles to half-court. “What else do you like to do?”

“I don’t know. I hang out with my friends. Read. Play soccer. Go to the movies. You?” He turns his back to me, and I press the front of my body into his back to try to snatch the ball. His arms are longer but his dribbling is kind of bad. I get it. Take it. Score.

I dribble it to half-court. I dribble right, then left—somehow I pull off a pretty good fake-out—then dribble to just under the basket and do an easy layup. He never touches me while defending. I catch the ball and throw it to him. He takes it to the half-court.

“Well, I . . . what I like to do is I . . .” He tries to turn and dribble, then turn, then the ball hits his sneaker and bounces away. “Damn, hold on.” He gets it and tries again. I press against him to defend again.

“You are definitely fouling me,” he says.

“Am I?”

“Ummm . . . yeah,” he says.

“Take a free throw.”

He stands at the free throw line. He makes like he’s going to shoot. Every time he does, I jump up like I’m going to rebound.

“You are ignoring several key rules,” he says.

He looks
so
nervous. He looks at my face and, for a split second, almost involuntarily, at my chest.

“Yeah?” I say. “Well, I think you’re looking at my chest.” And laugh. There goes my mouth, saying stuff before my brain can figure out if I should.

“I . . . uh . . . I . . . um, I’m sorry. I’m not like some perv or something.”

“Well, that remains to be seen.”

“It’s just that . . . can I say this and then we will stop playing and never speak of it again?”

“Okay.”

“It’s just that they’re really beautiful and I kind of can’t believe and I . . . I guess I’ve never seen any bounce like that.”

“Surely you’ve had gym class with girls before.”

“And I have two sisters. But it’s just that . . . I am really sounding like an idiot here, and you are clearly smart and fun to talk to and I don’t think you’re just an object or anything and I really want to get to know you, but . . . they are so beautiful.”

“Just your standard issue thirty-two Bs.”

“Fascinating and random bit of information. Fascidom? No, doesn’t work as a word combo. Anyway, now that I know your bra size, I feel like our relationship has gone to a new level.”

I laugh and reach my hand out to him and he puts the ball under his other arm. We walk to the bench under the willow, all the way at the end of the park where the lightning bugs light up the little stream when summer first starts.

We sit together, and he puts his arm behind me on the back of the bench. I snuggle into the nook that this makes.

“I’m afraid I am not making a very gentlemanly first impression.”

“Technically this is like your fourth impression, so I think we can start relaxing around each other now. What do you think?”

“I think yes.”

I look at him steadily, and he stops trying to pretend like he’s fascinated by the grass and finally looks at me, too. His eyes are green and I am close enough to see flecks of gold and a little splotch of blue on the left side of his left one. And just on the bridge of his nose, imperceptible unless you’re within kissing distance, a smattering of little freckles.

“You’re . . . you . . . I think you’re pretty cool,” he says. Delaying, I think.

“I think you’re pretty cool, too,” I say.

Finally, he leans in. His bottom lip is bigger than his top, so it grazes me first. He just holds it there, but then slowly he begins to plant kisses on my lips, then, finally, a little more. And although the lightning bugs aren’t there anymore and it’s cheesy to think about fireworks, the air is so special and sparkly and everything stops and is so still that it feels like the air itself is exploding in little bursts of happiness.

For someone who says he hasn’t been with too many girls, he is an amazing kisser. I don’t have that much practice either, unless that whole sixth grade hand-kissing marathon with Chelsea in her princess bathroom counts. But then maybe there is no such thing as good kissers and bad kissers. Maybe there is only finding someone who kisses like you do, and kissing each other, only to then find it breathtakingly good.

O
N
M
ONDAY
MORNING
,
MY
MOTHER
GOES
TO
SCHOOL
WITH
ME
.
She tells me to ask to speak to the principal. I translate her request to the school secretary. The one who usually hands me the tuition late notices.

The secretary goes through a narrow door and closes it. She comes back and says, “Sister Mary Augustus will see you now.”

I’d sorta hoped that she’d be busy.

I haven’t spent much time socializing with Sister Mary Augustus, and this is a good thing. She is a linebacker of a nun, scary and top-heavy, and prone to nosebleeds during assemblies. She focuses mainly on the troublemakers, the girls who sell pot in the locker rooms and walk out of dances with monster-sized hickeys.

My mother and I sit down on the low couch in Sister Mary Augustus’s office. She is about three feet above us, Buddhist lama style. I wonder if we are supposed to crouch and never let our heads get higher than hers.

My mother begins. “I’m sorry to involve my daughter in this, but my English is not very good,” she says in Spanish. She waits for me to translate.

I do it, reluctantly.

“That’s fine. She’s getting to be a young woman, and I think she can hear whatever we need to talk about.”

“It’s about her tuition,” says my mom.