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But it wasn’t just that. Lately, it was physical, too. Her olive skin. Her perfect toes. The way she wore her hair in that modified pixie cut, close and tight around the back, her curls swooping up over her forehead. The sweet curve of her hips and the faint strawberry mark that peeked out like a tattoo from the side of her bikini bottoms.
If she weren’t his best friend, he would have admitted it long ago. Even though he was just moving across town, he felt he had to tell her now. At least then she’d know that all those songs he’d written for “Sarah,” the “girlfriend” who “lived down the beach from his dad in the Keys,” had really been about her.
If only she’d come out to say good-bye, he could say the lines he’d been rehearsing all week.
He sent her one last text. “THEY’RE DONE. GOTTA GO IN 10.”
She responded immediately. “LOOK OUT THE WINDOW.”
And there she was in the chair he’d put out for her, casual, in tight jean shorts crisply folded up just above her knees, sporting her favorite Cowboy Bebop T-shirt. She made a goofy face, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue, briefly, then returned to hunching over the open laptop balanced on her thighs just in time to stop it from falling off.
The future—the future he’d imagined, anyway—flashed in front of Jake. Him moseying out of the house, hands in his pockets, playing it cool. Just as he reaches her, Elena looks up from the computer and something in her eyes says she knows what he’s about to say. That wry grin of hers, capable of communicating both her relish in experience and her ironic commentary on how silly life can be, breaks over her face. And before he can even say, “It’s always been you. I can’t hide it anymore,” she’s up on her tiptoes, her arms stretched out around his neck. A kiss that releases the years of longing between them into the world.
He could almost feel it electrifying his cells already.
The slow walk out of the house was the easy part, even if he could feel his hands nervously shaking in his pockets.
“Hey,” he said, from doorway.
“Hey is for horses,” she said with a wink. And there was that grin, but it didn’t convey the revelation of longing he’d imagined. “Sorry it took me so long.” She patted the six-year-old MacBook that, through the strategic placement of black electrical tape, she’d made look like a monster chomping down on the Apple logo. “Technology. I had to reboot this sucker like five times this morning.”
“Shaun White’s not what he used to be, huh?” Jake said. Shaun White was the name Elena had given the computer.
“Shaun White should have retired years ago.”
“Maybe I can ask Cameron to buy you an upgrade,” Jake said. He meant it, though the idea of actually asking Cameron for anything made him nervous. He’d never spent any time around super-rich people and he wasn’t sure he understood the codes they lived by.
Elena shot him a look that said, Yeah right. “I’d never let you put yourself in that situation.” She focused on the screen for a second and tapped the touch pad a few times. “I mean, he didn’t even come help you pack up.”
“He’s a busy guy.”
“I know. I’m just saying,” she said, protectively defending him.
Elena locked eyes with him for a second, and as her face softened and seemed to reach out to him, he knew she’d seen through to the part of him that was scared about all the change that moving into Cameron’s mansion on the beach would create in his life.
“Come look at what I made you,” she said.
Jake sat in the chair next to her, conscious of her body heat, not getting too close with his elbow or knee for fear of touching her—if he touched her, he’d melt.
“Come on, Jaybird,” she said. “You have to be able to see the screen.” And she threw her arm over his shoulder and mussed his hair, like a buddy, like she was about to give him a noogie. “You ready?”
She adjusted the volume and clicked play on her video-editing program.
First came the music. “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” from Toy Story. Then the delicate, slightly nervous script she always used in her animations.
For Jaybird, it said.
Jake immediately felt the emotions swell in his chest.
The animated characters that always represented the two of them in Elena’s animes—Electra, the tough girl with spiky hair of black flames, heavy kohl eyes, padded, studded leather armor, and jet-flight platform shoes; and Jaybird, tall and skinny with knob knees and a constant bewildered expression on his face—performed a choreographed dance to the music. A backbeat kicked in, and Electra grew larger and larger, her mouth opening until the darkness inside swallowed up the screen.
As Elena’s voice rap-talked over the Toy Story song, stylized freeze-frame images of the two of them floated in and out of the frame—highlights from their years of friendship: the day they raced their bikes all the way to the Seminole monument in the middle of town and then climbed triumphantly to the top and sat on the Native American warrior’s back; the time Jake’s mom took the two of them to Disney World and they spent the whole day pretending they weren’t having as much fun as they really were; the moment when Jake played his guitar in front of an audience for the first time and Elena was right there clapping from the front row. Image after image of the two of them sharing each other’s lives.
The song, or poem, or rap, or whatever Elena was calling the spoken word she’d layered over the images explained what was happening in them. She talked about the day her mom died and the long walk Jake had taken with her, not speaking at all, because what was there to do but be there, a presence by her side, ready when she needed him. She talked about the day he found out his parents were splitting up, how they’d snuck into the recycling center on the west side of town after dark and let out all their rage by shattering bottles against the wall, bottle after bottle after bottle after bottle, until they were giddy, until they’d almost forgotten how sucky the day had been.
“Most boys only want one thing,” she said at one point. “But Jaybird’s different. Jaybird sees the all of me.”
The anime ended with another scrawled fragment of text. Jaybird, don’t you ever change!
Jake was devastated. Not because he was sad but because he was so deeply touched by her work. He stared at the screen, frozen on the final image of the two of them holding hands, and he couldn’t help but wonder if she’d be saying all these things if she knew how much he wanted to be more than friends with her.
“It’s just a rough cut, but … what do you think?” she said, the look on her face betraying a real and desperate need to know he thought it was good.
“I love it,” Jake said, trying to twist his lips into an earnest smile so she’d think he was telling the truth.
Her elegant eyebrows were arched in expectation, her whole face open, waiting.
“Should I post it to AnAmerica? You wouldn’t mind?” AnAmerica was a web forum where Elena and other anime-obsessed kids from all over the country shared their animations with one another.
“Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, you should post it. It’s great.”
But part of him was disappointed, too. No way could he confess his love to her now. Because what if she rejected him? What if she said, Sorry, I love you, man, but I don’t love you like that? Better to be with her, even as friends, than to lose her friendship because he wanted more out of it than she did.
He rubbed his hands back and forth across his jeans, unsure what to do. “It’s time,” he said. He stood, dazed, and picked up his chair.
She flipped her lower lip down, trying to be cute as she made her sad face. When he didn’t respond, she said, “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. I’ve … I just have to lock up the house.” He knew himself. He felt itchy. He had to get away. To go somewhere alone and lick his wounds. “And then I’ve got to go. I’m already late meeting Mom. Can you grab that chair?”
Leaving her computer on the lawn, she swung her chair above her head and carried it inside.
When it was time for them to say good-bye, he awkwardly held open his long arms for a hug. She fell into his chest, squeezing him tight, which was nice, but he couldn’t bring himself to squeeze her back. He was afraid, if he did, that she’d see through him and learn his real feelings. Instead, he patted her chastely on the back.
“Don’t forget us little people,” she said.
“I won’t. I’ll see you soon,” he said. “I’ll call you every day. You’ll see.”
2 (#ulink_6f5debf7-19d9-5131-981e-dcb9cc1907a7)
Even though Jake had said nothing would change, by that afternoon, it felt to Elena as though everything already had.
She was trapped at home—her least favorite place to be. Her sister, Nina, had closed the curtains tight across the half-moon living room window, shutting the house in darkness, and she sprawled in her crater on the plush yellow leather couch in front of the TV, shoveling Cool Ranch Doritos into her mouth. She didn’t move once. She just lay there, watching episode after episode of Storage Wars, which she’d turned up so loud that Elena couldn’t hear herself think, much less focus on editing the animation she’d made for Jake. She’d tried hunkering down in the kitchen. She’d tried locking herself in her bedroom. She’d even tried the bathroom, sitting on the floor with her computer propped on the closed lid of the toilet.
When, finally, Elena tried asking her sister to turn it down, Nina stared, her mouth open just enough to show her disinterest, and said, “I’m pregnant, Elena,” as though that explained anything.
“And I’m trying to work,” Elena responded. “I want to get this anime up on the site tonight.”
Nina shrugged. “So do that, then,” she said. She glared at Elena, challenging her to push the topic. “But I have to keep my feet up, so …” She jutted her chin out like she was putting a period on her statement.
Elena knew how this went. Her sister hadn’t done much of anything but lie on the couch for the past month. She was overweight—by a lot—and being pregnant bloated her more. Her ankles had swelled when she’d hit her second trimester and her doctor had told her she needed to keep her feet elevated as much as possible. In the past month, Nina had done almost nothing but lie in her command center on the couch, her feet propped on one arm, her head lolling on the other. She wore the same pink Juicy Couture sweatsuit almost every day.
And what was Elena supposed to do? Argue with her? Tell her to get some exercise? Remind her that this was her house, too? She was pregnant! Being pregnant trumped everything.
“Fine,” Elena said. She gave in, plopped on the tiled floor in front of the white fake Christmas tree draped in so much silver tinsel that the red balls hanging from it were barely visible, and watched the show with her sister.
Not five minutes later, Nina nudged her on the shoulder with a socked foot and said, “Can you get me a Diet Pepsi? Pretty please?” She smiled with a coy helplessness that was as annoying as the question.
“Nina! I’m not your maid,” Elena said.
Nina rubbed her pregnant belly and readjusted the expression on her face to convey her helplessness with more conviction.
“Okay. But only if you turn it down.”
As Nina made a show of playing with the volume buttons on the remote, Elena hopped off the floor and wiped the tinsel off the butt of her jean shorts. She padded around the couch and up the single step into the kitchen area. She grabbed a can from the fridge and faked throwing it at Nina’s head before handing it to her.
“Should you really be drinking this while you’re pregnant?” Elena asked.
“What’s wrong with you today, anyway?” said Nina, defensively. “You’re all pissy. If you want to do your thing, go over to Jake’s house. You like it better there, anyway.”
“You really don’t know?”
Nina’s face was blank.
“Today was the day. The movers came this morning.”
“Oh!” said Nina. She reached out and squeezed Elena’s shoulder, a quick massage, just enough to convey that she understood how sad this must make her.
“So I can’t go over there.”
“Tell you what,” Nina said. “You take the controls. We’ll watch what you want today.”
Elena appreciated her sister’s gestures toward sympathy and understanding. She knew Nina cared, in her lazy way. But her attempt to comfort her felt more like a burden than a gift. They were just so different. Elena had unending supplies of energy. She liked making stuff, using her imagination to explore her reality and transform it into extravagant cartoons. She liked the sunshine. She liked jangly music played live on the guitar, especially when she was near the ocean and there was maybe a campfire nearby. Her sister just sort of let her life happen to her.
More than anything else, it made her depressed. She hated the thought of being condemned to this house, wasting her life away in front of the TV, shutting down her brain and passively letting the world close in on her.
Of course, she couldn’t tell her sister all this. Instead she said, “I don’t care what we watch. Whatever you want. It’s not like a different show will bring Jake back. Here—” She lobbed the controls back to her sister.
For the next three hours, they sat there, not moving, barely speaking, just staring at the obsessive freaks on the screen as they bid on box after box. Elena felt like a huge metal plate was being pressed down over her head, crushing her, pushing her into the floor. She felt both bored and trapped. She wondered how Nina could live like this all the time.
Then she wondered what was wrong with her that she was so ready to judge her sister—her pregnant sister! Life was just such a disappointment sometimes. Jake would understand how she felt. Jake would know how to make her feel better. But then, if Jake were around she probably wouldn’t be feeling this way. She wouldn’t even be here! She’d be outside somewhere with him, imagining, like they sometimes did, all the ways that, when Nina’s baby was born, the two of them would make sure it had good taste, teaching it about art and music and culture.
Eventually, the familiar sound of her father jangling the spring-loaded clip on which he kept his keys broke the monotony. Elena could hear him futzing with the door before realizing it was already unlocked, and then there he was standing in the room with them, a look of exhaustion and smoldering frustration weighing down his face. His white guayabera shirt was stained with sweat at the armpits and his pleated linen pants had inched under his gut.
He flipped his keys back and forth around his finger, slapping them repeatedly in the palm of his hand, taking in the situation at the house.
“Hola,” he said. “Good to see you’re all doing something constructive with your day.”
With three great strides, he moved to the window and dramatically pulled the curtains open, filling the room with streaming evening sunlight. Elena and Nina shot quick wincing glances at each other, blinking in the suddenly bright light and bracing themselves for what was about to come. He was in a mood. Everybody was in a mood today.
“What’s wrong with you?” Nina said bullishly.
He brushed his hand from the top of his bald head down over his bushy salt-and-pepper mustache, reigning in his thoughts. “What’s wrong with me is, one, I’ve been zipping back and forth from one Super Suds to the other, dealing with all kinds of mierda—Selina locked her keys in her car on the south side and I had to open up for her, then the basement flooded on the west side … uno, dos, tres, quatro. Every single one of my Laundromats had something go wrong today. And then while I’m dealing with all this, what do I get? I get a call from a Mr. Ricardo Colon. You know that name? You should. That’s Matty’s parole officer—”
At the mention of her boyfriend’s name, Nina shot up into a sitting position, ready to fight. “No, no, no, no,” she said, waving her finger at her father. “I’m not his keeper.”
“You see? Why don’t you tell me why this Colon guy called me, hey?”
“I don’t know,” said Nina, defensively.
“Sure you do. Matty missed his appointment. Matty hasn’t been to work. Matty this, Matty that. Matty’s blowing it again.” His voice rose a tick with each new item on his list. “Where is he? He heard me coming and snuck out the back door?”
“He’s not here,” said Nina.
“Oh? We must have run out of food, hey?” Elena’s father shot back.
And then they were both shouting, rapidly, in Spanish. Elena was caught between the two of them, ducking as their words zipped back and forth above her head. She’d so had enough of this. All they ever did was fight, and always about Matty.
God, get me out of here, she thought. But where would she go? She couldn’t flee to Jake. It’s not like she could ride her bike all the way across town and show up at Cameron Pendergrass’s estate, begging to be let in. He’d think, Who’s this crazy Cuban girl and why’s she on my lawn?
Her dad was stalking around the room now, circling Nina. And Nina was wagging her finger all over the place. Elena couldn’t take it anymore.
“Everybody! Shut up for a second!” she said. She leaped to her feet, putting herself physically between them. Turning to them one at a time, she said, “Dad. Matty hasn’t been here all day. I’ve been sitting right here. I would have seen him. And Nina. Dad’s right. You have to get Matty under control. What are you going to do when the baby is born and he disappears for days on end, or shows up drunk in the middle of the night shouting for you to come out and party with him? He’s the father of your child. Tell him to get it together. Jeez.”
She didn’t usually get involved in their fights like this, and the two of them stared at her in surprise for a beat. Then they turned right back to each other and commenced shouting again.
“You people are hopeless!” Elena said.
But neither of them even heard her. They didn’t notice when she slinked out of the room, either. They just kept on yelling. It was almost like they liked the drama.
She padded down the hall to her room, feeling with each step how wrong it was to head in this direction, farther into the house, when she should have been moving in the other direction, out into the crisp night air, toward Jake’s place next door, where they’d find a way to remind each other that laughing about their troubles always made things better. But she couldn’t do that. For the first time since Jake had driven away with his guitar and the duffel bag of clothes in the backseat of his beat-up old Jeep, which they affectionately called the Rumbler, Elena sadly understood how her life would be different without him living next door.
Locking the dead bolt she’d placed on her door, she sparked up her computer, put on her headphones, and checked out the new animations her virtual friends had posted on AnAmerica, hoping they’d be distracting enough to drown out the drama on the other side of the door.
3 (#ulink_a29980db-0d76-51f9-9bc8-7deb27709b42)
Jake had never seen a house quite like this one. It was like something out of a magazine. It had been featured in a magazine, actually. Luxury, it was called. Jake had never heard of it, but the name said everything he needed to know. It was hidden from the street by a solid white gate and the first time Jake had seen the surreally lush lawn he’d wondered how many thousands of dollars Cameron spent every month on landscaping. There were no trees, just this vast flat green space perched above the beach and the house sitting there like a sculpture.
From the outside it looked like a set of blindingly white boxes, each one set off-center from the ones above and below it, like children’s blocks that had been placed precariously on top of one another. Inside, it was a cavernous, flowing open space with different platformed levels connected by brushed concrete stairs that seemed to float free in the air.
The interior was so tasteful that there weren’t any Christmas decorations, not even a wreath. Jake felt like he was in an art gallery, not someplace people lived. But people did live here. He lived here now. It would take some getting used to.
That first night, as he sat at the hand-carved, blond-wood dining table—positioned in just the right off-angle location in the big oblong main room that was, all by itself, larger than his old house across town—he had the strange feeling that he and his mother and Cameron were guests at a five-star restaurant that only served one party a night.
They were served by a waiter with artfully mussed hair and a carefully untucked linen shirt, which he wore over crisp jeans and white no-brand sneakers. He looked casual but brought their duck confit and shaved fennel salad to the table with regimented efficiency. Jake wished Elena were here to see it—he could imagine the arched eyebrow she’d throw his way, the way she’d poke him under the table and slowly twist her silver custard spoon in the air, studying it like a mystifying artifact from an alien civilization until she finally got Jake to chuckle over the pomposity that was surrounding him.
Cameron didn’t seem to notice the waiter was even there. He held court, telling stories about the various adventures he’d had over the years, most of them involving the yacht he owned and small islands in the Caribbean. He was a small guy with big hair, a smaller guy than he seemed like he should be, given how much space he took up. He was the kind of man who never buttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, even when he wore a suit. Throughout the meal, he’d been leaning all over his seat and sprawling into the empty chair next to him, stretching his arms and legs out like he was inviting everyone to take their shoes off and chill.
“So, we looked out from the top of the cliff and Wickman points toward the bay and says, ‘Hey, check it out. Someone’s boat is floating away,’” Cameron was saying now. “And I look, and holy fuck. It’s my boat!”
