CHAPTER 1 - EMILE

Prior to my permanent arrival, we spoke in our respective tongues. Filled with youthful malleability and the corresponding inability to say anything truly worth saying, he would speak in the learned manner of this country and I replied in our mother's speech. Dancing across the water. Balanced. I have no siblings and neither does he, and so we connected and separated instinctively. Once I came to visit while it was snowing. I was unused to the dry, frigid air, burning my lungs and expelled as smoke. It was my first time seeing the sky turn white. I watched him make angels in the ground and gleefully copied him.

"Here, try this."

He gestured at the lid of some plastic tub he had stolen from my aunt's closet, and we laughed and screamed all the way down, and then trudged back up and did it all over again. And then it was over. His sister, in the aggregate, for but a few months. The last time he came to see me I had not yet learned all the particulars of English and still found it comfortable to engage in our arrangement, but now we stood on the same ground. Used the same idioms. Spoke our minds improvisationally, fluidly, not in some constructed childish pantomime. We observed the disparate reality of our thoughts for the very first time.

His stature, too, had changed. He stood unusually upright, scapula retracted, some pinned butterfly or disciplined ballerina. A body no longer in some androgynous state, but imbued with first wisps of virility. The round of the shoulder separated from the arm. The triangle of his back extended up into his neck. I watched his eyes flick up and down women on the beach, impulsively, and I felt a mother's disappointment. For in seeing him age so rapidly I understood how young he was, how young we were. This ageless entity, with whom I had entertained an abstract correspondence for so long, now revealed to be nothing but a boy.

The tide peeled back as our shadows lengthened. The tip of his nose and feet started to burn a mild pink, my darker complexion still unscathed. He gestured towards the surf and started to run. I followed. The sand near the waterline was firm and cold and ridged in patterns like the roof of a mouth. We ran without speaking and for moments it felt right. I tried to trip him and he kicked sand back at me. Then the water came up over my ankles and I felt nothing like a child. I understood that he felt it too because he slowed to a walk and then stopped and stood there with his hands on his hips breathing hard, looking out at the horizon with an expression I will call, for lack of a better word, embarrassed. We walked back without discussing it. The sun was a wound on the water and then it wasn't, and the beach repopulated with the long blue shadows of things.

***

We drove in the morning, as the fog covered the estuary. Blasting music loudly in the battered minivan that had been to hell and back and back again, odd stains and an odder smell evidence of a vehicle for maturation. The bass shook something in the dashboard loose, some plastic panel rattling at just the wrong frequency. Emile's mother sang along with mine, and I watched the smiles on their faces from the backseat through the rearview mirror. Neither could sing, but still, a kind of harmony. My aunt in isolation always seemed so severe, but here the severity had nowhere to sit. Her face rearranged itself around the singing, creased and contorted as they volleyed the music of their youth. She was always the firebrand to my mother's apathy. Older and angrier perhaps? Or younger and resentful? Unsure who was born first. But watching them now you could see it, some old current that ran between them, volatile and familiar.

Once, in Caracas, they were stuck in traffic. Traffic was a dull constancy in the city, perhaps not now, but then, when people had things to do and the city was alive with expectation. Old roads constricting, a plastic band cutting into the green flesh of a growing sapling. They wound through the valley like stacked ribbons, motorcycles needling through the threadwork, vendors walking the median with cases of Polar, ten different radios bleeding into each other through open windows, diesel and heat rising off the asphalt. My father's face was flush with indignation. He held his mother's countenance—round, almost gentle—and had never forgiven it, the softness betraying him now, twisting into something that recalled nothing so much as a whining baby.

"What the fuck are you doing...? Get the fuck over towards the exit! You're going to miss the exit... I can't possibly be late because of some insolent bitch that doesn't know how to drive."

My mother placed a hand on his knee and said his name once, quietly, the way you speak to something that might bite. He kept going. His voice had that recursion to it, looping back over the same grievance, tightening. A slap connected. My aunt merged over to the side of the overpass. Eight lanes. Semi trucks blaring, commuters honking. Left him there, briefcase and all.

The marsh returned in pieces through the window. Emile had his head against the glass, I could see the side of his face in the reflection, transparent, superimposed over the passing green, a boy made briefly of swamp and tempered soda-lime. His mother was driving now. Mine had her feet on the dashboard, sandals off, toes curling and uncurling absently, thinking without speech. Then Orlando assembled itself. Not suddenly, but in accumulation. The way a headache builds. Billboards, then strips of strip malls: Wendy's. Walgreens. Wawa. Everything the same flat height, as if the land itself refused it.

The apartment complex had a name that contained the word "gardens." A wide black pond lay opposite the H blocks. The parking lot was full of vehicles in various states of negotiation with functionality. My uncle's truck sat in the same spot it had occupied for months now, pooling dark fluid onto the asphalt. Inside, the nightly compression. Six people in two bedrooms and a living room that was also a bedroom, the couch a site of territorial dispute between my uncle and whatever guest had arrived most recently. For now it was Emile and his mother on the pull-out, toe to head in an approximation of privacy. For the moment he had won, his wiry frame leaning forward as he twirled the TV remote. Tomás's eyes were glassy. Betrayed nothing. He had a way of lingering in spaces before he entered them, testing the waters, under the security of doorways. The raised furrow of tissue on his palm, pink against brown. My grandmother was in the kitchen. She was always in the kitchen. Not cooking always but stationed there, presiding over the room the way a body presides over its own breathing, and she spoke to Emile now rapidly in a Spanish that belonged to a different era and he responded in attempts, circling around words, his accent perfect but the vocabulary mapped like complexities onto a child's pictures, and the bathroom was occupied, it was always occupied, and I waited in the hallway that was not a hallway but a passage between the kitchen and the bedrooms narrow enough that two people could not pass without one turning sideways without one body acknowledging the other's right to space, walls thin enough to hear everything and thick enough to pretend you couldn't, the crowd noise swelling, my uncle's single exhalation, a goal or a near miss both producing the same response the same slow release of air, and I waited, the air conditioner shuddering, cooling the apartment the way aspirin addresses a fever not by solving anything but by creating a local exception a temporary and unconvincing argument against the heat, and somewhere a faucet running, and the smell of something reheated, and Emile laughing at something on the screen, and my grandmother saying something I half-heard, and the pull-out mattress springs when someone shifted, and outside Orlando continuing.

***

Yaneth was my mother's cousin or my aunt's friend or both or neither. She worked at Universal five days a week and had for nine years, Yaneth, whose hands were extraordinary, raw and cracked and enormous on a woman her size, hands that had scrubbed the artifice clean so that children could believe in dinosaurs. She's the reason we could go.

The parking structure swallowed the van in dull white fluorescence. Negative brightness. Transition. We ascended the helix, passing cartoon index. Section Astrid. Section Bumblebee, in pale yellow. Finally we reached the top—it must've been busy—and the fluorescence gave way to the heat of the day and a shine that implied humidity even with the windows shut and at once I felt a kind of dread. I swallowed it. We walked across the hot concrete toward the gates. Emile beside me. Our mothers behind us. We descended and skated across those mechanical walkways, turning and moonwalking as we shuffled within the crowd. Showman. My aunt smiled, slightly.

Brief intermission through security theatre, and then the interior city folded out in front of us. It was enormous. Blue sky cut into shapes by rooflines and facades, and the mist nozzles caught the light so that for a moment everything in front of us appeared to be gently dissolving. Emile said something I didn't hear. The colours were impossible, the reds and yellows of things that want to be seen, aposematic, and the music came from no identifiable source, not a direction but a weather, a wash. I hated how beautiful it was. How well constructed it felt. The crowd dissipated into packs, circular cells splitting into arterial paths, into shops, restaurants.

A boy, about four, in a Real Madrid jersey ran the wrong way through the crowd, shin guards on for no reason, and his father trailed behind with a metal water bottle and no apparent intention of catching him. The boy stopped at some threshold only he could see and turned and waited, bouncing on his toes, and when his father caught up the boy grabbed the water and drank with his whole face, water running down his chin and darkening his collar. He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and said something and his father bent down and the boy said it again, closer, into his ear, like a secret or a threat, and his father straightened and shook his head and the boy pulled at the hem of his shirt once and then gave up with a completeness that seemed practiced. They stood there for a moment in that strange ceasefire. The boy's hair was a glittering, healthy brown with red in places and his face was round, inflated, he was beautiful and reminded me of Emile. I told him as much. He glared at me.

We separated from our mothers by the unspoken agreement of teenagers, the mutual understanding that the alternative was a specific kind of death. We had decided on Islands of Adventure earlier, something about the promise of water, of being soaked and cooled and temporarily absolved of the heat. We beelined to the disability office. I delivered my prepared speech. Urinary In-Con-tin-ence. The woman behind the counter looked at me the way a teacher looks at a student who has just asked to go to the bathroom for the third time in an hour. She didn't believe me. I could feel Emile behind me, his silence loud with the effort of suppression. She asked me what exactly the condition prevented me from doing and I said it, plainly, looking at a spot just left of her face, that I could not stand in line for long periods of time without the possibility of an accident, and the word accident hung there between us, absurd and clinical, and she stamped something and handed me an orange card and neither of us looked at the other.

The card entitled us to a time, not a line. We blitzed the park with ruthless efficiency. Mathematically traversing from node to node in an attempt to maximize all that Emile's mother had given us. Granola sequestered in our pockets, our pemmican and hardtack, we bounced between all the shorter rides as we waited.

"I want to leave."

The line wound through a constructed environment, some interior meant to resemble a laboratory or a government facility, the walls dressed with props and screens that displayed information about the fictional crisis we were about to participate in with cheerful imperative. Around us families stood in the patient daze of people who had agreed to wait as a form of leisure, and they stared at us as we sauntered through the roped sections.

"Leaving what?" with concern. "The park?"

"No. All of it."

He looked at me with a kind of bemused tolerance. I hadn't seen his father in a while, but it seemed like the genesis of such an expression. European patronization.

"Where would you go?"

"I dunno. Somewhere with hills."

He laughed. He didn't understand it but he laughed, which was generous, which was Emile, always generous. I watched him look around the fake laboratory with genuine curiosity and I understood that our positions could not be reconciled.

Finally, Hulk. We had heard it all throughout the park, the carts launched with a synthetic roar followed by the very real screams of bodies twisted and twirled through space. We arrived at the maw of the beast and the older lady looked at my card and smiled us through, and for a moment I felt a pang at my deception. The trudge up was endless, even the accelerated line was filled with enough people that had my condition been legitimate there would have been strain, my guilt acquitted. We got closer to the track where packs of bodies were herded into the slaughterhouse, and I felt legitimately excited and I felt Emile's excitement around me but also a touch of unease, and then finally we got to the line and they shipped off a pack right before us which put us in the very front of the first cart and I felt lucky but also mortified, for I had never been first. Emile took it in stride. They locked us down. Green bars ratcheting onto my lap, and it felt so very claustrophobic and I almost wished it wasn't there, to trust in the momentum to keep me in my seat like a children's science experiment. We shifted back for a barely perceptible moment as the brake disengaged and then HULK SMASH and I was accelerated into nothingness like a particle in an adult's science experiment and I thought of the first house I had lived in with my uncle and his ex-wife and how they were fused back together despite, and now because of, a previous fission and the predictable explosion and the texture of screams all around me, Emile had attempted a stoic brace beforehand but he folded so quickly it was its own kind of whiplash, and I heard his voice break a little and it made me laugh but of course he didnt have the energy for a glare in the face of this blinding light, my uncle's son never had energy for glares he was all pout and who could blame him, my uncles other son beyond pout as he had dared to love, but my fathers face was all pout and I missed and longed for him and click click click and we ratcheted upwards briefly in some false suspense but it was relentless and we plummeted back down again and I wanted to feel his embrace again to feel the compression of his arms against my skin and to turn off my brain and feel safe and secure and bank right and emile screamed, a legitimate scream of joy, the kind that empties you and I was envious, jealous beyond belief, and we corkscrewed and I felt my spine compress and I felt nothing like a child and I felt nothing like his child and the track straightened and the brakes came on in a long mechanical exhale and it was over and it was not enough and emile was laughing and shaking and alive and I was too but differently

CHAPTER 2

He had left, and the world had vacuumed itself back up into quotidian, and I was bored beyond belief. It was quiet enough to notice a slight ringing in my ears.

I stared at the time on my screen. The colon flashing. The secondhand revolves around its silver center pin and I think of orbits, how we rotate each other too, and around each other, and around ourselves. Our little labor of living, circling a hollow gourd of circumstance.

Tomás put his hand on my shoulder and before I could turn he was already in front of me, in the kitchen. He took out a paring knife, which felt a little overkill, and began to peel an orange into a continuous spiral. We were alone, together. Or really more alone, separately. He handed me the peel the way you hand a child a balloon animal and frowned slightly at the blank of my face. He had two girls about my age, somewhere, in Colombia I think.

I watched him separate the cloves with a sort of practiced machinicity. First halves, then quarters of three, then tearing them off one by one and gushing the tiny droplets of orange between his teeth. He spat out a seed into the sink and it made a cartoonish plop, and he looked at me again, expectantly. He had the quality of someone who always had a remark, a sly aside, but had transcended this juvenile wit and had instead moved onto something more gestural, impressionistic.

"How's your schoolwork going?"

I shrugged, and he laughed, a deep laugh, like he had managed to resonate it through all of his wiry frame, and then shut it off, and shrugged back.

"You sit like her." Said almost to himself, not really to me, as he tilted his head slightly, doggishly. "Kind of—"

The kitchen's cold light caught the film of his pupils as his head turned back upright.

"Kind of like your mom. Presiding."

I remembered my mother crying as she showed me a photo of a jackal lit against the dark, those same eyes I saw now that glittered with impregnable reflection. Stimulant was cheap in the south. Cheap and fleeting.

I had overheard them talking once, her and my aunt, both drunk, their shadows warped and twinned— he had roamed Medellín in a pack of strays. Sleeping, shoulder to shoulder, in a house that felt like the bottom of those ships that carried people from the Ivory Coast across the Atlantic. The coughing and piss and pestilence. Open flames. The chemistry of some organic with a carbonate, to make it stronger, even more fleeting. The glass clouds a sickly yellow. A paste cut with petrol and ground brick. He got into a kind of argument. A man stabbed him straight through the hand with an improvised blade, splitting tender nerve and tendon. Grasp refused to cooperate. They took him to the hospital and then to a kind of rehab and by some miracle my aunt had willed him here, to us, where he stood now handing me sections of orange. He looked at me expectantly, like I knew none of this. Nothing of the void of his silhouette.

"You reading something for school?"

I nodded.

"Good. Good." He separated a section and held it out to me. I took it. "Your grandfather, before he left, he kept books everywhere. Stacks of them. It was confusing, because he didn't seem like the type, but he did. Your grandmother hated the mess. He would make us read before bed, even if it was just a page of something. I don't think your mom remembers that. She was too small."

He paused and went to grab another orange, the whole ritual starting over.

"I wanted to be an engineer for a while. When I was about your age."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I just liked math. I liked that you could—" He shrugged. "Verify things."

He turned on the water and scrubbed the knife gently, and then moved to the other dishes, whistling loudly in that same impossible resonance.

***

My mother opened the door and the apartment filled with a humid exhalation. Her body limped with a posture of exhaustion but her face immediately brightened so much when she saw us that it inspired a sort of inadequacy. Tomás was already moving, he sprinted over to her and they started speaking rapidly. He was talking over her and she was talking over him and the familiar texture of the noise enveloped me in a kind of warmth. She dropped a paint-speckled bag on her shoulders down to the floor in a fluid motion and began to untie paint-speckled shoes and it struck me at once how she recalled a baby with spilled milk on his bib, a muted beige. Some had dried in the little fine hairs on her arms and caught the kitchen's light strangely, like she had been dusted with something. She smelled like nothing. Flat wet plastic. Acrylic sheen, trapping moisture.

She said something about the ladder, how high, and my uncle's face broke into something I hadn't seen earlier, either performance or reality or maybe just the past, something stupid, a wide grin. Saying something I half caught, hands in the air, comparing his younger sister to some tiny speckled bird quaking on her nest, and she swatted him and said she was serious, that it was scary, but he was already laughing but this time thinner and lighter and she was trying not to but gave in and the two frequencies lay right on top of one another.

Something in her frame had compacted. She stood more the way Tomás stood, planted, and kept flexing her hands open and closed like she was trying to get them back.

He was so affected by his work it was almost redundant on him: greasy knuckles, searching gaze. Now, in the perennial search for employment, he did more than just autos – air conditioners and heaters, welding and machining – but I always remembered staying in his old shop for the day. I gazed up at these hoisted creatures of rubber and steel, propelled by a sweet-tasting magic.

They stationed me by the toolbox and I fetched for the boys in a combination between a nurse and an infantryman. The surgeon general would treat me to a cup of fresh orange juice for my day's labour. Then, the true commanding officer would arrive and I would be relieved of my position with the understanding of a far more dangerous mission awaiting us at home.

Seeing them clearly now was too much. I went to bed.

***

I carved my face sculpturally. Contouring shadow into the hollow of my cheek, the sides of my nose, injecting luminance atop the turn of the malar, on my browbone, my chin. Lining hooded eyes in stages. Lining lips fluidly. I was applying invisibility. Permission to fade into the setpiece. I worked at the outdoor outlets, a behemoth of a strip mall but a strip mall nonetheless. For Burberry. The store was effectively a billboard, an advertisement, anyone who could legitimately afford to shop there would go to the real store and it was too expensive for most tourists or those looking for a bargain. Most of our patronage then, was internationals for whom every American experience was a novelty. Without my armor I marked myself conspicuously as a person, a whole person, who worked in a store and folded displays, not some stony, marble entity.

In the first week I had worked there, still awkwardly shadowing in a virtually empty store, a man had come in. People came in curious, like searching ants, wicking around for food, and determining a lack of value, doubling back through the way they came. Occasionally groups of teenagers, collecting in packs, laughing and shouting as we pretended to look at them disapprovingly. The worst was young mothers, kids pulling things off displays faster than correction. This man was different though, and I felt him steal glances at me as he performed the customary circuit. Then he left, and came back again, a few hours later, and I felt him searching, searching for me. The day turned done, navy sky, and I had a terrible sensation that there he would be, still searching, in the back lot where I had parked. Behind the store near the loading dock. Waiting to steal another look. I walked out the front of the store with a rehearsed calm and then accelerated into a run, still uniformed, until I had crossed the street and called my mother pleading for her to answer as it rang once, twice, and she answered and understood and picked me up an hour later and we exchanged a terrible look and embraced and drove on home.

I had 15 minutes all to myself. I exited the stage through the rear. Along the side of the building there were others from different stores taking their own time. Most of them smoking. I was jealous of their ritual. A little prop, an excuse, permission to stare wistfully and be outside and do nothing for a moment. I relaxed slightly and hated it. Edges of exhaustion in the arches of my feet, my back. Fourteen. Thirteen. A rare breeze rolled a can over by my feet and I fought the urge to kick it as hard as I could down the road. Eight. The asphalt reflected back the earlier heat of the day, and it was almost nice, for a moment. Two. One. I put my steel back on.

I opened the oven door, and defying all reason, climbed inside. Despite the white exterior, the upholstery was dark and hungry. I reclined the seat and flicked on the radio for the noise. Tagline that was still 90s 2000s and Now. Seek Track. Generic R&B. Seek Track. Mexicans. Seek Track. Then the little display said something like "Easy Listening" and I gave up my search because that felt sufficient, and sat back up in my seat and gripped the wheel with some kind of resolve. I threw it in reverse and almost backed straight into a sedan. It bleated at me in complaint. I waved in a sort of apology or surrender, and turned off my Easy Listening, head ringing, feeling the road the rest of the way.

The walls of the apartment bathed in shimmering blue. Tomás had fallen asleep with the TV on, watching some sort of earthly documentary. Smooth British English washed over me as I took inventory. My grandma must've been back, sleeping with my mother in her room, her shoes having joined the other pairs by the door. She rotated in a kind of transience between households, vagabonding, spending a week here or there, raising the family's children. Recently I had sat down with her and we charted bus routes to familiar places, the grocery store, the library perhaps, but without a car or language or her own income, she remained confined to this internal network. The documentary cut to something underwater and the whole room shifted darker, and I was somewhere else. The house she had lived in felt mythological even at the time. 30 minutes outside of Maracay, you could call it jungle. Terracotta tiles and baby blue walls against the uncomfortably saturated green of the forest. All five of her children grown and gone, living with her sister, Darcia, who I watched construct decadence out of nothing. Pineapple pie. Shoulder stew. They were a mischievous pair, the two of them, but now one was here and the other there and that was that. I entered my room.

***

Chiqui was to pick me up at 5. I hadn't seen them in forever, the whole group, not since the summer, when we hopped the low fences of new complejos and passed around an evil cartridge of Chinese origin, observing whatever lake or structure. He was shorter than me, impressively, and drove a loud low car. But it fit him, or he fit it. As soon as I saw him within it I understood each as extension of the other.

He arrived with the windows open, blaring music I knew he didn't listen to to embarrass me, and

"okayokayokay listen listen so you know how Ive been telling you that I started working this new job with javier you remember javier right my fathers friend, bro javiers an electrician and my father is like well youre not going to college so youre going to work with javier have a little bit of a trade whatever and I dont mind cause like javiers cool I think he makes decent money but I get there and im just his— im nothing bro im his lackey I barely learn a thing he just has me do all the shit he doesnt want to do, running wires through conduit going through crawl spaces and shit"

"Like a little pet rat"

"Oh shut the fuck up but yes literally yes im like a little rat and every two weeks I get my little block of cheese and thats— thats my life bro thats where im at Ive got an uncle who moved to Michigan or whatever which was kinda random I think it was for a girl or something like her dad is sick and hes tryna get me to come up but michigan is fucking far bro I dunno what id be doing over there"

We swerved around a corner and then merged through the cloverleaf onto the interstate.

"And then oh no wait wait wait you dont know the business about emma so basically ive been seeing this girl emma shes from like tallahassee or whatever kinda southern I dont really— I mean we get along we got along just fine or we did until recently, she had invited me to her house and her father just kinda looked at me you know that look but you know how I am I just kept cracking jokes to lighten the mood but his face got darker and darker and I couldnt— bro I couldnt help it I just laughed more and more, and now were texting less her replies are getting shorter and shorter but its whatever cause Marissa texted me the other day and I think shes over things so were gonna go out a little bit we'll see"

"Where the hell do you find these people"

"Nah thats just how it is thats just life, anyway Santis excited to see you"

"Santi's always a little too excited to see me. You know he asked me out again the other day over text, its like Santi Ive known you for five years at this point, you know its not going to happen"

"Yeah but hes just— you know how the kid is hes a dreamer hes hopeful I think he enrolled at Valencia for the spring same as you, hes in person though says he cant do any more online school cant focus for shit I dont get how you do it"

"I dont its awful to be honest but I dont know, I dont think I'd want to commute to work and then school at the same time. Valencia's kinda far from me, I think Santi lives a little bit closer nowadays, moved in with his mom"

"Yeah he said he could take the bus if he wanted to its only like a few minutes save on the parking permit oh shit—"

A minivan with a 30A sticker cut us off and Chiqui blared the horn for what felt like a minute straight.

"I dont know why Santi wanted to go here so bad man its so expensive and for what im not tryna spend like 30 bucks to throw balls around"

"I know you love throwing balls around"

We opened the door and the smell hit us first, pizza grease and children's feet and the faint hint of ammonia with no real effect. Mari ran over and hugged me and I hugged her back with all the strength I could muster, like a sailor's wife, and then we peeled back and I caught Santi's eyes behind her and he waved at me with a stupid grin.

40 dollars divided 4 ways for an hour at a lane, the lady at the checkout couldn't understand Chiqui and so I had to help, explaining that yes indeed we were here to bowl and that we all needed rental shoes and that he was a size 6 men's.

The alley had a little tablet with a camera where you could upload a little icon to hover over your frames. Chiqui made a face and Mari threw up a peace sign and shifted ¾ like she always did and Santi stared right into the camera with a genuine seriousness and I was taking my own photo when Chiqui poked me in the side forcing a yelp and so my image lay in motion, smeared across the glass.

Santi picked up a ball coloured like the sun from the storage rack. Walked up to the line, shoulder sagging, like it was a little too heavy for him, and then walked back a couple of paces and accelerated his throw with one long step. Gutter Ball. He looked back at us and we all clapped politely, mockingly. Chiqui grabbed a great plastic dinosaur with a ramp embedded within it to guide his aim, adjusting his sights and firing the cannon to great effect. The display offered an absurdly congratulatory animation for his spare as he beat his chest.

"They're both completely the same, aren't they"

"I don't think I'd ever want them to change"

It was Mari's turn and she stared at the alley for a long while like she could read the patterns of oil on the surface like tea leaves, to guide her intuition, and she let it go with a fluid motion and turned before it hit, seemingly indifferent, and we heard the clatter of the pins that sounded like compressed applause and the lanes next to us clattered with their own applause and I didn't want it to end.

I selected the lightest ball possible, colored light blue, like Neptune, aiming to throw it with all I could and I stood behind the line feet planted in a T, like the stance before you kick something and I shifted my weight into Neptune. He spun round his own axis while flying in that line and caught some edge of the lubricant and started to meander into some sort of arc and he hits the pins, not all of them, but enough and I waited for my Neptune to return from the sea, through the conveyer onto the rack and I waved goodbye to him again, and ended with a score of 10 and that was acceptable.

Mari sat beside me and we watched the boys argue over something on the screen. She had her legs folded beneath her, shoes off already, the rental pair discarded like something she'd outgrown in the span of an hour. She smelled like cocoa butter and dryer sheets.

Mari had discovered a tiny rip in the leather of her bowling shoe and was working her pinky finger into it with an almost surgical focus, widening it, pulling at the foam underneath in little tufts that she arranged on the table between us like a miniature landscape. She did this without looking. She was watching a woman three lanes over who bowled with a strange, two-handed underhand technique, knees almost touching, launching the ball from between her legs with a ferocity that seemed inversely proportional to its speed. The ball would crawl down the lane with this agonizing patience and then connect and somehow scatter everything.

"I want to be her when I grow up."

"You want to bowl like a frog."

"I want to bowl like a frog and I want to not care. Look at her she's not even watching it hit. She just knows." She pulled another tuft of foam and placed it carefully, a tree or a hill. "I think I'm going to stop shaving."

"Okay."

"Not like a statement. I just want to see what happens. Like as an experiment."

"You're going to look like Chiqui."

"God willing."

I must've let myself slip away somewhere for a moment, eyes defocused, as Mari hit me with the dreaded interjection—

"You good?"

I nodded. She accepted this, as usual, without suspicion but filing it somewhere accessible.

Santi was trying to demonstrate something to Chiqui involving his wrist and the angle of release and Chiqui was pretending to listen while texting somebody on his phone. Someone had ordered mozzarella sticks that arrived surprisingly warm, and I ate them carefully, in timed intervals. The fluorescent light above our lane flickered at a subliminal frequency, enough to induce a slight nausea. The whole building hummed with a low electrical drone beneath the music and the crashing pins and the beeping of arcade machines, and the roar of children all of it forming a kind of white noise that was peaceful in its totality, quiet city.

Chiqui threw a strike and screamed and Santi tackled him and Mari filmed it on her phone, already laughing, and I was laughing too. The pins reset in formation. The screen played its animation. Something in the overhead speaker changed to a song I half recognized from my mother's car and for a moment the two contexts overlapped.

***

She spoke to us first in English, then in Spanish, and finally Chiqui, having made her laugh, forced a few phrases in beautiful Italian. The place was small and didn't try. Fluorescent beer signs in the window, menus on a single sheet, the kind of laminate you could wipe down with anything. Eurovision electronica mixed in with someone's nonna. The owner's voice carried from somewhere behind the kitchen in rapid Italian that made our Spanish sound slow. Our waiter was about our age, and she had that thing in her sneakers where the heel was crushed flat from being slipped on too many times, and she moved between tables like someone navigating a current, practiced and slightly annoyed. Chiqui and Santi were preoccupied with some sort of co-op game on their phones as we pleaded with them to please keep their strategic callouts to themselves, but the restaurant was loud anyway, no matter.

Mari and I looked at each other, something about her expression had braced into a kind of anticipation. Corners of her mouth turning down not into a frown but still, creating a tautness. Intentionally, she would never otherwise. I prompted her, put my hand on top of hers.

"I dont think I can do it anymore. Its just too much. Between my mother and work and everything, my grades are slipping and the school is expensive, so expensive. Its like I have a little— have a little baby I havent slept and—"

I reached over and hugged her and the boys looked over and didn't understand but, thankfully, kept to their own screaming quiet.

"My mom keeps asking me when I'm going to finish. Like finish finish. And I want to say, I don't even know what that means anymore. She says it like I'm almost there, like I just need to push, but I've been. That's all I've been doing. I don't remember not pushing. And she's tired too, I can hear it, so I just say soon. I say soon mom. And she believes me or she pretends to—" She said this looking at the salt shaker, adjusting it like a chess piece, nudging it a centimeter to the left. Chiqui's phone erupted with some synthetic explosion and Santi swore and the moment absorbed it without breaking. I thought of my own mother's hands, how exhaustion on her looked like something weathered and ancient and still standing, and I wanted to say something to Mari about endurance or time or the particular cruelty of being asked to be grateful for the opportunity to be crushed but I couldn't find it. "You're not pushing," I said. "You're treading water. That's different. That keeps you alive." Mari looked at me. Not too unkindly. She squeezed my hand and the waiter arrived balancing plates up the length of her arm with a precision that bordered on contempt for gravity.

The food arrived and we must've all been hungry as we ate quickly, and in silence. We took slices in a natural rhythm, unconsciously. Splitting the field until Mari tapped out, then me, then Chiqui.

We paid and the night air felt like velvet across my face. Cold and heavy. We lingered in the parking lot for far too long, like none of us could work up the courage to say goodbye, but Santi got a call from his mother, asking where he was, and so I hopped in Chiqui's car and he drove me back, without a word.

***

The store was in stasis, a group of animals who had fallen asleep in a cold snap and the sun rose on our frozen bodies. In other places I had worked, dullness was filled in with drama at the very least, but here the floor had been structured to split the staff from one another. The other man was named James, mid-fifties, pudgy and gay. The latter worked in his favor — the pitch of his voice, his vocabulary, signaled something customers trusted. He spoke on the phone in a different voice entirely, gruff and southern. 

A boy walked in and the door fluttered. James thawed and moseyed over and delivered the line. The boy stammered in accented speech that had the color and shape of my own and I spoke to him in Spanish from across the store. Venezuelan, no? He laughed, and James looked up at me and transferred his warmth so that I could come alive.

He sauntered over. Pretty eyes. He launched into a legato speech, each word extending as he thought of the next.

“I'm looking for a gift for my mother, she turns fifty in a bit, like a week I suppose, she's always saying something about how I don't have any taste and so I figured I'd get her something from here, something foreign, sophisticated.”

Sophisticated. I clicked my tongue once and led him to the scarves.

I pulled one from the display, an emblem of a sun and four horses. It felt like nothing through my fingers. “I love this one. Feels kind of regal?” He held it at his side and looked at it a moment. She would want something larger, he said, and led me, almost by hand, to the trench coats, their form defying climate. He picked one out bleached a stark white that cost more than dreamt, and held it at arm's length before setting it down.

I brought him to the checkout and folded the thick canvas across itself, pressing the air slowly out of the fabric. He paid with a metallic tap in one fluid motion

“Would you like me to put it in a gift box?”

He had a case from somewhere else, he said, that seemed like it would fit the occasion. Then he paused, and walked back to the scarves, and stood before them a moment, and plucked out the one with the horses and the sun and set it on the counter alongside the other. 

“This one as well, as a gift”

The till's count was impossible. Enough to buy sleep. I asked for the name. He looked at the small metallic tag on my shirt and said it slowly.

I asked if he'd like to enclose a message and he took the pen, and bent over the card, and I watched his hand, the way the pen lifted between each digit and returned, the small gap of white between one number and the next, the slight drag of the nib on the card's surface, the ink still wet when he straightened and set the pen down, the card lying on the glass between us, the column of numbers very neat, the last one no different from the first.

He left in a flurry. I stood there with the scarf in my hands, the horses and the sun against my palms, the cold of the store resuming around me.

James came over, half genuine, and asked if I was to call him, which I would, and if I thought him cute, which I did, and ended it with just try to not let it get away from you, and I hoped I knew what it was but declined to ask.

***