The Truth of Right Now Page 9

  “No mustard?”

  Dari’s whole being deflates for the three seconds she can maintain a straight face.

  “Kidding. Thanks,” she says, flashing a genuine, if sad, smile.

  “You’re welcome.”

  They eat, and apparently Lily was more than a little bit hungry, because she puts that thing away like it’s the last pretzel she’s ever gonna get in her life. This is a good thing. If she were really on the brink of anything drastic, she wouldn’t be able to eat a bite, and even if she could, she’d just vomit it into the Hudson a few minutes later.

  “So what’s on Staten Island? Batting cages? Minigolf?”

  “My ex,” she says. She shields her eyes, looking at the approaching Statue of Liberty.

  Ahhhh. Suddenly this all makes sense.

  “Gotcha. Piece of work, huh?”

  She nods.

  “You gonna talk to ’im? I’ll back ya up,” he tells her.

  “I don’t talk to him ever,” she says matter-of-factly.

  “Might be useful. I dunno.” Dari knows better than to be pushy. People need to come to Jesus when they’re ready.

  “I saw my ex today.” Right after he says it, he regrets it. Lily turns to him and gives him the death stare to chill all death stares. He shrugs. “Sometimes it’s healthy. Closure and all.”

  Lily continues staring at him. Her dark eyes seem to drop several shades to a midnight hue.

  “So?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Did you fuck her?”

  Christ.

  He shakes his head. “She’s my ex. I have no interest in being anything more than friends with her.” In this moment, it is 100 percent true.

  “That doesn’t work for everyone,” she says.

  “What did he do?”

  Lily shakes her head and stares at the water smashing into the boat. Then she takes her iPod out from her book bag and sticks her earbuds in her ears. Not cool.

  Dari removes them from her ears, shocking her.

  “I got you a pretzel. If you don’t wanna talk to me, that’s fine. But you don’t need to be rude.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s a mess.”

  “It always is.”

  “Really? Is your ex married with two kids?”

  Whoa. Dari has no idea how to respond to this. The wind whips Lily’s hair around her face, and she squints.

  “It’s a mess,” she repeats.

  “How did that . . . happen?”

  Lily shrugs. “Thanks for the pretzel. I appreciate your thoughtfulness.”

  Dari nods. “No big deal.”

  “Thank you for, um, hanging out this weekend. I mean, I would be fine alone and everything, but . . . thank you.”

  Dari stares at the floor of the bow, slowly becoming aware of how important his presence might be to Lily this weekend.

  “Let’s maybe start with tonight and see how that goes.”

  Lily’s eyes drift back out over the water. “Up to you.”

  Man up, Dari.

  “Lily?” Something in his voice forces her to look him directly in the eye. “I’ll make it happen. Okay?”

  Lily nods and the right half of her mouth curls into a grateful smile. It’s pretty adorable.

  Carefully, she slips her earbuds back into her ears and Dari understands and turns his attention to the water and the fast-approaching island. He assumes Lily has some kind of plan, and he decides to trust her enough not to ask about it.

  * * *

  As the boat slows, just about everyone has already made their way toward the exit, filling up the stairways as though waiting the thirty extra seconds it might take if they stayed in their seats until the boat docks would mean the weekend is that much further away. Once it comes to a full stop, the mob clamors to get out. Dari makes Lily go ahead of him so he can keep an eye on her while they navigate the crowd. They get into the station and it’s basically the same as the one on the Manhattan side—pretzels and all—except for two large, mesmerizing aquariums with an assortment of tropical fish right in the middle of the giant room. No one seems to notice them. Not even children. Dari walks right up to one of them and peers inside. He wonders how often they eat, if they’re neglected, if he could maybe feed them if he asks an attendant. But then he remembers that he’d have to ask an MTA worker for assistance and they generally don’t like to assist anyone for any reason. That’s about when he remembers that he doesn’t know why they’re on Staten Island. He turns to Lily. She is now wearing sunglasses. Strange because she wasn’t wearing them when they were on the ferry shielding their eyes from the late-afternoon sun.

  “You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong, and I probably can’t do anything to help, but you might feel better if you talk,” Dari attempts.

  Lily stares. At what, he doesn’t know, because of the sunglasses. He is pretty sure he sees a few tears slip down the left side of her nose, but could it be sweat? Probably not. She inhales and exhales hard and then unzips her book bag and reaches in with shaky hands. She pulls out a folder and hands it to Dari. He opens the folder and gasps.

  “Holy shit! Is this some Photoshop prank?”

  Lily slowly shakes her head.

  “People were giggling and looking at me today. I tried to ignore them. Then my stupid lab partner told me I should visit the lit office. This is the proof for the cover . . . of The Folio.” Lily stops herself. Her quickened breathing has advanced to hyperventilating and Dari grabs her to prevent her from fainting. He pulls her to a bench and they sit. Her breathing gradually slows.

  “Stupid,” she mumbles. “I already fainted once today. Maybe I should see a doctor.” She tries to laugh. She fails.

  Dari rubs her back delicately and tries to piece the puzzle together. Staten Island, tears, literary magazine, explicit photo of Lily with music notes hiding her nips and a frowny emoji covering her pubes. He’s coming up blank.

  “Well, they can’t print it. There’s no way the faculty will let ’em.” He knows it’s a pitiful consolation, but it’s something.

  “I know, but it doesn’t even matter. Somebody thought this was funny and the literary staff agreed. It’s like . . . they went to all this trouble. Just to hurt me.”

  “You have to report this,” he tells her. He feels her back muscles tighten under his palm. “I can go with you, if you want. It’s horrible that they did this, Lily.”

  “Yeah. So the VP can see me like this? And call my mom?”

  “Better him than everyone else. I mean, there’s no way of knowing how many people have already seen it.” He wishes he could take back that last statement, because all the color fades from Lily’s cheeks and he’s certain that she’s going to barf all over him. But the moment passes and he decides to shut up and just let her breathe for a while. After about ten minutes or so, she takes the folder back and stuffs it in her bag.

  “We should go,” she says.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home,” she says, as if only an idiot would not know this.

  “But aren’t we gonna go to your ex’s place and confront the bastard?” Dari’s suddenly in the mood for a good old-fashioned fight.

  Lily smiles. “No, I can’t do that. I come over here just to remind myself that he’s stuck here and he deserves what he gets, and after I do that once or twice, I feel better and I go home.” She already seems more relaxed and stands, passing the aquarium.

  “What? Is this like a ritual or something? Come on! Don’t you wanna get in that jerk’s face? I mean? How old is this pervert?”

  “He’ll be thirty-five in February.”

  “Lily! He’s an old man!”

  Lily stops for a moment. She removes her sunglasses.

  “I can’t legally be within one hundred feet of his house. I broke the rule once and it was bad and I can’t break it again.”

  She leads the way as they walk back toward the ferry entrance. In a little over an hour, Dari has learned more things about Lily than he woul
d’ve dreamed possible. He isn’t the type to scare easily, but he must admit, he’s a bit anxious. This young woman has a restraining order against her—or at a minimum, an order of protection—which suggests violent tendencies. She has posed for a minimum of one explicit sexual photograph. Her last relationship was with a Staten Island man old enough to be her dad. And Dari has agreed to do his damnedest to spend the whole weekend with her.

  As they pull out and head back to the city, Dari discovers something about himself: Danger is his Spanish fly.

  LISTEN

  I text him. And I wait.

  He replies. He’ll meet me. Maybe I’m gonna be all right.

  Maybe.

  I didn’t think so a little while ago.

  * * *

  The door is closed. I peek through the window just in case. Mrs. Bayer isn’t inside and neither are any students. The lights are off. I try the door. Unlocked. I slip inside as quietly as I can. Since meeting Dari, I’ve become adept at sneaking in and out of classes, but I am not the least bit relaxed about it. I quietly walk over to my desk. I mean Tracy’s desk. Since she’s now the editor, I assume anything I should know about would be found here. Some old, ratty notebooks, a bunch of old copies of the magazine, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, blah, blah, blah—nothing here. I will kill Tara if she’s messing with my head.

  I look at Mrs. Bayer’s desk. It’s ridiculously neat with hardly anything on it, which suggests to me that she doesn’t care about The Folio at all and is a crappy faculty adviser. I shake my head in disgust. Nothing I can do about it now.

  I have no idea what I’m supposed to be looking for, and clearly I haven’t found it. I’m about to give up when I hear the doorknob turn. Do I hide or do I play it cool? I opt for the former and duck under Tracy’s desk.

  I hear feet walking toward me. I really hope they are Mrs. Bayer’s ugly brown pumps. Since they don’t have class in here this period, she might just be grabbing a tampon or something. Please, please, please . . . but no. The closer they get, the more certain I am that I’m not hearing pumps. Clogs. These are Tracy’s shoes, and she walks right over to her desk and sits. I have to scrunch way back so she doesn’t knee me in the face. She logs on to her computer, and I wonder just how long this will take. It’s last period, so school will end in . . . forty minutes? But what if she plans on working past the bell?? Oh no, oh no, oh no . . .

  “Oh my God.” I hear her gasp and then laugh and then gasp again. I can’t help but miss her. She always used to do that. Someone would tell a dirty joke and she would be horrified by it, but laugh just the same. And then go back to being horrified.

  She hits some keys, and then I hear the printer. That same old broke-down printer. I swore it only worked when it was sunny out. If you had a deadline during a rainstorm, you better hope the admin office liked you, cuz if not, you were screwed.

  Wait. She’s getting up to go to the printer. The printer is against the wall, three tables behind her desk. That would mean I’d have about twenty-five seconds of time when her back would be turned. I have already lost precious fractions of a second doing the math, but I decide I can make it and so I edge out from under her desk and I take a step and—having REALLY long, thick, curly hair can suck when it can get stuck just about anywhere without me knowing it. In part of this desk, for instance. My fast movement rips several hairs out at the root, and I scream.

  Tracy turns to me, stunned.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks, her eyes about to pop completely out of her head.

  “I was just looking for . . . I don’t know.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here.” She says it with no authority whatsoever. Like she’s the one that’s been caught.

  “Sorry.”

  Tracy regards me with terror. This seems extreme. What does she think I was doing under there?

  “I didn’t mean to. Someone told me something about . . . I don’t even know. I guess when enough people hate you, you start to get paranoid. Sorry.”

  “Fine. Just . . . don’t creep around like that. It’s weird,” she clutches the page she just picked up from the printer to her chest.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Then why are you still here?”

  I feel a huge lump in my throat. I will seriously strangle myself if I start crying in front of her.

  “I heard you laugh. It reminded me of when we were younger.”

  Tracy nods.

  “That’s all.” I turn to leave.

  “Lily?” I’m amazed she’s calling me, so I stop. “You should see something.”

  She takes the page she’s holding against her chest and shows it to me. I look at the photo and I can’t breathe.

  “Someone submitted this to me as a cover idea, which is disgusting. It’s a fake, though, isn’t it? Somebody’s playing a prank, right?”

  I move my mouth, but no words come. Where are my words?

  “Lily,” Tracy begs. “Please say you didn’t do this.”

  I can’t find my words. I can’t breathe. I can’t see. I can’t hear. I can’t stand.

  A second later, Tracy is screaming my name and some kids must have come in from elsewhere because several random faces now stare at me. I’m gaping up at them, which tells me that I’m on the floor and my arm hurts. Apparently, I passed out. How femme of me.

  “Lily, are you okay?”

  I somehow pull myself back up to standing.

  “Someone can take you to the nurse,” she says, but I don’t need a nurse. I need to get the hell away from here. I snatch the page from Tracy’s hands, run from the room, down the hall, and into the girls’ room, where I puke up the disgusting tacos that supposedly counted as lunch. Where the fuck was Dari?

  I text him. And I wait.

  He replies. He’ll meet me. Maybe I’m gonna be all right.

  * * *

  Last night, I kept Mom company while she packed her turquoise rolling suitcase and a burlap shoulder bag a faithful follower made for her a few years back. It’s dyed all the colors of the rainbow, and in tedious, black and charcoal cross-stitched letters is the word “Gratitude.” It’s shockingly not tacky.

  “Oh, dammit!”

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t thinking. We should’ve gone to the gynecologist this week.”

  “Why?”

  She opened her top dresser drawer. “Don’t read too much into this,” she said and handed me a large pack of condoms. “I just want to embrace whatever happens with intelligence and caution.”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “That could change at any time. Trust me.”

  Ick! It was like the conversation when she asked if I wanted to go on birth control and I told her my vagina was closed for renovations. I hate talking about this stuff.

  “Are you like hoping I’ll have sex with him?”

  “Jesus, Lily!”

  “Jesus what?” It was a genuine, honest-to-God question. It’s hard to tell with my mother what she’s decided in her modern, new age brain might be best for me.

  “I want you to be happy. I want you to do what feels . . . right while taking proper precautions. But at the same time, I don’t want you to just rush into a potential quagmire of emotions.”

  That’s when I fell backward on her bed laughing. Did she seriously just use the word “quagmire?” Is she talking about my life or Syria?

  “Lily, it’s not funny!”

  I covered my face with one of her lavender-scented pillows. God, my mother loves lavender. The suffocating, purple sweetness dampened my laughter.

  “You’re lucky, you know? It’s nice to be fifteen and have everything to look forward to. I envy you.”

  I stopped laughing then and shot her a you-gotta-be-kidding look.

  “I do, Lily. Bad things happen to everyone. Some of us more than others. But you can’t just give up.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Good. Then please don’t mock me when I’m trying to hel
p you. Yes, I want you to be careful with your body and your soul, but I want you to enjoy your life too. So you can’t . . . only be careful. Get it?”

  “Got it,” I said. But then again, do I get it? How do I know I have everything to look forward to? I could be pushed in front of an oncoming train, fall asleep in the bathtub and drown. I could get my heart trampled on again before it’s had a chance to properly heal. Under normal circumstances, I’d bring all this up to her. But last night I was too tired to fight.

  “Promise me you’ll keep those handy,” she reiterated, referring once again to the condoms. I was strangely flattered that my beautiful mom thought she and I might be desired in remotely the same way. Weirded out overall, but flattered.

  “I promise.”

  * * *

  Dari flips through the Netflix options. He’s fascinated, but I’m bored as a rock.

  “Wanna see my room?” I barely get the words out before wishing I’d thought that through. My room is kind of messy, and I don’t think I’ve asked someone that question in those words since I was about seven years old.

  “Sure.” I don’t think he’s judging my inadvertent childishness. Hard to tell with him. But right now, I appreciate his ambiguity.

  I sit on the floor with my back against my bed and feign interest in Angry Birds, though I’m far more interested in Dari slowly, methodically scrolling through my iTunes. His face is so hard to read. If he’s disgusted by any of my music choices, I have no idea. If he’s impressed by any of my music choices, I have no idea.

  “You can play something if you want,” I say. He turns to me briefly and then he nods. At least, it looks like he nods. The movement is so subtle it could’ve just as easily been a muscle spasm.

  “You have decent taste,” he decides.

  “Thanks.”

  “I was afraid you’d be into that pop crap.”

  “Really?”

  “Hey. You never know. Somebody can seem cool and then you look in their music library and there’s Katy Perry.”

  I mock gag myself with my finger.

  “As a musician, I take offense to that.”

  He smiles at me. “Never heard you describe yourself that way before.”