Work Text:
[2013]
“Jake, Jake, Jake, quick, get inside!” Amy shrieks, laughter filling up her lungs. She pushes the door to her father’s shop open, a familiar bell jangling overhead. Victor raises an eyebrow, then gives an approving nod as his daughter’s best friend scrambles in, breathless, a smile so wide it must hurt. Jake’s clothes are drenched, dripping onto the hardwood floor; he doesn’t seem to notice, anyhow, as he and Amy giggle at some inside joke they made years ago.
Victor peers outside and there’s a fire hydrant glowing red in the sun, a flood gushing out into the street. A few children are playing in the water. Their hair’s wet and glowing in the light, wearing tank tops and shorts Victor doesn’t expect will ever dry, the way they’re splashing, dancing around gratefully in the unnatural downpour.
“What’s going on?” Detective Lohank asks, lost in the haze as the echoes of laughter drown out his questions. And the reply comes and comes again, ‘no hablo ingles’ followed by only flustery giggles and the squeak of flip-flops on concrete as the kids run away.
Victor smiles a little, arms crossed as he peers out the window. He turns around as the bell rings, but it’s only Amy leaving. She tucks a few strands of hair behind her ear before walking Jake across the block, all the way home, and Victor feels like he now has eight sons rather than seven.
Home is a busy house in Washington Heights where Camila has her own study; she’s a Spanish tutor over Skype (she pronounces it like ‘skip’, but her children have learned not to correct her.) Half the time when she answers her clients, there’s a paintbrush behind one of her ears and a pencil resting on the other, the age-old smudge of graphite lining her fingertips whenever she’s been drawing too long.
Camila says she only draws for entertainment, but Victor tells her she could make the moon jealous. Light bounces off of everything she puts on paper, soft smudges of grey pooling in all the right places. That smudge of graphite turns into a still life, hung proudly along the walls of Victor’s limousine and taxicab service. It’s called Santiago’s, legally, and his children tease him, saying it’s just a name he came up with on the spur of the moment.
“Let’s see how you like inheriting a spur-of-the-moment million bucks, hmm?” he normally jokes back. “Good luck after it’s divided among the eight of you, your five uncles, four aunts, and twelve cousins.”
The only person on the block with more cousins than the Santiagos is the food truck guy, Lynn Boyle, whose son Charles makes a point of critiquing every shaved ice he can find (“piragua!” Amy corrects, time and time again.)
Charles can usually be found in the food truck, his miniature chef’s hat crisp and apron neatly tied behind his back. He goes to the same school as Jake and Amy, though he’s the first of any middle-schooler to take advanced home economics classes. They both say he’s obsessive in a good way. Charles insists he’s ‘refined,’ but his friends have to agree once he brings his homemade blueberry macarons to class.
Annoying Keith Pembroke doesn’t get any sweets, Jake likes to point out loudly. Only Charles’ friends get macarons. Aside from Jake and Amy, Rosa and Gina are part of their friend group, too. So Charles brings in a tray of his freshly-made desserts every week, and Amy gets out her favorite calculator (“there you are, dr. buttons!”) and figures out how to divide twelve macarons between five kids.
Amy’s worn glasses ever since she can remember, and she can often be found pushing them up the bridge of her nose. Besides Dr. Buttons, she carries a ruler, a protractor, and scratch paper with her at all times, just in case a big math problem presents itself.
“Remember the great cheesecake debacle of 2013, Ames?” Jake still asks, amazed by the radians-to-degrees conversion to this day.
He calls her a genius, and Amy sketches a unit circle at the top of her notebook, trying to teach Jake geometry even if he gets confused. She’ll always wait for him, though. She never lets him down.
Amy Santiago is glad it’s summer. She misses school, of course, but she’s grateful the annual getting-out-of-school party is a thing of the past.
Jake’s dad never, ever comes to the end-of-the-year parties in May, even if he promises he’ll be there. Nobody tells Jake not to get his hopes up, and nobody treats the celebrations like a big deal, making it the slightest bit easier when the ‘Roger’ placement is inevitably left empty. Sometime between the celebrations, Jake’s dad flies into New York from who-knows-where and regales him with stories about emergency landings and babies born in midair. The ache soothes a little before the wound reopens. His friends pretend not to notice.
Each year, only his mother shows up. Karen works across the building, teaching art to seventh-graders, and sets fourth period aside at the end of the school year to see her son. She makes her famous white chocolate chip cookies and beams proudly at Jake’s reaction to her presence (“okay, my mom says ‘difficult time concentrating on one topic’ is really code for ‘awesome multi-tasker!’)
Again and again, Jake’s mom shows up. She puts aside her paint-smattered smock, applies the pink lipstick rolling around in her desk drawer, and arrives on time. Mrs. Peralta’s probably every student’s favorite teacher, Jake likes to brag, because she smiles widely and gives away Hershey’s kisses with a generous hand. She regularly drops by home ec to give the students pointers (it’s mostly Amy, who somehow gets recipes wrong despite measuring the ingredients out three times beforehand.) A few minutes at the pottery wheel, a hint on an art project, and kids are laughing instead of falling asleep in their classes.
In summer, Amy knows, everything is quiet. Her mother works alongside Jake’s, giving tutoring lessons, and sunlight turns gold as it flows inside and floods the room.
Gina Linetti, too, is glad it’s summer. During the school year, she’s got to find an excuse to get out of field trips. She eyes the prices cautiously, then comes up with some arcane reason not to go (once, she insisted she was allergic to paint and couldn’t visit the art gallery.)
Nobody’s met Gina’s dad, and nobody knows what her mom does for a living. Gina’s perfected the art of shopping in the clearance section without looking like a typical latchkey kid. She walks to school every day, no matter how much the wind will mess up her hair. She never brings lunch, just taking what everyone else offers: half a sandwich, a dented apple, a stale fruit roll-up from the bottom of Jake’s backpack. Gina never invites anyone over to her house, and nobody brings up the option whenever there’s a group project. They all know why.
Gina’s mom wears pantsuits every day. Unflattering, yes, but practical for a pharma rep peddling carts and vials of new medicines across the country. Gina doesn’t see her mother (or those awful pantsuits) very much, anyways. If she’s home at all, Mom’s usually sleeping off the jetlag.
In autumn and in winter and in spring, Gina’s left in an apartment with low ceilings and generic art on the walls, where the yellow-white carpet comes out in tufts. The Boyles live across the hall and never fail to bring lasagna over 一 on the nights that Charles cooks, it’s octopus risotto instead.
The Jeffordses (the Jeffords? Gina’s not sure) live a few doors down. Their son Terry’s a high-schooler with a passion for baby-sitting, and he’s a good algebra tutor, too, for nights when equations don’t make sense. Gina won’t admit it aloud, but, some days, Terry is her favorite person. He’s the one who watches rom-coms with her when her mom isn’t home.
As grateful as Gina is for friends, though, she often longs for summers. In June, her mother arrives home and trades airline tickets for the steady thrum of a steering wheel beneath her palms. Darlene Linetti knows her daughter well, and the two embark on road trips with loud music playing across jagged state lines. They’ll visit conferences where Gina steals name tags (“nice to meet you too, Ashley Newton,” her mom will remark, and they collapse in giggles.) They’ll share a hotel bed and smuggle bags of chocolate-covered pretzels out of the mini-bar.
When summer calls, Gina comes running. She loves the Boyles, yes, and she’s more than appreciative of Terry’s friendship, but nothing’s like her mother’s company. They don’t even come close.
The Santiagos own a two-story house with sunny white-and-yellow trim at the end of Centennial Drive. It’s decorated with multiple sets of wind chimes that never stop jingling, given the constant open-and-shut of the screen door. Camila tends to a row of tulips by the grass, and Victor mows the lawn every Sunday morning. On Sundays when the Santiago brothers have been up to trouble, it’s their responsibility instead.
Inside the house, the walls are lined with photos, children’s first-day-of-school pouts and birthday parties gracing each corner of each wall. The garage is filled with science projects and worn gears and tools that, apparently, are too important to be thrown away (“Mom, once I find that Phillips-head screwdriver, I’ll finish the Rube Goldberg machine! Promise!”) Calendars and planners fill to the brim with tasks; the DVR can’t quite fit another rerun of ‘How It’s Made’; hand-me-downs with patches and peanut-butter-jelly stains cram the closets until their doors refuse to shut.
Everything about the Santiagos’ is bustling. It’s infuriating and endearing, miserable and magical, and Amy wouldn’t have it any other way. These walls have heard countless conversations 一 Camila’s theory that the Williamses down the street are government spies (probably not true.) That time Luis once stole a dissected frog from the science lab in Mrs. Brooks’ classroom (very much true, to Luis’ chagrin. He’d been grounded for months.) Victor’s insistence that he came up with Geico’s slogan before Geico coined it (maybe true, maybe not. It’s a 50-50 toss-up.)
The Peraltas, on the other hand, own the quiet brown house next door. From the outside, it’s easy to pass by; the lights are rarely on, and the beat-up mailbox with the crooked numbers is on its last legs. Inside, half the art hanging off the walls is Mrs. Peralta’s, and the rest consists of colorful doodles and comics that Jake drew. Amy doesn’t know much else. She’s only been over once, when Jake first moved in.
It’s Jake who routinely stays over at Amy’s, packing his red sleeping bag and Spider-Man toothbrush and pajamas. It’s Jake who tries to sneak a cup of espresso from the Santiagos’ antique coffee maker in the mornings, Jake who confesses that he’s afraid of ghosts late at night, Jake who nervously murmurs that he wishes he had brothers like Amy does.
“You do,” comes Amy’s reply, again and again. “You’re my best friend, you’re like family. What’s mine is yours.”
“Thanks, Ames.” Sitting cross-legged in her living room, Jake deflects from his emotions with a soft punch to her shoulder, and Amy translates the meaning in her head.
“Anytime.”
Jake Peralta is glad it’s summer, since he and Amy can spend three whole months together. They wait for the other to wake up, all bleary-eyed and messy-haired, before they switch on the Saturday morning cartoons. Amy teaches Jake about long division (useful, but not fun) and Jake shows Amy how to catch Charizard in the new Pokemon game (fun, but not useful.)
In summer, the whole world slows down as the city heats up. Swimming pools open. School bells ring for the final time. Snow cone vendors show up around the block, and zig-zags of block-text graffiti pop out from under the New York sun.
Jake and Amy go to 7-11 on weekdays when they can, clutching cherry-red and sour-apple slurpees until they wince of brain freeze. They’ll take turns cannonballing into the neighborhood pool, daring each other to try the high dive. Amy gasps every time she comes up from the water, wiping her hair out of her face as she readjusts her pink swim goggles.
“You have to go next,” she declares, confident, as if her stomach didn’t just flip in midair when she thought she might belly-flop.
“Nuh-uh! No way!”
“I double-dare you. No backing out.”
Jake rolls his eyes. “Fine. But if I make a better dive than you, you have to …” he sets his sights on Detective Lohank, patrolling on the sidewalk nearby. It’s so sunny, the rubber of his shoes might be melting to the pavement. “You have to report a fake crime to Lohank.”
“No!” Amy pushes a wave of water toward Jake’s face, a smile pulling at her lips when it washes over him. “I’m thirteen, I can’t get a criminal record.”
Jake wipes the water away. “Not even if you reported a small crime?” he suggests.
“No-” She cocks her head. “Like jaywalking or something?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well… Maybe. I don’t know. I guess it would be fun,” Amy admits, voice soft.
“Don’t you want to get back at him after he blew his whistle at you?”
“That was not my fault! I had the right of way! I was on the crosswalk!”
He grins. “I double-dare you to do it.”
Amy conceals her excitement poorly. “Fine, then. Whatever you say.”
So Jake takes a leap off of the diving board, landing about as gracefully as a boy wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles swim trunks can (that is, pretty poorly, but well enough to win the bet.) Amy musters her courage, fists balled up, and says her piece to Lohank. Before you know it-
“Jake, Jake, Jake, quick, get inside!” she’s shrieking, her threadbare drawstring bag thumping against her waist all the way to her father’s shop. Jake’s a hail mary in the works, rushing into Santiago’s a split second before Amy slams the door.
“I ... hate you.” Her words come slowly, breathlessly. She gives him a raised-eyebrow, loud-heartbeat, shaky cut-the-headlights kind of look, wet hair dripping down her shoulders. “I hate you so much. I am never taking a dare from you again.”
Jake bites his lip, relentless and reckless throughout this, and-
“Double dares don’t count either,” she blurts, her expression lofty as can be. “Beat you to the chase.”
Jake meets her eyes, and watches the joy reveal itself from behind her frustration. “You do know me, Santiago.” He sighs, leaning his head back against the wall. “But it was fun, wasn’t it? Just like I said it’d be?”
“Okay, sorta--”
He smirks. “Told you so.”
Jake snatches one end of the frayed Disney beach towel around Amy’s shoulder and sits down on the metal bench in the front of the shop. It’s cold against his legs, but he doesn’t mind. Anything’s easier to bear when it’s with her.
Amy lets him take half the towel, as usual, and they huddle together under the air conditioning vent for what seems like hours. Jake cracks jokes and Amy guesses the punchlines half the time before she practices tossing peanuts in his mouth for Charles and Rosa’s annual Jimmy Jab games.
“The key is volume,” she announces to him, taking a handful and letting them fly.
“Very astute observation.”
“Wow, your vocabulary game’s getting way better.”
“Learned from the best,” Jake says, high-fiving her. He tugs at the towel a little more.
Jake Peralta loves summer because Amy’s always there. He figured that one out a long time ago. And, as long as Amy stays a constant in his life, he’ll cling onto the perpetual hope that everything will be just fine.
Charles Boyle is glad it’s summer. During the school year, he never has enough free time. Homework is nice, of course, but Charles loves baking and writing in cursive and watching old episodes of Murder, She Wrote with his dad. He can make escargot and roast a duck from start to finish, even if he might make a few mistakes. Cut him some slack, he’s not a professional. Not yet.
So, yellow oven mitts and all, he takes a tray of chocolate-chip cookies out of the oven, putting half of them into a ziploc bag for Gina to share. She lives across the hall and she’s his friend, even if she cracks that same terrible ‘the food is boyle-ing over’ pun every time. Charles can tell Gina keeps her guard up for fear of … something. Abandonment, maybe. He can tell Gina’s dad isn’t around, at the very least, and he wants to support her.
Once Charles knocks on the Linettis’ door, he hears three voices beckon him in. Strange, he thinks, turning the knob nevertheless. The most crowded he’s ever seen the apartment is when Terry comes over to tutor.
“Hey, Charles! What are you doing here?” Gina calls. She’s sitting at the kitchen table alongside Rosa and an adult woman he can’t quite place.
“Boyle!” Rosa cheers. She’s generally more bitter, but her mood uplifts whenever she sees desserts.
He shrugs, shifting between two feet and shoving the ziploc bag behind his back. He hadn’t been expecting company. “Movie night on Fridays, remember? Cookies, milk, and Nora Ephron?”
Gina gets up from the table. “I’m so sorry, I forgot! D’you want to come in? We can watch movies with Rosa and my mom.”
Gina’s mom waves gently as she arises, and Charles can see that they share the same brown eyes. That’s why she looks familiar, too; he’s seen her walking the halls of the apartment building with a carry-on in her hand, wheels going ka-tunk-ka-tunk on the hardwood floors.
“Um, hi. I’m Charles,” he says, shaking her hand. “Gina and I go to school together, and I live across the hall with my dad. Movie nights are kind of our tradition.”
Mrs. Linetti smiles. “Darlene Linetti. Let me tell you, anyone who brings over cookies 一 routinely, no less 一 is a friend of mine. I, uh, I’m sorry we’ve never met. I’m usually traveling to or from a medical convention in another city.”
Charles spends his night watching The Holiday with Gina, Rosa, and Gina’s mom (his new best friend!!) curled up next to him on the couch. They shake cookie crumbs off his clothes, and they clink glasses of milk together when the opening credits roll. Charles is glad it’s summer because of opportunities like these. The sun sets later, and sugar tastes sweeter.
“Voila,” Amy announces, one arm weakly bent outward. She sincerely hopes this is a work of art worth voila-ing for. “I updated the life calendar.”
“You’ve done it again,” Jake replies, looking at the boxes in green in particular (academic activities, the legend says.) “Very detailed, almost too detailed, in fact. You know, I have this friend.” He pauses for emphasis, meeting her glance with a grin, then goes on, “and she’s kind of a nerd, but also the most productive seventh-grader I know-”
Amy rolls her eyes. He gets like this whenever one of his pranks works. (A rare occurrence, really.)
“-which really isn’t that necessary right now, but she’s got dreams, and I know she’s going to do whatever it takes to achieve them. Have you met her, by the way?” Jake laughs. “Her name’s Amy, she wears glasses and the same Harry Potter sweater all the time, even in summer because she insists it’s cold-”
“Yes, I’ve met her. She’s always hanging out with this guy Jake.” Amy frowns, then meets her friend’s look with a raised eyebrow. “You know, the one who goes to Sal’s Pizza practically every day, and he never stops talking about how cool John McClane is-”
“Hey!” He swats her arm.
“So you have met him, then?” Amy’s grinning back now, unsure of how her best friend manages to pair his teasing with genuine emotion all in one sentence. It must be a delicate art. “You, um, really think I can make it with the life calendar?”
“Absolutely.” Jake walks a step closer to the wall, trailing a finger across the paper. “So, Stanford University, huh?”
She nods. “My dream school, ‘cause of their history program.”
“You better not run off to California and leave me behind forever,” he murmurs. His expression is half-casual, half-broken, fully earnest underneath a layer of laughter.
“Nah, I’m taking you with me. There are plenty of good schools in Cali, and we’ll move to the west coast together,” Amy says, glancing over the little graduation cap decal at the end of 2022. She sighs, thinking about textbooks she isn’t old enough to read; future friends she has yet to meet; a trek from sea to shining to sea that she’ll make when she’s eighteen. “It’ll be you and me, okay?”
Jake grins. She’s put him into her life calendar, whether implicitly or not, and there’s no way he’s leaving her side now. So he pulls Amy into a hug, burying his nose in her hair. “You’ve sealed your fate now, Santiago. And, because you’re the one who planned this whole California thing, I get to pick the music during our inevitable road trip.”
Amy giggles, letting go of Jake’s grasp. “Okay, as long as you choose anything but ska.”
“Fine, then, you’ve forced my hand,” Jake says, voice trailing off in that false surrender sort of way. There’s always a catch. “I’m blasting Taylor Swift the whole way there.”
Amy nods, concealing a grin. Not that she’d ever tell him, but she likes most pop songs more than she lets on.
Jake gasps. “We can sing along to You Belong with Me!”
She envisions Jake’s mother’s car, a tiny silver Prius, making its way across the country with the two of them inside. Amy thinks about bottles of Coca-Cola lining the cupholders; suitcases stuffed into the backseat and trunk; bags of potato chips stashed in the glove compartment. She can see Jake taking the wheel one day, or putting his feet up on the dashboard, or scanning a roadmap for their destination.
She only sees possibility there. It’ll be extraordinary.
So Amy grins, casting her eyes on the life calendar once more. She nudges a red pushpin even farther into the wall, making a primary-color constellation that trails across the lined paper. “Anything for California with you, Jake.”