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It’s the last period of the day on the last day of school, and the long hand on the clock is inching toward 3:00. In seven minutes, summer starts. In seven minutes, Mar will go almost two whole months without seeing her again:
Elena Trujillo, the prettiest girl he’s ever seen.
Mar’s leg is bouncing up and down so fast that the coins in his pocket jingle. Distracted from Labyrinth playing on the TV set that Mrs. Morrison had wheeled in at the start of class, Ruby Johnson shoots him a dirty look. Mar doesn’t know why she’s so twisted up about it. It’s not like Mrs. Morrison hasn’t had every substitute teacher play Labyrinth for them all semester. It’s like the eighth time they’ve seen it at least.
Still, her glare reminds him that he needs to calm down. He stretches his legs out, quieting, and, pleased, Ruby nods once and turns back around.
Sneaking a glance at the next table over, Mar sees Elena reaching a hand into the plastic cup filled with the plain, unbuttered popcorn Mrs. Morrison had passed out to everyone. Mar had eaten his in the first five minutes, but Elena had stretched it out. Even now, she pulls out just three pieces, drops them on a flattened palm, and then delicately places each individual kernel onto the tip of her pointed tongue one by one.
It’s… a lot.
Mar swallows.
He’s been working up the courage to ask her out for the past three weeks, but every time he got close to doing it, his palms would get all sweaty and his tongue would feel too big for his mouth. He was half-convinced he was going to throw up.
Rio didn’t understand it at all—he said asking a girl out was as simple as just saying the words—but that was Rio, wasn’t it? He was currently sleeping with Alice Tamaki—a junior—while Mar had been dumped by four different girls over the course of the year. The longest one had lasted just three weeks.
The girls didn’t think much of him, he thought, because he didn’t say much. Not even when they called him on the phone, when he slipped into his bedroom with the cordless, flopping on his bed to stare at the shapes in the popcorn ceiling and listen to them talk about—whatever. Dance practice. The complicated nuances of the punctuation used in notes between girlfriends. The utter unfairness of parents. All of it.
It wasn’t that Mar didn’t say much because he had nothing to talk about. It just seemed that sometimes there wasn’t much to say to any of that. A lot of it just—was. And other times, he was thinking. Or just listening, absorbing, processing. He didn’t see what was so wrong with that, but apparently it was a problem.
“Don’t you have an opinion?” Leah Loosli had demanded once after telling him about how Jamie Maynard hadn’t signed her note with the usual “LYLAS” valediction. Her voice was all pitchy and annoyed, cracking through the telephone like she couldn’t believe the audacity.
But the truth was: he didn’t. Not yet. He was mulling over half a dozen reasons that Jamie might have signed “TTYL” instead, letting the ideas flow and lap against the edge of the decision-making part of his brain, but it wasn’t fast enough for her.
Elena didn’t seem to mind this quality, though. She never even seemed to care that he didn’t say anything, that he just bobbed his head along, listening to her monologue about the Rodney King case or about the floods in Mississippi while they pinched together clay or painted glazes on vases, fingers sticky with tack. He liked listening to her talk about things he knew nothing about, stuff that made him think, stuff that she’d obviously already thought about at length—her words swift and decisive, the ends of her spiels landing with finality like there was no other conclusion than the one she’d already reached. She didn’t need reassurance. She was right, and she knew it.
Every now and then, she’d trail off, like she was suddenly self-conscious. Like maybe she thought she was being impolite. But she seemed to like that he always looked up at her, expectant.
Or at least, her eyes turned all shiny and bright every time it happened—every time he asked, “And then what?”
Her gaze slips over to him now, and Mar fumbles, scrambling to pretend he hadn’t been watching her.
If he didn’t ask her out today, he knew his chance was lost. It was a fluke that they’d ever ended up in the same class together—she’d only ended up here because she’d tested out of the rest of French I and it’d left a hole in her schedule so that her only choices were between Ceramics or Auto Body Repair.
“I’m not very good at it,” she’d said, peeking over at the turtle-shaped box he was making to stash his weed (not that he told her that) early in the semester. “Not like you.”
“You’re good,” he’d said automatically, but then he’d looked closer to see her trying and failing to fix a misshapen fish, the clay too thin and dry.
Elena had raised a brow at him and he could feel his cheeks burning because obviously he was lying, and obviously she knew he was lying—but then she’d just burst out laughing.
“It’s okay,” she’d said, scrunching up her nose. “I bet I could kick your ass at identifying mollusks.”
“I dunno, I’m feeling pretty confident,” he’d joked, and she’d bitten her lip, trying not to grin. “I know all about the univalves and the bivalves and the cephalopods thanks to your lecture last week.”
Next year, there was no way they’d end up in any of the same classes. She was in Honors English and Geometry like Rio; meanwhile Mar wouldn’t know if he’d passed Algebra I until his report card got sent home in two weeks. On top of that, he knew she was going to Debate Camp in the summer, and he was pretty sure she’d come back in August with a boyfriend (because how could she not? How could every nerdy dude at Debate Camp not fall totally, madly in love with her when she inevitably wiped the floor with them, destroying them in every event—extemp and parliamentary and Lincoln-Douglas?).
Mar’s stomach twists thinking about it, thinking about some slick-haired, bowtied boy holding Elena’s hand. But it does a backflip when he tries to imagine walking up to her at the end of class and saying, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?”
(Or, if he took Rio’s advice—“Do you want to kick it?” But Mar wasn’t sure that really conveyed what he wanted.)
There’s only one solution he can come up with.
“Hey,” Mar whispers, reaching forward on the stool to tap her shoulder.
Ruby turns around again and pushes her glasses up on her nose. “What?”
“Do you have a piece of paper I could borrow?”
“How do you not have a piece of paper? We’re at school.”
“It’s the last day,” Mar says, like that’s an explanation—and maybe it would be, but he usually didn’t have a piece of paper. Or a pencil. Sometimes he didn’t even have his backpack. He’d straight up walk out of the house without it and not even realize until halfway through first period.
Ruby shakes her head and reaches into her backpack and rips out a piece of paper from a notebook. “Here.”
“Dope—thanks.”
“Shh.”
Mar shrugs, pulling a pencil out of his back pocket. He bites his lip, thinking. Rio had told him not to write a note (“You gotta just boss up and do it, man,” he’d said, like it was so easy) but it was better than nothing.
To: Elena Trujillo, he writes, and then he grimaces. That was stupid. Too formal. He didn’t need to put her last name. He goes to erase it—only the eraser on the cheap Dollar Store pencil Mr. Stewart had given him to take the Algebra final just turns the words into a big black smudge. He frowns, erasing harder. The page rips.
“Hey, do you think I could borrow another piece of paper?” he hisses.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“I messed up.”
“It’s not rocket science,” she says with exasperation. “I just want to watch David Bowie and his weird eyebrows do the magic dance.”
“The sooner you give me the paper, the sooner I shut up.”
“Fine,” she huffs, and she digs into her backpack once more and rips out another piece of paper. “But that’s it.”
“You’re the bes—”
“Shh!”
Mar shakes himself to refocus. The note. Okay. He can do this.
To Elena, he starts.
And this his mind goes completely blank.
Was he just supposed to jump straight into it: Will you go out with me?
Or should he make it less ambiguous: Will you be my girlfriend?
Scratching at his eyebrows, Mar contemplates.
Should he have, like, some sort of preamble? Like, some sort of how are you? or I had fun talking to you this semester?
He brushes his hair off his face and glances over at Elena, seeing that she’s pushing back her chair and walking her cup and her napkin to the trash can by the door.
He looks up at the clock.
2:59.
Fuck, he thinks, starting to scribble something down about how he looks forward to 8th period all day just so he can see her and—and maybe something about how she’s prettier than—
The bell rings, short and sharp.
Mar’s stomach drops as everyone stands and there’s a cacophony of stools scraping across the linoleum and kids from other classes cheering at the end of school and Mrs. Morrison hollering over everything, “Have a good summer, kids!”
Elena was already at the front of the room—if he didn’t hurry, he’d miss her.
He scrambles, shoving the note into his pocket and grabbing his backpack off the ground to swing it over his shoulder. His classmates swarm out of the door, impatiently jostling each other to escape the quickest. He’s sure he’s already lost Elena when he glimpses her through the throng, dallying and checking out some of the model student projects on the shelf. The ones she’s surely seen a hundred times before.
She glances at him, tucking her bangs behind her ear.
Was she waiting for him?
The crowd thins and Mar’s almost to her, and all he needs to do is open his mouth and say something, anything to her when—
“Oh, Martín,” Mrs. Morrison singsongs from the back of the room. “I think you forgot something.”
Mar whips his head around to see Mrs. Morrison holding a jug in the shape of a face with beady eyes and a toothy grin.
“Um—” He glances back at Elena, who shifts her weight, hesitating.
“This is your final project, isn’t it?” Mar turns back to see Mrs. Morrison shaking her head, laughing. “I swear, you’d lose your head if it wasn’t attached to your neck! You know, when I talked to your mom at parent-teacher conferences, she said that she had to replace your soccer jersey three times in eighth grade and—”
“Hold on,” he says, and he means to say it to Elena, but when he turns to look for her, he sees her three steps out of the classroom being absorbed into the crowd, shooting one last regretful glance back into the classroom.
“Keep it!” he calls over his shoulder to a startled Mrs. Morrison. He rushes out of the room, his sneakers squeaking against the linoleum—only to smack right into some blonde girl in a floral button-up carrying a tray of cupcakes.
“No!”
He watches in horror as the desserts fly through the air and crash to the floor, frosting splattering on the white tiles.
“Shit,” he says, frantic. He runs a twitchy hand through his hair. “Shit, shit—I’m—”
“My cupcakes!” the girl groans.
Mar stands up on his tiptoes, trying to place Elena’s brown braid in the hallway full of kids shoulder-to-shoulder. Was she—? No, that wasn’t—Maybe she was—?
He deflates, sinking back onto the soles of his feet.
She was gone.
Looking back at the blonde, he sees she’s now on her knees on the ground scooping up her cupcakes and plopping the pieces onto the tray with an angry flick of her wrist.
“I’m really sorry,” he says, bending down to help. “I didn’t—”
“It’s—” The girl sucks in a breath. “It’s fine. I already got my grade, so—whatever.”
She doesn’t sound like it’s whatever, though. Mar winces.
“I’ll grab some napkins,” Mar offers uncertainly, and when the girl doesn’t say anything, he sighs, standing to slip back into Mrs. Morrison’s class.
“I was hoping you’d change your mind,” Mrs. Morrison says, beaming. “It’s a really good project even if it’s—unconventional.”
“Thanks,” Mar mumbles. But suddenly it’s his least favorite project of all time.
“Did you do it?”
Mar sighs, turning around from his now-empty locker and throwing the last of the odds and ends into a nearby trash can to find Rio standing there, eyebrows raised in curiosity.
“No.” He pulls the unfinished note out of his pocket rips it in half, tossing it away too. No use keeping it as a reminder of his failure.
If only he’d just been able to say the words out loud.
Around them, kids high-five and hug goodbye and chatter about summer plans—from looking forward to sleeping in til noon every day to trips to Disney World. Down the hall, Bobby Quest jumps and kicks his locker closed with a hi-ya! The loud bang of the door slamming shut startles two junior girls who are standing nearby using the wall to sign each other’s yearbooks.
“Hey!” one of them protests, but Bobby’s deep, rumbling laugh drowns her out and the girl scowls.
Mar finds it all very annoying, the general spirit of celebration more oppressive than anything else.
Rio shakes his head. “Man, I told you, you just gotta—”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Mar says morosely. “I blew it, okay? I couldn’t do what you said.”
Lips thinning, Rio rubs at his chin.
“You’ll forget about her this summer,” Rio tries. “Alice is throwin’ a party next week. Maybe—”
“It’s whatever,” Mar says dismissively.
He doesn’t want to talk about it and he doesn’t want to think about other girls. Rio may bounce from girl to girl like it was nothing, but not Mar. After every single girl had dumped him this year, he’d spent two weeks listening to Sinéad O’Connor and moping in his bed.
“Wanna get high and go get loaded nachos from the mini-mart?” Mar asks. That might make him feel better. Or at least make him stop thinking about it.
Rio’s mouth twitches. “I can’t.”
“Oh.”
Mar’s already pieced it together, doesn’t need it to be said, but Rio says it anyway.
“Alice’s sister works today so her house is empty, you know.” He scratches at his ear. “But later?”
“Sure. I guess.” Mar shrugs, swinging the locker shut.
And it’s not like Mar doesn’t understand the choice—between sex and loaded nachos, he suspects, even without personal experience, that he’d make the same pick. But he finds himself annoyed at Rio, too, something aching in his gut, when he remembers how last week Rio bailed on their plans to bike to the river, their backpacks stuffed with a few stolen beers from the fridge in Rio’s garage. Alice had faked cramps to get out of youth group, though, calling Rio just before they were set to head out, and instead of pedaling away together, Mar had watched Rio shrink into a speck as he glided into the distance before he'd rounded a corner and disappeared completely, leaving Mar alone.
Mar shouldn’t be upset now, though. It wasn’t like it mattered. There was nothing Rio could do for him. School was officially over now. His freshman year was done, he’d failed at least two of his classes, and he didn’t get the girl.
“We can watch The Bodyguard,” Rio offers reluctantly. “If you want.”
Mar glances up, sees Rio with his eyes squeezed shut and his face tilted up towards the ceiling like he already regrets the offer. Mar unabashedly loved the movie (one night when his dad was out of town and his brother was working, he’d watched it with his mom. She’d ordered enough Chinese food to feed ten and then they’d eaten it in front of the TV in the living room even though it was against the rules) but he knew Rio hated it—that he thought it was too cheesy and sappy. Despite himself, Mar grins.
“I’m gonna hold you to that, man.”
Rio sighs, opening his eyes and scowling. “I know you w—” He abruptly stops talking.
“What?”
But Rio’s not looking at Mar anymore, and Mar feels a shot of adrenaline spike through him. He knows before he knows.
“Looks like you get another chance.” Rio juts his chin out, gesturing behind Mar. He flashes a too-bright smile.
Mar turns. Elena’s standing at the end of the hall. One hand plays with her braid on her shoulder. With the other, she waves shyly.
“Don’t blow it, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Mar breathes.
Rio claps him on the shoulder and walks away, giving Elena a conspiratorial nod when he passes her before he pushes one of the double doors open and escapes to summer.
Then, suddenly, Elena’s right in front of him. All five foot nothing of her in her daisy dress and pristine white sneakers, her yellow socks neatly folded over at the ankle. She’s got each hand wrapped around the straps of her backpack, and for once, she’s quiet.
Mar’s heart hammers in his chest.
“Hey,” he says dumbly, but he can’t help the way his whole face breaks out into a grin.
“Hi.”
“I thought you’d already gone home.”
“No, it’s just—Madame Heller promised me she’d grade my French final by the end of the school day, but she had an appointment, and I needed to get there before—” She seems to realize she’s overexplaining. She blows her bangs out of her face. “Anyway. That’s why. I had to run off, I mean.”
“Oh, okay, yeah,” Mar says, nodding, and then he realizes that she’s giving him an explanation. Telling him that she’d have stayed, waited for him—if she could.
It’s as simple as just saying the words, Mar thinks, but he’s staring at Elena’s big, brown eyes and his palms are sweaty. It feels like his heart is trying to burst out of his chest and his throat is tight.
Open your mouth and start saying the words, he tells himself. She likes you. Probably. You’re pretty sure, anyway. You just have to start. It’s that simple.
“Hey,” he says, like he’s starting a brand new conversation even though they’re in the middle of one. Well, technically. It did sort of seem like their conversation had reached its natural conclusion a second ago, but Mar didn’t want it to be over because it’d barely started, and—
And fuck, he thinks. He’s getting distracted.
The lull lasts a beat too long and Elena raises her eyebrows, waiting.
“Yes?” she prods.
Say. The. Words.
“I was wondering…”
“Yes?”
He hears steps coming closer and turns to see the two junior girls pass before they exit the building through the same doors Rio had, yearbooks clutched to their chests. The doors slam behind them shut with finality.
Looking around, Mar realizes he and Elena are completely alone now, the school seemingly deserted.
“Um, I was wondering…” Mar starts again. He glances at his feet, notices that one of his shoes is coming untied. He fiddles with the hem of his shirt, wishing he could fix his laces.
“You were wondering…?”
“Yeah, I was just—I just wanted—”
God, he wishes he’d just written the note. Given her his phone number. Left the ball in her court. Something, anything but this.
How did Rio do this?
His mouth feels unbearably dry.
“I wanted to ask—” You can do this, he thinks. Say it. And she’s staring at him, patiently waiting for him to construct a complete sentence, and he’s struck by the fact that he doesn’t think he’s heard her stumble over her words. Not ever. “Can I sign your yearbook?”
Elena blinks, surprised. Then her cheeks redden.
Fuck, Mar thinks, face pinching.
“I didn’t get one,” she admits.
“Oh.”
Stupid, he reprimands himself. Stupid, stupid—
“I could sign yours, though?” she offers reasonably, smoothing over his agony.
He recognizes it for the lifeline that it is, breathing a sigh of relief.
Maybe she’d leave her phone number, and he could call her this summer? Before he called her, he could prepare a list of topics to talk about, or maybe write a script to ask her out to the movies? Or maybe the museum? He thinks she’d like that and—
And right, he thinks. She’s waiting for him.
“Yeah,” Mar agrees brightly. “Yeah, definitely.”
He swings his backpack to his front, unzipping to reveal—
“Shit.”
“What?”
“I—left it at home.”
Mar wrinkles his forehead, staring into his empty backpack save for his gym shorts and his ceramic jug. How did this keep happening to him? He’s pretty sure these kinds of things never happened to Rio. He never got nervous, or stupid, or tongue-tied. He’d mentioned Alice offhand to Mar one day when they were smoking in the dugout, and by the next week, he was sneaking out to the dugout with her to—well, do something a whole lot different. Meanwhile, Mar had liked Elena for weeks—months—and he’d gotten nowhere, tripping over his own two feet on the way to the finish line.
He imagines going back home to see Rio, telling him he’d failed. Again.
“Oh, well—” Elena starts, but she bites her lip. She sucks in a breath, then says: “I could give—?”
“Do you want to come over?” he blurts.
It’s the longest second of his life, watching Elena’s eyes widen as she registers his question.
“To sign my yearbook, I mean,” he clarifies.
“Okay,” she agrees, and then she beams at him and Mar feels unsteady on his feet, like the whole world’s just flipped upside down. She’d agreed to come over to his house. They were about to hang out. Like friends.
And if they hung out like friends, then—
Then he could definitely ask her for her number at the end.
So they could do it again.
“Okay,” he repeats, grinning goofily. He feels something loosen in him.
And then they walk in lock-step to the double doors, to freedom.
The sun beats down on Mar’s back but he barely even notices. He’s got his skateboard in one hand and the other tucked in his pocket, where he slides two dimes together between his thumb and his pointer finger as he listens to Elena tell him about a documentary on Egyptian mummies she watched over the weekend.
“They’d remove all the organs,” Elena says, carefully avoiding stepping on any cracks in the sidewalk, “except the heart, because they thought was the center of a person’s being and their intelligence.”
“That’s cool.” And for once, he’s got something to add, something new: “You know the ancient Greeks thought that at the moment of death, your spirit left your body as, like, a little breath or puff of wind?”
“No, I didn’t.” She steals a glance at him, mouth curved up. “How do you know that?”
“What, are you the only one that can know things?” Mar teases, gesturing with the skateboard so that Elena turns the corner onto his street.
“No, I—”
“I’m just kidding,” Mar cuts in. “Rio’s super into Greek mythology and he tells me all about it.” He doesn’t add that he does it when they get stoned in Mar’s basement, razing through boxes of Cheez-Its and bags of microwaved pizza rolls.
“That’s kind of adorable. You talk about him a lot.” Mar cocks his head, considering. He didn’t talk much, but he supposed when he did, Rio was often starring in the stories he told—like the one about running away from the security guard at the mall, or the one where Rio broke Mar's finger when they were wrestling while they were laughing drunk. “Is he your best friend?”
For a second, Mar’s surprised by the question. He’d always figured she knew—but then he realizes that maybe he’s never told her. Not in so many words. It just hadn’t seemed like something that needed mentioning, the fact being so intrinsically true it felt as odd as announcing that water was wet.
“Yeah, and he’s my neighbor too.” Mar points six houses down to the small blue ranch-style house next to his own faded white split-level. He can see two small pink bicycles with chipped paint lying in the overgrown grass of Rio’s front lawn. “We grew up together. He’s like my brother.”
Even that was an understatement. Sometimes they felt like they were twins. They weren’t the same, no, they were basically opposites—but they complemented each other. Yin and yang, the head and the heart. Like Artemis and Apollo, the gods of hunting and harmony. Like the river and the sea, feeding into and absorbing each other.
“Don’t you have a brother?” Elena asks.
“Yeah, Guillermo—and we’re tight and shit, but me and Rio? Whole other level.”
“How come?”
“I dunno.” Mar pulls his hand out of his pocket to rub a finger across his bottom lip as he thinks about it. That fact had been cemented for so long, Mar wasn’t entirely positive. It was like asking why he breathed. He just knows that if they were away from each other for too long, sometimes Mar felt a dull throb, like he had a phantom limb in the shape of a person. Then he muses, “He’s always honest with me. And I can be quiet with him.”
“You can be quiet with him,” Elena repeats, like it’s a cryptic code. She cocks her head, taking in this statement almost like she’s analyzing what makes Mar tick.
“Yeah.” Mar scuffs his shoe against the pavement.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” she starts. “But you’re sort of—always quiet, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, but it’s—different.” Mar rips a leaf off of a neighbor's rose bush. If he told her, then maybe she’d start thinking it, too.
“It’s not a bad thing, being quiet,” Elena says quickly. “It’s just—you’re quiet with me too, so… I was curious.”
“I guess it’s like… Lots of people think I’m being weird or broody or—I dunno—dumb because I don’t say much but—” Mar hikes his skateboard up underneath his armpit and starts ripping the blades off the stem of the leaf. “I just like to listen, you know?”
“You are a good listener,” Elena agrees. “Which is good, I guess, because people always tell me I talk too much and that I’m a know-it-all and—”
“I like it,” Mar interrupts.
Elena freezes for a second, and Mar does too, matching her pace. “You do?”
“Yeah, I—like listening to you.” He picks at the little pieces of blade left behind, whittling the stem down to something smooth.
“You don’t get bored? My mom says if I talk about mollusks one more night at dinner—”
“I never get bored.” He flicks the leaf to the ground, chancing a glance at her. Her face is open, patient, and it’s heady, having someone willing to wait to hear what he thinks—someone other than Rio. “You’re, like, mad smart. I could listen to you talk about mollusks forever.”
Elena glows, her face splitting into a grin so that he can see her dimples.
“Um, wait here,” Mar tells her just outside his bedroom door. The house is empty, his family still at work for a couple of hours, and it’s just them. Alone.
Mar’s never been alone with a girl in his room before. Not completely. Not without the door cracked so his mom could peek in every time she checked on the laundry (which was a lot during those brief, blissful weeks before he’d been dumped).
Now though? Now he was about to be in his room alone with Elena Trujillo.
“Okay,” Elena agrees, and she inches further down the hall, checking out the photos on the walls—of Mar and Guillermo growing up, at baptisms and birthday parties and dressed up in their charro outfits for their mariachi performances. Pictures of him and Rio with their arms thrown around each other, gap-toothed and grinning wide in matching uniforms at T-ball and soccer games.
Mar doesn’t have time to be embarrassed about all the photos of his crooked, too-large teeth from before he got braces. He needs to clean—stat.
Slipping into his bedroom while Elena’s distracted, he surveys the situation: clothes are strewn all over his floor, hanging from the back of his chair, and overflowing out of his dirty laundry basket. There is a stack of plates on his desk from when he sneaks into the kitchen and makes himself Hot Pockets in the middle of the night, and then there are odds and ends everywhere—a frisbee at the foot of his bed (did he sleep with that last night?), a stack of tardy slips on his bookshelf, a tower of Game Boy cartridges on his bedside table, and all his drawing supplies spilled across his desk. Mar shoves the laundry basket into his closet, squeezing it on top of his shoe rack and then piling all the loose laundry from his room on top of it. It leans over, threatening to spill, and Mar shoves the closet door closed. Then, at a loss, he shoves the plates under the bed, hidden away. He yanks open a drawer and swipes everything on his desk—crumbs and crumpled receipts and pens—into it, then shoves it closed. Lastly, he makes his bed, and it’s a little rumpled, sure, but he thinks it looks alright. Not great, nothing like Rio’s immaculate room where everything had its place, but that was okay, he thought.
(He tries not to think of Rio scowling whenever he entered Mar’s room, tries not to imagine Elena wearing the same judgmental face.)
“Okay, ready,” he says, swinging the door open, and then Elena follows him into his bedroom.
For a minute, she just stands in the middle of everything, surveying. Her eyes skirt over the wrinkled bedspread, not lingering. She leans forward, scanning the titles on his bookshelf (mostly filled with his old Hardy Boys books and a few books Rio had tried loaning him that he couldn’t get into—weird dystopian stories with strange words). She studies the posters on his wall (Whitney Houston, of course, but also Isiah Thomas and Dennis Rodman).
With bated breath, Mar waits for her appraisal. But without giving one, she bursts forward toward his desk.
“Ooh, what kind of music do you listen to?” she asks, grabbing a mixtape and flipping it over. He watches her read over the tracklist. “Miles Davis? Louis Armstrong? Ella Fitzgerald? Are you—” She flicks her gaze back at him over her shoulder, “—a jazz fan?”
Mar laughs, waving a hand dismissively. “Nah, I am not ninety years old. That’s all Rio. Anything with that chicken scratch handwriting—that’s a tape he made me.”
“He makes you mixtapes?”
“I mean, sometimes. When he’s trying to push something on me, mostly,” Mar says, feeling awkward, like Elena might find his and Rio’s friendship odd. He grinds the heel of his hand into the post of his bed frame.
“That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Mar releases the breath he’d been holding.
“What’ve you got in the tape deck now?” Elena asks, punching the power button on Mar’s stereo. She presses down on the play button, and the hazy sound of Rhinoceros rolls out of the speakers and into the room, calming him.
“Smashing Pumpkins.”
“I’ve never heard them before.”
“They’re my favorite.”
He watches as her ears perk, absorbing their sound.
“What do you think?”
“It’s too early to give my verdict!” she protests. “You've got to listen to at least three songs before even forming a preliminary opinion.”
“Alright, alright,” Mar says, hands up like he’s surrendering, but he smiles. She returns the look, then glances away, suddenly shy.
“It’s your turtle,” she announces, reaching for a familiar ceramic creation. Before he can stop her, she lifts the lid—whipping around to look at him with surprise in her eyes. “You smoke?”
“Well, I—”
She arches a brow, and Mar really wishes he’d cleaned better. Or hidden things better. Been prepared for this, anyway.
“These things give you cancer, you know. They’re basically little death sticks. Did you know that smoking is the single most preventable cause of premature death—”
“That’s not—” Mar can’t help it. He chuckles a little. “That’s not a cigarette.”
“It’s not?” She looks back down into the box, brow wrinkled.
“It’s, um. Weed.” Mar walks over to her, putting his hand on the bottom of the box in her hands. With the other hand, he pulls out the joint, holding it out to her to sniff.
She scrunches her nose, frowning. “That smells weird.”
“That’s weed. And it doesn’t cause cancer.”
“Are you sure?” she asks skeptically.
“As sure as I am that a bivalve mollusk breathes through its gills.”
Elena purses her lips, squinting at him. “Okay,” she reluctantly accepts, placing the joint back in the turtle box. “I trust you. But I’m going to do my research and—”
Mar laughs.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing. I just. Knew you’d say that, I guess.”
Elena blushes, looking down, and Mar realizes suddenly that he’s very close to her. That the tip of his finger is just centimeters from hers on the box. That he can count her eyelashes, notice the light fuzz between her eyebrows, see the spot just above her lip where her gloss has smeared outside the line.
He gulps.
Sucking her lip into her mouth, Elena shifts her weight, pulling the turtle box out of his hand, dropping it back onto the desk. There’s a beat. Then Elena looks up at him, her eyes searching his.
She’s got flecks of gold in her eyes, radiant.
Electricity pulses through Mar’s body, sparking at every nerve.
His eyes drop to her lips.
He’s pretty sure this is the part where he should kiss her.
(That if he were Rio, he would.)
The moment pulses, and Mar feels his palms grow moist.
Five, he thinks, buying himself time. Four. Three. Two...
Elena giggles, nervous. Breaks eye contact. Tucks her bangs behind her ear, adorned with matching daisy earrings.
“Should I sign your yearbook?” She clears her throat and Mar feels like he’s been doused in ice water. He takes a step back, reaching an arm up to rub at the back of his neck.
“Oh. Yeah. Right.”
So he pulls the black book with gold lettering—A Season of Change, Martin Luther King, Jr. High School, 1993—off his desk and hands it to her, pressing one of his art pens into her palm, trying not to obsess over the fact that he’d missed yet another opportunity.
“You can’t watch me write it. And you can’t read it,” she insists, going to his bed and sitting in the corner so that he can’t sneak a peek. “Not until I leave, okay?”
Mar hums in agreement, but the longer she writes, the longer he hears the squeak of the pen against the silkiness of the paper, the more he wants to know what it says. It shouldn’t be a surprise that she’s got a lot to say, he guesses, but he’d never considered that she might have a lot to say about him.
He’s tidying the tapes on his desk, trying not to stare at her with the yearbook propped up on a pillow on her knees. It’s not a picture he thinks he’ll soon forget, though, her on his bed. He wonders if tonight his pillow will smell of her perfume. If that’ll make it harder to fall asleep—or easier.
When he hears the cap of the pen click back on, he turns back to her, watches as she flips through the pages now, reading the inscriptions of their classmates—the generic variations of let’s kick it this summer and stay cool and never change! filling up the spaces. Then she must turn to Rio’s page because she says, “Oh, wow.”
Mar wanders back to the bed and peers over the top of the book. She lies it flat so he can see. Rio had taken up a whole page. He hadn’t written much; he’d drawn something instead. One of his simple sketches, the lines rough, the guiding shapes still visible. It’s of the two of them in the dugout, both grinning, passing a joint between their hands, the smoke billowing up above their heads and filled with stylized graffiti: RIO & MAR, 1978 - ∞
“Yeah, we always draw something for each other in our yearbooks,” Mar explains. “Have every year since sixth grade.”
“What’d you draw him?”
“Us at the river. There’s this spot we like to bike to that nobody else has ever found. We just go down there and mess around and—”
“—Smoke?” she asks, tapping at the joint in Rio’s drawing.
“Ha, yeah,” Mar agrees awkwardly. “And swim and stuff. Shoot the shit. Whatever. It’s like a tradition.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Do you have thing like that—with your best friend?”
Elena closes the yearbook, reaches out to set it on Mar’s side table, careful not to push any of the Game Boy cartridges off the edge.
“My best friend moved away in December.”
“Oh. Shit. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. That’s why I didn’t get a yearbook, though. I figured—no point, you know? Nobody else really…” She shrugs. “It’s kind of the opposite. Like you said you can be quiet with Rio? I could be loud with Lucia. Other people—they find me annoying, I think. But not her. And not—”
“Not me,” he agrees. And his heart starts beating loudly again.
“This might be weird,” she says, readjusting so she’s sitting perpendicular from the head of the bed, her back pressed against his wall, her sneakers hanging off the edge of his bed, “but you remind me of her a little. Lucia.”
“It’s not weird. You kinda remind me of Rio, too.”
“I don’t listen to jazz. Or draw. Or smoke weed,” she says, eyebrows disappearing behind her bangs.
“No, but you’re both really smart. And, like, you both have an opinion on everything. And you’re both—I dunno—easy to talk to.”
“That’s really nice.”
“Just the truth.”
Elena presses her thumb to her lips, nibbles on her nail.
“I’m sorry about Lucia. I can’t imagine—what it’d be like. If Rio moved away. Do you still get to talk to her?”
“Yeah, sometimes. Long-distance calls are kinda expensive, though. And even when I get to talk to her, it’s not the same.”
“It’s not?”
“I mean, I miss the stupid little stuff that went along with that, you know? We had this secret language we made up to pass notes. We’d trace words into each other’s skin while we fell asleep at sleepovers. Give each other pedicures or braid each other’s hair—dare each other to eat gross pizza combinations and keep a list rating each flavor.”
“Like what kind of combinations?”
“My favorite is pepperoni and tomatoes with sweet chili sauce and feta cheese.”
Mar blinks. “You sure you don’t smoke weed?”
“Shut up,” she reprimands with a laugh, scrunching up her face in mock annoyance. “I miss it. I haven’t been able to eat it in ages. My mom won’t order it anymore because I can’t finish the whole thing by myself.”
“Well, I will not eat that with you, either,” Mar says, shaking his head. “But. You could braid my hair. If you wanted.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Okay, yeah,” she says, scooting forwards.
And that’s how he finds himself sitting on the floor, leaning up against his bed, each of Elena’s legs on either side of his shoulders. She’s warm, pressed against him, and he’s heady with the smell of her perfume—something faint and sweet—as he feels her long nails glide across his scalp, dividing his long hair into three sections. It’s strangely calming. Peaceful. For a few minutes, they don’t speak at all, and Mar doesn’t feel a shred of nerves about coming up with something to say.
“My verdict is in, by the way,” she says, crisscrossing his hair.
“Hm?”
“I like the music. This song especially.”
Mar refocuses on the soft rippling of the guitar, the gentle tiptoe of the bass.
And this feeling shivers down your spine, love comes in colors I can’t deny, all that matters is love, love, your love.
“This is Crush,” Mar tells her, leaning back just slightly so that he can look up at her above him. “It’s my favorite too.”
Elena makes a little pleased noise in the back of her throat, and Mar smiles lazily. Then she continues with his braid, her fingers moving deftly through his hair until she’s finished.
“Do you have a hair tie?”
“No, but I probably have one of Rio’s bracelets in that drawer,” he says, nodding towards the side table. Elena opens it and sure enough pulls out one of the bands Rio’s always wearing on his wrist. She stretches it between two fingers, feeling for its elasticity, then twists it into his hair.
“Done,” she says, and then she slides off the bed to sit next to him, reaching up to bush a piece of his hair that didn’t fit into the braid back. She cocks her head, surveying her work.
“Well?”
“You look very pretty,” she tells him, tugging his braid over his shoulder.
“Thank you.”
She smiles, eyes dancing, the flecks of gold in her irises shimmering, and Mar feels a warm glow inside of him.
Throw away those dreams and dare, Billy Corrigan croons, and Mar thinks, Okay.
“You... look really pretty too.”
“Thank you,” she says, but her voice is quiet, barely a whisper.
Mar’s eyes trace over her face, focusing on the smudge of blue eyeshadow on her eyelids, the sharp point of her nose, her plump bottom lip.
He remembers the popcorn balancing on the tip of her tongue.
“Mar?”
“Yeah?” he breathes.
“You can kiss me. If you wanted.”
Goosebumps break out all over his body, and he tugs on his earlobe like he’s testing to see if he heard her right. But she’s looking at him, waiting for an answer, her pupils huge and round, and he nods, smacking his lips together, trying to moisten his suddenly-dry mouth.
“Okay, yeah,” he says, but his palms are sweaty and his heart may currently be trying to claw its way out of his chest. He swallows, trying to steady his breathing.
She nods, turning to position herself, and then her eyes flutter shut, waiting.
And Mar should reach over and kiss her—she’s invited him to do it—but he feels frozen in place, the magnitude of the moment too much to bear.
“Elena?”
Elena cracks one eye open, peeking at him.
“I’m, um, really nervous.”
Her other eye flies open, and her face reddens. For once, she gapes, uncertain what to say, and shit, did that sound like he didn’t want to kiss her?
“Do you think… we could kiss each other?” he asks quickly. “At the same time?”
Features softening, her blush draining away, Elena nods.
So they rearrange themselves carefully. Sit criss-cross in front of each other. Shyly, Elena reaches out to link her fingers with Mar’s, and he realizes her palms are moist with sweat, too. Squeezing her fingers, he moves their clasped hands onto his knees, then leans forward. Slow. She matches him, and for a second, they just hover a breath away from each other, suspended in the moment as Mar inks it into the part of his brain with his most precious memories: The time Mar painted a portrait of Tamal the cat and his mom found it on his desk and then took it to Michael’s to get it matted and framed. When his dad taught him to shave, telling him he was a man now. Or when his abuela gave him his abuelo’s vihuela after he died, telling him that he’d wanted Mar to have it. The day Rio decked Shane Breeler in fourth grade for calling Mar a “retard,” promising to do the same to anyone else that ever insulted his best friend. Or the time Mar mastered the gazelle flip on the skateboard a full two weeks before Rio did, or the night he and Rio stayed up late and then stole Guillermo’s car to drive across town and get iHop at 4 am, nearly crashing into the car in front of them when they were laughing too hard—but stopping just in time and then laughing harder, masking their fear.
Now this memory cements: Elena’s hand, small in his. The shine of her lips. The whisper of her breath against his mouth.
And then the gap shrinks, and he’s kissing her, feeling the sticky residue of her gloss. She tastes like burnt popcorn and she smells like daisies. It’s perfect, soft and sweet, and as he kisses her, his hammering heart slows to something bearable.
They break away at the same time, both of them grinning like fools.
“Well, I guess Rio doesn’t need to watch The Bodyguard with me tonight,” Mar says, feeling dazed.
Elena giggles. “I have no idea what that means.”
“I’ll tell you,” Mar says. And then he does.
Mar hears the thuds of someone taking the stairs two at a time and lifts his head up off his pillow (it does smell like her—just faintly, but enough), knowing before it swings open that it will reveal Rio, each hand holding a white and red paper tray overflowing with loaded nachos.
“Please tell me these are celebratory nachos and that I can officially revoke my offer to watch The Bodyguard.”
Mar can’t bite back his grin. “We’ll have to save the greatest cinematic masterpiece of 1992 for another day.”
“Fuck! Yes!” Rio sets one of the nacho trays down on Mar’s nightstand and then seems to notice his room for the first time. “Damn, what kinda power does she got over you, man? You cleaned your room?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Nah, nah, I approve. This is the first time I’ve seen your carpet since sixth grade.”
Mar scowls.
“So, basement?” Rio asks, twisting his neck and gesturing back to the stairs. “Smoke a blunt, each some nachos, tell me all about it?”
Scratching at his hairline, Mar hesitates. “Actually… is tomorrow cool?”
Rio’s face morphs into quiet surprise, a line forming between his brows. “I thought we were kickin’ it?”
“I told Elena I would call her tonight.”
Mar’s mother had gotten home not long after the kiss, her eyes bulging when she’d come upstairs to find a girl in Mar’s room, but she’d smiled, tight-lipped, and offered to drive Elena home. He’d endured an earful on the way home about house rules—but it didn’t matter. He was floating, replaying the hug he’d given Elena outside of his mom’s idling Impala when they’d pulled up to the house, hearing Elena’s whispered reminder to check his yearbook when he got home.
“Oh.”
“I didn’t know how long you’d be with Alice…”
“Yeah,” Rio says, but Mar clocks it when he sucks his teeth. “Alright, then. Tomorrow.”
“Thanks for the nachos.”
Rio tips his head in acknowledgment, then rocks on the balls of his feet, hesitating for a second before he exits, looking one last time over his shoulder at Mar stretched out on his bed.
Mar feels a dull throb in his gut when he hears the front door whine closed downstairs and the screen door snap back into place, but it eases when he pulls his yearbook out from underneath the nacho tray.
He flips past Rio’s page, finding Elena’s, and rereads the last line of her inscription, written in neat, coiled cursive letters:
I’ve been trying to work up the courage to ask you this all semester, and this is my last chance, so I’m just going to write it here: do you want to be my boyfriend? If yes, call me tonight. XO, Elena Trujillo
And beneath that, she’d written seven pristine digits, beckoning him to the future.