Chapter Text
“Please Y/N, it will only take 10 minutes to pick up. Solo diez minutos, just 10 minutes.”
Anita’s sparkling eyes are contorted in desperation as I gaze up at her, my head lolling lazily upside down as it hangs over the edge of her bed.
“It’s not possible. You know work starts at 8, and it would take me too long to get there beforehand…Unless you want me to go when my shift is done?” I try my best to raise one questioning eyebrow, but I’m certain it’s ineffective. Despite however much I’ve practiced in our bathroom mirror, even holding down my right eyebrow with my index and middle finger, I’ve found it impossible to this without inevitably raising both.
Anita makes a big show of inhaling deeply and exhaling with a shudder through her nose as she folds a sky-blue bedsheet on an ironing board. She’s always been a little dramatic since we were children, playing in the stone-paved streets of Puerta de Tierra. I was quite a few years younger than her, five to be exact, but I worshipped each brick that I watched her step on with a ferocious and unapologetic sense of self, even as a preteen.
As neighbours, we often found ourselves reluctantly stuck together in my home as our mothers hashed out the details of whatever new gossip was drifting its away around the town over a cup of café. I was a kid who preferred to gaze out of my bedroom window at whoever was passing by and concoct little tales about what they were carrying in their bolsas rather than make conversation. But Anita never made me feel shy, and we spent many nights giggling on the floor of my bedroom about silly schoolmates and ridiculous jokes we’d heard.
I still remember when I first caught Anita’s eyes lingering on my brother. Bernardo couldn’t have cared less about girls at the time, or so I thought. It was a late weekday, and he had just returned home from boxing practice with his friends. Anita and I were sprawled in the living room, rolling coral-coloured sea-glass marbles between us when he stormed in, with an ink-blue mottled bruise seeping through his left knuckles. He ripped a strip of grey fabric from the shirt he was wearing and wrapped it around his hand with a mindless coarseness, his furrowed brows connecting with intensity, rather than concentration. Anita was watching him with a cautious wide-eyed gaze, like he was secret she was debating whether or not to keep.
I never felt left out when they struck up a romance; Bernardo and Anita just made sense. For so long I was totally blind to the connection between them, but it could not be unseen once I finally identified it. They were so deeply comfortable in each other’s presence that their romance appeared to be a naturally unfurling consequence of an innate connection. When my mother passed away, Bernardo and I just had ourselves and Anita. There was nothing left for us in Puerto Rico, so we all packed up each other and what little belongings we had to America, the land of opportunity and “prosperity,” where Nardo could turn his boxing talent into a career.
Our New York apartment is undoubtedly cramped, but we’ve done our best to turn it into a home over the past two years. My main method is plants; I’ve dotted our entire home with potted greenery. The kitchen windowsill is lined with basil, rosemary, and thyme plants, whilst the bathroom is home to a grand fiddle-leaf fig. My bedroom is filled with greenery that extends to the fire escape outside my window.
Anita, on the other hand, adores lace; lace curtains, lace bed-sheets, lace dresses. The worst are the lace pillowcases; I can’t stand the way they get caught in my hair, forcing me to detangle my curls first thing every morning. I squirm a little and look down at my right forearm, where there is a raised red imprint of delicately patterned semi-circle, almost like an embossed wedding invitation. I push myself off the bed, raise my eyes to our ceiling and let out a long, dramatically pained groan. A smile lifts Anita’s cheeks as she whisks towards me, her layered mint skirt flapping with her speed as she envelopes me in a hug. “Thank you, thank you, thank you”; her words are muffled as she buries her head in my shoulder, pushing us back down onto the itchy lace sheets. She knows I can never say no to her.
I lean against the cashier counter of Café Rosa, propping my face up with one hand as I gaze out onto the street. Glass panels compose the entire storefront, a feature I’ve come to adore over the past year I’ve worked here. We sit on Chambers Street, a border of stores between Jet and Shark territory – “neutral ground.” Outside the café past the sidewalk is a wide grey road, often filled with shoppers or wannabe troublemakers milling about.
I can see the world from the comfort of my counter. My typical sight are scrawny underfed white boys wearing ragged denim jeans, sauntering around as if they own the place: the Jets. Nardo was so wary of this job and tried his best to convince me to work with Anita at the bridal shop. Thankfully I convinced him otherwise. This is no man’s land after all, I said again and again until Anita felt badly enough for me to chime in in agreement. Baking is the one thing that brings me the most pleasure in this world, and I would never have let this opportunity slip from my hands.
Nardo was eventually pacified after speaking to Señor Garcia, the mustachioed, broad-shouldered, pleasantly Puerto Rican owner of Café Rosa. Garcia is deeply kind and fiercely protective. Our café is largely supported by soft Puerto Rican women wearing soft Puerto Rican skirts who miss eating Puerto Rican food – it’s not exactly a hotspot for spiky white men to congregate. But Garcia possesses some kind of sixth sense that on the very rare occasion that the door swings open and in walks a troublemaking white boy, he appears by my side instantly – even though he spends most of his time baking in the windowless kitchen behind the counter. We have a practiced choreography in such situations; Garcia mans the cash register with a gruff hostility, while I slink off to the side and busy myself adjusting the baked goods in the long glass counter to his left. No eye-contact and no words are exchanged; I only fill in the paper bags with whatever the white boy wants and slide them across the glass surface towards Garcia’s waiting hands.
Nowadays, Garcia is a little more lenient with me. It’s not usual for me to be alone in the store for a few hours each day for the past month, as he tends to another smaller bakery that he opened that’s far deeper into our neighbourhood. I’m grateful for the freedom and I’d do nothing to jeopardize it, but I can’t deny that I’ve been feeling increasingly uneasy for the past couple weeks. However much I’d like to believe I’m working in no man’s land, the increasing Jet presence is obvious, even just from my cashier counter view. Three days ago, a couple of them bashed in the windows of a Dominican-owned grocery store, just a street over from the café. There’s little I can do or say without losing my position – if Nardo were to find out, he would definitely send over a group of his men (and himself) to stand outside the café and teach any Jet boys on the street a lesson. That’s the last thing I want; all I care about is having the time to practice my baking with Garcia. I don’t have time to indulge boys who look for an excuse to pretend to be fighting men, even if they are my brother.
Today is one of those Monday afternoons where I feel every minute stretching before me as if it were an hour. I pull out the white paper bag I’ve stuffed in a cubby on my side of the counter. Inside is roll of soft woven fabric, pale yellow with the hint of a golden shimmer, like sunrays glinting against dewdrops on the petals of a sunflower. The material is captivating, and I can’t resist running my fingertips across it. Of course, the favour Anita requested would be for my benefit; I’m certain she will turn this material into a dress for me to wear at the high school Summer Social. The event is still a few weeks away, but Anita needs her time of course. It’s just one of the ways she tries to make my life the life she dreamed of when coming to this country, even if it means hours of toiling away in her room after long shifts at the bridal store.
I’m about to run my hands over the material again when I hear a loud yelp. My head whips up to see that what had been a reassuringly empty view mere seconds ago has now been shattered by a squad of Jets, at least six of them, laughing and clambering over each other. No doubt they’ve just broken through another storefront, or maybe just somebody’s skull. I’m not taking my chances today. I throw the fabric spool onto the glass counter and move towards the windows. It takes three sets of shutters to cover all the entire storefront. I start at the left, yanking the beaded cord, and the shutters clatter down with a reassuring thud.
The boys are too close to the café, congregated on the side of the road, overlapping the curb in the front of me. They’re close enough that I can see flecks of black, green, and purple along the arms, on their shirts, and their tattered jeans. I move to the middle window panel and tug down the cord. Their noises aren’t getting quieter, and their proximity is causing a sick feeling in my stomach.
I walk past the front door towards the last window panel. I take a moment to peer out of the glass. One of the boys catches my attention; he looks no more than 15, definitely the baby of the group, but is equally splashed with paint. I suppose defacing with paint is not as bad a truancy as I was expecting. Another boy runs up from behind him and clamps his hands down on his shoulders, giving the baby a little shake. This new Jet is a little taller than the rest of the crew but he’s just as skinny. His face is gaunt with sharp cheekbones that protrude enough to make it clear that it is a combination of genetics and situational weight. A breeze ripples open his raggedy t-shirt, revealing a white undershirt that is stained with a giant paint splotch. I squint a little. Is he wearing a glove? Its 95 degrees out. Must be some kind of gang fashion statement. What an idiot.
I stand on my tiptoes and crane my neck a little to scope out the setting beyond my immediate field of view, but no other Jets are on the fringes. That’s some relief, at least. My fingers are closing around the final cord when my eyes drift back to the gloved hand. It hits me that it’s not a glove after all; it’s just grey paint. The realization makes me smile in spite of myself. I glance up to see that the grey-handed boy is looking right at me. He’s standing in profile, with his hands still on the kid’s shoulders but his head is entirely turned to face the little remaining corner of exposed window, a corner that I fill almost entirely. Unmistakably blue eyes peer out at me. It’s a glowing, piercing blue, the kind of colour that warms up his entire skin tone.
He slides his hands off the kid’s shoulders and turns his body to face me entirely, hands hanging by his side and breathing heavily. I can’t read the details of his gaze – it’s not a menacing expression, it just seems like he’s reading my face, but it turns my blood cold either way. I can feel his eyes shifting to look at all the corners of my face and the feeling freezes me in place. It’s not until that he takes a tentative step forward towards the café that I snap back into my body. I yank the cord, the shutters fall, and the boy is gone.