It’s cool enough outside, the humidity letting up or maybe not yet sinking in. The streets are lit by streetlights and signs and still-awake apartments, but more than that, they’re lit by the passing cars’ headlights.
“You’ve always lived here?” he says. I don’t know if he means the city or the West Village, but I nod because the answer to both is yes. I’ve only lived here. The structure of my family is always changing, but the brownstone, the red bricks, the crumbling stoop, the yellow paint in my bedroom, the view of the Italian restaurant across the street from our building all stay the same.
“Where do you live?” I ask. I can’t believe I don’t know the answer to this yet. I know what he ate for dinner last night (a turkey sandwich) and his favorite song (“Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits, which I downloaded and fell in love with). I know what he thought of all the books we read while silently flirting in the park last semester. But I don’t know the basics of his life.
“I’m in Brooklyn. Clinton Hill. My parents have lived there forever so they’ll never leave, but my school’s around here. That going to be okay with you?”
“I love Brooklyn,” I say, but I don’t really know if I like it or not. I basically never leave my little corner of New York. Bernardo grabs my hand and brings it to his mouth. “Do you have siblings in Brooklyn?” I say, but I know the answer. I saw them running around him at the park. I know he has a full life with lots of ease. That’s stuff you can see even from a great distance, like how I’m sure my particular fucked-up-ness shines across the park at everyone too. Strangers pass me and know I’m from a crazy world.
“Four. Two of each. All younger,” Bernardo says, and I blush at how badly I want to fold myself into his life.
I’m jealous and a little scared I can’t compete with all that.
A year or two ago I would have bragged about Arizona and the way we operated like two parts of one brain. I would have thought maybe Tess was going to be The Stepmom, the one who was lasting. I would have explained that Roxanne is like a sister, so I almost had two sisters and almost had a mother.
I don’t know how to explain anything anymore.
“Sorry this is totally like an interview, but I want to know more about you,” I say. I think it’s that I want to know more, and not that I want him to know less.
“I don’t mind being interviewed by a cute girl,” Bernardo says with a straight face and a squeeze of my shoulder.
“Do you speak Spanish?” I say, even though it sounds awkward and weird and like I’m curious about the wrong things.
“I can,” he says. “Sort of. Badly. But I don’t. Sometimes with my dad. Terms of endearment and swears mostly.”
I smile. Bernardo puts a hand on my back, rubs for a moment, and keeps walking. He doesn’t smile, but not in a bad way.
I take note in my head: Bernardo is a boy who doesn’t depend on smiles. Bernardo is a boy who swears and loves in Spanish.
“I had a crap night until right now,” I say. He hasn’t asked, but I feel like it must be obvious, from my messy, lipstick-less face.
“I had a crap year until I saw you in the park a few months ago,” he says, turning the conversation into something sweet and large again.
“I’m the worst, seriously. Or, like, not the best.”
“I said no self-deprecation!” he says, but his eyes glint. “Look, I want to fall in love with a girl who reads and does weird stuff and has crap days and sends funny texts and sits at park benches drinking hot coffee when everyone else is drinking iced.”
“We’re not in love,” I say, leaning toward his ear and whispering into it. I smile when I pull back, and my body is trying to hold too many feelings for one single night.
“Wouldn’t it be nice, though?” Bernardo says. I smile and look down and try to stop the happy laughter from bubbling up like a water fountain. It would be nice. “I don’t know. I’m a romantic. Call me crazy, but being in love is the best.”
“Have you been?” I say. It feels like it would take something away for him to say yes, but I can’t put my finger on why. I want one big love, and only one. The exact opposite of my dad.
“Yeah,” he says, and my stomach drops. “That’s how I know I want it again.”
“It was good?” I say, so that he knows I haven’t been there.
“It was great until it was gone,” he says. He winces, like the pain is physical and still sore.
“I’m sorry,” I say. An ambulance rushes by, all sirens and whooping and so loud we have to stop talking for a moment. “That it hurt. Not that it’s over.”
Bernardo nods.
“It’s not the worst thing, being hurt,” he says. I want to ask what that means, exactly, but he takes my hand and squeezes and I think that is as much as he wants to say right now.