Just One Day

Twenty-nine
New York City
My parents want to drive me to JFK, but I’ve made plans to spend the day with Dee before I go, so they drop me off at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. I’m going to take the train—my first train in a year—to Manhattan, and Dee will meet me at Penn Station. Tomorrow night, I catch my flight to London and then onward to Paris.
When my train is announced, we walk toward the platform. Dad taps his toes impatiently, visions of Maui golf courses dancing through his head. They leave on Monday. Mom just paces. Then when my train’s headlights are visible in the distance, she pulls a box out of her purse.
“I thought we weren’t doing presents this time.” Last year, there’d been the big dinner out, lots of little last-minute gadgets. Last night was more low-key. Homemade lasagna in the dining room. Both Mom and I pushed it around our plates.
“It’s less for you than for me.”
I open the box. Inside is a small cell phone with a charger and a plug adapter.
“You got me a new phone?”
“No. I mean yes. I mean, your old phone, we’ll unfreeze the plan when you get back. But this is a special quad-band phone. It definitely works in Europe. You just have to buy a . . . what are they called?” she asks Dad.
“SIM card.”
“Right.” She fumbles to flick open the back. “They’re very inexpensive, apparently. So you can get a local number anywhere you go and have a phone if you need one, and you can call us in an emergency or text us—but only if you choose to. It’s more for you, so you have a way to reach us. If you need to. But you don’t have to—”
“Mom,” I interrupt, “it’s okay. I’ll text you.”
“Really?”
“Well, yeah! And you can text me back from Hawaii. And does this thing have a photo function?” I peer at the camera. “I’ll send you pictures.”
“You will?”
“Of course I will.”
By the look on her face, you’d think I’d given her the present.
_ _ _
Penn Station is mobbed, but I find Dee right away, under the departure board, wearing a pair of lemon-lime paneled nylon shorts and a tank top with UNICORNS ARE REAL emblazoned on it. He scoops me up in a big hug.
“Where’s your suitcase?” he asks.
I turn around, show off the olive backpack I got from the Army-Navy surplus store in Philadelphia.
Dee whistles. “How’d you fit your ball gown?”
“It folds down really small.”
“I thought you’d have a bigger bag, and I told Mama we’d come back home before we went out exploring, so she made lunch.”
“I like lunch.”
Dee throws up his hands. “Actually, Mama planned a surprise party for you. Don’t tell her I told.”
“A party? She doesn’t even know me.”
“She thinks she does by how much I talk about you, and she’ll use any excuse to cook. My family’s coming, including my cousin Tanya. I told you about her?”
“The one who does hair?”
Dee nods. “I asked her if she’d do yours. She does white-girl hair too, works in a fancy salon in Manhattan. I thought maybe you could get a bob again, go all Louise Brooks. Look just like you did when you met. You gotta do something with that mop.” He fingers my hair, up, as usual, in a clip.
We take the subway all the way uptown, to the last stop on the train. We get out and transfer to a bus. I look out the window, expecting the rough-and-tumble streets of the South Bronx, but the bus passes a bunch of pretty brick buildings all shaded by mature trees.
“This is the South Bronx?” I ask Dee.
“I never said I lived in the South Bronx.”
I look at him. “Are you serious? I’ve heard you say a bunch of times that you’re from the South Bronx.”
“I only said that I was from the Bronx. This is the Bronx, technically. It’s Riverdale.”
“But you told Kendra you were from the South Bronx. You told her you went to South Bronx High School. . . .” I pause, remembering that first conversation. “Which does not even exist.”
“I left the girl to her own jumped conclusions.” He gives me a knowing smirk. He rings the bell to get off the bus. We exit onto a busy street full of tall apartment buildings. It’s not fancy, but it’s nice.
“You are a master pretender, D’Angelo Harrison.”
“Takes one to know one. I am from the Bronx. And I am poor. If people want to translate that as ghetto boy, that’s their choice.” He smiles. “Especially if they want to throw scholarship money my way.”
We arrive at a pretty brick building with cracked gargoyles hanging over the front entrance. Dee rings the buzzer—“so they know we’re coming”—and then we take one of those ancient caged-in elevators to the fifth floor. Outside the front door, he looks at me and tucks some strands of stray hair behind my ear.
“Act surprised,” he whispers and opens the door.
We step into a party, about a dozen people crowded into the small living room where there’s a BON VOYAGE ALLYSON sign tacked up over a table laden with food. I look at Dee, eyes wide in shock.
“Surprise!” he says, twinkling jazz hands.
Dee’s mother, Sandra, comes up to me and wraps me in a gardenia-scented bear hug. “He told you, didn’t he? That was the worst look of surprise I ever saw. My baby couldn’t keep a secret if was stapled to him. Well, come on, then, meet the folk, have some food.”
Sandra, introduces me to various aunts and uncles and cousins and gives me a plate of barbecued chicken and mac and cheese and some greens and sits me down at a table. “Now you hold court.”
Dee has pretty much told everyone about Willem, so they all have advice on how to track him down. Then they start peppering me with questions about the trip. How I’m getting there—a flight from New York to London and then on to Paris—and where I’m staying—a youth hostel in the Villette area Willem and I hung out in, twenty-five bucks a night for a dorm—and how I’ll get around—with the help of a guidebook, and I will brave the Metro. And they ask about Paris, and I tell them about what I saw last year, and they’re very interested to hear how diverse it was, about the sections that were full of Africans and then this starts a big debate about which African countries France colonized until someone goes for a map to figure it out.
While everyone pores over the atlas, Sandra comes up with a plate of peach cobbler. “I got you a little something,” she says, handing me a thin package.
“Oh, you shouldn’t—”
She waves away my objections like stale air. I open the package. Inside is a laminated map of Paris. “The man at the store said this would be ‘indispensable.’ It has all the subway stops and an index of major streets.” She opens the map to show me. “And D’Angelo and I spent so many hours looking at it, it has our good blessings coursing through it.”
“Then I’ll never get lost again.”
She folds the map up and puts it in my hands. She has the same eyes as Dee. “I want to thank you for helping my boy this year.”
“Me helping Dee?” I shake my head. “I think you have it the other way around.”
“I know exactly the way I have it,” she says.
“No, seriously. All Dee has done is help me. It’s almost embarrassing.”
“Stop with such nonsense. D’Angelo is both brilliant and blessed with the road life has taken him on. But it’s not been easy for him. In his four years of high school and one year of college, you are the first friend from school he’s ever talked about, much less brought home.”
“You two are talking about me, aren’t you?” Dee asks. He puts an arm around each of us. “Extolling my brilliance?”
“Extolling your something,” I say.
“Don’t either of you believe a word!” He turns around to introduce a tall, regal girl with a head full of intricate twists. “I was telling you about Tanya.”
We exchange hellos, and Sandra goes off to fetch some more cobbler. Tanya reaches out to free my hair from its clip. She fingers the ends and shakes her head, clucking her tongue the same disapproving way Dee so often does.
“I know. I know. It’s been a year,” I say. And then I realize it has. A year.
“Was it short or long?” Dee asks. He turns to Tanya. “You have to make her look just the same. For when she finds him.”
“If I find him,” I clarify. “It was to here.” I point to the base of my skull, where the stylist in London had cut my hair to last year. But then I drop my hand. “You know, though. I don’t think I want the bob.”
“You don’t want a haircut?” Tanya asks.
“No, I would love a haircut,” I tell her. “But not a bob. I want to try something totally new.”