“For real? How is that possible? It’s so close!”
I shrugged, decided not to say any of the real reasons. Because my mother never had enough time off from work to take us anywhere fun. Because we never had any money. Because, unlike you, my parents couldn’t afford to buy me a truck and give me the gas money to go wherever I wanted to go whenever I wanted to go there.
Saturday, late afternoon, the sky darkening already. I paused a second before shutting the door behind me, smelling the air, feeling the cold of the coming twilight. Rain felt likely. Mom was at work. She couldn’t stop me from getting in the car with a boy I had sworn to destroy. She couldn’t make me leave the bottle of scotch behind. She couldn’t make me eat.
I was invincible.
We drove south on a punk rock carpet of sound, intricate melodies overlapping inarticulate guitar distortion. He wore all black, strong and graceful as a ninja.
“We’re driving to Poughkeepsie, then taking the train into the city. Then we’ll take the subway to the club. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
The music made my heart beat faster. Where had it been all my life, this sound, these noises, all the profanity and bare unashamed feeling that they’d never in a million years play on the radio or in the supermarket or any of the other places people play music? How big it was, this ocean of music, and here I was standing in water that was up to my ankles. Maya was out there, knee-deep in the same sea.
“You don’t say much,” Tariq said. “I thought it was just you didn’t want to talk to all those assholes at school.”
“That’s certainly true,” I said, watching the world darken before my eyes. “You seem to find plenty to say to them.”
He nodded. “It’s complicated. I’ve known most of those guys since we were little kids, you know? They weren’t always such jerks.”
“But they’re jerks now.”
Again, Tariq nodded. “Some of them, anyway. Sometimes.” I took him in: his profile, the slope of his wide nose, the smell of the dinner his mother cooked, spices I couldn’t name, meat so rich I could feel it on my tongue.
“Like Bastien and Ott,” I said.
He laughed. “They’re not so bad. They have their moments. They can be assholes, but it’s mostly harmless stuff.”
Both my eyebrows skyrocketed. There were a dozen things I could have said, but I decided to be strategic—and neutral. “Just because you don’t feel the harm doesn’t mean it’s harmless.”
“That’s true.”
“And anyway, I wonder. People say sticks and stones, words will never hurt me, all that bullshit, but the first thing you find out in kindergarten is that words can hurt. And if someone’s capable of hurting someone else with words, aren’t they also capable of hurting someone physically?”
Tariq shrugged. I breathed deep, but his guard was up. He didn’t like talking about his best friends.
I gave it a second, and then pressed the point. “You don’t think so?”
“No. I think so.”
Already the streetlights were stuttering on. “And would they? Hurt someone?”
Silence. Stalemate—he wouldn’t say anything else on the subject, not for the moment anyway. I’d have to sneak up on it another way. The scotch would help.
Many miles passed before he said, “In a way I envy you, you know? You don’t need to be disconnected from all these people. You don’t feel this pressure, to be some person they expect you to be instead of yourself.” I smelled something on him, then: the rush of yearning, the hunger for release. Bingo. I reached into my bag and my hand closed on the neck of the scotch bottle—but then something stopped me from pulling it out.
That smell.
The smell of wanting to be drunk. Of desperation for booze.
I’d been smelling it all my life. A knowing settled in my stomach, half eerie suspicion and half gut certainty. My mother is an alcoholic. She had kept it in check for longer than I’d been alive. She went weeks sometimes without thinking about it. It was why she went to synagogue so often, when I was pretty sure she didn’t believe a word of it. But it was still there, below the surface. Just like this bottle, hidden away. Forgotten sometimes. But there. How had I missed it?
“This song is so good,” I said, cranking up the stereo.
He smiled and sang along, and so did I. By Poughkeepsie my whole body was singing. We stood on the platform and waited for a southbound train. We stood so close I could feel his heat against the cold of the night. Lights glimmered and flashed on a bridge. The river was a wide rush of wind and water, cold and alive, the weight of the night so heavy it could crack me open. My empty aching belly gurgled out a song, every cramp and spasm an affirmation, a lyric: I am alive, I am an adult, I control my life, I can do anything.
RULE #17
Pattern recognition is an innate ability of all animals. Birds and jellyfish and people all learn the same way: by finding familiar things in the chaos of reality. And the human mind’s capacity for pattern recognition is the most impressive on the planet. Properly attuned, it can find the signal in an ocean of static.
Only the strongest, purest mind can control the body. But some truths can only be taught by the body. The warrior schooling herself in the Art of Starving will learn to let the body take the reins.
DAY: 13, CONTINUED . . .
This was a terrible horrible no-good very bad idea. I knew it the second I stepped onto the platform at Grand Central Terminal. New York City was the wrong place for a novice in the art of controlling his senses. Overwhelming stinks, deafening sounds. The crushing pressure of a half-dozen million people choking on their own anger and sadness. Like that first day back in high school, before I learned what my powers were, except cranked up ten thousand times.
“Stay close,” he said, leading me through the bustling chaos of the terminal.
“You know the city pretty well,” I said, although he didn’t hear me. I could barely hear myself.
If his plan was to hurt me, this handsome monster, he wouldn’t need to lift a finger. He could slip away from me easily enough in the crowd and abandon me to my fate in this terrifying city. Five minutes on my own and I was sure I’d be knocked out and dragged into an alley and tortured to death, my organs subsequently sold off for spare parts. I glimpsed streetlights, taxicabs; smelled bus exhaust and tar—but Tariq took me in the opposite direction, down a sloping hallway, burrowing underground, boarding an escalator, descending to the subway.
“This is so complicated,” I said, staring at the tangled transit lines on a map.
“Nothing to it,” he said, stabbing the map with two fine fingers. “Don’t think about the big picture. Focus on where you are and where you need to go.” He paused. “That’s good life advice, actually. Free of charge, brother. Anyway. This is where we are. See?”
I saw: Grand Central Terminal. A green line crossed a purple and a gray one.
“And this is where we’re going.”
He stabbed a different spot: Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn.