“This guy who made mobiles,” I say. “It makes sense, I guess, that Lilia likes him. She does enjoy suspending crap from the ceiling.”
My sister takes refuge in her bedroom, and I slip in after her and sit on the carpet beneath the framed portrait of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Angela sits on her bed with a book called How to Say Goodbye in Robot, but the pages aren’t turning. I message Victoria and then Tall Jon, asking what they’re doing tonight, wishing I were feeling direct enough to ask the real question: Do you want to do something with me?
“Abuela always liked the Dishwasher Lemur,” Angela says, with the book still in front of her face.
“I know. She never asked where he came from or anything. She was just like, ‘Yeah, a Dishwasher Lemur. Of course a Dishwasher Lemur.’”
“Well, it couldn’t be a dishwasher meerkat.”
“No! God, no.”
“Let’s draw him,” Angela says, hopping up from the bed. “It’ll be something to send to Abuela.”
I bring in my supply toolbox and my sketch pad and some nice microfiber paper and some cardboard. Angela looks excited by all the choices I’ve given her, like she’s just entered the notebook aisle at Target the week before the beginning of the school year. She’s probably debating whether to ask my permission about using this or that, but I don’t even want to start that discussion. Yes—take the oil paints and the watercolors and the drawing pencils. Take them all. I grab a sheet of the fancy paper and a couple of markers. Purple, blue, yellow, and orange. Oh, this lemur will be festive. Oh yes, he will.
My phone bleeps. Tall Jon says I should come over and there’ll be some other friends and it will be “a thing.”
“How’s this?” Angela holds up the sketch pad. She has an outline of a lemur-ish creature and our dishwasher. The lemur stands next to the dishwasher, back up against the cabinets, trapped by his overwhelming desire to get to the clean dishes. It’s pretty great.
“It’s cool. Keep it up,” I say.
Mine is a little more abstract. Everything is square-based: the lemur himself, the dishwasher, the dishes the lemur has stolen, et cetera. It’s kind of like Picasso’s cubist period if he had studied Warhol and then had a little sister who was afraid of opening the dishwasher.
The phone again. Victoria. She’s leaving dance class, and after she showers and eats, she will be “up for anything.”
I text back and tell her about the thing that Tall Jon is having.
She is actually up for that.
“Angela, how do you feel about parties and things?”
“I’m drawing a lemur picture right now and am therefore ignoring any and all of your bizarre ideas.”
“It’s not a bizarre idea. It’s a party. I thought we should both go.”
“Look.” Angela drops her colored pencil, and it lands on the lemur’s face. “I know you don’t think I know what a party is, beyond, like, some rich girl’s country-club quince or a third-grade sleepover. But I get it, okay? You want to go and hang out with people and smoke. I get that.”
“Hey. Okay. I get that you get that. And that’s not even what I’m going to be doing. It’s just an excuse to hang out with Tall Jon, and Victoria, and maybe even you.”
Angela looks away for a minute, perhaps seeing if Justice Sotomayor is going to indicate whether I’m serious.
“I mean it,” I tell her (or maybe them). “I just don’t want to be here tonight.”
“Yeah, me either,” Angela says, “but I think I’m going to call Hannah and see what she’s doing.”
We are off. I leave a message on Rex’s phone telling him not to worry, we’re staying with our best friends. I will drop off my sister at Hannah’s house and wait, like our mom always does, until she has gone inside and shut the door. Angela has a backpack and I have my trusty purple tote bag, and we say farewell to the piano and our half of the house as though we are going away for a long time.
twelve
EVERYONE’S HERE. PEOPLE from the University of South Florida and Ringling, people who’ve been in bands for five minutes, people who Tall Jon probably met in the parking lot outside his apartment complex, because people see Tall Jon and want to know him. And there are a few others I recognize from Sarasota Central High here, but they are mostly this year’s smoking-corner residents. And then there’s me. And Victoria.
Victoria can’t hear the word party without thinking of some fancy event that likely includes a sit-down dinner and a live jazz trio. Or at least something that doesn’t take place on grungy carpet. I would never turn down the opportunity to see her in a satiny, short gray-blue dress, though (but anything she wears that’s satiny is probably actually satin). Her heels are tall and silver and impressive, but they’re silent as she walks across the living room to say hello to Tall Jon and . . . Bill. Shit.
I step outside on the balcony to smoke, but about twelve people have already had the same idea, and there’s not enough room for us all. The threshold between the balcony and the living room is a good enough place to wait for the inevitable reunion.
Tall Jon wanders up. “Hey, Moreno. Sorry. It’s just that I didn’t know he was coming when I invited you, and then he said he was coming and then I didn’t want to disinvite you or him. You know?”
“Yeah.”
“I bought you some extra smokes to make up for the discomfort.”
“I’m sure I’ll need most of them.”
“Vic looks good.”
“Doesn’t she?”
I sort of hate it when he winks at me. He’s so bloody sincere about it.
“I’ll make you ladies some cocktails.”
“She doesn’t drink.”
“Oh, right.”
A couple of people push between us to leave the balcony, and we slide into their spots. Tall Jon produces two cigarettes and lights one off the other. Smoking doesn’t seem as appealing as it did a minute ago, but I take the cigarette and hold it by my side.
“You should talk to Bill, though. You know he’s in a new band, right?”
“Nope.”
“Well, he is. And they’re busting up the place. They’re playing in, like, Tallahassee and Jacksonville later this month. They might even have a gig up in Atlanta. I saw the show last week. It’s something.”
“It really fucking is,” says one of the girls behind Tall Jon.
“It ends with this hugely loud metal-cabaret cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Take This Waltz,’” Tall Jon says, to the balcony citizens in general. “It is the most unexpected, and yet also grandest damn thing you’ve ever seen. It will burst your eardrums while making you wish you had dressed up like you were going to the opera.”
“That’s so true,” says the girl, who is fumbling with her lighter so much that she is coming close to setting her hair on fire.