BY JULY, DEMING’S MOTHER had been gone for five months. Ever since the February day she disappeared, he had been waiting for a sign that she’d be back, even a sign that she was gone forever.
The summer was one big dead-end sign. The city had been too hot for weeks, the sofa’s upholstery sweaty against Deming’s thighs during the long, overheated afternoons. He and Michael batted their faces against the rattling plastic fan and sang la-le-la-le-la, the vibrations taking their words and spitting them out in a watery brown croak. They melted ice cubes in glasses and sucked on them, dug into cushions to search for forgotten change for Mister Softee runs, the ice cream always a letdown, soggy orange sugar that soaked into its cardboard shell before Deming even got his tongue in.
The rest of the school year had been a derailing. Principal Scott said Deming could go on to sixth grade if he went to summer school and made up the subjects he had failed, but Deming didn’t feel like going.
“If you don’t go, you’ll be left back,” Michael said.
They sat on a metal railing, a row of benches below. Even Crotona Pool, which they’d gone to last summer with their friends, had lost its appeal.
“Fuck this summer,” Deming said, tasting the pleasing heft of the words. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, too.” Michael’s consonants were resonant with spit. “Don’t you want to graduate high school?”
That was not my plan, Deming heard his mother saying. Fuck a plan. He contemplated the drop-off to the street. An odor of rot mingled with more familiar scents, flatulent exhaust and sweet garbage, searing pavement and grass. Pot smoke and perfume. Somewhere, a barbecue.
“Dare you to jump down,” he said.
Michael laughed without making a sound. “It’s not far. I’ll make you jump.”
Deming sat with his knees bunched up, jabbing his chin into the air like Leon did when he knew you were full of shit. “No one’s making me do anything.”
“We’ll all be in sixth grade and you’ll be stuck in fifth.”
“Shut up.” Deming slid off the railing. On W. 184th, Michael trotting alongside him, they passed Sopheap’s building, the same as all the others on the block, squat and brown or taller and gray, the windows full of other families, the sidewalks noisy with other kids. They paused and observed the window where the same plastic blinds hung, the ones they had seen so many times from the inside of Sopheap’s apartment. But that summer it seemed like their friends had never existed, that they, like Deming’s mother, had vanished with no guarantee of return.
Elroy was visiting his aunt in Maryland, Hung was at a relative’s upstate, and Sopheap, that traitor, had promised he’d be home all summer but had decamped at first opportunity to outermost Queens, where his cousin allegedly had a large-screen television and lived in a building full of hot chicks. Last time Michael and Deming had seen Sopheap, four days or six weeks ago or whenever it was, Sopheap had described the peek-a-boo bra strap exposed on the shoulder of the hottest chick, how close she had sat to him while they watched TV. She smelled, he said, of bubble gum and pepperoni pizza, and Michael and Deming had hooted and said Sopheap was full of crap, how come he never invited them to outermost Queens. Instead of hot chicks Sopheap might be spending the days with his grandma, who had moley arms and a long yellow tooth that caused her to fling saliva as she barked away at the boys in Khmer, slapping her slippers against their shoulder blades to get them to sit up straight.
Everything was suspect. Had Sopheap’s family ever lived there in the first place? Would Elroy and Hung even show up for school at the end of the summer? What happened to his mother? Nothing, no one, was certain anymore.
Michael and Deming stood in the space beneath the overhead tracks and hurled curse words into the subway’s rattle. A car bumped past blaring a bass line in rich, glossy maroons, and a slow ache spread in the center of Deming’s chest. Before his mother disappeared, he and Michael had been united in the secrets they kept from their moms, like filching a can of beer from Leon’s twelve-pack. Michael had grimaced and belched as they drank, and Deming had knocked back more. They had giggled, teetered. Another time, they stole a pair of panties out of a cart at the laundromat across the street from Elroy’s building, and in Elroy’s room ran their hands over the tiny cotton panel where an actual girl’s actual crotch had actually nestled. Held it to their noses, sniffing exaggeratedly, saddened yet relieved when they smelled only detergent. Hung laid the panties on the bed and the boys stared at the scrap of pinkish fabric until Elroy plucked them up and smuggled them into his closet. “I’ll keep them here,” he said, “for safekeeping.” Deming said they might not even belong to a hot girl but to the woman who sat in front of Elroy’s building and rubbed her fingers into her ponytail after scratching her hairy armpits. The other boys yelped in horror, Michael’s shriek the loudest and highest.
Now the only mother in the apartment was Vivian, and the fact that Deming’s mother was gone was no secret. It was a car alarm cutting through an empty street in the middle of the night. He could curse as much as he wanted, but the words tasted like they had gone rotten in his mouth. He tried to remember as much as he could about her. Such a brief time when she had belonged to him alone. She cuffed her jeans twice so they wouldn’t drag on the ground. She pulled the sleeves of her sweaters down like oversized mittens. The pleasing incongruity to her cackle, how she’d pinch the fat under his arms and call him a meatball, the delicate prettiness to her features. You had to hunt for her beauty, might not even catch it at first. There was a sweetness to her mouth, her lips lightly upturned, lending her a look of faint amusement, and her eyebrows arched so her eyes appeared lively, approaching delighted.
He looked away so Michael wouldn’t see the tears that came so fast he almost let them fall.
They turned the corner. “Deming?” Michael sounded hesitant, like he was talking to a teacher or a friend’s mom. “Did you hear? Travis Bhopa’s moving to Pennsylvania.”
“So?” Deming didn’t know where Pennsylvania was.
“His mom left his dad for another man and now he’s got to go live with his grandma.”
“What other man?”
“Some neighbor.”
Deming dug his fingernails into his arm, ten sharp half-moons sparking pain. But what if she wasn’t dead? “That sucks,” he said. “For Travis.”
THEY ATE DINNER AT the folding table in the kitchen, the plastic top printed to look like wood, a corner peeling and exposing a foamy underlayer. Deming snatched a piece of chicken from Vivian’s plate.