Chapter Ten #3
“Well,” Christian said, licking up a stream of juice that had dripped down his wrist. “If all you could scrounge up was the entire Atlantic-freaking-Ocean, I guess that will have to be enough.” Christian bumped his shoulder into Danny’s.
“We could always just go back to your house and, like, watch TV or listen to cast albums or something. It doesn’t have to be some grand tour. ”
“Yeah, I don’t know about that, Christian,” Danny said in a low voice.
For once, Christian Geronimo, the boy who always had something to say, who always seemed to have a rebuttal or a jab, must have sensed that this moment called for him to ease up on the questions.
“I don’t actually live in a house,” Danny muttered.
Christian rolled his eyes. “Neither do I, Danny. We live in New York. Who does?”
“No, like, I used to, but I don’t anymore.”
Danny stared down at his lemon ice, at the pack of ice crystals slowly melting into yellow goo.
“The place where I live? It isn’t…nice,” Danny said. “I used to live on the South Shore. We used to have a pool.”
“That’s okay,” Christian said. “As we already learned, it’s too cold to swim today.”
“And our place now—it’s in a kinda bad part of town.”
“Danny,” Christian said, locking eyes with him. “I’m from Flushing, not Park Avenue. You’re not the only one who has to cross a bridge to get to school.”
“Yeah,” Danny said, swallowing. “I just don’t want you to think that’s who I am.”
He looked down at his paper cup, at his fingers, numb from the ice and cold ocean air.
“Hey,” Christian said, reaching out and placing his hand on Danny’s shoulder, igniting that warm brand of quiet lightning under his skin. “I know who you are, Danny. And I like who you are.”
Danny felt the muscles in his shoulders relax.
“Now we just need you to like who you are.”
You never realize how messy things are until you see them through the eyes of someone you’re trying to impress.
“So, this is it,” Danny said, stepping into the apartment on Port Richmond Avenue, snatching a dirty sock off the couch and hiding it behind his back.
“It’s cute,” Christian said. “I like the wallpaper.”
“It’s really not,” Danny said. “But thank you.”
“Honestly, it’s not that much smaller than our place in Queens and I have a sister, so…”
Danny zipped over to the kitchen, scooting his and his mom’s chairs under the table with his hip.
“Can I grab ya something to drink?” Danny asked.
“Do you have any TaB?”
“Sure.”
“Wait, you’re serious?” Christian gasped. “I was totally joking!”
“Yeah, my Ma drinks it all the time.”
“Well in that case, one TaB, please.”
Danny skated over to the fridge, stealthily wiping crumbs off the counter and placing his cereal bowl in the sink as he passed.
“Is this your room?” Christian said, peeking into the open door next to the television set.
“No, that’s my Ma’s,” Danny said. “Here,” he said, walking back to Christian and handing him the maroon can.
Christian cracked it open and brought the cold metal to his lips, taking a big slurp.
“Whoa,” he said, his eyes going wide. “It tastes like I pressed every button on the soda machine at the movie theater.”
“Yeah,” Danny said, laughing. “Ma says that my Uncle Richie used to say TaB stood for ‘Totally Artificial Beverage.’ ”
“I think I’m in love,” Christian said, taking another swig.
“What do you wanna do?” Danny asked. “We could watch TV.”
“Do you have cable?”
“No.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
“I mean, I can show you my room. It’s kind of a mess though, so don’t judge.”
“I won’t.”
Danny walked across the kitchen to his closet-slash-bedroom, tightening his jaw as he twisted open the doorknob.
“Yoooo,” Christian bellowed, taking in the room. “That carpet is…is…wow!”
“Shut up,” Danny said, laughing. “I know, it’s hideous. I promise I didn’t pick it out.”
“No, it’s dope,” Christian said, stepping into the room, his gaze immediately drawn to the towering stack of cassettes. “And look at all those tapes!”
“Yeah, those were here when we moved in. They’re kind of my prized possessions,” Danny said, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall. “Granted, my only other possession is an inflatable mattress, so it’s not like it’s a tight race.”
“Holy shit,” Christian said, ignoring Danny’s continued attempts to apologize for being a poor schmuck whose mattress came with a bike pump. “I don’t even know some of these.”
“Most of them were my uncle’s. He had some really good ones.”
“Oh.” Christian lowered his voice. “Is he not around anymore?”
Danny shook his head. “It’s weird. I didn’t even really know him.
We’d only ever see him at Christmas. He used to do the coolest wrapping paper for all the cousins’ gifts.
He’d make ’em out of paper bags from ShopRite.
Like, he’d cut and fold them into these animal faces, like lions and elephants and stuff.
Every year! For all nine of us! And they were works of art, for real, I’m not kiddin’.
I used to save all of them and hang ’em on the door of my bedroom.
” He paused. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember what the gifts were. ”
Christian offered a soft smile.
“But yeah,” Danny said. “Besides that and these tapes, I guess I don’t know anything about him.”
Christian leaned back slightly, his brows slightly furrowed, a small smile playing on his lips.
“Aaand now I’m rambling,” Danny said, uncrossing his arms and taking a squeaky seat on the air mattress.
“No, I like hearing about your life,” Christian said, joining him on the edge of the bed, bouncing Danny slightly as the air shifted beneath them. “You’re still kind of a mystery to me.”
“What do you mean?” Danny stiffened.
“Well,” Christian pondered. “For one, I don’t even know what your dream role is. That’s, like, day-one friend stuff at LaGuardia.”
“Oh,” Danny said, relieved, stretching out his legs. “Aw man, I dunno, maybe Tony in West Side Story.”
“Classic.”
“Or Harold Hill, maybe. I don’t know.”
“I was gonna guess Sweeney Todd.”
Danny snorted. “What? You think I’d be a good serial killer?”
“I mean, look at this bedroom.”
This made both Danny and Christian howl with laughter, so hard that their faces turned red, their eyes shone, and they had to clutch their ribs as they fought to catch their breath.
“You asshole,” Danny cackled. “I knew you were lyin’ about the carpet,” he said, grabbing his pillow and whacking Christian in the face.
“I’m kidding! I’m kidding!”
“You were not!”
“No, no, I promise! I like the lime green. I’m just teasin’.”
They lay back on the mattress, their faces split into broad, joyful grins. Christian smoothed out his hair and Danny tossed his pillow back up to the top of his bed.
“So,” Christian asked after a moment. “Not to completely shift the subject to me, but also, to shift the subject completely to me…you’re gonna come see my show at the Limelight, right?”
Danny let out a sigh, his expression falling. Even with Christian somehow lying next to him in his apartment on Port Richmond, their situations were still worlds apart.
“Christian, there’s no way my mom is gonna let me go to the City that late at night.”
“It’s at ten. It’s not that late.”
“I don’t know, Christian. She’s really strict.”
“Ask your dad, then,” Christian said, pointing and flexing his toes. “Just tell him you’re going to a Rangers game or whatever Staten Island dads like.”
Danny felt his chest tighten and the room begin to go wobbly. He blinked, staring up at the ceiling.
“That’s…not really an option,” Danny said after a moment.
Danny could see out of his periphery that Christian had turned his head and was now looking at him. Danny couldn’t bring himself to look back. He just started talking to the ceiling.
“Back at the beach, when you asked if my parents were supportive of everything, I said yeah,” Danny murmured. “But the truth is, I don’t really know. My mom is, I guess. But my dad…He doesn’t live with us anymore. He’s…not a good guy.”
Danny could hear Christian’s quiet breathing. He could feel the slight rising and sinking of his body through the inflated PVC material of the mattress.
“He did awful things to my mom. For a long time,” Danny said, his eyes tracing the cracks in the ceiling, the bubbling paint from the upstairs neighbor with the leaky toilet.
“One night, I was in my room. I pretended I was asleep—he came home from work and they got into a fight about something—it was stupid, she’d accidentally burned a dish towel, I think.
And he grabbed her by her hair and smashed her face against the kitchen table.
I remember, she was on the ground and he kicked her.
And then he just got up and left. Like it was nothing. Like she was nothing to him.”
Danny felt the worms under his skin start to move as the memory came into focus, chewing, burning, and clawing their way to the surface. His mind flashed with images like a warped home movie—muddy soles and cold linoleum floor tiles and wet paper towels stained pink.
But Danny soldiered on, eyes still trained on the popcorn ceiling. “And we just saw a window, I guess. For the first time in basically forever. We barely said anything to each other, really. Just got in the car and drove. And that’s why we’re living here now.”
Danny felt the worms breaking through his top layer of skin, bursting, choking, and gasping for air.
Then like a whoosh, he felt them parachuting from his body, catching a breeze from the articulated fan in the corner, carrying with them all the memories and pain that he’d been holding inside, floating off into the air like dandelion spores.
But as that pain left his body, it was immediately replaced with a new sinking feeling.
Fear. Fear that he’d made a mistake. Fear that he’d said too much.
Fear that his confession may have just driven away the first person he’d been able to trust in, like, forever—the one person Danny was now too scared to look at but the person who, at that very moment, was reaching out a warm hand and placing it softly on his shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, Danny,” Christian whispered. “That must have been so hard. I’m so, so sorry.”
Danny sucked in a quick gust of air, then a much larger one, his lungs opening and expanding, breathing fully for the first time since that storm hit Staten Island, that night when the snow started falling and didn’t know how to stop.
And with each breath, Danny felt more and more in the room.
The walls had straightened, the fan was humming, and his friend was lying there, looking at him and not at the door.
Suddenly, the stereo crackled to life. The reels began to spin and the sound of a familiar tune filled the room.
Just pay me back with one thousand kisses.
Christian sat up, alarmed, his eyes growing wide as he looked around the room for its source, some hidden person who must have snuck in and pressed Play on the stereo.
“It’s just the electricity,” Danny said, waving him off. “That happens sometimes. I told you, it’s a shitty building.”
“Weird.” Christian laughed, settling back down on the mattress, their bodies close but not touching. “I was starting to think this place was haunted or something.”
Danny briefly considered saying more, but felt like he’d probably done enough sharing for one day.
He hadn’t scared off Christian yet, but probably shouldn’t press it.
They stared up at the ceiling, lost in the lyrics to the Rent song, listening to the sounds of each other’s heartbeats and the vinyl sigh of the mattress whispering beneath them, both of them praying for the same thing—for the song to never fade away.
With a thousand sweet kisses, I’ll cover you.