Chapter 2 #6
I took a few steps closer as she adjusted her lens. I still couldn’t see who she was. Finally, I yelled out, “Hey, what are you doing?”
“It is you, isn’t it?” she yelled back.
“Who?”
“Alfie?”
I recoiled.
“How do you know my name?”
“Come on.”
“Come on, what?”
“Lallu!”
“Lallu?” I mumbled.
She lowered the camera, and I blinked at the sight of the loveliest face I would ever encounter.
Full lips. Voluminous black hair that fell over her forehead and shoulders.
Cheeks that pushed all the way up into her green eyes when she smiled, and a smile so welcoming it sent little lightning bolts into my skin.
For the first time in a long time, whatever funk or depression or ennui I was suffering evaporated.
It wasn’t that she was so beautiful, but rather, after all these years, still so familiar.
“Princess?”
She threw her head back and laughed.
“I haven’t heard that name since I was eight years old.”
She moved toward me then, her cameras swaying across her torso, and held out her hand like a queen.
“My actual name is Gianna,” she said. “Gianna Rule.”
“I’m Alfie,” I rasped.
“I know,” she said.
Nassau
“Finally!” LaPorta declared. “We meet the mystery woman! Now I gotta pee.”
He rose to his feet. “By the way, they’ll be here shortly.”
“Who?” Alfie asked.
“The police. That’s how it works. They give me a little time to try and get to the bottom of things, then they take you to jail and see if that shakes a confession out of you.”
He paused. “Jails aren’t great here. Just so you know.”
LaPorta hoped for a reaction, but Alfie simply exhaled. This guy, the detective thought, what’s it gonna take to shake him?
The truth was, the evidence they had against Alfie was circumstantial.
He had won three straight roulette plays, each time betting a single number, the highest payoff with the longest odds.
He’d cashed out immediately and had gone to a bank to make a wire transfer.
The next morning, the police had caught up with him outside a travel agency where he’d been buying tickets to Africa.
Suspicious, yes. But so far, no proof of illegality.
LaPorta had never seen anyone hit a single roulette number more than once in a night, much less three times in a row.
The only explanation was rigging the wheel itself, or a scam involving the croupier, who had been picked up and was, at this very moment, being interrogated in another room, now that LaPorta’s Bahamian cohorts had finally arrived.
He privately hoped the croupier would implicate Alfie, although he had to admit, the notebook was entertaining.
More fun than the typical “I swear I didn’t do it!
” LaPorta remembered a quote he’d read during his training.
People will forgive you anything but boredom. This Alfie guy was anything but boring.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” LaPorta said. “Then you can tell me where to find Gianna Rule.”
“She had nothing to do with the roulette winnings.”
“Right,” LaPorta said, stepping out. “Don’t go anywhere.”
He locked the door behind him.
“Where would I go?” he heard Alfie say.
The Composition Book
Things my mother said she loved about me:
“The way you remember every little thing that happened.”
The afternoon I remet Gianna, all the other girls I had liked, dreamed about, or made a fool of myself in front of suddenly moved behind the clouds.
She was the only star in the sky. We spoke for more than an hour by that elephant exhibit, leaning on the railing, shifting positions, finding a bench, shifting again.
There was a rhythm to our conversation that felt like old music.
She asked. I answered. I asked. She answered.
Her family had left Kenya eight years earlier and moved to Morocco, then Italy, then the Philippines, where her mother was from, now America, all because of her father’s work.
She said at times she felt like a “Tuareg nomad,” two words I’d never heard anyone use to describe themselves.
She was hoping to stay put for a while by going to college at Boston University, where she planned to study literature.
But mostly she wanted to be a photographer.
I kept staring at her lips. Her teeth. Her eyes.
“What do you want to take pictures of?” I asked.
“Wildlife. Natural habitats.”
She grinned. “Old boyfriends.”
“Come on,” I said. “I wasn’t really your boyfriend.”
“I didn’t mean you.”
I felt myself turning crimson.
“Oh . . . I . . .”
“Ha. Look at your face!” She laughed again with that perfect smile and rapped my arm with her fist.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be sorry. Weren’t we going to get married one day and buy a house in Mombasa?”
“You remember that?”
“Yep. I’m like her.” She nodded to the elephant. “I never forget.”
?
When I finally got back to my father, there were four empty beer cans on the table and he’d unbuttoned his shirt due to the heat.
“Where the hell did you go?” he barked.
“I was checking out the elephants.”
He shook his head, exasperated. “Elephants?”
“Yeah.”
“To wait this long, I could have stayed in Disney World.”
“Sorry.”
He looked away, his face scrunched in anger.
“Hey, Dad?”
“What?”
“I’ve been thinking. Maybe I do want to go to college.”
His expression changed. So did his voice.
“Oh, yeah? Well. Good.”
Then he asked, “Where?”
“Boston,” I said.