ERICA #3
He gives me the side eye while we continue to walk around the festival.
There’s a knowing grin on that ridiculously handsome face of his, and I get the feeling he’s more curious than judgmental, so that’s a relief at least. Still, I want to justify myself somehow. Like trying to prove something to him.
I’m not a bad person, Mister Goody Two-Shoes, I swear!
“Okay, you want the story? Here it is. My dad thought it was a useful skill to teach a kid.” I shrug, realizing how ludicrous that sounds. “I was like Gavroche in Les Mis. You know…” I launch into a poor rendition of that song “What Little People Can Do.” “That kind of thing.”
“So you were essentially a tiny French revolutionary.”
“Exactly. I mean, once I realized it wasn’t exactly kosher, I told him I wasn’t going to do it any more and he was fine with it.”
We continue past the stage where a tribute band is playing “Coming to America” by Neil Diamond just as a formation of military planes streak over the Washington Monument.
We pause, watching the spectacle with a healthy measure of awe.
I’ve always liked air shows, how the Blue Angels do those spins and tricks in the sky.
After they finish their pass, Jeremiah gets in line for cotton candy, saying it’s not a proper festival without it.
As we wait, he admits he doesn’t really care for it that much.
Too much sugar. But it’s kind of a childhood pastime, so he makes a point to get one to share to keep with tradition or whatever.
I wholeheartedly agree and tell him so, but I feel like I still need to continue where I left off, if only to explain how my own childhood pastime doesn’t exactly define who I am as an adult. (Or maybe it does. I’m still figuring that out.)
“For the record,” I whisper so the other people in line don’t get any weird ideas. “I don’t actually steal from innocent people on the street. I think of it as more of a public service. A little awareness training. Somebody drops their wallet, and I find it for them.”
“Drops their wallet, huh? Like right into your sticky fingers, you mean.”
“Look, I know you don’t believe me but it’s not something I do for kicks when I’m bored. It was just that one time you happened to be there.”
“Hmmm.”
“People walk around clueless with all their stuff hanging out of unzipped bags or their phone in their back pockets all the time.” I gesture around me to prove my point.
Sure enough, there are at least three women with their purses wide open, just sitting on top of strollers while their attention is anywhere but that purse.
He nods in acknowledgement. “What I was offering was a free lesson in situational awareness.”
“So that’s what the kids are calling it these days.”
I wince and give him my best “whatta ya gonna do” smile with all my teeth.
He tips his head, something warm and amused settling into it. “I didn’t need the lesson, though, did I?”
“No,” I admit. “You really didn’t.”
I did.
He lets it go, and I feel the tiniest flicker of guilt that I mostly manage to smother with the cotton candy.
By the time the sun starts sinking into that gold, syrupy hour before dusk, the lawn in front of the Washington Monument has filled in with blankets and coolers and lawn chairs. There is no grass space left. There is barely air space left.
“This is insane,” Jeremiah says, surveying the crowd.
“I know a place.”
He looks at me. “Why do I feel like that sentence should worry me?”
“Because it should, a little.” I grin. “Come on.”
I lead him two blocks off the Mall to a building I scouted before I found the loft. There’s a fire escape around back, half-hidden by a dumpster and a truly heroic amount of ivy. It might be illegal. It is, generously, a gray area.
“Up,” I say.
“Up,” he repeats, like the word personally offends him. “You’re serious?”
“You’re a professional athlete. Athlete up.”
He goes first, because apparently chivalry survives even fire escapes, muttering something in Spanish about what I think translates to this being the craziest thing he’s ever done, and I choose to interpret that as a compliment.
I follow, one flag sock catching on a rusted rung and tearing clean through at the ankle, which I decide is a small, patriotic sacrifice for a good view.
Five flights later we’re standing on a flat gravel roof with a view straight down the Mall, monuments lit gold from the setting sun, the crowd below a shifting sea of red and white and blue, small enough now to look almost peaceful, like a flag someone forgot to fold up.
He unties his jersey from around my waist and lays it flat on the gravel. We sit shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, waiting for the sky to do something for a long, peaceful silence, bellies full of corn dogs and cotton candy.
“It seems unfair,” he says, after a minute. “You know my name and I don’t know yours.”
“I rather like that dynamic.”
I stand, stretch, walk a few steps toward the ledge to look at the crowd, mostly because sitting that close to him for one more second was going to require me to say something regrettable.
I don’t get far. His hand closes around my wrist, gentle, sure, exactly the way it did the very first time, and he spins me so my back meets his chest, my whole body suddenly and thoroughly in his gravitational field.
“Tell me your name,” he says, low into the shell of my ear, and there is nothing gentlemanly about that voice.
“Where’s the mystery in that?” I deflect, hiding the absolute riot happening in my whole body.
His breath is warm and sweet against my neck. “I can’t very well keep calling you Sticky Fingers.”
I laugh, loud, undignified, the kind of laugh that would get me kicked out of fancy restaurants. “Is that what you’ve been calling me? In those lurid dreams of yours?”
He doesn’t deny it.
He doesn’t deny it. My mind takes that fact and runs several unauthorized laps with it. Does he lie there at night thinking about me the way I lie there thinking about him, replaying all our encounters like it’s the highlight reel of this whole year?
“Not Dangerous?” I ask, because I genuinely like that nickname for me.
“That too.”
“So you have been thinking about me.”
He turns us so we’re facing each other and just smiles. Doesn’t confirm it, doesn’t deny it, just lets the smile do the talking, and honestly, that’s more confirmation than words would’ve been.
“Okay then,” he says. “What do you suggest I call you?”
Here’s the thing about my name. It’s the one honest thing I’ve got left to give him in a summer built almost entirely out of half-truths and strategic omissions.
He doesn’t know what I do. He doesn’t know about the Friendship Jewel, or the provenance letters, or the fact that this whole gorgeous, corn-dog-scented day started as reconnaissance for a heist. But my name.
My name I can hand over free and clear. So I do.
“America,” I say.
He scoffs. Actually scoffs, a full-body, disbelieving sound. “America.”
I shrug, like it’s just another odd fact about myself, filed somewhere between allergic to bees and cannot parallel park to save my life. “Born on the Fourth of July. Remember?”
He gives me a deadpan stare. “Okay. I get it. I’ll play along.”
“What? That’s my name.”
“Riiiight.”
“It is.”
“Okay.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“Oh, honey.” His mouth twitches. “Lying wouldn’t be the worst of your crimes.”
Crimes. If only he knew how right he is.
“I’m not a common thief, you know,” I say, mostly to buy myself a second to recover.
“I know.” His eyes hold mine, warm, a little too knowing. “There’s absolutely nothing common about you. America the beautiful.”
“Clever. That’s literally what it says on my birth certificate, so joke’s on you.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah. The-Beautiful is my middle name.” (It’s not) I tip my chin up. “What’s yours?”
“Adrián.”
I go quiet for a second, caught off guard in a way I don’t fully understand until the word settles. “Oh. That’s… actually beautiful.”
A beat.
“And?” he says.
“And what?”
“I’m waiting for the punch line.”
“I don’t have one.” I mean it, which surprises me almost as much as it seems to surprise him. “It’s a beautiful name. Jeremiah Adrián Precio. It just rolls off the tongue.”
He looks at me like nobody’s ever said that to him before and meant it, and something in my chest does a full, undignified cartwheel, right as the first firework goes up.
He doesn’t let go of my hand. Just tugs, gentle, until we’re both dropping back down onto the flattened jersey, both of us tipping our heads up to the sky.
The fireworks completely bombard the entire city with gold and white.
A huge chrysanthemum blooms into a thousand trailing sparks and the whole Mall below us gasps in unison.
Three rockets shoot off in three different directions at once, bursting into something that looks like a red, white, and blue smiley face, lopsided and delighted with itself, and I laugh out loud before I can stop it.
Fireworks are launching from ten different sites from the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to barges in the Potomac.
The whole sky is lit up, blinking gold and red like somebody hung Christmas lights and they just exploded everywhere.
The air smells like sulfur and summer and brings back the best memories of my childhood, when I used to watch the show from the roof of my dad’s trailer.
“My dad used to tell me they were just for me,” I say, before I can stop myself. “The fireworks. For my birthday. This whole insane production, orchestrated in my honor.”