Begin Reading #9
And turns and floats away.
When Joey meets Evan at their favorite hand roll place in Westwood Village, she is wearing an emerald-green silk tank top.
The cut is not surprising, as Joey likes to show off her arms, but the color is uncharacteristically vivid.
It makes her eyes glow, as well as the actual emerald she wears as a nose stud.
Her black-brown hair tumbles over the shaved strip of hair on her right side, an undercut that tilts rocker without being excessive.
Showcased against her flawless skin is a round-cut diamond solitaire necklace.
Suspended by a platinum filigree chain and held in a near-invisible prong setting, it looks as if it is floating against her jugular notch.
The thought plinks him like a flick to the head: She is wearing the necklace, which he gave her for her seventeenth birthday, for him.
Her head is cocked, that dimple in her right cheek presaging a grin. Her eyes are the way they get when she’s trying to decipher his expression.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
A smile bursts. “That’s, like, our most predictable dialogue ever.”
They hug.
She smells like herself, that tinge of vanilla from her lotion. He has gotten better at this, the act of embracing. Still, he wouldn’t say he’s a regular.
She releases her arms but he is still holding on to her so there is a split second of awkwardness before they pull apart. This has never happened.
She gives him a sideways look and hops up onto a stool.
They order.
“So?” she says. “How’d it go in Texas?”
“He died.”
“Shit, X. Before you got there?”
“I was there.”
She looks at him, looks down at her paper place mat.
Their first rolls arrive, toro, and she wolfs it down.
She is becoming a young lady but she still eats like a POW who’s just cleared the gates.
She stirs even more wasabi into her soy sauce until it looks like green-tea ice cream, then fiddles with her chopsticks.
“You get any, dunno, resolution? Or closure? To use grown-up words.”
He thinks about it for a very long time.
“Yes.”
A yellowtail roll shows up next. Hers is gone before he takes his second bite. It is like feeding a sea lion.
There’s a slight lull.
Then she leans over and tips her head onto his shoulder. He doesn’t like this sort of show of affection.
Except when it comes to Joey.
After lunch they stroll to get frozen yogurt, as dictated by Joey’s feeding schedule.
UCLA kids are out in force, trios of sorority girls sparkling with glitter lotion, mop-headed guys in torn T-shirts, scampering scholars with backpacks stuffed as full as a comms ruck on a field mission.
A few homeless guys lounge on the benches, and a not-terrible busker is warbling out a ska version of “Brown Eyed Girl.”
“I feel like every Mexican girl in the world gets to dance to this song except me,” Joey says.
“True. Your green eyes are a disgrace to your heritage.”
“Embarrassing, really.”
“And hideously unattractive.”
There goes that dimple.
“X, if you didn’t get stuck with me, do you think…?”
He scans the rooflines. “What?”
“You think we’d be friends?”
“Is that what we are?”
“Uncle-dad-cousin-person. Don’t get all semantic to avoid the question.”
“No way,” Evan says. “I was taught never to trust a green-eyed Mexican.”
“I’m serious, güero!”
“Why are you asking?”
“I don’t know. With your—” She catches herself: “With Jacob Baridon”—hitting the syllables hard in a parody of strained obedience—“dying … it just seems weird. Us Orphans, I mean, kind of floating unattached in the world. Is that what we’d be if we hadn’t met? Just … floating?”
He considers for about a half block. “Probably,” he says.
“That’s so pathetic.”
They keep walking. Joey’s face is like a mood ring; her cheeks get heavy when she is sad.
She halts abruptly on the sidewalk. Pedestrians stream around them, buffeting them with shopping bags.
“What was it?” she demands. “The closure or resolution or whatever? What’d you learn from Baridon?”
“From him?” He imagines his father, aggressively untethered, his cowardice ossifying layer by layer over the years. A man who, in Jack’s parlance, never stood in front of a threat with his back to something—someone—he chose to protect. “Nothing. But I got…”
“What?”
He wants so badly to be able to explain. She is patient with him as he struggles to know what he wants to say. He is scanning faces and packages, too, as always, which doesn’t help because he has to keep dialing back the focus.
“There was nothing to get from him.”
“The situation, then. Or whatever.”
His cheek holds the memory of Gwendolyn’s palm.
He starts haltingly: “As a foster kid, in the Program, operationally … So much of the world never made sense.”
“Like: the normal stuff.”
“Yes. The normal stuff.”
He starts walking again and she holds pace at his side. A guy with a leather jacket and a backwards baseball cap has his hand under his lapel. It comes out with a Samsung phone. He passes.
“You,” he says. They cross the intersection and keep on. “You made it make sense.”
Sunshine lies heavy across his shoulders. They are surrounded by chatter and wisps of radio songs from passing cars. Their footsteps fall into rhythm.
Joey makes a small respiratory noise. Turns her head away. Wipes at her cheeks.
They keep walking.
Evan nudges her with his shoulder.
She stumbles a half step to the side, recovers. Devious grin. She bulls into him.
To his delight and her dismay, he barely budges.
“You’re the worst, X.”
The yogurt shop is coming up, just a few steps away, and all of a sudden the words dawn on him, clear as a sunrise.
He says, “Love you too, Josephine.”