32
M arcos was easy to fall in love with and devastating to be separated from when he inevitably moved to Texas for college.
He continued to encourage Adrien to come live with him in Texas in every letter and phone call.
According to Marcos, Adrien deserved the world.
He could have anything he wanted, and Marcos wanted to help give it to him.
He told Adrien that he wasn’t beholden to his business scholarship to SFSU, like his mom believed he was.
But as desperately as Adrien wanted that to be true, defying his mother felt like a complete impossibility.
No matter how hard he wanted things for himself, or wished his world to be a certain way, Joyce hovered between his reality and his happiness like some dark, unmovable specter.
Her presence was enough to tear him from Marcos and everything that he had promised Adrien.
It wasn’t that Adrien and Marcos loved each other any less.
Marcos was overloaded with obligations to the soccer team and his sports medicine classes.
Adrien had to take on a second job after his mom managed to get fired from Mervyn’s during a drunken altercation with a customer.
It was getting harder to balance romance on top of everything else, and his mom was starting to get suspicious about the letters.
If it weren’t for Jessica storing them beneath her mattress, his mom would have found them all.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Adrien told her when she showed him the letters’ new location. Jessica shrugged.
“You’d have done it for me.”
The breakup letter was inevitable, but it destroyed Adrien all the same. He was too bogged down by expectations to put any thought into what he wanted for himself.
1996
Before long he found himself in his second semester of college. He was in the bathroom shaving one morning when he caught the tail end of one of Jessica’s arguments with their mother.
“—because I’m not letting you out of this house dressed like a hussy, you little slut!” his mom screamed.
“Oh gag me with a spoon!” his sister shouted back.
“Stop fighting!” David cried over the din. “All you ever do is scream and fight! I hate it here! ”
“Then run away!” His mother snarled. “One less mouth for me to feed, you ungrateful shit!”
“As if !” Jessica snapped. “All you do is sit on your ass drinking Adrien’s money away! It’s always been that way! You treat him like crap and what does he do to stop it? Nothing . I’m not letting you treat me like him! I’m better than that, I deserve better than that!”
Adrien flinched, setting down his razor. He cupped a handful of water out of the sink and splashed his face clean.
Was that really how his sister saw him?
He wandered out of the bathroom in a daze, not even bothering to interrupt the screaming match to say goodbye. Usually he’d at least comfort David and make sure he had something to tide him over until dinner, but Adrien would much rather avoid his mother’s wrath altogether. He was too tired.
The trip to campus was a blur. He arrived at his philosophy class, sat down close to the window, and stared down at his desk without really seeing. The professor came in and began lecturing, but his voice was all but lost to Adrien under the din of his thoughts.
Adrien looked out the window, peering over the townhouses and apartment towers at Park Merced.
He had a shift delivering pizza after this, then it was right to stocking shelves at Safeway, and then who knew what time it would be before he got home and managed to get his reading done for classes tomorrow and—
The clarity of the notion struck him like a bell:
Fuck this .
At this rate, between classes and work and pleasing his mother there would never, ever be enough time for him . There would be no art, no more friends like Erika, no love. There would be no one else in the future like Marcos.
He was an adult now. Why shouldn’t he take a little for himself? He could still go to school and work two jobs to support his siblings, but it would be for a degree he wanted, rather than the one his mom wanted for him. If she wanted the damn business degree she could very well go get it herself.
He didn’t give himself time to think. He stood up, left class, marched to the student registrar, and dropped out.
2002
“ It wouldn’t have been like this if you’d stayed at State .”
Her words haunted him.
But his transferring to City College hadn’t killed her liver, hadn’t given her lung cancer.
It wasn’t his fault that she was going through chemo while he and Jessica scrambled to pay off her medical debts on top of the ever-increasing cost of bills.
It hadn’t made David drop out of high school and refuse to come out of the bedroom most days.
Adrien could have gone to Texas if his mother hadn’t tearfully begged him to stay home.
Hadn’t insidiously insinuated that his teenage siblings were going to end up in the same position as him, working two jobs just to keep the family afloat—exactly as he’d feared.
Don’t you love them Adrien? Don’t you care about them?
But his mother was never the perpetrator, always the victim. It was his fault she had cancer, his fault the family was falling apart, his fault David had “gone insane”, his fault Jessica would never be able to afford to go to college.
A silent scream echoed through Adrien’s mind as he drowned in her endless criticisms: “ Why can’t you take responsibility for once in your life ?!”
But it was a useless question to ask a woman who was days away from going into hospice. When he got the call, he’d been taking inventory in the back room of the thrift store in the Haight-Ashbury where he worked. His boss had called him up into his office, looking grim.
“It’s your mom’s doctor,” he said.
Even though he hated her, Adrien ran.
The doctor talked him through it in a gentle tone: the chemotherapy wasn’t working and the cancer had advanced far enough that it was now not only in both lungs, but was spreading to her brain, as well.
There was always the possibility of continuing treatment, but it would be lengthy, painful, and expensive.
He, Jessica, and his mother attended an appointment with the hospital’s grief counselor and chaplain. His mother—suddenly a devout Catholic in her last several years of life—clutched her rosary to her chest.
“If Jesus has decided that it is my time, then it is my time,” she said with more grace and eloquence than she had ever allotted her children.
Adrien remembered when she’d shoved David into a wall for getting a B in Spanish class in eighth grade.
Where had this God-given acceptance and patience been then?
It didn’t make sense.
It wasn’t fair.
His life was empty. It was work, worrying over bills, trying to coax David out of his room, and the scant minutes he could get to himself working in the art studio or painting the side of a building. At least being out and about offered him the chance to work on his art.
That particular October morning saw him on the internal bridge of the Japan Center, putting the finishing touches on his newest mixed media installation.
“The kids at the art shop were asking for you,” an art student, Ruby, was telling him as she crossed the bridge to hand him some fresh polish and a rag. “They want you to come back to teach them to draw more Pokémon.”
“Do they now?” Adrien smiled, accepting the materials. “I’ll try and see what I can work out with my schedule.”
“I think they’d appreciate that.” Ruby smiled, hanging back on the other side of the hallway to observe Adrien’s work. “You know, you really ought to publish a book of your stuff.”
“You think?” Adrien asked, glancing at her over his shoulder.
“I’d buy it.” Ruby shrugged, propping herself up on the wall beside him. “I take BART to Oakland all the time to see your work there. It would be nice to have it in one place.”
“Maybe you could put it up on that Internet of yours,” Adrien teased, taking off his glasses and rubbing them clean on his tee-shirt.
“Har har.” Ruby rolled her eyes. “But for real though, why don’t you?”
“You kidding?” Adrien snorted. “My mom would kill me if she found out I was still doing this stuff. Why do you think I work under a pseudonym?”
Ruby wrinkled her nose. “Aren’t you, like, twenty-five? Who cares what your mom thinks?”
“Twenty-four,” Adrien corrected her with a sigh. “She’s… she’s been in a bad way the past few years. Cancer. I try not to do anything that would upset her too much.”
“Oh!” Ruby gasped, covering her mouth with her palm. “Oh, I’m so sorry! I had no idea.”
“It’s okay.” Adrien shrugged. He’d long since gone numb to it. The sympathy. The apologies.
Leaning over the form of the octopus, he used the rag to buff away the residue left from the casting and pulled back to admire his work. “Okay, does this look about finished?”
“Looks awesome to me!” Ruby flashed a thumbs-up, though her posture still betrayed a hint of discomfort.
“Sorry I had you run and get more polish just for that,” Adrien apologized, shoulders sagging. Ruby shrugged in response.
“No worries, I—”
“Yo, Adrien!” someone shouted from farther down the sky bridge. It was one of the waiters from the nearby restaurant, leaning out of the doorway. “I got a call from your sister—she said you gotta get home pronto, something about your mom?”
“ Shit ,” Adrien swore, fumbling his rag. Ruby looked at him, expression earnest.
“I’ll handle the clean-up here,” she told him, snatching the rag up from where he’d dropped it. “You get going home, okay?”
“Thanks!” Adrien said, making his way towards the garage where his Ducati Super Short was parked—despite his mother’s begging, he’d never been able to bring himself to sell it. It was one of the last things he had from Marcos’ family.