Joanna

 

My mom texted me, which was odd. It put me on edge instantly. I was sitting on the camel leather backseat of Gabi’s Lexus SUV. She wasn’t driving though; her boyfriend, Chaos, was. They talked to each other quietly while I looked out the window on our way back to Gabi’s house. It was dark outside—all I could really see were the balls of light from other cars, colliding and passing each other in the darkness. A lot of streaming reds and yellows.

My mom wasn’t a regular text-messager. I’d seen her texting my older brother before, slowly plugging along at the digits. She didn’t have the keypad memorized like I did. I could easily rant a paragraph to Gabi with my thumb inside my purse, driving, to her house. Texts from my mom read emotionless and without punctuation, unlike the way messages from my friends read. The exclamation point is a loaded symbol. Excluding one could mean you were pissed. With certain people, it inevitably did.

And she didn’t know anything about slang or symbols. After coming home from school having texted her during the day, she cornered me, pointing to the colon and parentheses I’d sent to her. She spoke low and steady—her serious voice. She thought it meant something obscene; nothing specific, just something obscene. I had to rotate the phone and trace it to show her the smiley.

Chaos turned into a Race Trak gas station so that he could get out of the driver’s seat before pulling into the gate at Gabi’s house. Her parents didn’t like anyone else driving her car, and they didn’t like Chaos at all. They wanted Gabi to be with a white boy, and preferably one that was German, like them. I thought that if they’d just get to know him, they’d actually like him. He was silly and prone to slap-happiness, not the smartest guy, but he would inevitably surprise you with a witty observation when you least expected it. He thought it would be hilarious to open up a store that took rainchecks. It had been a long time since I felt weird having to call him Chaos (for his ego I guess). And leaning forward between him and Gabi in the front seats, I found that he smelled mildly of vanilla ice cream.

I got out of the backseat and moved into the front while Gabi replaced Chaos. He climbed into the trunk where our shopping bags were floating around a massive lilac down comforter. He laid down on top of it, and Gabi smoothly shifted the car back into drive. This was a dance they did daily, sneaking Chaos into a house where he wasn’t welcome.

do you remmber dallas alders frum grapfvine hf died of heroin overdose, is what the text message from my mom said. I didn’t respond. Of course I remembered him. He was one of my older brother’s closest friends in elementary school and then his family moved onto our street, so I ended up spending a lot of time with him too.

During the summer we rotated whose house we swam at daily. The backyard at his house had a chalkboard black trampoline and a deep end of the pool so deep that a chill tickled my toes while I tread water, even in the most sweltering heat of the day. Our pool had a slippery white bottom that made me cringe when a toenail grazed it and was shallow from end to end so it all but boiled in the sun. We’d moved since living on that street with Dallas though, and didn’t have a pool anymore. During the summer I just swam in Gabi’s pool with her, and sometimes really late at night she would even feel safe enough to let Chaos swim with us. He was an awful swimmer and would just doggie paddle from edge to edge—concentrating so hard that he’d forget to breathe and all but hyperventilate on the other side. Gabi and I enjoyed teasing him while we tread in the middle of the deep end.

I’d had a big crush on Dallas Alders. I was in as deep as a 3rd grader could be— not knowing that a crush could ever be anything more than that weird feeling in my stomach which made the most arbitrary of interactions thrilling. I never even so much as thought about kissing him. I’d like to say I had a crush on him because he made me laugh, or, I’d at least like to give some sort of reason for liking him. But the truth is I don’t remember why I liked him. It was probably only because he was around all the time.

We pulled up to the gate at Gabi’s house. She was especially short—four feet eleven inches tall, and had to hang halfway out of the Lexus’ inky tinted window to press in the gate’s code. Chaos had already pulled the lilac comforter over himself and was cocooned inside. The iron gate shuddered open.

Her house was low to the ground and made of a light brick—the color of delicate shells. The thick behinds of her family’s two retrievers wiggled beside the car as we inched our way under the porte-cochere. Gabi took a sharp right and we were pulled into the junk filled garage. There was a twelve foot long stuffed hammerhead on the wall, that her father had caught on a deep sea fishing trip. I couldn’t remember where the trip had been to or even where hammerheads were native.

Gabi told a funny story—about a party her older sister threw when she was in high school. A drunk guy tried stealing the hammerhead, squeezing it under one arm as he tramped down the driveway to his car on the street. He appeared to be so sure of what he was doing that nobody stopped to ask him just what that was. It was Gabi, somewhere around 3rd grade herself at the time, who finally called out to him in the front yard. The oddest part, she swore, was how the guy claimed there just hadn’t been anything he could do to help himself from that stiff, shiny fish gleaming down at him from the unfinished drywall. He was apologetic but offered no excuses, leaving it on the grass with Gabi, who was too small and weak to carry it back herself. She sat down and guarded it until the party was over when her sister teetered out into the driveway looking for her. They tugged it back together and their father never found out; Gabi was more bonded with the shark than he was.

Whenever she told stories like this I inevitably imagined myself at the same age, there with her. We could have made good best friends in elementary school, if we’d gone to the same one. We were both basically still attached to our mothers by some invisible but incredibly strong umbilical cord. Gabi would often fake sick to go home at lunchtime so that she could keep her mother safely within her periphery, to make sure nothing bad happened she told herself. It was the same reason I refused to spend the night away from home, until high school. For sleepovers, I just got picked up around midnight when most of the girls had already fallen asleep—including myself. I’d grown farther and farther away from that, spending the night at Gabi’s house as often as I could.

Dallas Alders knew I had a crush on him. I wrote it down in a kitschy diary, on an elaborately designed page with the heading: CRUSH LIST. There was a cheap but sturdy lock holding it shut and I kept the only key in my coin purse. All of the pages had some kind of heading, to inspire the diarist. I just flipped through, jotting down a few things on pages like FAVORITE MOVIES and DREAMS. Dallas was the only name I’d written on my CRUSH LIST so far, though I liked many of the boys in my class. Crushes were easy and started on a whim at that age. In high school it took effort to establish a crush—I weighed endless pros and cons, never intending to do anything but masturbate to our potential anyway. Gabi never had crushes in high school, she just had boyfriends. Chaos was the only one who kept hanging on the way he did though.

My brother came banging on my door one afternoon, with Dallas in tow. He told me that he knew I had a crush on him because he’d read it in my diary. I got hot, quick. Believing he was merely acting on a hunch, I denied my brother, but he pushed inside my room and fell to his knees beside my bed knowing just where to reach for the book. He pulled the hard covers apart as far as he could and the lock held tight. He could finger through the pages and read what was written about an inch from each edge. In bright purple ink near the margin of the page where he stopped: Dallas Alders.

I remembered feeling less embarrassed than I thought I should. Something about the way Dallas looked at me afterward, from behind my brother’s shoulder, not saying a word. The three of us went into the living room and took turns playing Super Mario World. Neither of them brought it up again, and of course, nothing came of the crush. I could hardly remember what he even looked like. It was impossible to imagine him picking out a vein and sliding a needle inside, pumping in enough to die. We’d come from the same place, but I’d never done heroin or even seen it. To the best of my knowledge, I didn’t know anybody who did it.

Gabi and I got out of the car; Chaos stayed in the trunk. I didn’t say anything to him when we got out, expecting Gabi to, but she just slammed the door and led me out the side door of the garage, under the porte-cochere toward the yellow light from behind the glass door. She pushed a button to close the garage but left that side door gaping open.

 

Gabi

 

The second I had to leave Trey in the fucking trunk of my car yet again I started text messaging him. I thought that if I kept him entertained while he was in there he wouldn’t have time to get pissy about the situation. And he wouldn’t have time to call up or text one of those fucking little black chickies always buzzing around his cousin’s apartment. They know that I’m his girlfriend but will fucking sit in his lap just the same, whether I’m around or not. They’re just like that.

I unlocked the side door for Jo and me. I don’t know why it was always locked. Unfailingly my mom would be all but six feet inside, with the computer screen’s glow making her face blue. The dogs crowded our ankles then pushed in ahead of us of course. I texted Trey about how I couldn’t wait to get him upstairs and in my bed. I said that it would only be ten or fifteen minutes—put in a little face time with the folks then upstairs to crack the window for him to climb through after slipping up the cast iron spiral staircase onto the balcony.

Jo was being silent as usual. By the time it gets dark outside, I swear all of her thoughts just come to the surface to feed or something—on each other! She will stare out the back window like a zombie when we drive away from the movie theatre. I’ve actually learned to just pretend like she isn’t there for awhile, since she won’t respond if you talk to her anyway—being in her own damn world.

The kitchen was warm, and lit up. Mom sat hunched at her computer in the little square office across from the granite topped bar just like I thought she’d be. Folded laundry was stacked on the barstools. My pile was dominated by pink and baby blue. I leaned against the doorframe of her little room and told her we were home—trying not to make eye contact. If I engaged her she might start to pry. Because Joanna was around she’d feel more bold to ask about Trey. Fucking bitch didn’t take her eyes off the spider solitaire on her screen anyway.

Jo wandered over to the kitchen right away, letting herself into the pantry and refrigerator. I sat down on the staircase and stared at my phone; Trey hadn’t text messaged me back yet. What is it about fucking love that makes you so vulnerable?

Jo pulled out a plastic container filled with cheerios—honey nut of course. I guess she couldn’t remember where the bowls were because she banged around inside the cabinets, like I wasn’t even there. She pulled our organic milk out of the fridge and all but purred at it.

My mom called out to me from her little hole. Gabi! Come here my petal! I was starting to boil. Very unlike the precious petal she goes on about. I decided not to answer her, so Joanna wandered over there with her bowl of cereal. She spoke for the first time in what seemed about forever—suddenly announcing to my mom that a childhood friend of hers had been found dead earlier that day, of a heroin overdose.

Then I finally got my response from Trey. He said that it was getting hot in the car and that he really needed some pussy. Well, I really needed some dick was more like it. We hadn’t had a chance to do it that day and I found it hard to wait. Jo didn’t understand of course—because she was still a fucking virgin! I’d been doing it for like three years. I decided to hold out on texting him back and make him feel the pain like I did, waiting on his ass. Let him think that whatever I was doing—it was better than paying attention to him.

My mom had stood up and come out of her office. She was shaking her head and staring so fucking hard at the floor that her second chin was squashed against her chest. Jo stepped out of the doorway too and ended up collapsing on the chaise lounge by the stairs. The dogs rushed over to lick the sweet milk left at the bottom of her cereal bowl, which she’d set down on the tiled floor basically in offering to them. She smiled at me and I realized she was very sleepy. Her eyes were red but you could tell it wasn’t from crying because they weren’t wet or puffy. I guess she hadn’t been that good of friends with the dead druggie.

Just goes to show you... my mom trailed off, passing us on her way back into the office, still shaking that fucking face at the floor. That’s when my dad came in from the living room and I knew it was time to go upstairs, pronto. I flipped open my phone. It had only been about a minute and a half but that probably felt like an hour and a half to Trey. Or not. Either way, I couldn’t stand to be more than five minutes in my dad’s presence. He was bad for my cholesterol. He made my blood pressure rise. Five minutes, I wrote to Trey.

Jo sat up from the couch to give my dad a hug and he said hello so fucking loud in that booming voice, for no reason. We were all within about ten feet of each other and none of us had a god damned hearing aid in. Though, after I thought about it, Jo was a little hard of hearing. It got old having to repeat things half a dozen times to her. She begged me and Trey to project our voices into the backseat whenever we had a conversation, or she wasn’t going to be a part of it. No duh it doesn’t help when you talk to the windshield instead of me— she poked her head between the two front seats of my Lexus and cupped an ear, hoping to make us feel bad I figured. She’ll be one of those really annoying grandmothers always EHH?!ing at you unless she just goes deaf completely.

Hello to you too Gabi, my dad stood in front of the staircase with his arms out expecting a hug from his youngest daughter. Get into lots of trouble tonight? The way he said it meant: I’m going to say this like I’m kidding but we both know that I’m not. I stood up and gave him the hug he wanted, making it extra hard like maybe I missed him or something, but really I wanted to squeeze him so hard his spleen burst.

We’re going up, I said and turned around to take the stairs. Joanna picked her ceramic cereal bowl up off the floor and told me she would come in a second. There was a sharp corner halfway up the staircase, so I sat behind the drywall listening to them talking in the kitchen. I wondered if my dad would ask Joanna about Trey. He didn’t believe there was such thing as a black guy capable of being a suitable husband. I wasn’t personally in the habit of judging people based on their marital potential though. My older brother was probably even worse, telling me he didn’t want me to marry a black guy because that would make him an uncle to niglets. I laughed at first, because the word was kind of clever. But when things started to go really well between me and Trey— sometimes, I couldn’t help it, I’d catch myself imagining a wedding—Jo would be my maid of honor. It would be outdoors. We’d serve ice cold shrimp. The reception would be open bar, with a live band. Then there would be a honeymoon and more trips after that and a baby and then more babies after that. But then my brother’s big fat face would fill up my head and he was disgusted by my children and by me.

All they started talking about, in the kitchen, was the dead druggie from Joanna’s old neighborhood. She said that she’d had a crush on him when they were kids, which I thought was a weird thing to tell my parents, but they ooh’ed and aww’ed over her story. It is an odd feeling, my dad consoled her. They didn’t bring up Trey and neither did Joanna. They didn’t even bring up me.

I heard a tapping, so climbed the rest of the stairs. Trey was standing behind the window, on the wrought iron balcony. My heart stuttered to see him. His dark skin looked lighter than it actually was with the black sky behind him, no stars, and the yellow light from the ceiling fans reflecting off of him through the glass. Even though we were looking right at each other, he tapped again.

I picked our big remote up off the couch and pressed the blue POWER button. The screen started lowering from the ceiling on its rotating mechanism, making tons of noise. That’s when it was safe to yank open the window and let Trey inside.

 

Chaos

 

I was glad to be out of that car. I fell asleep for a little while—couldn’t help it. I had taken two xanax earlier on and that blanket Gabi keeps back there is so soft, like I was laying on a cloud, and the xanax made me feel like I was basically floating on it. I could hear my broken ass phone vibrating on the other side of the trunk but couldn’t open my eyes—they were glued shut. Couldn’t tell Gabi that though. She’d get pissed like I shouldn’t be taking xanax when really she’d just be pissed I hadn’t given any to her (there were two pills...).

Then I woke up and felt embarrassed all over again about having to hide in a trunk from some middle aged white folks. I knew niggers they would really hate, but I’m just not one of em. Still, they never wanna meet me. I didn’t care at first, cause, I didn’t want to meet them either. When I first started fucking Gabi, all I saw was her pussy. When I looked at her face, I saw her pussy. When she opened her mouth to talk at me, and she did a lot of fucking talking at me (still does), it was her pussy—paranormally opening and closing with every word. All I wanted was to stick my cock in that. So I kept doing it, and at some point she grew an actual head, which was when I realized she was probably more than just pussy.

I had to hold my pants up to climb inside the window or they would get caught on the ledge and trip me up, or maybe get pulled off. Not that it would really matter when I thought about it—except that it might be too loud. Once I was inside I could still hear people downstairs. Normally her parents went to bed real early. They sounded old, and definitely white. Joanna was down there too, distracting them I guess.

Gabi started squeezing me around the waist with her short arms— they barely made their way around me, but were so smooth. I ran my palms up and down them. She was whispering something to me about her father, an asshole and heroin but it all ran together and just ended up meaning nothing. She didn’t look up at me for anything to say, just started rubbing me through my basketball shorts. I let her do that and looked around at the autographed soccer balls and jerseys from Germany in their plastic shadow boxes on the walls. She said that her dad played soccer when he was growing up in Germany and her mom was a cheerleader. That’s how they met and were both still obsessed with it. They spent a month in Europe every few years to watch the world cup. Soccer.

Joanna finally came thumping up the stairs and I tried to pry Gabi off of my hips. Her pale foundation was starting to rub off on my tall tee anyway. My dick shrank. When she got to the top of the stairs and saw me with Gabi she didn’t look surprised. I knew that she accepted me always being around. I scored them really good weed and she was easily pleased I guess. We were actually pretty good friends. She never acted weird when we were alone together, without Gabi, and she never flirted with me. She just always acted the same, whether Gabi was around or not. Either joking about something or being quiet—and seeming like it was completely normal not to say one word for forty-five minutes straight. For some reason that didn’t matter though, because we were friends anyway.

She came over and sat down on the oversized ottoman in front of the couch and looked sleepy. The big white screen finally finished buzzing and came to a stop. Sound filled up the room all of a sudden and was way too loud. Joanna put her head between her knees while Gabi fumbled around for the big ass remote to turn it off. That thing turned on and off the lights plus it could dim them. It worked the satellite, DVD player, VCR, and however many gaming systems they had (probably all of them). I’m pretty sure it gave a seven day weather forecast and was a compass too.

Can I go to bed? Joanna asked Gabi. And the look on my girl’s face said FINALLY.

They went together into Gabi’s sister’s old room, where Joanna would sleep—we’d fucked in there a few times just for thrills. I leaned Gabi over the bed, held her shoulders onto the mattress and drove it home. She was so short her feet couldn’t even reach the ground but that didn’t matter; I take care of my baby girl. Afterward Gabi said she hadn’t really wanted to do it there—she preferred her own bed, but liked having something dirty to think about whenever Monika came home and stayed in her old room.

I went into Gabi’s room to wait. There were hundreds of photographs cut up and stuck all over the place. From looking through Gabi’s museum I had learned a few things about the differences between our families. Her parents took their three kids plus any blood within the tri-state area on family vacations to the beach and snow resorts in the mountains. My dad wasn’t around but my mom and her sisters made barbeque for days feeding my cousins and me—that was sort of our version of a vacation I guess. Gabi was always invited over when we had them—even Joanna usually came. But when Gabi went on her vacations I just stayed at home waiting for her to get back.

I took off my basketball shorts then my tee and beater—left them on the floor along with what looked like months of Gabi’s own laundry and climbed into her bed with just my boxers on. I stared at the ceiling and wondered where else I could have been right then— my cousin’s house watching the Mavs. Gabi couldn’t be there (because she had that curfew), but maybe other girls would and I wouldn’t have to put in any effort for them. Really though, the Mavs weren’t even my team. Call me a traitor but I like the Lakers. And at least when it came to sex I didn’t have to put in much effort. Actually, Gabi basically threw herself at me; she’d been begging for it all day. She would yell at me when I had no clue what I’d done but still fuck me right after—attempting to be rough (hard for somebody so small) and telling me that she had to teach me my lesson. Whatever the lesson was, she felt satisfied that I’d learned it by the time we were done. I pulled my boxers off and added them to the pile on the floor.

She was taking longer than usual to get the room ready with Joanna. I started feeling heavier and heavier on the mattress. The longer I laid there the more minutely it sunk to cradle me and I started getting tired. My semi hard dick started melting and finally just laid between my legs in its small form. I tried not to let Gabi ever see it that way; it usually took awhile to shrink after we fucked.

Maybe something was wrong with Joanna. I got out of bed, pulled back on the boxers and went to the doorway to listen for Gabi. There was a photo collage of her and Joanna on the sliver of wall by the doorframe. I got stuck on a picture of them in their bikinis, on the coast of France, with a fine red line around each eye where sunglasses had ruined their tans. They held onto each other like sisters and pushed each other away like sisters too. The coastline was made up of smooth round stones, instead of sand, unlike any beach I’d seen or been to before.

Gabi came out of Monika’s old room and the way my chest felt crushed the instant I saw her made me think I had something to feel guilty about—she’d caught me off guard, memorizing the picture. She passed me, into the room, and shoved the door closed behind us. I stayed standing right there by the door, while she wiggled out of all her clothes. Once they started coming off of her they seemed never ending—layer and layer and layer dropped onto the pile, tissue thin pieces of fabric I didn’t even recognize.

Then she was finally naked.

She climbed into bed and looked at me funny, because I was supposed to be in bed with her. That’s where I belonged, like her t-shirts belonged on the floor, and her stuffed animals piled up in the corner. I laid down and her hands were on me—all over. She had tiny hands, but they were so smooth.

I closed my eyes—she could do what she wanted to me. And I couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop myself: I saw that coast—with the big gray rocks halfway around the world. But I was alone.