Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (22 page)

Aidan looked at Dev and nodded. “Yeah. It does.”

“And if I do talk to him, I’d say that I don’t want to go to one of those schools. No way. I want to stay where I am.”

“Good.” Aidan put out his fist, and he and Dev bumped knuckles. “So, you want a ride to Philly or what?”

But they ended up having to wait a couple of weeks, and then, two days before they were supposed to go, Aidan met Dev at his locker before first period with a sheepish look on his face.

“What’d you do now?” inquired Dev, amiably.

“I broke up with Maria Winfield.”

“I thought you weren’t going out with Maria Winfield. Last I heard, you were just
hanging
out with Maria Winfield.”

“Hanging out still requires a breakup. Of sorts.”

Dev smiled.
Of sorts.

“So what?” he said. “Why the long face? Last I heard, you didn’t actually like her that much.”

“Right. Hence the breakup.” Aidan winced. “The, uh, problem is that I kind of broke up with her in my car in front of her house for fifteen minutes too long last night.”

Dev looked at Aidan.

“You were late getting home,” he said finally.

“Yep.”

“They took your car keys.”

“Yep.”

“For how long?”

“Two weeks. I tried to negotiate it into three weeks minus this Saturday, but I got no takers.”

“Oh,” said Dev. “I appreciate the effort, though.”

“Any chance your mom’ll lift the moratorium on train riding?”

Right before Christmas, one of Lake’s customers had handed her some long-winded story about the customer’s fifteen-year-old son (“an honor student,” like that mattered) showing up at home in the dead of night reeking of beer with a bloody lip, a torn jacket, an empty wallet, and a warmhearted but impatient cabdriver awaiting his $150 fare. According to the customer, the kid had taken the train into the city to do a little last-minute Christmas shopping and had fallen in with three “bad older boys” in hooded sweatshirts and goatees who’d gotten him drunk and then mugged him on the platform at the Thirtieth Street station before he could hop the train home.

Even though the story was definitely fishy (How many fifteen-year-old boys went combing the boutiques of West Philadelphia for Christmas gifts? Why had the bad boys bothered to get him drunk when three to one seemed like pretty good odds that they could’ve robbed him sober?) and also probably embellished (If a person were lonely enough to pester a waitress with a story like that during the dinner rush, isn’t it likely that they’d throw in a few juicy fabrications?), Lake used it as a tidy illustration of why Dev would ride trains without adult supervision over her dead body.

“I bet you weren’t going to let me ride the train even before you heard that story,” Dev had told her.

“That’s certainly possible,” Lake had answered with a noncommittal face. “In any case, ixnay on the rainstay.”

Dev grinned wryly at Aidan. “No, I’d say that moratorium’s rock solid.”

He appreciated that Aidan did not suggest that Dev ride the train anyway and then lie about it. When it came to obeying his mother, Dev was comfortable (comfortable enough, anyway) with splitting hairs and blurring lines (his mother now let him ride in the car with Aidan on main roads and she had never actually
said
that Dev was not allowed to go to Philadelphia) but uncomfortable with breaking laws that she had explicitly laid down. Dev had never explained this distinction to Aidan, but he seemed to get it without being told.

“It needs to be this Saturday, right?”

“Not really,” said Dev, trying to sound nonchalant. “My mom does a double shift one Saturday a month, so we could do it next month.”

“Wow,” said Aidan, shaking his head. “A month? Sorry, man. And we found him, too, old Ben Tremain. We found his address and everything.”

It had been right there in the Philadelphia phone book. Not Benjamin or Benedict. Not Teddy either, but Aidan had pointed out that Teddy might have been a nickname or a middle name or maybe Ben was the nickname. Maybe he was big. Maybe he was gentle.

“No sweat,” said Dev. “I bet Ben’s not going anywhere. He’ll have the same address next month,” but he was startled by how dejected he felt. What’s your deal, he asked himself. One minute, you don’t care if you ever find him; the next minute, you’re sinking like a leaky balloon because you have to wait thirty measly days to go look for him. Dev bristled with irritation at himself. A little consistency, asshole. A little consistency would be nice.

Then Dev heard a jangling sound behind him and turned to find Lyssa two feet away, slinking from around the last locker in Dev’s row with a self-satisfied expression on her face, shaking something silvery in her hand so fast that Dev couldn’t make out what it was.

“Guess what?” she said.

“How long have you been standing there?” demanded Aidan.

Dev felt a whir of concern about what Lyssa had overheard, but then looked at Aidan and shrugged a resigned shrug. A girl who executed umpteen loopy-ass rituals a day in the middle of a high school with next to nobody noticing knew a thing or two about subterfuge. If Lyssa had made it her business to find out his business, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it.

“What?” Dev asked Lyssa in a tired voice.

Lyssa stopped the jangling, and let what she was holding dangle in front of Dev and Aidan. Car keys.

“What?” said Dev again.

“I’m free on Saturday,” said Lyssa, smiling a half-smug, half-sugary smile, “that’s what.”

Dev was nervous. Of course he was. As he walked along the city street, every step he took on the busy, occasionally cracked sidewalk was possibly moving him toward not only the man who’d supplied half of Dev’s DNA, but also toward what Dev had begun to think of as a geologic period shift. Change. Big, big change. Dev didn’t know that much about geology, but he knew that shifts like this were tricky things: they could mean the Cambrian explosion or the K-T extinction; oceans teeming with life or every last dinosaur dead in the mud. He realized the list was playing in his head: Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous. The list steadied him, but the nervousness was still there, an annoying whine, like a mosquito buzzing in his ear.

But even through his nervousness, through the whine and the reciting (Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous…) and the name Ben Tremain, Ben Tremain pulsing like a bass line underneath it all, the city was seeping into his consciousness. A tiny used-book store; a man handing out flyers; electric blue daisies in a flower stall; people in café windows reading newspapers, drinking coffee, wearing odd glasses and leather jackets; a mosaic-covered wall, the shards of mirror flashing; restaurants with framed menus outside their doors; steam pouring from a grate; acrid smells, or sweet, or plain bad, drifting and temporary, like passing clouds. Dev had spent zero time in cities. He imagined Darwin in the Galápagos. The farther Dev walked, the more he looked around, paying attention, taking it in.

So that when Aidan asked him, in a low voice, “Hey, Dev, are you, um, noticing the neighborhood?” Dev automatically answered, “Yeah, man. Totally. It’s amazing.”

Aidan nodded and said, “Sure. Sure it is. But you know where we are, right?”

Dev stopped walking so abruptly that Lyssa, who was walking behind them, bumped into him.

“You mean we’re lost?” asked Dev.

“We’re lost?” squealed Lyssa. “Aidan, you
said
you knew where we were going. You
said
you had a map of the city tattooed on your brain; you said—and I
quote
—‘My internal compass hasn’t failed me yet.’”

“Settle down,” said Aidan. “We aren’t lost. I just wondered if you all had noticed where we are?” He pointed surreptitiously at a large, rainbow-striped flag flying from someone’s balcony.

“So what?” said Dev.

Lyssa glanced at the flag and then said, “My mom says decorative flags are tacky.”

Aidan shook his head at this, then intoned, in a deep, radio-announcer voice, “My friends, we are entering the heart of”—he paused dramatically—“the Gayborhood.”

Dev and Lyssa stood silently on the sidewalk, letting this soak in, and Dev began to notice a few things he hadn’t noticed before. Pairs of women. Pairs of men. The pairs walking together or pushing strollers or holding hands or exchanging sections of the newspaper. As Dev watched, in front of him two men in expensive-looking parkas crossed the street with a tiny Asian boy swinging between them, his red-sneakered feet flying off the ground every few steps.

“Oh,” said Dev, quietly.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up,” said Lyssa, turning to Dev, her pale blue eyes round as quarters, her eyelashes weedy and ink black in the noon sunlight. “Your
dad
is
gay
?”

“Lyssa,” said Aidan, and he made a ferocious slicing motion across his throat.

“Is this my dad’s—neighborhood?” Dev asked Aidan. “I mean, Ben’s neighborhood?”

Aidan nodded to a row of tiny houses a half block away.

“That one, with the red door, across from the Starbucks.”

Dev thought for a moment, scrolling through the gay people he’d known. It didn’t take long. Mick and Elliot from his mom’s restaurant back in California. His sixth-grade gym teacher, Miss Pike. A twelfth-grader at Charter named Patrick Gold who worked at the Teen Hotline, passed out flyers for gay pride marches, and wore T-shirts that said things like
GAY IS THE NEW BLACK.
What if Dev’s dad was gay? What if that was the real reason things hadn’t worked out with Lake? After a few long seconds of trying to imagine having a gay dad and drawing a blank, Dev shrugged.

“You guys drink coffee?” he said.

Dev got hot chocolate. Lyssa got chai. Aidan got a venti caramel macchiato heavy on the vanilla, with whipped cream and an extra shot of espresso. They snagged a table by the window, and as soon as they sat down, Aidan handed over his cell phone and Dev called Ben Tremain.

“Hello,” said a man’s voice. The voice didn’t sound particularly gay to Dev.

“Uh, hi,” said Dev, “could I speak to Ben please?”

“Speaking.”

Dev hung up.

“It was Ben,” he said, “he’s home.”

“You want to sit here and see if he comes out?” asked Aidan.

Dev nodded.

“Did he sound gay?” asked Lyssa.

“Not really,” said Dev, “I don’t know.”

“Oh, you’d totally know,” said Lyssa, tightening her ponytail. “God, it would suck to have a gay dad.”

“Shut up, Lyssa,” said Aidan.

“Well,” said Lyssa, loftily, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t believe in it.”

“You don’t believe in gay people,” snickered Aidan. “Like believing in them is
optional
? Like gay people are the Easter bunny?”

“I just think it’s not normal,” she said primly. “And I think a lot of people would agree.”

Dev thought,
Isn’t it possible that a person who has to touch her nose eight times before she can get up to sharpen a pencil so that she won’t scream out sex comments in class is not an expert on normal?
He didn’t actually pose this question out loud, but when he looked over at Aidan, Dev could tell he was thinking more or less the same thing.

A thought hit Dev. “Hey, Lyssa,” he said, and as soon as he started talking, he wished he’d never started, “I noticed—I mean you don’t seem to be doing all those—you don’t seem to be very, uh, compulsive today.” He blushed. Why had he said that? When he looked up at Lyssa, her face seemed different, like the usual bright, haughty tautness had jumped ship. Instead, she looked exhausted and sad. Dev felt about two inches high.

“Sorry,” said Dev, quickly, “it’s none of my business.”

“Fluvoximine,” she said, dully. “I guess it’s pretty effective? I hate it because it makes me clumsy when I dance, but my parents said that if I don’t stay on it, I have to quit.” She paused. Then added, “Which is a totally retarded idea because ballet is the only good thing in my whole stupid, fucking life.” When she said it, her voice was vicious, mournful, and scared, all at the same time.

Abruptly, all three of them averted their gazes, turning their faces to the window. Dev felt suddenly ashamed of himself for what he’d thought earlier, back in the car, that Lyssa should keep her craziness to herself, that having to feel compassion for a messed-up, hurting person was annoying and unfair. Dev thought about what good, reassuring, interesting company his brain had always been. How nightmarish, how abjectly terrible it must be when the enemy lived inside your own brain, when the enemy
was
your own brain.

Because Dev was thinking about this, it took a few seconds for him to realize what he was seeing.

“Look!” he almost yelled. “There he is!”

The man stood on the stoop, framed by the red door, buttoning his black wool coat. Right away, Dev noticed two things about the man: he was extremely short and he looked extremely young.

“Oh, sure that’s your dad,” said Lyssa, “if he had you when he was ten.”

“You can’t tell from this far away,” said Aidan. “And, you know, if he’s gay, he probably takes really good care of himself. Sunscreen, facials, all that stuff.”

“He’s, like, five feet tall,” sneered Lyssa.

“More like five five, I bet,” said Dev.

“What are the chances of you having a really short dad?” said Lyssa, her eyebrows raised.

“Not great,” Dev had to admit, “but it’s possible.”

“But hey, hey, you know what?” said Aidan, excitedly. “That might not be Ben. It might be his short, young domestic partner. Ben might still be in the house.”

Even though this was Dev’s potential dad they were talking about and even though he had not had time to get comfortable with the idea of having a gay dad (he wasn’t
un
comfortable, but the jury was definitely still out), there was no way not to chuckle at “short, young domestic partner.”

“All right,” said Aidan. “Let’s move it out. I’ll bus the table. You guys follow him.”

But that turned out to be unnecessary because the man set off across the street, straight for the Starbucks door. Without thinking about what he would do or say, Dev got up and walked toward the door so that he was standing just to the side of it, his fidgety hands shoved deep into his coat pockets, when the guy walked through it. When he saw him up close, Dev knew without a doubt that this man was not his father. Lake had told him that Teddy Tremain had been a couple of years ahead of her in school, which would make him well into his thirties. Dev wasn’t so great at judging age, but the guy in the wool coat was somewhere in the neighborhood of ten years older than Dev, maybe less. If this was Ben Tremain, he probably wasn’t anybody’s dad, and definitely not Dev’s. Nope. No way.