ALEX
We come up out of the subway. Afternoon sun glints off rusted rooftops. Wind blows but the yellow and orange leaves hold on tight.
We head for the park. Robi wants to carry the bag. I tell him it’s too heavy. He asks why I haven’t noticed how much he’s grown over the summer. Fine, I say. Half a block later, I shoulder the bag again.
Some kids are playing football on the field. Another two throw a Frisbee back and forth. I lead Robi to the far corner, toward the boulder he liked to climb when he was smaller. There’s enough room for us and more.
I dig out a bat Robi’s size and hand it to him.
Out of nowhere he says, “Isa’s really pretty. I think she’s prettier than Avery Santana.”
“Avery Santana?” I turn to look for his glove.
“The girl who lives next door. You’ve never seen her?”
The girl who was playing catch with her dad. “I’ve seen her.” I take out two balls and put them next to the bag. Ten-year-old me would have thought Avery was cute. But she’s nowhere near Isa’s league. Even at ten, I bet, Isa was beautiful.
“So why was she looking at you like that?” Robi’s swinging the bat. His grip is wrong.
I find Robi’s mitt. I take hold of the bat. I don’t let it go until Robi’s moved his hands all the way down the handle. “Who?”
“Isa. You didn’t see?”
I take a breath. I slide on my glove and pick up a ball.
“It’s like she wanted to look at you. But instead of just facing you and saying hi, all she did was these quick looks from the side. It was kinda like how you were looking at her.” Robi’s stopped swinging. “And her sweatshirt. Didn’t you used to have one like that?” He’s waiting for my answer.
I roll my head, stretching my neck. I reach up and massage a pinched muscle. “Isa and I . . . She used to be my girlfriend.” There’s no harm in telling him that.
Robi’s bat tips to the ground. “Shut up,” Robi says. “When?”
“Last spring.”
“What did you do?” he demands. “Why isn’t she still your girlfriend?”
I squat and riffle through the bag. I don’t need anything else out of here. I just don’t want to see Robi’s face. “I didn’t do anything. Except walk away.” What else am I going to say? I still don’t know what I did wrong. And I’m not going to tell him she walked away from me. If Papi heard that? Coño. I’d never live it down. He’d be saying Te lo dije for the rest of my life.
Robi punches my arm as I stand. “What did you do that for? She’s so nice. Nicer than Kiara. Kiara never talks to me.”
I rub my shoulder and show my teeth, pretending Robi’s fist hurt. I don’t tell him that Kiara’s different. That she’s not really my girlfriend. I don’t think he’d understand. “Isa is nice. But it wasn’t going to work. Her parents didn’t like me.” This is truth.
“How could they not like you? Are they blind and deaf or something?”
I smile at his joke. “I don’t know. I only ever met them once. And not for very long.”
“Then how do you know they didn’t like you? How did they know they didn’t like you?” Robi’s voice rises like it does when a game is close and we’re in the last innings.
“They didn’t like the idea of me.”
“What does that mean?” He drops the bat and lifts his arms to the sky. It’s like he’s been taking lessons from Bryan.
“You’ll understand when you’re older.” There’s no way I’m explaining that. Let him enjoy not understanding for as long as he can.
Robi rolls his eyes. “Well, she liked you, right?”
I pick up the bat, flip it around, and hand it to him. “Yeah.”
“And you liked her?”
Lines of dark wood course through the blond grain of the bat. They disappear under my fist. One of the poems I wrote for Isa comes back to me. About the way her hair looked against my arm.
I nod.
Robi snatches the bat. “So who cares what parents think?”
He should be right. Even if he’s only in fifth grade.
“Since when do you not care what Papi thinks?” I ask him.
“Papi’s different. He’s not like other parents.” Robi raises the bat over his shoulder. “Ezra and Seung-wong’s parents are cool. They don’t yell.”
I tap Robi’s hands, reminding him to line up his knuckles. I don’t tell him I think Isa’s parents are like Papi. I don’t tell him that’s not the only reason we’re not together anymore.
I adjust the bat’s angle then step back to check his form. He remembers what I taught him last week about keeping his body straight. I tell Robi I’m going to feed him twenty easy pitches. He’s going to run to retrieve each ball as fast as he can. I’ll time him. Just like Papi timed me. After that, we’ll work on his catching.
Robi chases his first hit. I’m glad he’s not asking about Isa anymore.
We walk back to the house. I tell Robi to run inside and open the basement door. I don’t want to track all this dirt into Yaritza’s living room. Robi grabs onto the railing like he’s going to drown without it. I worked him hard today.
“Oye,” I tell him. “You’re getting stronger. And faster. I can see it.”
He’s halfway up the stoop. He turns back around.
“Thanks.” His little chest is all puffed up. He takes one more step. “Hey, when did you and Isa stop being boyfriend and girlfriend?”
I scratch my chin, pretending to think. Really I’m trying to figure out why he asked. “I don’t know,” I tell him, even though I do. I know the exact day. “Just before school finished for the summer?”
“That’s what I thought.” Robi keeps climbing.
“Hey, hold up. What do you mean, ‘that’s what you thought’?” How would Robi know that?
Robi shrugs his bony shoulders and looks over at me. “You threw out that notebook. The one with the yellow paper. The one you carried all the time. Mami used to complain about the bits that would fall out when you tore the sheets from it, so I started picking them up for you. Don’t think you noticed because you were too busy writing in it. Then one day I was throwing away the scraps in the trash and the whole notebook was in it. It still had plenty of paper. I figured something bad must have happened since you loved that notebook so much.”
I rub the back of my hand across my mouth. I’m worried he’s going to ask me what I was writing. I want to ask him what Yaritza thought I was writing and if she told Papi about it. I don’t say anything except, “Huh.”
“I saved it for you,” Robi says. “In case you want it back. You know, when you wrote? You looked happy.” He squints, studying my face. “I think maybe happier even than when you play.”
When I get out of the shower a half hour later, the notebook with the yellow lined paper is on my bed.