SHE WAS TWO WEEKS LATE BY MARDI GRAS DAY, BUT SHE HADN’T said anything to Jonah yet.
She had promised to meet Jonah and Colby in Central City for the Zulu parade. It was cold out, but Luz felt like she was burning up. The parade was already rolling when she arrived, floats packed tight with riders in black-and-white face paint. They wore vibrant frills and robes and skirts made of straw. They chucked beads and toy spears into the throngs of people bunched against the curb. Sometimes a rider held aloft a rare, prized coconut, painted gold or silver or decorated with rhinestones. This was the evolution of a century-old tradition. The crowd lost themselves at the sight, held arms high, strained their fingers, and the rider picked his favorite and tossed the throw. The bouncing cadence of the bands between the floats punctuated all of it.
The boys were already drunk by the time Luz found them. Colby had a bottle of whiskey stashed in his backpack. They offered Luz a swig. She put on a good face and abstained, and they kept offering, having forgotten they’d already tried. There had been good moments earlier in Carnival season—dancing with the boys to marching bands, competing for the best throws from the floats, celebrating the Saints’ victory in the Super Bowl—but today, the ability to be present eluded Luz.
A sharp smack near her ear made her snap to.
Colby was standing there, shaking out his hand. He bent and picked up the coconut, a beautiful thing painted a solid and gleaming silver. He grinned. His drunken eyes bloodshot. He tapped his temple. “Thing was gonna hit you right there,” he said.
Relief blossomed in Luz’s belly and she leaned and kissed Colby on the cheek. An overwhelming release, like she might float away. Certainly she could have been injured and Colby had saved her from that, but the feeling struck her as incommensurate with simple personal gratitude. Luz backed out of the crowd.
Toward the end of the day they found themselves in the Marigny, downriver from the French Quarter. Luz followed as the boys listed through the costumed people on Frenchmen Street, and in the darkening day they stumbled upon some otherworldly drum corps on the corner. Men and women wearing costumes of horns and chains and red flashing lights. They had snares and bass drums, and some had triangles they dinged or cymbals they crashed, and one man wearing a skeleton mask shouted dancing orders into a megaphone as the revelers passed. Jonah and Colby fell in with the gathering group. Luz did her best to laugh as Jonah pulled her into the fold, but everybody reeked of liquor and sweat. The stench clawed up her nostrils and thrust itself down her throat, and her stomach clenched against it. Wet bodies slid against her. She was jostled about, vulnerable, exposed.
A panic rose like acid and she ran. The boys found her halfway down the block, but she couldn’t explain what the matter was. She didn’t want to.
And this was why such relief had flooded her when Colby blocked the coconut. Conscious thought drew even with her biology.
The world went wobbly, and Jonah caught her, and he laughed, thinking she was drunk like him.