21 
Pretending to Yawn
21 “So you’re gonna try to make out with her, right?” Ira asks. He’s rephrased the question about ten different times since he and Nomura showed up two minutes ago. I, of course, have been waiting for them in front of the Pavilion for twenty minutes (I couldn’t be late, could I? Not when Bijou’s schedule is so tight). And I was so amped I barely slept last night. “Maricel said you were.”
“Maricel?” I ask. “How would she know? Does she have ESP?”
“She knows because it’s what you’re supposed to do,” Ira says. “Otherwise, what are we all doing here?”
“You’d rather be at home with your PlayStation, I take it?” I ask.
“Than on a group date with my sister? And I’m the weird one?”
“Ira does have a point,” Nomura says. “It didn’t necessarily have to be a group thing. You could have asked Bijou out yourself.”
I shake my head. “I already went out with her alone once, remember?” I say. “This is a group thing because of you, not me. Or Mary Agnes, anyway.” I bask in the chance to play the teacherly role normally occupied by Nomura. “You don’t get it, do you? Mary Agnes has basically been stalking you ever since she found out I liked Bijou. You think she cares about Bijou and me so much that she’d be willing to go out of her way to put us together like this?”
“Well, if you put it that way …,” Nomura says, although he’s looking for a quick way to change the subject. “But why Maricel and Ira, too?”
“Elementary, my dear Nomura,” I say, stroking my chin as if a wise man’s beard were there instead of seven strands of peach fuzz (and to be honest, distracting myself from my jitters over the fact that the girls will be here any second). “She got Maricel and Ira to come so the pressure would be off not just for me and Bijou, but for you. She doesn’t want to scare you off.”
“Not bad,” Nomura says.
“So, Nomura, what’s your move going to be?” Ira asks. “Please, tell me somebody’s going to man up and try something.”
When Ira, who still looks and acts like a ten-year-old, is telling us to “man up,” I know we’re all in trouble.
On our way up the stairs to the tiny theater where Terror Lake is playing, the girls say they need to hit the bathroom, and I’m secretly grateful for one last chance to check my hair and my resolve. Nomura, who always gets it, gives me a little breathing room, but Ira won’t leave me alone.
“You’re such a girl,” he says as I sprinkle some water on my head and sweep my bangs off my forehead. As usual, he’s got that stupid video cam out. “Checking yourself out in the mirror, like Maricel.”
Despite the fact that he’s filming me in this incredibly private moment, I try to keep my cool. “Maybe you should try it yourself sometime,” I say. “Unless you’re okay with having a nasty zit right in the middle of your nose.”
“Bull. Where?” he says.
Once he realizes I’m pranking him, I say, “Now will you please turn off that stupid camera? Whatever winds up happening today, I don’t want it on film.”
“Fine, fine,” he says, turning it off.
“We don’t need another Rocky and Trevor situation,” Nomura says.
“Huh? What situation?” asks Ira.
Nomura and I get him up to speed on the nutty comments about “brown sugar” and immigration marriages. I’m the one who notices that his stupid camera is still recording.
“Ira,” I say. “Turn that thing off. And erase those stupid videos, please. God.”
Once we’re in the theater, Ira insists on sitting next to Bijou and me. First, he grilled me about making a move on Bijou, and now he insists on getting a front-row seat to the action? I swear, I don’t understand what goes on in the kid’s brain sometimes. I can literally smell his breath right now (if I’m not mistaken, his lunch was peanut butter smeared on a sesame bagel), and believe me, any knowledge of Ira’s gastronomic goings-on does not put me in a romantic mind-set.
The previews are okay. I try to forget that Ira is two millimeters away from me and concentrate on the fact that Bijou is. I try to keep the chat casual. I figure, if she and her mom have watched every episode of All My Children, they must have seen the all-time-favorite girlie movie Dirty Dancing, but no dice. Still, Bijou seems relaxed and happy enough to be hanging out, so I try to let her mellowness rub off on me, and it seems to be working.
But then Terror Lake starts, and I instantly regret not trying to get Mary Agnes to choose a different movie. There’s no warm-up, no scenes of teenagers having fun on their way to a house out in the woods. Nope, right away, some blond girl is about to open a closet. The camera shows her from several different angles, reaching for the door handle, thinking better of it, then reaching again. What should take three seconds is drawn out into a long minute of torture. In real life, would the redhead take this long to see what is in store for her? Never. You see a closet door, you open it, you shut it; you take control. But in movies like this, which are specifically designed to freak out people like me, the moment stretches into infinity and beyond.
I come up with the brilliant idea of going to get popcorn and Cokes, and excuse myself to Bijou.
Ira, of course, comes bounding after me. Why? He loves spatter-flicks like this; he should be in nerd heaven by now. But he’s got something else on his oddball brain.
“When are you gonna man up?” he asks me. The concession guy is putting about two gallons of butter on Ira’s popcorn, which I guess Ira considers a manly amount.
“Seriously, Ira, why do you care? You’re the least masculine guy in this entire movie theater. The only manly things you’ve ever done have happened in Call of Duty.”
“Whatever. You and Nomura have girls, and I don’t. But when I do, you won’t see me acting like such a nervous wimp.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.” I’m seething, but it’s well established that I’m bad at comebacks. Why are we even friends at all? is what I’m wondering.
I order my popcorn, asking for the tiniest amount of butter, figuring that if Bijou is anything like Dolly, she won’t touch it if there’s an ocean of buttery fat dripping down the bag. As for Ira, I go for the silent treatment, also something I learned from over a decade of living with my sweet sister. We pay for our stuff and head back up to the theater in silence. Before I walk into Bijou’s row, I say, “Find somewhere else to sit, man,” and for once, Ira actually listens.
Thank God there’s a break in the action when I find my seat again. I hand Bijou a lemonade, settle into the chair, and contemplate pretending to yawn. I think back to the source of that information. While Nomura is my best friend and a proven genius in many areas, he has even less than the tiny amount of romantic experience I do. He recommended calling Bijou at home, which turned out to be a bad move. So I rely on his wisdom for the sole reason that I have nobody else to turn to. Possibly not the best strategy in the world?
Pretending to yawn seems completely ridiculous, like a circus trick invented by dorks. A loser move performed only by lame guys (not that Nomura is lame, but perhaps his advice sometimes is) who are so afraid of rejection, they need to disguise their actual desires with shenanigans, with clumsy sleight of hand. No, Alex Schrader will not be performing any circus tricks today. No shenanigans for Alex.
And then Ira’s voice pops back in my head, and I wonder if, in his words, I’m not manning up. And then I do something even less manly: scream like a four-year-old girl when this absolutely freaky-looking cat jumps out of an old wooden trunk and pounces on some poor girl’s face. When the scream comes out of my mouth, I think, I have ruined it. Again.
But then Bijou grabs my hand, and a shock of sensation rushes through my entire body. Did she do it on purpose? She must have. Absolutely. She’s trying to comfort me, and as I realize that our bare skin is touching, I start to feel less like a four-year-old girl and more like the luckiest guy on the planet.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
And I think, Now I am. But what I say is, “Yeah. Thanks.”
Then, I up the ante and make a move of my own. I don’t need to do a fake yawn; I’ve got everything I need right here. We’re already touching, after all. I take a slow breath in, then interlace her fingers within mine. I feel her sit up in her seat—she’s a little surprised, and I would have been, too—but once our hands are intertwined, she seems to be liking it well enough. I stroke my thumb along the outside of her hand, and she squeezes more tightly.
Nothing much happens after that, at least nothing easy to describe. But I learn quickly that there’s a whole universe of awesomeness that lives inside that simple phrase “holding hands.” We squeeze, we tickle, we caress, we stroke, and a chain reaction of tiny electric currents goes up my arm, into my shoulders and chest. Suddenly the supposedly scary movie taking place on-screen seems as distant as the moon. Ready to hide under my seat only a few minutes ago, I now want this idiotic horror film to last forever.
I can honestly say that I’ve never felt this close to another person, and all we’re actually doing is holding hands. That’s not even first base, is it? But who cares? Holding hands with someone you like? It’s completely amazing.
Something crazy happens on-screen, but I barely even register it. “Are you scared?” Bijou whispers, so close it tickles my eardrum.
“No, not anymore,” I say. “Are you?”
We’re walking along Windsor Place, girls in front, boys behind.
Ira and Nomura are comparing notes on the movie when I hear Mary Agnes say to Maricel and Bijou, “Nothing happened yet. I need to give him more time.”
To which Bijou responds, “Please, Mary Agnes. We need to get back.”
I check my phone: it’s four forty. I know Bijou needs to be back at Mary Agnes’s place before five thirty, but that’s only a five-minute walk from here. If I were walking beside her, still holding hands (as soon as the movie was over, Mary Agnes and Maricel bum-rushed Bijou, and we were instantly back to the bleak days of gender segregation), I would tell her not to worry. I know this neighborhood almost as well as I know Ditmas, and I won’t let us get too far away.
We stop in front of Uncle Louie G’s, an ice-cream parlor with a giant mural of a pudgy bald man eating a scoopful from a cup. “Oooh, let’s get some,” Mary Agnes says. “John, buy me a cone? We can share it.” It’s hilarious that she calls Nomura “John,” like he’s forty years old or something. Nomura will never be a “John.” Nomura is Nomura is Nomura.
“I’m not superhungry,” Nomura says, either clueless or deliberately trying to escape Mary Agnes’s sticky web. I give him a jab, though. I couldn’t care less about ice cream right now, but it might give me another chance to break out of the boys-only ranks and get close to Bijou.
But Bijou says, “We should be getting back,” and she looks like she means it. She’s not having fun anymore. But we still have at least a half hour! I want to scream. Lady Bijou, I, Sir Alex Schrader, will see to it that you are safely delivered in prompt fashion to the meeting place previously decided upon by yourself and your stern uncle!
“Share one with me, then, please?” Mary Agnes asks Nomura, batting her lashes like a lovesick puppy.
“Mary Agnes, we really need to get back,” Bijou says. “Please.”
“Okay, we gotta be out of here anyway,” Maricel says, maybe trying to help Bijou out. “Come on, Ira.” Maricel kisses us, and Ira waves good-bye. He and Maricel cross the street to head to the subway.
Mary Agnes holds out her hand to Bijou. “Here, you can have the key. Alex can walk you home. Let yourself in the front door. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, max.”
I check my phone again. It’s four fifty. We’ll be back at Mary Agnes’s in plenty of time.
“My uncle can’t come back to see me there alone. And I don’t want your mom seeing me come back alone, either. She will be back in ten minutes, yes?”
I hadn’t realized Mary Agnes’s mom figured into the plan.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Mary Agnes puts on a look that says, Okay, we’ll do it your way, but I don’t have to like it. “You and your strict uncle,” she mutters, although she was really the only one who wanted ice cream.
The four of us take a right on Seventeenth Street and walk north toward Eighth Avenue. Bijou and I in front, Mary Agnes and Nomura following us. Once we turn the corner, we’ll only be five blocks away from Mary Agnes’s.
“Did you like the movie?” Bijou asks, still stressed but at least trying to keep things light.
I kick a leaf, sweeping it from the sidewalk into the gutter. “To tell you the truth, I hate movies like that,” I say. “Scary movies. Could you tell?”
“Maybe a little.” She laughs.
“Really?” Suddenly, I’m worried she might judge me for not being enough of a badass to sit through Terror Lake without freaking out.
“I was probably more frightened than you,” she lies.
“I’ve always been freaked out by horror movies, ever since I was a little kid.” It’s actually a relief to tell the truth about it. I mean, really—who cares? I wouldn’t even want to be with a girl who judges me for my horror-film phobia. “Ever since I was little, I just … didn’t like them. But how about you? You didn’t seem to mind.”
“You can get some actors, some lights, a camera, and make a movie. Add some music, make it scary. But it is not real life. In real life, I have seen far worse. These are the things that scare me. To see a man dying of thirst. To see a little girl die of cholera because there is no clean water to be found in an entire country. That is a horror movie.”
I don’t know quite how to respond to that. I look at the sidewalk again, unsure of what to say. Finally, I just take her hand. And there it is: that same electric current, shooting up my arm, making me want to cry out with joy. “Do you want to talk about it?” I ask, suddenly guilty that I can be feeling so good when Bijou is reliving such difficult memories. “About what happened, with the earthquake?”
“Not really.”
“Okay. Sorry.” Bijou squeezes my hand, showing me I don’t have to be.
“Maybe I will tell you someday. But for now, just know this: to see people die, it changes you. Certain things that seem small, like the look on your mother’s face when she greets you in the morning, or the taste of a cup of tea, become much more important. And the things you thought you cared about, some of them do not matter at all.”
“Do you miss her? Your mother?”
“Of course I do, yes. I miss her every day.”
“But you can visit her, right?”
She doesn’t answer right away, and I don’t push it. Maybe it’s crazy-expensive to fly to Haiti, and she can’t afford to jump on a plane any time she feels homesick. “For now,” she says, “I must make America my home.”
We’re still a full block away, and Bijou stops in her tracks and squints up the street. Then she drops my hand like it’s on fire and puts her arm in front of me, blocking me from taking another step.
“What is it?” Mary Agnes whispers. It’s obvious Bijou sees something, someone up ahead—not her uncle, I hope!
“Alex, Nomura, turn around and walk away,” Bijou says. “Mary Agnes, walk with me.” We’re a little slow on the uptake, standing here staring at her. “Please, let’s go!”
“Bye,” I say, unable to come up with a wittier one-syllable final word of my second date with Bijou Doucet. And unable, somehow, to complete the single, simple task she’s set out for me: to get my butt in gear and move.
Taking a quick look behind her, Bijou approaches me, stands on her tiptoes, and whispers in my ear. “I was hoping I could give you a good-bye kiss today, but you see, it’s impossible.” And just like that, she and Mary Agnes are off, half jogging down the street toward the Bradys’ house.
Nomura and I hightail it in the other direction like smalltime thieves. Before we’ve gone a half block, a car door slams behind us. “Bijou Doucet, get over here, right now!” a voice that could belong only to Uncle Pierre calls out.
I duck behind a tree and look up the street, Nomura kneeling behind me with a freaked look on his face like he’s ducking stray bullets from a drive-by. A pretty sweet seventies Crown Victoria is double-parked right in front of Mary Agnes’s house. Must be Pierre’s, and it’s not a bad ride. He’s a short guy, but trim and very neatly dressed, with a snazzy knit cap sitting on his balding head. This is a guy who spends a lot of time and attention on his car and his clothes. And he also seems to have a habit, at least when his niece is involved, of showing up to appointments forty minutes early.
It’s lucky Bijou had such good eyes, because there’s no way the old man could have seen Nomura and me. Is there? It’s impossible to tell by looking at him; all I can tell by Pierre’s body language is that he’s giving her one heck of a hard time. Boy, he sure is gesticulating like a wildman.
Yikes, now Mary Agnes’s mom is walking up the street, too, fresh from her spa appointment, and she looks a little mad herself. Whether at Mary Agnes or Pierre, it’s hard to tell. Bijou’s standing there, looking at her feet, but Pierre and Mrs. Brady really seem to be getting into it. Does she have her hands on her hips? Uh-oh. I know moms, and hands on hips can never mean anything good.
Bijou looks miserable, like she already knows that whatever grief she’s getting now, it’s going to be ten times worse at home. And all because of this group date. She’s paying a heavy price for spending a couple of hours with her friends, for catching a lame horror flick at the Pavilion. Will she look back on today and think it was worth it?
It was definitely worth it for me. This has to go down as the best day in my short life. After all, it’s the day that Bijou Doucet told me she wanted, actually desired, hoped, wished (Bijou’s wish is my command) to kiss me on purpose. Not to say hello or good-bye. Not to be polite. But because she wanted to.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes!
I’m so sorry about the way things ended today. This is not how I wanted to say good-bye to you. (I think I told you that already. Ha ha.)
I am writing to you in my room, where my aunt and uncle think that I am working on my social studies homework. I think it is safe, though. Tonton Pierre, he does not read English so well, and Marie Claire does not at all.
We have just finished dinner, and can you think of the one thing we spoke about the entire meal? Yes, that’s right, the “sin” I committed by leaving Mary Agnes’s house for a few minutes (that is the phrase we used) on a sunny spring afternoon. Pierre says that I broke a promise to him by going outside, and that a promise is “a sacred thing” (I’m translating from the Kreyol). So, a sin it is. (Don’t worry, he calls many things a sin. Even playing cards, which he does at least once a week, so it’s not as serious as it sounds!)
The thing so strange is that after nearly an hour of being lectured to by this man who wants to keep me inside all day like a prisoner, I began almost to feel bad for him. Can you imagine this?
But really, I do believe Tonton Pierre felt more bad than I did. He was angry at first, but very quickly, he became almost sad. He says he misses my mother, that he made a promise (this is his favorite word) to “his only sister” that he would protect me “as if you were my own.” I tell you, Alex, he looked as if he was about to cry, even after I apologized a hundred times and told him I will never do it again.
Oh, also: Pierre swears to me that he was not trying to catch me in a lie. After dropping me off at Mary Agnes’s, he had an appointment with his accountant, who has an office in Park Slope, not far away from the Bradys’. The meeting went longer than he thought it would, and he thought it would be silly for him to return to Flatbush, only to turn around a few minutes later to pick me up. So, starting at 4:45 (only five minutes before we returned!), he begin to wait outside Mary Agnes’s house. He did not knock on the door, because he said he did not want to disturb my time with my girlfriends. His plan was to read his newspaper and wait until 5:30, knocking on the door only at the time we had agreed to. But when he see me with Mary Agnes (thank God he did not see you and Nomura. Can you imagine how much worse this would be?), he got out of the car and started to go crazy.
Mary Agnes’s maman came home a moment later, and he go a bit crazy with her also. He said she should have known where Mary Agnes and her friends were at all times, that it is her responsibility to “protect my niece” as well as her own daughter. The woman was shocked. Speechless. Looked at my uncle like he was a lunatic. She apologized over and over, and finally, we left. I am so embarrassed, Alex.
Anyway, Marie Claire, my aunt, saved me as she does so often. She calmed my uncle down, let him see that this was not the end of the world. “Girls need their friends,” she said. (Of course, she has no idea that not all of my friends are girls!) After much talk, she convinced him not to punish me. For now.
But I’m afraid that seeing each other will only become more difficult. I really like you, Alex. I want to see more of you. But we are going to have to be even more careful. I don’t want to get into trouble. And I don’t want to hurt Tonton Pierre, either. He is only doing what he considers his duty. I don’t want to keep lying to him. It feels wrong, and bad. Even mean.
I will continue to write you, though, stopping by our Gran Bwa on my way home from school each day. And if any creative ideas come from your brilliant mind, please know that I am ready to hear them. I would like to see you again.
Soon.
Bisous (this mean “kisses” en français, but you must know this already?),
Bijou