THE WEDDING WAS IN AN HOUR AND ANDREA WAS STILL SITTING in her kitchen in an old black hoodie and battered jeans, empty glass in hand. She eyed the bottle of vodka on the counter—oh, for just one more Moscow mule—but she’d already had two, and Lucia had just appeared in the kitchen doorway. Instead, she climbed up on the counter and shoved the vodka, a precious leftover from her thirty-fifth-birthday dinner, back into its high cupboard. On her way back down, one knee of her jeans tore open.
“Mom,” Lucia said, “you need to put on your dress.” Lucia had been wearing her flower-girl dress since breakfast: a thrifted white frock her aunt Robin had altered to fit and modernized with vintage ribbons and jewelry and a raw scissored hem. In the reinvented dress, Lucia looked like a smaller, lighter replica of Andrea as a kid—full cheeks, paler skin, hazel eyes, light brown bob. Reclaimed. But strangely cute and girly. Normally Lucia preferred T-shirts and jeans and mismatched brightly colored Converse sneakers.
“Hello, fashion police,” Andrea said. “I had to unload and set up like a hundred chairs at Topher’s earlier and I haven’t even had a chance to walk Bullet. Poor girl.” A warm breeze came in through the open window, and Andrea inhaled deeply. “I hate weddings.”
“Why? I think they’re fun,” said Sydney, Lucia’s friend and bandmate. Her wire-rimmed glasses and little overbite made her look so serious.
“You would, Syd.” Andrea gave Sydney’s lapels a gentle tug. Syd was all lit up because she got to wear a suit for the occasion. Her pants were slightly too short for her skinny foal legs and her blue-and-yellow-striped socks flashed with every step. At ten, Sydney was still a string bean and fit perfectly in boys’ clothes; Andrea dreaded, on Sydney’s baby-andro behalf, the day when her straight body would begin to curve. Lucia turned ten in a month and was already four and a half feet tall. They had no idea how swiftly they grew. To them, it had taken forever to get to ten. They were already nostalgic for eight and nine, epic years. Five was archaeological. But hadn’t that been just months ago? Andrea was still wearing underwear she’d bought then.
“But you still want to do this, right?” Lucia said.
Andrea wrapped an arm around her daughter and rested her chin atop her head. “Of course I do, baby.”
Lucia leaned back from her embrace. “Where’s Beatriz?”
“She’s already over at Topher’s.”
Sydney pouted. “I wanted her to fix my tie.”
“I can fix your tie,” Andrea said. Syd glumly submitted to Andrea’s deft but clearly less exciting retying. When Beatriz fixed your tie, it made you cooler, like a secret agent on her squad; when Andrea did it, she was just a mom straightening you up. Andrea had accepted this. “There you go. You look sharp, kid.”
“Mom, Syd says we need something old, something new—” Lucia looked to Sydney, who finished out the phrase: “Something borrowed, something blue. Do you have anything?”
“Really, Syd?”
“Uh, yeah,” Sydney said.
“Where do you pick up these things?” Andrea marveled. Sydney’s parents were straight yet happily unmarried, with a faint but detectable whiff of polyamory. When they had their first kid, they changed all their last names to Juniper. They lived in a big royal-blue house two blocks off Alberta and grew all their own vegetables and volunteered at the rock camp.
“Everyone knows that one, Andrea,” Sydney said.
“Of course,” she muttered. The culture was waterlogged with this stuff. Anything having to do with marriage, babies, gender, it was like weather. You could board up the windows and bar the door for only so long—eventually you had to go out in it. And no matter how you tried to shield your kid, it seeped through every seam and shingle. “Don’t you guys want to run through your song a couple more times before the ceremony?”
Lucia and Sydney were in a band called the Tiny Spiny Hedgehogs, on guitar and keyboards (which also supplied the beats), respectively. Originally they had been called the Now, until Syd discovered it was un-Googleable. They had formed at the girls’ rock camp last June; their drummer dropped out on day three and Sydney and Lucia rolled with it as a two-piece. Sydney had recently decided she wanted to be a rapper, and they were struggling to integrate this into Lucia’s earnest guitar songs. But they’d managed to write one for the wedding. Andrea hadn’t heard it yet—they usually practiced at the Girls Rock Institute after-school program or at the Junipers’ house, thank god for the Junipers, while she finished up her teaching day.
“We practiced all week,” Sydney complained.
“We’ll sing through it while we look,” Lucia pleaded.
“Fine, go plunder the basement. I’ll get dressed.”
They begged to go search the attic instead, and Andrea gave in and dropped the trapdoor stairs for them. Up they scurried. “Don’t get too dusty,” she called after them.
“We won’t,” they said, scrambling into the pleasant gloom.
The attic was Lucia and Sydney’s favorite place to go, when they could, and now, on a warm afternoon in September, the air up there was temperate, even cozy. Lucia’s two-bedroom house was tiny, but the attic crowned its entirety, a vast low realm. It smelled like a habitat, or another dimension of time, a place where mysterious things could materialize. Sunlight filtered in from a small square window at each end, and a single overhead bulb in the middle lit up the wooden floorboards and the brown paper backing of the pink insulation stapled to the sloping ceiling. Here they had survived long seasons as orphans on dry pretzels and orange juice, had determined the fates of kingdoms with epic games of gin rummy, had plotted the first world tour of the Tiny Spiny Hedgehogs with an atlas and a red notebook, and had attempted to summon the new ghost of Michael Jackson with a Magic 8 Ball and a flashlight until they frightened themselves so badly they scrambled down the drop-stairs screaming in gleeful terror, causing Lucia’s mother to leap up from the table and send school papers scattering across the floor.
These days, at ages ten and almost-ten, Sydney had to duck and Lucia could just barely stand up straight without grazing her head. They fell to their knees and headed into the shadow city of boxes and bins jammed into the depths. They opened a plastic bin full of baby clothes and blankets, three cartons of photo albums and boxes of negatives (“Your mom looked like a boy,” Sydney said with admiration, holding up a snapshot of Andrea with short hair and horn-rimmed glasses), a box of college papers and folders, and a bin full of shoe boxes containing laminated expired bus passes, tiny gumball-machine plastic figurines, broken necklaces, scraps of paper with a sentence or phone number jotted on them, lanyards from long-ago music festivals.
Sydney said, suspiciously casual, “I think we should get a drummer.”
“I like the beats you make on your keyboard. You’re better than a drummer.” After Lucia’s first summer at rock camp—where she ended up in a five-member band that had meltdowns every afternoon, and whose deeply angry eight-year-old singer had hit one of the bassists in the face with a microphone for trying to sing backing vocals—she loved playing in a band of just two. Sydney had more than enough opinions for them to deal with. Then again, maybe if they got a drummer, Lucia could gang up with her to outvote some of Sydney’s more dubious ideas.
“Yeah, but I want to free up my hands so I can move around the stage,” Sydney said. “I’ve been watching YouTube to get new moves.” She swung her hands in front of her chest in an aspirational hip-hop gesture.
“So you’d be like the lead singer then?”
“No, only on the songs where I rap. And you could do the backing vocals.”
“I don’t want to be a backup singer,” Lucia said. She and Sydney always traded off verses, and shouted or sang choruses in unison or harmony. Why would they change what worked so well? “Anyway, who would we get to drum for us? Or”—her stomach turned, she blinked hard—“do you already have someone in mind?” For example, a new best friend. The thought was devastating, to be demoted to Sydney’s second best while Sydney would always be her first best. Lucia had plenty of acquaintances but she preferred one true and total friend.
“We could ask Nsayi,” Syd said.
Lucia exhaled in relief. “Nsayi is, like, seventeen, Syd.”
“But we’re so awesome. She would love it.”
“Plus she plays guitar.”
“I bet she could play anything.”
“Good luck with that,” Lucia said. To Sydney, no idea was too improbable. It was both her best and her most exasperating feature. “What do we still need for today?”
“There’s a bunch of old stuff over here, but we need something blue.”
Lucia pushed herself up off her knees. “I’ll look down here.” She hunch-crept down to the far corner and pulled out an opaque gray bin. As she knelt to pry it open, she noticed a pristine brown cardboard box hiding behind it, square and squat, and taped shut.
Lucia reached over to pick up this box, but it was unexpectedly heavy, as if it contained a block of stone. Instead she had to drag it into the light, leaving a sled trail across the dusty floor. She carefully peeled back the tape. It was dry and stiff—the box had never been opened.
Under the flaps lay a blank square of brown cardboard. Lucia lifted it away to reveal a stack of ten-inch records, shrink-wrapped and glossy, all identical. The cover read THE COLD SHOULDER along the top and LOST EP at the bottom. In the center was a Polaroid photo of a wrecked blue guitar—a little blurry, the colors saturated. The guitar leaned against a black wall, broken-necked, splintered, strings limp. It was a blue Telecaster, like hers.
Lucia removed the top record and peeled away the glinting shrink wrap for a closer look. How could it be? There was a thumbprint-sized dent at the bottom curve of the guitar’s body, rimmed by a crescent of bare wood. That was the dent she idly ran her fingers over while she was trying to think of lyrics or just spacing out. She knew it as intimately as the crosshatched skateboarding scar on her knee and the cowlick she twirled while she read.
“That’s my guitar,” she said.
“What?” said Sydney. “I think I found something blue. This ring. Or this could be the old thing. Or both! Come over here.”
“Just a second,” Lucia said. The frets looked different. But along with the dent, she could clearly identify the one long and two short scratches on the cream-colored pick guard—scratches she knew well. Even though her guitar was now downstairs in her bedroom, safe and intact, the image of it lying there with its neck broken unnerved her. Who would have mauled it so brutally? And when?
She flipped over the record. On the back was a photo of an empty practice room, and six song titles alongside grainy photo-booth head shots of three men. One had black hair and heavy lashes and scruff on his jaw. One had shiny hair falling in his eyes and a dimple in his cheek, a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a T-shirt, and was looking up and to the right. The third was pale-haired and -eyebrowed, gazing straight into the camera with an insincere scowl. THE COLD SHOULDER IS WAS: MATEO GOLD / BASS, RYAN COATES / DRUMS, JESSE STRATTON / GUITAR. The small print at the bottom said © 1999 Broken Zipper Music.
“Two blue things,” Sydney announced loudly. “What’s down there?”
“Nothing we can use.” Lucia slid the record back inside the box. Why was her guitar on the cover? And what was her mom doing with a whole box of these records, unopened, in the attic? Hidden in the attic? All their other records were shelved in the living room in a case that stood taller than them both. The mystery was enticing, and yet that broken guitar—
Sydney started to sing in as low and booming a voice as she could muster: “Girl, you’re not a snail / Girl, you’re not a tor-toise / Doesn’t take an hour / To walk across an at-tic—”
“I’m coming, I’m coming!”
“Hey, don’t you think that could be our next song?” Sydney said, and began beatboxing.
In the bedroom below, Andrea stripped off her clothes and pulled out the dress she’d allowed herself to buy new, although deeply on sale, from a shop on Mississippi Avenue. She couldn’t really afford to shop retail—thrift stores, clothing swaps with friends, and hand-me-downs had kept her and Lucia clothed for years—but last month she’d impulsively walked into this precious gentrifying boutique, flipped through the end-of-summer sale rack with a mix of scorn and longing, and landed on this dress that—oh shit—draped beautifully on her body and felt unbearably smooth against her skin. For the wedding, she justified. There would only be one.
The dress still smelled new, freshly manufactured and faintly sweet. It smelled like middle class. Like the clothes she used to receive for Christmas, and the clothes her parents would likely send to Lucia next month for her birthday—the grandparents her kid saw once a year, from whose weekend-long visits Andrea needed a month to recover, and whom she had very deliberately not informed about today’s ceremony. The stakes were too high.
Footsteps thumped overhead as Andrea pulled on the dress. Lucia was exuberantly wound up about today, and for the child’s sake, at least, she had to cut the wedding Grinch act. Why wouldn’t the kids think it was fun? Lucia had seen weddings only in movies and on television. To them, this was a performance and a party. They weren’t hung up on the history of heterosexual privilege, and by the time they were old enough to want it, gay marriage might even be legal here, all the panic bans of the aughts just a freaky historical phenomenon like Prohibition or McCarthyism.
So today, Beatriz, the love of Andrea’s life, a citizen of Brazil whose student visa would soon expire, would marry their friend Topher.
The ceremony would be held in Topher’s backyard two blocks away, where Beatriz’s mail had been directed for the past five months. The staging had been elaborate and meticulous; Andrea had even borrowed her old post at the letterpress studio for a Sunday to produce a batch of convincingly twee invitations, mailed out with floral stamps. It was a citizenship marriage, a charade for immigration’s sake, and the vows meant Beatriz could stay here. But still, the whole thing had gotten under Andrea’s skin. She and Beatriz didn’t even want to get married. They wanted to change the whole system. Why should citizenship depend on one exclusive form of a relationship? What about love between friends, community, love of work? Knowing Beatriz would be legally hitched to Topher, not her, and that they had to perform this relationship for the nation for the foreseeable months, maybe even years, with a closetful of Beatriz’s clothes installed in Topher’s bedroom, tampons stashed in his big gay bathroom, a joint checking account and tax returns, and a walk to collect her mail every few days—it rankled. For all her queer theory antinormativity, Andrea had come to understand that she was debilitatingly, uncoolly monogamous. When she wanted, she wanted fiercely and solely. When Beatriz had first moved in a year ago, each letter and bill that arrived for her had felt like a small victory, another claim staked. Once they diverted the evidence down the street, Andrea couldn’t help but imagine what it would feel like if Beatriz—god help them—actually left.
“Luz! Syd!” she called up into the attic. “We’ve got to get over there.”
She texted Beatriz. How’s the bride?
Beatriz texted back, Full drag. U will either die laughing or crying.
Beatriz was being an enormously good sport about this. She’d thrown herself into it as if it were community theater. Topher too had been a good player—he had a faggy crush anyway on Beatriz, who looked like a beautiful twink with her art mullet and muscle tees.
And here was Andrea, in a dress, preparing to sit in the audience and take photos she’d have to upload to Flickr, setting: Public.
Andrea replied: Can’t wait to get you out of that dress.
Beatriz: Not so fast—u might like being fucked by a girl.
The backyard of Topher’s tidy little gray ranch house was properly bedecked: a rented white tent over the food, grills lined up alongside it; a vintage bamboo bar covered in bottles; tiki torches everywhere, ready for dusk; a few dozen mismatched borrowed kitchen chairs on the lawn, split by an aisle of grass. Robin had hung sprays of wildflowers along the wooden fence. Sydney and Lucia broke into awed smiles. “Dust off your knees now, before people start taking pictures,” Andrea told them.
All of it was for the photographs: authenticating detail. The beribboned gift boxes were in fact packed with household goods Andrea and Beatriz and Topher had harvested from their own homes. Just that morning, Andrea had looked high and low for the blender before remembering that she’d already wrapped it up.
Miracle of miracles, a clear sky on a mid-September Saturday afternoon. Their friends were already filling the yard. Andrea unclipped the leash and Bullet, now white muzzled and stiff in the hips, wandered about amiably sniffing people’s hands before she sprawled under the cheese table and waited for luck to fall to the grass.
Flynn was walking around taking photographs with a camera lens the size of a dachshund. “Andy, kids, smile,” he called out, and they posed obediently. Sydney turned out her foot like a red-carpet pro. “You guys look sharp,” he said to Lucia and Sydney, and then to Andy, “Honey, it’s a wedding, not a funeral.”
“The bachelorette party took a toll,” Andrea said. “Bow ties are a thing now?”
“They are.” Flynn gave her a hug. “Don’t worry, this will be over quick—and then we get to keep Beatriz.”
When Lucia was born and Andrea’s entire concept of love was abruptly and totally rewired, she had realized, with a nearly electric jolt, what a poor love match she and Flynn had actually been; what she’d pined for all that time was her idealized fantasy of the relationship. And when Lucia arrived, Flynn showed up. Flynn brought Andrea food and supplies and cleaned her house when she came home from Lucia’s birth; for an entire academic quarter, Flynn and Flynn’s girlfriend came and watched the baby on Wednesday evenings while Andrea attended night class to finish her BA. In 2005, when Flynn returned from top surgery in San Francisco, Andrea joined the rotation of friends who helped him drain the bags of blood and fluid, swapped out hot packs and cold packs as needed, cleaned house, brought him DVDs and sudoku puzzles. And as Flynn healed, he settled into his skin in a new way; he went from restless and perpetually uncertain to a person quick to joke, with a deep laugh and a new, sturdy broadness to not just his body but his presence.
“Thank you, buddy,” Andrea said. “I’m really grateful you’re in charge of the evidence. Seriously.”
“Wouldn’t miss it. It’s the event of the season.”
“Have you seen her yet?”
“The blushing bride?” Andrea hit his arm. “No,” he said, “but I think you’re not supposed to.”
“I’m not the one who’s marrying her,” Andrea said.
“Oh yeah.” Flynn nodded toward the house. “Living room sofa, last I saw.”
Sydney perked up. “We have something to give her.” She started toward the house.
“Ah-ah.” Andrea caught her arm and gently tugged her back. “I’ll deliver it. You guys go ask Lawrence to help you set up the sound system.” She gave the kids a little push toward Lawrence, over by the punch bowl with her doppel-banger girlfriend Carson, who looked like a younger, long-haired version of Lawrence. Within a month of dating they had adopted each other’s speech mannerisms and merged their collections of band T-shirts. They didn’t live together yet but there was already talk of a kitten.
Inside Topher’s house, the kitchen was jammed with people. Summer was swiftly beheading pink and orange begonias and arranging the blooms around the base of the cake. No Beatriz in the kitchen. No Beatriz in the living room. Down the hall, Andrea knocked and pushed open each door, until behind the last one: Beatriz, in a simple long white dress hitched above her knees, sprawled on her back on the bed, eating cheese puffs from a bag. In her black hair, sleeked back femme-ily, was an actual gardenia. Between her spread knees, a glimpse of her tighty-whities.
“Oh my god,” Andrea said. “There you are. In a dress.”
“Babe! I know, I haven’t worn one since, like, confirmation.” Beatriz propped herself up on her elbows. Her low voice had a sweet graininess and an emphatic way with consonants. “I was hoping you’d come find me. I left my phone somewhere out there and Topher won’t let me out to find it.”
She reached for Andrea, and Andrea hopped up onto the bed and straddled her waist. “I’m disturbed by how well this fits you,” she said, tracing Beatriz’s bared collarbone, which was still tanned from a summer spent in tank tops. “Are you not wearing a bra?”
Beatriz popped a cheese puff into Andrea’s mouth. “Just two Band-Aids over my nipples.” She slid a hand under Andrea’s dress and then the bedroom door opened.
“Scandal!” Topher cried.
“I know, she’s going to get orange powder all over her dress,” Andrea said.
“Or your underwear,” Beatriz said, wiping her thumbs on the waistband of Andrea’s panties.
“My treacherous bride,” Topher said. “It’s enough to drive me into the arms of another man.”
A knock at the door frame: Robin, hair piled into a minor beehive, smoky eyed and regal. Tattoos ran up her plump arms, ducked under her dress straps, and tunneled into her cleavage. “Well, hello,” she said.
“You never saw this,” Topher said.
“Don’t tell immigration,” Beatriz joked.
“What, femme-on-femme action, with a man watching? This is the straightest thing I’ve seen all day.”
Topher brightened. “Oh! Someone text Flynn and get him back here with the camera.”
“Actually, I came back to round you guys up. I think it’s time to get moving.”
“Hang on.” Andrea dismounted Beatriz and the bed, dug into her bag, and pulled out a costume ring encrusted with fake diamonds encircling a blue stone. “Lucia and Sydney wanted me to make sure you got this. They found it in the attic. Old, borrowed, and blue. Three down.”
Beatriz sat up and slipped it on her long, banged-up pointer finger. She’d been doing carpentry and house renovation for work and even a prenuptial manicure couldn’t hide the damage. She laughed her throaty laugh. “You used to wear this?”
“I went through a vintage femme phase early in college.”
“And you still have it! Such a hoarder.”
“Oh lord, you should have been here when we helped her move into that house,” Topher said.
Andrea cringed. “I’m sorry. I know. I keep everything.”
“Even me,” Beatriz said.
“Oh my god, especially you.”
“Let’s go make it official then,” Topher said. “Time to get hitched.”
“One more cheese puff before I go?” Andrea asked.
Beatriz gave her two at once. “Te amo.”
“You really do. I love you too,” Andrea said through the crumbs. “Wait, you need some lipstick.”
Applying lipstick to a butch was like collaring a deer: unnatural, hopefully temporary, trust required. Andrea traced Beatriz’s mouth with her own red lipstick. B’s face was expectant, still, vulnerable. “There.”
Beatriz carefully closed her lips, rubbed them together. “Good?”
“Perfect.” Now the person marrying Topher no longer seemed like Beatriz, but a character Beatriz was playing: a dark-haired woman in a white dress and red lipstick.
Beatriz took Andrea’s cheeks in her hands and kissed her carefully but firmly on the mouth. “Some for you too.”
At the kitchen door, Beatriz stayed behind as Topher walked ahead to where the wedding party was assembled, and Andrea took her seat in the front row beside Sydney.
For veracity, they followed all the conventions. Flynn turned on a video camera. A cello started up with “Canon in D” (“we need to be as typical as possible”). Lucia came first, strewing flower petals; Robin had tucked some flowers behind her ears and the kid looked beautiful, her hazel eyes bright, a shy smile on her face. Then came three bridesmaids in their own blue dresses (Beatriz’s friend Ana, Robin, and Topher’s sister), and groomspeople dressed in black (Lawrence, Topher’s boyfriend Mike, and his favorite ex, also named Mike). Then Topher took his place at the front with Meena, who was Internet-ordained by the Universal Life Church and had flown up from L.A. to officiate in a white suit. The cello switched to the Lohengrin wedding march and here came Beatriz, unescorted, walking herself down the aisle.
Despite herself, Andrea’s eyes welled up at the sight of her beloved. Part of the reason she hated weddings so much was that despite her opposition to what they stood for—state sanction and control of personal relationships, property consolidation and transfer, etc.—they always stirred her to tears. The surreal indignity of her perfect, androgynous Beatriz in a dress, and yet this hopeless sentimentality. Beatriz, in marrying Topher, was binding herself to them all.
Lucia slipped into the seat beside her and took her hand. “Are you okay, Mom?” she whispered.
“Yes, baby,” Andrea said, wiping her eyes.
“Sad cry or happy cry?”
“Happy,” she said. Andrea slung her arm around her kid. If Lucia was anything like she had been, it might not be long, only a couple more years, before she pulled away from her mother’s hugs instead of nestling into them. But now, Lucia leaned in, and her soft hair rested against Andrea’s arm.
After the vows—brief and declarative—Sydney and Lucia went to their instruments.
Sydney turned on her keyboard, slipped on headphones, and pushed a few buttons importantly. Lucia tucked her hair behind her ears and slipped the Telecaster strap over her shoulder. She handled the guitar with extra care today—she pressed her thumb gently against the ding on its lower edge, inspected the neck. She ran her pick over each string to check the tuning. She tested the amp, adjusted a knob. She turned to the microphone and said, “Check, check.” She and Sydney looked at each other, and Lucia nodded one, two, three, four.
Lucia could play. She was one of those people who picked up a guitar and just could, the way Andrea had always been able to draw whatever people set in front of her—it might take a couple run-throughs to nail it, but it was never a problem. Even on her full-sized guitar, Lucia’s fingers stretched easily to form the barre chords, and she could sing in her clear, simple voice a tune that went one way while she plucked out a counterpoint on the strings. This musical ease, like the dimple in her cheek, must have been a gift from Ryan, not that Andrea wanted to point that out to Luz. Biology already took more credit than it was due. For ten years, she’d fielded people’s questions and assumptions about Lucia’s father or, at worst, “your husband.” Mrs. Morales. Even during her brief desperate attempt to look as butch as possible—it was pointless, she let her hair grow back. Parenting immediately ungayed you in a stranger’s eyes. But if there was any trace of Ryan in Lucia, Andrea was grateful that it was this. Lucia had an art, a lifeline she would always carry inside her. Thank you, Ryan.
Sydney kicked in with a sparse beat and a minimal yet stirring bass line on the keyboard. Two verses and two choruses about a fox and a squirrel sharing a den for the winter, a mutual survival plan that turns to love, and they ended the song on a bridge—an unexpectedly pleasing move—that Lucia sang in Portuguese. When they finished, the crowd burst into applause, and Beatriz ditched Topher to hug them both. She wrapped her arms extra tight around Lucia and whispered something in her ear that made her grin and nod. Beatriz kissed the top of her head. There, to Andrea, was the wedding’s real kiss.
Back at Topher’s side, Beatriz raised a sly eyebrow when Meena said, “Beatriz Ferreira and Topher Holt, I now declare you legally wed,” and she and Topher pressed their lips together with laugh-suppressing smiles that a third-party watcher of the video footage could reasonably interpret as irrepressible joy.
They both wiped Beatriz’s red lipstick off their mouths with the backs of their hands, and then thrust their fists into the air so the crowd could clap and cheer for the cameras.
All the living room furniture was pushed against the peacock-blue walls to clear a modest dance floor. Towering speakers brought over from the rock camp filled one end of the tiny dining room. Vintage lamps lit the corners, and a tangle of Christmas lights tucked in the fireplace sent a warm glow from behind the low orange couch that now barricaded it. Lucia stashed her heel-gnawing girly shoes under the coffee table and pulled on her turquoise Chuck Taylors. Sydney shed her suit jacket and loosened her tie. They were ready to hit the scuffed oak dance floor.
But no, Lucia’s mom stepped up and held them back: the first dance was for Beatriz and Topher. “Tradition,” she said. “Sorry.” And Lawrence played a very boring slow song about wise men and fools.
Uncle Flynn knelt between them. “Want to hold the video camera while I take stills?” he asked. “Just keep it aimed mostly on B and Topher.” Lucia took the camera and held it as steady as she could while Beatriz and Topher looped arms around each other’s waist and neck and swayed dramatically. On the tiny screen, they looked like TV. That person in the long white dress wasn’t really Beatriz. Lucia looked up from the screen as the dance orbited Beatriz into her sightline. Beatriz gave her a wink and held up the hand with the vintage blue ring on it. There she was for real.
Lucia was the one who had found Beatriz. It was summer of 2008, the first time at rock camp for both of them. Beatriz arrived as the guitarist in an all-female five-piece punk band who had traveled from Brazil to volunteer and hang out in Portland for a month. Luz landed in her guitar class: three eight-year-old girls and this person with kind eyes and a ready laugh and infinite patience, who spent half her time on her knees or in a squat in order to meet them at their level. And she pronounced Lucia’s name Lu-see-a. “You said it right,” Lucia said when Beatriz first read it from her lanyard.
“Of course,” Beatriz said. “How else would you say it?”
“Sometimes people say Lucheea. Or Loocha.”
“That’s not you,” Beatriz said somberly.
“It certainly is not,” Lucia said. Here was someone who understood her.
When her mother came to pick her up at the end of the first day, Lucia clutched Beatriz’s hand and said, “Mom, this is my teacher.”
“Lucky you,” her mother said, and then blushed and focused on tightening the strap on Lucia’s backpack.
“Lucky me,” Beatriz had said. She added that Lucia was good at guitar. “She picks everything up like that.” She snapped her fingers, and now it was Lucia whose face warmed with pleasure.
The way Lucia saw it, she’d brought Beatriz into their life, and then Beatriz and her mother fell in love. Which was weird at first, but it meant Beatriz wanted to stay. Life with Beatriz in it meant Lucia had another party to appeal to in family decisions (pro), but when the decision was unfavorable, this party stuck to her guns far harder than her mother (con). It meant she could spend more time unscrutinized, undetected, because she was no longer the only other person in the house (pro). It meant that Lucia now had an actual bedtime (con), and that her mom could usually sleep through the night (pro). Andrea almost never reached that point anymore where her voice grew tight and she’d say, Lucia, if you keep stretching my patience I am going to break; Lucia would ask, How many pieces? and her mom would say, Seven, or One hundred, or if it was a really hard day, a number like Six hundred thousand and fifty-two. Her mother almost never broke now, or if she did it was only into two or three pieces, easy for Lucia to mime picking up and patching back together to earn a smile. Now, when her mom stressed, Beatriz would cup the nape of her neck and her mom would lean into the hand and close her eyes and breathe. If that wasn’t enough, Beatriz would say, “Okay, Luz, let’s go on a mission,” and they would head out for a grocery run or drive to the nickel arcade or take Bullet to the river. Beatriz said any errand could be fun if you had a buddy with you. “Want to go to Lowe’s?” she’d say, and going to Lowe’s suddenly sounded as good as Disneyland. They would walk down the lumber aisles inhaling the smell of fresh-cut pine boards and speculating about the tiny house on wheels Beatriz wanted to build in the backyard. “On wheels?” Lucia asked. “Does that mean you’re going to leave in it?” Beatriz said hell no, it meant the three of them would have a house they could live in anywhere. Or a really luxurious chicken coop.
“Can I hold the camera?” Sydney asked.
Lucia clutched it tighter. “Not yet.” She panned the crowd, taking in her mom and all their friends, her bonus aunts and uncles, leaning against the walls and perched on furniture, talking and pouring drinks; if they saw the camera moving over them, some made funny faces or flashed peace signs. The boring song came to an end and everyone applauded and Lucia shifted the camera back to the bride and groom as Beatriz gallantly dropped Topher into a deep theatrical dip. They stood and shook it off as Flynn reached over and turned off the camera. “Show’s over,” he said. “Let’s party.”
Meena and Lawrence were in the corner DJing with records and a laptop. Meena started with “Single Ladies”—Sydney knew the whole dance by heart and Lucia could follow along for most of it—and everyone put a ring on it. Then Lawrence took over and played the Delta 5, the B-52s, Gang of Four, jerky shouty bands Lucia’s mother thought were essential and that Lucia liked because she’d grown up with them, but that Sydney could not abide. “Come on, Luz. This party needs help.”
The two wove through the dancers to the DJ table.
“Can we play a couple songs?” Sydney asked. Meena said, “Well . . .” and Lucia broke out her most anime-eyed smile: “Please?”
Lawrence relented.
Sydney plugged her iPod into the system and Lucia took the microphone triumphantly. “Ladies and gentlemen, are you ready to dance?”
The crowd clapped and whooped obligingly. With a flourish, Sydney pressed Play.
Staccato synths faded in, smeared with a telltale swoop of canned strings. Everyone on the dance floor paused a moment, ears cocked. Then eyes narrowed; groans went up. “Not this song!” someone said. “Please, god, no,” someone else said.
“Please, goddess, yes!” Sydney thrust her fist in the air. Lucia leaned into the mic and said, “Let’s do it,” and then the Auto-Tuned warble of Will.i.am shouldered in and sentenced everyone to “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas.
Meena covered her face with her hands, laughing, and Lawrence moaned, “You guys, this is the worst,” but Carson ran up and grabbed her hands and pulled her onto the floor. Lucia just rolled her eyes and she and Sydney high-fived. Lucia’s mom and her friends had strong opinions about what songs were good and what songs were the worst, and as far as Lucia could tell it had nothing to do with the actual awesomeness of the song. The adults ardently praised songs that sounded crabbed and itchy, songs that were fuzzy and gnarled and droopy, songs that sounded like people shouting over garbage trucks crashing. But to Lucia and Sydney, if a song tasted like candy and made your body act of its own accord—foot tapping, fist pumping, a little extra swagger in your step—and it made the moment feel bigger, like a movie, like you were living now and now was huge and shimmering, it was the best kind of song. No matter what anyone else said.
And look: everyone was on the dance floor now, everyone was shouting whoo-hooo, everyone had goofy grins on their faces, they had all given themselves up to the silly greatness of a gigantic pop song that had played nonstop that whole summer—a song so vapid and so overplayed that by the end of the year, it might never be played again, and if it was, it would forever be cemented to this particular summer, a song that could invoke an involuntary twinge of nostalgia mere months after it fell from the charts. But now, the song was still number one. The moment dilated. Beatriz was married to them, and tonight was going to be a good night.
Lucia and Syd plunged into the crowd and flung themselves into the beat, and a circle opened up. Sydney moonwalked right into it and did the worm and cheers rose around them. Lucia’s mother and Beatriz appeared at the edge of the circle, clapping and whooping, and when they saw Lucia they danced their way across the circle to reach her and Sydney. Beatriz looked more herself again, face washed clean and hair shaken down, handsome even in the incongruous white dress. Andrea’s cheeks were flushed, her mascara smudged, and her eyes were so bright Lucia wondered if there were tears in them, though her smile was radiant.
“Show us your moves,” Beatriz said. “We need some new ones.”
Lucia grabbed her hand and said, “Just follow us.” And they did.