Hank had to practice. He did not have practice, but he had to.
He planned to drive straight to Moreno Park after school. Seven minutes before his classmates burst from their cages, Hank got his head start. It came at the cost of another bathroom pass, but who cared? Hank was having a decidedly shitty day. Basketball was the one thing that could salvage it.
By the mirror above a graffitied bathroom sink, Hank splashed water over his face and tried on his smile.
What the hell? Had it looked this crooked all day? Man.
He readjusted his face and stepped into the hallway with three minutes to spare. Probably he’d get in trouble for skipping, but this was only for today. Hank just had to find his bearings, just had to make some baskets and practice smiling more and by Wednesday he’d be an all-star student like he used to be, just wait—
Hank almost ran over Carmella again, carless though he was. She stood between the restrooms, using a single finger to scroll through her phone.
A stranger might have thought her presence had nothing to do with Hank. Carmella looked as if she’d just chosen to drift there, in that regal way of hers. That same regality made necks crick in the turning as she passed, made people deliver anything she asked for directly into her manicured hands.
“Hey, Carmella.”
Unrelenting eyes scored him from head to toe.
Once, Hank had tried complimenting Carmella by calling her eyes glacial. Hank was never good at finding nice things to say about girls, but he knew glaciers were beautiful. Glaciers were beautiful, but Hank wasn’t in love with them, either.
“How was your summer, Carmella?”
“Dull by comparison, I’m pretty sure.”
She stared at his hands. Hank hid them in his pockets.
“Sorry again, about this morning. I just zoned out.”
Carmella raised her eyebrows. “You’re a total mess, aren’t you, Hank?”
Hank chortled. “You followed me out here just to tell me that?”
Carmella cocked her chin. “I’m not the only one thinking it. You’re not pulling off whatever you’re trying to pull off here.”
“Well, thanks? See you tomorrow!” Hank smiled and started walking.
Carmella and her mint heels were not the least bit deterred. She fell in alongside him and didn’t even tear her eyes from her phone. “Can I show you something, Hank?”
“Carmella, I’m really in a hurry—”
She took his elbow. Not his hand. “You owe me so many more minutes than two.”
Hank showed her every tooth. “Man. People talk about clingy exes …”
“How does it feel to say that to me, Hank Vasquez?” Her stare could pierce iron. “Tell me. Because I don’t think it feels good.”
“I—no. Sorry.” He took a ragged breath. “I don’t know what made me say it.”
“A little honesty escaped, maybe?” Carmella placed her phone in Hank’s hand. He squeezed it too hard. “Look at this and I’ll forget you said a thing.” She unlocked the screen. “What’s wrong with this photo?”
Hank pretended to look, just enough to know it was a shot of him playing at summer tryouts: Hank was the main focus, situated just right of center, face blank and a bit distant as he crouched at the three-point line. He was gripping the ball tightly in his hands—his hands—
He pushed the phone away. “I don’t want to think about tryouts. All right?”
“Did you look at your hands?”
“The shot’s blurry.”
“Really. Because it clearly looks like you have more fingers than human beings are ever supposed to have. About, let’s see, one … two … three more fingers?”
Hank refused to look again.
Luz, you idiot.
For the first few weeks that Luz visited, he hadn’t worn those fingers right, couldn’t quite nail the shape or settle down about the numbers.
Luz had experimented.
It doesn’t make sense, he whined in Hank’s notebook. Hank could always tell when Luz was whining; it manifested as scratchier handwriting than usual. Why not create as many fingers as you need, whenever you need them? If you’ve got all this matter at your disposal, why not rearrange it to suit you?
Luz had demonstrated his point, there at Hank’s desk, or tried to—Hank felt a tingling in the heaviness of his hands, a sensation not unlike what he’d felt when Brendan once pushed his arms into a papier-mâché mixture, thick flour water enveloping him—
Hank gagged. Luz had only been with them for a week at that point, and Hank still worried he would no more understand Luz’s nature than he could love glaciers or girls. Luz always sounded somehow reasonable, until he was dissolving and re-forming your fingers, stretching them like taffy.
When Hank looked back, his left hand had seven spindlier fingers. His right hand had just three, thick like talons.
More fingers for a wider grip, wrote the taloned hand, while the seven-fingered one tapped a rhythm on the desktop. Or maybe a single long, large one for reaching farther? All this flesh, Hank. Why not let it do more?
“Flesh … I don’t think it usually works that way, Luz.”
Only because no one’s made it try. Luz dropped the pen and reshaped Hank’s hand into a mallet, back into a hand again. Your species is so defeatist.
“That’s pretty true.”
Good thing you have me now, wrote one hand, while the other cuffed Hank affectionately on the chin.
“Good thing,” Hank agreed.
“Welcome to the present, Hank.” Carmella’s arms were folded, her phone tucked away. “Hello.”
“Well, if that’s all you wanted—”
“That is not all.” Carmella closed her eyes. “I didn’t fall for you, Hank. I fell for your whole dopey family, the sadness and the kindness and the weirdness. I was your beard for a year.” Her eyes opened, her lips twisted. “I’m still growing on you.”
“I—look, I never thought of you as a beard.”
She smirked. “I know you didn’t. That’s why I didn’t mind it so much. There was this chance you’d never figure it out, you know?”
“That would have been awful for you,” Hank said.
“What can I say? I’m a very half-assed feminist.”
He couldn’t look away from her face; he couldn’t feel his hands at all.
How often did people look at Carmella like she was something otherworldly? Not just Hank, but everyone?
White-gold Carmella Spalding, descended from another plane.
In junior high, guys like Tim Miller had started saying sickening things that killed Hank’s laughter, things about what they’d like to “do” to Carmella Spalding, given the chance.
Hank was Carmella’s partner for a project in sophomore American Lit class, writing and reading aloud reimagined soliloquies of characters from The Crucible. Carmella chose Tituba and performed the hell out of her lines, lifting her fists and slamming them into her chest during a speech about her character’s mistreatment.
Probably the last thing Carmella Spalding would ever want would be to have something “done” to her. If Hank hadn’t asked her to homecoming that year, Tim Miller might have. A boy obsessed with a body might have.
Hank asked; she had raised an eyebrow but said yes.
Hank wanted to believe it had been selfless. But a tiny worm in his heart wondered what Dad might say if he came home and found Hank dating a girl like Carmella. Dad and Hank used to talk about girls sometimes, during truck rides home after games, and Hank had played the part almost as well as Carmella played Tituba. There had passed seconds between telephone poles when Dad nudged him as if Hank could only love girls, would be climbing glaciers for eternity.
But Hank would pass Brendan in hallways and forget where he was.
After a year, when they were juniors, the way Hank dumped Carmella—well, he didn’t, exactly. She came over to watch crappy B-movies on the sci-fi channel (nobody knew she liked that sort of thing), and midway through a scene that featured a bounty hunter in a bikini making out with a buff alien barbarian, Hank laughed so hard he cried. It seemed so ridiculous to him—not just the romance IN SPAAAAACE. But the man and the woman together.
It was inexplicable, but Carmella held his hand. She wiped Hank’s eyes.
“I get it,” she whispered. “Brendan Nesbitt has killer cheekbones.”
The last bell rang. Hank stared at Carmella. Her makeup hadn’t smeared.
“Hank. Whatever this is, tell me about it. Not lies about swine flu or termites, or whatever. The truth.”
She always seemed to know him.
Hank shivered. Luz had always seemed to know him.
“Carmella … see you tomorrow?”
She didn’t return his smile.
The courts at Moreno Park weren’t empty.
The blacktop was occupied by a scraggly band of middle schoolers who tossed around a flat basketball. Beside the park fence, an old man in a garish Hawaiian shirt appeared to be bird-watching through a pair of enormous black binoculars. There was a clear view of Nameless Canyon and the Vasquez household here. Hank didn’t look.
He couldn’t stop shooting.
When he missed his 117th consecutive basket, a middle schooler sniggered. Maybe the scabby-kneed kids recognized Hank. If they were local, they’d probably seen the termite tent and heard the Ebola rumors. They’d probably seen him play before, and couldn’t believe what they were seeing now.
Somehow that kid’s snigger was the most alienating experience of the day.
Alienating, Luz.
Luz had been fascinated by human vocabulary.
They didn’t have to teach it, exactly—the moment he’d moved into Hank and the others, Luz had access to all the same knowledge they did. He bathed in a pool of everything the Vasquezes knew. He savored the experience, asked always for more. Luz adopted Milo’s capacity for learning, Ana’s tendency toward interrogation, Hank’s unchecked growth. But knowledge didn’t always equal understanding.
At first Luz didn’t realize the Vasquez kids were separate people.
You are so similar. I assumed you were one organism in three pieces. Are you sure you aren’t?
“Definitely sure,” Hank told him.
Grow more complex, then. You’re very simple creatures, Luz wrote. He’d been with them for three weeks. All of them were huddled on the top bunk. By then, Hank carried a whiteboard and dry-erase markers everywhere.
“You are a bit overcomplicated in the area of emotions,” Milo continued, repeating words Luz whispered in his ears.
“Come on.” Ana closed her eyes, or Luz closed them for her: “Look closely at my brothers and tell me their emotions aren’t mostly about food, Luz.”
“They aren’t. They are as overcomplicated as you are.” And then, as Milo: “But fingers are truly a nightmare.”
Hank laughed. He wasn’t annoyed with Ana. When Luz was with them, they weren’t annoyed with one another. They understood what they’d never understood in all the years of growing up without him. The Vasquezes understood they would never entirely understand one another, and that was okay.
“I really would like chilaquiles right now,” Milo confessed.
There was no point denying that Dad had taught Hank exactly how to make them, now that Luz had bridged the gaps between them. Luz could show Ana what Hank knew or Milo what Ana knew.
They went to the kitchen and fried stale tortillas and eggs at two in the morning.
When Mom came in and asked what the hell they were doing, they realized they hadn’t prepared her a plate. Then they realized that she didn’t want a plate—she wanted them not to cook the thing Dad used to cook. She watched them in her bathrobe, stared at the fluid, symmetrical way they moved like one organism.
She left the room in tears.
Hank felt himself failing to care. Overwhelmingly, she wasn’t part of them.
The chilaquiles were delicious. Hank wondered if he’d cooked them, or if Luz had with Hank’s hands. Did it matter? Again Hank felt himself failing to care.
A hole was opening at their feet. Hank saw them all plunging into it—Ana with relief, Milo in a joyful forward dive, and Hank wondering whether anyone would care enough to catch them.
The sky was still, overcast and starless.
The smacking of the ball seemed louder without the offset of middle school snickers. Beside the fence, the old man was adjusting his binoculars, muttering to himself.
The ball fell through the net for the first time in months.
It may have been pure chance—it wasn’t as though Hank could feel his hands.
But it went through.
Hank punched the sky. “You see that?” he asked his fingers. “I don’t need you.”
“If that’s true,” a voice called from the sidelines, “let me break them for you.”
Hank’s fist fell faster than a comet. He turned.
Anyone might think they were setting up for a scrimmage. Beside Tim Miller stood two red-cheeked others: Ben O’Brien, Rin Hisoka. The three still wore their practice jerseys and sneakers. Like they’d just finished warming up.
But there wasn’t a basketball in sight. Hank’s had rolled into the darkness between two streetlights.
“Hey, guys. Here for a game of HORSE?”
“The fuck is wrong with you, Vasquez?”
“Oh.” Hank put his hand to the back of his head. “You know. Just out of practice.”
“Quit fucking smiling. I mean it. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Tim’s skin barely seemed to contain him. Despite the dark, his eyes shone like dimes.
Hank had never been attracted to Tim Miller, which was not to say Hank wasn’t a little in love with him. But countless summer nights spent at Tim’s house, lounging on the sectional couch while they tossed a foam football back and forth and talked shit about their dads, had amounted to brotherhood rather than romance.
After Hank showed up at homecoming with Brendan on his arm, those basement years had dissipated like foam, leaving only crusted spit.
Tim stepped forward. Hank refused to step back.
“Tim. Let me talk to you. Just you.”
“You think I wanna be anywhere alone with you? Fuck no. Never again.”
Tim shoved hard. Hank’s shoulders hit the pavement, and as the first kick shunted the air from his stomach, Hank could hardly have explained that he hadn’t asked his hands to hurt Tim during tryouts.
Because maybe he had. Even if it had been Luz possessing Hank’s fingers while those fingers wrapped around Tim’s throat, choking him in a quiet locker room, Tim was nonetheless hurt.
Hank let his arms fall open. He let his wrists smack the court.
Tim’s face looked a little like Milo’s, scrunched up like that. Hank had hurt both of them. There would be no more piggyback. Tim might as well break his spine.
Hank lay still.
He felt gravel grate his scalp as his skull slid against the pavement, flint to steel. Hank felt the scraping of man-made earth against his elbows, but it wasn’t intimate. The sand in Hank’s ears wasn’t, the places where feet pounded his rib cage weren’t, not even close. Not the wood chips forming in Hank’s stomach, nor the sensation that his torso was granite being shattered by a hammer—nothing was as intimate as Luz had been.
Hank didn’t need to say “hit me” and Tim didn’t need to call him “faggot” again. This exchange was as natural as a ball rebounding. This was Tim recovering from a play Hank had made months ago, unfairly, cruelly, without remorse.
Ben and Rin stood at Tim’s shoulders. They framed him like wings, bore witness.
All told, it was only five licks: three kicks to Hank’s stomach, one stomp on Hank’s rib cage, and one knock to his head.
The knock was the most intimate. Tim leaned in, lifted Hank’s head up by the ears, and dropped it. The back of Hank’s skull took fire, but he was too thickheaded for a real concussion. As usual, Hank was an idiot.
A dollop of hot salt water slipped from Tim’s face to his. Not spit this time.
Finally they left him there.
Hank lay still. Throbbing, coughing, but still. He wanted to bleed right into the courts. He couldn’t.
They hadn’t even broken his skin.