Carmella pecked Hank on the cheek before English Lit.
This was something she did every so often, if the mood took her, when she wasn’t busy charming the hell out of someone else. Carmella collided like an asteroid. From nowhere and everywhere, she broke away from her girlfriends or boyfriends or teacher friends or the dust motes—everyone and everything got caught in the gravity of Carmella—and made a high-heeled beeline across the hallway for the pillar known as Hank Vasquez.
The collision was always gentle. It made nothing extinct. Today Carmella wore black makeup and a flaming-orange wig, but the marks left by her ashy lipstick did not scorch.
Hank remained grateful that she took his arm. That she never tried to take his hand. She never asked him to stop smiling.
Hank scanned Carmella from head to toe during the trek to Mrs. Moore’s Olde Kingdom, gaze snagged by black silk and white shoes. “What are you supposed to be? The Great Pumpkin?”
“It’s Halloween.”
“Yeah, I know it is. And you’re supposed to be? Cruel-Ella Deville?”
“No. I just said. I’m Halloween. The holiday incarnate.” She pulled a rainbow roll of Smarties from a hidden pocket. “Would you like a cavity?”
“Maybe later.”
“And who are you today, Hank?”
Hank stared down at his Converse, jeans, and monochromatic blue V-neck.
“Looks like I’m Hank Vasquez.”
“That sounds like something Milo would be,” Carmella observed, raising a perfectly painted eyebrow.
Hank didn’t wince, though it was a near thing. “It’s almost like we’re related.”
“Almost. Do you know what Milo told me yesterday?”
“Do I want to know?” Even this morning Milo had clamored for Hank’s attention, flicking Corn Pops at him when Mom turned her back. Hank wished he could give Milo the smile he so clearly wanted, but every time he saw Milo, he remembered how he’d been the first to make him scream.
That night Luz left them, and left them smaller.
“He told me that red ants aren’t native to America. Some idiots imported them by accident in the 1930s.”
“Oh. Neat.” In the past weeks there had been evenings, sometimes when Mom was busy with parent-teacher conferences and Hank and Ana remained at practice, when Carmella insisted on watching Milo. “Thanks for talking to him. I wish, I mean. I’m glad you do.”
“I don’t mind giving you all a hand,” Carmella said, pointedly.
She’d stopped asking about the summer, but clearly hadn’t stopped thinking about it. Carmella’s thoughts were not to be taken lightly.
People assumed being popular meant being shallow, that being beautiful meant being empty. Hank had always thought Carmella was full of the right kinds of canyons—pensive caverns, passing kindness shadows, and the unknown glow of forgiving lichen in dark places.
When they’d been dating for months, a millennium ago, he said this in those exact words, in the context of a Valentine’s Day poem. He felt uncomfortable the whole time he wrote it. He passed Carmella the shoddily cut construction-paper monstrosity on the bleachers after school; they’d been helping student council decorate for Winter Carnival.
She read it and laughed aloud.
“You have a penchant for terrible metaphors, Hank Vasquez. Eventually you’re going to compare me to a graceful deer in the forest, aren’t you, like all the creepy dead poets do?”
“Never said I was a writer.” Hank flushed and scooted away. Her hand found his shoulder and reeled him back.
“I say you’re a writer, Hank.” She held his chin in soft hands and pulled his face toward her own. “And you know what? It’s not like the words aren’t nice. But the thing that annoys me is that a deer isn’t trying to be a deer.”
“And you’re trying to be … Carmella?”
“Always.” Her hands slipped from his skin. “Every second of every day, I’m trying to be Carmella. I’m thinking about every gesture, every tiny choice. I see my parents doing the same thing. They’re exhausted. But they aren’t unhappy.”
Hank had met Carmella’s parents a few times, had attended their Thanksgiving dinner last year. The table was set meticulously, the turkey carved in even slices and salted to perfection. Everyone dressed just so, in deep autumnal colors that complemented the tablecloth. Mom always took Hank and company out for Chinese on Thanksgiving. She didn’t even make them wear khakis.
“I think you’re nailing Carmella, Carmella.”
“No, you’re supposed to be,” she joked, but there were barbs in it. Hank hadn’t even tried lifting her shirt yet.
He cleared his throat.
“See? Now I’m second-guessing that joke. But I’ve had a long time to work on my makeup. I’m not talking about the face I paint on. Although that can help.”
Hank thought of his little sister—Ana, in eighth grade, smearing black under her eyes.
“I’m talking about my make-up, as in what I’m made of. It does take a little effort to look beautiful. But it takes a lot more to feel it.” She scratched Hank’s head for him, tickled the short hairs behind his ears. “Pretty thoughts are the hardest to have.”
“Yeah.” Hank slumped back, let his elbows rest on the row of bleachers behind them. “God.”
“Carmella is fine.” Her fingers had found his scalp again, traced parallel and disjointed paths across it.
“No, I meant: god, we have a lot in common.”
“A whole lot, Hank Vasquez.” Carmella had her paint. Hank had his.
She leaned down and pinned him there, and for a second, Hank kissed her back.
Carmella pressed the roll of Smarties into Hank’s weak grip and found her seat at her table in English. Within minutes, Mrs. Moore, whistling merrily, had passed out monologues from Canterbury Tales for them to memorize.
Hank’s assigned pilgrim was the Cook. “ ‘Such a pity it seemed to me, he had a boil upon his knee.’ ” Hank smiled. “Because nothing says ‘delicious’ like boils on your knees.”
“Yeah, Vasquez. I bet that would make things hard for you. How would you kneel for your pansy boyfriend?”
Hank turned before he could stop himself.
Tim Miller had spread his lanky body across an entire side of his table, squishing bespectacled Alan Boleyn into the aisle. An eyeball was painted on Tim’s forehead, a star in its center, and he wore a vest and dress shirt like a prep-school dropout.
Since the shattering in Moreno Park, Tim had kept his distance, but Hank had felt him glaring in his peripheries. More than once he’d found spit on his locker and used his elbows to scrub penciled slurs from his desk.
“You hear me, Vasquez?” Tim whistled. “Hey, meatpacker?”
Usually, this was the part where some of Tim’s friends would start slinging shit. Back when Hank was one of them, he’d done it, too. But deep down he’d known that guys who joked about smearing queers were only a hairsbreadth away from shoving Hank’s face into concrete.
“So how does it feel not to touch the ball? That’s literally never happened to me.”
Hank realized what Tim’s costume was supposed to be: Tim was a star pupil. It really wasn’t a bad costume.
Tim Miller really wasn’t a bad guy, or not as bad as he was pretending to be. This was a performance.
Tim could be better. Hank knew it, he knew it like the back of his confounded hands. Hank had hurt Tim first. He had squeezed, choked, and bruised. And Hank had to believe he was better than that now. Which meant Tim could be, too.
“What do you want, Tim?” Hank asked.
“You hold a basketball like it’s a girl. Scared it might try and screw you?”
“Very funny.”
Tim’s eyes shot to his teammates for support. Rin Hisoka shook his head. Even Ben O’Brien—a frequent instigator, usually happy to harangue—pretended to focus on his monologue.
The blood left Tim’s face. “You getting too gay for sports, or just getting retarded like your brother now?”
At that ugly word, Hank forgot all reason. He spun around, and god, he didn’t need Luz’s apathy to help him make pulp of Tim Miller now because useless or not his fists were rising in the bad way—
“Shut the fuck up, Miller.” Esmeralda Benaway slammed her hands on Tim’s table. She knocked his legs over the edge, throwing him off balance so that he had to catch himself, one hand on the carpet.
Tim looked like he had been punched.
Hank probably looked the same. He gaped as Esmeralda took her seat.
Esmeralda Benaway and Hank weren’t friends. They’d been partners for science projects over the years, sure, and once he’d helped her pass out flyers for her hockey team. She did have a reputation for taking shit from no one. Esmeralda was rumored to have gutted a rival team’s goalie with her skates “by accident.”
But rushing to Hank’s aid like that—what had he done to earn that?
Hank cottoned on in time to see Carmella nod in satisfaction before redirecting her attention to Patrick Sims, her latest would-be paramour.
Weren’t Carmella and Esmeralda both class representatives?
Hank couldn’t prove it was Carmella, but someone had started a very intentional rumor about the Vasquez Catastrophe. The word had spread, and the word was this: the reason Hank Vasquez sucked at basketball now (the JV team had so far lost every one of its six games this season) was not because he went apeshit on Tim Miller at tryouts, but because he’d sustained nerve damage to his hands. His whole family had in fact contracted tragic swine Ebola coli, or whatever, and while that sounded gross, it really wasn’t their fault and wasn’t it sad, even?
In September, Hank had heard his last name in hushed hallway voices. Now, in October, the whisperers had abandoned the Vasquezes. Now the whisperers were wondering whether they should cheat on the upcoming Trigonometry exam. Whether there’d be any actual Halloween parties. How some kid in sophomore class got arrested for trail bombing. And on and on, into infinity.
Not for the first time, Hank felt small in the universe. Maybe for the first time, he was grateful for it.
Esmeralda Benaway readjusted her bun of black hair and went back to work.
Mrs. Moore appeared in their midst. “Woe, that we should hear tongues so young speaketh so vilely!”
Esmeralda balked. She was intimidating in every way imaginable, but Mrs. Moore was very Scottish. Mrs. Moore whispered, “Next time say ‘Maketh thine motherfucking mouth closed.’ This is English Lit, ya ken?”
Hank and Esmeralda blinked at each other.
Carmella wasn’t looking his way. Hank knew this was her doing, the end result of her remaking his makeup in the collective subconscious of Eustace High.
Maybe he really could kiss her, now, but her majesty deserved better than that.
“I fell for your whole family,” she’d told him.
That fall was proving priceless.