Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

Helen, despite herself, was stirred. There goes a leader of men, she thought. I could never do that job. The more she thought about Arturo’s words, the less sure she felt what he was actually talking about — it was really just sort of a variation on my way or the highway, with a little Messiah complex thrown in — but still, he was right, it wasn’t just about what you said to the world, it was about what was in your heart when you were saying it.

FREEDOM FROM HER FAMILY, freedom from a sense of place, freedom from peers who knew all about her, freedom from familiar objects: all of this had happened to her once before, Sara reflected, but not when she was old enough to remember any of it. “Rebirth” was too strong a word, maybe, but it was both truer and more mischievous to say that she felt like she was up for adoption again.

Here was one of the differences between her parents: she knew she could never figure out her father’s email password in a hundred years, but it had taken her all of five seconds to correctly guess her mother’s, which was “Sara.” Sara sent an email, from her mother’s account, dropping out of the basketball program entirely; she carefully deleted both the sent email and the coach’s understanding reply. She still rode the bus across town every Tuesday and Friday after school, though, usually just to wander in and out of stores or, when the weather got a little warmer, to lie on the grass embankment between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, a spot she found soothing and also far enough from most human traffic that detection wasn’t a worry. Once in a while she’d take a picture of the river and upload it straight to Facebook, less for the benefit of her few friends from school who might see it than just to create some record of where she was. Sometimes these friends would respond, sometimes they wouldn’t, and then one day a few of them came and surprised her en masse, two she knew and three others. They sprinted across the highway like idiots to reach the embankment, rather than go two blocks out of their way to take the underpass.

They sat and watched the boats, Sara’s cheeks growing hot in the midst of them, talking about nothing — mostly waiting for some jogger to go by, or for some middle-aged guy to emerge from below the deck of his weathered boat, so they could fall silent and then mock him after he’d disappeared again. One of them, a boy in a green army jacket and a sad Jewfro that the wind off the Hudson kept shaking like some kind of jello mold, had a pocket-size bottle of Jägermeister with him; but after one swig everybody pretended they were buzzed just so they wouldn’t have to taste it again. Sara’s sort-of-friend and chem lab partner, Tracy, seemed to want to cultivate the impression that she was with one of the other guys, a fellow eighth grader named Cutter (at least that’s what he had named himself), whose family, she’d heard, was more well off than anyone else’s in the school, which, because he was black, probably shouldn’t have seemed ironic but did. Cutter kept catching Sara staring at them, which was not cool; she made herself look instead at the tide racing upriver toward the George Washington Bridge.

She heard his voice on the hill behind her, diluted by the pulse of traffic sounds from the highway, and then she realized he was saying, “What’s her name?”

“Sara,” someone answered him.

“Hey, Sara,” Cutter said, “you live near here?”

She swallowed. “No,” she said, “I’m all the way across town. Not too far from school.”

“So you just like boats?”

She laughed, still without looking at him. “My mom thinks I’m playing in a basketball league,” she said. “But I just come here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. ’Cause I like boats?”

“What about your dad?” Cutter said. “Where’s he think you are?”

“Don’t know,” Sara said, but none of them heard her because they were all yelling at Cutter to try minding his own fucking business and stop asking people personal questions. “This is why no one will hang out with you except us,” the Jewfro guy said.

Next Wednesday in school, Sara was standing in the cafeteria line, which stretched out the door, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, boat girl,” Cutter said. “What’s your first class after lunch?”

“English,” Sara said.

He snorted. “Come on,” he said. “It’s a beautiful day.” He took her hand, which kept her from dwelling too much on anything else that was happening as they walked straight through the kitchen and out the fire door onto Seventy-seventh Street. He hailed a cab going west, and at first she thought he wanted, for some bizarre romantic reason, to go back to the embankment by the boat basin where they’d met, but no, the cab kept going south all the way to the Hudson ferry slips, where he bought them two tickets for the Circle Line. They sat on the deck — it was two-thirds empty, no one but out-of-season tourists and a couple of lame class trips — and circled the island of Manhattan, watching the sun split by the peaked tops of the buildings, the silent cars, the way the crosstown streets would open up to their full depth just at the moment you passed them and then flatten out again. Cutter pushed her hair out of her eyes with one finger. Sara felt a bit like she’d heard drugs were supposed to make you feel — dangerously receptive, like in the future it was going to be too hard to resist knowing that you had the power to feel this way again.

“Better, right?” Cutter said. She looked at him quizzically. “To be the one on the boat,” he explained, “getting looked at by the people on the shore.”

He had a thing for boats, it turned out, even though they were no great novelty for him since his family owned one, which they kept at their place out in Sag Harbor. It was a little disappointing to Sara to realize that that was the initial basis of his interest in her — that she reflected an interest of his own. On the last Friday of the nominal basketball season, he took her to ride the Staten Island Ferry. The ferry itself was about the least quaint thing imaginable, and the harbor was surprisingly crowded, and if you looked too closely at the water it was pretty full of garbage, but Sara loved it anyway, in large part because of the uncharacteristic smile it put on Cutter’s face. When you got to Staten Island there was really nothing to do — some storefronts, an empty baseball stadium, MTA buses that went God only knew where — but there was the ride back to look forward to, with Manhattan expanding in front of you, as you tried to pick out from the forest of mismatched structures along the water the one small maw toward which the ferry was pointed.

She’d never been anybody’s girlfriend before, and she wasn’t sure she was now; the most official-seeming aspect of it was that Tracy wasn’t speaking to her anymore. She and Cutter never went to each other’s homes, though if the weather turned wintry again and they kept hanging out like this, she could see how that was going to emerge as an issue. For now they dated the way she imagined two homeless people might date. The first time he tried seriously to make out with her, they were on a bench on the East River promenade, and she was freezing. She pulled her head back and looked into his desire-clouded eyes.

“What is your real name?” she said, stalling. “I don’t see how I can kiss a guy when I don’t even know what name your mother gave you.”

He shrugged. “What name did your mother give you?” he said.

Which undermined her just enough to make her want to end the conversation; she unzipped his jacket so she could get her arms inside it for warmth, and kissed him until she could feel that her whole throat was bright red.