Nina LaCour - We Are Okay

Too many people were at Ben’s house. They crowded the foyer and the kitchen, made it difficult to hear anything anyone said to us. Mabel gestured to the kitchen, and I shook my head. It wasn’t worth it. I caught a glimpse of Ben in the living room and grabbed Mabel’s hand.

“Where’s Laney?” I asked him when we were settled there on the soft green rug, the city lights through the windows, the nostalgia of everything taking me over. In seventh grade, Ben and I had spent a few months kissing each other until we realized we had more fun talking. I hadn’t been in that room with him for a long time, but even with everyone else there, and the loudness of it, the way people were showing off for one another and getting wilder, I remembered our mellow afternoons, just him and me and the dog, once we discovered that we were meant to be just friends.

“I shut her in my parents’ room,” he said. “She gets nervous around too many people. You could go say hi to her, though, if you want. You remember where the treats are?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

It had been years, but I could picture the tin of dog treats on a shelf next to a stack of cookbooks. I wove my way past the groups of people and into the hall by the kitchen, and there was the tin, just as I’d remembered. Ben’s parents’ room was quiet, and Laney whimpered when I walked in. I closed the door behind me and sat on the carpet, fed her five treats, one after the next, the way we used to do when Ben and I were thirteen. I stayed in there, petting her head for a little bit longer, because it felt special to be somewhere other people weren’t allowed to go.

When I got back to the living room and sat between Mabel and Ben, they were in the midst of a conversation with Courtney and a few other people. “We’re basically the only teenagers in the city,” a boy said. “All the private schools are worried because they’re losing students every year.”

Courtney said, “We might move.”

“Whaaat?” Ben shook his head. “You’ve been my neighbor for, like, ever .”

“I know. It’s crazy. But I share a room with my brother, and it’s not that cool anymore. When he was a little kid, fine. But now that he’s hitting puberty? Not so much.”

“Where would you go?” I asked her.

San Francisco always felt like an island to me, surrounded by the mythical East Bay with its restaurants and parks and North Bay with its wealth and its redwoods. South of the city was where our dead were buried—but not my mother, whose ashes returned to the ocean that killed her, which was also the ocean she loved. South of that were little beach towns, and then Silicon Valley and Stanford. But the people, everyone I knew, everyone I’d ever known, all lived in the city.

“Contra Costa,” Courtney said.

“Gross,” Ben said.

“You’ve probably never even been there.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Snob!” Courtney punched his leg. “It’s fine there. A lot of trees. I’m just so ready to have three bedrooms.”

“We have three bedrooms. It can’t be that hard to find. Maybe go out to the Sunset. That’s where Marin lives.”

“How big is your place?” Courtney asked me.

“It’s a house,” I said. “It’s pretty big. I think three bedrooms.”

“What do you mean, you think ?”

“My grandpa lives in the back and I live in the front. I think there are two rooms back there. Maybe three.”

Courtney’s eyes narrowed.

“You haven’t been in the back of your house?”

“It’s not that weird,” I said. “He has a study and a bedroom, but the bedroom opens up to something, either a big closet or a small room. I’m just not sure if it’s technically a bedroom or not.”

“Bedrooms have to have closets or else they aren’t considered bedrooms,” Eleanor, daughter of real-estate-agent parents, informed us.

“Oh,” I said. “Then it’s a three bedroom. It doesn’t have a closet.”

“It’s probably a sitting room,” Eleanor offered. “Lots of the old houses have them off the master bedrooms.”

I nodded, but the truth is that I wasn’t sure at all. I’d only caught glimpses through his study a couple times, but that’s just how it was with us. I gave him his privacy and he gave me mine. Mabel would have loved that arrangement. Ana was always digging through her drawers.

But as the night got later, as people showed up and left, and the music got turned down because of the neighbors, and the alcohol flowed and then ran out, I kept seeing Courtney’s look. Her narrowed eyes. The tone of her voice. You haven’t been in the back of your house?

She was right. I hadn’t been there.

I’d only paused in the doorway some nights when he was in his study, sitting at his desk, smoking his cigarettes, tapping the ash in his crystal ashtray and writing his letters by the light of an old-fashioned desk lamp, green with a bronze chain. Most of the time the door was shut but once in a while it was left open a crack, by mistake, probably.

Sometimes I’d call, “Good night,” and he would say it back. But most of the time I walked quietly by, trying not to disturb him, until I got to our shared territory and then to my room, where nobody ever went besides Mabel and me.

“What’s wrong?” Mabel asked me when we were back on the sidewalk, waiting for the car under a streetlamp. I shook my head. “Courtney was being kind of aggressive.”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

I was still thinking about Gramps at his desk. I was still wondering why I tried to be quiet when I walked past his rooms.

I was only giving him privacy. He was old, and the whites of his eyes seemed to grow more yellow every week, and he coughed like something was ready to rattle loose inside of him. A week ago I saw a red spot on his handkerchief when he lowered it from his mouth. He needed rest and quiet. He needed to save his strength. I was only being considerate. It’s what anyone would do.

But still—doubts, doubts.

The car pulled up and we slid into the back. The driver eyed Mabel in the rearview mirror as she gave him her address.

He smiled, said something to her in Spanish, his tone so flirtatious I didn’t need a translation.

She rolled her eyes.

“ México ?” he asked her.

“ Sí .”

“ Colombia ,” he said.

“ One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite books.” I was embarrassed before the sentence was even finished. Just because he was from Colombia didn’t mean that he’d care.

He adjusted the mirror and looked at me for the first time.

“You like García Márquez?”

“I love him. Do you?”

“ Love? No. Admire? Yes.” He turned right onto Valencia. A burst of laughter reached us from the sidewalk, still teeming with people.

“ Cien años de soledad ,” he said. “Your favorite? Really?”

“Is it that hard to believe?”

“Many people love that book. But you are so young .”

Mabel said something in Spanish. I slapped her leg and she grabbed my hand. Held it tight.

“I just said you were too smart for your own good,” she said.

“Oh.” I smiled at her. “Thanks.”

“ Inteligente , okay,” he said. “Yes. But that is not why I ask.”

“All the incest?” I asked.

“Ha! That, too. But no.”

He pulled up to Mabel’s house, and I wished he would circle the block. Mabel was pressed against me—she’d let go of my hand but we were still touching—and I didn’t know why it felt so good but I knew I didn’t want it to stop. And the driver was trying to tell me something about the book I’d read so many times. The one I kept discovering and trying to understand better. I wished he’d circle all night. Mabel’s body and mine would relax into each other’s. The car would fill with ideas about the passionate, tortured Buendía family, the once-grand city of Macondo, the way García Márquez wove magic into so many sentences.