Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

Derek dutifully assists Emerson, jotting down weights and reps, racking his weights, helping him to chalk his hands. Emerson switches from barbell to dumbbell, through overhand and underhand grips, shoulders, biceps, triceps, deltoids, pectorals. He’s flushed all over, glowing, panting, hair glittering, swigging from a pitcher of water Felice refills from the tall blue bottles in the refrigerator. Felice watches the whole session — two continuous hours of methodical training — her long, thin legs drawn up beside her on the chair, her black hair flared across her back. Emerson finishes his workout by gulping the water straight from the pitcher, then dumping the rest over his head. He waves at Felice as if too tired for words, then wanders to the outdoor shower around the side of the house. His sweat-soaked shorts flap over the edge of the wood stall. She hears the hiss of the water and wonders what he would do if she joined him. Then Derek appears. He sprawls in the chair across from hers, dragging an arm across his forehead. “Awesome, right?”

“I guess.”

“You hungry yet? You want something?” he asks. “Or you one of those air fern-type girls?”

Felice shakes her head, eyeing the shower mist.

Derek grins at her, shoulders jutting, straight arms, palms flat against the seat of his chair. “I’ve seen you around the Green House, right?”

Felice looks away, lifting her chin. “If I had a house like this, I’d be home all the time.”

He bobs his head. “Hey, you can come over, like, whenever.”

“What does your dad do?”

“He’s a psycho-the-rapist.” Derek’s smile reveals a crooked incisor and bicuspid. “He talks, talks, talks, then he gives his clients nice painkillers. He says it’s ‘therapeutic.’ ” He makes air quotes with his fingers. “We’re all best friends with the shipping department at Merck around here.”

Felice glances over his shoulder at the shower again; frilly green shrubs and bougainvillea surround the yard. A single palm branch arches above a white rope hammock almost hidden among the trees.

“You can even live here, if you want. For real.”

She crosses her arms, the long bones pressing against each other. “We’ve got another plan.”

“Yeah? What?”

She can’t help herself: she wants to tell someone. “We’re going to Oregon. Maybe.”

Derek doesn’t say anything for a moment, studying her, his eyes still and small. “Oh yeah? Since when?”

“He’s going to train at a special gym out there. I’m going with him.” She thinks: I’m going to do it.

“Right.”

“We are.”

“ Oregon? Do you have any idea how far that is?” A leaf shadow bobs over his face. “How’re you gonna go?”

“We’ve got some money.”

“Yeah? How much?”

“Plenty.” She hesitates. “Almost a grand.”

He sagely gazes over her head, evidently digesting this information. There are premature lines running from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth, a divot between his eyebrows. He’s no older than Emerson, but his skin looks weathered as sandstone. Finally he says, slowly, judiciously. “That’s enough to get you there — maybe — depending — but not much else.”

Felice shrugs, sensing he’s right — a band of anxiety encircling her ribs — because now she feels invested in the plan — but she won’t let him see this. “We’ve got other… sources.”

“Uh-huh. Like?”

She examines the cuticle of her index finger. “My brother Stanley maybe. He owns Freshly Grown.”

“Pff! No he doesn’t.”

She lifts her chin and peers at him through lowered lids.

Derek’s grin disappears. “No fucking way. The store ? In Homestead? Are you shitting me? My dad is, like, obsessed with that place. We get all our protein mixes and eggs and stuff like that there. No, really, I gotta admit, that place rules.” He angles his face to one side. “You just mean he runs the place, right? He doesn’t actually own it?”

“He owns it all right. Came up with it, started the whole thing out of nothing,” she boasts.

Derek’s face softens with a pleased wonderment. “Wow,” he says. “That is too cool. I gotta say, I love that place. Do you hang out there a lot?”

“I don’t know.” She doesn’t want to admit she’s never actually been to the store. Stanley opened it after she left; her mother told her about it. She knew he would: he used to talk about his market as if it already existed. Stanley always did exactly what he said he was going to do — he was different that way from everyone else.

“So he must be pretty fucking loaded now, right? I mean, he could blow old Capitalist-Stevie here away.”

Felice doesn’t respond. She pulls the backs of her ankles in close to her butt and rests her chin on the flat of one of her knees. She thinks of Stanley’s colored pencil drawings of theoretical businesses: a café, a bookshop, and, always, a grocery store. When she was ten and he was fourteen, he was already working as a bag boy at Publix, reading what their father called “hippie books.” He talked about stuff like citrus canker, the Big Sugar mafia, and genetically modified foods and organisms. He got his store manager to order organic butter after Stanley’d read (in the Berkeley Wellness newsletter) about the high concentration of pesticides in dairy. Then, for weeks, the expensive stuff (twice as much as regular) sat in the case, untouched. So Stanley used his own savings to buy the remaining inventory and stashed it in his mother’s cold storage. He took some butter to his school principal and spoke passionately about the health benefits of organic dairy: they bought a case for the cafeteria. He ordered more butter directly from the dairy co-operative and sold some to the Cuban-French bakery in the Gables, then sold some more from a big cooler at the Coconut Grove farmers’ market. He started making a profit and people came back to him, asking for milk and ice cream. The experience changed Stanley — he was sometimes a little weird and pompous and intense before, but somehow, he began to seem cool and worldly.

Their mother, however, said she couldn’t afford to use his ingredients in her business. They’d fought about it. Stanley said that Avis had never really supported him. Avis asked if it wasn’t hypocritical of Stanley to talk about healthy eating while he was pushing butter. And Stanley replied that he’d learned from the master, that her entire business was based on the cultivation of expensive heart attacks.

Derek sits back in his chair, gnawing meditatively on the corner of a thumbnail. He lifts his eyebrows. “How come Sonny’s never mentioned this plan to me?”

“Emerson?” Felice feels a pulse of satisfaction: she busies herself with raking back streaks of loose hair. “I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t have time.”

Derek interlocks his fingers over his stomach and narrows his eyes at Felice. “He tells me everything. We go back, man, like before you were fucking born.”

“We’re the same age.”

“Fine,” Derek utters in an exasperated whisper, looking over one shoulder. He swings back, his face tight. “Listen — I already know what you think of me.”

“You do ?” Felice can’t suppress her smirk.

“Yeah, I do . I know you think I’m an ugly faker loser. And like I hang out with street kids and I’ve got this great big fucking dandy mansion where I can get drugged and beaten and generally fucked up as much as I care to let myself be…”

Felice blinks, dropping her eyes to her knees, reflexively gathering her calves up to one side.

“Okay — sorry — sorry.” He lifts one hand, fingers spread. “Not to freak you out, like, oh, I’m so messed up. Just to say that you might think that kind of shit about me, but we’re not so different, Felice. I mean, yeah, you’ve got this hair and these legs and this face and you could be living in a for-real mansion, up in like, Palm Beach, if you worked it a little and went to the right yacht parties — or at least pulling down some obscene fucking amount of green as a model or something — if you weren’t such a lazy piece of shit.”