He looks out at the water with her a moment. Without moving his eyes, he says, “I could take care of you, if you wanted.”
It feels like the blood in her veins speeds up. “What’re you talking about?” She tries to laugh. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He stays trained on the water, his face studious — something about him reminds her, oddly, of her brother. He isn’t turning out to be anything like the person she’d assumed he was. “I’m not trying to offend you or anything or say you aren’t doing great yourself. I’m just saying…” He shrugs.
“What?”
“Well, like—” He permits himself a half-glance in her direction. “What do you want to do with yourself, I mean.”
“I dunno. Be a model.” She can’t look at him as she says this.
“A model? Fuck.” He keeps staring at the water. “You’re too pretty. You’re beautiful.” He lowers his voice reverentially. “But mostly you’re too smart. Way too smart. If you want to do something like that — I don’t know — be an actress.”
Felice is silent, studying her wadded-up wrapper. He doesn’t know about the punishment. Emerson goes to get them more burgers, and when he comes back he’s animated with a new plan. “Listen, Felice,” he says quickly, “I’ve got some money saved up — nine hundred dollars—”
Her spine straightens. “What?”
He smiles.
“Well, what the fuck?” she says quietly. “Where’d you get all that money?”
He brushes his hand over his head several times before looking up. “I’m pretty good at working, and, like, saving up. I bounce and mix drinks at a couple clubs.” He interlaces his fingers, straightening and closing, studying them. Everything about him so intent and serious. Like one of the old Jewish men set up on their folding chairs on their apartment balconies. Felice can see the ghost of his eighty-year-old self on his face — pouches and worry lines. She feels, weirdly, drawn to this, to his funny soberness. Every other kid she knows would’ve spent that money, dropped it on drugs, a new board, some shitty, stupid thing. She brushes elbows with wealth every week in the clubs; she even, on occasion, has picked up better gigs — like the swimsuit special for Australian Elle or the Nordstrom spring junior catalog — that paid $2,000 for a day’s work. But she currently has $7.50 in her pocket and she’s never so much as opened a checking account. Nine hundred seems like a staggering amount, especially for someone like Emerson — just a street kid — to have actually saved up.
A rose flush rises under his skin. He flashes another tentative look at her — smiling and not-smiling. Then he pulls something out of his side pocket, some striated shells, some shaped like little turbans. He puts them in Felice’s hand: miniature lightning whelk, sand dollar, and a ruffled conch. She admires them a moment, feels a smile come to her lips, then she drops them on the sand. “So?”
Emerson looks at the shells. “There’s this guy, Yann Hanran — he’s one of the really, really big-time strongmen? I met him at the Dixie Gym. He said he’d train me. I mean, he’s a real coach — not just some, you know… Like, just a really excellent guy. His gym is out in Portland.”
Felice’s stomach tightens: all this sincerity and weirdness. Her feelings oscillate toward and away from Emerson. “You’re going to move to California to go to a gym?” She nips at the side of a nail, wishing for a cigarette.
“Not California—Oregon.”
“So what, whatever, it’s retarded. You’re not going to Oregon—there’s nothing even out there.”
“Why not?” Emerson bounces a little on his haunches, shaking the skateboard. “Why not, why not?” It’s a bit of the frenetic energy she remembers from seeing him with the other shaved boys at the Green House. She inches away, calves flexing, ready to spring to her feet. “We can move wherever we want to,” he says. “Why not? Seriously. Let’s go see stuff.”
His shirt is wilting, collapsing like a tissue onto his skin. Sweat streaks his forehead, his skin looks tenderized — reminding her of the “white natives” she’d seen on a long-ago vacation with her family to Trinidad. Her father said they had lived on Trinidad for generations, migrating there from northern climates. But they all seemed to suffer from the sun; their skin gleaming red.
Felice has her mother’s sparkling, near-black hair, and a lighter version of her biscuit-colored skin. As far as she knows, they’re German and English, a little Scottish on her father’s side. Apparently there is also a grandmother in there from some biblical place, Bethlehem or Nazareth. Her mother had shown her the photo of a dreamy girl, elbow-propped on her bed. Avis turned the photo over, reading her name.
“Lamise,” her mother had said her name tentatively: the black-and-white snapshot was tucked in an envelope with old family photos. Felice held the photo by the edges.
Her mother wasn’t sure of her identity. “Maybe my great-grandmother. Or maybe a great-aunt. You know how Grandma is about the past…” Avis smiled, referring to her own mother. Avis had the impression that Lamise had married into the family.
Felice couldn’t stop staring at the photo: Lamise’s soft expression was lost in a dream; she seemed to communicate with hidden traceries in the air. Felice saw clearly her mother’s face and her own face — right there — as if superimposed on top of each other’s. This old image seemed to describe all sorts of inner sensations, to show Felice the sorts of things her own face couldn’t reveal. She’d returned the photo to her mother, but later she’d crept back into her mother’s bedroom closet, taken the photo out of its box, and hidden it in her own dresser drawer.
EVEN THOUGH IT’S EXCITING to hear someone talk about leaving — Miami is still the only home Felice has ever known. It’s never seriously occurred to her to really leave: the rest of the world, even New York and Paris, seems so dismal and drab, so far away. “I’m sorry.” She gathers her knees toward her chest, mirroring Emerson. “But that’s crazy. Moving to Oregon.”
“Why?”
“’Cause it is, okay? You gonna move to the other end of the earth, just to go to a gym? We got fifty million gyms right here, right on South Beach. And, Oregon? It’s like, practically the North Pole.”
Emerson’s face brightens. “But it isn’t really. That’s just what they say to keep outsiders from coming there and wrecking it. I’ve been studying it on the Internet. Yann says it’s got the prettiest summer and fall of anywhere. It’d be so cool — real seasons.”
Felice looks back down the beach, over the miasma of shimmering bodies, slanting umbrellas, sunglasses. Even with his old-soul face, there’s something about Emerson, his excitement, that makes her tired. It’s not fair, how everyone else always gets to be the kid. She stands abruptly and glares at Emerson. “Off the deck.”
“What?” He stands slowly. “What I say?”
Felice stomps up her skateboard and turns away from Emerson, starts walking.
“What? All I said was there’s seasons.”
“There’s seasons in Oregon — big fucking deal!” she roars, wheeling on him. He actually flinches, which she likes. “You know what your problem is? It’s you don’t know when to shut the fuck up.” She walks faster: she doesn’t know exactly why she’s so angry. Maybe something to do with imagining Emerson fitting in so perfectly in a place called Oregon — or Nebraska — or Cali-fucking-fornia. All those places like those creepy towns in North Florida they used to stop in on their way to visit her grandmother. Everyone in those places as pale as Felice’s father and brother. She remembers their pink-rimmed gazes over their soda straws. The way everyone in the restaurant would study her. Her mother used to say: You’re just so lovely: people want to look at you; they’re a little afraid of beauty.