SHE WAKES TO an ivory sky; over the water to the east, a plane tows a banner advertising the dance party at Automatic Slim’s. The air feels mossy, the sun rising in layers of new light, and Felice slowly sits up, her bones stiff. She inclines toward Emerson and examines his sleeping face. His size and his manner make him seem older than he is. Asleep, he has a boy’s face with a softly curving mouth and pale, almost transparent eyelashes and brows. She admires the fact of his strength: it strikes her as a kind of luxury.
If only, Felice thinks. If only I wanted to kiss him.
“Hey.” Emerson is awake, gazing at her from the grass.
“Hi,” she says moodily: she can’t help it.
“What’re you thinking about?”
She scowls, then tears up a handful of coarse grass and sprinkles it over Emerson’s head like confetti. “What. Is. It. With. You?”
He grins and bats away the grass. “I’m starving. It’s seriously time for food.”
Emerson says they can get breakfast at his friend Derek’s place. She thinks again — a strand of anxiety — that she has to get work. But as they start up Michigan Avenue, Felice realizes that it feels good to let someone steer the course of the day. What else would she be doing? Smoking on the beach? She’ll just stop for coffee, maybe a cigarette — then she’ll get going. It’s early and the air is soft as sea foam. As they walk, Emerson talks about his parents. “Jim — my dad — he was Mr. Activist Guy. But originally he was an engineer — he worked on the rockets at Cape Canaveral. Then he, like, became a hippie and moved to Fort Lauderdale. Totally a dad by accident. My mom too, pretty much. Neither of them was so into it.”
“Did you love them and all?” Felice feels as if, walking this way, hands in pockets, staring at the pebbly sidewalk, Emerson carrying her board, that she could ask or tell him anything.
He shifts the board to his other arm and the back of his hand brushes hers. “Well, yeah,” he says finally. “We fought a lot, but I guess we loved each other — me and Jim and Mandy, and my brother Tosh.”
“I have a brother too,” Felice says. “Stan.”
“Yeah? Did you used to fight?”
“Not really — not so much back before. But he got pretty pissed at me — I’m sure he hates me by now.” She smiles.
“Not exactly your fault you got born.”
“Well, he didn’t exactly beg to have a little sister, either.” But that’s not what she’d meant. Scuffling her sneakers in the white dust, she feels protective of Stanley, who’d seemed to Felice — even back when he was fifteen and she was eleven — heroic and slightly removed, reading about stuff like feeding the poor and cleaning the environment. “So, if you all loved each other,” she says, barely able to stop herself from adding, so fucking much, “so then why are you, like, living in the gutter and all?”
“I’m not living in the gutter.” Emerson laughs — a fine, clear tone. He puts one hand in his pocket and carries the board loosely in his other arm. “I don’t know. I just wanted to try living not in a house for a while. Or, well, not in the same house my family was in. And not at a college either. Jim says that college is just another arm of the military-industrial complex.”
“Pfft!” Felice curls her upper lip. “What isn’t?” That came directly from Stanley.
“What about you then? Why are you staying in a place like the Green House?”
‘Oh.” She shrugs heavily, aware of Emerson’s scrutiny. “No reason. Same as you.” She walks with her arms crossed.
Emerson is still considering — his eyes lifted as if reading something on the air. “I guess — for us it all kind of fell apart. Jim and Mandy never got married in the first place, so… They said it’s too hard on kids if you have to go through a divorce and all. So. Pretty thoughtful.” His smile is private, directed at the ground; Felice looks away, uncertain if he’s serious.
“They made it too easy — in a way — to fall apart. I mean, next thing we know, Dad’s kind of living with Sandra — this other lady with a baby son — over in Plantation. And Mom moved to Denver to take jewelry design classes.”
“They moved away from you? That really sucks.”
Emerson’s expression is mild. “Well, they were pretty decent about the whole deal. They talked to us tons about it before they went. I had some impulse control problems, I guess. I’d get a little wild. Jim still stopped by the old house sometimes and gave me and Tosh some cash for groceries and stuff. Of course Tosh would always spend it on weed mostly.” He smiles at her again, that flickering, uncertain expression, but now he’s looking at her.
“Fuck,” she says softly. She lets her knuckles graze his, their fingers intertwine for a few moments before she lets go. They walk several more blocks, silenced by traffic noise, and negotiate a chaotic intersection. Then they pass a residential hedge tall as a gate and the traffic howl diminishes and the street opens to tall, wide trees like those in the Gables. Felice has never been in this neighborhood before — sticking to places she knows — crowded, touristy spots on the beach and a few secret street rat places — avoiding the police and kids from school. She feels exposed and anxious walking up this stately street: there are houses with circular drives, velvety emerald lawns, and children’s bicycles on the lawns. “So where’s your brother now?”
“Tosh?” Emerson half shrugs. “I don’t totally know. He works as some kind of assistant in a medical lab at MIT. I’m too much of a waste product for him. He’s really into, like, motivation and incentives and excellence and shit.”
“And pot.” Felice smirks and Emerson nods and laughs. He pulls a ragged frond from a banana tree and fans her with it, the dry edges flapping against her hair. She swats it back at him, laughing.
DEREK LIVES IN A big house, mid-beach, behind an ornate iron gate on Pine Tree Drive. Felice admires the place, its vaulted ceiling and big fir beams, an entry filled with flat rugs and beaded vases and wooden sculptures that look vaguely African to Felice. She immediately recognizes the young, beefy boy with the shaved head who answers the door. “Wow.” She touches a curved lintel as they enter the main room. “You live here? I thought you lived at the Green House.”
Derek looks around the expansive room with distaste. “My so-called dad lives here when he’s not out with his ho. I’m not supposed to even be here when he’s not. But, like when is he here?” He knocks on a waist-high silver sculpture of a elephant with human arms and legs. It writhes on its wood base on the floor. “Conk-conk. You wouldn’t believe what this fucker cost. Steve-o got it like in Pakistan.” He picks up a small dark carving of a woman’s body with a bird’s head, a sharp, open beak. “Here”—he thrusts it at Felice—“it’s for you — take it.”
“It’s your dad’s, dumbass,” she says, scowling, and replaces it on an empty bookshelf.
“Whatev.” Derek picks up a half-dollar-sized flat silver heart with a dagger through its center, then an old watch that was positioned in an artistic display of timepieces. He slips them into his pocket. “I’ll sell all this crap eventually. He always gets more.”
They follow him through the room into a bright doorway. It’s been years since Felice has been inside a nice kitchen — granite counters crowned with chrome appliances, clean glints of untouched things. Like the kitchens of her school friends’ mothers. Her own mother’s kitchen had a big convection oven and fans — the counters glowed but her appliances looked battered and industrial. Felice sniffs, half hoping for the flour vapor of her home, but the air here is flat and empty. Her hands tremble as if with reawakened muscle memory: she tugs on the heavy fridge door — its tomblike chamber spilling milky light. Expensive, nearly empty shelves: film canisters, six cobalt bottles of water, a package of bacon and carton of eggs. “What a waste,” she mutters.