“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.”
The bones in her face loosen. She hears a whining in her right ear.
“Come on — don’t give me that stupid look. You know it already. Don’t act astonished. You’re so pretty you’re practically a different freaking species. And yeah, how exactly did you accomplish that? Well, fuck you — you didn’t. You were l-u-c-k-y. Your daddy fucked your mommy and your genes lined up in a nice pattern. Well, hooray for you. I’m rich, sort of, and you’re stupid-gorgeous, and Sonny over there? He is insanely smart and honest, and in every way known to man, he is so much better than you or me. He beats his ass working. He is gonna go everywhere. I know. He started from absolute nothing — less than nothing — no parents, no money, begging for freaking food out on the street, okay? And here’s my point—” Derek slides forward, his stomach folding and his elbows digging into his knees. “It’s fine if you want to screw around with him and torture him out of his mind. Dump him. All the usual girl bullshit. But I want to emphasize that you gotta stay the fuck out of his way. Right? Because he does not need some scrawny bitch dragging him around to hell and back, messing up his training, fucking up his plans. Okay? Capisce?”
Felice releases her breath in a thin stream, almost a laugh.
“We cool?”
“Jesus — get the fuck away from me.”
“What? We can be friends — you don’t have to get messed up about it.”
Emerson emerges from his shower, a bath towel wrapped around his waist, and says to Derek, “Hey man, let me borrow some clothes?”
“What’s wrong with your own crappy clothes, asshole?” Derek stands and kicks the sweaty pile of shorts and T.
Emerson darts a glance at Felice. “I’m not going back to the Green House anymore.”
“Oh, right, the big plan,” Derek drawls. Still, he comes back with some clothes and Emerson turns away modestly, pulling shorts on under his towel. He drags over another Adirondack chair and sits across from Felice, their knees almost touching, his borrowed T-shirt draped over one shoulder like a waiter’s towel. Felice is angry, but now she has to stay, to stake her claim on Emerson. She felt a burst of competitive adrenaline after Derek’s dumb little speech, recognizing some element of truth in it. Emerson sits back, showing off his sloping chest and arms, gleaming with drops of shower spray. He smiles at Felice, one arm resting along the back of his seat, a cavelike space between his forearm and chest. She notes the even lift of his smile; a note of lilac soap drifts from his skin. She moves to perch on the flat arm of Emerson’s chair and places her hand experimentally over his: a kind of startle runs through his body. He lifts one thumb, claiming her fingers.
The sky grows overcast with mounting summer thunderheads but there’s no rain, just a dense, hot curtain of air. The afternoon is pure languor. Derek lights a crackling joint, which Emerson waves away — Felice leans toward the joint, then smiles coolly at Derek. “Better not.”
“So your brother owns Freshly Grown?” Derek says, as if none of the earlier conversation happened, his expression once again meditative. “He actually owns it.”
Felice looks away.
“I wonder if he’d like to expand his operations, carry some, like, new product…”
“Jesus.”
“That store has got major clientele. Man — all those old hippies, fuck.”
“Forget it,” Felice snaps.
Emerson’s gaze turns from Derek to Felice. Derek gives Emerson a lift of the brow, then disappears into the house to make his calls to “associates.” “So what’s all that?” Emerson asks. “What’s Freshly Grown?”
Felice crosses her arms in a scissor over her chest. “Why do you even hang out with that guy? Such an asshole.”
“What?” Emerson turns toward the house. “Derek? Nah. He’s just, like, a businessman.” He explains that Derek sells drugs to other people who sell drugs — all kinds, amphetamines, cocaine, pot, but mostly he specializes in MDMA, “otherwise known as Ecstasy,” because, Emerson continues gravely, “he believes in it.”