The Girls in Queens: A Novel

2006

These girls are the truth."

Brian had remained stoic when he introduced us that way to his lawyer near the courthouse in Kew Gardens. He looked at Kelly and then me, faint roses blooming beneath the dark stubble of his cheeks.

"They got my back like family." He’d smiled then, a single finger resting on the back of my hand where I gripped my purse, the skin at the corners of his eyes folding like sunshine filtered through blinds. "Better than family."

Brian’s words from that day echoed in my ears as I walked up to the suburban front door, sweat curling the hair at my temples into tight, angry spirals that mirrored the manicured cypresses lining either side of the yard. It was confusing, how proud I’d felt when he described us that way, me and Kelly, his girls, who’d been there from jump, since childhood. How proud I was to witness his success as a high school, and then college, baseball player. How lucky, I’d thought, to have been his first girlfriend, to hold that status entirely on my own, separate from Kelly, who so often was the one of us booed up at any given time.

Behind the red-painted door in front of me, framed by clear glass panels that invited strangers to look inside, was a border beyond which I could not return: Janet. Stepping into the world in which this suburban girl lived, a world where people felt entitled to the safety of unarmored windows, meant, I suspected, accepting a truth about Brian that I’d never been able to grasp entirely, like the tail of a mouse in the dark of the night as it scurries around a corner, always just a disorienting inch out of reach.

Pressing my thumb against the smooth black button of the doorbell, worn, I imagined, from scores of dinner-party guests and prom dates calling with corsage in tow, scenes from a safe suburban life I’d only ever seen in movies, I knew one thing for sure: Kelly was going to kill me for this.

I toed the wooden slats of the porch with my boot and in my pocket fingered the sharp grooves of my apartment keys, metal against flesh to ground me in the moment, keep me from running away. This is what I wanted, I reminded myself.

The seconds passed, heavy with anticipation, but I heard nothing but birdsong in the cool autumn air. A twig snapped in the distance, but when I turned to look, I saw only a branch’s burnt-orange leaves shaking on a large elm in the front yard. How could I ever think I’d have anything in common with a girl who lived here? How could I trust her?

I took one last breath and turned to leave, when the slice and sweep of the front door opening startled me.

You’re early, Janet said, popping one white earbud out and narrowing her hazel eyes at me. She wore ratty old gym shorts and an oversize JUMP ROPE FOR HEART T-shirt that reminded me of field days in elementary school with Kelly, who always sat out the games because her mother never gave her any cash to participate.

Sorry, I stammered, thinking her appearance didn’t match what I expected of this pristine-looking home. I overestimated the distance from the train station. I can leave if you’re not—

No. Janet reached out an arm. I was just working out. It helps when . . . She trailed off. Well, whenever I don’t want to be in my head anymore.

Hmm, I said, nodding, my brain filling in all the scenes Brian had painted for me with her face, her body, in them. What she looked like when Brian first saw her after his game, what she looked like at the party, in her dorm room . . .

Let me change, Janet said.

She pulled the door open wider and stepped aside to let me in.

Then I’ll be ready to talk.

1996

Kelly crouched over, a single finger against my lips, her breath humid and sickly sweet from the Sour Patch Kids we’d stolen from the Indian deli down the street. She pressed me down onto the ground of the abandoned overgrown lot next to her family’s home and whispered in my ear.

You can still smell her cigarette.

She was right. Above the fresh scent of overturned soil and empty Doritos bags, it lingered heavy around the two of us. If I waited, if I searched for it, I could still smell the smoke from her mother’s Virginia Slim wafting toward us on a breeze that barely tickled the heads of the tall weeds surrounding us. I blinked at her in recognition of the danger we were in, and she flopped her skinny bones next to mine with a distracted huff.

My bare shoulders still flattening the patchy grass of the sloping earth behind me, I turned my head to hers and saw that her eyes were clear and focused on something straight ahead, in the sky. I inched my pinkie finger inside her clenched, clammy fist, and she squeezed it. Digging my jelly sandals into the gravel to lift my hips, I shifted over quietly so that no one could detect us hiding there. To our left, trucks barreled down the road and onto Queens Boulevard, rolling metal doors clanging against iron bumpers. In the distance, we could hear plastic skateboard wheels growing closer as the new kid, Brian, sped down the hill.

How long you think we’ll have to wait? I asked. But before Kelly could answer, I heard Brian scrape his skateboard against the sidewalk in an abrupt stop. Through the weeds, we could see him crouch down and squint toward us.

¿Quién está allí? he asked. Who’s there?

Brian and his mother had been introduced as newcomers during mass one Sunday, having recently arrived in New York from La Paz.

Shh, I whispered over Kelly’s body, emphatically shooing him away with my hand. Go away!

I could make out the shape of his shoulders shrugging before his skateboard clattered once again against the sidewalk as he sped away. Kelly didn’t move.

I nudged my head closer to hers on the ground and searched the sky to find what Kelly had been watching. It was a plane. Two planes, in fact, crisscrossing the clouds, and from our vantage point, seemed to only narrowly avoid crashing into each other. It was hypnotizing to zero in on the space between the flashing red lights underneath the aircraft, each beat taking longer than the last.

I blinked and refocused my eyes on Kelly’s dry, cracked bottom lip.

Coming or going? I asked.

Coming, she said. She’d been looking at the other plane, descending into LaGuardia.

From Cancún, she said, nodding.

Her older brother had gone there on spring break a few months ago. He was the first person in either of our families who had ever flown somewhere on an actual vacation, besides our fathers. Kelly’s left often to return to family she had never met in Colombia, and mine never looked back when he left for Puerto Rico via Miami when I was three. As far as kids, Patrick was the only one who’d ever had the pleasure of seeing his name printed on a boarding pass except for Timothy, the high school senior who lived in the spare bedroom of Kelly’s house, and from whom we were now hiding.

How do you know? I whispered.

I felt her bony shoulder shrug beside me in response.

I turned my attention back toward the plane that had by then nearly disappeared in the distance, and I imagined all the waves in the Atlantic Ocean it would have to cross over to get to Italy, or to France, or to Greece. All countries I’d only run my stubby fingers over on the topographical globe in our elementary school library.

From the shallow grave we dug ourselves to hide inside of in this abandoned Woodside lot, it was hard to imagine tiny little people inside those tin birds, always leaving, always coming. In this neighborhood, people seemed to always be arriving anew or moving away. But never us. No, we had been planted there right from the start on Clement Moore Avenue.

* * *

Her house always smelled of ferrets and melted butter. It was one of the few old, yellow clapboard homes on the street that predated the expansion of Queens Boulevard. When the city widened the road, they dumped the rubble at her grandmother’s doorstep, forcing the family, newly arrived from Cork, to build a steep set of concrete stairs to the new hill paved along Clement Moore, which became home to more and more three-story, red brick apartment buildings.

The steps had become chipped and worn by the generations of Irish, and then Irish Colombian, schoolchildren running up, away, and always back down again. Inside, their sponge of a sea-green carpet hid stains created by animals and kids alike; in addition to the two kids, her mother, Frances, took in every stray, human and nonhuman, she could find. The rolling French pocket doors that separated Kelly’s bedroom from the living room had long ago bounced off their tracks, allowing gray feathers to float from Frances’s living room birdcage and land on the colorful ruana—the sole gift her father had brought her from Colombia—that lay across the foot of Kelly’s bed.

Some women are like that, Mami had said once after suffering through a coffee with Frances, straining to hear her over squawking birds. Mami kept her purse clamped shut in her lap the whole time.

Like what? I’d asked as we walked back to our one-bedroom apartment down the street.

Scared to be alone.

The latest stray to arrive at Casa Morales (Frances kept the name after the divorce) was Timothy. Timothy was a senior on winter break at Monsignor McClancy when his parents kicked him out for getting a blow job from a sophomore girl in their basement. Patrick, who spent a year with Timothy on varsity before enrolling at Baruch, convinced Frances to offer him a room in their house so he could finish out the year and graduate high school.

He told her it was the Christian thing to do. As if. Kelly had rolled her eyes when she first explained the new housemate sleeping in their converted old utility closet.

Frances took to Timothy right away, I could tell. She saved him the biggest baked potato, served him iced tea first. He was attractive, but as an eleven-year-old only child to a single mother, the presence of any man, really, was reason enough for excitement.

Timothy had a thick neck that had tanned peach by June, and wore scuffed Timberland boots as if he already knew he was destined to work construction. He had curly brown hair that he kept cropped close in a fade and offset with a sparkling blue stud earring. It was his birthstone, he had told us.

Virgo, he’d said. Like a virgin. Do you know what that means?

Kelly and I broke into a rendition of Madonna’s song immediately, swinging our neon, Lycra-clad hips and running our hands through our frizzy hair.

He smiled and his healthy pink lips curled at the sides. I would spend hours in the mirror that summer staring at my own pale mauve lips, Herbalife commercials and lead paint contamination PSAs blaring between Ricki Lake segments in the background, wondering if I might be sick or deficient in some kind of vitamin, because mine weren’t the same color.

Sometimes he would sit with us on the shaded back stoop of the house that overlooked a steep, littered valley of freight train tracks that rumbled to life every twelve hours like clockwork, at 2:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. The tracks were separated by a fence along the cracked asphalt of the Moraleses’ driveway, at the end of which sat the sole tree on their property. Timothy had built a swing in woodshop and installed it on one of the tree’s branches to thank Frances for letting him stay at her house. Kelly and I took turns pushing each other on it as high as we could, reaching for the tracks all spring.

Timothy had a harmonica that we thought was stupid.

Who do you think you are, Blues Traveler? I asked him once while he played.

He flourished the end of his song with what looked like big, fat, turkey-tail hands flapping against the instrument and strained to widen his green eyes.

Kelly, her bony, narrow thighs and hips too tiny for her hand-me-down shorts, slid in close to sit next to Timothy and rested her hand on his knee.

Can I try?

He looked at her and, for a second, I could see that he was nervous. He raised a scarred eyebrow at me briefly, but then quickly flashed that strawberry-pink gum smile at us both.

Nah, I don’t think so, Kels. He tugged on her right earlobe and brushed her cheek, freckled by the sun, with the back of his hand.

"It’d be like we were swapping spit, he had said. Like we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Kissing or something."

Kelly took her hand off his jeans.

You don’t want to kiss me, do you?

We both erupted in nervous laughter and Kelly screamed, Gross! as she leapt up from the pebbled steps, but not before discreetly swiping the harmonica sticking out of his jeans pocket. She shot out across the concrete yard and swung the broken chain-link gate open, and it bounced back on its hinges with a loud whine, as she ran into the empty lot next door. I followed closely behind, not wanting to be left alone with Timothy, and found her in the plot of soil we’d excavated to be our hideout. The dugout, we’d called it, long before we knew all that much about baseball.

She lifted the large, flat rock under which we hid a hand-me-down Spider-Man lunch box full of chica chica cards, matchboxes and loose cigarettes, and a cubic zirconia ring we found on the schoolyard. She popped the lid and tossed Timothy’s harmonica inside with a loud clatter.

Shh, I giggled. He’ll hear it!

Kelly slid the cover back on and smiled without teeth. Her eyes were just a little too far apart, and sometimes when she had this calm, satisfied look on her face, she looked like a frog that had swallowed a fly.

Let him.

* * *

On the third straight day of a New York City heat wave that July, Kelly and I retreated to the cool, damp air of her basement to read the latest installment in my fan fiction saga based on The X-Files.

Kelly flipped the last page closed, revealing dollar signs and zeros; the manuscript was printed on the backs of old medical bills from Mami’s job at St. Vincent’s. The maintenance men always knew to save a box for her to take home before trashing them.

So, Kelly said, blowing silky strands of black hair from her face, the chick is Mulder? Or—

I snatched it out of her hands.

Never mind, I said, rolling it up and shoving it into my back pocket.

No, no, Kelly said. I liked it!

I tugged at the hem of my shorts, which were already too tight from the beginning of the summer, and sat down. I’d grown several inches taller—and fuller—than Kelly in the last few months.

Forget it.

Kelly humored my fan fiction, especially when I wrote her into it, but couldn’t be bothered to watch much television beyond what was on at my house when she came over.

I’m a liver, she’d said, not a watcher.

You’re an internal organ? I asked, eliciting a groan.

"How you such a nerd sometimes, yo?"

Our forearms on the cold concrete floor in the one furnished room of the basement, where her older brother used to make out with girls, we listened to Boyz II Men cassette tapes on his boom-box for a while before we decided to explore the dark corners of the cellar. Kelly and I regularly searched for love letters, or mix tapes, or condom wrappers, anything to piece together the intimate lives we knew the adults around us must have lived. Toward the back of the house, where cellar doors swung out onto the concrete backyard, a washer and dryer sat underneath lines of rope hung from the exposed wooden beams of the ceiling to dry delicates. That day, we found the silk and cotton boxers that had come out of Timothy’s wash hanging on the lines.

"Oh là là!" Kelly said, as she tugged a black pair with red kisses on it down from the clothespin on the line. She held it up in front of her face and made it dance between pinched fingers.

I laughed.

How the hell he got these kinds of boxers? I asked. You think your mom bought them for him?

Kelly let the pair drop from her fingers and sucked her teeth.

My mom don’t buy him shit, she said, looking up at the line for another one.

Do you think he’s cute?

Kelly rolled her eyes as she ripped another silk pair down and threw it on my face.

I tore it off and tossed it back at her. Yo, that’s disgusting!

What, she said, cocking her brow. I heard you say you thought he was cute.

Did not! I leaned on the clothesline with my right arm and caught myself in the mirror above the sink. I sucked in my stomach and adjusted the tank top over my chest; Mami had graduated me from sports bras to the polyester sheen of Conway’s back wall a few weeks ago for my eleventh birthday, and the underwire dug uncomfortably into my rib cage. "I asked if you thought he was."

Kelly pretended to ignore me and ran her hands along the line of boxers as if she were a rich woman admiring her art collection.

Besides—I shrugged—even if I did think he was cute, I don’t want to rub my face in his underwear.

Kelly sighed, tired of me, I could tell. I got the sense oftentimes that I was too dumb for her, or too prudish. Too naive, for sure.

What’s the big deal, you baby, she said, gesturing toward the washing machine. It’s not like they’re dirty.

She ripped down a cotton pair with a silkscreen print of Porky Pig on the butt and threw it at me, but that time I caught it.

She smiled and opened her arms wide, grabbing onto the lines overhead, and ran her face across each pair of shorts, one long motorboat through a sea of his unmentionables.

I laughed at her audacity, her brazen disregard for other people’s personal property. I wished I could be more like Kelly.

What are you doing?

His voice was deep and reverberated against the low ceiling of the cellar, stopping my laughter cold. Timothy stood behind us with an empty laundry basket at his hip. His face was hard; I couldn’t quite read if he was mad at us, but there was heat in his eyes, an excited self-awareness of the scene he’d just walked into.

I looked at Kelly, but she didn’t look scared. She looked amused. Defiant. As if she’d been expecting this.

Laundry. She shrugged, a blue-and-orange pair of Mets boxers hanging off her fingertip.

He snatched it from her and threw it in the plastic basket at his hip. Just as quickly, he grabbed her wrist in his thick fist and twisted it behind her. Kelly was so short she only came up to his chest. He pulled her close to him.

You wanna do my laundry? he asked, his voice frighteningly intimate. It wasn’t the same voice he used when he played his harmonica for us on the stoop.

Kelly didn’t look at me, or him, but at the line of clothes above her. She didn’t seem shocked or afraid at all—only embarrassed. She tucked her chin to her shoulder to turn toward him.

You’re hurting me again, she said low, as if reminding a scene partner of their lines. Not so hard.

Timothy turned to raise his eyebrows at me.

You want to feel my boxers?

He dropped the laundry basket onto the concrete floor and the sound echoed throughout the basement. Underneath it, I could hear the metal of his belt buckle coming undone.

I gasped and took a step back, my bare heel banging into the empty washing machine behind me. It was like a gong, the sound of its quivering hollow walls echoing through the house and snapping Kelly out of her dim fog. She elbowed Timothy away from her hard. He staggered back, but trained his hungry eyes on me instead.

I saw you, he said, his right arm reaching for me, the alarm of leather and metal sounding off at his waist. You wanted this, too.

His fingers barely grazed my neck before I ducked out past him and ran for the far back door. I made it up the warped wooden steps and out into the yard, where Frances sat with a freshly lit Virginia Slim. I ran past her and past the broken fence, losing one of my chunky jelly sandals in the process.

When I got to the dugout, I hugged my knees at the far edge of the dirt lot where the tall weeds grew strong and thick from the ground. It wasn’t until Kelly followed shortly thereafter, trailed by Frances’s coughing wails for us to come back and apologize for being rude to Timothy, that I realized I was still clutching a laundered pair of his underwear.

Kelly lay panting, back flat on the ground next to me.

Has he done that before?

She cut her eyes at me. There I was again: so silly, so naive.

She propped herself up on one elbow, her eyes still on mine, sizing me up.

We practice, she said.

Practice what? I asked.

Shh! She clamped her perpetually wet palm over my mouth.

Kissing, she said. We practice kissing. It’s like a game.

I stared at her, not comprehending what she was saying even though, on some level, I had suspected it for some time.

But he’s almost eighteen, I said.

Kelly lowered herself back onto the ground, and I could feel the wall go back up between us.

If we listened, we could just make out Frances apologizing to Timothy and offering to buy him new clothes. Occasionally she would shout out in our general direction, Come get your shoe! or You lost your shoe, dingbat. And she’d laugh, and we’d hear Timothy laugh, too. I dug into the cool soil with the bare toes of my non-sandaled foot and imagined myself as a worm crawling into the earth.

Suddenly, Kelly scrambled to her knees, snatched the boxers that I’d been gripping in my fist, and pawed at the ground like a dog with a bone.

What are you doing? I flicked dirt off my thighs and peeked back through the weeds, my body still humming with adrenaline. Why don’t you just stuff it inside the lunch box with everything else?

I can’t leave this out, Kelly grunted. It’s too dangerous. I have to hide it. Her hands were claws, the star-shaped plastic ring on her finger collecting more and more soil like a miniature trowel.

Dangerous for who? I asked, but Kelly only lifted a wrist to wipe sweat from her brow. Beneath the cars whizzing by and the cicadas above, I could hear Frances’s lighter catch in the distance.

I pulled myself to my knees alongside Kelly and grabbed clumps of earth to pile on top of the garish fabric. I wanted to bury this moment and forget it as soon as possible. But Kelly, it appeared, was burying treasure. She hadn’t put the boxers in the lunch box with our other naughty items; this was something else, something precious, and something that was hers alone. I got to run away, I understood, but