“You good?” he asked plainly, his face strangely neutral and his eyes intently not on me.
“Yeah. All good. Let’s go,” I replied, matching his tone and posture. I guess we were going back to normal like nothing just happened. I felt as if I did something wrong but couldn’t imagine what it could’ve been.
“Aight, let’s go,” he replied while pivoting towards the nearby stairways, hand extended back in offer to me. I had completely forgotten that we came here hand-in-hand until it was offered to me. Jon looked back and saw that I made no move to take it and furled his brow. He left the hand hovering for a moment longer, then used it to push the door open. Three flights of stairs and another doorway later, I was blinded by the searing sunlight.
****
My mom had me working back-to-back 12-hour shifts the following week and I had no free time or energy to go to Fountain Park. In the few moments when I wasn’t running around serving customers, washing dishes, cooking food, or wiping down tables, my mind would inevitably wander to Jon. We never exchanged numbers or last names. I wouldn’t have been sure that his name was even Jon had several people not also called him by that name. Hell, I didn’t even know if he spelled his name with an ‘h’ or not. I really didn’t know anything about him. I wondered what he was doing and if he had looked for me. Had he asked for me, surely, some of my friends would have told him the reason I hadn’t been around.
After a week, the details of our time hiding from the storm together were starting to blur and get fuzzy edges in my mind the way all memories do. I spent one entire day trying to remember the color of his shirt. I honestly couldn’t recall, though my mind was telling me that it was white. But did it have a pattern or design on it? I didn’t know. Everything from that afternoon was distilled into feelings and sensations. The way his fingers felt in me. The softness of his lips against my neck. The warmth of his breath and tongue against my skin. The taste and weight of him in my mouth. Since I had worked so many days in a row, I begged my mom to let me leave early at 9pm on Friday. I heard from Adam that Malcolm, the lone adult in my immediate group, was having a rooftop party at his building. Fountain Park people could roll through if they didn’t come empty handed. Malcolm was generous and had a job, but he didn’t have the means to host a party fully, especially if all of Fountain Park showed up. It wouldn’t be until 9:30pm that I got to leave, but I had boxes of food ready to go and I couldn’t wait to see Jon again.
On the way to the party, I stopped at a bench to spray myself down with Honeysuckle body mist from Bath and Body Works. I always carried a bottle in my backpack so I could mask the smell of food on my clothes and skin. As for my hair, it was a lost cause. There wasn’t anything I could do short of washing it in the shower that would rid the slight yet seemingly permanent fragrance of the deep fryer in my hair. Only weirdos smelled someone else’s hair anyways, so I wasn’t too worried. I rang up to the apartment and walked the three flights of stairs up to Malcom’s place. From there, I knew to climb through the kitchen window to access the rickety fire stairs that went up to the roof. The building was located on the same busy street as Fountain Park. It only had four floors, but the flat roof spanned between the busy street it faced and the dark alley access in the back. It offered a bird’s eye view of the Friday evening bar crowd on one side and views of the dumpers and parked cars on the side of the alley. The space was well-lit in the front from the all the streetlights and darker in the back since the alley only had a few lights for security. Both buildings on either side were taller, so the roof was flanked by walls on the left and right, making the space seem more private than it really was.
Screams and squeals of my name greeted me when my head and boxes of food appeared past the decorative brick crenellation. I hadn’t even fully ascended the fire steps to the roof yet when the food boxes were wretched from me by unknown hands. Everyone knew my family had a restaurant and the denizens of Fountain Park were often beneficiaries of soon-to-expire foods and other culinary castaways from the shop. It was no surprise that my arrival, along with the usual food that accompanied me, elicited such joy from the crowd. The small roof looked like it was over capacity and probably posed a safety hazard for the people up top and the people immediate below it. With both hands now free, I pushed myself up and over the last bit to land with a thump on the roof. I winced, hoping that my landing hadn’t been too loud for the residents on the top floor. Malcolm was there to greet and pull me into his signature bear hug and deep belly laugh.
“Don’t worry about it. The neighbors are up here,” he explained with a small laugh. “Always so polite, you.” He laughed again and ruffled my hair as if he were petting a puppy. Being the eldest in our group, Malcolm fashioned himself as a bit of a big brother to the kids at Fountain Park. Sure, he bought cigarettes and alcohol for us, but he also mediated fights, comforted us through break-ups, and offered solid advice on a wide array of issues. Because he lived so close to the park, his place was a place of refuge for those who were displaced, no matter the reason. The offer was always made on the condition that it was temporary, and he expected people to find our own way sooner than later. I was never put in a position to take him up on his offer, but I knew that Josh had on several occasions. Besides being one the nicest people I had ever met and known, Malcolm also had the most piercings and tattoos out of anyone I have ever laid eyes on.
Once settled on both feet and freed from Malcolm’s firm hug, I did a cursory glance around to see who was here. Even I couldn’t deny to myself that I was looking for Jon. His height alone would have made him immediately visible, but there was no silhouette that could have been his. It was early yet though. I looked around again to see if I could find any of my friends. Malcolm added helpfully, “Yeah, they’re all here somewhere.” Could he read minds or was I just super obvious? Probably the latter. On the second sweep, I saw Calvin. He was illuminated by one of streetlights in the alley. Of course, Calvin put himself somewhere so people could see him and what he was doing. He had his whole body pressed against a girl, one hand holding his weight against the brick building next door, the other stroking the her chin. His lips brushed on hers as he talked. The girl was young, maybe 3-4 years younger than me from the look of it, which is a big difference given our teen years. The young girl had clearly made an effort on her appearance and clearly bit off more than she could chew coming to this party. Her clothes seemed too curated and hair too done up to truly fit in. She was gonna be as easy a prey like a wounded baby gazelle in the Serengeti.
I could pretend otherwise all I wanted, but my body remembered Calvin and began to react to him. My heart started to pound, moisture coated my palms, the base of my neck and in the crevice of my small breasts. Most tragic of all, wetness pooled at my center. Our meeting was an intense whirlwind and ended just as quickly as it began, but my whole body apparently remembered him and still wanted him. I saw now that ours was his standard greeting. He was just being Calvin. And in this moment, he was being Calvin right up against another girl, no matter that the girl was much too young for him. He either was checking for an audience, or he must have felt me staring, because he suddenly turned and was looking right at me. My eyes were still locked on him, unable to look away, when he leaned in to kiss the girl, the same way he had kissed me when we met, all while maintaining steady eye contact with me. I could see the girl swallow against the hand on her neck, her eyes closed, lips parting invitingly. I even saw the shiver that ran through her body before it went limp like mine did when he kissed me. My mind had replaced the girl’s body with my own. I could feel everything like it was happening to me again in real time. When the girl completely surrendered to him and slumped back again the wall, Calvin smirked and winked at me.
I turned around to hide from my own embarrassment of getting wet at the sight of him and the mortification from being caught staring at him with another girl, so thankful for the patches of darkness on the roof. That and I didn’t want to witness whatever was going to happen next. My stomach was twisting and I felt hot, like I was going to throw up. I felt insane every time I fell into Calvin’s radius. Instead of vomiting, I focused on the groups of rowdy drunks who were stumbling to their next destination on the street below. Just like my last interaction with Calvin, if one could call whatever just happened an interaction, no one else seemed to have noticed the complex drama that was unfolding in my mind. Everyone was engrossed in their own group conversations, some were sipping out of bottles in brown paper bags, the usual guitar crowd were singing and strumming music softly while the others were dimly lit by the orange dots of their cigarettes. On that thought, I fumbled around in my backpack for a moment before I could find my own cigarettes. Smoking would occupy my hands, mouth, and mind nicely. The first warm exhale from my lungs felt absolutely cathartic.
A few inhales later, I felt a familiar presence near me. I heard the tell-tale jingling of the wallet chain and various ear piercings before I heard Malcolm speak. “You hiding from Calvin?”
Shocked again by his intuition, I made a show of looking insulted. “What? As if!”
“I saw,” he said simply as if that information was enough to be damning evidence.
“I wasn’t looking at him, I just saw him,” my reply came out sounding more petulant than I intended. Malcolm looked pointedly at me. I wasn’t convinced by my own with retort either. I figured it was probably better if I didn’t’ say anything more incriminating, so I pulled a long drag from my cigarette to fill my mouth with smoke before offering it to Malcolm.
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