1
I’m throwing an Independence Day party, which should mean a good time, but I’ve got a bad feeling about tonight. We’re about a month and a half late for the Fourth of July, but senior year starts tomorrow—class of 2007, baby—and that makes this our last night of freedom.
An exclusive soiree on a New York City rooftop. Really, I’ve outdone myself. So what if “exclusive” actually means “small guest list”? And sure, by “New York City” I technically mean “working-class Brooklyn.” And okay, my building is only four stories high, so the view is mostly other, taller brick buildings, but that iconic New York skyline is only a few miles away. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there, sparkling, full of life. Like the promise of senior year. The night sizzles with that promise—with that unquantifiable sense that anything can happen.
My best friend, Sof, marches toward me, pulling a boy behind her. “Jimmy,” she says, “meet Dwayne.”
“Hi, Dwayne! You got the stuff?”
Without a word, Dwayne unzips his backpack, and Sof and I peek inside. The JanSport is heavy with all sorts of illegal fireworks, and Sof and I look at the loot like two gorgeous pirates opening a treasure chest. Wouldn’t be an Independence Day party without fireworks.
“Awesome.” I point Dwayne toward the spot where he can start setting up.
“You sure your neighbors won’t mind?” Sof asks.
“The building rules are clear: No loud noise after ten P.M.” She’s got her phone in her hand and I reach for it, flipping it open to look at the time. “It’s only 9:04.” I flip the phone closed again with a satisfying snap. “We’re good.”
So why do I feel a gnawing sense of unease? A vague worry that fits me like a dress that’s one size too small. Sometimes, when I feel worried for no reason, I’m sure it’s the residual effects of my mom’s overbearingness. If my mother were here, she’d say there are too many people on this roof, that this is reckless, idiotic, courting danger, and—at 9:04 P.M.—way too late in the evening to be having fun. But my mother isn’t here—she’s two floors down, too engrossed in an episode of Heridas de Amor to have any idea what a good job her daughter is doing hosting the first party of the year/last party of the summer.
“Is that Big Rally?” Sof asks.
I follow her gaze, peeking over the roof wall to look at the courtyard below.
My eyes widen when I spot him. “He’s back.”
* * *
I burst through the heavy courtyard door, the hinges groaning just slightly louder than my neighbor does upon noticing me. He sits in his usual spot, an ancient Adirondack chair that was once blue but thanks to weather, age, and Vitaly’s near-constant use is now driftwood gray.
“Welcome home, Big Rally! How was Mexico?”
Vitaly shuts the notebook on his lap and tucks his pen into his polo pocket. “El Salvador. And it was productive.”
I fight the urge to roll my eyes. It would’ve been so easy for him to say great, nice, or even a dorky cool! But Vitaly has to prove he is above a good time. Talk around the building is that he spent six weeks in El Salvador helping to build houses for disadvantaged families, the noblest of college application fodder. Though there is also talk that he joined a real construction company down there to make enough money to cover his first year of college. I can’t be sure which story is true, but when I told my mom about how the boy from 1F had left the country to build houses and how maybe I could do that, too, she said, “¿Tú? ¿Construyendo casas?”
When she stopped laughing, she told me I wasn’t going anywhere.
The little Moleskine notebook on Vitaly’s lap begins to quiver with the subtle bouncing of his right knee. Is he impatient? Nervous? Both? Vitaly never seems all that happy to be talking to me, and I can’t for the life of me understand why.
“Who spends the summer on a tropical island and comes back without a tan?”
I guess maybe it’s because of questions like that. But can you blame me? He’s so white I could ski off his nose.
Vitaly looks like he really wants me to leave, which is precisely why I plop down in the chair next to him.
“El Salvador isn’t an island. Don’t you have a party to host?”
I grin. “Come. You might have some fun for once in your life.”
Vitaly holds up his notebook like a crossing guard would a stop sign. “Can’t. Working.”
“School hasn’t even started yet. What could you possibly be working on, your valedictorian speech?”
“Something like that.”
I stare at him expectantly, and he sighs through flared nostrils, resigning himself to explaining. “It’s my plan for senior year.”
“Plan?”
“My intentions, goals, due dates for college applications and scholarships, course load optimization, scheduling extracurriculars—”
I stop him before he starts ranking his top five pencils. “You need a party more than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“How good of a party can it really be if you’re down here with me?”
Ha.
When people at school find out Vitaly is my neighbor, they ask me what the quiet boy in class is really like. Because someone so bland in literally every sense of the word (fair skin, blond hair—he’s even wearing a polo the color of mayo right now) must be hiding some magnificent secret life. But the truth is, with Vitaly, you get what you see. He’s a boy doing homework, sitting by himself in a concrete courtyard on the last night of summer, actively avoiding a party.
“My party is great,” I say. “I’m having a great time.”
And though I am the picture of your all-American girl, your fabulous New Yorker, your effortlessly fun party hostess, Vitaly looks at me like he can see the gnawing uneasiness. My dress itches and he can tell.
Even if Vitaly thinks he knows something about me, it isn’t the power move he imagines it is. All it tells me is that he’s paying attention. And I’m the kind of person who likes attention.
“There’s more to life than plans, Big Rally.”
“There’s more to life than partying, Jimena.”
He pronounces my name the right way, and for some reason that hard H softens something inside me. Our conversation has reached its boiling point, and now I feel like taking a deep breath to cool it down. After all, I know what he’s doing out here—what he’s always doing out here. What he’s trying to get away from. And I really do want him to have some mindless fun. “A party’s a much better distraction than a plan.”
He looks at me through the hair that falls over his forehead. He doesn’t ask me what I mean about the distraction thing, and he doesn’t try to deny it, either. Eventually, his notebook goes still as his knee stops bouncing and we look at each other for a long moment.
Then a shrill voice screams, “This noise is killing me!”
Both Vitaly and I strain our necks back to stare up at the lady in the fourth-floor window, her frizzy, graying bangs drifting through the late summer breeze like rising smoke.
“Hi, Mrs. Gorky!” I smile with all my teeth and wave, but it does nothing at all to brighten her mood.
“Are you having a party on the roof?” she yells.
“Aww, it’s the last night of summer, Mrs. G., don’t be such a cranky-poo.”
Mrs. Gorky squints down at me but directs her next comment to Vitaly. “Did that little shit just call me poo?” She disappears back into her apartment.
“She’s going to call the police,” Vitaly says, standing.
“The more the merrier!” I say, popping out of my seat, too. “Let them try and arrest me! At least I’ll know I went down having the time of my life!”
“Understated as usual.”
I shrug and make my way back to the party.
* * *
If the cops are coming, I might as well make it worth their time.
Dwayne’s got his little rockets all in a row, ready for my command. “Light ’em up!” I tell him.
Vitaly may be boring, but at least he knows what he wants out of life. He has a plan. Maybe I need to take a page out of his book. Go into this year with a clear intention. Tonight, I’m declaring my independence. I’m going to go into my senior year balls to the wall. Because this is my last year of freedom before the real world sneaks up on me.
There’s the fizz of a lit fuse, the thwiiip of the launch, and then the sky above Sunset Park explodes with light. Next to me, Sof howls and whips her hair back. I squeeze her hand and peek over the edge of the roof wall. He may have declined my invitation, but the party still manages to reach Vitaly, the fireworks putting some much-needed color on his face.
“Isn’t this fun!?” I shout down. There’s no way he can hear me over the explosions or Mrs. Gorky’s screaming. But this moment is everything. I feel light and loose and good, like someone has finally unzipped my too-tight dress.
How nice to be young and free. I hold on to that feeling, even when the sounds of sirens start to break through the fireworks. “Might be time to book it,” I whisper to Sof.
“Yeah, we gotta go.”
2
My mom is deathly afraid of cops, in the same way that most people are afraid of bugs or rodents. If she sees one, she will let out a little startled yelp, grip her purse close to her chest, and cross the street immediately. I don’t get it. It’s not like she ever does anything to get on the police’s bad side. My mom has never been in trouble in her entire life. She lives by a strict set of rules, and she makes sure I live by them, too. Rules like: stay out of trouble, make your bed every morning, don’t talk back to your elders, and, most importantly, never ask a cop for help.
I’ve broken every one of those rules tonight. Except that last one. I definitely didn’t ask Officers O’Hannley and Bivens for help, and yet they insisted on accompanying me to my door like I couldn’t get there myself. Before either of them has a chance to interrupt my mom’s sacred viewing of her favorite telenovela, I turn to face them in a last-ditch effort to save my own skin.
“Please just arrest me.”
It takes a minute for the officers to process words they’ve clearly never heard before. I hold out my wrists and brace for the cool metal of handcuffs. “Let’s get this over with.”
Cops are a drag, but they’re no match for my mom.
O’Hannley ignores me and raps his knuckles against the door of 3B. I pray for the minutes to stretch as long as they can, buy me some time, but my mom is there quick as a telenovela slap.
When she sees us all standing there—two NYPD officers flanking me like drab angel wings—a million expressions flicker across her face. A flip-book of shock, awe, rage, fear. In the end, she blankets all her emotions with a bright smile that only quivers a little.
“This your daughter?” Officer Bivens asks.
It takes so long for my mom to answer I begin to wonder if she’ll deny knowing me. Her fear of cops can’t go that deep, can it? Spanish from the TV floats through her excruciating pause.
“English isn’t her first language,” I mutter.
My mom’s eyes blaze with a panicked fury. If looks could kill, I’d be on the floor in a puddle of blood. “Yes, she is my daughter,” my mom finally says. “What happen?”
“Nothing happened,” I say, but Officer O’Hannley speaks over me.
“She threw a party on the roof. There were fireworks. Neighbor called in with a noise complaint.”
I can see the wheels turning in my mom’s head, working out how many buses she’ll have to take to visit me in juvie. Her hand encircles my wrist, tugging me inside. “It’s okay, I’m not in trouble. Right, guys?” I say, turning to the officers.
Officer Bivens starts listing all the laws I’ve allegedly broken, and the whole time my mom just keeps nodding, smiling, the typical show she puts on for people speaking a language she isn’t fluent in. In pleasant conversation, the nodding and the smiling do most of the heavy lifting. It’s a lot smoother than the alternative, which is to stop every few seconds to ask for something to be repeated or explained. And my mom definitely wants this to go smoothly.
Copyright © 2024 by Goldy Moldavsky