She turns around and storms away, taking the three stairs to the sidewalk and running to the street. She flings herself toward the boardwalk, bursting into traffic, and when a car brakes and honks at her, she jams her fist on its hood.
“Fuck you! This is Todos Santos. Your daddy will buy you a new one,” she screams.
My mind is telling me to sit this one out and let the shitshow unfold without my intervention. But my legs are assholes and so is my rusty conscience because they carry me down the stairs. Mel warns my back that when Daria’s Hulky, she doesn’t like to be interrupted. I think she needs some tough love and to be grounded until the next decade. She needs to be asked some hard questions. Questions like:
Are you fucking your principal?
Is your foster brother fondling you in the locker room?
Are your friends assholes who run betting rings in an illegal fight club?
What in the actual fuck is Hulky?
At the risk of sounding like a Dr. Phil wannabe, I keep this shit to myself. Jaime and Mel are still ten million times better than my parents. They care. Mel is just scared of her daughter, and Jaime…well, Jaime is a dude.
The light turns red, and I have to wait for cars to pass before I can cross the road. Unlike Daria, I don’t have a good health insurance plan and can’t go around slapping moving vehicles. I spot her sneaking into the dwindling line of the Ferris wheel and buying a ticket. She slips into a seat. My eyes flicker back to the traffic light. When it turns green, I sprint across the road. Since I left my wallet—which Jamie padded with a couple of hundred—at the house, I hop over the fence and slide into her booth a second before she closes the metal bar and locks it. The guy operating the wheel has already pulled the handle, and the wheel starts moving. He shoots me a look and shakes his head. I don’t mean to laugh in his face, but he should thank his lucky stars that Kannon and Camilo are not here with me. We’d have found a way to steal the entire Ferris wheel and sell its parts to travelers.
“What are you doing here?” Daria looks the other way toward the ocean. She is holding the metal bar in a chokehold. The wheel moves slowly, and our cart sways back and forth.
“Shit was getting real, so I decided to split.” I take out my pack of cigarettes, and she knocks it out of my hands, letting it fall to the abyss of tourists underneath us.
Why am I here? Because I recognize that, although she’s a brat, she’s got a case. Daria isn’t seen. Her mother barely talks to her, and when she does, it’s to tell her to stop being horrible. She’s normally left to her own devices, and other than a generic “How’s school?” I’ve never heard her mom ask about her friends or dates or cheer. It’s a vicious cycle because in order to get attention, Skull Eyes keeps on acting up.
You’re only lonely if you’re not there for yourself.
Some pearls of wisdom by the man himself, Dr. Phil.
“Cut the bullshit, Scully. What do you want?”
“A rematch, greasy burger, and your cunt on my face. In that order exactly.”
She scrunches her nose. “You’re disgusting. I can’t believe my parents took your side. We won because we kick ass, even if you guys didn’t look bad.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll meet you at the play-offs, by which time Gus will make the full transition from a dry vagina to the basic pussy he is.”
Now she full-blown laughs, shaking her head. We’re getting farther up, and people and places and palm trees are starting to look smaller. The lights dance across the horizon, and the ocean looks too blue and too infinite not to admire.
“Release the bar,” I tell her, out of nowhere.
“Why?” Her fingers are still curled firmly around it.
“Because I want to see if you trust me not to open the handle.”
She stares at me with the same wild gaze that made me give her the sea glass four years ago. As though I’m the most fascinating creature in the world. I want to pocket that look and save it for the next time the world lets me down. Which should be in the next twenty minutes.
“But I don’t trust you.”
“Let’s rectify that.”
“Thanks, I’m good.”
“Did you hear a question mark in my voice? It wasn’t an offer.”
She turns to me. “Tell me something real about yourself.”
“Like what?” It’s hard not to stare at her lips. She has great lips. She’s always had great lips. And the rest of her body is the kind of stuff that got Edgar Allan Poe and Pablo Neruda into writing poems about chicks. It saddens me that I can half-understand how rich, gorgeous girls like Daria turn out the way they do. Too smug to feel, too bitchy to be tolerated. They are so much yet so little. They have everything, but they earned nothing by themselves. It’s like winning the lottery and expecting to make wise investments on your own without any financial background.
“Why do you cut holes in your shirt?”
“Don’t go for the jackpot before you win the fluffy teddy bear at the fair,” I warn. “Ask me something else.”
She rolls her eyes at me, sighing as though I exasperate her. “What kind of name is Penn?”
“Release the bar, and I’ll tell you.”
“How do I know you won’t open it?”
“You don’t.”
Her face is so close, and I’m starting to realize why people love Ferris wheels. It feels like we’re alone in the universe, isolated. She lets go of the bar, almost in slow motion, and tucks her hands between her bare thighs.
Don’t look at her thighs, bastard. I can practically hear Jaime inside my head.
Why? Her thighs would make great ear warmers, I mentally answer back.
“Close your eyes.”
She does. Just as she did when we were fourteen. I like that she is obedient when we’re alone. I make a mental note not to abuse that power. Daria answers to no one and does whatever the hell she wants—except with me.
“Before drugs made my mom fall down the rabbit hole, she was this poetry chick with nerdy glasses and a library card. She met my dad at church when she was seventeen as a part of some Christian scouts program, and he knocked her up. Then a chain of really shitty things happened all at once. She was involved in a car accident that almost killed her and broke most of the bones in her body. My dad decided to leave with his mother and start a Christian cult. Mom got hooked on painkillers, then illegal drugs. I used to read poems to her when she was in the hospital, going in and out of there for one of her trillion surgeries. Anyway, her favorite poets are—were,” I correct myself, remembering she is no longer alive, “Sylvia Plath and Alexander Penn. So she named us after them.”
“Who’s Alexander Penn?” Her cheeks flush.
She doesn’t want me to think she’s stupid. We are reaching the highest point.
“He was this Israeli-Russian communist poet dude. Off the rails certifiable. He was desperately in love with this chick named Bella. She rejected him, so he tried to commit suicide and shot himself. Failed. She was so enchanted by his love and devotion, she decided to marry him.”
“Just like Van Gogh. Only this girl said yes,” Daria muses.
“Yeah.”
“Kinda gross,” she says.
“Yeah.” I chuckle.