I follow the flow of bodies toward the stairwell, push my way through the turnstile, and step out onto the sidewalk. I slip my earbuds back in, put on Ella Fitzgerald, and look left and right, making sure no one who knows me is around. The coast looks clear, so I turn my music up, cross my fingers, and keep moving. Something about skipping school makes me feel like I’m actually in control of my life.
I walk down Layla’s block, taking in all the familiarities of the street. The way the door to the bodega on the corner doesn’t close all the way. The ragged rainbow flag hanging from the fire escape of the building beside hers. The same yellowed flyer’s been taped in the window of the deli advertising their “new” kosher salami since I was twelve.
We always got Popsicles at that bodega in the summer. We challenged each other to jump and touch the hanging threads of that flag whenever we walked past it. We never tried the salami, but we’d get sandwiches and ninety-nine-cent Arizona iced teas at the deli almost every time I slept over. If it was warm out, we’d eat on Layla’s stoop.
I keep walking, past Layla’s building and into the park where we first met. Its lawn is wide and a little green even though it’s February. The grass is dusted with snow and it’s still falling fast. I go to the exact spot where I was sitting the day I met Layla—the exact spot where she saw me crying about Gigi and where she started singing to make me feel better—and I text my dad.
Daddio, I send. You’re off today, right?
His response comes almost instantly. Yep.
Can you meet me?
Cleo…
Daddy…
You better be on your way to school.
Not exactly.
SIGH.
I start typing another response, but then my phone starts to vibrate with a call.
“I…fell on the subway platform,” I say to him instead of hello. It’s a low blow, but I’ll say whatever I need to get him here. “The trains were delayed and my leggings are ripped and it’s snowing, and you know how the snow reminds me of Gigi. I just had an awful morning, okay? Please don’t give me a hard time about this, Daddy. Not today.”
He sighs, long and low. “Cleo, this seriously has to be the last time. If it isn’t, I’ll have to talk to your mother.”
I gasp.“Et tu, Brute?” My dad knows almost everything about Layla, and that I’ve been skipping school to avoid her. But as long as my grades don’t slip, he lets me get away with pretty much whatever I want. My mom’s another story.
“This is the last time, Cleo.”
I’m pretty sure it’s an empty threat, so I grin.
“It will be. I promise. Now, can you meet me?”
“Where are you?” he asks.
* * *
—
He arrives about twenty minutes later. I grabbed a cup of coffee for him, and a tea for me, from the café across the street while I waited, so as soon as I spot him, I run over and push the steaming cup into his gloved hands.
“Oh, honey,” he says as soon as he sees my leggings. He straightens his glasses and pulls me to him. He plants a kiss on my forehead and his bristly goatee tickles my eyebrow. “Why did you want me to meet you here? You should have just come over.”
“I want to build a snowman,” I say, hating that I sound like a five-year-old. “Correction: I need to.”
He makes his Librarian Face—an expression of both confusion and intrigue. He makes this face when he’s cautiously interested in or fascinated by a book, an idea, or a person. I’ve seen him use it with patrons at the library where he works when he’s asked a particularly strange question, and as he reads articles on his tablet in the mornings. Since he moved out a few months ago I’ve seen this face (and him) a lot less, but it’s still so recognizable that I grin at his eggshell-brown skin and dark freckles; his wide, scrunched-up nose. “A snowman,” he says, and it’s a statement and a question all at once.
“Yes,” I say. “I have a theory.”
He purses his lips to stop himself from smiling, and I know what this expression means too: he has no idea what I’m about to say next. “Okay,” he says. He puts his heavy arm over my shoulders. “Tell me.”
We start to walk, strolling past people walking dogs in coats and nannies pushing strollers. Snow is still falling and everything around us feels a little magical and unreal. I inherited my dad’s freckled face, his poor eyesight, and his dreaminess too. He never rushes me to speak because he knows what it’s like to be easily distracted—what it’s like to get lost inside your own head. “I think,” I say, “that I need to make some new memories. I think that if I make enough new ones in the right places, not being friends with Layla anymore will hurt a little bit less.”
My dad sips his coffee. I look across the park at the tall trees and beyond them to where Layla’s walk-up sits beside the bodega, deli, and fire escape, and my breath catches. If I could erase this whole block from the city, I would.
“And these new memories,” Daddy says. “They start with a snowman in this park?”
I nod. “This is where I met her, remember? At that cookout right after Gigi died? But if we do something else in this exact spot, like build a snowman, maybe that will be the first thing I think of when I come here, instead of her.”
“Ah,” he says, something like sadness passing over his features. “I understand.”
* * *
—
We build a snowman. When we’re half done, I throw a few snowballs at my dad and he laughs and dodges them, making his own between searching for stones and sticks to put finishing touches on our creation. As we roll and pat and press the snow into new shapes, I pray that my memories are just as malleable as the snow in my hands. Hopefully my past is as rewritable as I’m pretending it can be.
READY FOR BATTLE
“So you wanna skip school, huh?” my mother says that night, the second she gets home.
I’m brushing my teeth, planning my next new-memory-making trip, when she squeezes into our tiny bathroom behind me.
I’m in pajamas, a satin scarf already wrapped around my head for bed, but she’s still in the tight pencil skirt she wore to the office this morning, her blazer slung over her arm. Her high heels are hanging off the tips of her fingers (she’d never leave her shoes by the door) and there’s barely any space between us at all.
“Oh crap,” I mutter, pressing my thighs closer to the sink. Toothpaste droplets land on the mirror. I don’t know how she found out, but then I remember my father’s threat.