“Whatcha thinking about?” Dustin was so close that I could smell his soy sauce breath. He’d had lunch in the cafeteria, and they’d had Chinese. You would think the smell was gross, but… Okay, it was gross. But still. It was Dustin. I couldn’t turn away. And then, his hand was on my waist and we were making out right there, standing there. Finally we moved to the couch, and even though I kept asking him if his mom was going to come home or something, he never answered, which I took as a no. Instead it turned out to be… one of his brothers who stood in the doorway and cleared his throat a few times until we noticed his presence.
“Uh—Dustin?”
I sat up real straight, tucked my hair behind my ears. Dustin hopped to his feet, stood halfway between me and a tall guy who looked like Dustin—but ten years from now.
“Oh, hey, Kev. This is Lili.”
“Hey,” his brother said.
“Hi,” I said.
I couldn’t read Dustin’s brother’s expression—surprised, curious, impressed—confused? His hair was so blond, it looked gray, but he was also tan, which made him look like an oxymoron, like I couldn’t tell if he was young or old or what.
“Dustin… I just came by to… pick up some books.” He turned to me. “I’m working on my dissertation.”
“Pretty soon, we’ll have to call Kevin doctor,” Dustin told me.
“Oh, and tell Mom I’ll be back this weekend to do some laundry,” soon-to-be-doctor Kevin added.
“Laundry day. Yep.” Dustin gave his head a shake to flick his bangs out of his eyes.
“Well, nice meeting you, Lili.” Kevin smiled in my direction.
“Nice to meet you, too. Bye.” A moment later we heard him leaving out the front door.
“Well, that was a little embarrassing,” I admitted. Dustin stroked my cheek.
“Nah, Kev’s cool.” He paused for a second, then said, “He doesn’t really have that much laundry, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“And he probably didn’t really have to come here to get those books.”
Now I was totally confused.
“My parents are… getting divorced.”
Oh. Ohhhhh.
I reached for his hand. “That must be so hard.”
Dustin flopped onto the couch, patting it for me to join him. “Yeah. Kev comes over all the time with these totally random excuses, to check on me like I’m a little kid or something.”
“That’s actually kinda sweet.”
We scootched closer to one another on the couch, but making out didn’t exactly seem like it was on the menu any longer. Then, in the softest voice, Dustin said, “My mom… she, like, had an affair or whatever.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah… with her boss. So cliché, right?”
“Well…” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Only, it isn’t really a cliché. I mean, her boss is a woman.”
Dustin went on about his mom and her lady friend and basically everything that had happened. I listened. Rubbed his hand. He kept moving it to bite the side of his thumb. But he kept talking, kept sharing.
Then he suddenly asked, “So what about you?”
“What about me?” I said warily.
“Your family. Your parents. And your dad—you hardly ever mention him. At all, really.”
“Well, my father…,” I began, then shifted to, “What time is it?” I took out my phone. “Oh my God. I’m going to miss the late bus if I don’t leave like right this second!”
Dustin pulled me up to my feet. “I’ll walk you, and you can tell me on the way.”
I pressed my lips together hard. I didn’t have to walk to the bus stop by myself! But I’d have to tell him something about my dad.
Turned out, talking to Dustin about my dad was so easy, and once I started, I just couldn’t stop. I told him everything, then swung back to when I was a kid—how Dad had gotten me hooked on reading.
I used to totally hate reading. Then, once, after a school book fair, I came home all annoyed. Dad asked me what was wrong. I drank juice from a small carton with the curly red straw I’d gotten from Chuck E. Cheese at a birthday party. I loved that freakin’ straw. “Boring books at school,” I said. “We have to pick, and they’re all sooo boring!”
Dad nodded, thought for a minute, and nodded again. “Let’s go. I’m taking you somewhere special.” He grabbed his keys and we tiptoed out of the apartment.
I loved going into Boston with Dad. He whistled while we walked. He nodded to strangers on the street. When he saw a homeless person, he always—and I mean, always—gave them a dollar. A whole dollar! On the street sometimes women checked him out. Sometimes men. I mean, Dad was handsome. He had black hair sometimes cut close to his scalp or sometimes grown out into a long ponytail, big eyes, a wide forehead (which he said means you’re smart), and dark skin like mine. And he was tallish. Too bad I didn’t get that gene. Whatever. That afternoon we took the orange line train to a stop I had never been to before—Haymarket. When I asked where we were going, he kept saying it was a surprise.
After a few minutes we reached some concrete steps. Dad took them two at a time to the landing. I scrambled after him.
“What is this place?” I said, looking around. People everywhere. Tables lined up in rows, boxes and crates and stacks upon stacks of books.
“This is a book fair,” he said. “A street book fair.”
I wandered around as Dad explained that this was the best place to get books in all of Boston because (1) they were cheap (and they really were; some were only ten cents), and (2) they were used. “If you read a book you love, you want someone else to read it,” he said.
That afternoon, with the sun following us around from table to table, Dad helped me pick out a whole bunch of books, including one by Sandra Cisneros. He said I was too young to read her books yet, but he would buy it for me and give it to me in a couple of years. The fact that he’d said I was too young to read it of course only made me want to read it more. Come to think of it, maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. Because that was the afternoon I became a reader, for real.
“So, your dad got you into reading and writing,” Dustin said now.
“Yeah.” I was wishing the walk back to school were longer. We were only a couple of blocks away.
“Man, that really sucks, what you all are dealing with. It’s not like he did anything bad or anything!” Hearing those words from Dustin’s mouth made me—all kinds of ways—relieved. I wasn’t hiding anything anymore. And it really didn’t sound all that bad: It sounded fixable because Dad wasn’t a bad guy. But at the same time I also felt a little uneasy. Like, now I had to trust Dustin with that information. And I did trust him.
“Exactly,” I said. “My dad is actually a pretty fabulous guy.”
“So, wait.” He stopped short. “Are you, like, undocumented too?”
“No,” I said. “I was born here, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” And he clasped my hand.
I thought about the two of us walking down this shaded street, together. There I was walking free in this suburban neighborhood, but where was my dad walking—where was he walking to, or away from? It was like the latitude and longitude of your birthplace can ultimately determine your life’s borders. I know—heavy. My head literally began to hurt. I squeezed Dustin’s hand tighter. And I didn’t care who drove by. I held his hand the whole way back to school. Hood down.