“You should probably go.”
“Yeah,” I agree, though my mind is still floating. Still in shock. Still trying to piece together how this happened. I want Colin to drop everything and drive to my house, curl up in bed with me, and hold me while I cry. Run his fingers through my hair and tell me it will all be okay.
Instead, I let him go.
After we hang up the phone, I go over to the couch and lie down, covering myself with a throw blanket Nonna crocheted for me when I was a kid. I close my eyes, willing myself to fall asleep, which has been my defense mechanism of choice ever since I was in high school. I’m like a possum in that way. Whenever a possum feels threatened or is about to be attacked, its first instinct is to play dead. Most human beings don’t do that—they go into fight or flight mode. Not me. I channel my inner possum and try very hard to pass out.
The upside to this is that sleeping helps time pass quickly. The downside, of course, is that when you try to sleep your problems away, you wake up and for one split second you forget that the problems even exist. Then you remember, and you suffer the realization of the issue all over again. It’s kind of like peeling a scab off a healing wound. The wound reopens and has to start healing all over again.
Cheez-Its help a lot, believe it or not. In fact, any kind of carbs, eaten quickly, make it much easier for me to drift off to sleep. So, as I lie here, teetering on the edge of a Cheez-It-induced stress-coma, willing mymind not to think about Colin or Lindsay or my uncertain future with both of them, my mind does this funny thing.
It brings me back to—of all people—Ronald.
Ronald Cummings and I met on a yellow school bus that went through Parkchester, Westchester Square, Morris Park, and Pelham Bay to get to Bronx Gardens High School. He was a sophomore and I was a freshman, but despite his advanced age, he still sat at the front of the bus, instead of at the back with the jocks and the cool kids. He was loud and often obnoxious, but also smart and funny, and he would verbally spar with the other front-of-the-bus nerds about all kinds of things I found useless at the time: politics, current events, comic books, video games, and, occasionally, music. He was far from attractive; he had a lazy eye that was just off enough that you could never be a hundred percent sure of whether or not he was actually looking at you when he talked to you. His nose had been broken in an unfortunate accident at a roller-skating birthday party as a kid. (His lack of sporting ability and generally poor balance led him to fall, and while on the ground, a superfast teenager on roller blades tripped over Ronald’s face.) It never healed right, leaving him with a prominent bump that he joked was a “battle scar.” He had awful acne: red, raised pustules lined his cheeks and neck, and he used to nervously scratch and pick at the scabs in his thick brown hair, which he parted to the side without any particular style. He had braces on his teeth that would occasionally catch food particles in them, changing his otherwise-average smile into an unsightly potential advertisement for dental floss. He wore clothes from JCPenney, because his mom worked at the Bronx Center mall and was able to use her employee discount there. As a result, he had a plain Champion sweatshirt in almost every color of the rainbow, and he would cycle through them weekly, always paired with a turtleneck in either white or black and a pair of loose-fitting Levi’s jeans.
Ronald wasn’t one of those nerdy kids who knew his place in the world, like me. In fact, he was quite the opposite. He thought highly of himself, dominating the other geeks at the front of the bus with his loud opinions and musings on life and the world around him. He sat alone on the vinyl bus seat meant for two, his oversized backpack occupying the window space beside him, his knees pointed out into the aisle so he could chat with whoever was close enough to listen. This often included our bus driver, Sam, whose poor ears were assaulted daily with the noisy ruminations of an egotistical fifteen-year-old.
For the first half of my freshman year, I sat next to Maya, a friend of mine from junior high school who I had art class with. She was quiet and unassuming, and we were both content to sit side by side and listen to our respective Sony Walkmans without interacting too much. But one day, Maya was absent, and Sam got a call on his CB radio that another bus had broken down midroute. We were the rescue bus, so in an attempt to make space for the kids on the other bus who we went to pick up, Ronald parked himself and his bookbag-luggage in the empty space next to me.
“What are you listening to?” he asked.
“Hmm?” I replied. I was not used to having to engage in chitchat with my seatmate.
“What are you listening to?” he repeated, louder.
I took off my headphones. “Notorious B.I.G,” I said.
He nodded. “So, you like old-school East Coast hip hop.”
I shrugged. “I guess. I mean, I also like Tupac and Dr. Dre, and I think they’re both from the West Coast.”
“You see? This isexactlywhat’s wrong with the youth of America.”
“Huh?”
“You’re totallyblindto the implications of your choices.”
“What?” I looked at him, confused. To this day, I think it was Ronaldwho gave me my first wrinkle, a small perpendicular crease right between my eyebrows borne out of all the times he’d say something I didn’t understand.
“Forget it,” he said, shaking his head.
“I also listen to Jay-Z and DMX. What difference does it make?”
“And Justin Timberlake?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Ugh,” he said with disgust.
I didn’t particularlycareabout his personal feelings on music, but I was bothered by the conversation and the fact that he was cutting into my quiet bus time.
“Ugh, what?” I said.
“Nothing. You just don’t know music, that’s all.”
“How do you know what I know? You don’t even know me!” I replied.
“You know what I listen to?” he asked.
