Beating Heart Baby, page 22
“You haven’t had a day off since you got here, hm?” Aya digs around and pulls out a set of sheets, folding them in her hands. “Cola’s really been working you to the bone.”
“It’s fine. I can work.”
“You’re meeting up with the reporter before the show?”
“Yeah, it’s…” I sigh. Right, I can’t forget about this. “I’m … supposed to come out tomorrow, too.”
Aya laughs sharply. “What’s ‘supposed to’ supposed to mean?”
“For the story. It’s like, I’m back in the place where I transitioned. It’s symbolic?” Even as I say it, I know it rings false. But I’d told Cola I would, and her guidance this far has been spot-on.
“But you have doubts.”
After some hesitation, I nod. “I know it’s probably nothing, but there’s this part of me that wonders … what if word gets out to my family? They’re definitely around, and I … I’ll never be able to control what they say about me.”
Aya takes a seat on my bed and taps the space next to her. I wrinkle my nose; a part of me bristles at this transparent attempt at mothering. Still, I take the seat.
“Fuck your family.” My jaw drops. Aya shrugs. “Yeah, I said it. If they see you onstage, on fire, doing the thing you’re meant to do, and they make a scene? We’ll shut it down. You’re blazing, Suwa. Nothing they ever say or do can put that out, you understand?”
I’ve always respected Aya as a person, but I’m beginning to understand why Cap handed his legacy off to her. “I think I do. Thanks, Aya.” She gives me a quick hug, then gets up to go.
She stops halfway through the door. “One more thing. I know you kids think coming out is what you gotta do, but if you really want to, and I mean want to, at least do it on your exact terms. Not just because it’s a neat story trick.”
After the door clicks shut, I notice my phone resting on my laptop. Duh. As I walk back across the room, I hear something fall in my closet, so I investigate. And gasp.
It’s the jacket. Santi’s jacket. I never bothered to fully unpack my suitcase so I haven’t rummaged around in here. I hadn’t brought the jacket with me to Tokyo since, well, it wasn’t mine. But if no one else has claimed it … I don’t have a choice.
I stand in front of my mirror and slip it on. It’ll always be roomy on me, but I want to believe I’ve grown into it a little. I slide my hands into the pockets and, just this once, smirk at my reflection. And just this once, how I want to look and how I actually look align perfectly.
Now I’m curious. What else is in here? For one, a box filled with sheet music. I flip through the pages; they’re band scores, including some so faded and torn up that they must be from when Cap taught her. I also uncover a binder full of press clippings for one of her old bands, Horadorada.
And then—oh. Wow. A bin filled with school reports and pencil drawings. Sketches by … by Santi. Based on the dates, they’re from our middle-school years. My fingers move on their own, sifting through this tender time capsule. And then they brush against something that static-shocks me.
I pull it out: a lightly crumpled manila envelope. When I flip it over, my breath hitches. It’s labeled MEMO. I recognize Santi’s handwriting, but it’s blockier, messier.
Is there any way this could be something from when he—when we were talking about meeting up? I smooth it out and begin to undo the flap.
“Suwa!” Cap knocks on my door. “Sayo’s here?” He sounds uneasy. I quickly shrug the jacket off, replacing it on the hanger, but fold the envelope and stick it into my back pocket.
“Baby bro!” Sayo rushes up and hugs me before I’ve even made it down the stairs. And into my ear, she whispers, “Please don’t kill me.”
“What? Why the hell…” The words die in my mouth as I spot her stranger savior.
Santi’s taking off his helmet, and he’s holding the one Sayo must’ve worn. I feel the floor begin to slide away from my feet as Cap overzealously invites him in. Santi switches his shoes out, puts the helmets down, and runs his hand through his hair, which is already growing into curls. And when he walks past me, his eyes catch on mine, but then he looks away, leaving me to tread water in the wake of his stride.
* * *
“Thank you, everyone, for turning it up. Especially Aya. When I die, I want her cooking buried inside my grave, ancient-Egypt style.” Sayo raises her glass; the backyard breaks out into cheers. My sister nudges me with her elbow. “Our diet in Tokyo was, what, half instant ramen, half Famima snacks? No time or money to cook on the reg. This is such an upgrade.”
Sayo leans across the table we’ve lit with candles to ask Aya, “Suwa’s useless behind a stove. I tried to teach him when we were younger, but way too many close calls with knives. Any chance you can school him in the basics while he’s here?” I scowl and reach for the last lettuce wrap. Sayo’s no slouch in the kitchen, but between the two of us, I’m not the one who once set off the fire alarm while reheating frozen gyoza.
Aya, another goblet of sangria deep, wraps her arm around Santi’s shoulders and plants a kiss on the side of his head. He scrunches his face up. “Sure. But Santi might be the better cook now. He’s a magician in the kitchen these days.”
Santi shrugs. And without turning toward me, he answers, “Only if he wants me.” I choke on lettuce. If I die tonight, I’ll use my last breath to accuse Sayo of murder.
Before we all sat down, I’d grabbed Sayo, pulled her into the pantry, and hissed, “Explain.”
“I’m not messing with you. My car started smoking and sputtering, thank the gods for this, after I pulled off the ten, and I called you like fifty times, by the way. But right as I got off the phone with Cap, no shit, Santi pulls over.” She’d raised her hand. “Scout’s honor.”
“You literally got kicked out of Brownies for lying—whatever. I told you about the last time … Santi and I crossed paths. I don’t want to do this. I can’t.”
“You say his name now, huh? And yeah, it sounded like you were about to have a hot make-up kiss with— Did you peep those tattoos? You’ve totally been downplaying what’s going on, because now that I see it for myself? Yeesh.”
I’d scowled. “Are you on my side or not?”
Sayo had flicked my forehead. “Are you on your side, Suwa?” And: scene.
Aya takes a long drink of water before jumping into a conversation between Reva and Lucía. I’m trapped between Cap and Sayo, who keeps tilting past me to ask questions like, “Has my brother been pulling his weight around the Woodshed?” Judging by the color of her cheeks, she forgot to pop a Pepcid.
She’s not the only person at the table who’s a little rosy, a little buzzed. But the flush on Santi’s face, faint but visible against the candlelight and the string lights strewn through the citrus trees, looks a lot like a blush. I keep sneaking glances at him, which would be a more effective scoping strategy if he weren’t right across the table from me.
But it doesn’t escape my notice that everyone else at the table chats with him like … things are normal. Even Ari’s asking him about the mural he’s working on now, something for a new horror movie coming out soon. In fact, at a table full of cross chatter, good food, and free-flowing wine, surrounded by almost everyone I love, I’m seemingly the only one with nothing to say to anybody.
When Santi takes his leave early, something about a work thing in the morning, he waves his goodbye to everyone but looks at me. I ignore the weight of Sayo’s gaze as I halfheartedly lift my hand in return.
After he’s gone, my brain works overtime to figure out what is in the air tonight. My friends have insisted on handling all of the dinner cleanup, and I join the assembly line, scraping plates before passing them off to Mira.
“So, Suwa…” Reva’s got that conspiratorial tone in her voice. I’m going to get grilled about something. But I’m surprised when instead she says, “You were kinda quiet at dinner. Nerves?”
“Not really.”
Reva bats her eyes. Here we go. But I’m not prepared for what she asks: “Then … is it because of what Santi did for you?”
When I don’t respond, she tries again, “For his Friendship Redemption Tour?”
“Excuse me?” What am I missing here?
Mira turns the faucet off and fills in, “Santi tabled with me and Lucía at the zine fest last weekend and took Ari and Reva out to Moonlight Rollerway for their gay night. He got Feli and his date seats at that hot new Cambodian place, the one that opened right by De Longpre, yesterday. He’s been hitting all of us up and, like, trying to reconnect? I kept up a little with him before, but he’s doing some really cool shit these days.”
Octavian realizes it first. “He was the one who picked me up at Union Station when I moved back after the semester, and you didn’t know any of this.”
In the two weeks since our mural encounter, I’ve buried myself in work. Ari, Lucía, and I have finished recording, though we still meet up most days to rehearse. I’ve been spending more and more time alone with Cola and other label people debating potential singles and my first-ever music video, or just plain alone, practicing and workshopping new material, including a few covers to mix things up on the road.
I told myself my increasing penchant for solitude was a last hurrah. We’re getting closer and closer to Moonflower’s re-release date, less than a month away, and I have more press and publicity appointments coming up. But, as I sit with the waves of emotion breaking inside my chest, maybe I also burrowed into myself to avoid confronting the memory of Santi’s hands, the nostalgic lance that’d carved a fresh canyon through my entire body. My heart had almost split open. And as I process what my friends just told me, it strains in my chest like a flower against a swooning wind.
“Suwa!” Ari calls out after me as I rush out of the kitchen. I stumble over my feet, quickly switching to my sneakers. Behind me, I faintly hear Sayo’s voice, but I run down to the street, following the lingering scent of smoke down the block, then another, only to suddenly lose the trail.
My heartbeat’s pounding in my ears. Breaths coming in sharp and raw. Cola’s right, I should take up running.
Wait. What am I doing? I slap my cheeks. Santi’s probably long gone and, anyway, what would I even say if I caught up with him? That almost at the mural was a fluke. A moment of weakness on both of our parts.
And—a spike of bitterness shoots through me—if he really wanted to extend an olive branch, he would’ve reached out as part of his adorable “Friendship Redemption Tour.” But he’d hit upon something true when he said that I was bad for him. That I’d be bad for him now. We’re a record at the end of the side. I’m watching it spin and hoping to hear some secret track, but it’s over.
Melissa, the BEATING HEART reporter, is going to be at prom tomorrow. I’m going to talk not just about the album, but about me. I laugh darkly. Compared to confronting my feelings for Santi, coming out genuinely seems like a much less daunting prospect. I take a seat on the curb and close my eyes against a cool night breeze.
I used to remember exactly what I said to Santi after he revealed himself to me, but I don’t anymore. I’d spent so much time imagining my best friend, but when I finally met him, I realized I’d been idealizing a fantasy. My phantom in the clouds. When the real thing appeared, I wasn’t prepared to actually know him. But how could I have been? What else could I have done?
I try to slow down my thoughts. For now: Answer the texts rolling in on my phone. For future Suwa: Stop running after a boy and go home; play prom; get real about going back to therapy. I clench my hands as my chest tightens and my vision begins to blur.
Then a pair of out-of-focus paint-splattered sneakers appear in front of me. My eyes climb up, and suddenly Santi’s concerned face is level with mine. He opens his mouth, but I don’t let him speak.
“Breathe. I know, I know.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand, but I hadn’t been crying. Until now. So I pull my shirt collar up to my eyes and will him to walk away.
But instead Santi puts his arms around me. And I let him, and I unhook my sweatshirt from my face, slide my arms against his, and lean into his hug.
Our bare knees brush. This can’t be comfortable for him. This isn’t comfortable for me, but neither of us lets go. Our bodies figuring out what our brains haven’t. I try to form some sort of argument about why we shouldn’t be holding each other like this, but everything I think I should say turns into breath, so instead I say the thing I wish I’d told him as soon as we saw each other again.
“I missed you.” Santi’s hold around me tightens as I pull the words out from between my teeth. “So much, I missed you.” I hiccup, and he lets out a soft snort that tickles the back of my ear.
“I missed you, too.”
Of course he’s also crying now, which makes me laugh wetly. We sit there, trading tears, until I notice the smoke wreathed around us. When I pull away, a cigarette dangles between his fingers. And I almost laugh; one of my earliest memories of him is when he admonished me about the very same thing he’s doing now. I can’t resist the easy shot. “That’s terrible for your regular lungs.”
Santi hesitates in the middle of a pull and exhales away from me. He drops the cigarette onto the ground, where it rolls into gutter water, hisses, then disappears down a storm drain. And then we’re both holding our breath, teetering on the edge of either a breakthrough or yet another breakdown.
I was always the one who initiated. “Your charm offensive with our friends is working. So you’re staying in Los Angeles for good? Or at least you’re not leaving soon.”
A long beat of silence passes before Santi speaks. “Is … that why you came after me? You wanted to know when I’ll be gone?”
He cracks his thumbs. He’s nervous.
“You wanted me to come after you.” I say this more confidently than I feel.
“I don’t know what I want.” Santi’s mouth slices into something that’s neither a smile nor a frown. “I keep telling myself every time I talk to you is the last time.”
“Why?” I didn’t feel my body move or register any movement from him, but we’re somehow closer. His freckles have gotten darker. I only knew him at the end of summer, but here we are, at the start.
Santi laughs lowly. “Don’t play, Suwa.”
I want to hear him say my name over and over again. But as the person responsible for this mess, I have to do some cleaning-up. “I’m sorry. Santi, I’m so sorry. I didn’t…”
I curl into myself and bury my head between my arms. “Everything I said about and to you back then was so completely misdirected. If I’d just dealt with my issues instead of constantly compressing them in, like, the accordion pleats of my heart—”
Santi laughs. I raise my head, both alarmed and embarrassed, but he says sheepishly, “Sorry, just—you really have a way with words.” His voice softens. “Some of those Moonflower lyrics … ‘The heir of Orion / Took me out hunting / But I was the game’ … Ouch.”
I let out a groan. He raises his eyebrows. “Oh, c’mon. Of course I listened to it.”
I raise my face toward the sky, my cheeks burning. “I didn’t mean it like that! I mean … I knew there was no turning back once the songs were out there. But I didn’t have to make them. What we were, what we became to each other, didn’t have to be so … like this.”
I grind my teeth, frustrated with the way I keep failing to describe how I’m feeling. “Look, when you told me about our past, my fight-or-flight response kicked in. I chose flight, obviously. But I didn’t move to Tokyo to write a breakup album. I never blocked your number. I kept everything up and checked, every day. I kept waiting for you.”
But as I say that, I remember that he’d gone through this before. Sending messages into the void where I’d once been. No wonder he didn’t want to do it again. So he’d taken me at my word and left me alone. Everything has been done before. The vicious cycle eats its own tail. I have no one but myself to blame for how we ended.
All for what? My pride?
I don’t feel proud of myself.
Santi’s quiet long enough that I look at him out of the corner of my eye. He’s … crying again, but unlike before, the tears fall silently. His lips part like he wants to say something, but can’t. Until: “A part of me knew that you’d leave LA eventually. And then you’d be traveling the world, meeting all kinds of people, for pretty much ever.”
“So that would’ve been it?” The words scrape the sides of my throat. “It was always going to end?”
Santi chews his lip for a long beat before sighing. His breath smells like ginger. “Suwa, what do you want me to say?”
That you want me, like you used to. “That you were following your dreams, too.” My thoughts unravel as soon as I voice them, but I push through. “I never asked you about your dreams. I was always so fucking selfish. It looks like they’re coming true anyway. And you did that on your own, but you shouldn’t have had to.”
Maybe we had to let each other go to get what we wanted. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe this, a quiet acknowledgment and acceptance of mutual pain, is the only happy ending I can realistically hope for. I brush my palms off and move to stand.
Santi wraps his hand around mine. I’m so stunned that I sit back down. And he finishes what he’d started to tell me at the mural, before I walked away: “I almost thought I could live my life without you.”
I shake my head, but he continues, “I guess I wanted to see if I could. That was part of it, me leaving. For … years, I looked for Memo in everyone I met, everywhere I lived. I only stopped when I met you. You took over. So realizing you were the same person … it was like a shock to me, too. But of course it was weirder, and harder, for you. Because … when I think about that time of my life…”
Santi’s earring glints in the moonlight as he leans toward me. “All I wanted back then was for you to be happy. For you to get what you want. And that’s still what I want. To see you happy, and free. Even if it means I can’t be there as…” He squeezes his eyes shut, blinks quickly, and whispers, “Even if that means I have to get out of your way.”
