We Are Lost and Found Read online

  I know from experience this standoff will go one of two ways. Either he’s in the mood for a fight, in which case I’m screwed. Or he’s trying to rattle me, in which case I just need to wait him out.

  Maybe you should spend that money on a haircut, he says. You’re beginning to look like a fucking girl.

  I bite my tongue. Literally. And wait silently. A cop car screams down the street, and our upstairs neighbor must be getting ready to go out too, because I can hear her high heels clack against her wood floors.

  Finally, my father sighs, Get out of here already. And don’t let me see you coming in past curfew, do you hear me?

  Connor would have said: Of course I can hear you; the whole Upper West Side can hear you.

  But I know when to keep quiet.

  This is only one of the things that makes me smarter than my brother.

  The Echo is packed. Sometimes it gets like this. Random people called to the same pulsing beat at exactly the same time. Sometimes I mind. Tonight, I don’t. Tonight, I need this mad crush of people and noise.

  I dance until I can’t walk. Sweat runs down my back. My legs start to ache. My anxiety hunkers down like a dog sleeping in the corner.

  I’ve almost made it to that place where nothing matters.

  And then I stop.

  It’s his eyes that get me. Gray. Or green. Or perhaps, blue. Hard to tell in the flashing lights, but they’re big and perfectly rimmed with kohl, and they stand out against his brown skin and his black hair and his white shirt and follow me across the room to where I can no longer dance, but I merely perform.

  I’m aware of every beat. Every move of my arms. Every breath.

  I try to push that all out of my mind. Synth beats. Smoke. Lights. The scents of cologne and dry ice and alcohol. I open myself up and let it fill me.

  Only.

  Those.

  Eyes.

  Suddenly we’re dancing together. Not just next to each other, pushed adjacent by the jostling crowd in our black jeans and black eyeliner, but together, mirroring each other’s movements, sharing glances.

  Three songs later and he’s still there, his lopsided smile telling me he knew that I knew that we were in it for an hour, or at least another song.

  All the while I watch him covered with blue dots like stars in a dark sky.

  There’s a slice of silence as New Order’s “Blue Monday” slides into Re-Flex’s “The Politics of Dancing.”

  The boy motions me over to the wall. Away from the people. Far from the speakers.

  I’ve seen you here, he says. Before.

  He phrases it like its two sentences. With a pause between “here” and “before.” It’s difficult not to analyze his comment. He’s noticed me in the past enough to recognize me in the present.

  While I try to figure out how I can respond—as if I could respond—he adds, With your friend. With James.

  Well, of course he’d know James. Everyone at The Echo knows James. The only reason he would notice me is because I was with James.

  So I smile and nod, and I wait for the questions to start: What is James really like? Are you seeing him? Is he seeing anyone? Does he like boys or girls? What’s his deal, anyhow? Can you give me his number?

  This time there are no questions. This time there is only: I’ve been wanting to meet you. To talk to you. To dance with you. I’ve been waiting until you were alone.

  His name is Gabriel. And all I can think of is the angel.

  We talk about the music. We talk about the club and the boys and the girls and the snow and about how sad it was that Karen Carpenter died. We talk about everything and nothing, even when we aren’t sure we heard right because of the relentless thump of the bass and the pressing crunch of the dancers and because I keep losing my train of thought while I’m looking into his eyes. Trying to figure out if they’re really blue or just blue in the lights.

  He never does ask about James.

  As we’re talking and dancing, I’m also hovering somewhere over the bar, soaring above the room, lost in the lights. Danni throws on Lena Lovich, singing about wanting a new toy. Very funny. I’m not sure who he thinks the toy is, Gabriel or me.

  I watch us dance. Watch myself nervously fidget with my favorite blue skinny tie, the one Connor found at the store and put aside because he said the pattern of guitar picks reminded him of me.

  Gabriel doesn’t fidget. Gabriel dances like fire released. Gabriel moves like someone used to being watched. Someone who likes it.

  Gabriel wears his jeans tight and his shirt loose, and I can see him sneaking glances at me as if I’m the type of person that someone like him would sneak glances at.

  Lena’s voice soars loud, asking what we want.

  What do I want?

  What am I allowed to want?

  The bouncers are selective, yet random. But somehow they always let in the old women who sell cassettes and flowers at the end of the night. Flower for you. Flower for your boyfriend. Flower. Flower. Flower.

  Gabriel buys me an indigo-blue rose. To remember me by, he says, and I cringe at the finality in his words.

  When he hugs me goodbye, his eyes are as black as a subway tunnel. The rose feels insubstantial in my hands; cold comfort when what I’m yearning for is everything contained in this boy in front of me.

  But then he leans in, runs a hand under the edge of my sweaty shirt, up my back, and says, Next week.

  Did it happen?

  If I close my eyes, I can see Gabriel.

  But through the Sunday fog of homework…

  And my mother’s Run to the store and pick up flour, Michael…

  Connor’s on the line for you, don’t stay on long, your father is expecting a call…

  It feels like a dream. He feels like a dream.

  After my parents are asleep, I call James.

  I met someone last night, I whisper.

  Tell me.

  I tell him about Gabriel’s eyes and how he was wearing an earring with a cursive S on it, the one I couldn’t bring myself to ask about.

  I tell James about how he sang along to the songs in perfect pitch and how, when we were talking, he’d duck his head and look at me through his coal-black lashes.

  I tell him nothing that matters.

  But I tell him and that matters.

  I tell him “New Toy” is my new favorite song, and he laughs. What do you want?

  I don’t think I have to answer.

  In the morning, my mother sees the flower and asks if it’s for her. I can’t think up a lie so I say yes.

  She transfers it to a bud vase and a few hours later, I have to change the blue-tinged water. I didn’t know you were into horticulture, she says, only my tired brain processes it as whore-to-culture and I choke, wondering what she knows. Then she has me get a wet rag to clean up the coffee I spit on her newly cleaned floor.

  Becky comes to school on Monday in a hot-pink fishnet shirt and huge gold cross earrings. I bought this shirt from your brother, she tells me. Of course she did, Connor always gives James and Becky his employee discount.

  I hope you washed it first, I say. Some of that stuff comes in looking pretty grungy. I don’t ask about the earrings.

  When we meet up with James after school, he tells me I need to let Connor pick out my clothes next week when I go back to The Echo. Becky tells him to shut up and that I can do fine on my own. He stops talking. She’s the only one who can get away with it.

  My parents are fighting again. Something about Connor and health insurance and why doesn’t he get a real job so he can pay for his own benefits and food and not just his tiny squatter’s apartment that he’s only living in until his friend or coworker or whatever gets back to town wheneverthehell that is.

  I put the pillow over my head and shut my eyes tight until all I can
see are blue lights dancing against my lids. Gabriel, I think. Gabriel.

  I’ve never gone to the club two weeks in a row. It’s too hard arguing with my parents about curfews, too hard coming up with the money for cover and drinks and transport, too easy to give myself over to the lights and the smoke and the boys. Well, watching them anyway.

  Then again, no one has ever asked if I was coming back before, so there’s that.

  April 1983

  James comes over on Friday and reminds me that this week is The Echo’s half-year Halloween party. I need to dress up, only I have nothing to wear, and Gabriel will be there, and I think I’m going to be sick.

  Wait, he says, I have just the thing. He pulls black jeans and a black shirt from my closet and starts sticking on pieces of a broken mirror that he found in the alley and shoved into his bag somehow knowing, in his James way, that he’d need it at some point.

  He says, You’ll be a disco ball. Then he shrugs and says, It’s the best I can do on short notice.

  I’m at the club at nine when the only people there are the bartenders, a couple making out in the corner, and Martin and Pedro. Pedro is a parrot and Martin is a bar regular who likes to wear impossibly high gold-glittered platforms. They make the rounds every weekend because people like to give Pedro beer, but he’ll only drink the Mexican stuff. Martin taught him to say “give me another,” and so they do. At least until Martin has to take the bird home to sober up.

  Sipping a Coke, I dance alone to Yaz.

  What are you supposed to be? Brian calls from behind the bar. Seven years of bad luck?

  I choke on a piece of ice and a sense of foreboding.

  I see Gabriel across the now-crowded room, only I’ve had too much caffeine and I’m not even sweating it out because the music sucks so I’m not really dancing and I just want to bolt. Maybe he won’t see me.

  See me.

  Please. See me.

  Gabriel catches me staring and smiles before I can look away.

  James once said that “precipice” was his favorite word and now I know why.

  I’m on the edge of something. On the edge and I want to fall. I want to fall so badly.

  Gabriel’s dark clothes are covered in glow-in-the-dark stars that reflect in the mirrors on my own. I’m night, he tells me. You can be my light.

  These are the things I learn about Gabriel: For minimum wage plus tips, he delivers balloons for parties, bar mitzvahs, and weddings. I have to wear this awful red jumpsuit, he says. And you haven’t lived until you’ve had to get into a crowded subway car with three dozen balloons. But it’s cool. No one is sad or angry when you’re bringing them balloons.

  He tells me he used to get good grades, and he used to live in the city, and he used to be a gymnast, and he used to pretend to have a girlfriend. But then his father was killed by some random guy on the F train. Gabriel quit school. He quit the gym. He quit the pretend girlfriend. His mom moved them to the Bronx where they live in a one-bedroom apartment over a smoke shop.

  Gabriel decided then that if he had to work to support his mom and little sister, if he had to sleep in a converted closet, he was going to do whatever things he could to make himself happy.

  As he’s talking, I realize I want to be one of those things.

  One of his things.

  I told Gabriel I live on the Upper West Side, which isn’t a lie, but James says I should have made up something more exotic.

  I told Gabriel I’m only sixteen, and he laughed and said, Age is only a number. He just turned eighteen, anyhow.

  I told him I’d write him a song.

  I told him I’d never been kissed, although I can’t tell that to anyone anymore.

  A kiss should be so simple. Lips against lips.

  A fulfillment of the promise I made to myself when I was twelve.

  A new promise created.

  After Becky and Andy went on their second date, she told me how he’d kissed her in the lobby of the movie theater.

  An older woman standing in the bookstore aisle next to us had smiled. Becky didn’t care who heard her. She didn’t have to.

  Gabriel and I hid in the shadows created by the fog and the lights of the dance floor. We weren’t hiding from ourselves, but from the world, and everyone who might hate us for it.

  Our kiss was a secret we didn’t want to keep.

  But we had no choice.

  As I’m getting ready for bed, a star falls out of my shirt and onto the floor. I place it under my pillow.

  I wish. I wish.

  I’m too busy wishing to sleep.

  When I was ten, I taught myself to play guitar upside down like Paul McCartney plays bass with the strings reversed and everything, because I’m useless doing anything right-handed. My dad asked why I couldn’t play something “manly” like the trumpet and join marching band. I told him I hated football, and he never asked again.

  I play through my favorite minor chords. Then the major. I thought that orange was the only word not to rhyme with anything, but Gabriel doesn’t seem to rhyme with much either.

  From our fourth-floor apartment, the city looks like just a bunch of lights. Streetlamps. Storefronts. Cars. Windows.

  Behind each one, a story, I guess.

  People fighting and falling in love. People having sex and having doubts.

  I want someone to tell me how it happens. Growing up. Finding your place in the world.

  The houses and the lovers and the jobs and the thoughts and the drama of it all. How do I make it my own?

  The next day, I ask James if he’d consider writing lyrics for a song for me.

  Oh, you wouldn’t want that.

  Wouldn’t I?

  Lyrics aside, I want my guitar to sound like The Edge, but it always comes out more like Paul Simon.

  Flipping through channels at James’s before the stations sign off for the night.

  Hey, look, he says, nodding toward the TV. He comes back to sit on the couch. Taps on the top of a cigarette pack. Puts it down.

  I don’t really have to. I’ve seen this before. David Bowie on an old Saturday Night Live rerun from the seventies. He’s wearing a blue dress and heels like a stewardess, and, behind him one of the singers, a performance artist James likes, named Joey Arias, wears matching red, right down to his hair.

  But I know who has James’s attention. Wearing all black, white-faced Klaus Nomi doesn’t normally sing behind rock stars. On his own, Nomi does this odd mix of opera and cabaret, and James is obsessed.

  I wait until the show is done. Then ask, So you don’t want to…I mean, you don’t sing opera.

  Oh, lord, no, James says. I just want to be that brave.

  Brave?

  James stares at the screen, which is still glowing bright, even though the set is turned off. Yes, he says. To be myself.

  I glance at James. At his black-and-white striped T-shirt. Red bandanna around his neck. White vinyl boots laced up to his knees over black parachute pants.

  And pretend I understand.

  HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR screams the Post’s headline.

  Honestly. You can’t make this shit up.

  Becky sometimes makes her own clothes on a sewing machine she found on the curb outside her building.

  It’s a little beat-up, but still works, and lately she’s been making increasingly odd headbands with things glued on top. Today, she’s wearing one that has a tiger with a key around its neck.

  What’s the key for? I say.

  My mom’s car, she answers.

  I know better than to ask.

  I dream about Gabriel. About being kissed. About what comes next.

  Becky sits in front of me in Mr. Solomon’s class and I pass her notes:

  How do I know?

  What if?

  What does it
feel like?

  We’re supposed to be writing down questions to ask a class visitor, a girl who volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel, a kind of communal living thing.

  Becky stretches and drops a crumpled paper behind her head and onto my desk. It says: If you want sex, don’t fall in love. If you want love, don’t sleep with him.

  Her answer feels wrong. Limited. Like, there have to be more than two options.

  Wait, I write back, What if I want both?

  She never answers, and then the bell rings and I’m too embarrassed to ask her out loud.

  James is going to his parents’ house in Connecticut for the weekend, so he’s smoking twice as much as usual.

  We sit on the fire escape of his apartment, watching the hookers cruise Ninth Avenue.

  You could live in a better neighborhood, you know. I mean, not like you can’t afford it. Wouldn’t your mother freak if she saw this place?

  James laughs. Forget my mother. My father would have me locked up.

  James sets his cigarette down on the edge of the rail and leans forward, elbow to knee.

  This is what I know about James’s parents: His mother is British and rich and beautiful and distracted by her clubs and her foundations and her committees. James loves her, although he wishes he didn’t. His father is a wildlife photographer for a big glossy magazine and spends his life on safari and in the bush and anywhere but at home. James says he doesn’t love him, but sometimes wishes he did.

  Wouldn’t your dad be used to this kind of thing? I ask, pointing to the rusty railing and the broken windows, the shattered crack vials and burned-out cars, and the guys sleeping in the doorway across the street.

  James picks up his cigarette and takes a long drag before flicking it over the rail and into a stagnant pool of water.

  My dad only shoots things he thinks are beautiful, James says, as if his father used a gun rather than a camera. He’d hate this.

  Coming down the hall back in our apartment, I stop to listen to Mom on the phone.