It's four o'clock and James O'Connor is sitting on my sofa. His feet are hanging over the arm, gently hitting the side, and his head is on a pillow about a foot away from where I sit, but I'm too busy kicking ass at Mario Kart to notice. “Come on, come on, come on, yeah!” I let out a triumphant shout, pulling into the finish line .058 seconds before Luigi, that bitch. “How have you never played this before?” I inquire, “This is literally the peak of all video games.” James merely rolls his eyes. “Come on,” I insist, “You’ve gotta try.” I offer him the controller. “Nah, I’m good.”
“Would you do it for a Scooby Snack?” He cracks a smile. I’ve been bullying him since lunch about his Mystery Machine shirt. “It’s vintage,” He had argued. “It’s lame,” I’d declared. “Oh my god, you’re unbelievable,” he says, pulling himself upright, “Fine, fine. Whatever.” He reluctantly takes the controller from my hand and starts the next race. “I’m gonna warn you though, when I say I’ve never played before, I mean I have never touched a Wii in my life.”
“That’s just sad.” He rolls his eyes again and crosses his legs on the sofa while I show him all the controls. The TV counts down 3, 2, 1, beeeeep! James hits the gas button too soon and false starts.
As fate would have it, James sucks at Mario Kart. He comes in ninth place. "Happy now?" He says, shoving the controller back into my hand. I shake my head. "Do you want food or something? We've got, like, Wheat Thins and cheese, probably."
"I was promised Scooby Snacks," he says. "Alright, Wheat Thins and cheese it is." He rolls his eyes again and follows me into the kitchen.
At the moment, James and I are the only ones home. My parents are still working, and Casey is at a movie with some of her friends from school. I grab a box of Wheat Thins from the pantry, a small broom closet with no door. In the place of said nonexistent door, there is a giant Costa Rican flag fluttering down in its place. It’s probably disrespectful to walk through a curtain made of your home country’s flag, but who cares? Certainly not my dad. Every opportunity he has to “Costa Ricanize” something he seized with no second-guessing. “Este país,” He’d said, “¡Ellos no quieren que mantengamos nuestra cultura! ¡Necesitamos rebelarnos!” And apparently his idea of ‘rebel’ was ‘hang a Costa Rican flag in front of the pantry’.
"Can you grab a plate? They’re in the cabinet to the left of the sink.” I call out to James. He nods as I return from the pantry and head to the fridge to look for cheese. James looks over my shoulder into the void also known as our fridge. It’s a seemingly never ending stockpile of food that we, surprisingly enough, always consume before the expiration date. “Dude, your fridge looks like a hurricane went through it,” James notes. “Hurricane Karina? More like Hurricane Tortilla.” I say. James glares at me and sighs. “You’re ridiculous. I can’t believe you’re quoting vine. He rubs the back of his neck. Why do you need so much food anyways?”
“If there isn’t constantly a mass of food we would all starve to death. My mom stress cooks and the rest of us stress eat. You should come around for Sunday dinner sometime. Family dinner night is probably a bigger disaster than you can imagine. Between the four of us, it takes forty minutes to clean the kitchen.”
“That’s nice.”
“It can be kind of annoying though, ‘cause I always put off my homework until Sunday night.”
“I mean, my dad and I never eat together. Or, like, talk.” I shrug. “Grass is greener on the other side.” He nods in agreement.
Once I find the cheese, James and I bring the plate of snacks to my room. It’s sort of a weird thought, James coming into my room. My parents really don’t really care about that kind of stuff. They’re pretty chill as far as parents go, and they’re not super huge on the ‘no one you would screw in your room’ rule, but nonetheless, it seems unnatural for James to be sitting in the wooden rocking chair next to my closet. “You have a lot of baseball stuff,” he observes. I forgot that he’d never actually been in my room before. When he came over we usually just watched movies in the living room. Or, well, he watched movies. I daydreamed about him. Is that creepy? Ugh.
Anyways, my walls are covered in baseball posters, and my bookshelves have more baseballs than they do books. Some of them are from players, and some of them are MVP’s from little league. “What can I say? I’m dedicated.” He smiles and rests his head on his palm. My room is definitely a place of comfort. Aside from all the baseball memorabilia, there’s an NYU pennant and various photos of my family and friends. My red and blue bedspread is thrown on the floor and a pile of clothing is stacking up in the corner. Sure, it’s a bit of a mess, but I usually find the mess kind of comforting, like it’s lived in. I’ve lived in a lot of places that don’t feel lived in, I wanted this to be an exception. Nonetheless, I feel slightly embarrassed that I didn’t make an effort to clean. James doesn’t seem to mind. “It’s nice,” he says, taking a second look around the room. “My room is pretty messy all the time. It’s like if you replaced all of the baseball memorabilia with oil paintings,” He admits.
“Why is that not surprising at all?” He chuckles. We talk for a while about school and teachers and papers. He’s taken a liking to the dark wooden rocking chair in the corner and is now sitting with his head on one arm, and his legs dangling over the other. We talk until the box of Wheat Thins is completely empty, and then return to the living room to continue playing Mario Kart. During this time I make a valiant effort to teach James everything there is to know about the game, but he cocks his head and stares at me like I’m trying to explain astrophysics to a chimpanzee.
My mom comes home at 7:00 on the dot. "Hey boys,” she says, poking her head into the living room. “Hey, mamá,” I say, directly followed by a, “Hi Mrs. Reyes,” from James. “Dios mío, James, we’ve talked about this! Please, call me Carmen.”
“Sorry. I forgot,” he explains. She smiles at him because she’s teasing him for being so polite rather than reprimanding him. “Anyways,” she starts, “Dinner.” She dramatically slaps her hands together “I’d make something nice, but someone forgot to pick up groceries from the store, that someone being Peyton’s father, so how does spaghetti sound?”
“Perfect,” James replies. “Good, because it was either that or the week-old chicken and rice your papá brought home from work last week.” I turn to her, “Yeah, spaghetti sounds like the superior option here.”
“Great,” she says, making a brushing motion with her hands, “I’ll get started. Papá is going to pick up Cassandra from the movies, and then we’ll all eat as a family,” I glare at her because I know “we’ll eat as a family” is code for “we’ll relentlessly tease you about your crush in front of him, but we won’t do it in English so it’s totally okay.” She merely smiles and heads for the kitchen.
I’ve got to say, I definitely got lucky with my mom. She’s light-hearted and not terribly strict. She’s also quite beautiful. Her skin is a lighter shade of tan, and her hair is full of thick, dark curls from my Abuelita, but her eyes are a deep emerald green that pierce your soul with every glance.
James is once again lying with his legs hanging over the arm of the sofa with his head on a pillow. I look at him with a gentle fondness. There’s something about his slightly disheveled look that seems otherworldly. There’s no way that someone with unkempt blonde hair and crooked glasses should coexist with high cheekbones and full lips, but his whole physique says otherwise. “What?” He asks, his periwinkle blue eyes meeting mine. I feel my cheeks heat up. “Ah, nothing. I was just thinking about … uh, how I need to ask Marina to prom. I think she deserves a sign or something. I’m just not that artistic.”
“Pft,” He says, swatting a hand up into the air, “That’s ridiculous. Everyone has artistic capacity, you just need to hone it. Anyways, I got some good ideas last night, I kept them all on a Pinterest board for you.”
“I swear to god James we're not using..." but it's too late. He's already opened up the app to a little folder called “Peyton”. "Mae, what the hell?" I chuckle, "Listen here, Reyes. Pinterest is wonderful," he says, and I just agree to it because I'm too busy thinking about how much I love it when he calls me by my last name. "She's into shot put right? What else."
“Shot put is fine, I mean, she likes orchestra too, obviously, but shot puts, like, her thing. They have that nickname for her, you know? The Bullet.”
“Okay, so shot put it is.” He lays his head back with a contemplative look crossing his face. “Okay, I have an idea,” he says, pulling himself from off the couch. “You’re not just gonna stare at me while I try to do the whole thing are you?”
“Of course not. What else are best friends for?”
“Dope. I’ll go rob Casey’s art cabinet.”
As I return with an armful of art supplies, James’ eyes widen with that dazzle, the one I first saw back in September. He’s contemplating, putting together the whole thing in his mind. “So in shot put, you use a discus,” he says, “that sounds like discuss. We could start with, like “I have to discus something with you, yeah?”
“I follow so far,” I say. “Then how about we add something like ‘wanna take a shot at prom with me?’ Short and simple ya know.” I nod in agreement as he reaches for a marker. “Do you want it simple or fancy?” he asks. “It’s Marina, mae, let’s go all out.”
Watching James draw is an art in and of itself. His wrists move elegantly, all in this dancelike motion. There’s nothing stiff about his body, he works swaying gently as if he is making some kind of beat. My mom comes in to check on us, “What are you up to?”
“We’re making a proposal for Marina,” James says, with an as-a-matter-of-fact tone, without even looking up. “¿Es para tí?” She asks me. "Yeah mom.”
“Qué despiche, mijo.” I can't tell if she's teasing me or being genuinely sympathetic. “Ya sé, ya sé."
“¿Y él?”
"Va a ir con Emily. Pensé que te había dicho.”
“Ah, claro. Se me olvidó. Lo siento, mijo.” I shrug my shoulders. I always feel bad about speaking in Spanish when someone around can’t understand. I guess I’m scared that other people will think I’m gossiping about them, but James seems unbothered. He’s smiling a little bit and filling in an assortment of letters with glitter. My mom winks at me before returning to the kitchen. “Limpien la mesa antes de la cena, por favor.” She calls. “Ugh, sorry about her,” I say to James. “It’s fine,” he says. “She wants us to clean the table.”
“Okie.” He caps the pen he’s using and moves on to the next section. “I wish I spoke another language. It’s so cool that you can speak Spanish AND you’re good at French. All I can say in German is ‘Ich spreche kein deutsch.’ I don’t know how far that will get me.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t speak German.” I laugh at that. “You’d think that after four years I’d be able to say more than that.”
“You should learn Spanish, it’s more practical.”
“You should have told me that four years ago.”
By now we are almost finished with the poster, we being James because I have done very little due to my lack of any artistic capabilities. “Do you want some help?” I ask. “I think I’m good.” He looks up at me, “You and Marina are just going as friends right?” He asks. “Yeah.”
“Alright! Finishing touches.” He says, changing topics as he writes ‘Ft. James’ in the bottom corner with little yellow rays poking out around his name. “Perfect.”
“It looks amazing, mae. I probably just would have written it in pencil.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. We would no longer be friends if that happened.” He brushes his hands together and stands up, as he admires his work. I watch the corner of his lip curl into a smile. “Ta-da!” He says. “Thanks, mae, she’ll love it.”
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