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In this kitchen, I was beginning again. I was turning into me. Not a dancer. But someone else. I’d catch up with myself; I’d retrace my steps any way I could, even if I wasn’t able to see my own old footprints marking the path.
Working the knife across the board. One-eighth cuts, presto. Tears were dropping off my face and rolling down my neck. Here was my passion—I chose it once, and I’d choose it again.
Dice dice dice, mince mince mince, chop chop chop. The sound was rolling motion and maybe I was on my way.
28
World Hold On to Me
The moon was a scrubbed white dish—or possibly it only looked like that because five minutes ago, I’d unloaded, oh, at least forty scrubbed white dishes from the industrial dishwasher—by the time I left the restaurant. I didn’t like walking by myself anywhere after ten, when Smith Street seemed to change hands from a café and restaurant crowd to a rowdier bar scene. I texted Mom and kept up a quick pace.
There hadn’t been much for me to do after all the prep work. So I’d polished off another of Isabella’s customized delicious dinners at the bar—fish tacos, along with tiny avocado bean cakes—and afterward she’d let me go without a word. The acknowledgment that I’d be returning was unspoken.
“Hey! Wait up!”
“Hey, you.” My chest constricted. Kai. He hadn’t been at the restaurant all night. I truly hadn’t thought he’d be there, though I’d yearned for him, of course, and had been half watching for him around every corner. Seeing him now, I could feel myself ache with joy and relief.
“Got an idea,” he said. “What do you say we hit the theater down the block? It’s all film geeks who run that place. We won’t have to pay, for one, and they’re lax about letting you sit in the balcony.”
“Sounds good.” Maybe it was because I’d bailed on the physical therapy earlier, but I felt pulled as a puppet from being on my feet for hours. The prospect of sitting down for a movie sounded perfect.
Kai’s presence was gravity. I was conscious of the heavy lift and fall of my boots, the weight of my sleepy eyelids as we ducked inside and slipped upstairs in the creaky old Cobble Hill Cinema, and then settled ourselves into the astoundingly comfortless iron seats. A movie was playing—something in German with subtitles, one of their typical esoteric offerings.
And there it was. Scratched onto the exit door, not to be missed, like a smirk.
Excitedly, I pointed to it. “It’s you, right?” I asked. “The graffiti tagger? The sideways-A guy? It makes sense that it’s you. Is it?”
“The tagger,” he repeated.
“Come on! Don’t play innocent! You keep putting them where you know I’ll find them. There’s a tag below the mural at Cobble Hill Park, and one at the Lincoln Center subway stop. There’s even one on the boardwalk on Coney Island.”
“Ha, listen to you. Are you an undercover cop?”
“Except that you are looking very guilty. You did it, I just know it. I thought it was another letter, an A, but it’s a K—a K for Kai, right?”
“Okay, guilty. K for Kai,” he admitted, but he seemed pleased that I’d figured this out.
“How many are there, in all?”
“Two hundred? Two hundred fifty?”
“Seriously!?”
“Yeah, around there. I don’t keep count.”
“Kai.” I sat back, knitting my fingers under my chin, contemplating the city as a city of silver Ks. All the ones I’d found and all the ones I had yet to find. “That’s a lot of tags. What’s the deal? Is it some kind of project?”
“It’s more just something I’ve always done, since I was a kid. It was my thing, a way of owning something that can’t be owned. Call it a way of feeling special, maybe. Or call it, I don’t know, my way of making the world hold on to me—till someone scrubs me off the wall and back into oblivion.” He waved a hand through the air, as if it was all the same to him.
But it was personal for him, these tags. He wanted to talk about it, but at the same time he was self-conscious. He pulled out his flask and passed it to me. I took a tiny sip of coffee.
“I’m going to start looking for them,” I decided. “I bet there’s some at El Cielo—I’m starting with the men’s room.” I passed back the flask. “And I’ll check some key warehouses in Bushwick, for sure. And around by the St. George and…I can’t think where else.”
“There’s plenty more places. I guess you’re just going to have to get to know me better, if you want to find them all.” He leaned in to steal a kiss, ending the discussion.
We stayed until the movie was over, though neither of us had any idea what it was about. Kissing in a movie theater—it was so stupidly, deliciously middle school, but with Kai the act also became a high-octane thrill.
Afterward, he walked me home, all the way up to my front door. The casual nearness of him made me dizzy. I was conscious of holding my breath. “So what exotic locale is next for us, Mr. Bond?” I asked. “The Carnival in Rio?”
“How ’bout Central Park?” he suggested. “Cheap and easy?”
“Sure,” I answered. “I go where you go.” I fished out my keys. “From the minute we met, I knew that was true.”
When I looked up, I saw in his face the promise of a response, but then he didn’t give me one. We stood together, not speaking. Kai used his finger to delineate each of my features in simple strokes, sketching me in the air but not touching me. We were so close that his skin radiated warmth, his eyes shone by the light of the streetlamp. He wanted to tell me something, I could feel it. But at the last minute he decided to kiss me one last time instead.
Then he turned, down the steps, moving swiftly.
“Wait—when? When are we going to…?” Too late. Kai was a ship out to sea, swallowed up in the night horizon.
But the smile remained on my lips, fading only when I opened the door to find both of my parents standing in the hall. This time, they weren’t even pretending that they were occupied with anything else. They were as alert and aligned as two arrows in a quiver.
“Really, folks?” I forced an easy tone. “I checked in with you three times since after school. There’s absolutely no reason for drama.”
“Your last call, you said you’d be home before seven,” said Mom. “Here it is, almost midnight. And when we tried you, you’d turned off your phone.”
