Age 12
I got my first job behind a pushcart icebox filled with tubs of ice cream. Vanilla, chocolate and mocha, but never strawberry because the shitty Chinese man paying me an under the table wage of two dollars an hour didn’t like strawberry. He’d show up at noon everyday, crack open the icebox and scan its contents, mumbling to himself. An hour later he’d return with more ice cream. Around six when the lights were just beginning to change, we rolled the cart into a garage he owned on Embarcadero and he handed me my sixteen dollars.
Two weeks into the job a homeless man with three teeth and a unibrow approached my cart and demanded I give him the tin of cash behind the icebox.
“No,” I said, but he reached around and took it anyway. Then he opened the icebox and spit inside.
“Oh, fuck you,” I said to his back.
He shrugged and gave me the finger.
When the Chinese man arrived at noon I told him what happened and he sighed for an hour.
“You no fight, Darcie?”
“No. I don’t.”
He knotted his eyebrows and stroked his chin. “We get you assistant,” he said, and the next day you showed up.
Your name was Dean and you had a thick black mullet and squinty eyes. From some angles you looked handsome but from most you just looked cruel. You were two years older than me, and when you showed up with a pack of Parliaments sticking out the front pocket of your Hawaiian button-down I thought you were the coolest thing on Earth.
The Chinese man gave us a scrambled introduction, winked and ran off to catch the BART. You nodded, opening your pack of cigarettes. Without a word you fished out two, handed me one and lit them both. I never smoked before and wasn’t sure how to hold it, but I copied your two finger technique and inhaled quick, pursed puffs. I wouldn’t pull the smoke into my lungs though—I let it sit on my tongue and exhaled when you did.
“That Chinaman is retarded,” you said. “He’s not so bad.”
“He told me I had to fight bums.”
“Just because?”
“No.” You laughed. A thought bubble of smoke floated overhead. “Only if they try to rob us.”
“Are you going to?”
“We’ll see how I feel.”
After an hour of honest working you taught me to do whip-its with the cans of Reddi Whip. At first the highs were a quick rush of cold hollow sinus pressure, then we realized that if we held our breath we could make them last for minutes. We plugged our noses and stared over the bay, letting the west coast breeze blow through our bodies, fill us with sea salt. When the Chinese man did his test squeezes the next morning, every can of whipped cream was out of air.
Age 13
It was one of those sick grip summer days, the rare California temperature spikes. People walked slower, breathed heavier between the hills and valleys. Asphalt steamed when water hit, and no one went barefoot without singeing the soles of their feet.
We took solace in your backyard, running through knee-high grass and spraying each other with the gardening hose. I wore a string bikini even though I couldn’t fill it out. But I liked the way I was developing, edges going soft.
“You look beautiful,” you said, and I believed it.
Your mother came home from work at five, wiped. She was a CNA at the local nursing home and her scrubs were stained with what looked like vomit. She reheated meatloaf in the toaster oven, humming an old Beatles song.
“Dean, is your girlfriend staying for dinner?”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” you said. “But yes.”
Age 14
I didn’t necessarily want to lose my virginity to you. There were other guys in Oakland, guys my age with better hair and better postures. But one week earlier I found out that my boyfriend was cheating on me with Lisa Laurel. He was always worried about me sleeping with you. Now seemed like the time to do it.
We smoked a blunt in your attic, where the smell clung to the insulation for weeks. There was one tiny light bulb and you sat underneath, so it looked like you were in the constant process of having an idea. You laid out a quilt of old t-shirts that your hobby mom made. We stripped down facing opposite directions. When I turned back, you were naked. Your penis was hard, thick and a little bent.
“You’re sure about this?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t make it more than it is.”
“I’m not.”
You laid me on my back and kissed the space beneath my thighs. I put my hands behind my head and relaxed, let the feelings wear into me like waves beating speckled sand. I bit my lip and stared into the core of the bulb overhead, watching kaleidoscope rainbows shrink and shift. When you thought I was ready you pushed into me, gentle, both hands on my waist. For the first minute it hurt and when it started feeling good you were done. But in that brief interlude between start and finish it was like those whip-its. Euphoric.
“Looks like I made you a woman.”
“Hooray,” I said, wiping a spot of blood off my inner thigh.
Age 15
You knocked my makeup tray onto the ground, sent mascara, eyeliner and lip-gloss flying into the corner of the room. Called me a whore, a puta, said I was the most disgusting thing you’d ever seen.
“I wish I never fucked you.”
I lit a cigarette and sat on my quilt, the floral one your mother made for my birthday. It was an array of flower patterns, daisies, poppies, roses dripping hot pink petals.
“That makes two of us,” I said, not meeting your eyes.
I was ending our relationship, if you could call it that. In reality we were doing everything we’d done before we started sleeping together, only now sex was a constant possibility. I was taking that possibility because your smart friend, Felix, asked me out and I said yes. He had potential. I liked that.
“Fuck you, Darcie.”
Your feet echoed down the stairs, out my front door. My window was open and I heard you drop your keys, a metallic clink on the asphalt. You cursed. Seconds later the car started. You swung the wheel and floored it with enough force to make crooked zigzags at the end of my driveway.
In the morning you called and apologized. I said it was fine while studying the skid marks through the window. You shouldn’t drive angry.
Age 16
The day you dropped out I swung by your place and walked in on your mother sitting on the couch, knees tucked under her chin. She was crying.
“He had four months left,” she said, nose running. “Why would he do this?”
I found you in the attic, high on Vicodin. You kept laughing when I tried to speak and even when I was silent. I waited until you came down, gave you glass after glass of water and forced you to drink each one. Ice rolled against the bridge of your long nose when you dipped your head back too far. Two hours passed before you became even a silhouette of yourself.
“I was just done, Darcie. You know?”
I didn’t. I was on a studying kick, turning my overall GPA into an exponential curve. I wanted to follow Felix to Berkeley, to trade my hot pants for bellbottoms and study French literature. I wanted to see something other than Oakland in the cracked conscious of my dreams.
When I stood up to leave you asked me to kiss you. For old times.
“I can’t do that.”
“I know.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
You hiccupped.
Age 17
I got into Berkeley, not with a scholarship but eligible for enough financial aid to buy a small boat. I’d been there a hundred times but for once the school was mine, not Felix’s. It was the edge of summer and I wanted to walk the campus, to feel the weight of my new home.
We hadn’t seen each other in weeks but you agreed to come for the drive. We rolled through Telegraph Avenue, past the thrift shops and ramshackle jewelry stands, the Indian restaurants and psychic booths. The windows were down, music loud and my hair was wild.
“You know,” you said, “I think I could have gotten into Berkeley.”
“You couldn’t even get to community college.”
You twisted your head so quick that it almost turned all the way around. “I mean I could have gotten in if I hadn’t dropped out.”
Bullshit. Your grades were worse than mine, your attendance record an absolute joke. By senior year you weren’t making it to a third of your classes. You dropped out before you even dropped out.
“Did you put on your application that you’re Spanish?”
“Yes,” I said, no longer staring through the windshield but simply at it.
“That’s probably why you got in.”
I gritted my teeth and gripped the wheel until my knuckles turned bone white. “Dean, what exactly are you doing with your life?”
You opened your mouth to say something but I cut you off.
“Are you going to be a rapper?”
“Darcie.”
“An athlete? Is your 5’7 ass gonna play basketball?”
I looked over, satisfied. You crossed your arms over your chest. Pretended to stare outside, watch the flashing Christmas lights dangling from nostalgia shop shingles. The song on the radio cut to commercial.
You swallowed hard and reached forward, tracing waves in the dust on the dash. Your hand was shaking.
“Pull over.”
“Dean—”
“Pull the fuck over.”
I got in the right lane and rolled up next to the sidewalk. Called your name but you were already throwing open the door, swinging both legs forward at once. You almost tripped. When you crossed in front of the car I could see that you were crying.
Age 18
That night you took the keys to your mom’s Monte Carlo and drove into one of the only trees of route 1, towards Bodega Bay. The autopsy showed that you were drunk. It also showed you didn’t die on impact. Some people called it an accident. Some said suicide. Either way, we all agreed you were dead.
I still think of you when I’m alone at night, listening to rain swim through the gutter. I wonder what went through your head in those last moments when you were trapped between the seat and the dashboard, blood pooling from your temple. Was it of the ice cream cart? The Chinese man? The playground we’d smoke in, dragging our feet through woodchips, listening to static and Biggie on your dime store boom box? Garbage can bonfires, girls with dreadlocks, crescent moons? The way the bay clouded in the morning and cracked open clear by noon?
Or were you thinking of that time in my attic, the night you truly owned me.