Carina turned off her stereo and came outside for a cigarette. I could smell the chemicals of her newly dyed electric-blonde hair as she sat down next to me and sucked down the cigarette like she had been smoking for years, even though she was only fourteen.
“Freddy, Mom says she won’t be back until Sunday. She’s going to New Mexico with Roger. She left money for you on the table upstairs.”
“No one calls me that, Carina. And how could you smoke those? That shit is so bad for you.”
“I wish my ma’s left me some money, yo. You rich kids got the hookup,” said Henri.
I never considered myself a “rich kid,” but teachers would always tell us we were. They would say it like it was our fault, as if we carried around some pox that could only be cured with pulverizing self-awareness. Don’t get me wrong: there were plenty of rich kids funneling into Millburn Middle School from all the different Short Hills neighborhoods. I just always thought I was different. The Jews went to sleepaway camps in the summer and the WASPs went to this thing called Bartley: “Where boys are molded into men.” There they learned how to court girls and properly hold a knife and fork and ballroom dance and crap like that. Everyone went vacationing to the Caribbean and nobody’s mom worked—some of them even had nannies to cook and clean and take care of the kids while Mom drank wine.
My mom yelled at a bunch of them once because they gave her flak for not picking up bagels from Bagel Chateau and brought Nature Valley bars for the basketball team snack instead. “These women—don’t work a day in their life and have nothing better to do than… bitch”—she’d look around to see if my father was in earshot—“about the… the god—the damn snack. God give me strength.”
But the teachers would throw a blanket of privilege over all of us, even the kids who didn’t take Caribbean vacations and whose parents worked to afford their little houses in Millburn or an apartment above Buncher’s downtown, like my friend Jabes—we called him Jabie—who came to Millburn from that other slice of island paradise, the Dominican Republic. Jabie’s mother never seemed to stop working, and sometimes when we would go eat our deli sandwiches at his apartment across the street, we could hear his mom snoring from her bedroom after her shift like a troll under a bridge.
Maybe I was a rich kid. I didn’t really know, to be honest, but I did know that when we drove down Springfield Avenue through Irvington, or on I-78 East to get to the Portuguese restaurants in Eastside Newark, that I loved those neighborhoods with tight houses that had porches and sidewalks where everyone could just walk around and hang like in Hey Arnold! I didn’t know, though, that last week two boys about my age were casualties of a drive-by at the corner of Stuyvesant and Lyons Ave.
“Those two little dudes was just mindin’ they own business,” said Henri.
“I bet it was Jermaine and his crew. He got beef with Ali and the rest of 21st Street.”
“You guys better be careful,” said Carina as she exhaled the smoke from her filtered cigarette. “We don’t have to worry about drive-by shootings here.”
“Don’t you worry about us, C. You know me’s and Pierre works good-good with all the crews.”
“Hey, do you guys have guns?”
“Ha! Nigga, I’m always strapped!” Pierre turned his hand sideways and simulated the hammer with his thumb.
In the past year, I had attended so many bar mitzvahs I thought I could recite the Torah myself: Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam… I was jealous of them, not because of the attention or the money or the immediate manhood—Josh Glassman said he got, like, twenty thousand dollars for his bar mitzvah—but because of the photo montages they would show as everyone enjoyed their dessert. I wanted to show everyone pictures of me and Tony and Karl and George in the Geigers’ basement or on the front steps of the house we rented in Ocean City.
Sometimes, if the celebration was at a hotel, I would leave the party and wander the hallways by myself. One time I even took my shoes off and sprinted from end to end like Deion Sanders returning a kickoff from goal line to goal line.
Not to say I was always bored at them or anything. I had my first kiss at Alex Liebersfeld’s bar mitzvah, with Carly Feldman. It was okay, but the real memorable part of that night was when Alex’s uncle tossed a set of keys to my father, who was waiting to pick me up by the door in sweatpants and a New York Jets satin starter jacket, to fetch “the silver Beamer convertible.”
“I’m not working tonight,” my father said calmly as he handed the keys back to the unfazed gentleman.
At the start of eighth grade, I had already dated Stephanie Hinkle, Julie Greenberg, Carly Feldman, Julie Fischer again, Jen Weichselbaum, another short stint with Jenna Tisch, and now Jessie Levinson—John Thompson’s ex-girlfriend.
“Why don’t you date a nice Italian girl?” my father would say, to which I would remind him that from November 2003 to February 2004, I dated Julie Esposito, but Julie Fischer had told Stephanie Hinkle that she liked me again, so right up until the start of lacrosse season, I dated number one. Then she dumped me for this new kid from White Plains who was the friend of a friend of a camp friend’s friend.
I also hadn’t smiled in fourteen months. Despite my best efforts at protest, I got trapped in those ubiquitous silver braces suctioned onto each tooth with hot glue. My teeth had grown in jagged and on top of each other like a mako shark’s. Sometimes I’d pick out food stuck in the metal and give it a sniff—a dreadful habit—and my lips would curl. That first night, I
