That year, I was Cleopatra and Lucia was a TV set. Bobby made a costume for her out of a big box and Reynolds Wrap. She had the cutest tinfoil hat with chopstick antennas. The apartment complex became playful for once. People actually answered their doors willingly and gave us candy. Lucia and I went through all six buildings until our plastic pumpkins were heavy and full. As we walked back toward our building, a dark shape jumped out at us. “Aha!”
I screamed, dropped my candy, and began to run. Lucia turned and scratched whoever it was in the face.
“Holy shit!” the dark shape said, jumping back. “You scratched my face!”
“Russell!” I said, walking back. “What the hell? You scared the shit out of us.”
“I’m sorry, Russell,” Lucia said. She touched his face. “Oh no, it’s bleeding.”
“Fuck,” Russell said, feeling his face and then looking at the blood on his fingers.
Lucia started to cry.
“Hey, it’s all right,” Russell said, patting her on the arm. Then he hugged her, awkwardly because of the box. “Shh, it’s okay, I’m fine. I’m fine.” He kept saying that into her hair.
Lucia pulled away from him and stood with her arms hanging stiffly out of the box, unable to wipe away her tears.
“It’s my fault anyway,” Russell said. “I’m the one who jumped out at you.”
It was hard to see in the dark, but I definitely saw two long lines on his left cheek. “You should clean that,” I said.
“Will you help me with that, China?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “If you help us pick up our candy.”
We went to Russell’s apartment because he said his mother wasn’t home. She was at a party with her boyfriend. Their apartment was in the basement, a few doors away from the laundry room, from where a loud knocking sound came. Probably someone’s sneakers in the dryer. You weren’t supposed to, but people did it all the time.
His apartment was nicer than I’d imagined and hippie-ish, with Indian tapestries and homemade paintings of women with snakes and moons, candles on every surface. There was a big plastic bong on the coffee table, and a pretty young woman smiled at us. A guy sitting next to her looked half asleep but nodded in our direction.
“Hey, Russ,” the girl said. “So glad you’re here. Can you lend me ten bucks? We’re starving.”
“Shit, is that mine?” Russell asked, pointing to the bong.
“Hey, man,” the guy said. “What happened to your face?”
Russell put his hand up to his face. Lucia looked worried.
“Holy shit, Russ!” the girl said. “Wait till Mom sees that! You look like you got attacked by a cat. Who did that?”
“Me,” Lucia said, raising her hand like she was in school.
“Russell jumped out at us in the pitch dark,” I said. “Scared the shit out of us.”
They laughed.
“This is my sister Kat and that’s . . . that’s just Gary,” Russell said as he started walking toward the bathroom. As we followed him, we heard Gary say, “Hey, I just noticed you’re a TV. Come over here so I can turn you on.” And then the two of them cracked up.
“Fucking idiot,” Russell said under his breath.
Lucia had to take the box off in order for us to all fit in the bathroom.
Russell took a wad of toilet paper and wet it in the sink. He looked at himself in the mirror. Then he winced as he touched it to his face.
“Here,” I said, taking the wet paper out of his hand. “Sometimes it’s better if you don’t look at it.” I made him sit down on the closed toilet. I cleaned up the blood as well as I could with more toilet paper and water. I asked him if he had any Neosporin.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“You know, the stuff that keeps your cut from getting infected?”
“Oh. Then no.”
“How about Band-Aids?”
“Yes,” he said, jumping up and moving things around in the medicine cabinet. He found a box of assorted Band-Aids with only the smallest ones left. I put eight of them on his face. And then Lucia and I laughed.
“You look like Frankenstein,” she said. I didn’t tell her that Frankenstein was the doctor. She connected the Band-Aids on his face with a light touch. “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it,” Russell said, his face soft.
For a second I thought they were going to kiss. But then he said, “We’d better go out there before they eat all your candy.”
“My candy!” I squealed, running out to the living room.
Russell’s sister lay against Gary’s chest. They were both watchingan infomercial on some Time Life Books about the occult: Mysteries of the Unknown. Candy wrappers were scattered all around them.
As I reached over for my violated pumpkin head of candy, Russell’s sister said, “There’s grass in there,” without looking at us.
For a while after his talk with Lucia’s mother, Bobby was much nicer to us. On Saturday mornings when Lucia’s mother was still at work, he took Lucia and me to the pancake house for breakfast. He still talked too much about boring things like stereo speakers and baseball teams and he still muttered under his breath. Lucia told me her mother had told her it was just a weird quirk that Bobby had and he didn’t mean anything by it. He used to stutter as a kid, she said, and this was one of the ways he had overcome it.
“Weird,” I said. He traded one tic for another.
He got Lucia a kitten she named Midnight. It slept curled under her chin and I soon discovered from my constant sneezing and red eyes that I was allergic to cats. I stopped sleeping over.
I thought things were going well with Bobby. At least I didn’t hear otherwise.
