Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Later he’ll try and trace steps back through his indistinct memories to find the source, like a detective walking the last road the victim was seen on: every customer with a cough, every sneeze on the street. Who brought this into their lives, where did it start, whose fault is it?

He doesn’t know, he'll never know, who got sick first. He knows he got worse first. Later, that will always be what he comes back to.

The flu is inevitable year after year, with the months descending into cold and how many people with how many questionable hygiene practices pass through a bodega and a high school on the daily, breathing all over the place and germing things up. And the De la Vegas can’t afford to be sick again this year, not after Pai spent so long in September with another prolonged chest infection he’s only just recovered from, one that they had no choice but to see a doctor about. Money's been pretty tight since then, and their lives shift around the finances like they always do: heat should've been on a few weeks back in these temperatures but they’re stretching as late as possible before they give in on that, food should be more than it is but they’re stretching that too, Usnavi should probably be sleeping off the insistent flu that all three of them have been suffering through for a couple of weeks, but he isn't. Instead he gets home from school, eats early dinner of the same leftovers they’ve been making last for four days now, and then straight to work to help out because they’re keeping the store open later than they usually do to get some extra business, which means longer shifts and all hands on deck.

It isn’t the first time he’s worked sick, probably won’t be the last, but man, Usnavi can’t remember if he’s ever worked while he felt this much like he just fell off a building before. Damn flu just won't get shook off.

He glances around for a second to check the store's empty and, seeing that he’s alone, leans folded over at the waist to rest his head on his crossed arms against the counter, a blissful moment of darkness. The lights here are so fucking bright. The people are so fucking loud. Just one moment away from it and he’ll be back on…well, not top form, but like maybe scraping a pass, and ain’t that always been the Usnavi way anyway?

Some time later, someone says “¡Usnavi, despierta!” very loudly, followed by a scratchy cough.

Usnavi stands up straight so fast he nearly falls backwards. “¡Estoy despierto!”

“I said your name three times just now,” Pai disagrees. 

“I was just, y’know, deep in thought.” There’s a weird nearly-painful feeling in Usnavi’s chest, not quite stabbing but almost, like the itch of deep breathing in icy air. Was that there earlier? He coughs into his hand, then makes a face, because turns out that was the gross and very solid kind of cough. Ew. Shit like that got no business being inside a person’s lungs.

"Vas a dormir,” Pai orders. 

“Shift ain’t over,” Usnavi says, wiping his hand off on a tissue and then applying hand sanitizer fastidiously. Last thing they need is customers catching nothing off them.

“Your shift’s over when I say it’s over, and I say that’s now,” Pai says. The bell jingles on the door. “Rosa, !justo a tiempo! Intimidate your son into an early night’s sleep, por favor.”

Mama takes one look at Usnavi’s admittedly pretty pitiful state, raises her eyebrows, and says “Usnavi, hora de dormir, vamos.”

“Yes, Mamá!”

“Your mother is truly a powerful woman,” Pai says.

Usnavi hates to admit that they both have a point: climbing the stairs may as well be walking a ladder to the moon, in lead boots. The apartment when they get in is freezing. It’s still early enough that his parents will be down in the bodega for a few more hours, and besides Usnavi’s way too old to crawl in between them in their bed for body heat in winter like he did when he was little, but Mamá awkwardly manages to cram herself into the half a square foot of floorspace in Usnavi’s room that’s not taken up by the bed so that she can pack all three of their hot water bottles into his bed beside him then tucks the comforter right up around his chin. She kisses him on the cheek before she leaves, and even though it’s cold enough in the apartment Usnavi can see his breath in the air, there’s still a kind of warmth in the comfort of being home.

***

Usnavi wakes up hours later sweating so much that his first instinct is to check it’s not one of the hot water bottles sprung a leak. His pajamas and his sheets are soaked through, and he’s hot, so hot that he flings open his door expecting to be greeted by the apartment in flames around him. Outside there’s only the dark hallway stretching out in front of him, spinning away when he attempts to step forwards and his legs straight up stop functioning.

“Mamá!” he tries to shout from his sudden position on the ground, but his voice comes out just a rasping sound. He’s alone in the bewildering dark for a moment but they must have heard him fall, because they’re coming out of their room and Pai’s helping him sit up.

“I fell down,” Usnavi says miserably.

Mama places her hand on his forehead and immediately snatches it back, hissing in shock. “Usnavi De la Vega!” she says sharply, like she’s caught him in trouble. “Mateo, he’s burning up.”

“Don’t feel good,” Usnavi mumbles. Mamá strokes his hair. Pai says something about calling…someone? Usnavi curls up on the floor with his head in Mama's lap to go back to sleep.

Things happen, vaguely: Pai's voice on the phone, Kevin Rosario's voice at the door. Sitting in the back of the cab. Mamá by Usnavi's side at the urgent care while a doctor tells him a whole lot of stuff he doesn’t even try and listen to.

Faint delirium covers next few days, next several days, Usnavi in a tedious cycle of sleeping, taking pills, coughing, aching. Nina stops by to deliver a dinner Camila prepared for them and he’s pretty sure she mentions that she brought him the schoolwork he's been missing but when he asks, Mamá just tells him not to worry about it right now. He worries anyway: he's done all his exams last year and resat a couple in the summer and all, so he thinks he’s gonna graduate but it’s such a fine line that he was gonna make up some grades this year, just to be sure. How many days has he missed? No sense of time passing, fades in, fades out, fades in to his parents talking in low voices right next to him. How? There isn't space for all three of them in his room. He twitches his fingers round and feels a rougher fabric than bedsheets underneath him, pats behind his head and there's a couch cushion: ah, he’s in the living room. The satisfying conclusion of this little mystery is interrupted by the unsettling sensation of something being taken out of his mouth that he didn’t know was there.

“One-oh-three point five, same as earlier.”

“That’s too high, Mateo, why isn’t it going down?”

“It hasn't gone up any more, at least,” Pai says. His voice is flat and rough. He doesn’t sound at all like himself. “Emergency room at 104, like la doctora said, but it isn't going up any more. He’s going to be fine, querida, nothing keeps a De la Vega down for long.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen him stay this still for this long since he was a baby,” Mamá says quietly.

"Sí, or be this quiet." A hand patting Usnavi's arm. “You sit with him. I have to get back to work.”

“You’re going back to la tienda? While he’s like this?”

Pai is silent for a long time, then says, “the money has to come from somewhere. If I hadn’t had all those damned appointments earlier this year…”

“Then god knows what would have happened to you and we’d be in even more of a mess right now, wouldn’t we?” Mama retorts. “Papi, you shouldn’t be working this much. This terrible flu, you need rest too.”

“We all do, but if Usnavi does need to go to the hospital—“

“Don’t need hospital,” Usnavi cuts in, finally opening his eyes. “M’fine. Peachy keen. Walkin’ on sunshine. Where's Abuela?”

He hasn’t seen her for days. Weeks? Forever. It must be why the air is so heavy and sad in here: Abuela always shines a light on the best paths to walk, when even his parents are stumbling in the night.

“Lo siento, mijo, but you can’t see her right now, you’re still contagious. It could be very dangerous at her age.”

Usnavi contemplates this forlornly. He's sick. It's dangerous. It's expensive, already gotta pay for the urgent care visit and the medicine and the missed time off work for all of them. Hospital would mean more money, more work for everyone, paying to get there, paying for treatment, if things gets worse. That's a lot of pressure, he thinks, to get better quickly, and him without even the energy to blink. “Tired. Wanna go home.”

“You are home, pequeño,” Mamá says.

“Oh,” he says, frowning around. She’s right. Lost track for a moment. “I want Abuela.”

Mamá sighs, a resigned and rattling sound. It turns into a cough, deep and wet and wheezing like he’s never heard her sound before, not even when she’s had asthma attacks in the past. She takes a pull on her inhaler.

“Mamá!” Usnavi tries to sit up, though he doesn't get far. “You sound like hell, why ain’t you in bed? Is it the same thing what I got? Did you go to the doctor?”

“Who’s the parent here?” she says, tapping him reproachfully on the tip of his nose. “It’s just the flu. Don’t worry yourself.”

They keep saying things like that, but how is he supposed to stop when there’s so goddamn much to worry about? He weaponizes his stress to fret noisily at her until she finally agrees to go and lie down at least for an hour or so just to placate him. Usnavi waits for Pai to make a joke like he usually would, about how Mamá’s so stubborn, about how Usnavi was obviously born so good at arguing just so someone on this Earth would be able to get through to her: instead, he just stares at the door till after she leaves, rubbing the brim of his cap as though in thought.

“Pai?” Usnavi says, worry stabbing deep in his chest and settling in as heavy as pneumonia.

“Está bien, little one,” Pai says, and he looks so tired, he looks as tired as Usnavi feels. “You just sleep. It’s going to be okay.”

***

Usnavi’s fever finally breaks early November. He’s still barely able to stay awake for more than an hour at a time, so he isn't doing no celebratory dances yet, but the cough finally eases, he can finally breathe clear again.

His parents, though...it's easier to see now that he isn't lost in his own delirium, his parents are only getting worse, as though they poured all their health into Usnavi's recovery and left none for themselves. Shadows hanging over their eyes and their words and their spirits, so strange to live a life where instead of singing in the morning Usnavi wakes up to coughing, or the sound of someone vomiting, or just his own heart beating a little too fast with constant anxiety.

T hey're getting worse, faster and faster, and it's starting to scare him. He keeps asking them to go to the doctor and they say not to worry, it’s just the flu. Mamá's started clutching her inhaler in one hand all day like a lifeline, and then one evening as November’s end is looming over the winter-white horizon, Pai collapses in the store.

“You gotta do something about this, Pai,” Usnavi says to him. “This definitely ain’t just flu, it's been too long, and I know it ain't 'cause Abuela's had her flu shot but you still won't go to see her in case she catches something off you, but what about all the other old folk who come into the store? And what if you’d hit your head when you passed out? You’re lucky me and Benny were in the bodega.”

He had to get Benny to help him take his dad upstairs. Even though it’s Benny, who’s been Usnavi’s best friend forever, it was somehow humiliating: this isn't the kind of home Benny's come to visit a million times over the years, unfamiliar even to Usnavi. The mess of the apartment now none of them can prioritise chores, the unwelcoming chill of the air without the heat they can’t pay for, standing in his parents’ bedroom while Mamá is sleeping there and Pai is shivering and too weak to stand. Usnavi heard Benny in the kitchen doing some of the dishes before he left, and it made him want to cry. 

“I didn’t pass out,” Pai insists. “Solo una siestecita.”

“In the middle of the aisle.”

"An unexpected siestecita.” Pai coughs, the same rough bark that’s been clinging to Mamá’s lungs too. She turns over next to him in bed, but doesn’t wake up. It’s five in the evening, dark out already, and the apartment feels like a perpetual midnight these days.

“Why won’t you just let me take you to the hospital?” Usnavi pleads, and he's embarrassed of how close he is to tears. “Or at least to a doctor, they gave me medicine, you need it too.”

Pai blinks slowly, then seems to drift off for a few minutes. Belatedly, as Usnavi’s about to leave and reheat another meal sent round by the Rosarios that nobody will have the appetite to eat, he murmurs “we just can’t afford to, Usnavi.”

You found a way to afford it for me, Usnavi wants to say. You woulda taken me to hospital if it came to it. But he’s terrified that maybe that’s exactly why they can’t afford to go themselves, and besides, at least now maybe they’ll both finally rest up and get better. Usnavi can pick up the slack for a while, he's tough. So all he does is kiss Pai on his burning forehead and head down to the bodega, staying open as late as he can force himself to, all the time buried under the paralyzing weight of urgency, of being split in two: he's at the store wondering if he should be upstairs watching over them instead, he’s waiting by their bed knowing every minute he’s there is a minute less of a paycheck that he could put towards helping, he’s too tired to work the hours he’s pulling  but what other choice is there? The pressing weight from all sides, torn between doing what his parents want or doing what he feels like he needs to and the sheer impossibility of even considering a hospital bill, with two out of three of them down for the count while they fight in the poverty cycle of overworking to pay bills accrued from the consequences of overworking. It's quicksand and the harder they struggle the further they sink.

His parents sleep restlessly, increasingly incoherent by the day and then by the hour until he's not sure they know he's even in the room with them. Their fevers burn silent fires while every night Usnavi prays, by candlelight to keep electric costs down, his knees aching on the cold floor of his parent's bedroom.

Chapter Text

New York City always wakes up in sound and the De la Vega household has always done the same: Mamá crooning along to the radio at 6AM, Pai yelling outside Usnavi’s door that they don’t run a breakfast-in-bed service so he’d better get up if he wants to get fed. Usnavi's got no window in his room and it's winter anyhow, but in the summertime in the kitchen Pai likes to have the windows open, so they can hear the sounds of the Heights starting to move while they eat breakfast, traffic picking up and other radios one by one joining theirs as people crank the tunes to take the edge off the early hour.

The De la Vega household stays quiet these days. Windows closed against the winter and it’s only Usnavi who's waking up early, his room dark as always stumbling to an equally-dark kitchen without the radio on. It’s tea, not coffee, that he’s brewing, to take through to his parent’s bedroom, where he sets the cups down and wakes them just enough to be sure that they've hydrated some before he goes. Pai murmurs to have a good day at school: Usnavi hasn't been back since before he had pnuemonia: he's opening the store at 6.30 because the pre-work coffee rush is a solid profit they can’t afford to lose. He’ll run the bodega for an hour or so, then get Abuela to watch the counter for a hurried twenty minutes while he runs upstairs to take temperatures, clean up vomit, be a steady shoulder to lean on to walk someone to the bathroom. Wipes faces, brushes hair, even cleans their teeth for them.

He tries so hard not to think about how they did the same for him when he was too small to do it for himself.

Abuela takes both his unsteady hands when he gets back to the store. “Mijito…” she says.

“Lo se,” he answers. He knows, the concern in her voice and her eyes and all the meaning in that one single word, because hasn't everyone been telling him the same thing for well over a month now? He knows they need to go to a doctor, he knows that this isn't something they can just wish away, he hasn’t been thinking about anything else. He knows. “I’m gonna do something, I swear, it’s just…man, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doin’, Abuela, it’s way more complicated than just showing up to a doctor, it ain't like we got insurance or nothing. I never figured I’d have to think about this stuff yet, not without one of them telling me how.”

Abuela places her hand softly on his cheek. He  remembers sitting on her lap when he was sad as a kid, or hiding his face against her hip when he was feeling shy as they stopped in the street every five steps to talk to someone she knew. " Sometimes paciencia y fe is not enough by itself," she tells him.

“There are always people here who will help you. Camila is a smart woman, you remember how she helped your father with his last hospital bills, and me with my medicine too? And Kevin will always give you a free ride. And there'll always be someone to help you at the store."

“...Okay,” he says. “Yeah, okay, I know. I don't know what we can do but I…I want them to get better already.”

“Todos los hacemos,” Abuela says. “It’s been quiet around here.”

Usnavi smiles at her. “I'll talk to the Rosarios sometime this week, figure something out,” he says. It's November 28th.

***

The Rosarios deadbolt their front door at night so Usnavi’s key is useless at this hour. He’s hammering against it as hard as he can and it should be deafening but his own ears feel deaf to it and nobody’s answering, at least not until Kevin yells through the door at him.

“Juro por Dios, get away from my door, cabrón, I’m armed!”

“It’s me!” Usnavi shouts, the words catching like a sob. “It’s Usnavi, ayúdame, abre la puerta, you have to—“

Kevin opens the door, hurriedly dropping a baseball bat to grab Usnavi by the arms as he practically falls into the apartment.

“Usnavi, what—!” he starts.

“I can’t wake them up,” Usnavi gasps. “They ain't breathing right and I can’t wake them up and they— Kevin, I don’t know what to do!”

Everything explodes instantly into chaos. Nina appears from nowhere to hand Kevin the spare keys to Usnavi’s place, Camila suddenly with them already dialling 911 on her cellphone while she tells Kevin to bring his cab around so they can follow the ambulance as soon as it comes.

“Ambulance?” Usnavi says, reeling a little. Why hadn’t he called one himself? He hadn’t thought, acted on impulse, had desperately needed someone else to share this with him as soon as possible. It’s November 29th, and he woke up with the knowledge that the world was wrong before he even opened his eyes, the deep and dreadful echo of the unconscious voice inside all living things that tells you to run when you stand too close to something dead.

No! They’re not dead. They were breathing, stuttering, stopping, erratic, but they were breathing, no matter the strange gray-blue tint to their lips, no matter that Usnavi’s too fucking stupid to have got them to a hospital himself a week ago. No matter, no matter, they're not dead.

Kevin grips his shoulder reassuringly. “We’ll be with you the whole time, Usnavi, it’s going to be okay. Nina, call Benny and tell him he’s in charge of dispatch today, I don’t have anyone else free.”

“What? But Benny’s got school, and he's never run the —“

“Nina, do as I say!” Kevin shouts, putting on his coat as he runs out the door. Camila’s right behind him, phone up to her ear while she talks to the 911 operator, and Usnavi goes to follow them when Nina steps in front of him.

“Wait,” she says, leaning down to pick up a spare pair of Kevin’s shoes, lined up with the rest underneath the hooks for all their coats, and she holds them out to Usnavi. He stares in confusion for a moment, then realizes that he came round here without getting dressed, he’s barefoot and so cold he can barely feel his body. Is that important? He tries to push past her but she’s stronger than she looks, stopping him in place with her hand on his chest.

“Usnavi, please, it’s snowing.”

He grabs the damn shoes just to get her out of the way but as he takes them, his body locks up, frozen except for the trembling.

“The ambulance is on the way, the paramedics’ll know what to do,” Nina says.

“They wouldn’t wake up,” Usnavi says, helplessly. “I couldn’t wake them up.”

***

The first step through hospital doors is like tapping unmute. The overlapping beep and shout and murmur of machines and medics and patients, people’s shoes squeaking on the linoleum, a world so busy he’s going to choke on all of it, the bright lights and the bleachy sanitized scent of the air and the bitterness of the vending machine coffee Camila bought for him while they sit in the waiting room. Usnavi desperately needs to be anywhere that isn’t here but he doesn’t dare even step outside for a breather in case he misses anything. Instead he tries to focus on his dad’s hat in his hand, which he’d grabbed on impulse on the way to follow the paramedics, resting it on his knee and walking his fingers up and down the light polyester stripes and the black that separates them like keys on a piano.

They won’t let him in to see his parents while they’re working on them. He doesn’t know what working on them means in the specific and nobody will tell him anything.

“Can I see them yet?” he asks again at the nurses station anyway.

“I’m afraid not,” she says, with a detached sort of gentleness. “As soon as we know more, we’ll tell you. Just take a seat, please.”

Usnavi doesn’t want to sit back down, he doesn’t want to sit still, he wants to pace the hallways and smash all the too-bright lights and tear out all the too-loud machines until someone tells him something, until it forces something to happen. He bites down hard on his wrist till his eyes water, and then bites harder than that.

Nina gently tugs his hand down from his mouth and laces their fingers together.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he doesn’t know why.

“Me too,” she answers, and he doesn’t know why.

A long while later, a doctor approaches them and Usnavi squeezes Nina’s hand tightly enough that it makes his fingers ache instantly, but he can’t loosen his grip. Nina doesn’t flinch.

“Are you here with the De la Vegas?” the doctor asks, and Usnavi forgets to answer so Camila says “yes”.

“We’ve run some tests,” the doctor says, to Camila not Usnavi. “Both Mateo and Rosa have a viral form of pnuemonia, which in itself is not necessarily dangerous. But—“ he says, hurriedly like he doesn’t want to give them too much space to hope, “I’m afraid that it has progressed to the point that they’ve developed a severe secondary bacterial infection, which can often happen in vulnerable persons - that is, people with lowered or weakened immune systems, or those suffering from conditions like asthma, which if left untreated—“

“Aite, but what does it mean?” Usnavi butts in. “Can you treat it? How long will they be sick for?”

The doctor sighs. “We’re doing everything we can, but at this advanced stage it’s hard to say anything for certain. If they survive the night we’ll be able to tell you more about the long-term prognosis.”

Camila covers her mouth with her hand, and Kevin mutters something under his breath. A solid steel box in Usnavi’s brain immediately slams down around the implication, refusing to let it germinate.

“…If?” Nina whispers. Usnavi drops her hand.

“We’ll know more by this evening,” the doctor says.

“Can I sit with them?" Usnavi asks, for the hundredth time.

***

Paciencia y fe what Usnavi was raised on, but he’s never been good at the former and the latter is wavering. They survive the night. It was supposed to be good news, but the doctor says that it seems like things were worse than they thought, he says, if they improve, he says, if they wake up. The nurse says that Usnavi can go in to see them now. Usnavi’s waited and he’s prayed all day, and all he got for it grim pessimism and an if, and this dimly-lit room where his parents are hooked up to needles and tubes and respirators. Faint noises behind closed curtains of other families, other illnesses, other machines.

“Hola,” he says. “Soy yo.”

It's November 30th, and they haven't woken up. Can they hear him? If he talks enough, will his voice find them wherever they’re wandering and remind them to come home?

He pulls the chair round to sit in between them.

“I brought your hat, Pai. S’weird seeing you without it, been what, four years come Christmas? Did Mamá tell you she only got you it ‘cause she hated that old baseball cap you used to wear so much?” Usnavi taps lightly at the kangaroo logo on the back of the hat. “Girls look fly in Kan-gols. Ain’t ever been so sure about you though, Pai, coupla scrawny little Dominicans like us can’t pull off the Sammy L Jackson schtick.”

The light pattern in the room changes as Camila pulls the curtain back. “Just checking in,” she says. “How are you, cariño?”

He isn't gonna answer that.

“Do you want company?” she presses. He shakes his head. “Water? Something to eat? You haven't had anything for hours.”

“Coffee would be great.”

“You need more than that, I’ll get you a candy bar from the vending machine,” she says. “And a coffee too, yes.”

“Gracias, Camila.”

“De nada.”

“Café con leche here sucks,” he informs his parents when she’s gone. “You’d hate it. Once you’re awake I’ll head out and get you a proper one, ain’t nobody deserve that taste in their mouth all day. I shoulda asked her to get me some gum.”

He glances over at Mamá, the plastic mask over her face, the faint artificial inhale-exhale of air being pumped into her lungs. It reminds him of his earliest baby pictures from when he was still in the NICU, tubes up his nose and wires on his tiny wrist. Was this what it was like for them when he showed up in the world before he was ready for it? Long days drinking hospital coffee, watching him breathe through a machine, living on an if.

“That doctor don’t know what he’s talking about,” Usnavi says. “Bet they said that kinda shit about me when I was a baby and I ended up fine, we always bounce back, ain’t we? Besides, we got a store to run, nobody got their coffee today, the whole barrio’s gonna fall apart if you don’t get better fast. And we’re s’posed to hit up Playa Rincón in the summer, we’ll still find the money somewhere. Sonny’s real excited to come with us this time, we can’t let him down. Don’t you wanna go back home?”

The heart monitors beep asynchronous, two BPMs clashing in one song. It grates his ears to listen to.

“Come back,” he says, getting desperate. “Come on, what will it take? I know you’re tired, I’ll work both your shifts all day forever if I have to, I’ll quit school for it and work all night too. Or I’ll graduate ‘cause I know you want me to, and then I can do the store full-time and, and you guys can have some time off, do that stuff you always said you’d do when you retire, ¿recuerdas? Goin’ to concerts and dressing up all fancy to go out for dinner and watch plays on Broadway, and we’re gonna win the lotto and then we’ll take Abuela and Sonny to Cuba and Puerto Rico and México and Europe. And we need to go home, please!"

Some point during this he took to his feet pacing, took his volume up shouting, and a nurse leans worriedly past the curtain asking if he wants her to get his family. Who—? Oh, she means the Rosarios, still in the waiting room. Usnavi shakes his head and sits back down. It's lonely in here, but it's private, it's De la Vega business.

“Please,” he says quietly as the nurse leaves again. “You told me you’d be okay, you can’t just say shit like that and then go back on it.  You can’t only make promises about things what don’t matter, you can’t lie to me when it’s this important.”

Mama and Pai sleep on, dreaming in this place he can’t reach them, and Usnavi for maybe the first time in his life has nothing left to say.

***

How he expected it to end is…he didn’t. Not really. Nobody ever does until they have no choice, but if he’d been pressed, if you’d asked him a few months ago when all of this would have been so unthinkable that it was easy to think about, he’d say that of course he’d be right there beside a hospital bed. Singular, never both, not both of them. The three of them together, though, always together, and always one last time to say a final word, like movie death scenes. A weak cough and fluttering eyelids and whoever's leaving saying…whatever, some wisdom to kickstart the next part for whoever’s still got story left to tell. Look after the store or be good or even just fuckin’ remember to brush your teeth twice a day. At the very least, the very most, I love you. Leave him with something. With anything.

How it ends is this:

Usnavi, the middle pillar between two beds. Nobody wakes up. Doctors come in and out, and Kevin does too sometimes and Camila sometimes, but there’s long stretches when it’s only Usnavi. He can’t quite reach both beds at once, so he sits for a while direct centre, then eventually moves to hold his mamá’s hand, because Pai would want him to be with her if he couldn’t himself. She doesn’t wake up.

He stays motionless for an hour and then just before four PM in the stillness, in the split second before the alarm, something leaves. Usnavi wouldn’t be able to explain how he knew and he doesn’t intend to ever try. He’s holding her hand, and then underneath his fingertips he can feel that she’s gone, and only after that comes the flatline.

The doctors do what they can. It’s not enough. It's December 1st, and Mamá is gone.

How it ends is Usnavi, slumped in his chair, sleeping with his head against his arm resting on his father’s bed. If he is dreaming, he doesn’t remember it later. What he remembers is the wake-up: the flatline comes afterwards, he knows this now, and the alarm’s already sounding.

“Wait,” he says as people flood into the room and move him aside. “Wait, Pai, no, no, no, not now, no!”

Usnavi tries to push his way back to his father's side and Kevin is there, suddenly, holding him in the corner with his arms locked around Usnavi’s chest to keep him from getting in the way of the doctors working. Like with Mamá, they try and try to bring him back. Like with Mamá, it's too late. They call it: 3:07 AM, December 2nd, though later he'll always think of it as December 1st, a foregone conclusion ever since the failure of the first heart monitor.

Usnavi collapses backwards, Kevin catching his weight. Right there in the room and Usnavi was still too late. He wasn’t even holding Pai’s hand. He wasn’t even awake. And that's the end, a nd neither of them told Usnavi where to go next, or what he’s supposed to do now, or that they love him, and all they've left him with is the store.

Chapter Text

Not that Benny’s cut up over missing another day of school, but Usnavi hasn’t answered any of his messages so he’s gonna need a lot more information than Kevin’s I need you to work the dispatch again today.

“Okay, but how’s Mateo and Rosa?” he says, and gets no answer. “Mr Rosario?”

“Dead,” Kevin says flatly.

“...What?"

Kevin gives a limp shrug, rubbing at his temples, and sits down heavily in a chair. His face is gaunt, blank.

It occurs to Benny that, of all the people in the barrio, Kevin’s closest friend is Mateo.

Was Mateo.

"Usnavi,"  Benny mutters, taking his headset off. “I gotta go.”

“Camila and Claudia are with him,” Kevin says. “Benny, I know you’re worried but I’ve been awake all night and I don’t want to spend all morning calling around for someone to fill in. You’ve been saying for months you want more responsibility, take the chance when it’s given to you.”

Kevin sounds desperate, and it isn't easy to drop the biggest opportunity he’s been given to prove himself, god knows Benny needs every chance and all the cash he can get. But what’s months compared to how long Benny’s been friends with Usnavi?

As respectfully as he can, Benny takes his tie off and puts it on the table. “Then fire me if you have to, man, I get it, but I ain’t staying here directing traffic when my best friend’s just lost his parents."

He leaves the dispatch without waiting for a response.

***

Vanessa always waits til last possible minute and then five more minutes after that to get out of bed and get ready for school, so she doesn’t walk with Nina any more because Nina likes to be punctual. Which is why it’s weird Nina’s at the door this late, when she hasn't even been answering texts since yesterday afternoon.

“Usnavi’s mom and dad died,” she says in a tiny voice.

Vanessa says, “the hell are you talking about?”  

Not the response she means to give, but the one that comes out. She knew they were at the hospital in a bad way, but that can't be right. It wasn’t even long ago Vanessa been in the store and Rosa had called her princesa  and Mateo had tipped his cap to her. True, they’d sounded pretty sick even then and it’s been Usnavi at the counter every day the past few weeks. But like, everyone gets sick, they don’t just up and die a month later. “Jesus. Is…is Usnavi okay? Are you okay?”

Nina, still standing uncertainly at the door, starts crying, the silent sudden-tears-on-face kind.

“Oh, hey, come on,” Vanessa says uncomfortably, bringing her into a hug. "Should you even go to school today? This is like...I don't even fucking know.”

“They’re only the same age as my mom and dad, Vanessa,” Nina says, and she’s not sobbing, she just sounds confused. “Mom said I could have the day off but I’ve gotta go to school ‘cause otherwise I’m gonna think about that and I don’t wanna. I've known them my whole life. What am I even supposed to say to Usnavi now?”

Vanessa doesn’t know either. What is that, is it a text, sorry you’re an orphan?  She doesn’t even hang out with Usnavi at the moment, but even though they don’t all always spend every day together, they all grew up together, Vanessa and Nina and Usnavi and Benny, they're part of the fabric, something outside the make up break up dramas of other childhood friendships.

Mateo and Rosa and the De la Vega bodega have always been the fabric too. The store on the corner where everyone goes. And now they just aren't there.

Vanessa doesn’t say anything. But before she leaves for school, she does something she hasn’t done since middle school, and hugs her own mom goodbye.

***

Dani can read the atmosphere of a neighborhood like a restaurant menu, and passing the bodega's still closed grate gives her a chill down the spine like the falling snow that's drifting down in lazy flakes. There’s some juju in the air that Dani doesn’t like at all.

“No store again today,” Carla notes. "You heard anything yet?"

"Not yet."

She sets up the sign outside, sweeps snow away from the entrance so that nobody slips and tries to sue their asses, and then she sees Camila, leaving alleyway that leads to the side entrance of the De la Vega's building. It only takes an glance exchanged between them. Dani’s good at reading people, too.

“Ha pasada algo,” Dani says.

“Están muertos,” Camila says, simply, and Dani closes her eyes, shakes her head. “Both of them. We were there. I've left Usnavi with Claudia and Benny. He's--well, I'm sure you can imagine."

She doesn't want to. "Ay, that poor boy. And you, don't tell me you're going to work now."

“I have to do the payroll, I’ll get some sleep at lunchtime. If I don’t start it now there’ll only be more to do tomorrow.”

Isn't that always the way? Always more to do tomorrow, until there's no tomorrow left . Dani built her business alongside the Rosarios and the De la Vegas, all of them going through the same starting problems and stressful nights and days they thought it was all going to fall apart, and they all grew together and celebrated their successes together. Now Rosa and Mateo are dead, and Camila’s going to spend all day doing admin for the dispatch, and Dani’s going to spend all day cutting hair, and the bodega will stay closed.

“Did you expect things to end like this?” she asks.

“Call me naive, but I don’t think I expected things to end,” Camila answers.

“It’s too cold out here,” Dani says. “We’ll…no sé. We’ll talk about this later, sí? Take care of yourself, linda, it’s something we could all stand to remember more often.”

Back in the salon, Carla's turned the radio on, something bright and cheerful ringing out of the speakers.“That was fast,” she says cheerfully. "Too snowy out there, huh?"

Nothing like the feeling of being the one to break unheard news. For once, Dani doesn’t want to be at the epicenter.

“Carla, we need to talk,” she says, and she locks the salon door behind her. “En privado.”

***

Sonny’s trying to jump onto the kitchen counter so he can reach the peanut butter in the top cupboard when his mother’s half of her phone conversation in the living room catches his attention.

“—Sonny's en la cocina, do you want me to— sí, lo entiendo, I’ll tell him. Call us if you need anything, Miguel.”

Is she talking to his dad? Weird. He loves both his parents but Sonny is their only common ground, so they prefer to relay only necessary information through him and otherwise intensely pretend the other one doesn’t exist. It’s the only reason their divorce stays as civilized as it is. Easy enough usually, with his dad being in DR, but that only makes it weirder that he’s calling at this time in the morning, and that he didn't ask for Sonny, and besides Sonny only just spoke to him two days ago, that’s the day Pa always calls.

Mom comes into the kitchen and just stands there, phone in hand, looking at him.

“Was that Pa?” Sonny asks.

“Sonny,” Mom says, and he can feel something bad in her voice.

“¿Que pasó?” Sonny says. “Is he okay?”

“Your dad is fine. He just got a call from the hospital. It’s…it’s about your Tío Mateo and Tía Rosa.”

She tells him, about how his tío and tía who give him free candy and piggyback rides and who always make sure he gets the piece of the Rosca de reyes with the baby Jesus figurine are gone, and Sonny’s ten years old, he isn’t a kid who doesn’t know what dying is, except he never knew it could hit like a punch. He’s used to the idea that he can fix everything by trying hard and caring hard, but in an instant he knows there’s nothing he can do about this, and that’s the most frightening thing that’s happened since the day he realized he couldn’t fix his parents marriage either. 

He’s got questions like he always does about everything, how could something like this happen or why would something like this happen, why didn’t anyone stop it, what’s gonnastop it happening to anyone else?  and usually he’d ask all those and more in a single breath. Today he only asks what seems to him the most important question out of all of them, and the scariest: “but what about Usnavi?”

***

Claudia was the first to hear about it. Kevin called her as soon as they were home.

She takes her rosary in hand, and she thinks of a sky full of stars. As it always seems to, her lord’s prayer fades into only the names of those she’s seeking divinity for. She often got scolded by her mama for failing to remember the exact words of the bible verses, but Claudia struggles to read and hasn’t got the mind for rote memorization. Besides, she’s always thought there must be no words more holy to speak to the Father with than love, and today with all the love and sadness her years have brought her, she passes bead past bead and thinks Rosa, Mateo, Usnavi.

There’s nothing more holy than love, her balm to the increasing wear of age and time and a long, difficult life. Nowhere does she find strength more than in the youngest generation who are the ones she truly considers hers , watching Nina flourish into a such brilliant young woman and Vanessa with her proud fierce inner strength, and Sonny with his bright and noisy sense of right and wrong, and even though Benny came along later Claudia’s taken so much joy in seeing him go from a roguish little troublemaker to such a smart and ambitious man.

And Usnavi, with his father’s sweet smile and his mother’s music in his soul and all those little ways that are just himself. The De la Vegas came over to America on a warm September day, and Claudia met them just outside their building where she was feeding the birds from her stoop. The baby was kicking, and Rosa was so excited that she asked Claudia to feel before she even introduced herself, and told her how earlier that very day was the first time she felt him move while they were looking at the boats and reading the names aloud.

She was the first to meet him, at the hospital when he was born too early, too little. The first to hold him other than his parents. He was small and  floppy like the ragdoll she still has carefully stored in a box, the only possession remaining of her childhood in Cuba beside a few old photographs. She’s been Abuela Claudia to the neighborhood long before any of the little ones were born, but it was meeting Usnavi that she realized she would never regret this life that had prevented her from having children herself: it was only patience and a trust in God through all of it that lead her to this boy who was unquestionably her own, and all her babies afterwards.

Claudia prays to her own Mama passed so many decades ago, asking her to help Mateo and Rosa find their path in the next life, and then she goes to do the same for her grandson left in this one.

Chapter Text

Crying doesn't even come close to what Usnavi wants to do.

He doesn’t cry at the hospital while Camila and Kevin talk to doctors on his behalf, or when he gets back to his empty home, he doesn’t cry when he goes to the kitchen and instinctively pulls out the green, blue, red mugs that belong to Mamá, Pai, Usnavi and then stares at them til Camila takes him to sit down. He doesn't cry staring at the table.

Nina brings him his drink, and it tastes wrong. Pai always makes the coffee in the morning. Nobody makes coffee like Mateo De la Vega, and there was a day sometime in the recent past that was the last time he’d ever make it for Usnavi, and Usnavi isn't even sure when that was because he never thought it would be different enough from a lifetime of drinking Pai’s coffee to commit the specific instance to memory. Nobody makes it like Mateo De la Vega, nobody ever will again.

Usnavi throws his mug against the wall.

The shattering sound cracks hairline fractures around whatever numbness surrounded him and suddenly he’s crying so hard he thinks it might kill him and it still isn't close to what he’s feeling, even when it seems the only thing keeping him from physically breaking apart under the force of it is Nina’s arms holding him, Camila’s hand on his knee. Abuela’s voice from the doorway is the only thing that eventually cuts through the ringing in his ears.

“Ay, Usnavi,” is all she says.

“Abuela, I broke my mug,” he sobs, which is a legitimately insane thing to say, only he’s had that mug since he was seven and first allowed to drink café and they bought all three of them as a set.

She makes quiet little shushing noises, helps him clean up his face, patting his tears away with a damp cloth. Usnavi closes his stinging eyes. “Abuela,” he whispers. “What am I meant to do now?”

He doesn’t get an answer.

***

“Are you sure you don’t want to sleep at our apartment tonight?”

Usnavi shakes his head. If he doesn’t bite the bullet and stay at his own place tonight he’ll never be able to get the courage up to step back inside the building again. 

“Es tu decisión,” Kevin says dubiously. “But Nina, you really should come home, you have school tomorrow. Benny can stay here with Usnavi.”

“I’m staying,” Nina says, folding her arms.

“There’s no use me arguing, is there?”

“No.”

Kevin sighs. “Pues, then I think Benny shouldn’t stay, perhaps.”

“What?!” Benny protests. “How come?”

“Because Nina needs to get some sleep,” Kevin says, “I don’t want her up all night talking.”

Yeah, ‘cause that’s really the reason. Usnavi doesn’t need to exchange a look with Benny and Nina to know they’re all thinking the same thing.

“Benny can sleep in Usnavi’s room,” Nina says, scowling at Kevin. “And Usnavi will sleep on the couch, and I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“No.”

“Dad—!"

“Don’t worry about it,” Benny interjects. “Nina can stay, and I’ll just head home and come over in the morning before I go school.”

“You shouldn’t have to leave!"

“Nina, it’s fine,” Benny says. “That cool with you, Mr Rosario?

Kevin nods, and when Benny’s headed to the door, he calls out, “Benny!”

“What’s up?”

“Do you think you can run dispatch solo again tomorrow? You did a good job the other day.”

Benny looks startled, then nods. “Yessir!”

“Good.” Kevin turns to pat Usnavi on the back as the door closes. “Do you have everything you need, yes? Okay. Come round straight away if there’s a problem, or if you change your mind, and Camila and I will both have our phones on. Look after each other.”

When he goes to kiss Nina’s cheek, she flings her arms around his neck and hugs him, for a lot longer than she usually would. Usnavi looks away, aching.

Five minutes after Kevin leaves, theres a knock on the kitchen window. Benny’s up the fire escape.

“Yo,” Usnavi says, opening the window.

“Kevin gone?”

“Yeah, you’re good. Thanks for coming back.”

“Sorry about Dad,” Nina says. “I don’t know what he thinks is gonna happen. Like. Even if that were, y’know, how we are, not really the time or place.”

“Right? I’m just glad he ain’t mad I ditched the dispatch today, I feel kinda bad leaving him to find cover.”

“You ditched work?” Usnavi says. “For me?”

“Duh. It’s fine, I still got a job. But maybe not if he finds out I come back here, so let’s hope I ain’t gettin’ chased out of town with a baseball bat come morning.”

He’s grateful for their company, he is, but suddenly Usnavi’s hit with the overwhelming pressure of a whole evening of being observed after a whole day he can’t even remember getting through, of the two elephants in the room that none of them know how to get round, the compulsion to talk, or know that he’s speaking volumes by not talking at all. He interrupts Benny halfway through to a sentence to say, “can we put a movie on or something?”

“Sure. Whatcha wanna watch?”

“Iuno.”

“Disney?” Benny suggests, which is rare: they usually don’t go with Usnavi’s preferences, ‘cause Benny likes horror and Tarantino and all them long-ass classics like The Godfather and always teases Usnavi for his taste in kid’s movies and musicals, even though Benny secretly likes cartoons too. “We could watch…Lion King or—“

Nina grimaces and shakes her head. Usnavi watches the little news ticker passing through both their heads trying to come up with Disney movies that don’t have any dead parents in.  They end up watching Monsters Inc, Toy Story, something else, all crowded together under blankets on the sofa. He wouldn’t have cared watching Lion King. Not like it’s real. It’s all just noise and color so he doesn’t have to make his own internal noise and color yet when he doesn’t trust what shape his thoughts might take if he lets himself think at all. He keeps nearly slipping into sleep then jerking fearfully awake; he doesn't trust that, either.

Somewhere during the third movie they’re watching, when Usnavi’s too tired to even know what’s on the screen, Benny puts an arm round Usnavi’s shoulder, pulling him into a reclining position against him. Nina curls up with her head resting on Usnavi’s chest, and even though Usnavi doesn’t want to, he falls asleep there.

***

Usnavi wakes up to the faint indent of the ridged couch fabric against his cheek, a pounding headache, and two voices talking quietly and seriously in the kitchen, and he's suddenly back in early November when his mind was six levels deep in pneumonia confusion.

“Oh, hey, you’re up,” Nina says to him, looking up as Usnavi catches his shoulder on the door in his hurry to get to the kitchen.

Reality check like a hammer to the skull. Usnavi ain’t sick any more, the headache’s a hysteria hangover, the pain in his chest just echoes in an empty space: it’s December third, and the two people in his kitchen are Benny and Nina. Nina’s in her pajamas, but Benny didn’t bring nothing round with him so he’s still wearing last night’s clothes, and they’re both eating dry cereal because the milk’s gone bad for God knows how long ago.

“…Oh,” he says, very quiet, very resigned.

“You doin’ okay, man?” Benny asks. “Do you..uh, need anythin’, or, um, what—what do you wanna do today, I guess?”

Does Usnavi need anything? Not anything Benny or Nina can offer.

“Usnavi? Did you hear me?”

He ignores that, too. God, he really did think for a second there that it was all a fever dream. Instantly and terribly Usnavi knows it won’t be the last time that happens. That's the rest of his life now. However long that is.

“Usnavi.”

He scratches his index finger down the doorframe, a flaking chip of paint digging in small and sharp underneath his nail. He ignores it.

“Should I go get Abuela?” Nina says. “¿Quieres Abuela? Or, or my mom, or—“

“I don’t want Abuela,” Usnavi says. “I want—“

It doesn’t matter any more what he wants. It all ends up at the same brick wall, in the end.

***

What stage of grief does manic hospitality fall under, because that’s the one Usnavi’s living in right now. Even after Benny and Nina leave, for school or sleep or work, he didn’t listen which, Usnavi can’t escape from people. Word’s spreading, everyone coming round to give condolences and flowers and empty reassurances, people who he’s glad to see and people who have no business being part of this. But he’s always been taught to be an open door, a welcoming presence, so he’s on automatic making drinks, trying to chat like today’s as normal as a bodega shift while everyone replies to him in whispers like they’re worried being any louder might make him keel over dead too from the shock of it. It’s tiring and infuriating and all he wants is for them to leave him alone, and then when they do the apartment is a deep ocean pulling him downwards and inwards to something enormous and terrifying he can’t name or understand, till he falls onto he next knock at the door with overenthusiastic gratitude for the reprieve and start the cycle again.

It might be the second or third or fourth day of this, Usnavi hasn't been keeping track, but when he answers this time it’s Camila with Usnavi’s tío Miguel, flown over from Santo Domingo.

“It’s good to see you again, Usnavi,” Miguel says, hugging him tightly.

“Been a while,” Usnavi says. “Prob’ly ain’t making it to the island for a while now, you’ll have to hit the beach without me this time round.”

Miguel breaks the embrace to hold Usnavi by the shoulders and look him over. He shakes his head in disbelief. “You got so tall since summer.”

“Don’t lie to me right now, man,” Usnavi says, and Miguel laughs, and they hug again. He wishes Miguel woulda got Sonny on his way over, even though when Sonny came over with Tía Marcela before he’d asked a million questions about how Usnavi was feeling and whether he was sad and does he want to come live with Sonny because they can get a bunk bed and he’ll even let Usnavi have the top bunk if he wants it. It was overwhelming, but a little less lonely to be reminded he isn’t the only one of them still standing, it's comforting to still have family in the room.

Except he knows what Miguel’s come here for.

“¿Quieres café?” he says. His words sound like they’re vibrating, like when you talk into a fan when it’s got the blades spinning. “Or tea. Or, I dunno what else we got, OJ, agua. Did you come straight from the airport, I—mierda, I was meant to come to meet you! Siento, forgot to check my phone, how was the flight, are you tired? Do you wanna take a nap or something, you can sleep in my bed or, oh, ¿ya ha comido? ¿Qué hora es, is it past lunch?

“Café is fine,” Miguel says.

“I’ll make it,” Camila says.

“No, no, I’ll do it,” Usnavi insists.

“You two should really—”

“I can do it,” Usnavi says, running to the kitchen before she can disagree again. He ignores the blue and green mugs in the cupboard to pull out three of the mismatched guest mugs, faltering when he tries to pick one for himself because he’s always drank out his red mug but that’s so much smashed pottery now. There’s one with red stripes, that’ll have to do. He measures out the grounds, redoes it twice because he doesn’t think his spoonfuls were quite level enough. Pours too fast, that won’t taste right, tip it out and start all over. Do it perfect. It has to be perfect. This is all that matters right now.

He takes so long that finally they just come and sit in the kitchen with him. Miguel clears his throat.

Usnavi taps the spoon against the counter in a harsh unbalanced rhythm. “I got it, gimme one more minute, sólo será uno minuto. You sure you ain’t want something to eat? I don’t think we got no food in but I can run down to the store.”

“Usnavi, we need to talk about—” Miguel says.

“What’s gonna happen to the store, though?” Usnavi asks, because at least that’s only the second most scary thing they have to discuss. “Do I have to get a lawyer, or something? I ain’t know shit about no legal stuff. Who’s it even belong to now?”

“Everything will be in Miguel’s name until you turn eighteen next month,” Camila says. “It’s your store, though. That’s how they always wanted it.”

“But I just do the customer stuff and the heavy lifting, I don’t know how to run the place,” Usnavi says. "And we’re broke, Dios, there’s all the hospital bills and what about the apartment? I ain’t know how to pay the rent or if we got enough or —“

“You don't need to worry about the hospital bills just now," Camila says. “But we’re —“

“Anyone need a refill?”

Miguel sighs. “Usnavi, lo siento, this is hard for all of us but we can’t avoid it forever. I have to fly back home in a few days.”

Usnavi sits down, defeated. He can barely arrange the cupboard-size room he sleeps in on the best of days, and now he has to arrange a funeral. He has to arrange two funerals.

“It’s gonna cost so much money,” he says. “I don’t know how to do it.”

“The money is my problem, not yours,” Miguel says. “I want to do this right. Please, help me do this right.”

He rubs his eyes tiredly and Usnavi feels bad for making this harder. Miguel is Pai’s only brother. Mamá doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, and Usnavi’s biological grandparents are all long dead. He knows that Pai and Miguel’s mamá died when they were very young, that they had to arrange the funeral for Usnavi’s abuelo not long after Mamá and Pai got married, a few months before Mamá got pregnant. And now here’s Usnavi and Miguel, just a couple of orphan De la Vegas sitting at a table wondering where it is they all keep disappearing to.

“They should go home,” Usnavi says. It’s the only thing he can think of. “They should be buried back home, that’s what they’d want. It’s warmer at home, in the winter. It don’t get so cold as over here.”

Miguel hesitates, and says “I…I think they’d want to be here, where you can visit. Mateo loved you so much, Usnavi. He’d want to be with you, they both would.”

Usnavi doesn’t argue. But he does wonder, if his parents want to be with him that much, why did they leave him behind?

***

Church is a full house for the funeral. People keep shaking Usnavi’s hand which seems weird to him. He nods blankly at their sympathy, the same condolences he’s heard enough times for it to turn to white noise, and keeps his head busy with a list of facts about each face.

Luisa. Second cousin on his Pai’s side. Taught Usnavi how to whistle on one of their trips to the DR when he was six.

Joel Rosenthal. One of Kevin’s drivers. Takes his coffee black, likes it with two sugars but his doctor says he isn't supposed to have sweets no more so he only gets sugar on Sundays.

Sra. Mendoza. Usnavi’s upstairs neighbor. One cream, no sugar, pinch of cinnamon and a pack of Marlboro Lights every Monday and Thursday with her lotto ticket.

When the service starts he takes his seat front row and doesn’t look ahead to where he knows his parents are, or at least what’s still here of them. There should be comfort to be found here, in these four walls where he learned to speak to God in song, with the priest’s voice talking in echoes off the high ceilings about finding peace and eternal rest. Paciencia y fe. Usnavi wants to go home. Unfocuses his eyes, unfocuses his ears, recites coffee orders in his head till Abuela nudges him and murmurs, “mijito, it’s time.”

“Huh?”

She points up front. The eulogies. Usnavi’s supposed to start them off. He never actually got round to writing one, let alone two. What stage of grief is stagefright? His hands are shaking. What a weird thing to happen, here and now, as if anyone’s expecting fuckin’ Shakespeare, or as if falling over or forgetting his lines would even matter.

“I don’t know what to say,” is how he begins. “Which ain’t something I’m used to.”

A murmur of solemn laughter.

“Mamá—Mamá always said I learned that from Pai. The motormouth, I mean. I…There’s so much stuff I learned from them. It—I—they…man. I-I can’t do this. I can’t do this.” He’s tapping his fingers nervously against his leg. Everyone’s looking at him. He shoves his hands in his pockets. “I’m…you know I had to pick what songs I thought they’d want? I don’t know if I chose right. Uh, first one when we came in, that’s what they danced to at their wedding. I always see ‘em dance round the bodega to it when there ain’t no customers in. And then Rompiendo Fuente ‘cause Areito is the first album they bought when they came over here and Mamá always says it’s about us even though the baby in the song’s a girl. And when we’re leaving it’ll be Dream a Little Dream ‘cause they both love that one. Pai always tells everyone how that’s what I was conceived to…actually, maybe I shouldn’ta used it ‘cause that’s so gross and I always tell—told him nobody wants Ella and Louis ruined like that. I’m sorry to everyone who knows that story. And I’m sorry to anyone who didn’t before who does now. And for talking about that in God’s house.”

More laughing. He remembers sinking into his seat hearing that story told over Thanksgiving dinner, and remembers his Mamá proudly telling anyone who came through the bodega that time when he came home with a B+ on his English paper, his Pai forever telling people about the funny things he did as a kid while Usnavi melted from embarrassment in the background. For all the baby stories everyone in the damn barrio knows about him there must be a hundred more he never heard. And a hundred stories about Mamá and Pai being married back in DR before Usnavi came along, and thousand more before they met each other, and he’ll never know what it is he didn’t have time to know.

“That’s three songs. Only three, when I ain’t ever remember a time they wasn’t singing. And now I’m s’posed to stand here and talk about them, I’m s’posed to celebrate who they were and make this speech about how they’d want us to carry on and be strong. That’s how they raised me. Things get tough but you learn from it, you turn to the people you love, you get on your feet and keep on goin’ till you’re back on solid ground. They worked hard to be happy. And that’s what they’d want us - what they’d want me to do, only I gotta be honest, right now I don’t see how I can. I’m sorry I can’t give you nothing prettier, but I ain’t gonna lie to none of you here in church. They were my parents, and I loved them more than anything, and now they’re dead. I don’t know what words could make that seem like a lesson worth learning.”

There’s expectation in the crowd like they’re waiting for the plot twist, the stinger scene where he turns it around to something inspirational. Usnavi holds both his hands out empty, that’s all I got, folks, and goes back to his seat. He stays there through the other eulogies, all so much tidier than his own even though he’s the only one who wasn’t talking through tears, and he stays there when they’re supposed to all get up and view the bodies in a procession. He doesn’t know why anyone would want to.

“Ain’t you gonna go up there, Usnavi?” someone asks him in the careful soft way people have been talking to him recently. Jaime Elvira. One cream, one sugar. Used to work at the dispatch, sells imitation designer bags and hats on 133rd now.

“No, thanks,” Usnavi says.

“You sure? I got a friend lost her dad ten years back, pretty messy so they done a closed casket, and she always says even ten years gone she still wishes she coulda had one more goodbye to his face. You shouldn’t miss your chance.”

Fuckin’ great, that’s exactly the kinda uplifting story you wanna hear at a double funeral. Usnavi slouches down further, plants his feet firmer on the floor. “Aquí estoy bien.”

“She always says, you’ll regret it if—“

“Keep talking and you’re gonna regret it,” Usnavi snaps.

Jaime holds his hands up, apologetic surrender. “Just wanted to—“

“Leave him alone!” Sonny says shrilly from beside Usnavi. He stands up on the pew to make himself eye level, paying no mind to his mom tugging at his arm. “If he don’t wanna he don’t gotta, and you ain’t barely know Tía Rosa and Tío Mateo at all, so it ain’t even none of your damn business so- so just shut up and go away!”

“Sonny, sientate,” Tía Marcela hisses.

Sonny sits back down, making an angry huffing noise under his breath. Usnavi bumps their elbows together in wordless gratitude, and feels less remorse than he should when Jaime shrugs uncomfortably and walks to the front. He was only tryna help, really. Hell, maybe he’s right, maybe Usnavi will regret this. On the other hand, though, maybe if Usnavi goes up there all he’ll ever remember of them after is their faces painted up by some morgue worker into a satire of vitality. No amount of make-up’s gonna fool him into thinking they’re only sleeping. Last chances for goodbyes are long gone already.

***

In the cemetery, the memory of his family now dust being consigned to the dust and with his life in ashes underneath his feet, Usnavi stands silent in the snow and doesn’t cry.

The burial is over. It’s over. What next?

After he shrugs off the first few comforting hands that people keep putting on his shoulder it’s a general message received and they all keep their distance like he’s radiating a forcefield, except Sonny who’s been a little shadow stuck to his side since they walked to the church together this morning. Usnavi doesn’t mind that the way he minds everyone else.

Earlier it was a comfort to see just how many folk wanted to pay respects to his parents, how important they were. Now it’s starting to feel like the whole world dragged their families out to parade what they still got in front of him. The Rosarios, talking quietly to Abuela. Sonny’s parents are there, standing next to each other for probably the first time in five years, Tía Marcela with her hand on Tío Miguel’s elbow. Benny and his mom are there, even Vanessa and her mom. Mamá and Camila used to be friends with Naomí García when Usnavi and Nina and Vanessa were all still babies, so maybe it makes sense she showed up for the sake of old times, but she’s got her arm linked through Vanessa’s and Usnavi can’t remember the last time he even saw the two of them interact at all, never mind with anything approaching tenderness. He’s always thought Vanessa must get so lonely, walking through the world without her parents there to catch her falling.

Vanessa sees him looking over and meets his stare with her own, expressionless. Usnavi doesn’t look away, even as her eyebrows set sternly and she marches over to him. Ignoring the invisible bubble of empty space around him and ignoring Sonny, she grabs Usnavi in a tight and furious hug.

“Fuck this, though,” she mutters vehemently in his ear.

“¿Verdad?” he says, with a flat laugh. Her hair blows all around his face in the wind as she holds onto him, as he lets her hold onto him. He doesn’t cry.

Chapter Text

Some kid in middle school once told him that if you dream about falling and don’t wake up before you hit the ground then you die, and Usnavi had lowkey freaked out about it every night for a month and a half after. Considering how much he falls over and/or off things in real life compared to everyone else he knows, he had figured he was probably way more likely to dream about falling too, and that meant he must be a high risk case. His solution at the time was to wedge himself up in the corner of his bed, surrounded by pillows and stuffed toys and his quilt built up like barricades, because if he fell asleep knowing there’s no physical way for him to fall off the bed then obviously the security would translate to dreams too.

More than a decade on and Usnavi wakes up in bed, swears that just a second ago he was so close to impact that he could feel gravel brush his skin. He walls himself in with pillows and the growing pile of increasingly dirty laundry that lives at the end of his bed and his now-cold hot water bottles, instinctively fortress-building, and goes back to sleep.

He wakes up a second time, wondering if they were dreaming about falling when it happened.

He wakes up a third time with a weight next to him and reaches out to touch Pai’s arm where it’s resting on the hospital bed, brain coming unstuck for a second when he discovers it’s just a hot water bottle.

He lies in the dark and even in a room without windows through the paperthin walls he hears sirens. Hears telephones. Hears music from however far away. Distance merges it all to a faint continuous alarm.

He wakes up a fourth time and he’s terrified to open his eyes, to reach out and find whatever his fingers just brushed against. No sounds of life other than his own breathing, and he came to with the tactile memory of an ending held in his hand, so does that mean he’s lying here next to — he opens his eyes.

It's just the fuckin’ hot water bottle. He throws it to the end of the bed, then finds his iPod and shuffles indecisively through the first few seconds of every song he owns until he finally loses consciousness.

***

“Marcela will be here to pick up Sonny in an hour once she finishes work.” Tío Miguel checks his watch, and winces at the time. “Ay, I’m going to miss mi vuelo, I wish I didn’t have to leave so soon.”

Usnavi makes a noncommittal sound. God knows he wouldn’t have got anything at all done without Miguel helping out, and he’s reluctant to lose proximity to family now that it’s something in scarce supply. But he also very much wants Miguel to leave so that he’ll stop asking Usnavi things like when do you plan to go back to school and have you thought about what to do with the store while you’re still at school and don’t worry too much about it for now, just you focus on school. Strong impression here that Miguel thinks Usnavi should finish high school. Usnavi has tried to imagine spending even one day back sitting in a classroom surrounded by other people his age and only came to the realization that, give or take a few weeks until he’s eighteen and it all passes to him official, he has an apartment. He has a business. He lives alone, he’ll have to be self-sufficient, he’ll have to be his own safety net.

Is he an adult now?

He breaks the hug, says, “Let me know when you land, yeah?” and then goes into the living room so that he doesn’t have to watch Sonny say goodbye to his dad.

A few minutes later, Sonny comes in alone and flops down on the couch next to Usnavi, looking sombre. “Thought he’d be here longer.”

“I’m sure he woulda stayed if he could.”

“Lo se, it’s just been cool having him around.” Sonny looks kinda embarrassed. “So…uh…Mom and Pa have been real nice to each other since he arrived and. I mean, like we all had breakfast together today and nobody even fought no-one, and I was thinking maybe…”

Ah, shit.

“Hey…listen,“ Usnavi begins, with no idea how to continue this sorry but your parents are definitely gonna stay divorced conversation sensitively.

“Aw, no, don’t gimme that lissssten,” Sonny says, mimicking Usnavi’s soft intonation. “That’s exactly how Pa said it when I asked him to stay for Christmas.”

“Uh, you didn’t tell him why you was asking, ¿no?”

“Nah. But should I of asked? You think if they had more time like that maybe they’d remember why they liked each other before? When they first got married?”

“Things don’t really work that way, Sonny,” Usnavi says, imagining Sonny and Marcela and Miguel sitting at breakfast, back together and happy. There’s a sensation in his heart like a guitar string snapping.

“Pero don’tcha think if—“

“I don’t think nothing,” Usnavi says. “So drop the damn subject already.”

Sonny looks clearly half a second away from arguing, and then surprisingly holds back and just mutters “I really wanted him to stay, is all.”

Usnavi has to bite his tongue so as not to say all the things building up on it, like: how the fuck would that be fair, for Usnavi’s unfixable home to be the glue that sticks all the broken edges of Sonny’s back together? Like, that eventually Sonny’s gonna have to grow up and realize that there’s gonna be a day when there aren’t even enough pieces left to put back together. Doesn’t Sonny know that wanting someone to stay isn’t enough to make it happen? He’s so naive.

Of course he is. He’s just a kid. It’s good he don’t know any of this, that’s how it’s meant to be, or is dragging a ten year old into an existential crisis the only way you can think of to make yourself feel better?  “Shit. I’m sorry, Sonny, I’m bein’ a jerk. I know it sucks he lives so far away. Mira, let’s just forget this conversation, I’ma walk you to Abuela’s and text your mom to pick you up there.”

“Are you mad at me?”

Usnavi sighs. “No, I ain’t mad, you didn’t do nothing wrong. I’m bad company right now, you’ll be better off with Abuela.”

“Oookay,” Sonny says, uncertainly. “You gonna stay at Abuela’s till Mom comes? You can have the good chair, si quieres.”

The good chair is the one spot on Abuela’s couch where there’s no springs poking you in the ass the whole time you’re sitting on it. Couch shotgun is a vicious custody battle every time they’re both at Abuela’s: Sonny almost always manages to but I’m the baby his way to victory, and only ever gives the seat up for Nina. It’s a big gesture for him to offer it to Usnavi.

“Estoy bien, you keep your chair,” Usnavi says. The aftertaste of resentment is still a bile-tasting reflux in his throat, ready to come back any second: maybe he just doesn’t want Miguel and Marcela to patch things up no matter that it'd make Sonny happy, because Usnavi would be too jealous to ever go round there again if they did. Some cousin he is. “I don’t think you’d want me to stay.”

***

He wakes up coughing out imaginary grave dirt and when he flings his arms out in terror and hits two walls, Usnavi’s tired brain doesn’t quite register that people aren’t usually buried with additional flailing space, he just registers small and dark and the conclusion of a nightmare rolling through to life until he fumbles the light on to see that it’s just his room. Tiny enough for him to touch both opposite walls at once, not enough floor space for him to stand without being partially in a different room. Not so tiny as a coffin. It’s just where he’s slept his whole life, and he was just sleeping, and that’s all.

“Fuck me,” he mutters to himself, lying back down.

In retrospect it’s hard to wrap his head around the fact that they were all sick with the same thing. Of course it makes sense, really: Usnavi’s younger and healthier than his parents were, he got proper treatment early. It makes sense, except that now Usnavi’s the only one of them still walking around overground and tonight he woke up with the phantom feeling of splintered wood under his scratching fingernails, and lying here the six stories of apartments above him is six feet of dirt pressing down every time he closes his eyes even for the length of a blink.

He needs to go outside. It’s a bad time of night for walking, it’s a bad time of year for being outside, but it’s better than a burial and Usnavi needs to go around the block and clear his head and clear his lungs. When the block isn’t big enough to feel like he can breathe again yet, he widens the radius, widens it again on every pass by his building until some circles later he bumps into Carla of all people, approaching from the opposite direction.

“Usnavi?” she says, stopping in her tracks.

“Carla? What the hell are you doin’ walking around on your own at this time?”

“¿Qué quires decir? I’m goin’ to work."

“…¿Qué? What time is it?”

“It’s a quarter to seven,” says Dani, looming suddenly behind him like a dracula with a belt full of hairdressing equipment. Usnavi takes a second to readjust to being in real life daytime world and figures out a) they’re just outside the salon, b) it’s still dark out, but dark in the fading way of imminent morning and c) obviously it’s a quarter to seven because the grate over the salon door is open while the one over the window is still pulled down, and there’s lights on in the dispatch too, but only faintly, in the back. He shoulda noticed that. “Carla. You brought me an Usnavi.”

“¡Hola, Dani!” Carla says. She pinches Usnavi’s cheek. “I sure did. He could use a bit of fixing up but he ain’t too shabby, is he?”

“I don’t know about that.” Dani eyes Usnavi over. “Go inside and start setting up, Carla, por favor.”

Carla disappears and Usnavi lingers awkwardly with the impression that Dani is about to harangue him for something, but all she says is “lindo, why are you out at this hour?”

“It ain’t that early, if I had a morning shift I’d already be at work. I just went for a walk.”

“Mmhm. And how long have you been out here, walking?”

“Iuno,” he says. Dani has a terrifying way of barely twitching her expression and managing to speak volumes with it, so he tries to appease the minuscule shift at the corner of her eyes by adding “not long, probably?” because he really doesn’t know but it can’t be more than a couple hours.

“Mmhm,” she says again, then grabs his hand and physically drags him inside the salon. Usnavi finds himself sitting down in the tiny break room at the back so suddenly that he can’t tell if he blacked out for a moment. Or maybe Dani just has that effect. Could go either way.

Dani clatters what sounds like seventy spoons and mugs around. The microwave hums. Usnavi waits in bewildered silence, wrapped in an old multicolored blanket that was lying over the back of the couch. For a million dollars he wouldn’t be able to say for sure if he put the blanket on himself or if Dani did. Maybe he’s been up longer than he thought.

Dani crouches down to level with Usnavi’s sitting height, looks him compassionately in the eyes and says, “te ves terrible.”

“You just called me lindo outside, don’t tell me that was a lie.”

Dani makes no attempt to laugh politely. Fair enough. He didn't find it funny either. “Lo digo en serio. You are going to drink this -“ she hands him a mug, wrapping his fingers round the handle like she doesn’t trust him to do it himself “— and then you are going to lie on this couch and get some sleep until you look less like a…a raccoon. Dark circles are never in, chiquito.”

Usnavi catches the hesitation on the last-second word-switch, and wonders whether she was gonna go with corpse or ghost, and which one would be most fitting.

“I have to get to work.” Dani squeezes his knee through the blanket and stands. As she nears the door she reaches for the light switch, saying “Let me get the—“

“No!” Usnavi says, and she startles at his loudness. “No. It’s fine, you can leave ‘em for now, I’ll turn ‘em off once I finish my drink.”

Dani taps her nails loudly against the plastic switch casing and then nods and leaves him to it.

He sips his drink. It mostly tastes like hot, burning the tip of his tongue, but there’s a hint of chocolate under that. Powdered packet stuff and microwave-nuked milk, nothing fancy. Usnavi’s just glad it isn’t coffee.

***

Dani must have told someone about finding Usnavi wandering the streets in the early morning like a roaming zombie because suddenly everyone’s reiterating their invitations for him to come stay with them for a while, and telling him he looks tired as if he didn’t know that already. He doesn’t take any of them up on the offer: he’s going out every night now, late enough that nobody will still be out to catch him, early enough that he’s back before people start going to work.

There’s no reason to keep it secret. It’s not like he’s out with a dangerous crowd or doing anything stupid. All he’s doing is walking, four or five hours every night. Maybe 3AM in the hood isn’t the safest time but he doesn’t take any valuables with him, only his old walkman from the late 90’s that nobody’s gonna steal, and his wallet emptied of cards with a little bit of money just in case because nothing’s gonna make the guy robbing you madder than not having anything to give him - ten dollar mugging insurance, Pai used to call it. Nobody’s bothered him so far. Still, Abuela was upset enough after hearing about just one night, and Usnavi doesn’t want her to find out that it’s a recurring thing.

He also doesn’t want anyone to know that when he does eventually come back and go to bed, he’s had to start sleeping with a light on. He's almost eighteen years old. So in all it’s just easier for him to be on his own at night, but he still gets asked by someone at least once a day.

Today, it’s Nina, who seems just as tired of asking as Usnavi is of being asked, because she says “Mom says to tell you you should stay with us in case you changed your mind from six hours ago. Did you?”

“Nah,” Usnavi says, “gracias, though,” and then they sit in silence for almost five full minutes. Usually Usnavi would be the one restless and bored and trying to find something to say, but he just stays still and watches Nina tuck her hair behind her ears five times and check her phone four times and inhale like she’s about to speak but not quite follow through on it eight times.

“Are you uncomfortable ‘round me now?” he asks, blunt.

Nina snaps her fingers loosely down by her side three times, and grimaces. “Un poco,” she says. “I don’t really know what to say, I guess.”

He nods. “Wanna talk about the weather?”

“It’s cold.”

“Sure is.”

Nina laughs and says, “well, that was dumb. Hey, uh, do you know what you're gonna be doing for Christmas?”

“Not been top of my agenda.”

“You should come to ours.”

“You just said you’re uncomfortable round me.”

“Yeah, so what, we’re gonna just stop talking forever? I keep overthinking it. That’s my problem. Don’t spend the holidays by yourself.”

Usnavi shrugs. “I don’t wanna be the Ghost of Christmas Bummer in the corner ruining everyone’s fun.”

“You won’t.” At Usnavi’s skeptical look she clarifies, “let’s be real, no-one’s gonna have fun anyway. It doesn’t seem right. Dad got all the office decorations out the other day and then just put the box away again without opening it.”

“There ain’t any decorations up in the salon either. Usually Carla’s on that as soon as possible.”

“We’re supposed to put the tree up in the apartment this weekend and I think Dad’s only doing it for my sake and I wanna tell him to just not bother,” Nina says. “I don’t know why anyone’s bothering this year. Nobody’s in the mood.”

Usnavi wonders how true that is. He doesn’t doubt that everyone’s grieving, it hangs in the air like intangible soundproofing dulling everything around them, but it had surprised him so much to see Dani and Carla opening the salon the other day: he’d forgotten people don’t just disappear into waiting static in between checking up on him. How much of the quiet is the gap two deaths of two central people in the community have made, and how much of it is a temporary lull that settles over people whenever Usnavi walks past, trailing suspended animation around with him while people wait for him to leave so they can get on with their lives without seeming disrespectful. Even if the Rosarios did skip Christmas this year, they’d be back on track for New Year, or Dia de los Reyes, or the Fourth of July, or whenever. The neighborhood is on pause. Usnavi got the stop button.

“I don’t really wanna be watching someone else’s family Christmas,” he says quietly.

“I know it'll be weird. But you’re our family too, Usnavi,” Nina says. “You know you’re my favorite little brother.”

“Do I gotta remind you again I’m a year older than you?”

“Am I wrong?”

“Nina Rosario ain’t ever wrong,” he says. “I appreciate the offer. I just wanna be at home.”

***

Usnavi just wants to be at home, and he means that he wants his apartment to feel like home again. On his nightly circuit round the block he thinks about Nina, who is the best younger big sister he ever had, and he thinks about the triangle between the bodega and the salon and the dispatch while other businesses pop up and inevitably fail around them, and all three of them left undecorated with five days left till Christmas.

On the next pass by his building he finds himself at the back entrance of the bodega, opening the door. There’s something post-apocalyptic about the inside: the stark lights, the window covered by the grate, the sound of a couple of rats scuttling away as he flips the lights on, their run across this treasure-trove of undefended snacks suddenly interrupted.

It's only been a few weeks, but it's like he's been gone for years. It tastes like decay in the air. He never cleared the little sandwich counter or the trash can or the produce shelf. Milk he forgot to put back in the fridge, the cardboard carton swelling and leaking at the seams. Usnavi hasn’t been in here since November, when he told Abuela that he’d get his parents to a doctor, when he thought there was still time to fix things.

He jumps up on the counter to sit facing backwards towards the wall where they keep the dirty magazines and the cigarettes and all the other ask-at-the-counter stuff.

It's kinda strange he’s been selling that stuff to people for years even though he’s still got a few weeks before he’d be allowed to buy them for himself. Usnavi remembers getting The Talk at age fourteen, how he’d been sitting on the floor watching TV in the living room and Mamá had come in after putting his clean laundry on his bed and said, “mijo, you know we have a rule that you pay for anything you take from the store out of your wages unless it’s food”. Usnavi had said “huh?” and then “oh god, no” on realizing he’d been late for school that day, and had forgot to shove the recently and unlawfully acquired reading material for his, uh, recently discovered new hobby back to the bottom of the box of more innocent comics under his bed before he left. He’d begged her not to tell his dad, not so much out of fear of getting in trouble as the horrifying knowledge that it would mean a Conversation was going to happen and that Pai has always taken so much joy in embarrassing Usnavi right out of his skin.

“Por supuesto I’m telling him, he needs to make sure you're getting the right kind of información,” Mamá had said.

“Mamá, please! I’m too young for my life to be ruined like this.”

“You have to know about these things, and not from those sucias revistas. I want you to be safe.”

“I’m not—it’s—I’m fourteen! I ain’t gettin’ no girls pregnant, I ain’t even dating! And we already done sex ed at school, recuerdas, you had to sign the form.”

“Lo se, pero there’s things they don’t teach you en escuela. Life can be so complicado, Usnavi. It’s our job to make sure you’re prepared for anything.” Then she’d smiled at his anguished look and said, “anyway, what kind of parent would I be to let you get away with stealing from your job sin consecuencias, hm? No lo hagas de nuevo.”

Life can be complicated: through the dedication of both his parents Usnavi was theoretically, if not quite emotionally, prepared for dating and sex and love and consent and graduation and work and institutional racism and cooking and a million small necessities of growing up. Usnavi was never prepared for sitting in his bodega with only a bunch of overconfident rats and moldy bread for company staring at the colorful rows of cigarettes at four in the morning.

He grabs a pack and a lighter off the shelf, leaves the grocery mausoleum that is the store dark and locked behind him and takes to the fire escape.

There was one more time after the magazine incident that Usnavi stole from work. His parents never found out about that one: in the summer after Usnavi turned sixteen, hanging out in Benny's room, Benny had turned to him and whispered “hey, my cousin gave me this when he came to town, check it,” and showed him a very tiny plastic baggie filled with a few very small green buds.

“Oh my god,” Usnavi had whispered back. Nobody was there to overhear them, so it wasn’t actually necessary to whisper, but the drama of secrecy deserved to be respected. “You gonna try it?”

“I dunno,” Benny said. “Maybe? If you wanna too? I don’t wanna do it on my own.”

“Sí, okay,” Usnavi said, because alcohol had never really interested him and he isn't big into the idea of drugs, but weed ain’t really drugs, and Benny already had it, and Usnavi’s never done anything cool in his life so maybe this will be the thing. “What do we do with it?”

“We need tobacco so’s I can make a joint,” Benny had said, with that confident I Know What I’m Doing voice he uses when he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. “Do you think you can get some from the store?”

“Sure,” Usnavi had said, with equally unearned confidence, ignoring the instant trepidation because he doesn't want to seem like a chicken. Next time he was alone in the store, he’d quickly swiped the first packet his hand touched into his pocket, with his heart racing and his stomach full of guilt, and him and Benny had got high for the first time together with a badly-rolled joint from the paper and dry, crispy tobacco from the cigarettes that night. And Usnavi discovered that there was, in fact, something that could made his racing thoughts and anxious hands and restless legs feel calm, which  he thought about a lot afterwards.

He thinks about it now, lighting up a cigarette on the fire escape, wishing like hell it was cut with a little something to take the edge off. It’s not the first time he’s done this, either: Usnavi, age sixteen and restless and permanently sweaty and stressed and horny and sleepless and ecstatic and anxious, constantly in desperate need of mellowing out but too scared of getting in trouble to go looking for someone to hook him up, trying to recreate a high with only half the necessary materials.

Being caught with stolen softcore porn was one of the most embarrassing moments of his life. His parents found it hilarious. Being caught with cigarettes, stolen or otherwise, would have left his Mamá heartbroken and his Pai disappointed. They would have asked him why he had them, and why he didn’t listen to all their warnings about smoking being the thing that killed Mama’s father before Usnavi was born. Usnavi wouldn’t have been able to explain. He told his parents almost everything, but he didn’t tell them about the intolerable claustrophobia that sometimes came over him just from existing, in the late hours when he was left alone with his hormones and the electricity under his skin and the knowledge there’s something about him that doesn’t work the same as everyone else which he doesn’t let himself name but which sometimes aches to be recognized, and memories of rejections from girls and the fact he was still only five foot four and couldn’t grow a beard yet and the weight of what a future might be for a kid who knows he’s never gonna get into college and has no real talent other than coffee.

So he didn’t tell them how he had smoked a joint and for once felt like he knew exactly who he was and where he was going, or at least that it was fine and endlessly funny if he didn’t know either of those things. Or that one night a few weeks later he crept out onto the fire escape to smoke one of his leftover cigarettes. They tasted too harsh without the weed, they didn’t make him feel mellow, they made his head buzz and left him feeling faintly stained and stuffy, and the whole time he was tensely expecting his parents to wake up and catch him. It wasn’t a chill experience, but for some reason it still helped. Maybe the association with being high. Maybe because he knew that if anyone were asked to pick someone they thought was a secret underage smoker they wouldn’t pick Usnavi in a million years, and there was something exciting about that. Maybe just that every time he did it over the next few weeks he had fewer stolen cigarettes until finally they were gone and could finally stop weighing on his mind with the fear of getting caught and the shame of knowing he was doing something wrong.

He thought about taking another pack, sometimes, but never did until now, when it doesn’t count as stealing any more.

As soon as he finishes the first, he lights up a second, coughing. Chainsmoking, great choice a month after recovering from pneumonia but who’s gonna stop him? There’s nobody here to stop him. He survived and they didn’t, and it should never have happened, he could've stopped it happening if he called an ambulance a week earlier. A night earlier. The few minutes it took him to run to the Rosarios and have them call one instead. How much did he miss the cutoff by?

He’s so stupid. He’s so unbelievably fucking stupid.

Usnavi stays out on the fire escape, lighting new cigarettes off the cherry stubs of the previous ones once they get close to filter, and it’s only once his lungs burn as much as they did when he was sick that he feels like he’s allowed to go inside and sleep off the nicotine nausea under the brightness of his overhead light.

Chapter Text

Pick any holiday out of a hat and Usnavi’s always loved it. New Year’s, Three King’s, Fourth of July. Any excuse for a big party, a big dinner, music and decorations and celebrations, that’s his shit. Christmas is an expensive time of year, especially with Usnavi’s birthday so soon after, so it isn't always the most extravagant out there but he’s always adored it just as much as all the others even when they’re pinching the pennies.

Last year his parents gave him their old record player, with a few records bought second-hand. It still occupied the same space in the living room it always had before, and they all still used it the same as they always had, but the point was that after that it was officially Usnavi’s. It’s never mattered what he gets, year on year of fell-off-a-truck technology and scuffed-up Goodwill toys and dollar store candy. What matters is that it’s his, that he knows what belongs to him and where he belongs, playing all of the new records one after the other, dancing and dancing through the afternoon with Mamá and Abuela in the refractions of the colorful lights draped on their artificial tree.

The decorations are boxed up in the closet in his parents room. Even if he wanted the tree he won’t step foot in the door. Usnavi doesn’t really know what anyone’s doing this year, only that he’s been asked to spend the day by everyone he knows and rejected every invite.

Abuela comes round on Christmas Eve, while Usnavi’s lying on the couch listening to old movie musical soundtracks on lightly-scratched vinyl. “You’re spending tomorrow conmigo, sí?” she says, a question that seems more like an instruction.

He can’t bring himself to give Abuela an outright no, but Usnavi doesn’t intend to ever celebrate Christmas again.

***

It’s a quarter to three in the morning, December 25th, the space between too late and too early where Usnavi’s always trapped. Nobody crashing on his couch tonight. His parents room next door echoing untouched is a lack of sound so loud it drives him outside to escape it, another night alone. Nobody in the stairwell, nobody in the store. Outside the city’s as dead as it ever gets, the lingering lights of the sleepless and the shift workers and the late-night straggling partiers struggling home with their buzz fading in the early hours. Their paths intersect but don’t intercept: Usnavi walking widening concentric circles with his headphones in, so tired he can’t feel tired any more. There’s nobody in his apartment, and this is almost like sleep, a walking meditation through the liminal hours of life.

He’s not paying as much attention as he should to what’s around him, near on walking into a guy who’s come up right in front of making an exaggerated headphones out? motion pointing at his ears.

Usnavi sighs, takes one headphone out. He's lived in the hood long enough he knows how this goes. “Lemme guess, you need cab fare?”

“Lost my job last week,” the guy says, apologetic. “I only need just enough for the night, gotta get back home and maybe something to eat, you know how it is, anything you can spare.”

“Sure.” Like this is really a dude out for groceries at this time, but what does Usnavi care so long as he isn’t ending up with a knife in the gut.

“Thanks, buddy,” the guy says, as Usnavi reaches into his pocket. “Slow, don’t be trying no Batman shit.”

Yeah, right. Usnavi ain’t the Bruce Wayne kind of orphan. He’s the kind who takes his wallet out and tosses the whole thing over without question, because the guy might have his hands empty now but that doesn’t mean they'll stay that way. It’s no loss. He doesn’t carry much on him at night.

“Ten dollars? That’s it? C’mon, I got kids at home,” the dude says. “Gimme your phone.”

Usnavi shrugs. It’s a 2005 brick. His wallet’s probably worth more even without the money in it. He holds it out and the guy makes a derisive sound, though he still takes it.

“Don’t bullshit me with a burner, kid, I seen you listening to music, hand it over.”

“Only phone I got, tunes are on the walkman, see?”

“A walkman?! Man, it’s nearly 2010, the fuck’s wrong with you?”

“I got some good mixtapes.”

“You got some— fuck me, the people in this goddamn town,” the guy says, then, absurdly, “yeah, fine, piss off then, happy holidays.”

“Aite,” Usnavi says, with a surprised cough of laughter. “Feliz fuckin’ Navidad, I guess.”

***

Christmas day starts with a knock at the front door, and the knocking continues even when Usnavi pulls the pillow over his head to block out the sound getting more urgent until he has to sit up, biting his lip indecisively. Today isn’t happening and nobody’s gonna drag him into it, but what if it's an emergency?

The door tries to open and catches on the chain. “Usnavi?” Abuela calls out, that waver in her voice that always stresses Usnavi out because he never wants to upset her, and that makes the decision for him. He runs to the door to let her in.

“Ay, bendito, so you are here!" she says, taking his hands with a tight grip. “I tried to call for an hour and it wouldn’t connect, I was getting so worried.”

“I, uh, I lost my phone,” he says. Well, what else is he gonna tell her? Don’t worry, Abuela, I just got sorta mugged at three AM, no big deal. It really doesn’t feel like a big deal, Usnavi’s got bigger fish to fry, but it definitely would to Abuela. 

She fans a hand in front of her face as he takes her arm to bring her to the living room. “Me asustaste, I didn’t know where you were.”

It’s not like it’s the first time she’s called round and missed him. But, he realizes with guilt, Abuela always spends Christmas with his family. She has plenty of other places she could've gone today- the Rosarios, Dani, any number of her friends all through the barrio - but then, so does he, and none of them were the one he wanted. She loved his parents too, like they were her own children.

“Lo siento, Abuela,” Usnavi says, and means it in a thousand ways. “So. It’s Christmas, huh?”

She squeezes his hand, and says “it is. Camila said that she can make space for us if you want."

“I don’t wanna do anything.”

“You can’t just sit here en la oscuridad all day,” she says, indicating the closed blinds. “Would you…would it make you feel better if we go to see them, perhaps?”

“Camila doesn’t—“

“I meant tus padres.  We could go to the cemetery, and—”

“No,” Usnavi say. Tío Miguel said they’d want to be close so that he can visit. It was a wasted effort so far: he hasn’t, he can’t. There's a lump in his throat and he can’t explain, she’ll think he’s losing it if he tells her about all those dreams of the pallor of their faces and the blueness of their barely-breathing lips when he’d found them in the morning, the dreams about a third name on the shared grave marker, and the dark closing over him, visceral intrusive images of the terrifying biology of decay when he closes his eyes. He’s scared, is what he is, plain and simple, and it'll make him sound insane to say why. “No, Abuela, I-I don’t wanna go to the cemetery, no.”

She gives him a searching look and says, “then what about church? It will do you good to get out of this apartment.”

“I don’t know if church will help either. It…I ain’t felt like God’s been on my side much, recently.”

“Lo entiendo,” she says, gently. “But the times when you doubt Him are usually the times you need Him the most, mijito.”

***
One room can be so many places. The church, humble and ostentatious both in one, holds a thousand different places in a single room of pews and altars. When he's had to do confession it always looks so towering and foreboding like sitting in the principal’s office or his old special ed room - his parents weren’t too strict on confession, so it meant he must have really messed up whenever he ended up there. Squirming in his Sunday best through the boring parts of weddings, waiting for the bit where everyone cheers and throws confetti, the flowers and colors turning it into a room like summertime no matter the weather. A cold cavernous emptiness like floating in outer space at the funeral. They come here every year on this day since Usnavi can remember, and Christmas mass holds some of his favorite versions of the room: the joyful echoing songs, the security of faith, the orange glow inside and out like a warm light through even the bleakest parts of winter.

This year is different. The warmth is still here, but Usnavi’s struggling to feel it in himself even he feels it all around himself, watching it with his nose pressed to the glass like the little match girl. Broke and hungry clinging onto vicarious heat before dying alone in the snow, now that’s an accurate Christmas story. More so than guiding stars and God's mercy. Still, there’s an echo in the songs that isn’t joy any more but at least a memory of it, at least the proximity to it through a window. He doesn't join in with the carols, he doesn't cry even as the song presses hard on a painful place in his heart. It sounds like Mamá and Pai.

His prayers feel empty: they weren't answered before and what's left to pray for, but he looks to the ground and mouths along when the congregation bow their heads anyway.

After the service, every year since Usnavi can remember, Abuela always lights a single candle at the altar, and no different this year. She stands, the rosary in her hand and the sad, sweet smile at the flame she just set down, the barely audible “Feliz Navidad, Mama” and the prayer.

Usnavi murmurs the amen with her and then asks, “did this help? When you first lost her, did it make it easier?”

"Not at first,” Abuela says.

“But it did later?” They can both hear the desperation in his voice.

“Paciencia y fe, mijo, these things will take time.”

“What if I don’t got time?" he asks, because time is a rug that can be pulled out from under him any second and besides, he can’t imagine not feeling this way forever, for however long he's got. Abuela just looks at him, filled with sadness, then she takes a second candle and lights it from the first.

Usnavi drops some change in the donation box, picks up the matches to light two of his own candles. They sit side by side in the company of the flames of all the others lost and others hopeful. He hopes they’re happy together, wonders whether it’s as hard for them to be so far away from him as it is for him to be apart from them. He hopes wherever they are burns bright like Dominican sunshine, in the company of all the other lights around them even though the days are so dark down here.

***

It’s a scene familiar in all the worst ways, wind so cold it's like being stabbed in the chest on every inhale, begging for someone to please hear him and open the door, it’s urgent, it’s desperate. Usnavi’s even still in his pajamas. At least this time he remembered to put shoes and a coat on.

“Is Sonny here?” he asks frantically, as soon as Tía Marcela opens the door. “Is he okay?”

“¿Que? Usnavi, it’s the middle of the night, I have work tomorrow,” Marcela says. She’s in pajamas too, her long hair wrapped up in a headscarf. “Sonny’s fine, he’s been asleep for hours. ¿Qué pasa?”

“I—“ he cringes under a wave of agonized embarrassment that drowns out the panic. “I, um, had a dream that, that he was—I had a bad dream.“

Marcela’s sleepy frown softens, and she sighs. “Vamos, then, you’re letting the cold in.”

Usnavi only comes in far enough to close the door behind him, feeling like an intruder. He likes Marcela well enough, but they aren’t exactly at comforting hugs after a nightmare level of closeness. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“De acuerdo. You could have called instead of running over here.”

“We ain’t had the landline for months and my cell got stole —“

“It got stolen? What happened?”

“Never mind,” Usnavi backtracks. “It don’t matter. I’m sorry. I just…had to check he was okay. It’s dumb. Lo siento. I’ll go.”

“Usnavi,” she says, “stop apologizing. And you're not walking back home in this state. You can stay in Sonny’s room. No lo despiertes, he’ll be bouncing off the walls all night if he finds out you’re here.”

Does she sound a little bitter about that? Maybe it’s just the late hour, or Usnavi reading too much into it. He’s grateful anyway, for her letting him stay and the unspoken understanding that he’d rather be in Sonny’s room than on the couch. It isn’t all that comfortable in a sleeping bag on the floor, but it means that when things he’d rather not think about start flashing across the inside of his closed eyes he can sit up and check that Sonny’s silhouette shifting with the faint rise and fall of his breath is still there in the dim light from the window.

It’s reassuring enough that Usnavi can drift off, and when he wakes abruptly only a few hours later, there’s a fluff of curly hair tickling against his face and a warmth at his side. Sonny must have woke up and found Usnavi there; he’s curled up inside his quilt on the floor right next to him, breathing deep and peaceful.

Usnavi almost smiles. He drapes an arm over his baby cousin, and instantly falls back asleep til sunrise. It’s the most rest he’s had in weeks.

***

The next morning, Sonny’s chattering excitably over breakfast, about what he got for Christmas and how he wishes his mom didn’t have to go back to work “but Usnavi can watch me today so—“.

Usnavi, pushing the cereal in his bowl around listlessly with a spoon, doesn’t miss the expression that passes over Marcela’s face.

“I’m sure Usnavi’s already got plans,” Marcela says.

“I don’t mind staying with him,” Usnavi says, watching her closely. There’s that expression again.

“It’s fine, I’ll just drop him off at Abuela’s on my way to work.”

“Why can’t I just stay with Usnavi though?” Sonny asks. "He said it's fine."

“And I said that we're going to Abuela's, she's already expecting you.”

"But—"

“No buts.”

Sonny looks bewildered, but Usnavi knows exactly what’s happening. There’s always some tension between him and Marcela, the details of her divorce from Usnavi’s Tío Miguel not entirely clear to him but he’s gathered from eavesdropping on his parents whispers that it was a rough one, that Miguel might have been seeing someone else. He’s always liked Tío Miguel, he’s a good uncle and a loving father, the same easy laugh and big smile as Pai, as Usnavi. The idea he isn’t a good husband is upsettingly incongruous, so Usnavi never asked more: ignorance is bliss, and he suspects it isn’t something Sonny knows either. Whatever it was, it left Marcela’s connection to the De la Vega side of the family strained, clearly only maintained for Sonny’s sake. In spite of that, though, she’s always trusted Usnavi to look after him, to be responsible for his safety.

Apparently that’s changed. Could be that she’s saying you don’t need the stress, but it feels a lot more like you showed up at midnight in your pajamas like you're having a breakdown and asking if Sonny was dead, so I don’t really trust you watching my kid right now. Can’t blame her, but it’s still crushing.

 “Listen to your mom,” Usnavi says. “I gotta go now anyway. Thanks for letting me stay, Marcela.”

"You’re welcome here any time,” she replies, and her voice is kind but he thinks she’s probably lying.

***

Usnavi's out on the fire escape, fourth cigarette of the night burning close to the end, when there’s a suspect kinda clattering coming from right outside the bodega below, like someone’s rattling the grate. He’s down there in an instant.

It’s some punk with a spray can in hand, already making fast work of his tag across the front of the grate, E-T-E-P in outlined, kinda wobbly bubble letters that he’s filling in with color. He drops his can in surprise with a “hey—!” as Usnavi grabs him by the shoulders and spins him round to face him, demanding “what the hell do you think you’re doin’, you son of a bitch?!”

The vandal attempts to struggle away and says “what’s it to you? It’s just some crappy abandoned store!”

“It ain’t abandoned!” Usnavi says hotly, grip tightening. “It’s mine. It’s my store, that’s my name on the sign, you ain’t got no right to write your name all over it!”

“Yo, let me go, you freak, what’s your deal?!”  This voice squeaks a little and it’s only that moment it clicks that this dude can’t be older than fourteen, a few inches shorter than Usnavi and wide-eyed under the sneering bravado, obviously scared. Goddammit.

Usnavi loosens his hold, keeps it just enough so the kid doesn’t make a break for it.“I ain’t recognize you," he says. "What’s your name? Your real one, not your bullshit graffiti one.”

“…Pete.”

“Aite, Pete —wait, is your tag just your name writ backwards? Dios mio.” Shit, he really is just a dumbass kid. Usnavi lets go of his shoulder and picks up the backpack full of cans off the ground. “I’m taking these. You got anything in here you need back? Keys or whatever?”

“Wallet and keys. Front pocket,” Pete says sulkily. Usnavi tosses them to him. “You really gonna take my cans though? How am I meant to practice my art?”

“Go buy some crayons, do you think I give a shit? Now vamos, I don’t wanna see your face round here again, you hear me?”

“Yeah, whatever,” Pete mutters, and just before he runs off, he adds with the petty venom only a fourteen year old can muster, “fuckin’ psycho.”

***

Usnavi’s trembling with rage too much to walk back up the stairs to his apartment, his legs all jerky like he's run a marathon and heart going full speed, so he goes into the bodega till he can calm down. He drops the backpack on the ground and tries to count to ten slowly in his head. Calm down, he has to calm down. It’s just some graffiti, it’ll clean off, they get it all the time.

Being in the bodega makes him feel worse, a month of neglect taunting him that no matter what he said outside, no matter the name written on the awning, this is just a crappy abandoned store now. His parents left it behind, Usnavi’s barely stepped foot in here except to pick up cigarettes.

He grabs the nearest thing his hand touches, a paper cup, and throws it. It’s too light to get far, catching the air before falling gently to the ground. For some reason that’s the thing that flips Usnavi right out of control. He kicks out at the counter, runs down the aisle tearing boxes off the shelves and when that’s not enough pushes a whole shelf unit down where it cracks one of the floor tiles. He gulps in deep, furious breaths and flings a bottle of cheap wine across the room, not caring if it'll stain the wall where it smashes. Fuck this shithole of a city, fuck this tomb of a store, burn it down for the fucking insurance money for all he cares because Usnavi doesn’t want any of it. He almost trips on Pete's backpack going behind the counter and it only makes him madder, scream suppressed in the back of his throat slamming his hands against the wall till they’re red-hot painful. A fragment of rational thinking stops him from punching it like he wants to - don’t do that, you’ll break your hand - so instead he sweeps his arm across the coffee station to knock everything to the ground: the box of sugar packets and the carton of expired milk, the coffee pot which shatters on the floor and, too late to stop himself, the picture frame with his dad’s first dollar in it.

That stops Usnavi’s rampage in its tracks, paralyzed in the middle of his own destruction. He’s broken everything, he’s left the bodega to die. If Pete hadn’t been so young Usnavi’s pretty sure he would've beat the shit out of him, and that isn’t like him at all. God, the kid was right, he's gone full on get me a straitjacket crazy, he’s in as many pieces as the coffee pot.

Crouching down and avoiding all the broken glass, Usnavi picks up the picture frame with shaky hands. It’s fine, not even a crack, the dollar inside still safe and sound; he clasps it to his chest in relief.

Once, when he was very young, he had asked Mamá why Pai had bothered framing it - “it’s only one dollar, you can’t even buy videos with that.” Mamá had taken the old photo albums out to show him pictures of when they’d first got the store. He remembers one in particular, Pai and Kevin on ladders putting up the sign, clearly yelling at each other while Mamá stands on the ground smiling up at them, one hand shielding her eyes from the sun and the other hand resting on her pregnant belly. She told him all about how the place was a mess when they first bought it. It had taken weeks of cleaning up for it to be ready, but they were still so happy because it belonged to them. 

“That dollar might not be a lot of money,” she’d said, “but it’s a dollar that we would never have earned if we’d given up on it.”

They’d both always dreamed of owning a business, something that belonged to them, that they could pass on with pride to Usnavi. They'd never given up, they'd worked so hard to make it happen. Worked themselves to death for it.

Usnavi carefully wipes down the glass of the picture frame, sets the dollar back in its place on the side. Then he steps over the toppled shelf and heads for the row of cleaning products along the back wall. He’s got a store to fix up.

Chapter Text

Carla

Carla hates walking to work in winter. It’s only a couple blocks from her place to the salon, but it’s dark and it’s cold and its kinda scary sometimes, with so few people about except the type of people you probably don’t wanna cross paths with. She hides the bottom of her face inside the loop of her thick blue scarf, tucks her hands inside her pockets, and scurries through the snow. The lights in the salon glow invitingly from all the way down the street.

As she gets closer, half her mind focused on shivering and half of it keeping an eye out for hidden patches of ice or dog crap or early morning junkies, a figure outside the bodega catches her attention. At first she thinks it’s someone trying to break into the store, but as he moves into the flickering light she recognizes the grey Uptown’s Finest hoodie. It’s just Usnavi, headphones on, scrubbing at some graffiti on the grate at dumb o’clock in the morning.

Who the heck would choose to be up and out right now if they ain’t gotta be? she thinks, even though she’s already bumped into him before at this time. After they’d dragged him inside he’d slept on their break room couch for five hours, lights blaring, sneakers still on and all. Dani had been pretty worried, in her stoic Dani way, going back to check on him every time there was a break between customers. Poor kid. It’s hard to sleep when you’re stressed, and this is for sure more than a relaxing evening in a bubble bath can cure.

Should she say something to him? But like, what to say to him? Carla’s a pretty good talker even when she isn't too sure what it is she’s talking about, but she ain’t quite so clueless as to not realize she’s really got a talent for putting her foot in it sometimes. This probably isn’t a good moment for her to run her mouth.

Dani will know what to do. So Carla goes into the salon, where Dani’s setting up the cash register, and tells her, “Usnavi’s outside again. He’s cleaning the grate.”

“Oh, is he, now?” Dani strides to the door to take a look outside, then quickly ducks back in from the cold. She shakes her head. “Ay, let him be. It’s better than him walking all over la ciudad all night.”

“Okay,” Carla says, dubiously, because leaving him feels mean, but if Dani says so…

Instructions from Dani or no, Carla’s inquisitive by nature. Little things that she doesn’t know how to interpret keep playing on her mind over the next few days. The lights are always on in the bodega on her way to work, shining out barely visible from the edges of the newly-cleaned grate. Usnavi’s upstairs neighbor comes in for a blow-dry and says sometimes when she's woke up in the night by her back problems she can hear him leaving his apartment. Jayla from 5B says she saw him on her way to work the other day, out back taking a bunch of stuff from the store to the trash, "whole dumpster was so full it looked like he was gutting the place."

“Really?” Carla says, pausing with her comb in the air trying to think about what that might mean.

“Uh-huh. I asked how come he’s throwing so much out, but he just says he was cleaning and put his headphones on before I could ask him no more.”

“Huh. Wonder what he’s doin’?”

“Never mind what Usnavi’s doing, what are my staff doing?” Dani  waves her scissors threateningly in Carla’s direction. “How do you expect me to work with all this chat, chat, chat all day long?”

“But Dani, don’t you think that—“

“I think I pay you to cut hair, not gossip,” Dani says, in a voice that ends any possibility argument, even though Carla wants to point out that most of what they’ve done for the whole ten years she’s worked here is gossip. And Dani has no problem stopping everything to listen in with delight when Jayla changes topic to talk about how the woman who works at the desk next to her was caught getting dirty with an intern in the copy room - “explains why she spends so much time in there, huh? Refilling the toner my ass, only one getting their toner refilled is her” - but if Carla knows anything it’s not to call Dani out on stuff like that, even when it doesn’t make much sense.

She keeps her curiosity in check until one day on the walk to work something too big to contain it happens.

“¡Ay, madre! Are you trying to give me an aneurysm?” Dani says, as Carla burst through the door shouting Dani! Dani! “¿Qué es todo esto ruido?”

“The bodega’s open!”

Just like before, Dani runs to check for herself. Carla joins her, just to make sure she hadn’t imagined it. Both of them peer around the door, looking at at the open grate, the lights from the store window, the raised awning in a frozen silence until Dani gives a determined little exhale and stands up straight, smoothing her skirt.

“Okay! Well, we need café, and looks like Usnavi’s back in business. Vamos, Carla, time to support the local economy.” She takes her coat off the hook by the door and adds, quietly, “god knows he needs it.”

***

Nina

Sometimes Nina wishes she wasn’t the smart one. Being smart means thinking. It means thinking about everything, and definitely means overthinking about most of it.

Example: she’s just spent around ten agonizing minutes working herself into a mental frenzy over whether to set a place for Usnavi at the Three King’s Day meal her mom is hosting tonight. He wouldn’t give anyone a straight answer about whether he was coming and Nina knows that, just like at Christmas, he doesn’t want to ruin the day for everyone. As if they won’t feel it just as much without him there. She eventually sets a plate and a chair out for him because she reasons it’d be far worse for him to show up and not have a place set, like they’ve written him out of their story already, or like they were hoping he wouldn’t show. She doesn’t want to give up on him that fast. And maybe he’s getting better. The store reopened yesterday. Maybe that’s a good sign.

Rationalizing it out like that builds her hopes up until Abuela comes in, alone, and shakes her head before Nina can even ask. Nina puts the extra place setting away, shoves the cheap folding chair back into the corner, then goes to sit in her room and just breathe for a while, even when she hears Dani and Carla arrive and her mom calls twice for her to come be sociable. Getting it wrong feels like a personal failing, like the amount of places was a test and she just got an F. I set up nine chairs and only one was wrong, 88.8 percent, that’s still an A, she tells herself. And then she tells herself, are you really getting upset over how well you did at guessing party guests like it’s the most important part of this whole situation? even though, as always, being painfully analytical of her own shortcomings does not in fact make her feel any better about their existence.

At dinner it’s quiet, there’s too much extra room round the table, too many missing pieces in songs that are too solemn, too forced. This would be easier to bear if Vanessa had shown, but she’s avoiding for exactly the same reasons Nina doesn’t wanna be here. At dinner there’s usually laughing and shouting and a hundred toasts in a night, but this time there’s just Dad, standing up with his glass in his hand. He doesn’t praise the food, or the season, or make some jab about being kicked out of his own kitchen that makes Camila swat at him. He just stands, and swirls the wine gently around in the glass for so long that it starts to get uncomfortable. Eventually, he says, in a low, quick voice, “Por nuestros amigos ausentes. Salud.”

“Salud,” everyone murmurs, raising their glasses, except for Sonny on the other side of the table, who just folds his arms and slides so far down in his seat she can only see his curls and his furrowed eyebrows. Doesn’t she just wish she could get away with doing the same, or leaving the table altogether. She picks at her dinner, ignoring the subdued conversation and the fact that her mom keeps dabbing at her eyes with a paper napkin. Watches the snow falling outside the window and thinks, it isn’t snowing in Puerto Rico.

A silly escapism, she knows, but one as familiar as a book read so often the binding’s come loose. Sometimes Nina thinks she thinks so much her brain is constantly boiling and any day it’s going to bubble right out of her ears and splat, cerebral matter all over the floor like an overflowing soup bowl in a microwave. She’s built her own private Puerto Rico in her head for those days, a fantastical Narnia of a Puerto Rico built from rose-tinted childhood memories and anecdotes, the endless double-edged comfort of an unexplorable if. If she’d grown up there maybe the future wouldn’t be a constant weight on her head, if she’d grown up there she’d know for sure where she’s meant to be. If she’d grown up there she’d be surrounded by people who speak the same as her, instead of the placeless American voice she grew into, her dad always telling her that he doesn’t care how Usnavi or Vanessa or any of her friends talk, because they’re not his daughter. He says Nina’s meant for so much more than the barrio. He says it will hold her back if she talks like she’s from the hood, even though she is from the hood, so now she just sounds like she’s from nowhere. And what good is it being from a place when nobody can tell and you don’t really know what it means and where the people that make it what it is can disappear any second?

If she’d grown up in Puerto Rico, she wouldn’t have to miss the Rosca de Reyes that Rosa’s made every January sixth since Nina can remember, she wouldn’t miss Mateo heckling Dad’s over-lengthy speeches, or Usnavi’s skinny elbow nudging her and his unapologetic grin while he steals food off her plate. They’re not her family to have lost but they’re still lost, and Nina’s tangling herself further and further into a web of self-conscious self-criticism of her selfish grief when Abuela starts gathering dishes and she realizes dinner’s over.

“Claudia, you don’t need to do that,“ Mom starts, standing up.

“¡No no no, tonterías, sientate! I can pull my weight. Ninita! Help an old lady con los platos.”

In the kitchen, Abuela starts stacking plates by the basin. She says, “Habla conmigo, mija. What’s on your mind?”

Everything, always, all the time, Nina thinks, wryly, because it’s easier to be wry than to listen to the part of her that sounds like a little kid that’s asking does life just get harder and harder, and lonelier and lonelier?

“Do you miss them?’ she asks, in a bad parody of a steady voice while she scrapes off leftovers into the trash, and presses her tongue very hard to the roof of her mouth to keep herself from crying.

Abuela starts running the water, testing the temperature with one finger and giving a weighted, weary sigh. “Sí. Sí, I miss them very much.”

“Okay,” Nina says, and stands beside Abuela to help with dishes, shoulder against shoulder. “Okay. Good. Me too.”

***

Camila

Camila stands outside the bodega, just out of sight from the window, one hand clutched around the box in her pocket. It’s horrible weather to be standing around in, but she’d been making her determined way over when she’d suddenly recalled a conversation with Rosa, and had to stop to pull herself together. It hurts to think about Rosa, their long friendship, the talks they’ll never have again, and Camila refuses to break down about it in front of Usnavi. She and Kevin save those moments for nighttime, when Nina won’t overhear, when they don’t need to put a brave face on for the children or for the rest of the world.

It was September, when Mateo was recovering from a chest infection only a few months before that second, more final sickness hit. The medical bills had cut right into the De la Vegas savings, including, Rosa told her, the money they’d been keeping by for Usnavi’s eighteenth birthday. They’d had to cancel their plans: the trip to the DR, the big gift ideas, they just wouldn’t be able to do anything but the usual small party with what they’d got left.

“We should still be able to go to Puerto Plata later, en verano, but we really wanted something special for him,” Rosa had said, dejected.

Camila remembered that exact feeling from just before Nina’s quinceañera, after a year or more of saving up for it, looking around at their best attempt to celebrate her daughter growing up and still feeling like it should be so much more than what they could provide. Rosa had been a great comfort to her then: the main thing, she said, is that you’ve given Nina everything you have the ability to give, including a good life. That’s more important than one party, isn’t it?

She reached across the table to pat Rosa’s hand. “We can only do what we can with what we’ve got, mami, Usnavi will understand. You don’t need to spend lots of money on him for it to be a good day.”

“We’d been trying to put something aside to help him get a place of his own one day. He doesn’t want to be living with his parents forever, and since we can't send him to college…”

“He doesn’t want to go to college anyway, does he?”

“Maybe he would’ve done, if we’d been able to get him the help he needs earlier on in school.” Rosa shrugged. “Pero, all that’s out the window now, so I suppose he’ll just have to make do with cake.”

“I’ve never heard Usnavi complain about cake.”

“Ha! Sí, es cierto.”

“He’ll be happy with whatever you get him." Camila shook her head. “Can you believe he’ll be eighteen next year?”

“I don’t want to believe it,” Rosa said, wistfully. “I want him to be mi bebé forever. They grow up too fast, don’t they?”

That could have been yesterday, and now it’s already Usnavi’s birthday. Camila can’t give him all the things Rosa wanted for him, and she certainly can’t give him what he really needs, but he deserves something. There’s only one thing she could think of, something she’d taken at the funeral home because she knew that they’d want to pass them onto him, but she’s never found the right moment to bring it up.

Enough dwelling on the past. Rosa wasn’t one to wallow, and neither is Camila. She pushes open the bodega door and Usnavi’s standing by the shelves with a sticker gun, repricing all the two-liter soda bottles.

“Hola, cariño,” she says.

“Hey,” he replies. Camila notes how he doesn’t even pretend to try and keep the conversation going, he just keeps working as if he’s already forgotten she’s there.

“It’s your birthday today,” she says, because happy birthday feels cruel.

“Yup. The big one-eight.” He stickers a Pepsi Max bottle with unnecessary force.

“I have something for you.”

That gets his attention: he puts the sticker gun and the Pepsi on the shelf and turns around, a rueful twist to the corner of his mouth. “You done more than enough for me already, Camila,” he says. “I ain’t expect no presents.”

“It isn’t a present, really,” she says. “They already belong to you.”

She isn’t sure whether it’ll help or hurt him when she hands over the jewelry box with his parents’ wedding rings inside. She still isn’t sure even after he opens it; his face is expressionless, though he touches both bands with his thumb as though he’s checking they’re the real thing. But it gives her a long moment to really look at him: his solemn brown eyes circled with exhaustion; the tight serious set of his shoulders; that patchy adolescent peach-fuzz of his starting to grow out darker and a little unkempt.

“Ay, they grow up too fast,” she thinks.

***

Benny

The real fucked up thing about restarting school is that by this point it basically feels normal that Usnavi isn’t there. He has n’t been in since he came down with pneumonia and yeah, Benny had felt his absence, had felt real bad for him getting so sick, but he’s got other friends, a life to live, and everyone has sick days. It sucked that his buddy was gone for so long, but he doesn’t need Usnavi to hold his hand at recess, he coped.

The absences felt different after it happened: everyone was asking Benny about it, all the time, until he got so sick of it that he could've punched someone. Would've done, if he was younger and dumber, but he’s got a hold on his shit these days, so he just waited with gritted teeth for it to stop being the headline news.

Now, first week back, nobody asks about Usnavi, not even any of his friends. It’s not that they don’t care, only that its so much more uncomfortable to talk about it than ignore it, and there isn't much left to discuss.

The real fucked up thing isn’t that they got used to Usnavi not being around. The fucked up thing is it’s easier this way. The fucked up thing is that it’s kind of a relief. It’s a relief to hang out with people when hanging out doesn’t mean watching movies in the strange emptiness of Usnavi’s apartment, sneaking glances to his side and seeing that Usnavi isn’t even looking at the screen properly. It’s a relief to talk to people who talk back and cuss and laugh and shout and have fun.

Look, he wants Usnavi to come back to school, he does. But, he wants Usnavi to come back to school, like things used to be. It’s real hard to spend all his time trying to cheer someone up who he doesn’t even know how to talk to any more. He isn't gonna abandon Usnavi, not right now when he needs everyone he can get, but…y’know. Benny needs a break too. So at school it’s easy to just think of it like Usnavi’s still on sick days, and save reality for after the bell.

On Friday, though, Miss Nichols asks him to hang back after homeroom. She waits for everyone else to leave then turns to Benny and says, bluntly, “none of us have managed to get a hold of Usnavi. Principal, guidance counsellor, nobody, and we don’t have an updated next of kin. Is he coming back?”

“I…don’t actually know,” Benny says, caught off guard by the truth of it.

“You two are still friends, aren’t you?”

“Of course we are!” Benny says, indignant. “It’s —things are hard, that’s all. And I ain’t telling you all his business, but you think he ain’t got a damn good reason for not showing up to school?”

“Benny, I know that,” she says. “We're doing everything we can to buy him more time, but there’s legal stuff. He needs to talk to the guidance counselor about how we can manage…everything, else he’s not gonna be able to graduate. Please, just tell him to call us back, we can find a way to make this work. He’s gonna listen to you more than me.”

She shuffles some stuff around on her desk and adds, “and tell him he’s in my prayers, will you?”

“Sure,” Benny says. He starts walking to his next but finds himself going downstairs, ducking out of school through the gap in the fence round the back where they never bother to watch, even though everyone knows it’s there. He doesn’t feel like studying today. All that pretending that Usnavi’s just still sick meant that some part of Benny’s subconscious had just assumed things would go back to how they’d always been, Usnavi sitting at the top of the steps with his radio, the two of them getting in trouble in class together, all the shit that’s been a fact of every day for years.  He wouldn’t just drop out, right? He can’t just leave all that behind?

It’s too risky to go back home in case his mom’s about, so instead Benny goes to the store. Usnavi waves at him, either not noticing or not interested enough to question the fact that Benny’s there at ten AM on a Friday. Benny picks up a bunch of random shit he doesn’t really need and sets it down on the counter.

“So,” he says casually. “Miss Nichols talked to me today. About you.”

Usnavi raises one eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“Why ain’t you answering none of their calls, man? You know if you don’t you ain’t gonna graduate, right?”

“Mmm.” Usnavi taps quickly on a calculator beside him. “That’s seven dollars fifty-six.”

Benny hands over a ten, with a sinking feeling. “You…you are gonna come back to school, right? You gotta come back eventually.”

“Did you want a bag for this?” Usnavi says.

***

Kevin

The workday is long enough without taking on extra, Kevin thinks, watching as Camila runs herself ragged making sure all the De la Vega business is taken care of. Speaking to Usnavi’s landlord and managing to get an extension on the apartment rent for him, calling around every spare moment of the day with every trick in the book to take the hospital bills down as far as possible. There’s barely any time they see each other that she’s not frantically rushing about trying to juggle everything at once. Shouldn’t something like this bring everyone together? Between Camila’s second workload and Nina suddenly always being out with Vanessa or shutting herself in her room all evening, there’s little time for family at all.

Kevin isn’t heartless. He misses Mateo too, and Rosa, he misses them deeply, he knows that it’s far too early to expect Usnavi to not be grieving. But when Camila starts fretting that Usnavi shouldn’t be running the store, that he should leave it up to them to worry about finances, it seems like things are getting out of hand. Typical Camila, of course, always wanting to be in charge of everything, but eighteen isn’t such a crazy age to start work, is it? Especially with the business already set up and running. Kevin had only been nineteen when they moved over here and he’d set up his shoeshine business. People have been doing harder work with less at younger ages for centuries.

When he says as much that to Camila, she says “don’t you think he’s got enough on his mind already? And I’m worried about him. He hasn’t been in school since they got sick.”

“I suppose he doesn’t need to, if he’s got the bodega.”

“I’m just trying to do what I think they’d want for him. What we’d want someone else to do for Nina if she was in the same situation. Would you be happy, if she dropped out to run the dispatch all alone?”

“Well, of course it would be different for Nina,” Kevin says, “She needs to go to college, she’s got too much potential to drop out. Usnavi has never been…”

The pause hangs meaningfully, until Camila shakes her head and says “Kevin Rosario, you are unbelievable,” gathering up her papers and storming off to the kitchen to work on them alone.

He hadn’t meant anything by it, of course. Usnavi’s got a good heart, but look, you can tell who’s going places and who isn’t, that’s simply how the world works.

As the evening goes on with Camila maintaining her disapproving silent treatment, though, Kevin finds his thoughts wandering to last summer, when Nina had been tutoring Usnavi to retake the math exam he’d failed the year before. Kevin had sometimes come by, just to watch with pride as she explained the same thing over and over without ever seeming frustrated: what a patient, kind girl his daughter has grown up to be.

Kevin will admit it, he hasn’t always been the most generous in his perspective on Usnavi. Yes, yes, “learning difficulties”, but it’s really only a matter of pushing yourself harder. No excuses for slacking off. And then during those tutoring sessions he’d also seen Usnavi, frequently near tears, fingers clenched around his pen so hard they turned white, taking a deep breath and saying “okay, I’m gonna get it this time”, no matter how many times he was wrong, and he'd understood a little more why Mateo had never taken kindly to any of his tactful suggestions that Usnavi just needed more self-discipline.

When Usnavi had passed his retake and brought his grade average up enough to pass, Mateo had been as excited about that as Kevin is at every 100% and A+ Nina brings home. “You see that, Kevin?” he bragged. “My boy’s gonna be the first De la Vega to graduate!”

The next day during his break Kevin goes to the bodega, mentally cursing out Camila for always getting under his skin and, worse, for always being right. Usnavi’s at the counter, pen in one hand and gripping at his hair with the other. He looks up as Kevin comes in and tosses his pen down, saying, “you got a business, Kevin, tell me, do they make all this shit up just to mess with us?”

“Absolutamente. What are you working on?”

“Trying to understand what the hell I’m doin’ here. The fuck is sales tax even for?”

“That’s what I came to speak to you about, actually. There’s a lot of learning goes into running a business. I just want you to know, if you ever need advice, I’ve made enough mistakes in my day to tell you how to do it right. Here, let me see what you’ve got so far.” Kevin takes the paper and frowns down at it, but it’s a hopeless effort. “Ah. Uh, this is a little…”

“Unreadable? Yeah.” Usnavi takes the paper, smooths it out on the counter like getting rid of the creases might fix up the handwriting. “Gracias, though. I shoulda learnt all this before, but Mama always said there’d be time later so I never bothered. Guess I ain’t got no choice now.”

“What about school? You are going to finish, aren’t you? Benny said your teachers keep asking about you. ”

Usnavi shrugs. “Too much to do here.”

“Not if you sold the store,” Kevin says, as gently as possibly but Usnavi instantly stiffens up. “A high school diploma could make a whole world of difference. You’ll have more career options, you could even take a night class in business to prepare you for if you wanted to reopen —“

“I aint selling our store, man.” He picks up a cloth and turns away to clean the coffee station, though it already looks spotless. “Y’know, you always talk like if everyone just tries they can do anything and be anyone ‘cause that’s how Nina is. Well, it don’t work like that for people like me. I ain’t passing no night classes or impressing no employers with my damn 2.0, so what’s the point? Let’s be real, Kevin, nobody ever really thought I would graduate anyway.”

Kevin clicks his tongue in surprise. He may have thought it, once or twice, but it seems harsher knowing Usnavi himself is apparently aware of it.

“Your parents thought you would,” he says. “I can’t make you finish school, Usnavi. But they always believed you could do it. You still have a chance to prove them right.”

Usnavi just carries on cleaning, scrubbing furiously like he’s trying to take the plastic coating off the counter.

***

Vanessa

The first day Vanessa begins her part-time job at the salon starts off with a fight with her mom, because apparently Vanessa sweeping up hair and getting hot drinks for a few hours every Saturday is yet another sign that Dani is undermining every parental choice Mom has ever made.

“You do that pretty well by yourself,” Vanessa says.

“Don’t act like she ain’t always doing things like this,” Mom snaps. “Offering you a job, like she thinks she's so much better than me.”

“She didn’t offer! I asked her for a job, and she gave me one.”

“You’re still a kid! What the hell are you goin’ out asking for jobs for?”

“Because one of us has to!” Vanessa shouts, and hopes that the loud slam of the door hurts Mom’s hangover like hell.

Truce over, it looks like. They’d had a good Christmas together. A quiet Christmas, not as such a happy one, but one with a keen awareness that dysfunctional as it is, Vanessa and her mom are a family. It was…ugh. Nice, or whatever.

Oh well. Shit like that never lasts, anyway, Vanessa doesn’t bother to get her hopes up any more. This is just a sign that everything’s getting back to normal. And it really is, in most ways. The job is new, something she’s doing partly because she started reading Mom’s bills and decided that someone needs to have some savings just in case, and partly because Kevin’s started bringing Nina into the dispatch on Saturday mornings - says it’s good for her to take a break from books and learn something about the real world too - so it isn't like Vanessa can hang out with her anyway. Aside from that, though, there’s music playing at the salon again, the usual chatter and laughter. Nina stops crying randomly during the day and starts talking about study plans, life plans, everything plans again, while Vanessa complains about bad teachers and bad songs and bad hair days. It’s like nothing’s even changed, except for when Dani sends Vanessa out on the coffee run to the bodega during her shifts.

“I could just make the coffee here,” Vanessa suggests, and Dani says “I give you a job and you have the nerve to threaten me?”

“I ain’t that bad at it,” she protests, but Dani won’t hear it, and there’s no way she’ll be allowed to waste time going to the next closest bodega so looks like she’s stuck going to Usnavi’s.

Usnavi makes coffee as good as Mateo ever did, and Usnavi sometimes asks Vanessa how she’s doing, but these days his attention visibly wanders while she answers and mostly he just asks you want a bag for that? or you need anythin’ else? He doesn’t smile or sing or slip free things into her bag with a wink, none of the De la Vega stuff that made the bodega what it was, but that’s fine. It’s fine that everything else is going back to normal except him. It's fine that the odd mixture of comfort and envy Vanessa used to get watching that funny, fluid dance of daily life of the three De la Vegas working together has given way to something even more complicated, the envy of what he had combined with pity of what he doesn’t have any more and the fear that things she’d always assumed were unbreakable are broken now.

She shouldn’t have bothered to get her hopes up, even vicariously, that some relationships might be built to last. People always move on. People die or get divorced or get sad. That’s life, and Vanessa ain’t got time to go round getting all maudlin about something she can’t change, hasn’t she wasted enough of her life trying to stop her mom being miserable? She feels bad for Usnavi, sure, but it's nothing to do with Vanessa. Let him be sad, at least he’s got a good excuse for it.

And it doesn’t mean anything, either, that on days when she’s not at work and needs to pick up groceries she’ll walk further out to the next bodega. The other store’s just got better selection of food, that’s it. Nothing at all to do with whatever the hell feeling you call it when you look at the human version of sunshine and realize it’s started raining. Usnavi doesn’t owe nobody his happiness and Vanessa doesn’t owe nobody nothing

How long’s it supposed to be until someone’s themself again? A month isn’t very long, even two. Six months? A year? Forever?

January’s ready to give up to February, Usnavi may as well be a self-service checkout for all he engages with people, and Vanessa definitely has no feelings at all on the matter. So her heart definitely doesn’t jump with relief and anticipation when one day at lunch break, Benny Roberts comes up to her and Nina and says, “we gotta do something about Usnavi.”

Chapter Text

Benny

From the second he first stepped into Usnavi’s apartment after hearing the news and saw his best friend completely falling apart in Abuela's arms, Benny’s known he is not even slightly equipped to deal with this situation by himself. No shortage of people who he could ask to help him out: Usnavi’s almost universally well-liked and even the few people who never got the message aren't gonna be assholes to the kid who just got orphaned, but the times it's come up with any classmates, Benny hasn't even wanted to talk about it, never mind give them more details on just how hard it’s hit. Too much like airing dirty laundry, too much like throwing open the doors to Usnavi’s echoingly empty apartment and telling everyone to have a good ogle at it.

He was kind of hoping things would start to work themselves out with time, but there isn’t all that much time left before graduation, and from their conversation yesterday it feels like Usnavi might have already made his choice. So maybe Benny's already left it too long to do any good, but he’s gotta try. The next day he searches out Nina and Vanessa on the small staircase round by the fire exit where they usually sit, and says “we gotta do something about Usnavi.”

The girls look at each other, then Nina indicates the step next to her. He sits.

“Tell us what we can do,” she says.

“I think he’s gonna drop out, and I don’t know how to stop him.”

“Why stop him?” Vanessa says. “Good for him gettin’ out of this hellhole early, wish I could.”

“Not good for him. He’s just gonna hole up in the store all the time, and I don’t think it’s doin’ him no good bein’ in there so much.”

An uncomfortable silence settles over them. 

“I keep expecting to see them whenever I go in,” Nina says quietly. Vanessa looks away and starts braiding her hair. “Every single time. Don’t you?”

This is why Benny came to them instead of anyone else. Just like him, Nina and Vanessa spent a childhood entwined with the store, going in after taking a tumble on the street so that Mateo could patch up their scraped knees, confiding in Rosa things that it was far too embarrassing to tell their own moms, they’ve sat on top of the counter watching customers when their parents have been at work and nobody else could look after them. It’s all Benny can think about in that place, so how is Usnavi supposed to start living his own life again if he doesn’t step out of their memory every once in a while?

“I already tried to talk to him,” he says. “He just pretended like he didn’t even hear me and I ain’t much good at the sensitive stuff so I didn’t know what to say. But he’s gotta come back, right? So I thought maybe if one of you talked to him about it—

“Yeah, yes, obviously,” Nina says. “He worked so hard last summer to pass his retakes, we can't let him throw that away.”

“Hm,” Vanessa says.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. We all know how much Usnavi loooves school. Coming back’s definitely gonna cheer him up.”

“At least it's gettin’ him outside,” Benny says. “The hell else we gonna do, take him to a theme park?”

Without answering, Vanessa leans back to rest her elbows on the step behind her, radiating disapproving energy.

“It’s just somewhere to start from,” Nina says. “Meet at the gates after school, we’ll go talk to him. He can’t ignore all of us at once.”

***

It’s long past the last bell and there’s only two of them at the gates. Benny checks his watch. “Jeez, where is Nina?”

“Maybe she realized this was a dumb idea and bailed,” Vanessa suggests in a bored voice, still playing on her phone. She hasn’t bothered engaging Benny in conversation other than reminding him how much she doesn’t agree with anything they’re doing. Her whole don’t-care schtick is really grating on him: she could stand to drop the attitude for five minutes.

“If you ain’t wanna—“ he starts, before Nina comes running up to them.

“Sorry, had to check something first,” she says, breathlessly. “Let’s go.”

They do their best to act natural coming into the store, but something about them must be screaming this is an intervention because Usnavi takes one look at them then immediately starts typing random numbers into the cash register to shuffle around its contents, effectively proving that yes, he can actually ignore all three of them at once.

“We gotta talk,” Benny says.

Usnavi hmms, dismissive. “I’m at work right now.”

“Pretty hard to catch you anywhere else these days,” Nina says gently. “Don’t you think maybe you’re working a bit too much?”

“No, I don’t,” Usnavi says. “Was that all?”

Vanessa makes an impatient noise and shoves in front of Nina. “Yo, Usnavi. You gonna drop out of school, yes or no?”

Benny elbows her, but the bluntness apparently surprises Usnavi enough that he answers “yes” instantly, then looks like he regrets it as soon as Benny and Nina start protesting.

“You can’t just leave!”

“It’s only a couple months left!”

Usnavi counts out a stack of bills, making a note on a piece of paper next to him.

“It wouldn’t even have to be full time,” Nina pushes. “I spoke to the counselor today and obviously nothing’s set in stone until you talk to them but he said it's pretty likely you’d only be expected to attend enough to get your credits and nobody’s gonna be too harsh, they all understand the situation—“

Usnavi puts the stack off cash back in the register and slams it closed, the echo loud enough to shut everyone up. “Oh, they understand, do they? You all fuckin’ understand? Glad someone does, because I sure don't. You made any more big decisions about my life without me, since apparently I ain’t capable of doin’ it myself?”

“I wasn’t—“ Nina says, stepping back a little. “Th-that isn’t what I was trying to…”

Benny puts a reassuring hand on her arm. “Leave off, Usnavi, she’s just tryna help.”

“Well, she ain’t. You all really think it’s so simple and I’m just too dumb to think of hiring someone else? I can’t afford no staff. It’s great you’re all tryna look out for me, but there ain’t nothing you can do to help.” He breathes in raggedly, then composes himself and in a frighteningly wooden voice like the ventriloquist dummy version of a store clerk asks, "so can I get you anything or is that all?"

“Usnavi…“

“C’mon,” Vanessa says. “Let’s go, Benny.” She’s got her arm around Nina who looks like she’s about to cry, and Benny has no idea what else to say anyhow, so he shrugs and follows them out.

“I’m fine,” Nina says when he asks if she's alright, setting her jaw stoically. “I’m fine, we’ll just have to come up with a different approach for next time.”

“Different than stomping all over the conversation, yeah,” Benny says, directed at Vanessa. “What the hell were you thinking, just asking him like that? You ever hear of tact?”

“You ever hear of wasting your time?” she answers. “Like he was gonna answer any different doin’ it your way, at least I got it over with. I told you this was a dumb idea.”

“Well, y’know what, Vanessa, I ain’t see you coming up with any better solutions, and I think I know him better than you—“

“Then why’d you come to us to fix things if you know him so well?” she retorts. “He’s right, you ain’t got no idea what he’s goin' through.”

“And you do?”

“Better than you! Either of you the only adult in your house? Either of you the one working to pay for for food and bills 'cause your mom ain’t gonna take care of it for you? ‘Cause I am, and so’s he, and let me tell you something, it fuckin' sucks.”

“Oh, don’t act like you’re the only one out of us who’s broke! I’m sorry your mom’s a bitch but this is about helping Usnavi so if all you got is negativity then you ain't gotta be involved and you can leave this to people who have enough feelings to actually give a shit about him.”

“Oof,” Nina murmurs. Vanessa gives Benny the kind of glare that’s made her the terror of untold amounts of eleventh grade boys, and he’s expecting to get totally chewed out, but she just jabs a finger into his chest and says, “fuck you, Benny Roberts,” then storms off. He looks at Nina and all he gets from her is a staredown, not quite as icy as Vanessa but pretty high up there.

“That was too far,” she says. “You should apologize to her.”

“Nina—“

“I have to go home now,” she says, and follows Vanessa’s path down the street.

Benny curses to himself, kicking the wall beside him before he gets his shit together and starts walking the opposite direction back to his own place. Vanessa hit a nerve. He'd never admit it aloud but she's right: he really doesn’t understand any of that shit she was talking about, and what kills him is how long he'd spend so convinced he’d got it all figured out. Got a job at sixteen to pay Kevin for driving lessons, pays all his own car insurance and gas. Career already set up ahead of him. Independent, that’s Benny. So independent my mom still pays the bills, he thinks. And the rent. She still calls in to check he’s okay if she’s away with work for longer than a weekend. He's never thought about what if his mom wasn’t around, or about what if he does everything right and it still doesn’t work out for him, because things always work out, right?

But with his final year of school flying so much quicker than he’d anticipated, all the nice ties and smart shirts in the world haven’t made him feel any more ready to face the unknowns after graduation. He’d been counting on one thing without even knowing it until it was taken away: that if nothing else, he’d be more ready than Usnavi. As kids - hell, as teenagers too - Usnavi would almost always go anywhere Benny went, and that made it easier for Benny to be the one taking the first step into something new, to pretend he knew more than he did and was less scared than he was. Now even if they do get Usnavi back to school, he’s already gone somewhere Benny hasn’t been leading, and maybe he’ll never come back. Benny feels like he’s pretty much clutching at straws just to not be left behind. He never thought about what growing up might be without Usnavi next to him.

***

Vanessa

Vanessa fumes all the way home and carries it with her to her shift at the salon. Her mood isn’t helped by Dani making a cross-shape with her fingers and holding them up at Vanessa’s scowling face like she’s trying to ward off a vampire, or by Carla giggling while she does it. And it’s made even worse by Sonny De la Vega and his mom walking in halfway through her shift while she’s sweeping the floor, because that makes her think about Usnavi and that means she’s thinking about Benny and his bullshit all over again. Sonny, to his credit, at least has the decency to look just as pissed as Vanessa feels. She makes a face at him in solidarity and he sticks his tongue out at her then goes back to complaining about being dragged along to the salon instead of the million other things he’s listing off that he’d rather be doing instead. Vanessa isn’t really paying attention until she hears “—why can’t I just hang out in the store like normal,” and Marcela’s short “no”.

Vanessa moves closer under the pretence of straightening up a picture-frame near the couch to listen in, as Sonny says, “but I never get to see him no more.”

“He’s very busy, mijo, he doesn’t need you getting under his feet.”

Sonny slouches down, defeated, but only for a second. “Oh! I could get a job there!”

Marcela only laughs a little, and shakes her head, still flicking through her magazine.

“No, no, ¡es una gran idea!” Sonny insists. “I can still hang out with Usnavi and I wouldn’t be in his way ‘cause I’d be helping, so he wouldn’t be so busy, and I ain’t really need to go to school anyhow ‘cause I’ve pretty much learned everything already, and—“

Marcela holds up a hand, obviously losing patience. “You’re ten years old, you’re not getting a job at the bodega, and you still have to go to school.”

“But why? Usnavi ain’t gotta!”

“Well, Usnavi is—“ she gives a little exasperated out-breath. “You aren’t going to the bodega today and that’s my last word on it.”

“Usnavi is what?” Vanessa says, loudly.

“Vanessa,” Dani calls a warning from across the salon.

“No, I want her to finish.” Vanessa folds her arms. “Usnavi’s what? Usnavi’s too difficult to deal with so you’re just gonna cut him loose? Usnavi might be dropping out so now he ain’t good enough to look after Sonny no more?”

“Vanessa!”

“What? Where are you getting that from?” Marcela says but now Sonny’s up in her face with a horrified gasp, saying “is that really why you ain’t let me see him?”

“I do let you see him!”

“Hardly never no more! You always send me to Abuela’s or Nina’s instead of his place, and—“

“Te lo dije, he’s got enough on his plate without—“

“Without spending time with the last bit of family he’s got left?”  Vanessa challenges, at which Dani throws down her scissors and comes over.

“I…” Marcela trails off.

“Vanessa, go wait for me in the breakroom,” Dani says, pushing lightly at Vanessa’s shoulder.

She shakes Dani’s hand off harshly, her heart going a thousand miles a minute in pure anger, too overwhelming to direct it so it’s just exploding everywhere. “You ain’t my mom, you can’t tell me what to do!”

“I am your boss, and I am telling you to go wait in the breakroom, now!"

“God!” Vanessa turns on her heel with her hair flying and face burning, throws one last look over her shoulder to note with satisfaction that Marcela’s got a contemplative, guilty look on her face, and that Sonny meets Vanessa’s eye and nods at her.

“Can’t believe a ten year old’s the only one with any goddamn sense around here,” she seethes to herself while she waits in the breakroom. She’s left to stew until there’s a break between appointments, which only means she's even madder by the time Dani comes in and says, “you better have a damn good explanation for that,” shutting the door behind her.

“You heard what she said!” Vanessa says, getting to her feet to stamp one foot.

“I heard you yelling at a customer for no reason.”

“No reason?! She’s supposed to be his family and she don’t even care!”

“She does care! It’s a complicated —“

“Like hell it is! She’s just decided he’s too much effort now he’s sad and can’t play free babysitter for her, if she gave a damn she’d actually ask if he wants Sonny there instead of just assuming he don’t. Everyone’s always saying it’s complicated or they’re tryna help but nobody’s asking him if he wants their help.”

Dani holds her hands out like over to you, then. “So what do you suggest, chica, we all act like nothing's changed?”

“No—y—I don’t know!” Vanessa throws herself back down on the couch. “It just seems like everyone just wants him to be happier so’s it’ll make their lives easier, so they ain’t have to deal with him.”

“That isn't fair," Dani says. "We want him to be happier because we love him.”

Through a sudden block in her throat, and even though she’s scared of the answer, Vanessa stares at the floor and asks “and what if he don’t get better? What if he’s just sad and angry forever, will everyone still love him then?”

“Oh, Vanessa.” Dani’s voice is very gentle all of a sudden, and she sits down on the couch next to Vanessa and hugs her tightly. “Of course. Of course we will.”

"Stop huggin' me," Vanessa mutters, making a half-hearted attempt to get herself out of it, but Dani holds on and suddenly out of nowhere Vanessa’s crying, silly overtired-kid tears with stupid noises and shaky breathing, and she doesn't know why, which only makes it worse, and every time she nearly gets it under control it starts back up again, until there’s a light knock at the door.

“Dani, your five o’clock is here," Carla calls.

“¡Bueno, un momento!” Dani picks up a tissue and licks the corner of it then brings it to Vanessa’s face to scrub off her mascara-trails. “Ay, look at you. Parace un gatito ahogado, you’re in no fit state to work. Do you want to go home?”

Vanessa squirms away. “No.”

Dani makes a sad tch noise under her breath and says, “come back out when you’re ready, then, linda.”

She kisses Vanessa on the forehead before she leaves, which brings a fresh wave of tears. She hates this so much. She hates everything so fucking much.

A text alert buzzing is a welcome distraction from her own embarrassing outburst: it’s from Benny, and it just says “sorry about earlier”.

“yeah, whatever,” she texts back. It isn’t like he was wrong about her mom being a bitch, after all. But even though Vanessa works her ass off to cultivate the reputation for never giving a shit about nobody or nothing, when it works well enough that people accuse her of being heartless for some reason it really gets under her skin. She does care about Usnavi, she cares so much it makes her want to break something. It ain’t like she was saying to give up on him, it’s just she thinks he should be allowed to feel like shit if he wants, and if he wants to stay in the store forever ain't that up to him?

That said, she also really doesn’t want him to be sad and angry forever. If even someone as obnoxiously optimistic as Usnavi can break, what hope does anyone else have? The only reason Vanessa’s stuck out school herself for as long as she has, aside from the fact Dani would kill her with her bare hands if she quit, is knowing she’s gonna need it to get herself out of this place some day, take her far far away from all the shit that’s happened here that’s always clawing at her chest, the things that are always making her do stupid reactionary shit like yelling at Marcela and Dani. Maybe Benny wasn’t so wrong about the rest of it, either.

benny:
- we cool or no?

vanessa:
- yeah its fine
-i know how to get usnavi to go back to school

***

Nina

Homework isn’t as exciting as it used to be when Nina was little. Most kids might argue homework was never exciting, but back in elementary and middle school she loved it. Book reports. Write a story about what you did over the summer. Look up one of the planets and make a fact sheet about it. Her dad would always be so proud of her doing her work the second she got home, but it didn’t feel like work to learn things she wanted to learn anyway.

Now it’s all algebra and stress, and she does it all straight away because if she doesn’t then she’d probably throw up from the anxiety of it hanging over her. It takes a lot more discipline. There’s no time to stare off a fire escape and dream. Whenever her mind tries to wander, she makes a note of the thought in a separate book to go back to later, and refocuses on the question at hand, even when the question at hand is if we multiply a function f(x) by a number c, where c > 1, to get cf(x), what happens to the graph of f(x)?

The counsellor said Usnavi could probably just attend some Saturday classes to do catch-up work for last semester. Nina or Benny could easily hold the store for a few hours at the weekends and wouldn’t need to be paid for it, and Abuela knows enough about the place she could supervise without having to do any heavy lifting. She writes down Saturdays - cover shifts? in her other notebook.

Multiply a function, f(x) by a number c — What about this semester? She chews the end of her pen. She’s sure they’ll be lenient on any test-taking, so assuming he has to attend maybe two out of five sessions of each class a week to get credit, could she find someone to cover the store just for an hour or two at a time, who wouldn’t mind working for free? Mom might be able to do it. Dani might even spare Carla for a while. She writes that down in her other notebook, then adds call Benny for Usnavi’s class schedule.

Okay. Algebra. f(x) multiplied by c —

As though writing his name summoned him, Benny calls her before she even reads through the whole question.

“Hi,” she answers, a little cautiously after how they left things earlier.

“Hey, so Vanessa just text me saying she knows what to do about Usnavi and I think she’s onto something,” he says in a rush.

Nina grabs her second notebook and a pen. Algebra can wait. This is more important. “What’s the plan?”

“When are you next babysitting Sonny?”

***

Usnavi

Abuela keeps telling Usnavi he spends too much time in the store. He opens at six-thirty, he closes at ten, or sometimes eleven, or however late he can before she comes in to fret at him till he gives in and goes to get some sleep. Some nights he comes down from his apartment and naps in the stockroom on two chairs pushed together.

Everyone keeps telling him he spends too much time in here.  They don’t get it. In the store, Usnavi doesn’t have to think. He doesn’t have to talk to nobody. He doesn’t know how to talk to people no more, whatever motor used to make his mouth run endlessly never came back online, and the idea of trying to force it honestly just makes him want to lie down on the floor and sleep for fifty years. So he stays safely dissolved into an automaton extension of the store, nothing more than a pair of hands to stack shelves and a pair of feet to climb ladders. It’s easier that way. He doesn’t like it. It’s just easier, and that’s all he’s got in him right now.

Except whenever Sonny comes in: today he’s charging through the door, Nina walking in more sedately behind him, and he runs right behind the counter to fling himself into a hug, shouting Usnavi’s name like he hasn’t seen him in decades. Usnavi can’t bring himself to blank him: being Sonny’s cousin is even more automatic than working the store.

“Hey, chiquito,” he says, smiling as best he can. “You behaving yourself for Nina?”

“Yeah! Well. Mostly.”

“We were just talking about jobs,” Nina says. “Tell him what you decided, Sonny.”

“Oh!” Sonny beams at him. “I’m gonna work here!”

With a sinking heart, Usnavi listens to Sonny lay out some rapidfire nonsense plan to drop out of school and work in the bodega, apparently convinced it’ll be nothing but banter and escapades and free candy like a PG-rated Kevin Smith movie. The first moment Sonny pauses for breath, Usnavi shakes his head. “No way, you ain’t doin’ none of that. School’s important.”

Sonny makes an aggrieved noise. “But why?!”

“You need it so you can get a job.”

“If I work for you I’ll already have a job,” Sonny points out.

Usnavi rubs his temples. This is exhausting. “You need a stable job.”

“Pssh, you ain’t never gonna fire me, I’m your cousin.”

“That don’t mean the bodega’s gonna be around forever. It’s hard to keep a business goin’, Sonny. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m gonna be able to make it last the year, never mind till you’re old enough to start working.”

Sonny frowns. “Then how come you left to work here? What about if you gotta find another job?”

“I...well...that’s just how it is.”

“So then how come I can’t?”

“Because I say so.”

That does not fly with Sonny at all. No surprises there. “If you ain’t gotta go to school, I ain’t goin’ neither,” he says stubbornly.

Usnavi looks at Nina. She’s reading the back of a candy bar like its the next great American novel, clearly no intention of stepping in to back him up. He sighs. “Sonny, why don’t you go get yourself a soda? Invita la casa.”

Sonny whoops, immediately placated, and runs towards the drink fridge at the back. Usnavi takes the candy bar out of Nina’s hand.

“Oh, hi, Usnavi, what’s up?” she asks, innocently. He isn’t in the mood for it.

“You put him up to this, didn’t you? I can’t believe you of all people would encourage him to even think about giving up school for this place just to try and make a point.”

“You’re giving me too much credit. We might have talked a bit about careers. but I didn’t tell him to say any of that, it was all his idea.” Nina gives him the sad eyes. “He looks up to you, you know that, right? You’re his hero.”

“No debe. He got a better future than this place ahead of him, I ain’t having him throw that away for nothing. And I already told you I can’t go back anyway, I still can’t pay no staff.”

“We can help with that,” Nina says. “I—I know you told me to back off, but I may have talked to Mom. And Dad. And Abuela and Dani and —well, everyone, really. Most everyone’s had at least some experience working in a store, and spread out around everyone there’s ways we can make it work without you having to hire anyone or miss too much business. Dad said he can even pay a couple of the drivers who’ve done retail before if they need to sub in in an emergency.”

“I—¿qué? Nina, they can’t, I can’t just ask everyone to bend over backwards to—“

“When are you gonna get it through your head that we want to?” she says, leans over the counter and takes his hand. “Just let us help you. Please. Don’t you deserve a future too?”

It isn’t a matter of whether he deserves it or not. Deserving is a luxury Usnavi’s got no space for any more. There’s the sound of the drinks fridge closing, the click-hiss of a soda can being opened as Sonny comes back to join them at the front.

“For his sake, at least,” Nina murmurs to Usnavi. She’s holding his hand nearly hard enough to hurt like she was doing in the waiting room at the hospital and Sonny’s drinking a free soda that Usnavi can barely afford to give him and he knows that they’re both playing him, it’s clear as glass. But nobody in his family’s ever graduated before, he’s the closest any of them have ever got. Does he want a failed business and nothing left from it but debt and heartache to be the only example he’s setting? If he doesn’t do it, who else is Sonny gonna look to?

“Fine,” he says, defeated. “I’ll go back to school.”

Chapter Text

Usnavi hasn’t had It’s A School Day dread like this since fourth grade. It’d be even easier to skip now that he doesn’t have to convincingly fake sick to anyone. Who’s gonna stop him?

Well, okay, Benny and Nina knocking on his door might have a few words to say about it. And Carla’s already in the store covering the early shift, Abuela due to take over mid-morning. Everyone’s put so much work into making sure he goes back to school, there’s no backing out now.

Conversations die out in homeroom for a split second when he walks in and instantly, crushingly, he knows that whoever he was to these people before, now he’s always going to be Usnavi who disappeared for almost four months and came back an orphan. And whoever they used to be to him, teachers or friends or bullies, now they’re always just going to be sorry for your loss.

He’d like to say he tries to make the best of it, but honestly, he doesn’t try at all. He spends first period English sketching tiny crosshatch patterns across his page just to stay awake, the bright overhead lights and stuffy room making his eyelids heavy and tired. Second period Math he gives up on fighting it and puts his head down on the table as soon as class starts, staying that way till Benny nudges him sharply, a teacher’s coming warning.

Usnavi raises his head to the not at all pleasant sight of Mr Riley’s face way too up in his space as he leans in to say in a low, private voice, “everything okay, Usnavi?”

It’s the last straw. Mr “no homework from Usnavi again, what a surprise”, always said loud enough for whole the class to hear. Mr “who’s talking? Never mind, I already know who it is”. Mr “if you pass this class it’ll prove the existence of miracles.” Any other time if Usnavi hadn’t even opened his textbook by this point, Mr Riley would be be foaming at the goddamn mouth and out for blood. Now he’s just standing there, looking all sympathetic, asking if Usnavi’s okay.

“Yeah,” Usnavi says. “Actually, no, can I… can I just go outside for a minute? I need some air.”

Mr Riley gestures him out with a nod. Usnavi really does mean to just stand outside the building, gather his thoughts for a moment, but once he’s out of the door he just keeps walking, right out of the school gates and all the way back to the store.  The second he walks in something agitated he hadn’t even noticed settles down a little: he should never have left it this morning. This place is fast becoming a prison but it’s his, his responsibility and the only place he knows how to be.

In one of the aisles, he hears Abuela make that little old person oof noise of bending down to pick something up, and he rushes to help. “Here, lo tengo.”

“Ay, gracias,” she says, sounding winded, but she regroups as soon as the box is out of her hands, folds her arms and says, “and why are you here? You should be en la escuela.”

“Raincheck on that one.” Usnavi balances the box against his hip and starts putting the two-packs of paper towel rolls out on the shelf. “I tried, but it just felt too weird. Fue un error.”

“You were barely there for one morning, Usnavi.” She moves his hands out the way to rearrange the paper towels more tidy. “You need to give it more time y las cosas mejorarán.”

He’s trying to give it time. Spring’s been moving into Manhattan, in the air and in the slowly lengthening days, and Usnavi’s still stuck in midwinter. How much longer does he have to wait before something starts to change?

Abuela wags her finger too close to his face for him to pretend he didn’t see it. “Mijito, no me ignores. You will go to school again tomorrow?”

It isn’t clear if she’s using Spanish grammar or if it wasn’t really a question in the first place. Usnavi nods, because there’s no way to say no. She probably does that on purpose.

***

Benny comes round late afternoon to drop Usnavi’s schoolbag on the counter and says, “you coulda at least told me you were gonna ditch.”

Usnavi takes the bag, plays with the strap, adjusting it tighter then loosening it again. “I didn’t exactly plan on it. Sorry. Not like I had any way to tell you anyhow.”

“When are you gonna get a new phone? I know a guy who can hook you up cheap,” Benny persists. “It’s pretty hard to get in touch with you. We never hang out no more.”

“We’re hanging out right now,” Usnavi points out.

“This ain’t hanging out, this is just me bein’ your bag delivery service. Hanging out implies, you know, out. C’mon, my cab’s right here, let’s just go for a drive or something.”

“Why?”  Usnavi doesn’t mean anything by it other than he’s basically the least fun person to spend time with, but Benny looks kind of hurt.

“Because!” Benny makes an awkward gesture, waving between both of them and shrugging. “Because I mis—” and then he grimaces and determinedly bangs his hand on the counter, before grabbing Usnavi in a sort of human straitjacket hold that he uses to start physically pushing him towards the door.

“Oye, what the hell are you - I’m at work! I can’t just leave Abuela to—“

“I’m borrowing him, Abuela, is that okay?” Benny calls. Abuela just waves them off cheerfully and carries on with wiping down the fridges, no help at all.

“Benny, quit it!” Usnavi tries to wriggle away but Benny redoubles his hold so much that the toes of Usnavi’s sneakers are barely touching the floor as he’s dragged along. He doesn’t get freed until they’re next to the cab, where he glares at Benny as he straightens his shirt out, ruffled and irritated. “What, so you’re kidnapping me now?”

“If that's what I gotta do,” Benny says. “May as well get in the car, since you're already out here.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“You think I won’t just come back in and drag you out here again? I ain’t got no other plans for tonight.”

Fighting’s a lost fuckin’ cause, then. Usnavi gets in the car, slamming the door. He simmers furiously until Riverside Drive but he’s never been much good at maintaining anger for too long, and it boils itself out to resignation, to regret. He thinks Benny was going to say because I miss you when he cut himself off earlier, and Usnavi realizes all of a sudden that he misses Benny too. He misses when car rides like this were just about blasting music and singing along with the windows down, and dumb jokes and feeling like he’s going to be seventeen and laughing and moving forever. He misses feeling like a person.

***

Almost more than anything, Usnavi misses talking. It’s so much effort to even get a sentence out. Lunch breaks at school are when it’s worst. Once he’s been back a couple weeks people stop freezing up when they see him like they’re worried he’ll break if they move too fast in front of him, and instead they start trying to pull him back into how things used to be. He doesn’t want to be the ghost in the group dragging everyone down, but it all seems so far away and incomprehensible, all these conversations or good-natured tussling or throwing to him in the cipher like Usnavi has any clue how to freestyle any more.

They all look at him when he misses the cue. Usnavi never misses his cue. This is where he made his name. This is where he stopped just being Benny’s weird friend and got some respect in his own right: say whatever else you want about him, but no denying Usnavi got bars. Except he doesn’t, not any more.

“I, uh, maybe next time, I just remembered I gotta—“ he motions behind him with a thumb and ditches the circle before anyone can respond, so fast that Benny has to jog to follow after him.

“What was that?”

“It’s fine,” Usnavi says, slowing but not stopping. “It’s all good. I just, I still have so much work from last semester I gotta do, that’s all. You go hang out.”

“But—“

“Benny, please,” he says. Benny looks conflicted but finally nods and jogs back to the group. And on the search for some breathing space, somewhere he doesn’t have to be anyone or say anything, Usnavi, for the first time in his high school life, goes to the library.

Okay, library is a real charitable thing to call it. A dingy little room with four battered bookshelves and two graffiti-carved desks and, unsurprisingly, Nina Rosario, who glances up then double-takes when she sees who it is. “Oh! Usnavi!”

“Hey,” he says. “Not interrupting, am I?”

“Of course not.” Nina moves her bag off the desk so there’s room for him to sit down opposite her. He takes the seat gladly: he’d come here to be alone, but actually, it turns out he’s relieved to see her, maybe the only person in the world who’ll admit straight out that she doesn’t know how to talk to him any more, and who still refuses to let that get in the way of being his friend.

They’re more similar than people might think, him and Nina. Sometimes it’s easier to be around her even than it is with Benny. She’s always understood that little motor that sends him into overdrive; she has her own, even if it works in a different way. Nina would never say to just give it time because she’s as impatient as he is, it’s just that Nina’s better at making things happen about it, instead of floundering around like Usnavi does.

“Can I tell you something?” he asks. “Un secreto?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t remember how to talk.”

She closes her notebook as if to say well, now you have my attention, and looks at him, leaning her cheek against one hand.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he says, in a rush before it all blocks up again. “Talking’s supposed to be what I do and now I can’t hardly speak and I can’t rap or nothing, I can't even sing. It’s like the words just ain’t there no more.” He looks at her, pure desperation. “Nina, I don’t know what to say.”

“Oh, wow,” she murmurs, and gives a whistly that’s a lot to unpack exhale, looking thoughtful for a second, then gestures for him to pass her backpack over. He does, and watches her nervously while she searches through it until she goes “ah!” and pulls out a very slim, dog-eared book that she hands to him.

Usnavi takes it, frowning. “¿Qué es esto?”

“Poetry. Neruda. I think you’d like him.”

There’s a hard little knot of disappointment in his chest. Her solution is giving him a book recommendation? Like, yeah, he said they’re similar, but this is probably the one point they differ the most. “You know I ain’t much of a reader. I ain’t really smart enough for poetry.”

“The good thing about poetry is it’s usually very short, so you don't need much of an attention span,” she says. “I’m not asking you to write me an essay on it. You can just read it and if it doesn’t work it doesn’t work, but if you can’t find the words you’re looking for maybe you need some inspiration. Borrow someone else’s words for a while.”

Point made, she reopens her notebook. Usnavi idly fans himself with the book, then turns to the first page. Fuck it, it ain’t like he’s got any better ideas.

***

He gets through the Neruda haphazardly over the next week, in quiet moments at the store or in sleepless moments at four AM. Reading Usnavi-style, skipping ahead by whole stanzas, suddenly stopping halfway through a sentence to turn back ten pages. To say he enjoys it would be a strong word, but for the first time since he was a little kid he actually finishes a book, and finds himself asking her for more when he’s done.

It turns into habit, lunch in the library with Nina, her working on her advance classes while he works on catching up, and she brings him more poems to read. She never asks him to talk about them, which is a relief because he wouldn’t know how to discuss it. That kinda thing is difficult enough even when there’s a teacher and SparkNotes to explain it, and the books Nina lends him  are nothing like the old-fashioned stuff they cover in English class. Gibran and Mistral and Whitman, Angelou, Lorde.

Truth be told, he doesn’t understand the first thing most of them are trying to say, but it’s different from how he doesn’t understand algebra or geography. Lines that he can't articulate the meaning of stick in his head and his heart and pull at his fingertips, a little stirring memory of how loud his hands used to be, and he starts to think that maybe understanding isn’t even the point. Ambiguously lyrical, pulling at things that can’t be made coherent, things that by their nature can only ever be abstractly translated feelings. Things that he’s been feeling this whole time and mistaken for numbness, other peoples words filling up the spaces in his lungs and clawing at him and he still can’t get them out, still doesn’t know what he needs to say even though now he knows there's definitely something there. He isn’t numb, he’s overloaded. He’s drowning.

Benny takes him out in the cab a lot, going nowhere for hours at a time, and always picks the music. Lupe, The Roots, Black Star. Usnavi half-listens and gazes out at boarded up windows that seem to have been waiting on new glass for as long as he’s been alive. The empty shells of deserted storefronts that he remembers as once selling cheap clothes or knockoff DVDs or whatever, before they all got slowly priced out of town over the years. The neighborhood’s as loud and bustling as ever but it seems like all he sees are the hollow buildings, and Kweli says I’m askin’ if y’all feel me and the crowd left me stranded. 

Usnavi closes his eyes. The next few breaths are shaky and loud. When the song finishes, Benny puts it on again. That’s usually Usnavi’s thing, listening to one song on repeat: Benny’s a serial track-skipper, never even lets them finish half the time, so either he instinctively knows that Usnavi needs to hear it again or it’s just hitting him the same way. Common says felt the spirit in the wind, knew my friend was gone for good. It’s getting dark outside, and they keep driving, and Usnavi is fucking drowning.

They’re halfway through the fourth replay, Mos Def says sigh before we die like the last train leaving and bursting out of him like a gunshot Usnavi blurts “I’m sorry.”

Benny gives him a confused sideways look, turning the music down. “For what?”

Shit, Usnavi doesn’t even know, the answer to that still something that’s trapped way too far down to articulate. He tries, he really fuckin’ does, he feels like every milliliter of blood has been replaced by this something that’s trying to bubble up into his mouth, but all that he can think of, all that comes out is a frantic “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—"

***

It takes a while, after they pull into a parking lot, for Usnavi to calm down and dam the sudden torrent of unstoppable apologies. He can tell Benny’s not at all happy when Usnavi insists that he can just drop him back at his place and leave him there. He probably thinks Usnavi’s totally lost his shit and needs round-the-clock supervision, but right now what Usnavi really needs is a cigarette or five and he can’t do that with Benny around.

Something hit him during the drive that peeled all his skin off and left him raw and bleeding, the sting of really, truly feeling that his own hometown is a stranger to him now. How long has everything been closing down? How long have people been leaving for? Was he just too young to notice it before, or did it start with his parents and the rest of the barrio is draining away in their absence, just as unable to survive without them as he is? His head is too full of words now, poems and street signs and store signs and that one song on repeat, and a fight a few blocks away, a party a few buildings down. Usnavi knows what dying feels like, going limp and cold against his hand, knows the sound of it: this is all just the last gasps of a city that’s dying around him, while he smokes his lungs out and waits for the distant sirens to turn into flatlines.

He reaches for another cigarette and the pack comes up empty. Should be a sign to go to bed, maybe, but instead he goes to the store for a refill. It’s as he’s reaching up for a packet of Marlboros that for some reason, even though it’s been there for months and become part of the background noise, he notices the backpack full of spray cans he’d confiscated from that little punk kid, still shoved in the back corner behind the counter.

Usnavi doesn’t know what comes over him, one of those impulse-driven moments that’s totally beyond his control: he ditches the unopened cigarettes on the side and grabs the bag instead, walks out into the night with his heart racing and his hood pulled down low over his forehead, walks like he’s always known this is where he’s supposed to be going.

Across and down the street, three buildings off from the salon. Four floors up on this same building is Vanessa’s place, but Usnavi’s got his eye fixed on on the ground floor, what used to be used to be a makeup and beauty products store before the Romeros shut their doors and moved back to Chile. Now it’s nothing, it’s a particle board that the spray barely makes a mark on at first, the paint around the nozzle dried out in the months of disuse and caused a blockage, but after that false start it comes out thick and black and messy, and Usnavi scrawls four words across the boards with his hand moving like a fever dream.

He’s breathing so hard he’s almost hyperventilating when it’s done, caught off guard by himself, a little frightened by how quickly that happened. Dios mio, what is he doing? Nothing that his mamá or pai would be proud of, that’s for sure, nothing they taught him. Usnavi doesn’t do petty, risky shit like vandalism, this isn’t him. It isn’t even his words.

But as he startles at the sound of voices down the street and darts off to hide back in his own building, he dares give one last look back at his work before he disappears into the shadows. escúchela, la ciudad respirando, and just for this minute it really does: the racing adrenaline in Usnavi’s veins a temporary life support forcing one more breath at a time, the borrowed lyrics a temporary claim laid on a neighborhood that used to be his home.

Chapter Text

Usnavi’s dragging his feet through the quiet Sunday morning shift when Marcela comes in. She’s wearing her work clothes, and Sonny is at her side, his curly hair still combed down neatly from when they must’ve been at church. He’s practically rebounding off the walls with excitement. Marcela manages to get as far as “hi, Usn-“ before Sonny butts in and says, “guess what, Usnavi, I’ma come to work with you today!”

“¿Verdad?” Usnavi says. “That mean I can take the day off?

“No, dummy,” Sonny says. “Mom’s gotta go to work and she fiiinally said you can watch me! Well, I ain’t need watching, but she says it’s cool for me to come hang out here today.”

“But only if Usnavi’s got enough time,” Marcela adds, then to Usnavi she says, hesitantly, “I can take him to Abuela if you’re too busy here, but I thought I’d see if you wanted to have him first?”

“He ain’t too busy!” Sonny says. “I told you a million times, we can get twice as much done with both of us.”

“He don’t got any homework, does he?” Usnavi checks with Marcela, who shakes her head. Usnavi nods and points at Sonny. “You sure you wanna commit to working? We don’t take no slackers in the De la Vega bodega.”

Sonny nods eagerly.

“Aite, then. You see the shelf nearest the front with all the cans on it? I gotta change that out, ain’t nobody gonna be coming in looking for canned soup and shit en abril, we gotta hook ‘em with the soda pop and cervezas right at the door. Think you can get started on boxing all that up for me so’s I can move things around?"

“Yeah!”

“There’s empty crates in the stockroom you can use.” He tosses Sonny the keys. “Don’t lose those, they’re my only copy. And don’t go lifting the crates once they’re full, either, they’ll be heavy and I ain’t gonna send you back to your mama with no old man back problems. You leave that part to me. ¿Lo tienes todo?”

“Yessir!” Sonny makes a beeline for the backroom then quickly doubles back on himself. “We’ll talk paycheck later, sí?”

“No. Best get gone before I change my mind and fire you.”

Sonny grins at him and bounces away to the back room. Marcela shakes her head and says, “imagine having that much energy about work.”

“Tell me about it.” Usnavi starts making her a coffee, turning so he can frown to himself. It isn’t like Marcela’s banned them from seeing each other - she lets Usnavi drop by for dinner, and always greets him kindly enough when they cross paths at Abuela’s - but she hasn’t left Sonny with Usnavi in charge since it happened.

“¿Qué tal la escuela?”

“It’s okay. Just trying not to fail out, at this point.”

“You’ll do fine.”

“Hmm.” Usnavi hands over her coffee and cuts through the bullshit with, “so how come I’m suddenly back in the good books? Abuela and Nina too busy to babysit?”

Marcela takes the plastic lid off her coffee and looks down into it, blowing across the top to cool it. “You weren’t in the bad books.”

“You ain’t brought him here in months,” Usnavi points out, mildly, like he hasn’t felt that absence as much as all the others. “At least not to leave him here with me.”

“No fue nada personal. I wouldn’t expect you to look after a kid when you needed some space to...” she trails off.

“I got nothing but space. Sonny’s the only family I got left here.”

“Yes, Vanessa yelled as much at me in the salon a few weeks ago.”

“Vanessa García?” Usnavi says blankly. “Why would she be yelling at you about me?”

“Who knows,” Marcela says.  She purses her lips. “Sonny really misses his tío and tía. He tries not to show it, but I can tell. And... he misses you too.”

She won’t go any deeper into it, Usnavi knows. It’d bring up way too much other stuff that neither of them wants to deal with, so this is the closest she’ll get to admitting that she was wrong. And if it means he gets to spend time with Sonny then Usnavi doesn’t really care how they get from point A to point B anyway. He waves off her pulling out her wallet to pay for the coffee, says “on the house,” confirming the tentative truce for a fight they never had, that they’ll never have out loud for Sonny’s sake.

There’s a crashing noise from the front of the store and then the sound of rolling metal, as if perhaps someone has tried to pick up a crate full of cans that’s too heavy for him to carry and dropped it everywhere. Usnavi and Marcela both shout “Sonny!”

“Nothing!” he shouts back. “Todo va bien, don’t come down here for a minute!”

“You know it’s not too late to send him to Abuela,” Marcela says to Usnavi, with a small apologetic smile.

“I might have to rethink my hiring process,” Usnavi agrees. And true, he’s still the one who does all the work – the kid’s ten, Usnavi’s mostly just trying to keep him entertained here – and he spends more of the afternoon cleaning up Sonny’s well-meaning mess than he does being helped. But somehow the day passes by a lot quicker and easier than when he works the store alone.

***

Usnavi’s gotten used to lunchtime library sessions with Nina, though he can’t spend them just idling around with poetry books any more. Things are getting to crunch time now: he passed his catch-up semester, by some miracle, but he still has to get through this last one. Nina, sitting beside him, has started developing a faint and permanent look of panic in her eyes as the year progresses and her own exams approach, like there’s any chance she won’t ace everything. There isn’t much talk until Nina says, “we missed you at dinner yesterday.”

“Dinner?” Usnavi repeats, confused.

“Dad’s birthday? Mom says she came round to the store twice to remind you.”

“¡Mierda! I totally forgot, I was so busy. I’m sorry. Did he have a good time?”

“Does Dad ever have a good time?” she says, still sketching out formulas on her chemistry homework as she talks. “Mom got him a new phone. He spent three hours cursing it out trying to figure out how it works and kept saying he was gonna throw it on the subway tracks first chance he got.”

“Oh, so he liked it then.”

“Ha. No, but he accepted it. Which means I got something for you!” Nina reaches into her bag and pulls out Kevin’s ancient cellphone, holding it out to him. “This way we can get in touch with you without having to go to the store a million times to get you. And it means you don’t have to keep coming to use the dispatch line when you need to do business or whatever.”

Usnavi holds his hands up. “No necesito un phone.”

“Yes, you do,” she insists. “What if there’s an emergency?” She pushes his hand till his palm's facing flat and she can put the phone in it. “Dad says you can have it as long as you’re careful not to lose this one.”

“I didn’t lose the last one,” he says absent-mindedly, spinning the phone between his thumb and fingers. Seems clear to Usnavi that having a phone in an emergency hasn’t been much help to him before since he’s too fucking dumb to think of using it.

Nina gives him a confused look and says, “that’s what you told me?”

It takes a second to realize what she’s talking about but then he flushes with the heated panic of being unexpectedly caught in a lie. “Aaah, uh. Yeah, I did, yeah.” He tucks the phone in his shirt pocket, hoping that’ll be enough to keep her placated. “Tienes razón, I should take this. Say gracias to your mom for me.”

He picks up his pen and tries to go back to work, bending close to the desk to hide his face, but Nina’s having none of it. She slides his notebook out from under his pen. “You’re hiding something,” she accuses.

“Fine,” he says, exasperated. “I didn’t exactly lose my last phone. Some dude stole it off me.”

“What? What dude?”

“I dunno, man, he didn’t leave me a forwarding address. I was out for a walk and he asked for my phone and my wallet, so I gave it him, that’s all. No big.”

“No big?!” Nina whisper-screeches. She gives a quick incredulous glance round the room like she’s looking for someone else to come back her up, and after that comes up empty she leans towards him and says, “you got mugged!”

“I mean, barely. Ain’t like I had much worth stealing. And he didn’t really seem dangerous, I think he just spotted someone walking round on their own at night and saw a chance.”

“Oh, well, that’s okay then, isn’t it?!” she says shrilly. “We’ll give him a citizen of the year award. Dios mío, Usnavi, what if he’d had a gun?”

“He didn’t have a gun.”

“That is not the point! Why didn’t you tell me? Does Abuela know? Does Benny?”

Usnavi says, “didn’t seem worth mentioning, if I’m looking at things big picture,” and she makes a disapproving Nina face about it. His heart sinks. “Nina, no, you ain’t really gonna tell on me? Everyone’s done enough worrying about me as is.”

“Yeah, and don’t you think things like this are exactly why we should be worrying?”

“Please? It was months ago, there’s no point even bringing it up now.”

She looks conflicted, so he adds, “you know it’ll just upset Abuela” and she relents.

“I won’t tell,” she says, “but only if you promise you don’t go out on your own at night any more. It isn’t safe.”

“Of course,” he says. “Swear it.”

***

Usnavi isn’t usually someone to go back on his word, but more nights than not, after shutting down the store and spending a few hours at Abuela’s, he goes back to his place just long enough to change into his darkest clothes, shoulders the backpack full of cans, and then leaves everything behind for a few hours.

He hadn’t really intended to do this often enough to develop habits in it, but he’s in a pattern of warming up somewhere close until he settles on a soundtrack then walking further out, just keeps going till he finds somewhere that feels right, finds some words that need writing. So maybe he’s breaking a promise to Nina. So maybe he’s risking getting mugged, or beat up, or arrested. So maybe he’s disappointing everyone who expects better from him. So what? Better than what he’d be doing otherwise.

Hood up, head down, he walks a couple blocks away then heads down the first gap between buildings that looks inviting. There’s the faint sound of music a few floors up and voices conversing in a room with an open window, but he doesn’t worry about that. Just means people are less likely to come investigate if he makes any noise.

He doesn’t consider that this means he’s also less likely to hear what anyone else might be up to around him until he’s kneeling to unzip his backpack and too late catches ringing sound of feet on metal fire escape, the retractable ladder squeaking and clattering down to the ground, blocking him down his end of the closed alley. He tries his best to blend into the shadows as a figure jumps off the third rung, her long hair swishing in an unexpectedly familiar way that startles him out of his corner.

“Vanessa?” he says, stepping forward and reaching to tap her shoulder. She jumps at his voice and instantly spins round, knocking away his outstretched hand with one forearm and her other fist held up, the thin streetlight from outside the alley glinting off something she’s clutching tightly in her hand. Usnavi reflects that, of all the dangerous things that might happen to him when he’s out at night, even Nina wouldn’t have predicted ‘gored to death by Vanessa García armed with just her apartment key.’

“Vanessa!” he repeats, clumsily pulling his hood down. “¡Sólo soy yo!”

“Usnavi?!” she says. “What the fuck are you doing here, are you crazy?”

She’s breathing a little heavily and she’s still got her fist raised so he tentatively pushes it down and asks, “what are you doing here?”

Vanessa steps away from him, tucks her hair behind her ears and tugs her skirt down straight,  regaining her cool. “Who’s asking?”

“Your mom might be.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Well, Nina definitely wouldn’t approve. Trust me on that one.”

“You gonna rat me out to her?”

“Nah. You want me to walk you home?”

“I’m good,” she says, although she doesn’t make a move to leave, still giving him a confused and suspicious stare.

“You wanna come hang out on my roof?” he suggests, mouth making the offer before his brain even knows the thought is there. “Lock’s been busted for weeks, we can get up there without the super.”

She tips her head looking bewildered, then says, “yeah, ¿por qué no?”

“Really?” he says. He hadn’t been expecting her to take him up on it. “Well. Cool. Let’s go.”

They don’t talk on the way back. Vanessa goes straight up the stairs after Usnavi lets them in, while he detours into the bodega through the back door to drop his bag behind the counter and grab two sodas from the fridge. He catches up with her halfway up the stairs and they make their way to the roof, where they sit directly in a circle of cast light from the higher rooftop the building over, catching their breath from the long climb.

“So you gonna tell me why you were creepin’ around in the dark?” Vanessa asks, in a way that suggests she absolutely expects him to.

“No,” Usnavi says. He opens the bottles against the walled edge of the roof, hitting down hard with the heel of his hand to uncap them, spilling tamarind Sol over his cuff on the second one. “Are you?”

Vanessa sighs and takes her drink from him. “I had plans. They didn’t work out.”

“Oh. Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” she says, and rests her chin on her knees.

“Were you at that party?”

“Does it matter?” she snaps.

“I guess not.” He flips the metal top of his soda bottle in his fingers like a coin toss, misses his catch on it and lets it skitter somewhere out of sight. “Did you really yell at Marcela about me?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a bitch,” Vanessa says. “The kid just wanted to hang out with you, I ain’t see what’s so bad about that.”

“She let me look after him the other day.”

“Still a bitch, if you ask me.”

Usnavi wouldn’t feel right expressing an opinion on that, so they end up stewing in uncomfortable silence. He’s the worst person to be alone with when he can’t fill the gaps with rambling or some distracting task, but he has nothing to say so right now the only defensive barrier between him and Vanessa are the two sodas they’re both intently staring at.

“Why’d you ask me to come here?” Vanessa asks, finally.

Good question. Impulse, mostly: what he’d felt right in that moment was that they were just a couple of teenagers standing in a dark street, Usnavi with a backpack full of cans and Vanessa with her keys held up self-defensively like a switchblade. Usnavi’s empty apartment at home, Vanessa’s mom at hers. He’d remembered how she hugged him at the funeral, and figured if anyone would get even the tiniest part of his mood, it’d probably be the girl climbing down a stranger’s fire escape in the middle of the night.

“I dunno,” he says. “Seemed better than what either of us woulda been doing otherwise.”

Vanessa nods. The second silence is a little friendlier than the last, until she says, “one day I’ll be able to do this stuff for real, you know?”

“Hm?”

“Like...no more shitty apartment parties full of shitty people. Real parties, where everyone dresses nice and talks about interesting stuff. Or –“ she gestures around, “doing this, but in a rooftop bar somewhere instead of sitting on the floor, and instead of soda I’ll be drinking champagne. Proper champagne, not the sparkly wine crap you sell in the store. No offense.”

Usnavi nods. “Like the kind they bring to you in a big bucket full of ice and some guy with a silver tray pours it out for you.”

“That’s the stuff,” she says, and then gets this sort of set, scowling look. “I’ll stay out till the sun comes up and then get drove home in a limo, and it’ll be taking me to my own place downtown, not Mom’s.”

This is probably more personal than anything Vanessa’s said to him in the last ten years combined. Not wanting to ruin it by adding anything, Usnavi just raises his soda in an I respect that gesture. She clinks hers against it and takes a sip, then lies down on her back and says, “so where do you wanna be? In like, however many years when I’m out doin’ cool stuff in limos?”

Years? Usnavi doesn’t think in years any more, he can barely manage envisioning past the next week, and all of it blurs into one big dark lump anyway. “Not much point thinking about it, is there? This is where I am.”

“You gotta at least want a vacation or something.”

Usnavi lightly clicks his teeth against the rim of the bottle. “We were supposed to go to Playa Rincón this summer,” he murmurs.

Vanessa props herself back up on her elbows, wincing at the rough gravel of the rooftop. “You could still go some other time, when you got more money. Hell, move there. Gotta be better than this, right?”

“I got a business here, and an apartment. I’m locked in for life.”

“You don’t have to be,” she says, as if it’s so easy, then pokes him hard in the arm when he gives a disbelieving exhale. “Don’t laugh at me,” she says heatedly, misinterpreting the noise. “En serio, I ain’t stuck here and neither are you. And when you’re off living on a beach somewhere, I’ma get a bottle of champagne sent to you and I’ll make the waiter say ‘this is from Vanessa García and she says I fuckin’ told you so’.”

“That’s sweet,” he says dryly. “Does that mean I gotta buy you a bottle if you get your place downtown first?”

“Only seems fair, don’t it? she says. “And don’t cheap out on it, I want that bottle ice-cold and expensive or nothing, De la Vega.”

She holds her hand out, and though it’s a bet he already knows he’s going to lose, Usnavi shakes on it. It's good to think that maybe at least one of them's got something better ahead of them, even if it isn't him.

***

This evening’s car ride with Benny only takes them as far as the unoccupied parking lot of a high school up in Inwood, where Benny parks horizontal across three spaces and says, “I’ma teach you to drive.”

“What? No. Bad idea,” Usnavi says. “El peor.”

“How is it?”

“Uno, I live in Manhattan so it’s pointless,” Usnavi lists, “dos, I’m clumsy as shit and can’t tell my left from right. Tres, you need this car for work and if I crash it you’re screwed.”

“We’re in an empty parking lot, you’d have to be trying to wreck to fuck it up here. And we’re just gonna do some basics for now. C’mon, switch places.”

Taking Benny’s place in the driver’s seat, Usnavi nervously stretches his toes out to gently feel out the pedals, which he can barely reach. “I’m gonna have to adjust your seat.”

“Yeah, I figured. Okay, you don’t gotta worry about the gears right now because the car’ll do most of it for you and I’ll do the rest. You just turn the key and get us rolling.”

Usnavi does. The engine makes a disgruntled noise and sputters out. He looks at Benny like already off to a great start.

Benny just makes an encouraging try again gesture. “Sometimes it takes a couple of – yeah, and now just carefully push the gas pedal. No, the other– holy shit I said carefully!”

Slamming both feet down at once trying to stop the sudden lurch forward, Usnavi yells, “sorry!” either to Benny or to the protesting car. After countless false starts and a lot of cajoling from Benny, he manages to get moving at an uneven, agonizingly slow pace. The car crawls jerkily around the parking lot in a wide circle, while Benny tries to give instructions and Usnavi mostly just tries not to fuck up and wonders why Benny’s chosen to drive as his whole-ass career.

“You can speed up, you know,” Benny says.

Usnavi tries, and ends up accidentally braking instead. He makes a frustrated noise. “Fuck it! Benny, I think this is a lost cause.”

“It’s all good, just start up again, nice and steady– there, and a little more speed now. See, you’re doin’ fine! I have total faith in you!”

Reluctantly, Usnavi presses his foot down harder on the gas and says, “fine, but when I ruin your car don’t expect me to be able to pay for it.”

Benny says, “you’re not gonna ruin my—“ at which point there’s a sudden explosive crunch-pop noise. Usnavi flings his hands up off the wheel and lifts both of his feet off the pedals, instinctively conceding all responsibility over whatever happens next. Cursing loudly, Benny leans over him, almost simultaneously jamming it into park and turning the engine off, then scrambles out of the car. As Usnavi follows him to inspect the damage, Benny hollers “are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?!”, pointing under the passenger side wheel where a can of Coke is crunched up under the passenger side wheel, an explosion of soda darkening the ground beside it where the pressure burst the top.

“That’s all it was, a can?” Usnavi says.

“Yeah, but it sounded like a goddamn bomb went off!”

“Huh,” Usnavi says, looking at Benny leaning weakly against the car like he’s recovering from a near-death experience and at the soda trail still fizzing out on the floor, and it’s such a stupid situation that he straight up starts cackling with laughter.

Benny gives him an eyebrows-raised shocked look, and then grins and cracks up too, gently thunking his forehead against the roof of the car. “Dude.”

“So much for having faith in me,” Usnavi says. “You deadass thought I blew something up.”

“So did you,” Benny says. “You know that letting Jesus take the wheel is like the opposite of what you should do in an emergency?” He mimics Usnavi throwing his hands up. “I mean, seriously.”

“Told you I wasn’t cut out for driving.”

“Nah, you didn’t do so bad.” Benny goes round to the  driver’s side and says, “aite, it’s gettin’ late and you definitely ain’t ready to drive in the dark yet. I’ll drop you back at your place.”

In the car, Benny puts his seat back in place and mumbles, “how fuckin’ short are your legs? Jeez.” Usnavi flips him off, and turns the CD player on, nods his head along as they drive. Benny gives him a few inscrutable looks on the short ride home, but Usnavi thinks nothing of it until he’s back home and opening the door to his apartment.

His breath stops for a second.

He says, “oh.”

This is why Benny had looked at him like he’d lost his mind: in focusing so hard on driving and the ridiculousness of the can situation, Usnavi had, for approximately half an hour, forgotten about everything. No, something worse than forgetting, worse than thinking for a deluded moment his parents were still here - for just a short time, he hadn’t been thinking about Mamá and Pai at all.

“Oh,” he says again, helpless, horrified. “Oh, no. No.”

He’s standing just inside the door of his apartment. Right beside the door there’s the hooks for coats where his pai’s Kangol hat and winter jacket and his mamá’s red coat are still hanging all these months later. Beyond that, interspersed along the wall from the little jutting-out nook  of the entrance all across the living room there are family photos. His parents wedding day and Usnavi’s christening and all of three of them with baby Sonny, with Abuela. All of his life with his parents who he loved with every part of himself, all those photograph frozen smiles and frozen eyes watching him.

Usnavi shrinks under their claustrophobic gaze, then impulsively he grabs the closest frame and unhooks it from its nail, takes every picture down and sets them down on the couch. He’s careful not to break anything, but still he’s moving as fast as he can just to try and make space, trying to find somewhere he can breathe again. Just for one moment today he felt like himself again and he has no idea how it happened or why. The guilt of it makes him want to die on the spot. His parents are dead and earlier he was laughing and he feels like the worst son in the world, the worst person, and the apartment feels like it’s collapsing around him.

“Lo siento,” he says to them, repeats it with every picture he takes down, “lo siento, lo siento” and then “Mama, Pai, this isn’t fair!” and it hurts, physically, a tightness in his throat that the words have to fight past. He tosses the last picture with the others piled on the couch without even looking at what’s in the photo, grabs his backpack and black hoodie, and he doesn’t come back until sunrise.

***

Stumbling back home paint-stained and overtired to the point of wired, Usnavi is greeted by all the picture frames now neatly stacked into a pile on the side table and Abuela dozing in the armchair in the corner, the scene softly illuminated by the light of the lamp. The thick wool throw from over the back of the couch that she’s covered herself with has mostly fallen to the ground in front of her, one corner still clinging to her knees.

“Aw, shit,” he murmurs, because he knows he’s going to be in for it now, and because Abuela’s in her seventies and it won’t do her no good sleeping upright in a chair.

She wakes up as he tucks the blanket back around her and murmurs, “mijito, ¿eres tú?”

“Sh, ‘tá bien, go back to sleep,” he whispers,  but she pulls herself out of the chair with a groan and then glares at him.

“Go back to sleep?” she says. “This is what you say to me, after the night I have had, you come in and you say ‘Abuela, go back to sleep’?!”

Usnavi cringes, preparing for the lecture he’s about to get. Instead, she bursts into tears.

“Abuela!” he says, startled. “No, no llores, please don’t cry!

He tries to hug her but she flaps her hands at him, shooing him away, except then she grabs his wrist and shakes his arm gently but insistently. “Toda la noche, I waited for you! Toda la noche! And then when I ask if anyone else has seen you Nina tells me that you go out en las calles in the night and someone has taken your phone once before, so what do you think I’m thinking when I sit here and have no llamada telefónica from you?”

Usnavi stops in his tracks trying to console her, betrayed. “Nina told you? I told her not to say anything, I knew it’d only upset you –“

“Of course it would upset me!” Abuela says loudly, and he thinks she might actually be yelling at him, and it might be the first time that’s ever happened. “Of course it upsets me! She did the right thing to tell me. What is so secreto that you can’t even talk to your abuela about it, what kind of trouble have you been getting yourself into? ¿Dónde has estado tonight?”

“I was just walking, I wasn’t doing nothing.”

Abuela, still holding his wrist, tugs his hand closer towards the light. The spraypaint residue on his index finger and spattered down the side of his hand is pitch black and incriminating against his skin.

“That’s just Sharpie,” he says, but as always his voice betrays the lie.

“What is in that mochila?” Abuela asks, softly. “Tell me the truth.”

He shakes his head, he can’t answer her, so she opens the backpack herself, giving him an infinitely disappointed look as she pulls out a spray can. “Oh, Usnavi,” she says.

“It ain’t like I’m hurting nobody,” Usnavi says, defeated but still defiant. “It’s a bunch of old abandoned buildings that nobody gives a damn about, they’ll just paint over it anyway.”

“No me preocupa about the buildings,” she says, and drops the backpack to take his hands. “You’re hurting yourself, doing this kind of thing. They wouldn’t want this for you.”

This time Usnavi pulls away from the touch, nauseous with sudden rage. “Well, who cares what they would have wanted? If they cared so much about me they woulda still been here, but they ain’t, so why should I care what they want? I hate them, they left me and I hate them!”

He tries to turn and leave but Abuela grabs him in a hug and he can only resist for a second before he collapses against her, his weight bringing them both to their knees on ground. He chokes on tears and Abuela holds him, stroking his hair, kissing his forehead, crying right along with him.

“Ssh, ssh,” she says. “No digas eso. You don’t hate them. “

“I do!” he sobs. “I hate them! I asked them to come back home and they didn’t and it ain’t fair, they got to stay with each other and I got nothing. I don’t wanna be on my own either, I didn’t want them to go, why wasn’t I  worth staying for?”

“No, mijito, you know they would have stayed if they had a choice.”

“But they did have a choice,” he says, and ignores Abuela protesting. “They did. They chose to take me to the doctor when I got sick and pay for my medication and spend all the money on that so they didn’t have none left to get no help for themselves, they chose to keep working when they was sick so they could afford to look after me.”

If only he really did hate them. It would be so much easier if he hated them, if he blamed them, but he’d be lying to himself if he tried to pretend he did.

“They did that for me, and I couldn’t even get them to a hospital on time, I couldn’t even call an ambulance when they were dying right in front of me.” He’s shaking now, more than he ever has before, his teeth chattering like it’s December and he’s barefoot running through snow. “Abuela, it’s all my fault. If it wasn’t for me, they wouldn’t be dead.”

Chapter Text

Claudia

Claudia’s distant childhood is a memory painted with brushstrokes that get broader with each year that she moves further away from it, and so it always comes as a surprise to her, how vividly things can rush back given the right nudge. The faint image of their apartment on 173^rd unclouding to show clearly the double mattress on the floor; the green and blue bottles holding half melted candles atop the makeshift table of an upturned apple crate at which she and Mami would sit crosslegged to eat their dinner; the tarnished faux-golden frame on the windowsill that held their only photograph of the two of them with a father that Claudia cannot remember, with a dark water stain bleeding down from the top and onto their heads like rain as a relic of Claudia’s own clumsy distraction one day when she knocked it into the bowl of soap water while cleaning the floor beneath the window.

Perhaps it is something in the way that Usnavi will not look at her as he speaks that recalls it, some 60 years later, how she couldn’t bear to look at Mami’s face as she held out the damaged photograph and explained what happened. Perhaps just the familiarity of her own guilt and shame. Here is something so precious and irreplaceable, to be treated with absolute care, which Claudia has failed to protect.

“It’s my fault they’re dead,” he repeats, in a hollow voice.

“No. It was un terrible enfermedad, Usnavi,” she says.  “You didn’t choose it to happen. Nobody blames you for it at all.”

“They should,” he says. “I should have stopped it. Mamá and Pai deserved better than this,” and Claudia hears, they deserved better than me.

These are the moments when it is so hard to be Abuela Claudia, when she wants to be a Claudia without responsibilities and duties, so that she can swear, or shake Usnavi by the shoulders and shout at him to see some sense, or to give into how helpless she feels and how hopeless things can seem and simply cry until someone else finds a way to make things better for all of them lost here and mourning.

But she is Abuela Claudia and these are exactly the moments that her children need her to be that more than anything, so she just makes a show of settling comfortably on the floor like she could stay here all day, though her back is already protesting. In a light and lilting voice like telling a bedtime story - because that is what this used to be, when Usnavi was much younger– she says, “when me and Mami came over en el barco, the weather was unthinkable. El viento, la lluvia, I never felt anything like it before! I thought it would blow us right out of the water and all the way back to Cuba and it would be a good thing if it did because who would ever want to live in such a cold, ugly place? But the day your mamá and pai came, the weather made Nueva York beautiful for them.”

Usnavi tips his head down and scrunches one shoulder all the way up to one ear, like he’s trying to block out the sound.

“They were so excited! Your tío had found a place for them to set up una tienda, con un apartamento right above it to live in,” she continues.  “I was feeding my birds when they arrived, and your mamá saw me and do you know what she said? No ‘hello’, no ‘buenos días’, no. She says, ‘the baby is kicking!’” Claudia pinches at Usnavi’s cheek. “That’s you!”

“Abuela,” he says disapprovingly, though she notes that he stays focused on her, waiting for the rest of the story.

“They were so excited about that too, because it had never happened before, not until that morning when they they read it on the ship going by and just like that, kick! The baby wakes up and says, ‘soy aquí, Mamá, time to dance!’ So of course they knew it must have been your name.”

This was always Usnavi’s favorite part when he was little, where he’d sing his own name in glee or wiggle around in a little dance or climb right out of bed to demonstrate how much better his kicks have gotten. Now he shakes his head. “It’s just a name,” he says. “It ain’t even mean nothing, just a word they read wrong off a boat.”

“It meant enough that your mamá told me it before I even knew her name,” Claudia says. “The very first thing I ever learned about your family was that your name is Usnavi and that you were the most important thing in the world to your parents. They would not have let anyone say they deserved a better son. They knew they already had the best."

"It wasn't enough, he whispers. "I could have done more."

“And so could I. So could Camila, and Kevin, and Daniela. Sí, and your parents. We were all there too and we all could have done more if we knew, but we didn’t know, we hoped it would get better with time. Even at our age we made mistakes. How could we blame you for doing the same, when you are still only a child?”

“I ain’t a child,” he says, because it is the easiest thing in the world for children to mistake heartache for maturity. Pain ages you, it’s true, pain makes you grow, but only when it has already begun to heal. There is nothing to be learned from a wound that still bleeds and even for Claudia the loss of Mateo and Rosa is almost too raw to bear, when in her mind they will always be that couple standing in front of their new store in the warm sun, so happy to start their new life.

Ah, even at her age, she makes mistakes. When it first happened, Claudia wasn’t the only person who offered Usnavi a place to stay; the Rosarios, Daniela, Benny’s mother, Mateo’s brother, Usnavi had declined them all. It had troubled her heart to know that he was living alone but she let it lie in the hopes he would come to her when he was ready. It troubles her heart now that if Nina had not told them what she did last night that maybe he never would have come to her about this at all.

“Come and stay with me for a while, mijito,” she says, expecting another no. To her surprise, he simply nods, and then his face crumples, that same little boy who always looked to her to help when he’d skinned a knee or fought with a friend, and like always she is there to hold him the second he reaches his arms out to her.

***

Nina

The ringing of a phone wakes Nina up as urgently as if she was waiting for it, muffled though it is through the wall that adjoins her parents’ bedroom with her own. She strains to catch her dad’s sleepy grumbling, her mom saying “Claudia, hola, is everything –“ and the heated flash of her pulse quickening in her ears drowns the rest out, that same erratic tempo that it beat last night when Abuela called to ask if they’d seen Usnavi because he didn’t show up for dinner and hasn’t been home all evening.

Her parents had speculated about where he might be after the call, mildly concerned but not worried. Nina, sinking low in her seat and hiding behind her book, tried to think the same and to ignore the little voice in her head saying, if he is in trouble, you’re the only one who’ll know why. The voice lurked and muttered and fretted for two hours, until she was so tense that even her bones hurt from it, and so when Abuela came over at about half eleven while they were all getting ready for bed to say that she still hadn’t heard from him, Nina had burst out of her bedroom with  one side of her hair up in a braid and the other still loose, because she had to explain it all before the pressure killed her. It all spilled out: the late night walks, the mugging, the way he didn’t even care that it could have so easily been something so much worse.

For once she wouldn’t have minded being told that she’s just overthinking, just overreacting, but instead everyone exploded with questions at her all at once, demanding to know whens and wheres and what else did he tell her, what else does she know, what on earth was she thinking not telling them straight away?

“I promised him I wouldn’t,” she said. It had sounded pathetic even to her.

“So much good that will do!” her mom said. “Who knows what he’s getting up to in the state he’s in. Madre, I swear, if that boy has gotten himself tangled up in a gang of some kind –“

“It’s so easy for kids to get hold of drugs these days,” her dad put in. “Dealers on every corner—“

“Usnavi isn’t on drugs!” Nina said, shrilly. “Abuela, tell them he isn’t!”

Abuela, who had been sitting quietly with a hand pressed to her brow, stood abruptly. “I should be there when he gets back,” she said, and left without saying goodbye.

“Let’s hope he comes back soon,” Dad had said in a darkly ominous way. “The last thing we need is another knock on the door at 5AM.”

“Kevin, you shouldn’t say things like that,” Mom admonished, leaning to tap her knuckles on the wooden end table by the couch.

“I’m going to bed,” Nina had said, and then she hid under the sheets texting Usnavi every ten minutes with no response until she finally drifted off. Now it’s morning, and Usnavi still hasn’t replied, and Abuela is calling. She pulls the sheets back over her head and firmly tells her anxiety that it isn’t going to be anything bad and Abuela is probably just telling them that they can stop panicking and everything’s fine.

Her anxiety answers, she’s his emergency contact now, and who do you think she’d call first if she needed a ride to the hospital?

There’s a soft knock on the door and her mom calls “Nina, are you awake?”

“No,” she says.

The door opens. “Abuela just rang. Usnavi came home about an hour ago.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’ll be staying at her place for a few weeks,” Mom says, which isn’t a no, something horrific happened to him but also isn’t exactly a yes.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” she says into her pillow.

Her mom pats at approximately the top of her head and says, “I’ll make us all some breakfast.”

Once her mom has gone, Nina throws the sheet off and breathes out slowly, her disheveled bangs fluttering in front of her face. What did I tell you? she asks her anxiety. Usnavi’s okay, and now Abuela can look after him, and Mom isn’t mad at me. It all worked out.

Her anxiety replies, okay, but he still hasn’t texted you back.

***

“Usnavi isn’t answering my texts,” she says to Vanessa later, when they’re lounging on a bench in Bennett Park.

“No duh, it’s Usnavi,” Vanessa says. She drains her Pepsi, shaking the can to check she got it all.

“I think he hates me.”

“Why would he?”

Nina explains the whole situation while Vanessa listens, frowning and clicking the ring pull on her soda can back and forth. “So you snitched on him?” she says, when Nina is finished.

“I was hoping for more of a ‘you did the right thing, Nina, you’re such a supportive and caring friend.’”

“And I was hoping my best friend wasn’t a narc but here we are.”

“Well, what would you have done?” Nina says crossly.

“Usnavi’s a dumbass, but he ain’t stupid. He can take care of himself.” Vanessa throws her can at the garbage and misses. “I’m sure he don’t hate you.”

“Yeah, he’s just giving me the silent treatment for totally unrelated and normal reasons.”

“So go corner him in person if you got this much of a stick up your ass about it.”

“Maybe I will,” Nina says. She retrieves the can and disposes of it properly, since it’s obvious Vanessa has no plans to do it any time soon. “Will you come with me?”

“If you want, but d’you think letting him know you told even more people about something you said you’d keep secret is gonna make the conversation go smoother?”

“I guess you’re right,” Nina admits, and thats how she ends up letting herself into Abuela’s apartment to face Usnavi alone that afternoon. No Abuela to be seen, but Usnavi’s dark hair is just visible over the back of the sofa. Abuela’s ancient CRT television set is playing video with the volume too quiet to hear, and the sound of Nina closing the door behind her feels deafening.

Usnavi turns to the noise. “Oh,” he says. “Hey, Nina.”

See, I told you he hates you, her anxiety says. She doesn’t even dignify that with acknowledgment. “Where’s Abuela?”

“Runnin’ errands?” he guesses, and yawns. There are pillow creases marked on his cheek and his eyes are dark shadowed and heavy lidded. He shoves the orange blanket piled on the other side of the sofa to the floor to make room for Nina to sit. “You wanna watch Newsies with me?”

“Not really,” she says, sitting down anyway. “Are you mad at me?”

“¿Qué? No.”

“You know I told on you to Mom and Dad and Abuela, right?”

“Sí, I saw the texts.” He rubs his eyes. “I ain’t mad. I broke my half of the deal first. Wasn’t ever planning on keeping it, to be honest.”

“Oh,” Nina says, taken aback by how flippantly he admits it. “Why didn’t you answer, if you saw my messages?”

“I was asleep all day. Long night.”

“Doing what? Mom and Dad have got in their heads you’ve started scouring the streets for coke at 3AM.”

He looks faintly amused. “They think I got the dollar to pick up a coke habit just like that? I’m payin’ off ambulance bills for the next decade, I’m too broke to even get drug debt. I was just...out. Needed to clear my head.”

“I spoke to Benny and he says that you were totally fine when you guys were out driving together.”

“Yeah, I was fine,” he says. “So fine I even forgot that my parents are dead.”

It sounds like a weird, tasteless joke until she sees the bitter, furious look on his face and realizes he means it. “Is that why you were upset? I mean, you were hanging out with Benny, I don't think about my parents when I'm hanging out with Vanessa. You don’t have to think about them every second of every day.”

“If I don’t, who will?” he answers. "You got to walk out of that hospital with both your folks still alive. It's okay if you don’t think of them 'cause they’re still there, they don’t just disappear when you’re not looking at them. But all that’s left of mine is –“ he makes an airy gesture round his head. “Just thoughts. When I forget about them then they’re gone for real. Like they never even existed. So yeah, I do gotta think about them every second because I ain’t gonna let that happen.”

“I’m sorry but that is such bullshit,” Nina says, and then claps a hand over her mouth in horror.

“Excuse me?”

Oh, she should apologize. She really, really should apologize. But how dare he? How dare he? Like she hasn’t been worrying constantly about him for months, her and everyone else, while he throws aside every bit of help they try to send his way? Like he didn’t lie to right her face making promises he knew he meant to break while she spent all day agonizing about betraying his trust for his own safety? Like just because Mateo and Rosa weren't her parents she didn’t lose anything at all when they died?

“If you don’t think about them who will?” she repeats. “Are you really saying that to me? I would think about them! I stayed in that hospital all night with you. All night. I would never forget about them. I know I haven’t lost what you did but we grew up together, they were my godparents, they were my family. I loved them!” She clenches her fists. “And I think you’re lying to me again. I don’t think this is about Rosa and Mateo at all.”

If he wasn’t mad at her before she’s convinced he should be now, but all Usnavi does is wave a hand and say in a tired voice, “bueno, enlighten me, Nina, what the hell else do you think it’s about?”

“It’s about you,” she says. “I don't think you actually want to feel better, you want to force yourself to feel bad for the rest of your life, you won’t even try to fix things. It’s about you, and I won’t let you sit here and tell me that you’re doing this to yourself for them because they would be heartbroken if they saw, and if you can’t see that then you're the one who's already forgotten them.” That might be crossing a line. But she thinks about what Rosa and Mateo would say, and she refuses to take any of it back. She isn’t wrong. “I just wish you’d at least try to be happy.”

Usnavi stares at the silently moving figures on the TV screen and says, “what if I try and it don’t work?”

It’s the same thing her anxiety screams in her head every time she does basically anything. She knows the answer to this one. “But what if it does?” she says.

***

Usnavi

If he had the energy for it Usnavi could almost kid himself that things are normal and his parents are just at the store or his apartment, that this is just a normal visit but stretched out over a week, then two. There are things that haven’t changed his whole life. Doing his homework at Abuela's paintchipped kitchen table like he always has. Like always, he sleeps on the sagging couch under a flowered orange blanket made of a material that somehow manages to be satin-slippery and scratchy both at once and smells like the lavender cleaning products that she keeps in the same cupboard as the spare sheets.

Just like always, Abuela keeps an eye on him with her fondly gentle way of refusing to let him get away with things, though the things themselves have changed. She used to stop him in his tracks after calling him for dinner and silently put a hand in his pocket, pulling out a handful of the red and green strawberry-printed wrappers from the bowl of hard candy she keeps by the television, evidence that he’d covertly had a piece or five of while she was cooking. Now she’s watching him pick at his half-eaten food and pointedly adding an extra serving to his plate, with the strong implication that he is expected to eat all of it. Instead of fruitlessly trying to persuade her to let him go play with Benny late on a schoolnight, he’s trying to think of excuses to sneak off and smoke in the evening, but has to settle for hasty half-cigarettes by the dumpster out back of the bodega during quiet moments on shift. Instead of her coming into the living room at 2am to tell him to stop watching movies, she just stands by the couch and says “you’re up late again, Usnavito.”

“So are you,” he points out.

“Old ladies need less sleep than teenage boys, especially teenage boys who have been at escuela and work all day.” She gives him an expectant look for him to explain himself. He used to try and wait her out, but both of them know by now that she can and will stand there forever, and that Usnavi hasn’t got the patience, so he always loses.

“I get these... dreams,” he mutters uncomfortably. “Nightmares, I guess. It’s nothin’.”

“Ya veo.” She sits in her chair with a little groan. “Oof. Do you remember what I used to tell you about las pesadillas when you were little?”

“You’d say I shouldn’t worry because ET ain't real and even if he was you wouldn’t let him in your apartment ‘cause he got bad manners,” he says, and finds himself smiling a little too when Abuela laughs at the memory. “It ain’t exactly monsters under the bed no more, Abuela. It’s...messed up stuff, really messed up. You’ll think I’m crazy if I tell you.”

“I do not think you are crazy, mijito.” She smiles at him, sadly. “I think you have been through something very bad, and you’ve been very brave, but you do not have to be so brave in front of me. And no, I was not talking about the little rude alien boy. I would tell you that if you talk about your bad dreams it takes them out of your head and they will leave you alone.”

Doesn’t he wish that was true? That he could tell Abuela that he dreams of someone closing a casket on him and lowering it into the ground as he begs and hammers against the sealed lid and insists that no, he’s still alive, can’t they hear him, why aren’t they listening; of standing in the snow through an eternal funeral procession where right beside his parents he buries first Sonny and then Benny and then Abuela and everyone else he's ever loved; of watching Mamá and Pai die in front of him again but nobody comes to take the bodies away and so he simply waits and waits in an empty hospital room with the corpses on either side rapidly deteriorating into something rotten and unrecognizable and wrong. Don’t he wish that just vocalizing all the fucked up tangles in his subconscious would smooth it all out?

Or maybe he doesn’t. It might fuckin’ work, that's what's fucked up. All of these simple, practical things over the last week, two weeks of staying with her have helped more than he thinks they have any right to. He isn’t hungry, he wants his parents back, but it still turned out that eating real food makes him feel better than living off ramen and bodega snacks. He isn’t sad about cigarettes, he’s sad because he’s grieving, but still not chainsmoking for hours on end feels better than nicotine overload. They’re still gone, but having someone chattering to him about their day and asking about his own feels better than the permanent disconnect surrounded him like cotton wool dulling all sound and sensation.

And it would probably feel better for him to be able to sleep at night without dreams about dying dying dying, everyone dying all the time, but he’s even more scared about what happens when those dreams stop. Nina had him right on target. Getting better also means saying goodbye. He isn’t ready for that.

“I wish you would talk to me like you used to, mijo,” Abuela says.

They could have lived to a hundred years and he still wouldn’t be ready.

“I think I wanna stay at my place tomorrow night,” he says, and Abuela looks crestfallen.

“Usnavi....”

“I ain’t gonna do nothin’ dumb,” he reassures her. “There’s just something I gotta take care of and after that, we can talk, I promise,” and this time he means it.

**

He wonders if he should’ve told Abuela what he's doing after all, asked her to come with him to make sure he saw it through. He’d made it all through the night, through the workday, all the way up the stairs to his apartment striding past his own bedroom door not even stopping to take his shoes off and then his resolve flickers out like a short circuit the second his fingers meet the handle of a door that he hasn’t opened since December because as long as it stays closed, there’s the tiniest shred of uncertainty in him that maybe, maybe it might all have just been another nightmare. As long he walks away right now there will always be an undisturbed universe in which his parents could be just behind this door, alive and sleeping peacefully, forever. He could walk away right now.

He lets go of the handle. Takes a step back.

He wonders if they ever had one last moment of clarity amidst the fever. If they tried to call out to him one last time despite their failing lungs and swollen throats. If there was any part of them left by the time he came in that could feel him there and knew he answered their call even though it was too quiet for him to hear it.

if he had slept in that morning, for just another hour or two, they might have been dead before he found them.

He opens the door.

Inside his parents’ bedroom he finds a time capsule standing in a snapshot of last year, the only thing marking the five intervening months two full glasses of water never drank and now evaporated, leaving concentric circles of sediment marking the passage of time like the rings inside a tree. The air is still and stale, oppressive behind windows that were closed to try and shut out a weather that spring has already chased away. Even the bedsheets are exactly the way they were left, halfway dragged off the bed and onto the floor from where the paramedics had moved first Pai and then Mamá onto stretchers and out of their home forever.

Usnavi walks towards them in a trance, and then startled at a dark shape in the corner of his eye – he turns expecting to see Kevin, coming to put an arm round his shoulder and say that they’ll follow the ambulance in the cab, but it’s only his own reflection in the mirror door of their closet.

He stares at it for a while not seeing himself in the moment, eighteen and exhausted, but instead seeing fifteen year old Usnavi, getting ready for his first ever date. Her name was Liana and he’d taken her to the arcade and started off well by buying her a slushie and then ruined it by spending about forty minutes too long on the claw machine. Before he’d left to pick her up he had stood in front of the mirror nervously trying to make the button-down he borrowed from Pai look cooler than it was, while Pai told him that all he needs to worry about is being a gentleman and not eating anything that he might spill on himself. He looks in his reflection and sees sixteen year old Usnavi, Mamá doing up his bowtie before Nina’s quince and saying how it’s a shame boys don't get to have a quince too because she would have loved to throw him one, he looks so handsome when he dresses up nicely, he takes so much after his father.

The shirt he wore on the date is – yeah, still hanging in the closet, next to Mamá’s best dress that she wore for every anniversary with Pai. Usnavi touches everything one by one, tries to remember the last time he saw Pai in that ugly blazer from the 80s, Mamá in that velvet blouse that his fingers cringe away from: he’d always refuse to hug her when she wore it, because the texture set his teeth on edge. Their church clothes still neat and clean from Sundays that tasted like the orange juiceboxes Mamá always brought for him to drink during the service and sounded like a hymn and smelled of Pai’s hair grease as he carried Usnavi home on his shoulders, the Tres Flores brilliantine that still sits on the vanity in its familiar green-lidded tub.

He opens the lid to sniff it and the memory only gets clearer, so vivid that he feels it like a hunger. All the things that never made it into his dreams about them, where their physical place in the world had narrowed down just to bodies that were buried, stopped hearts and cold hands and closed eyes. Usnavi methodically works his way around the things more than just cosmetics caught in all these dust gathering bottles and jars. Pai's cologne which he sprays in the air and he’s fifteen being taught to shave his nonexistant facial hair. Mamá’s perfume and he’s just a preschooler, sitting on her lap while she gets ready for a dinner date with Pai and laughing at him as she obligingly lets him try on the lipstick that she was applying herself, the powder fragrance of the lipstick itself.

They were alive here once. The room is a tiny museum of interrupted life, waiting for them to come back and pick up where they left off. The tangle of dark hair still caught in the bristles of a brush. Pai’s glasses on the bedside table, still with a smudged fingerprint on one lens, sitting on top of a newspaper he never finished reading. A half burned candle, a crumpled tissue, and-

“Mamá,” Usnavi whimpers as his hand closes around a piece of blue plastic. Her emergency inhaler. Even when she was having an attack she’d wait it out as long as possible in the hopes of not needing to use it, trying to draw out the time between having to get refills, but she took it everywhere. She would sit and hold it while she wheezed, like its presence alone could be enough to ease her breathing.

They really aren’t ever coming home. He sits on the bed and lets himself finally feel what that actually means, finally understands that whether he keeps this room an untouched shrine or throws every last thing away, whether he seals himself in and freezes in time with it or moves on, moves away, whether its his fault or not, it won’t change that they aren’t coming back for him, for any of the things they left behind, and Usnavi with an inhaler clutched tightly in one hand curls up on his parents bed and just cries. He isn’t angry. He isn’t numb. He’s curled up in the negative space of an indentation still in the mattress left by someone who once lived and breathed and slept here, sobbing without end into a pillow that at one time smelled like apple shampoo and laundry detergent and Tres Flores and vivaporu, and now just smells like the dust of an accumulated five months of grief that was locked in this room, waiting patiently for him to come and meet it.

Chapter Text

He calls it “their room," but it was Usnavi’s too once, when he was a baby. The corner where the big stack of mismatched bags and storage boxes now sit is where his crib used to be, and he was using that much longer than he probably should’ve if the stories about his parents waking up to him cheerfully dangling off the railing are anything to go by. But they didn't have anywhere else to put him so that’s where he slept, right up until he pitched himself headfirst over the side into the fortunately full laundry hamper in the middle of the night, and his parents quickly upgraded him to sleep in their bed with them.

By the time his brain developed enough to be able to recall his own bedtimes firsthand, he’d lost whatever toddler fearlessness led him to climb out into the dark without a plan for what happens next. One of Usnavi’s very earliest memories is being around three years old, waking up from a bad dream at what seemed at the time like the deepest depths of night but was really probably only around 8pm. His parents talking in the living room inaudible under the sound of the TV, and the feeling of tears trapped at the back of his throat. He wants to go find them, but he’s stuck, sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet hanging over. During the daytime it was a short and easy jump, but at night, with all the lights out, who’s to say it hasn’t turned into a 20 foot abyss that he doesn’t dare drop into? 

It’s too old of a memory to last than a few seconds, so he doesn’t know how it ended. Probably he yelled for them, and they came in to find him, because they always did. When he was a little older he figured out he could scale up and down the handles of the drawers on the bedside cabinets like a ladder and had been so proud of himself for being able to solve the problem all on his own. The second down on Pai’s side of the bed still sits askew from one too many overenthusiastic ascents, and sticks when you try to pull it out.

The summer before Usnavi started school, Pai had declared him “¡tan grande ahora!” and then spent an afternoon hammering together a bed frame out of the wood from old delivery pallets, while Mama relocated all the boxes and cleaning supplies out of the big closet near the front door to their bedroom and the bodega storeroom. They bought a futon mattress to put on top of the frame — cheap and plasticky-smelling, but brand new, he can remember how excited they all were about that — and that’s been Usnavi’s room ever since. It took him about a year to actually start sleeping in it properly. He’d always end up back in his parents’ room, brave enough by then to walk through the dark to look for them.

“He’d never stay where you left him for any amount of time,” Mama used to say when she’d tell these childhood stories. Pai would add, “And as soon as he’s awake, he’s making sure we’re awake too. Y todo el barrio.”

And here he's ended up back in his parents room. With his face hidden in the pillow, he can’t promise himself that when he does sit up it will be daylight or that the floor will be where he left it. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to deal with the fact that everything else will be where they left it, and he’ll eventually have to do something about it, when he'd hoped that it was a one and done, rip all the grief off like a band-aid. A lie that won't hold when he opens his eyes.

If he could just get up and open the blinds, that's something, isn't it? That proves that it was catharsis, not just another night of another breakdown and nothing to show for any of it. If he gets up and lets the daylight in, he can go back to Abuela's and tell her that he's at least figured something out himself, he might not be on solid ground but he made himself a little ladder and he knows how to find the rungs with his own two feet. But no luck, still stuck, he’s lying in bed over an hour later when he hears the inevitable sound of a key in the lock.

“Estoy aquí, Abuela,” he calls before she can check his room and get worried, and musters all his willpower to roll over and look awake. There’s the pause in her footsteps as she realizes where she is, and the sound of her coming towards the open bedroom door.

“Good morning, Usnavi,” she says, as though this is just the same as any other morning that she’s come in to wake him up, from her couch or his, over the past half a year. It’s bitterly disappointing, after the storm of the night before. Things aren't supposed to be the same. She puts her hand out to pull him up sitting, and notices that he’s still holding Mamá’s inhaler. “Ah,” she says, so sadly. “Oh, Usnavito.”

Don’t do that, he wants to say. It isn’t that kind of situation. Doesn’t she know he’s in here because he’s trying?

“I’m gonna have to go through their stuff and sort it, ¿verdad?” he says. He means, see, I’m facing up to it, I’m making grown-up decisions, I’m self-aware, and, misunderstanding his point, she says, “paciencia y fe, Usnavi, we do not need to rush into anything.”

“But one day.”

“Sí, one day. Cuando estés listo.” She kisses his forehead. “And we will all help you, claro.”

He doesn’t want to need their help. He doesn’t want to be so helpless. In this room he is a child sitting on the cliff edge of the bed with its unreachable floor and watching Abuela, who, after a melancholy look around, stands up and open the blinds as if it’s the easiest thing in the world.

It was supposed to be him doing that. As always, too late, too slow. So slow he might as well not be moving at all.

***

Over breakfast, Abuela asks what he wants to do today, which she often does even though his only two answers are “I should go to school” or “I should open the store.”

“I didn’t ask what you should do,” is her response. “Mira, el tiempo es tan agradable, and it is the weekend! Let me look after la tienda. You must take a day off.”

Days off are for people with dollars in the bank. And wanting things is for people who aren’t Usnavi. But nevertheless he’s being shoved unceremoniously into the streets of Manhattan - well, okay, gently prodded out with a hug and a kiss and lunch packed up for later — because it would've been no use telling Abuela that.

There are options, endless options in the city that never stops. On warm days like today the old folks are out on the sidewalk, in their folding chairs at folding tables set up in the shade for dominoes or card games or chess. The laundry lines strung between fire escapes are heavy with clothes drying in the sun. Vanessa's standing outside the salon, eating a piragua and smirking at something on her phone. A thousand times before in his life he’d so easily slip into any of these situations, join a game of dominoes, go into the salon and chat to the clients. He could see what any of the guys from school are up to. They're probably doing something. They don't invite him out any more because they know he'll say no. 

Except Benny. Benny still asks every time. Or just decides for him and brings his cab over for an amicable abduction. Everyone’s very good at deciding what Usnavi should do, except for Usnavi himself.

It’s so beyond frustrating that Abuela got to the blinds before him. He was going to do it himself. He could have, if he'd had more time. Just like he could do any one of the things that everyone else in the city does to pass a Sunday that he's walking right past. It's that fucking gap between knowing the options and being able to do something about it, gone the way of so many well-intentioned checklists that never get past the first item.

Maybe that’s why when he passes the entrance to the subway station he makes a sudden sharp turn for the stairs and finds himself on the A without really thinking about it. Headed for Queens, with every intention of proving the point he missed the chance to prove last night. So trade out one resting place for another, on his own, before someone drags him there because they think it'd be good for him and takes away the chance for it to be his idea.

As with so many of Usnavi's own-brand ideas, this seems like a good one for the first half an hour, and then promptly turns into regret. If there was any burial space left in Manhattan it would’ve been a lot easier. Impulsive actions are way harder to maintain when you gotta take two trains and a bus to get to them. By the time he’s standing at the cemetery gates, he’s all but lost momentum.

When they were kids, Vanessa once told him that you gotta hold your breath walking past a cemetery so you don’t breathe in any ghosts, and he did that for about six years after hearing it. He doesn’t believe in ghosts now, but the whole setup still creeps him out, to be honest. It just feels like such a final place.

No shit. It’s a fuckin’ cemetery.  What he means is, he can't help but feel like he'd walk in and never be able to walk out, like his real body is still standing over their freshly dug grave waiting for him to come back to it and then…he doesn’t know. Those buried alive nightmares. Or he’ll turn into one of the sad and grey-eyed angel statues that stand growing old and weathered watching over the plot below them. Maybe that’s how people get them. He definitely don’t know anyone who could pay for one. His parents share one flat marker, just their names, over the single shared grave. They would’ve wanted it that way anyway, but fact of the matter is, it’s just cheaper to put two people in one spot. He can’t even afford to die here himself, at this point, unless they wanna sneak him in when nobody's looking.

Usnavi sits on the front steps of the currently closed main office to light a cigarette, exhaling spectral shapes of smoke into the air. It floats away on the light breeze and dissipates against the green grass and grey stones beyond.

They’d tried to upsell him on maintenance too, one of a thousand little things you never think about until you have to. Grass cutting and drainage and all. Camila, who’d been dealing with all the logistics, had said that they’d maintain it themselves for now. Usnavi was still too much in shock at the time to process it either way, so much so that he’d forgotten about that conversation entirely. Until now. You’d think in a city so huge, you could be pretty confidently anonymous outside your own borough. But he’s halfway through his second cigarette when he suddenly hears his own name, in a scandalized and questioning tone. 

He looks up. Standing just inside the black metal gates that lead from the main road into the cemetery, and holding a small bunch of flowers, is Camila Rosario.

***

Usnavi sits very still. He's hoping that she won’t recognize him so long as he doesn’t look directly at her. It definitely isn’t working.

“Usnavi,” Camila repeats, “what is that?”

“I think they call them ‘cigarettes’,” he says, with ill-advised sass. She snatches it out of his hand and throws it to the ground, grinding it out under her heel.

“That's mine,” he protests, because he might technically get them from the bodega without paying but he's the one buying them in, so it’s still his money.

“I can’t believe you,” she says. She sounds so exactly like Nina. “I cannot believe you would do this! Of all the things! Smoking!”

Much as he’d put up a fight at the time, Usnavi had understood in his heart why Abuela had been so upset about the graffiti thing, and why Nina had been upset about the nighttime walks and his phone being stolen. This, though? You’d think Camila had caught him with a crackpipe from the look on her face, like she doesn’t know whether to cry or call in the drug squad. It’s a bit much for legal-ass tobacco he could purchase from any store, even one he doesn’t own, not that she seems to appreciate him pointing that out to her.

“Legal! Do you think I care about legal? You surely don’t need me to remind you that you’re less than six months out recovering from severe pneumonia, and you decide to pick up smoking? You must know the kind of consequences that getting sick again could— oh no you do not, don't you even think about—Usnavi De La Vega!”

He's taken out another cigarette and put it to his lips. His hands are shaking as he goes to light it, whether out of anger or just out of sheer terror from directly defying Camila Rosario when she’s in this kind of mood, but he does it anyway. “I’m not your fucking child, Camila,” he says. “I know the consequences. I got a whole goddamn lifetime of consequences ahead of me. I don’t gotta justify how I spend it to you.”

“So I’m supposed to walk on by and let you speed up your death?” she snaps, shaking the flowers for emphasis. Their brightly-colored heads bob and jerk on their stems.

“Why not? Gonna happen to everyone sooner or later.”

Unexpectedly, that takes the wind right out of her sails. Her arms drop heavily by her side, and she gestures with the flowers at the step beside him, a rare moment of asking for permission. In acquiescence, Usnavi switches which hand he’s smoking with so that it's not blowing all over her when she sits, but doesn’t put it out.

“It’s things like that,” she says quietly, “that make us worry so much about you. Do you even care about putting yourself in danger? Is that what you’re trying to do?”

“It’s one cigarette, Camila, it ain’t like I’m threatening to throw myself on the subway tracks.”

“Yes, because I’m sure it’s only this one cigarette,” she says, disparagingly. “I’d better not see you anywhere near the subway tracks.”

“Only so’s I can get the train home. It was just a bad joke.”

“A very bad one,” she mutters, but seems content enough with the answer. It feels so weird to keep smoking while she’s watching him - he can't shake the feeling of, "she's going to tell my mamá" - but he committed to the point and he’s unwilling to concede on it this early. Camila wrinkles her nose as he exhales, and waves her hands in front of her face even though it’s blowing downwind of her.

“You’re the one who decided to sit here,” he says. “I like the smell.”

“It’s terrible.” She laughs. “But in a way, it’s very nostalgic. Kevin used to smoke. Well, everyone did it, back then. It would drive me crazy that he’d do it inside the house. Did you know that actually stopped because of your mamá?”

He didn’t, but it makes sense. “‘Cause she was pregnant when you met her?”

“En parte. He’d never smoke directly around her, and we used to air the place out and clean the ashtrays before we had guests, but there was one time… she was already under the weather, and they had to leave because just being in the apartment sent her into an awful asthma attack. Kevin never said much about it, but I know he’s always wondered if…” she trails off.

“If what?”

“Pues, it was only a few weeks later that Rosa gave birth to you. Muy temprano. The doctors said it wasn’t related to the asthma attack, but still, it scared Kevin enough that he stopped smoking inside the house, or anywhere near her. And as soon as I told him we were having Nina, he threw his last packet out right then and there and never picked one up again. Or so he tells me.” She looks at Usnavi, contemplatively. “I don’t know how much you know about when you were born.”

“I knew I was early. And that I had to stay in the NICU a while. Not much else.” He’d always been satisfied enough with the child-friendly version, with his baby stories, but kids pick up on things. The tantalizing lure of parental voices clearly trying to keep conversations quiet from the children. He’d overhear little pieces, and usually promptly decide to stop overhearing because it was all so scary and serious, like the pictures of the visibly unwell little incubator baby that he always found it so hard to believe was actually him. Not like the fun stories about his name or his first words. The kinds of things adults talk about, that didn't need to concern him. “How much do you know about it?”

“A little more,” she says.

“Tell me?”

Camila answers slowly, clearly picking her words carefully. “Rosa had to go in because she was bleeding a lot. It would have been around...33, 34 weeks, I think. Doctors usually try and keep a pregnancy going as close to term as possible but after they did a scan they decided to induce labour early, to give both of you the best chance.” Camila pauses, and delicately adds, “Tengo entiendo it, ah, wasn’t as high as you might hope.”

“…Oh.”

“I remember when they finally got back from the hospital with you. Oh, you were just the cutest little thing, I wanted to take you home with me and keep you! But it would always take so much to persuade them to let anyone even hold you, and would they ever listen when I told them to get some sleep or slow things down?” She pulls one of the flowers out from the bunch, a delicate yellow-petalled thing, rolling the stem between her fingers gently. “Your mamá and pai, they both took the birth very hard. I think Rosa felt like it was something she had done wrong. And that if she could do everything by herself, it would…make up for it, in a way. And Mateo felt like he was the only one who could take any weight off her shoulders.”

“I didn’t…I didn’t know that.” He isn’t sure that he wanted to know that, now that he does. But he did ask. Grown-up answers to grown-up questions. And it does make him understand some things, or at least understand more why he doesn't understand them.

“Rosa never liked to talk about it. I don't know that she ever wanted you to know. But,” she sighs. “Rosa isn’t here. And I am. I don’t know how to help you, Usnavi, don’t you see that? Smoking or getting your phone stolen or staying out all night might not seem like much to you, but to us, to me, it does. You’re not my child. And I’m not Rosa. I know they’d want us to look after you, to make things better for you. I just don’t know how they’d want me to do it.”

“Then don’t.” He throws his cigarette end to the ground, folds his arms around himself. It isn’t cold, but he keeps expecting to feel snow against his skin. “Let me make my own decisions. Even if they suck.”

Camila mulls on it for a long time before giving a helpless shake of her head. “Es tu vida para vivir, Usnavi. If you want to run your store or finish school, bueno, if you want to smoke sixty a day and ruin your lungs, it would be a stupid thing to do and I won’t stop being angry about it, but I can’t stop you from doing it. Just…” she falters, apparently unsure what he should just do. “I’m going to go in and see them now. Do you want to come with me?”

“I should get back to the store,” he says.

***

Abuela isn’t happy when he gets back and insists on taking over for the rest of the afternoon, but he manages to persuade her to let him behind the counter, where he sits in a sunbeam watching dust motes like fine sand dancing in the air, and entertains just for a minute that rooftop conversation with Vanessa about Playa Rincon. No chance of seeing it this summer, or the next few.

It’s kinda comforting. There's another place out there that Usnavi considers home where he hasn't, as of yet, had to grieve, and he’ll keep it that way a little longer.

As if he'd have the choice anyway right now, he’s bleeding more money than he’s got. He only managed to pay half his apartment rent last month, and there's only so much leeway that his landlord's gonna give him on that, so for all Abuela's got notions about days off, it’s straight back to work, any dreams of beaches set aside for the things that have to be done. Inventory and cleaning and customer service. What cemetery? When he dies it'll be under a stack of boxes and paper bags.

Something thunks on the counter next to him. A tub of baby formula and a packet of diapers, for Eli who lives two floors up from the Rosarios. “Ayo, for the kid.”

“Hey,” says Usnavi, ringing him up. He couldn’t tell you when Eli and Brenna’s baby was born, even though he can clearly remember them being so excited talking to Mamá about the pregnancy. Last year, before everything changed. He doesn’t even know the kid’s name. “That’s $23.42.”

“Cool.” Eli indicates with his card and Usnavi punches in the total and passes over the machine for him to key in the pin. It beeps unhappily.

“Card declined,” Usnavi says.

“Aw, fuck, you sure? Maybe my pin was wrong…” He tries again, to the same angry beep.

“Nothin’ doing, sorry. You got cash?”

“I…yeah, lemme look.” Eli pulls a ten out of his wallet before rummaging every pocket in his jeans and hoodie, coming out with a couple of crumpled dollar bills and disparate  coins that he counts three times with increasing desperation. Then, very quietly, he moves the formula off to one side, pushing the diapers towards Usnavi without making eye contact. “Just that, then,” he mutters.

Usnavi nods and takes the ten, then hands both the formula and the diapers back over the counter. 

“What? No, I— I only got this much, bro, I can’t afford the formula.”

“Take both,” Usnavi says. “I’m gonna just send you out of here without no food for your goddamn baby? What the hell do you think I am?”

Eli shakes his head and puts a hand over his mouth, with a slow inhale through his nose. He one time saw Eli calmly stroll into the store to ask if they sell bandages and then casually show them the giant shard of glass embedded in his palm without so much as a blink, but he looks near tears now. Usnavi used to be good at talking to people who were having a bad day. He turns around and busies himself making coffee and lets Eli compose himself on his own time.

“You got no idea how much that helps, man,” Eli says, thickly. “We wasn’t even planning to put Quinn on formula but then Brenna had to go back on the meds so she can’t feed her herself, and I thought it’s fine ‘cause I was getting good hours but they cut everyone’s shifts last week. And even when I am working it just means Brenna’s gotta do everything else by herself. And the kiddo just don't sleep.”

Usnavi pauses mid-pour to give him a concerned frown. “What about Brenna’s mom? I thought she comes over to yours all the time, right, don't that help?"

“Not so much since February, it's the chemo, it’s hitting hard. Doing what it's meant to, at least, but she ain’t in no way to be doing much of nothin’ right now, never mind getting the train over from Astoria every day to look after a baby.”

“That fucking sucks.”

“It’s like, sure, if it was just any single one of the things, but it’s gotta be all of it at once, y’know?”

“Yeah, I do.”

Eli grimaces. “I just bet you do. Hey, you don’t gotta hear my crap, I know you got problems of your own.”

“Believe it or not, it’s kinda refreshing to have someone else’s problems for a minute.” Usnavi fixes the lids on the coffee. “Here. That’s for Brenna, two sugars soy milk. Tell her I said hi and I hope it gets easier soon.”

“You really don’t—“

“I already made it, it’ll just go to waste if you don’t take it.” He scribbles down a couple of numbers on the back of some receipt paper.  “Look, if it makes you feel better I’ll put it all on a tab. No deadline. Take your girl a coffee, she deserves it.”

“She does,” Eli says softly, and then nods, tucking the package of diapers under one arm and stacking the coffee on top of the formula. “You're a good kid, Usnavi. Everyone’s glad you kept this place going after what happened, we're all rooting for you. Wouldn’t be the same with nobody else on the corner. And I’ll pay you back for all of this as soon as my next check comes in, I swear.”

Once Eli leaves, Usnavi opens the drawer under the register. “Wouldn’t be the same?” Hell of a thing to say when it’s changed so much as is, but this, at least, is a fixture: the tab system. Years worth of the things, scraps of receipt paper organized into three separate wallets and kept in this drawer. The ones that were paid off, maintained for Pai’s records, even though they’re already resolved. The unpaid ones who ain’t allowed a tab again ever. And the current ones who are always good to pay it back their next payday. It’s usually just for a few dollars here and there, nothing big but even that adds up. Thirteen dollars short on one transaction ain’t exactly pocket change.

He closes the drawer again untouched. Usnavi doesn’t need his folks to tell him you don’t ask a guy to choose between diapers or formula for his baby. You just don’t. Probably they would’ve done the same, but they aren’t here to. It’s Usnavi’s decision, and his alone, to crumple Eli’s tab into a ball and toss it straight into the trash.

He stands in the sunbeam for a minute longer, and then takes out his phone and dials.

“Hey, Benny,” he says, when the call picks up. “You ain’t working right now, are you? No, nothing’s wrong, I just…we should do something, if you’re around. I wanna hang out.”