We're having a hurricane party, just me and Marco. Like we used to do when we were little.
It was so hot all day, plus the humidity, so we stayed in the living room with the window unit running and watched his copy of Spice World, and Elephant that I rented from TLA Video, but after that I needed a break. There really isn’t much else to do on days like these, when you’re just waiting for something to happen, waiting for something to pass. When you just want to be anywhere else. It makes sense that everyone picks August to leave town, but I like it when the city is like this. Emptied out, I feel like I own it. Like it actually belongs to me.
The rain was starting to come down in surprise party streamers when we decided to go into Marco’s backyard. Roaches scattered when we pulled the pool out from the side area cutout behind the Coleman and the trash bins. Those bugs don’t want to get wet either, but maybe they’re watching the rain too. My mom calls them waterbugs, the black and shiny ones. I think because it doesn’t carry the same weight as cockroach. It doesn’t feel quite as offensive on the tongue. Almost makes them sound cute, like a happy little beetle splashing in a puddle.
Sitting on lawnchairs under the blue plastic shell propped up at an angle between the railing and the wall, a percussive swarm of raindrops surround us in a cozy, familiar buzz. The air temperature has changed, the way it always does in these late afternoon storms. My ankles almost feel cool. Marco tells me he’s not going back for senior year, he’s just going to get his GED and take some community college classes. “Might as well get my prerequisites out of the way,” he says. “That’s smart,” I say, and wonder if my parents would let me do the same. Probably not, even though I was so bored in all my classes last year I would end up cutting half the time to sit in the music corridor and watch Jaslyn work out pop tunes on the upright piano.
Before watching the Van Sant on opposite ends of Marco’s mom and dad’s pink leather couch, I studied Marco’s face as he downed two full bottles of Robitussin Extra Strength Cough like they were Gatorades. “You have to get the kind where DXM is the only active ingredient,” he said. He sounded so confident. So knowledgeable. “Why’s that?” I asked. He looked me hard in the eyes, the way he would sometimes do when he wanted to pause for dramatic effect, then up at the ceiling fan spinning dusty circles over our heads. “Because otherwise you’d die.”
The rain isn’t heavy, but it’s steady. The light grey cinderblock walls framing the concrete garden are streaked with dark grey saturation. It’s almost too muggy to be sitting under here breathing pre-aspirated air but it’s the next best thing to sitting on a porch in a rainstorm, and neither of us have one of those. It only happened once, but one of my favorite childhood memories is from when I visited my granny one summer, sitting on the front porch of her rural doublewide with the crick out back during a rainstorm. Something about the smell in the air, the sound on the aluminum awning, the frail security of being dry while everything else is getting wet, being close enough to touch it and get wet myself. I’ve been chasing it ever since.
“I wish we had snacks,” I say. When we were kids, a box of Tid-Bits almost always accompanied us on our hurricane parties. I can’t remember the last time I saw a box of Tid-Bits at my house, or anyone’s. I checked Marco’s fridge and cabinets before coming out here. Nothing of interest. “We can zombie walk to the Pathmark,” he says, laughing. It’s not a long walk, but I feel rooted to this spot, almost on a contact, riding alongside whatever wavelength Marco is on.
I imagine holding a small bowl filled to the rim with the cheesy finger-shaped treat. Closing my eyes for a moment, I can feel the grains of salt on my fingertips as I hover a single invisible cracker toward my mouth. “Let me get one,” Marco says. I extend my cupped hand over to him. “Just save me some,” I say.
