Ada and Syd
2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 2024; Issue: 102 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00265667-11047095
ISSN2157-4189
Autores ResumoAda's hand lands on Sydney's knee while they're sitting in Ms. Duluth's classroom, five minutes into their lunch period. Sydney doesn't think it's a big deal that Ada isn't Ms. Duluth's student, because the drama room is always open for loitering with its three couches, its small stage set with a table and stools and crates, folding chairs lined up along the back wall.Ada says, "We get our babies in two weeks, but it's like, I know shaking a baby is bad. Can we move on to a different lesson?"Sydney tilts her head up and down. She thinks of those wooden birds plunging their faces into cups of water but can't remember what they're called or why they exist. She says, "Do you get to pick what your baby looks like?""No, which is fucked up. At least promise me a brown baby. I couldn't love a white one." Sydney pictures Ada's younger siblings flocked all over the fridge at her dad's house, honey-haired and light-eyed.Neither of the girls brought or bought lunch. In the fall, they'll be able to leave campus to cross the street to El Pollo Loco or the donut shop or the taqueria that doesn't have horchata but does have carne asada fries. There's no guarantee they'll eat any of that when the time comes, but at least they'll have an option other than stagnancy. There's a cafeteria near the dance classroom, but in two years they've never tried it.The girls take turns showing each other posts from their feeds. When Ada moves her phone, the mobile of Winnie the Pooh and Hello Kitty charms looped onto the bottom dance above the hand that's still on Sydney's knee. Sydney stares at the space between the rubber accessories and skin and wonders if it tickles her, the almost-touching.Ada likes watching clips of people being injured while doing tasks that could only end in injury. Climbing up lattices to backflip into pools, homemade motorcycles hurtling toward a crash. Ada watches Sydney's face as a video starts, a hand on a dartboard then panning to the man throwing the darts. Sydney shuts her eyes when the man's arm moves and Ada says, "Well it's not fun if you're going to be a baby.""Not liking that gross shit doesn't make me immature," Sydney says with her head turned. Earlier in class, Ms. Duluth asked everyone to do vocal exercises so they could work on enunciation and projection. She walked around to everyone, and when she got to Sydney, she placed three fingers on her throat as they walked through different hums.Ada removes her hand from Sydney's knee, but she can almost pretend the damp residue is the real thing. Sydney wants to say something mean about the charms, about who is really a baby, but she can't because Ada is doing it ironically. Ada with a Medusa piercing and a loose Xanax in her pencil bag.The videos have stopped, and the only sound to Sydney's left is the kissing of nails to screen. Sydney imagines all of the people Ada could be texting and sits silent in her reactions to the ones that would hurt the most. That unnamed nineteen-year-old girl who Ada spent last summer crying over, or Apollo her more-than-dealer.Sydney cranes her neck and tries to see but can't. She would never ask directly."Do you want to share some chips? I can go grab some from Ms. Duluth," Sydney offers toward the quiet. Ada indulges her and says she wants Hot Cheetos or Cool Ranch.Ms. Duluth doesn't look older than some of the seniors, and there's a rumor she's hooked up with a now-graduated boy. On anonymous apps, students argue over if it counts because it wasn't sex, because the boy was eighteen, because who wouldn't feel up Ms. Duluth? Ada believes the rumors because Apollo saw the nude torso that he swears is her. Sydney can count every chest she could recognize on a single hand: her mom's—a saturated glimpse into her future—xoxophoenixluv from black-and-white Tumblr montages, Ada's from the corner of her eye while they changed. Ada's from locker rooms and beach days. Ada's body in the photos she sends to Sydney to ask opinions of, which should i send to him?"Hey Ms. Du, got any Cool Ranch left?" Sydney asks.Her teacher's index finger curls over her lips, then she places her fork down and shuffles through a box beneath the desk. "Your lucky day," she says while handing two bags over.Tonight, Sydney and her mom have to pick her brother up from the airport in Santa Ana. Sydney wonders why they built the airport there when there are so many more important destinations nearby. Why they named it after a white man parading as a cowboy. If Sydney could name it she would pick Mendez, the first time she saw anything from her county in a textbook that wasn't Disneyland. Her brother is out after eighteen months away and her mom only told her last week. Said she should wear something nice so they can treat him to dinner.Sydney tosses the chips at Ada, who isn't looking at her. Sydney thinks she could vanish troublingly easily. Opening the bag from the bottom, Ada places a single, perfect triangle on the center of her tongue. Sydney thinks Ada's tongue is a slick, pink conveyor belt and imagines depositing her earlobes, her pinky finger, the inside of her elbow.Apollo struts into the drama room, and Ada flags him over. He squats between them and places a hand on both of their legs. Sydney tries to remember the last time she fell for the stoplight game. Green. Yellow. Red. A boy—always a boy—continuing to inch up her thighs because firetrucks don't stop for red."I'll never know why you did it," Ada says, running her hands over Apollo's buzz cut. "You're so ugly now."He places the hand that had been on Ada over his heart and pretends to faint onto her lap. Sydney doesn't know what to say so she stares at the menagerie weighing down Ada's phone. The girls like collecting the charms from coin machines in supermercados and liquor stores. Their best find was Piglet in Tigger's skin.Apollo leans back up and gives Sydney's thigh a squeeze and says, "I'm still handsome as ever, right?" She lifts her shoulders and wants to press them all the way to her ears."Leave her alone," Ada says."Did you hear you're about to be a daddy?" Sydney asks. Apollo laughs like boys here laugh, with their teeth climbing beyond their lips, their tongue poised to gleek.His fingers walk up Ada's stomach, flat and hairless in the peak between her top and jeans. Sydney watches as his fingers move up and disappear and she hopes Ms. Duluth will say something, but she doesn't, keeps eating her salad and flipping through pages in her book.Mostly, Sydney feels like an only sibling. Can't remember a time she's talked about her brother to anyone—even Ada. Her brother, ten years older, punching out the windshield of the car meant for her. Her brother, a decade older, locked in a back room. Elsewhere, Sydney and Ada trying to flee their bodies with their dampening and dirtying desires. Sydney makes up scenarios, just for herself, where she was switched at birth or had descended to the ground via a UFO beam. When she's high, she's convinced she's about to be swept back up. Before her brother's release, she and her mom will drive to a strip mall to buy him new Dickie's and belts and wife beaters. She's seen online calls to rename them, Wife Pleasers or Ribbed Tanks, but she thinks the name suits him."Did you still want to come over Saturday?" Ada asks after Apollo leaves. He was here to slip something into her bag, for safekeeping, he said. Sydney nods.Sydney offers to bring her India ink so they can mar their bodies if that sounds fun. Ada shrugs. "Whatever. I'll get some weed from Apollo. Maybe he'll even stick around for a minute."While Ada's dad and stepmom and siblings are off at practices or appointments or family activities she refuses to attend, the girls smoke on the roof. Last weekend, they locked themselves out and spent the afternoon preserving their phone batteries by trying to unravel each other. Ada revealed a little about the nineteen-year-old girl from last summer. They only hooked up twice, but it was special. Better than anything she's felt to this day. Said she didn't know what was happening with Apollo, but it was nice to be held by hands that weren't pale.Above the house, their thighs touched then the sun started setting and goosebumps prickled up. Ada ran the back of her hand up Sydney's leg and said, "I forget you're morena clara."A few minutes before the bell chimes, Ada's hand returns to Sydney's knee. Red light, Sydney thinks, willing the hand to finger-walk its way up, for Ada to whisper Firetrucks don't stop for red lights. Ada's talking about an assignment to write a poem from the perspective of a WWI soldier, begging Sydney to write hers.Sydney's never been kissed, but last weekend she said she had. Pressed for any secret, she wanted to hurt Ada back. Wouldn't give a name or pronoun, just that it was sloppy. Ada absorbed it without emotion, the helixes of their ears clasped together. Sydney imagined the sound of an ocean made of wax and spit. She stared up into the sky and asked to be returned to a home with no one in it.Sydney wants to barter for the poem, but can't conjure anything she'd receive in the trade. Ada shakes her head when Sydney tries to deny her. At her desk, Ms. Duluth stretches up, and Sydney sees the white toss of stomach. Sydney could place her hand on top of Ada's and wait. Wait for any reaction. Sydney could write the ode to Ada and their baby, tan and never-shaken, named and virtuous.
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