Once, Brody and I got to talking outside of school. We’d been let out early because of teacher meetings. Jenna hadn’t bothered coming at all. I felt aimless and not ready to head back home to take up my role as babysitter to my younger siblings.
“So, Jenna didn’t come in today,” he said. He rolled the one spiral bound notebook he ever used, and forced it into the back pocket of his jeans.
“She said it was a waste of time just for a few hours. Anyway, it’s a long bus ride from City Island,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. If I’d known I would have skipped to be with her.”
I looked at his profile. “You’ve been over there? To City Island?”
“Sure. Lots of times.”
“With Jenna?” I thought of her father and the boundaries he’d laid down.
He laughed. “Before I ever met her. I use to fish off the pier near the bridge. I once tried to get a summer job at the marina. Jen and me, we get together and walk around Orchard Beach Park. I have to do the right thing. I want to meet her folks, see where she lives. Let them know straight out Jen and me are together. I love City Island. I could live there.”
“How come?”
“’Cause it’s small. It’s surrounded by water. It feels like home. Kind of cozy and safe and cut off, know what I mean?”
“Like your home?”
“Not where I live now. Where I’d like to live one day.”
“But there’s nothing there. There’s nothing to do but eat. Jenna even says so and she liked growing up there. It’s so different from the rest of New York.”
“Maybe that’s why I like it.”
“Maybe your family could move there.”
“I don’t have a family. I live in a group home. My last foster parents moved before the school year started. I didn’t want to go with them to Norfolk. I was old enough. I could decide to stay on my own.”
I looked at Brody more closely. I was afraid to be too nosy and ask the questions that would give him a history and fill in the blanks.
“Aren’t you afraid to be by yourself?”
“I’ve always been by myself. It could have been worse, I guess. I always knew I was really on my own. I don’t know why my real mother gave me up. I don’t know who my father is. Bottom line, I have to take care of myself.”
“Doesn’t that make you mad?”
“I used to be, but now all I want is my own life, my own place, and to do what I want. I’ve been working part-time near boats and water since I was fifteen. South Street Seaport promised me something full-time when I graduate, but I’m thinking how cool it would be to find a job on City Island. Then I could really stay.”
Brody had always struck me as a guy who said what he meant, and knew what he wanted and pretty much how to get it. But what I wasn’t hearing was where did Jenna fit in? Was she just a stepping-stone to his need to belong somewhere?
His self-confidence was amazing, and it made me wonder if there was some great advantage to having to build your own life, create your own family from the ground up. To not be afraid of the world, not be afraid of being told no. City Island must have seemed like a cosseted haven to him, the safe harbor at the end of the crazy world he came from, where kids were discarded like garbage.
Brody was already eighteen by the time we started our senior year. He looked and behaved older than most of us, which was part of his attraction. We still didn’t know yet how combustible those kinds of traits could be. Awesome to us, threatening to others.
We all had to plot and plan how to get together on Friday nights and weekends for parties and occasional trips into the city to a club. Elaborate lies were created that tested the boundaries of our lives, our families, our communities. Brody had no such concerns and became our de facto leader. I know for me it changed the idea of how big and complicated the world was beyond my own neighborhood. For Jenna I think it was more confusing. How far was she willing to go before she had to turn back home?
“My father is going to kill me,” she inevitably moaned on each new adventure. Like the one that took us to Staten Island, another remote outcast of a place.
In the spring before graduation, Jenna’s parents insisted on hosting a birthday party for their daughter in the tiny backyard of their home. The idea both embarrassed and frightened Jenna, but everyone looked forward to the evening, hoping that the Hardings were cool enough to just disappear so that the real party could go down.
I got there too early, and sat on Jenna’s bed and watched as she finished dressing and did makeup and decided on a pair of cute but treacherous high heels. Her friends started arriving in earnest around 8:30, quickly spilling into the front yard, and the street to the side of the house. Some boy who’d once dated Jenna, before she’d left the island and met Brody, actually showed up, his presence blessed by her father. Goodlooking but, to my way of thinking, too much like a Tommy-in-the-making.
