Page 164 of You + Me – Against the World

“They had my brother soon after that; there are two years between us. I think he was planned. And a year later… Nothing. They were gone. Dead and buried. The film career, the passionate love story, the sweet, little family—all gone. Blown apart. Off to the orphanage for Roman and me. He was adopted almost immediately. I just remember being told he was going on vacation with this nice lady and gentleman, and I fell for it. He never came back.”

I don’t know why it still hurts this much.

I move the camera back up to the photo of my parents holding each other. Beauty can be tragic sometimes. Often. I guess the more love there is, the more pain there is. Two best friends, together until death.

“That’s when everything fell apart for me. Too much abandonment all at once, I think.”

I grit my teeth and swallow the lump in my throat that makes me want to bawl. “Abandon” is one of the words I hate most. It’s not usually part of my vocabulary. I take a breath before continuing.

“I went crazy. I refused to eat, which drove the ladies at the orphanage crazy. I would go for days without speaking, but I told myself all kinds of things in my head. I just didn’t need to say them to anyone. When a couple came to meet me with a view to adopting me, I would rock back and forth, staring into space. It always had the same effect. The fathers, generally, would start freaking out. But it broke the mothers’ hearts; they wanted to whisk me away and save me. So, suddenly, I’d start screaming like a wild animal and running around in every direction. The women looking after me would try to catch me, and I’d fight them off and run away. Quite the little performance… And always the same result in the end: my potential new parents would run away, too. After a while, I got too old to appeal to adoptive parents. That was when the foster families entered the scene. People paid by the state to take care of you. Some do the bare minimum; others start to love you a little along the way.”

Sighing, I rummage through my memories. I didn’t keep photos of any of the foster families. I don’t even know if there were any photos—I never stayed anywhere long enough. I walk over to my apartment window, throw it wide open, and point the camera at the street to film the passersby. Empty, soulless filler footage, with no faces and no feelings, just like the people I’m about to talk about.

Keith is probably going to love this highly emotional moment.

“I’m sure there are foster parents who do it for the right reasons—good people, loving people, ordinary people— but I wasn’t lucky enough to get placed with them. In my foster homes, I came across two kinds of temporary parents. First, the older couples whose children had left home and who wanted to stave off boredom while doing a good deed, convinced they were the best parents in the world. They went everywhere with you, watched you constantly, kept such a close eye on you that you hardly dared breathe without their permission. You became their little plaything, the doll they dressed up and paraded around to show their neighbors they had saved an orphan. I’m sure they meant well, but for me, it was too much. I suffocated. It was impossible to exist with these self-proclaimed saviors.”

I let out a little laugh and film the sky before returning to the strangers on the street.

“And then there are the couples desperate for money, who already have three or four kids of their own and who cram you all into a bedroom together, just so they can collect the foster care maintenance payments. The ones who don’t look at you, don’t talk to you, just feed you chips and park you in front of the TV until they forget you exist. And when you try to get their attention, they dish out slaps and kicks, because that’s what they believe parenting consists of. Until I was twelve or thirteen, I changed families about once a year. I’d run away, they’d find me, and it would all start again. Eventually, I was declared a lost cause—an unmanageable child, undisciplined, impossible to raise. And it was back to where I’d started: the group home.”

But all I wanted was for someone to be a parent to me.

***

I set the camera down on the counter of my open-plan kitchen, pull my battered wallet from my back pocket, and take out the photo I never leave home without. Four little snapshots taken in a photo booth with Felix, when we were fifteen and thought we were gangsters. He’s wearing a bandana on his head and four or five gold chains around his neck, and he’s making a gun with his fingers, aiming it at my temple. Meanwhile, I have a shaved head, my chin is held high, and my arms are crossed. An arrogant smile plays on my lips, and the overall impression is that of a little punk who isn’t afraid of anything. A kid who wants to challenge the whole world just to prove he can.

Now, five years later, I find us ridiculous, but those were probably the best years of my life. We didn’t have much, but we felt invincible. And we were rich when it came to something that’s priceless: our freedom. It’s a story worth telling.

“That’s Fe. Felix Alonso. Same age, roughly the same background. We met at the group home, got into a fight the first day, and after that we were inseparable. Together, we came up with shady little schemes and lived our little lives, stealing whatever we could—especially things that we didn’t need. Wandering the streets until we found something to do, often something pretty stupid. Driving cars we hadn’t really stolen, because after our joyrides we always returned them to where we had found them. Sweet-talking girls, or just trying to catch their eye, and getting blown off sometimes, but not always. We thought we were the kings of the world. Nothing could stop us, because the two of us were a team, a mini-family, the only one we’d ever had. We covered for each other, protected each other, and got even for each other. And when no one could see or hear us, we talked, we opened up to each other, and sometimes we even cried. A friendship like that only comes around once in a lifetime. Felix was all I had.

“Until I met Alma.”

Abruptly, I stop. I need to go get some air. Talking about my life doesn’t work for me. What’s with this trembling voice-over? If I keep this up, I’ll turn into the kind of teenager who bawls into his diary, leaving big, round tear stains all over the pages. Right next to the little hearts in the margins.

I wrap my camera in one of my T-shirts to protect it and slip it into my backpack. Then, I walk to the park and start filming the trees, the paths, the old people shuffling along in slow motion, the determined joggers chasing after some invisible goal, and the children playing in the grass, who have no idea what awaits them when they grow up.

Suddenly, I realize that I don’t have a photo of Alma to film.

But I’m not sure Keith would even be interested in that part of my life. Alma isn’t my past, my wounds, and all the other stuff he wants me to talk about. She’s the complete opposite. She’s my bandage. My ointment. The antiseptic that stings a little but heals me. And Keith plays the part of my savior, but he doesn’t like seeing me do better, especially if it isn’t thanks to him. Sometimes, he thinks he’s a bit like God. I’ve seen other social workers struggle, forget their own needs, work incredibly hard to help kids pull through. But him? He doesn’t like happiness. It makes him feel useless.

When I finally reach the bench—our bench—at the very back of the park, I can’t bring myself to point the camera at the inscription I carved into the wood. “You + Me” means exactly what it says; it’s just us, so no one must know, no one must see it. It’s too precious. It would be tarnished if someone else laid eyes on it.

So, I film everything else: the December sky, almost blindingly white; the wooden slats of the bench, worn down by all the bodies that have sat on them; the little pebbles on the ground that I pick up and hurl as far as I can when life pisses me off; the tiny pieces of wood she twists between her fingers when life hurts her, fills her with anxiety, frightens her, overwhelms her. Which is pretty much all the time.

“Alma is a beautiful name. It means ‘soul’ in Spanish; I looked it up the other day. But it has nothing to do with her roots. Half French, half English, she lives in the United States, with a Latin first name and a British last name, but she’s moved around her entire life. She’s from nowhere, and home for her is kind of everywhere, all at once. She’s a mystery.

“When she showed up at the beginning of the year, I thought she was a daddy’s girl. Rich, well-behaved, polished, boring. But also genuinely beautiful, with big, green eyes that bore deep inside you, and then look away, afraid of what they might find. When she finally dared to speak to me, her sharp wit floored me. I realized she carried something inside her, something that didn’t want to come out.

“That damn film professor paired us up. Probably to set her free and to keep me in line. But our two worlds were never meant to meet. It’s like asking the Queen of England to have tea with Al Capone—though that probably flatters me a little. Plus, it’s a cliché. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t understand each other. Or maybe we understood each other too well, I don’t know.

“Anyway, it happened. I asked her to meet me, she came, she kept saying she had to leave, and she never left. I didn’t want her to leave. I think that’s where it all started.”

I place the camera on the bench, angled up at my face. I don’t feel like filming anymore; I’m just going to talk.

“There are a bunch of things about Alma that annoy me. She never has time. She always has to go home. Her parents are waiting for her, Clémentine is waiting for her, and her boyfriend used to wait for her, too. And then she’s afraid all the time. Of what she might do, what she might regret, what people might think of her, what could go wrong. She’s suspicious of Felix, too, even though she trusts Abrams and his son—who she barely knows. Oh yeah, and then there’s her taste in movies. I can let Forrest Gump slide, but Dances with Wolves? Honestly, that’s unforgivable. And she’s always freezing, even though, where we live, it’s sunny all year round. But I suspect she acts like she’s cold on purpose, just so I’ll hold her in my arms.”

The people passing in front of me wonder why I’m talking to myself. I consider rocking back and forth or jumping up and running around screaming, like in the good old days. But they’d probably call the cops. It’s crazy how people can’t handle it when you’re different.