Southward - 2. II.

There was a special kind of sadness about Buenos Aires. It was something in the overcrowded streets, in the aged grey buildings, and even in the people – melancholy appeared to be part of the city’s own idiosyncrasy. Even as I’d visited almost every year after moving to Connecticut, the Buenos Aires I remembered best was the one from my early childhood, the city with wide avenues that painted itself in lilac every spring as the Jacarandá trees bloomed.

We arrived at midnight on the coldest night in June, smack in the middle of winter. The abrupt inversion of seasons in the span of 12 hours from New England to the Southern Cone seemed fitting for what was essentially a complete 180 degree turn in the trajectory of my life.

The first thing I did when I finally managed to get the airport’s WiFi to work on my phone was letting Noah know we’d landed in one piece. He was probably asleep by then, though, and when I woke up at noon the next day, he still hadn’t replied.

He’d never been the one to religiously check his notifications, and since we saw each other all the time at school and spent so much time together anyway, we’d never really gotten used to communicating by text.

By the end of the first week we’d only exchanged a couple of words.

I supposed I’d better get used to that.

Ω

The food on my plate had gone cold a good half an hour ago. My mom, my uncle and my grandparents had migrated to the kitchen to talk about divorce stuff, leaving me and my cousins on our own in the dining room.

It’d been a good three years since the last time I’d seen anyone from my mother’s side of the family, and the times I'd seen them I could've counted with the fingers of a hand. Truth be told, I'd never really gotten to know them very well.

My grandparents were Korean migrants, of the first families to arrive in Argentina during the 60’s. My mom had always had a complicated relationship with them; they’d had plans for her life that she’d never felt like following, and when she decided to marry the man she loved and make her life in America, my uncle had to take care of the family business on his own. Of course, now she had to rely on them again, and the years of keeping her distance were bound to manifest themselves somehow.

And I knew all of that baggage was hers alone, but the estrangement between them meant that my relationship with that side of my family – especially my two cousins, Nahuel and Romina, who were about my age – was practically non-existent.

Which was making things incredibly awkward for me at that very moment.

“So…” Nahuel said, breaking the uninterrupted silence that had befallen the room since the end of dinner. “You’ll be going to our school, then?”

Romina’s disinterested gaze didn’t leave her phone screen. I cleared my throat.

“Yeah, just the remainder of the year. I suppose that means we’ll be sharing class,” I said, forcing a smile.

I heard Romina chuckle, and Nahuel’s own smile didn’t reach his eyes. No one spoke after that.

God.

The following were going to be some difficult months.

Ω

“Why don’t you state your name for the class?”

The whole class’s eyes were on me. My mouth felt dry. I suddenly felt like I couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, or any language at all for that matter.

“I’m Lautaro Saez Li. I’m seventeen.”

Luckily, the principal did the rest of the introduction. I was Nahuel’s cousin, I came from the US, I was going to be there for the remainder of the year. All the basics.

I gathered the strength to walk across the room and sit on the nearest empty seat. Nahuel was on the other side, too busy talking to his friends to spare a glance my way.

Asshole.

I hadn’t finished getting everything out of my backpack when I heard a booming voice call for me from across the room.

“Hey, you, Nahuel’s cousin!”

It was one of the kids in his group, a broad-shouldered guy with mossy green eyes and a wide smile on his face.

“C’mon, sit over here,” he said. He waved towards an empty seat next to his.

I tried to ignore my cousin’s overt annoyance as I resettled beside them. It was then that I noticed the cast on the green-eyed boy’s arm.

“What happened to you?” I ventured, suddenly less uncomfortable. Something about his demeanor made me feel at least a little welcome.

“He’s an idiot, that’s what happened,” said another one of the boys, prompting some laughter from the group. The green-eyed boy laughed, too.

“Welcome to the school,” he said, extending his free hand. “I’m Tomás.”

Ω

Tomás convinced Nahuel and the others to let me hang out with them after school. ‘Let’s be nice to the new kid’, he’d said. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was supposed to take that.

We went to a quiet park a few blocks from the school, and we all pitched in to buy beers at a store nearby. Despite most of us being underage at the time, it seemed teenagers drinking out in public at 5 in the afternoon didn’t raise any concerns from passersby. The mild winter breeze was also no deterrent.

I decided to simply go with the flow and take it as the norm in this turf.

“So, you’re half Argentine, half Korean, and were raised in the US?” Tomás asked over a drag of his cigarette. “That’s insane.”

I shrugged, trying not to let the attention get to my head. The mosaic that was my background had made me accustomed to feeling like an outsider from childhood, but being a foreigner had never been too much of a big deal for me back in New Haven.

“And do you –”

“I already told you, man,” Nahuel interrupted his friend, rolling his eyes. “Neither of us speak Korean. We just look the part.”

“Alright then, jeez, sorry.” Tomás laughed, and dimples formed on his cheeks.

I felt butterflies in the pit of my gut as I was suddenly reminded of Noah, and how his smile would never fail to become contagious.

The two of them looked nothing alike. Tomás’ skin was a tan-olive shade, his hair cut short and meticulously combed back, and despite being a good few inches shorter than Noah, his athletic frame gave him an imposing appearance. They were easily antithetical.

And yet, I still couldn’t help but feel that familiar warmth in his presence.

“So why are you here, anyway?” brusquely asked another of the boys, to whom I’d been earlier introduced as Valentín. It took me a moment to realize I was being addressed, and by the time I noticed the group had already erupted in reprimand.

“Dude, seriously?”

“I’m just saying!” Valentín defended himself. “Sounds to me like you had things figured out over there…”

I tried not to get the obvious contempt in his voice get to me.

“It was just a family thing,” I said simply. Valentín didn’t bother with a reply, though the nasty look on his face remained.

What is his deal?

“Pay him no mind,” said Tomás with a smirk. “He’s just jealous cause now all the girls at school are gonna be all over you.”

Laughter.

And just like that, in an instant, the butterflies in my stomach turned into a knot, and all I could do was hope that my face wouldn’t give away any indication of what was going on inside.

Oh. Right.

Luckily for me, right at that point another member of the group showed up proudly announcing he’d brought more beer, and I swiftly stopped being the focus of the conversation for the rest of the evening.

Still, that uneasy feeling took a while to fully go away.

Ω

The few weeks that passed between our arrival and my getting into school went by in a blur. The paperwork, looking for a new apartment for my mom and I, the inevitable culture shocks, the never-ending novelties I’d find in everything – I felt like I’d blinked and two months had gone by without me realizing it.

“I feel like I’m still not really here,” I told my mom one day after class. We were drinking mate by the window of my grandparents’ old house, watching the rain pour down on the empty streets.

“That’s because you’re not,” she said. “Your body is physically here, but your mind is still 5000 miles up north.”

I snorted. “Well, do you happen to know when my mind will be showing up?”

She smiled. It was a rare sight those days, albeit a welcome one.

“I couldn’t tell you. But don’t stay up waiting.”

At that point, keeping my guard up against her was already starting to get tiresome. I had to see her start over from scratch, rebuilding her life in her home country after over ten years, having to essentially concede defeat to her parents as, in some way, she’d proven them right in failing to achieve lasting happiness with the life she’d chosen for herself.

I still didn’t fully understand why they’d done what they’d done, and why I’d had to be a part of it. I hadn’t forgiven them. But I was slowly learning that they, too, were just as flawed and prone to mistakes as anyone else.

And that made accepting the new reality just a bit easier.

Ω

It’d been a whole week since Noah had last answered a text.

The first two days had been okay. By then I was used to a little delay in our communication, the impersonal medium hindering the possibility of a worthwhile exchange. Then by the fourth day I started getting worried I might’ve said something wrong.

Had I somehow been too explicit in my affection? Had I given away my feelings and was he now too weirded out to even reply with a dry ‘ok’?

By the end of the week I was fully worrying something might’ve happened to him, though texting with some of our common friends I wasn’t able to reach any conclusions.

His social media was inactive, though that wasn’t necessarily meaningful when it came to Noah.

Maybe he’d gone on vacation somewhere and forgot to anyone beforehand. Maybe his phone had broken down and he was temporarily incommunicated.

Or maybe he was just not that interested in talking to me anymore.

I suppose I don’t have to say which hypothesis I was favoring at the time.

Meanwhile I was starting to settle in at school. I was no longer spending that much time with Nahuel’s friends; I could realize when I was being invited to tag along out of pity, and though my self-respect and dignity were by all means not unquestionable, I still preferred to mostly stick to my own.

Tomás still talked to me from time to time, when he wasn’t around the rest of the pack – which was, admittedly, not that often. He was probably the only one who consistently tried to strike a conversation with me, which didn’t always work.

For some reason, I couldn't bring myself to let loose and be casual with him. I mostly let him ask questions and limited myself to giving straight-to-the-point, dry answers. It was excruciating.

It could’ve been that I was sort of afraid to speak in general. Even though Spanish was my mother tongue and I’d spoken it interchangeably at home my whole life, I was completely unfamiliar with the way kids my age actually spoke it, and at times I was fully missing out on entire conversations. There was undoubtedly a fear of coming across as stupid for saying the wrong thing.

It could’ve also been that he was one of the most attractive guys I’d ever met, and I kept catching myself staring at him from across the classroom whenever he was looking the other way. There was something about the way he handled himself, just projecting confidence with every word he said and every move he made… It was nice having someone like that pay attention to me.

While not everyone at school was as ready to socialize with me as Tomás was, most kids had by then grown used to me being there, and didn’t mind talking to me from time to time – especially at English class, when everyone suddenly seemed to want to sit next to me. Even Nahuel appeared to be making amends with my presence.

And then there was Valentín.

I couldn't help but feel Valentín was actively ignoring me most of the time, and when he wasn't, I would sometimes catch him giving me dirty looks from across the hall or during class. He’d snicker if I used a word wrong in a sentence when participating in class, or he’d simply stand up and leave whenever I approached the group.

There was nothing I could do if he just didn’t like me – after all, not everyone was bound to. But it still would’ve been nice knowing what it was about me that made him hate me so much.

And I came closer to finding out one day after class.

We were all jammed up at the school’s entrance waiting for the doors to open so we could finally go home.

“Hey, Lauti,” Tomás greeted me with a pat in the back. He’d taken to calling me by my nickname pretty much right away. “Nahu told me it’s your birthday this Saturday.”

“Eh, yeah, that’s right!”

In the midst of getting up to date with schoolwork, resuming cello lessons with my new instructor, and worrying over Noah dropping off the face of the Earth, I’d somehow forgotten about the proximity of my own 18th birthday.

“Congrats, man, eighteen!” said Tomás, a wide smile on his face. “So listen. With the guys we were planning on going out at night, hit the club, maybe pregame at my place. That sort of thing. Want to come?”

“Uhh, yeah!” I blurted out, almost as a reflex.

I’d never even been near a club, and the idea was quite frankly terrifying, but by then I’d learned most teenagers in Argentina were avid clubgoers by the time they were sixteen, and I didn’t want to look like a complete loser in front of Tomás and the rest.

Plus it was my 18th birthday.

“Sweet, I’ll text you the address then,” he said, and promptly returned to the group.

I made a mental note to worry about the party thing later – I had plenty on my plate already.

The next instant, however, I heard Valentín shouting behind me.

“What the fuck, man, why did you have to invite him?!”

Just as the ensuing fight among the boys began, the doors were opened and people started pouring out of the building, so I took my cue to scurry through the crowd. That was a discussion I had no intention of bearing witness to.

But when I was walking down the stairs on my way out, something hit my shoulder, making me lose my balance and trip.

“Yanqui de mierda,” Valentín hissed as he walked past me.

“Hey, watch it!” Nahuel barked back as he came to my aid, though the offender was already halfway across the street and didn’t bother looking back. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, straightening my jacket. I was lucky I hadn't fallen flat on my face. “But God, what’s his deal with me, anyway?”

“Hell if I know,” said Nahuel, scratching his head. “Don’t worry about him, though. Come to Tomi’s party, it’ll be fun.”

I shrugged. “I’ll think about it.”

If things were going to be like that, I didn’t feel like having to deal with Valentín’s mood all night.

Nahuel raised an eyebrow and smirked. “What, like you have anything better to do?”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I was thinking of going skating after cello practice.”

“Skating?”

“Yeah, on ice,” I explained. “There’s a rink down in Flores.”

Nahuel laughed. “Fucking hell, Valen’s right. Sos un yanqui cheto de mierda.”

You’re a posh fucking yank.

I laughed along. After all, it was kinda true. And I liked being able to joke around with Nahuel, even if it was at the expense of getting low-key bullied.

Still, it would've been nice to have someone I trusted to talk to about all the things I was going through.

It would've been nice to have Noah.

Ω

I breathed in, and the cold air filled my lungs. How long had it been since I’d last hit the ice? Easily over a year.

The rink was closing in an hour, and it was nearly empty save for a couple of little girls clearly taking their first strides on the ice. I hadn’t managed to convince anyone at home to come with me – I’d been placing my bets on Romina, but she ultimately decided it wasn't worth the subway ride – so I was just on my own that day. But that was okay.

I was used to skating alone.

Though it had always been something I shared with Noah, his time on the ice was mostly spent at hockey practice, so he rarely had time to just hang out with me at the rink. And I didn't want to join the team – sports had never been my thing.

So we simply stuck to our own. It had always been more of a hobby for me than anything.

But this time felt different.

Everything that was supposed to happen was happening: the familiar breeze on my face as I wandered aimlessly in circles, letting my thoughts drift away, and the soothing sound of the skates gliding through the slippery surface and the echo of the hollow arena.

Yet for some reason, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was not clicking.

I left the ice after just a half an hour or so.

I was packing my things when I heard the notification bell on my phone go off, and my heart skipped a beat as I saw Noah’s name pop up for the first time in days.

I took a deep breath, my whole body lighting up in expectation.

“Hey L, happy birthday! Love you man, take care!”

I stared at the message on the screen for a good minute.

That's it?

After a whole week of nothing, was that really it?

I wasn't sure if I wanted to ask him what was up with him or just tell him to fuck off.

In the end, I did neither.

“Thanks bro! Love you too.”

If there'd been any doubt in my mind that those words hadn't meant anything to him back then, I was sure they didn’t mean anything now.

Ω

I stared absently at the clock on the wall. 7:12, 7:13, 7:14…

I was physically and mentally exhausted.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Noah’s stupid little message. Who did he think he was? Going AWOL for a whole week and not even bothering to explain himself. On my own birthday, at that.

Stupid little ‘love you man’.

I’d waited for him to say something else. The whole ride back home I kept checking my phone, ignoring the scores of birthday messages from people I obviously didn’t care as much about.

But there was nothing. Radio silence.

Stupid Noah.

There was a knock on the door.

“Everything okay, Lauti?”

I forced my best smile and nodded. “All good, mom. I’m just tired.”

She sat beside me on the bed. “Being a grown up will do that to you.”

This time my smile was genuine.

“Nahuel called me to complain that you’re not answering his texts. He really wants you to rsvp.” She raised an eyebrow. “Where did you say you were going?”

“Uhh, just a friend from school’s house. But I don’t know if I want to go, to be honest.”

“Right, you’re tired,” she sighed as she stood back up. “If you change your mind, remember to text me the address.”

“Will do.”

“And Lautaro,” she made a knowing face. “Answer your father’s birthday message, will you?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Fine.”

Even after getting divorced, they were still bound together by their shared passion for being a pain in my ass.

Ω

“Are you seriously telling me you’ve never had fernet con coca?” Tomás asked in pretend outrage. “I’m gonna need you to give me back your Argentine passport, Lauti.”

“Well, where was I supposed to find something like that in Connecticut?!” I asked, imitating his tone. I had to raise my voice to hear myself over the music.

“That’s all in the past now,” interjected Nahuel, handing me a glass of the dark-scented spirit. It reeked of cough syrup. “This is a formative moment for you, your first fernandito!”

I took a tentative sip, which was more than enough to decide I did not like the drink at all. Bitter, herbal and exceedingly strong. Luckily, the boys found the obvious disgust on my face hilarious.

I’d considered skipping the party up until the last minute, but ultimately I decided to try not to let the Noah thing get to me. At least not on my birthday.

And the prospect of spending the night near Tomás was a pretty strong incentive, too.

“Happy birthday, Lauti!” Tomás said over a side hug. In his proximity I could smell his cologne.

“Thanks for inviting me.”

“Don’t mention it,” he laughed, squeezing my shoulder. “I want to see you dance cumbia tonight!”

“I’m not making any promises.”

And the night was off to a good start.

The boys were treating me as one of their own. Valentín, for his part, appeared to have set his animosity aside and mostly ignored me, which was the best I could’ve expected from him. And for the most part my birthday wasn’t being held as a big deal, which allowed me to simply sit back and observe the others in their natural environment.

Against my own best judgement I eventually got used to the taste of fernet, and no matter how much I drank, somehow the glass on my hand kept getting refilled.

I wasn’t a stranger to partying, but the style of party cultivated down here was unlike anything I’d experienced back home, and eventually I found I was getting really drunk really fast.

But things started really going south when someone passed me the blunt.

My view got hazy, and the loud music was starting to deconstruct into a mere repetition of the same primal beat, resounding through my entire body.

I’d always been a lightweight, anyway.

At one point, I realized more people were showing up. I recognized a few from school, and there were others I’d never seen before – though in the state I was in, it could’ve been either way.

I sat down and wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand. By then the cup was gone from my hand, though it was probably for the best. What time was it?

If this was merely supposed to be the pregame, I didn’t think I was going to make it to the club.

I looked around. Nahuel and a girl I vaguely recognized from school were grinding to the beat of the music. I mentally gave him props.

Where was Tomás? Tomás, Tomás… I tried to remember what he was wearing. Green shirt, green shirt…

And there he was, making out with some girl against the wall.

Every ounce of alcohol I had ingested over the course of the night suddenly turned on itself.

Right. Of course.

I could’ve laughed. What had I honestly thought? That he was somehow going to be into me? Had I really been so daft as to mistake his friendliness for something else, or had I simply fooled myself into thinking I could’ve enjoyed my time with him safe from ulterior variables?

What a natural talent I had for setting myself up for disappointment. Lautaro Saez Li, olympic champion of acting a naïve fool.

I stumbled over to the bathroom, somehow managing not to trip and fall in the process. My head hurt like hell.

I stared at the reflection in the mirror. My hair was a sweaty mess, and my eyes were alarmingly bloodshot. I looked like a different person.

Why do I have to be like this?

I don’t know how long I stood there, looking at myself. I wasn’t moving but I was getting dizzy nonetheless.

Then the bathroom door opened with a loud noise, and I promptly snapped out of the trance.

Valentín’s dark eyes met mine in the mirror.

Instinctively, I mumbled a barely audible ‘sorry’ and headed for the door, but he stood firmly planted in the way.

He looked just as out of it as me, if not more. His disheveled hair and ochre skin were visibly covered in sweat.

But the contempt on his face was somehow still there. Was just what he looked like?

“Uh, can you move –”

“You think you’re hot shit, don’t you?” he asked, a grave rasp in his voice.

He was only a few inches taller than me, but at that moment I felt like he was completely towering over me.

“Man, just– I gotta go,” I tried to brush past him, but he grabbed me by the shoulder and held me back.

“You’re…” he hissed, but he was either too drunk or too high to follow that train of thought.

We held each other’s gazes for an instant.

Then he closed the door again, with both of us inside.

A shaky breath escaped his lips.

“Kiss me.”

Had I been in full possession of my faculties, I would’ve probably thought about the implications of what happened next. The fact that in my eighteen years of life I’d never kissed anyone before. The fact it was Valentín, of all people.

But there were too many unnatural chemical reactions going on in my brain, and it had already been a weird enough day.

Fuck it.

Our lips crashed unceremoniously, his teeth brushing against mine and our tongues intertwining with no preamble. His breath reeked of fernet, vodka and weed, and his shirt was so sweat-soaked he could’ve easily just come out of a pool – though that didn’t stop me from holding onto his waist as he pushed his whole weight on me against the wall.

We pulled back to catch a breath. I tried in vain to decipher the look on his face, on his unfocused eyes, his gaping mouth. The echoes of our panting in the small tiled room were barely drowned by the cumbia still booming on the other side of the door.

Is this really happening?

For a split second, he inched closer again, as if to pick up where we’d left off, but a knock on the door made us both jump and bolt away from each other.

We exchanged a wide-eyed look.

The next instant he’d opened the door and fled.

I stood frozen in place against the wall. The girl who’d knocked was so shit-faced she didn’t even notice I was there.

I took my cue to leave as she threw up on the toilet. My hands were shaking. The party outside showed no sign of having slowed down.

I looked around, but Valentín was nowhere to be seen. My knees were weak. I sat on the first surface I found.

Holy shit.

That really just happened.

I didn't make it to the club that night.