Midnight Taxi Tango Read Free Page A

your bones.
    Still, he’s never been on me like
this
. Usually it’s just the emptiness.
    Giovanni.
    It’s been seven years, almost to the day.
    I should probably give up and admit he’s dead. Everyone else has. A boy like that, that bright a fire, seems like it’d be too much to ask to have him around for more than a decade or two. Instead I make up stories: Giovanni in Amsterdam, whoring around gleefully with poets and painters, smoking hash and making fun of American tourists. Giovanni in India, writing plays while riding elephants. Giovanni in Tunisia, fermenting a lusty new remix of the Arab Spring.
    When I was nine, almost ten, and he was what? Sixteen? I was still plotting how to get him to marry me. I’d done all the math, checked and rechecked it: he would be twenty-three when I hit seventeen, the legal age to marry in New York. That seemed doable: seventeen and twenty-three. Shit, Uncle Freddie got married when he was fifteen and Aunt Bea was twenty-eight and they’re still going strong. Then again, Uncle Freddie’s been known to swallow his own teeth on purpose. Anyway, I scratched the equations out on my little
Powerpuff Girls
notepad and arrived triumphantly at the conclusion that it was doable, mathematically at least. The other concerns, that he obviously had no interest whatsoever in girls and that we’re first cousins—that all seemed like secondary problems. Sex was gross anyway, right? Who wanted all that?
    I’m gonna be seventeen next week and Giovanni is . . . nowhere.
    â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢
    A woman comes in, ignoring the CLOSED sign on the door. I can’t tell if she’s white or Puerto Rican or white and Puerto Rican. She’s got loud purple lipstick on and she’s almost perfectly round. Maybe she’s been here before—Gina? Louisa? Then she opens her mouth and she’s definitely Puerto Rican. “Hola, mi niña. Lissen, you have those collares for Babalu I asked about before? It was maybe two weeks ago, yes?”
    Oh yeah, she was here before, but it wasn’t no two weeks ago. Two months maybe. “We already sold ’em out, Iya.” I use the respectful term for an elder santera even though I don’t know if she’s initiated or not. Whatever. One way or the other, she’s older than me.
    â€œAy, mi madre, but I put in the order and everything.” A singsongy whine enters her voice. I want nothing to do with it, so I end the conversation quick and she finds her way to the door. And then: Giovanni. Giovanni dressed in a hundred shades of violet, fro unruly. We were on our way home from school. That same chilly freshness teased the arrival of spring, and Giovanni was rolling his eyes because he got cast as the swan again in the ballet school’s version of
Swan Lake
. “Gayest role ever,” he said, sipping a cup of milk and sugar with a splash of coffee in it. “So stupid. Why can’t we do a ballet based on
Ishigu
?”
    I jumped up and down and did little pirouettes around him. “Ishigu! Ishigu!” That’s the manga we both loved. Well, I loved it because he loved it and everything he loved was a holy relic to me. Plus, Ishigu was half boy-demon, half android and surrounded by the hottest anime chicks in Robot City. Gio could be Ishigu and I could be Maiya, who carried a staff with a talking ram’s head on top that she used to disembowel all the tentacle-bots that came at them from the Red Death Chambers.
    â€œI’m coming in late,” Baba Eddie says when I pick up the landline. I hear him pull on his cigarette. “Something came up.”
    â€œI’m so sure.” For no reason at all, I’m annoyed.
    â€œHold things down for me, okay? Why are you there so early anyway?”
    â€œI dunno.” I shrug as if he can see it over the phone, but really: it’s Baba Eddie; he probably can.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, Kia?” That touch