Fiction | Short Story

Unbecoming Behavior at the St. Agnes Fair

He always smelled like fabric softener exhaust from the laundromat down our block: like blue bottles of Downy and Saturday nights, when Mami would blow dry my hair straight with dollops of Dippity-Doo.

An excerpt from the novel, The Girls in Queens, available June 14, 2022 from HarperVia.

*

The spinning Big Eli grew larger as we approached the St. Agnes fair, hundreds of multi-colored bulbs flashing in preset sequences from every available surface on the wheel. We jumped at balloons bursting atop open-mouthed clown busts getting shot full with water from a line of gun-wielding children aiming across a table. We heard the screams and laughter of kids on the nearly-vertical Tilt-A-Wheel, and beneath that, faintly, the beat of music playing from KTU through strategically located speakers. The air smelled of beef fired on a charcoal grill, and oily paper bags of deep-fried zeppole, coated in clouds of confectioner’s sugar.

St. Agnes’ carnival was held each Labor Day weekend to raise money for the parish. New York City public schools traditionally started the Thursday after Labor Day so, for us, the carnival marked the unofficial end of summer. Kelly and I looked forward to it every year, but this year was special; this year, we would start fifth grade.

Kelly elbowed my hip as we walked down the hill toward Queens Boulevard.

“Chica chica!” she said, pointing toward wild dandelions growing out from under a tall wooden fence that walled off a tiny concrete yard and an aging rottweiler.

I bent down and peeled the black-and-white chica chica card off the sidewalk. A curly blonde with lace gloves held a finger to her pouting mouth, the angles of her elbows covering her nipples. A number was printed in hot pink at the bottom, promising “DELIVERY” on one side and “ENTREGA” on the other.

“Nah,” I flicked it back into the grass. “We’ve already got her.”

Back in “the dugout,” the space we’d carved for ourselves in the abandoned lot next to Kelly’s family’s old clapboard house—one of the only single-family homes left on the block—we kept a hand-me-down Spider-man lunchbox filled with these cards that we’d find strewn across major avenues on our walks to and from school. We collected them like baseball cards.

“Who do you think is gonna be there tonight?” I asked, raising my arms to pull my ponytail tight inside its scrunchie.

St. Agnes was close enough to our block that if we stood on our tiptoes, we could spot the top of the Big Eli once it had been erected. Kelly and I had been baptized as infants at St. Agnes’ and attended religious instruction classes there since kindergarten. But we were on the literal wrong side of the Long Island Railroad tracks to go to school there, in the northern half of Woodside, with better transit options but darker skin tones. To the south of the LIRR, past the mechanic shops and auto yards, homes grew taller and statelier, sprouting side lawns of fresh grass and backyards with vegetable gardens. Woodside grew into Maspeth there, an Irish-, Italian-, and German-American enclave of Queens where SUVs were parked in double-wide driveways and kids played Manhunt after dark without fear of much more than their shadow.

“I heard Nicky Gargiullo got back from Sicily last weekend,” Kelly said, tugging on her Bugs Bunny embroidered denim shorts that hung loose around her swayback waist.

Kelly and I had crushes on many of the boys from these families, and Nicky Gargiullo was king. There was virtually no girl who’d met Nicky Gargiullo and didn’t immediately go weak in the knees and start scribbling his name in hearts in the back of their notebook. He had perfectly gelled hair, a sparkling diamond stud in his left ear, a St. Anthony medallion dangling on a thin silver chain around his neck where soft blond hairs sprouted down his spine like a fawn. He always smelled like fabric softener exhaust from the laundromat down our block: like blue bottles of Downy and Saturday nights, when Mami would blow dry my hair straight with dollops of Dippity-Doo.

“Who told you that?” I asked, smoothing down flyaways at my temples. “Who told you he’s back?”

Kelly shrugged and reached into her pocket to pull out and count the crumpled dollar bills she was bringing to the fair. It seemed to me she was doing it more to make sure the money was still there, the way boys grabbed the crotch of their sweatpants in gym class.

“That kid, Brian,” she said.

Brian’s family had moved into the basement apartment of the small building around the corner from where we lived. When Mami came to Kelly’s one evening to drag me home for dinner, I heard her whispering to Louise about the Vargases having arrived from Bolivia, as if the word itself were a threat, as if Mami hadn’t moved here from Puerto Rico, or Kelly’s dad from Colombia.

“I didn’t know you talk to him,” I said, a twinge of jealousy in my chest.

“I don’t talk to him, Brisma,” she said as a car horn blared at the green traffic light up ahead. “I just spoke to him. Once or twice.”

Brian went to our school, but was in an ESL class. He had joined the basketball team at St. Agnes, too, though we never saw him at mass on Sundays.

“He speaks English?” I asked.

Kelly rolled her eyes.

“I guess so?” she threw her hands up. “I sure wasn’t speaking Spanish.”

I felt the unresolved questions I still had about Timothy, the eighteen-year-old boarder in Kelly’s house, catch inside my throat, so I chose instead to listen to the cars barreling down Clement Moore Avenue, rubber tires rolling over metal plates NYNEX installed in the road.

Timothy had finally moved out of the tiny extra room he’d been renting from Kelly’s Irish-Colombian family since he was expelled from Monsignor McClancy for “unbecoming behavior.” Kelly’s mom Louise enjoyed the extra bit of cash and the handsome face around the house after her husband Julián had moved back to Medellín, leaving her alone with four kids to feed in the house she’d grown up in.

Mami and I had watched through the venetian blinds in our living room as Timothy packed his stuff into a white Ford Explorer one morning. Mami explained, her chin knocking against my shoulder as she shook her head in pity, that he got his GED and secured a job in Mount Vernon as a nursing home attendant. Kids came from all over the city to attend Monsignor McClancy, and rumor had it, Timothy had already been offered a full ride to play basketball for Seton Hall. That was supposed to be Timothy’s future. For him to end up working in a nursing home, despite everything I knew he’d done to Kelly during his six months in the Cortez house, still didn’t make any sense to me. Mami sucked her teeth and agreed it was “no place for a jung man with his whole life ahead of him.”

After the incident in their basement, when Timothy attacked us for playing with his clean boxers on the clothesline, Kelly told me she confessed to her mother everything that had been going on between them: the kissing, the touching, the games, the “practice.” Louise listened to Kelly, not breaking eye contact as she slid a fresh cigarette out of her pack and lit it with a rose-engraved Zippo that she flicked on by snapping it against the side seam of her black jeans. (She wore black jeans every day, she said, “in case Aunt Flo reared her ugly head.”) Louise had inhaled when Kelly was done and asked her with one of her penciled eyebrows cocked: “So?”

She exhaled the smoke with a deep, phlegmy laughter that grew in intensity.

“You think,” she’d coughed out. “You think you are special?”

Kelly said she heard her laughing through their broken French doors while she tried to fall asleep that night. It was the last time Kelly mentioned Timothy’s name to me—she hadn’t even mentioned it when he moved out.

We stopped at the corner to wait for the walk sign and start the trek across the twelve-lane Queens Boulevard when a Toyota Corolla slowed down in front of us, blasting a Cover Girls song. Dance music had just returned to the local KTU radio station, and freestyle was once again everywhere. A man with tight baby-oiled curls and hairy arms leaned over and puckered his lips at us.

“Mamita, I like those legs, honey.”

He didn’t have to shout. He was driving closely and slowly enough for us to hear every word over “Show Me You Really Love Me.” I didn’t know if he was talking to one or to both of us, but I shrank underneath hunched shoulders in my holographic-printed baby tee and curled my toes inside my white shell-top sandals, looking east down the boulevard at oncoming traffic.

Kelly, on the other hand, bent down to pick up a pebble resting in the tacky rubber cracks of the cement sidewalk and launched it at his side-view mirror. It didn’t crack the glass, but I heard it bounce off his exterior.

He had perfectly gelled hair, a sparkling diamond stud in his left ear, a St. Anthony medallion dangling on a thin silver chain around his neck where soft blond hairs sprouted down his spine like a fawn.

“Shut the fuck up!” Kelly screamed, her voice breaking on the cuss, veins swollen in her neck; so much anger coming from such a tiny body.

“Fuckin’ bitch,” we heard him mutter before accelerating his NOS-fueled engine down the road and onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway ramp, drowning out the beats from his stereo.

We’d been getting catcalled since we were eight, when I started developing the tiniest curve of what would become my fourth grade B-cup breasts. We’d already learned to raise our voices when anyone got too close to us on the sidewalk, or to tuck into a neighbor’s yard so that no one would be able to track us home and return to stalk us later on.

I turned to Kelly, who was once again tugging up her Bugs Bunny shorts. She had already turned her attention back to the crosswalk, dusting off dirt from her hands on her back pockets.

“Good aim,” I said.

She chuckled.

“Too bad. I loved that song,” she said.

“Do you realize?” I asked as we stepped onto Queens Boulevard. “We’re gonna be fifth graders this year. We’re gonna rule the school!”

Grease had become our favorite movie that summer, and fully aware that I would never be Kelly, I desperately wanted to be Rizzo. I quoted her lines from the movie in everyday conversation, as if the words were an incantation, as if they held some magic that could one day make me as cool and tough as she was. Kelly and I weren’t exactly popular. We were part of a divorced kids support group named Project Friend that met every Tuesday (or Wednesday, or Thursday) afternoon—whenever one of us needed to “talk.” In reality, we used it as an opportunity to get out of class and play cards and dance to songs by Selena and Madonna and Mariah.

“Yeah,” Kelly beamed. “I know.”

She swung around the streetlight pole on one of the median islands and slapped it once for emphasis.

“And this is the year I’m going to make Nicky Gargiullo my boyfriend.”

*

Kelly ripped the cash out of my hands and slapped it down on the ticket counter along with her wad of crumpled bills.

“Let’s start slow,” she said, eyelids low, urging me to act cool.

I nodded.

“Work our way up,” I said, nodding behind her at the brown potato sacks flying down the enormous yellow slide in the middle of the parking lot—by far, the worst attraction that year. Our strategy was to build up to the Red Baron, a see-saw of sorts that not only twirled twin cabins around in circles, each cabin also somersaulted on its own axis. Watching it spin as I climbed the steps to the slide made my own stomach churn.

From the line at the top of the yellow slide, we could see the entire layout of the fair. Kelly managed to spot Nicky Gargiullo waiting to board the Tilt-A-Wheel in the thick of a crowd of Italian boys, silver chains glinting in the twilight. My stomach lurched again, nervous at the sight of his peach-ripe cheeks, fresh off of two months of sun and travel through a world beyond our expressway-bound borough.

“Killing Me Softly” was playing over the speakers, and Kelly grabbed my hand.

“Follow me,” she said, plopping her skinny legs out in front of her on the plastic slide.

“One,” she said, as I hurriedly pulled the rough burlap over my legs. “Two . . . ”

Kelly pushed off, tugging me along. Lauryn Hill hit the bridge and we sang the note together. It felt like freedom to fly down like that, in unison. It felt like we were cruising in from the clouds, like we were making our debut to an adoring crowd below.

As I was heavier and taller than her, the gravity of my sack catapulted Kelly farther out than me onto the ground ahead of us at the bottom of the slide. We laughed about it and checked, out of the corners of our eyes, to see if anyone—Nicky—had caught our duet down the slide.

I stumbled getting up off the wobbling plastic, and felt my stomach gurgling again. When I lifted the sack to return it to the pimple-faced line attendant, I noticed a slick black stain on it. With a dread that reverberated from my tailbone to my temples, I reached around and touched the seat of my shorts. Wet.

Immediately, I snatched the burlap sack back and pinched it around my waist. I elbowed Kelly in the ribs where she stood flirting with the gawky fifteen-year-old attendant. More practice, I caught myself thinking.

“Kelly,” I shout-whispered through clenched teeth. “I shit my pants!”

I cleared my throat and shuffled a step closer.

“I think I shit my pants!”

Kelly’s eyes bulged and she opened her mouth wide to laugh, shoving her own sack to the attendant’s chest before turning to leave.

“Again?” she asked.

I had soiled my pants once in Kindergarten, on the day I transferred out of my ESL class. I was terrified to find myself there, and so was Mami. She purposely hadn’t taught me Spanish at home to avoid the fate she’d experienced as a new student in Bushwick back when Abuelita brought her here from Isabella Segunda as a seventh grader. After bumbling through the few Spanish phrases I did know, the school figured it out and placed me in Kelly’s class, but not before I’d been so nervous to speak up that I held off going to the bathroom until I literally couldn’t hold it anymore. Kelly, recognizing me from the block, offered me her sweater to tie around my waist, and we were friends ever since.

I had soiled my pants once in  Kindergarten, on the day I transferred out of my ESL class. I was terrified to find myself there, and so was Mami.

“No,” I swatted her wrist as we exited the slide area. “My stomach,” I tried to explain, gesturing to my belly button, but Kelly was already laughing. “Shut up, let’s go!”

She followed, but laughed so hard while jogging up to me that when I turned to enter the church basement bathroom, she was doubled over at the corner of the rectory, trying to catch her breath in front of where a Mary-on-the-half-shell was planted.

I hobbled down the dark marble steps to the girls’ bathroom and, safely locked inside a stall, pulled my pants down, expecting to be met with a crotch full of shit. But I found, instead . . . what looked like grape jelly and the contents of an old packet of ketchup.

“Oh my god,” I declared, my mind racing with contrasting commercial images of elegant blue liquid pouring onto white cotton and the mimeographed worksheets from Sex Ed that diagrammed the angry goat of the female reproductive system. Everything felt like a lie, a letdown. At least Louise had called “Aunt Flo” ugly. The truth was right there, facing me from between my knees: the biological garbage of my uterus.

Kelly, still giggling, pinballed into the bathroom and broke out into a full cackle again when she heard my voice still mumbling, “Oh my god.” She locked herself in the stall beside me, but I could smell that she had already pissed herself, at least a little, probably back when I saw her doubled over at the rectory. It was not uncommon for Kelly to do this when she was particularly excited; she’d stained enough furniture in our house that Mami had tried and failed for a while to confine us to the kitchen when she came over.

“I made it,” she banged an open palm on the metal wall separating us.

“Kelly,” I said. “I think I got my first period.”

I heard her wrap a mitten of toilet paper around her fist as she reined in her laughter.

“No, you didn’t,” she said, her voice dismissive. “You shit your pants.”

“I thought I did,” I replied. “But this shit . . . it’s red!”

“So maybe your ass is bleeding.”

We both started laughing again, an infectious high taking over our shared embarrassment of the absurdity of our bodies’ betrayals, when I heard her flush the toilet.

“I’m not even eleven!” I said, wiping at the crotch of my panties with one-ply.

“My panties are ruined,” Kelly said as the lid to the metal trash receptacle whined open. I heard her drop the wet fabric inside the brown wax paper lining with a crinkle and a thud.

“Uh,” I unspooled fresh toilet paper from the roll and folded the long sheet into a tidy stack to sit inside my underwear. “I’m not exactly springtime fresh over here, either.”

We decided our best bet was to make a run for it through the double door exit we’d entered through, down the street, to the new twenty-four-hour laundromat where we could swipe some new bottoms, or at least something large enough to wrap around our waists and conceal each of our messes until we got home.

But just as we passed the exit, we nearly collided with Joey Catania, the beefiest of Nicky’s boys, and the widely-accepted bodyguard and protector of his popular holiness. I could see he’d grown a faint shadow of a mustache above his top lip since class ended in the spring.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he smiled at us with his palms outstretched. “Where you goin’, Speedy Gonzales?”

I wasn’t sure which one of us he was insulting, but Kelly chose to ignore it instead of throwing the nearest projectile.

“I’m not feeling well,” I announced, immediately regretting it. We clearly had just left the bathroom, and these boys would be all too willing to fill in the blanks.

“I think the clams are bad,” I continued, as if that would help.

Kelly looked at me. Why couldn’t I shut up?

Joey laughed, along with his cronies, Nicky Gargiullo, and the Bolivian boy, Brian. I wondered what he’d had to do to be accepted by the rest of these CYO boys. I wondered if he’d caught the Speedy Gonzales comment, and how the white boys felt they could get away with those kinds of insults even with a South American in their crew. Joey patted Brian’s chest as if to say, “watch this,” and turned suddenly to snap the potato sack off my waist.

“Did you forget something?” Joey asked. “Or is this,” he gestured to my waist, “a new fashion statement?”

The boys snickered behind him, and I prayed that nothing had seeped out the front of my pants in the rush up the stairs from the bathroom. No one pointed or laughed any harder, though, so I figured I was in the clear.

“Fuck off,” I said to him. “Why do you care?”

Proud that I set off a chorus of boos and oohs from the boys in the crowd, I backed away slowly, when Kelly lunged forward and stole the Coke can out of Joey’s hand and the strawberry Slurpee out of Nicky’s.

Before I could raise my arms to shield myself, Kelly dumped both drinks over my head, to an even louder chorus of jeers.

“Ohh shit,” Nicky clapped his hands together before covering his snickering mouth.

The liquid was cold and sticky as it congealed, creating a vacuum-seal of my fabric against my skin. I glared at Kelly, enraged that she would use me for an opportunity to impress these herbs. I felt my arm tensing to punch her in the jaw, when I realized that she was tilting her head at an odd angle and widening her eyes at me. She wanted me to retaliate.

“Don’t you talk that way to him!” she shouted too loudly, performing for our audience.

“You,” I started, the Coke trickling down the crack of my ass. “You fucking bitch!”

I stepped wide and grabbed Brian’s Mountain Dew from his hands and pulled Kelly’s slack waistband away from her belly. I squeezed the paper cup and the soda and ice exploded down the front of her shorts and onto her bare legs, leaving electric green streaks of corn syrup on her skin. Her eyes were wild again, the same wildness as when she dug into the earth of the abandoned lot, to bury Timothy’s boxers in our dugout. She threw her head back and charged at me, emitting a squealing, antagonistic laughter, as she shoved me onto my heels, as if tagging me to follow her down the steps, past the crowd of pre-adolescent boys doused in their own weather system of Cool Water and perspiration, and I did, praying all the while that no one would notice the original stains on either of our outfits.

In the laundromat across the boulevard, I grabbed my knees, trying to breathe through a stitch in my side. I pulled out a soggy string of green tickets from my front pocket.

“You owe me ten bucks,” I told Kelly.

She grabbed them from me and threw them in an active dryer.

“There,” she said. “I think we’re even.”