An Innocent Fashion (41 page)

I thought it must be my time to go.

I hadn't talked to God since Lola had died, when I had realized that if I didn't leave Corpus Christi, I would end up just like her. Back then, I had crawled into bed, hands clasped, and prayed, “
Please God, save me from this place.
” Now I bowed my head to the rain, and thought the exact same thing.
Please God, save me from this place—this world.
I thought it as loud as possible, hoping he could hear me above the New York City traffic.

I wondered if anyone in New York would even notice someone falling from the sky. Most likely they would be running to a meeting, or taking a cigarette break, picking up coffee or dry cleaning or an Alexander McQueen package from FedEx, and they would never notice. I'd get run over by ongoing traffic and cause a couple of taxi drivers to wonder, “
What was that bump?
” while rain pounded on the windshield and I got flattened into nothing. Edmund probably wouldn't know I'd even been to his apartment until a few months later when he was firing Rosita, and she asked in Spanish, “
Is that why I never saw him again, the boy with the glasses? Did you fire him too?
”

Maybe some people would know instinctually when I died, like a shudder would go through them or something—at least
my mom and dad, and Madeline, and Dorian—and years later they would tell the story to someone. My parents to each other, and Madeline to her kids, and Dorian to his own assistant, who worked for him at a big magazine. A story about how I came into their lives and left, bookended by, “
He was a beautiful person—he tried to do beautiful things.
”

And it occurred to me that, after all these years of chasing after it, I didn't even know what it meant—“beautiful.” I came to the city for as much as I could get, but maybe I just had no idea. I mean, girls in magazines were beautiful, right? That's what I had always thought, along with operas and sunsets, and certain rinds of fruit when they curled up, but right now—right now I wondered if I'd ever seen a beautiful thing at all.

I opened my eyes and the blurry ground rose up to meet me. I saw the whole ugly city swarming with people like life-sucking bacteria, except now, with the worst of it behind me, it didn't seem so bad—as though by unfocusing a microscope I had revealed something unexpected.

I took a breath. Maybe it just wasn't the right time yet. Maybe I should wait another day or two—to fall when the weather was better, when I could turn around and plummet backward with my eyes to the sky and the sun shining on my face. Edmund's roof would always be here waiting. I could come up here as many times as I needed—every day even, until I was ready . . .

And what? Prolong it all?

I looked up, and rain rushed into my eyes.

It had to be now.

Except the sky seemed so much closer now than it had ever been before. Five minutes.
I'll do it
, I told myself. Just let me stay alive for five more minutes, to look at the sky.

Pushing my hair back against my skull, I lowered myself into a sitting position over the ledge. My feet dangled, I laid back on my elbows and tilted my head up. I gazed at the clouds; let the water pour into my eyes and wash away my vision.

With a tiny shrug of my body, I relaxed, and fell to rest.

R. J. HERNÁNDEZ
is a writer living in New York City. He was raised in Miami by Cuban-American parents and graduated from Yale University in 2011. This is his first novel.

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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

AN INNOCENT FASHION.
Copyright © 2016 by R. J. Hernández. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hernández, R. J., 1989– author.

Title: An innocent fashion : a novel / R. J. Hernández.–Description: First edition. | New York : Harper Perennial, [2016] Identifiers: LCCN 2015037268| ISBN 9780062429544 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Young men—Fiction. | Fashion—Fiction. | Periodicals—Publishing—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Satire. | FICTION / Literary. Classification: LCC PS3608.E7676 I56 2016 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037268

EPub Edition July 2016 ISBN 9780062429612

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