Kareem: The party wasn’t the same once you left.
Me: Awww, you say that to all the documentarians, don’t you?
Kareem: Only the cute, irreverent ones.
Rereading Kareem’s flirty texts in bed, I still feel the touch of his hand on my skin. It’s all a little cliché for my tastes—the words on the phone, the silly smile I can’t get rid of—but so is being seventeen and unkissed.
Kareem: So are you a doc film purist?
Me: I love old classics and foreign films, too. And I can always find something to mock in a blockbuster.
Kareem: In other words, you’re open to temptation.
Me: Totally depends on the tempter.
That dialogue! It’s even unfolding like a screenplay. We had the meet-cute, so I allowed us the full rom-com text treatment this weekend. Now it’s Monday morning and I’m second-guessing, right on schedule.
Staring up at Aishwarya Rai on the Bride and Prejudice poster above my bed—a typically well-meaning, completely misguided gift attempt from my mom—I hope I’m not getting ahead of myself. But maybe that’s the message my mother meant to send with the poster. “It’s a desi Pride and Prejudice! You love that book. But it’s better because there is singing and dancing!” She left out the part about obedient daughters and no kissing. The all-important subtext. She literally clapped when I agreed to hang it on my wall.
I sigh. “You probably always know what to say to the cute boy, don’t you, Aishwarya?” I whisper. “I mean you probably don’t even need to speak; you just bat your beguiling eyes—”
“Maya, come eat some breakfast before school,” my mom yells up.
I wonder if she heard me.
“Everyone at the party was telling me you’re so thin,” she adds.
There is no acceptable in-between for Hyderabadi moms. You’re either too skinny or a little too chubby.
I scurry to get ready. I pull on a favorite blue V-neck sweater over a pair of skinny jeans. I search through my jewelry box and come up with an orange-and-blue beaded choker and a pair of silver crescent-moon earrings—from Hina. I dab a little mineral bronzer on my cheeks and run a reddish-brown gloss over my lips.
Before I walk out of my room, I wink at Aishwarya, perpetually cool and confident. “Maybe there’s a kiss in my future after all, Aishwarya. Maybe lots of kissing.”
I don’t want to eat, but my mom hovers in the kitchen. She always hovers. I wolf down a little cereal for her benefit.
“Let me make you an omelet,” she says. “You’re skin and bones. Skin and bones.”
“I’m not hungry, and Violet’s going to be driving up any second.”
She waves a wooden spoon in her hand. “Not hungry? How can you go to school on two bites of cereal? You need to take care of yourself, beta. I’m not going to be here forever, you know. Then what will you do with no one to look after you? You can’t cook a thing.”
“That’s why God invented takeout.”
My mother blinks, her face blank. She should be used to my snark by now. These days, honestly, she just seems bewildered by me. I’m an eternal stranger forced to reintroduce myself to her one bon mot at a time. Lucky for me, the silence is broken by three telltale honks from the driveway: Violet. My escape.
“I’ll take an apple with me, okay? Don’t forget I’m working after school. I’ll need your car. Khudafis.” I’m halfway out the door.
“We need to put cooking on your biodata,” my mom yells after me. “No suitable boy will marry you if you can’t cook.”
“Counting on it,” I whisper to myself.
Music pulses from Violet’s vintage Karmann Ghia, a gift from her dad shortly after they moved to Batavia, Illinois, from New York City. The orange paint and vanilla interior remind me of a Creamsicle. Sometimes I have the urge to dart out my tongue and lick the hood and see if it tastes like summer.
Violet tosses her blonde hair over her shoulder and bats her eyelashes. This is Violet. She will flirt with anyone. Even me.
“How was the dance?” I ask. It’s a courtesy. I don’t need to fish for juicy gossip; I know Violet’s been chomping at the bit to tell me in person. “Did Mike fawn all over you?”
Violet rolls her eyes and backs out of the driveway. Mike’s been crushing on Violet since she moved here freshman year. Clearly the guy’s an optimist.
“You know you love the attention,” I tell her.
“You’re right, I do.” With a laugh, she shifts into drive and heads toward school. “But it got a little wild.” She’s still smiling. “You missed the fight.”
“The fight?” I repeat. My cinematic imagination immediately takes over. “As in droplets of blood bouncing off the well-buffed wood floor of the gym?”
She groans. “You should listen to yourself talk sometimes, Maya.”
“I know how brilliant I sound,” I shoot back dryly. “So what happened?”
“No blood, but plenty of drama.” Violet glances at me. “It was Phil and Lisa.”
My heart thumps a bit. “Phil?” I repeat, before realizing I neglected to add Lisa to my question.
Violet nods. “Apparently something is rotten in the state of super couplehood. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Lisa made a huge scene of stomping out of the gym during a slow dance.”
A flaw in the perfection of Phil and Lisa is like my parents allowing me to go to prom (even if I had a date)—impossible. I almost sit on my hands to prevent the ridiculous gesticulations I want to make. I am a whirling dervish of what-ifs.
“Maybe this means Phil will be available for prom.” Violet raises her eyebrows at me. “For a certain hot, yet unassuming, and often exacting Indian chick.”
“Whatever.”
“Well, why not?” Violet prods. “I mean, you’ve had a thing for him forever. Like, literally, forever.”
I shake my head. “I have not had a ‘thing’ for him for any amount of time. I may have said I thought he was hot once—”
“Revisionist,” Violet interrupts. “Saying Phil is hot is not a confession; it’s a profound grasp of the obvious. You like him like him. Admit it.”
Phil and I have known each other since kindergarten, but we’ve never been really close or even truly friends. Then in health class last semester, the teacher assigned us to be partners for a project on “Aging in America.” We had to record oral histories from senior citizens in a retirement home. I braced myself to do all the work. But Phil showed up and charmed everyone. I remember looking over at him talking to one of the oldest residents at the home. He held her hand and listened to her so intently and smiled at her with this dimple in his cheek. He charmed me, too.
Since then, he occasionally sidles up to me for a lunch-line chat while he chomps on a basket of cafeteria fries. The conversations aren’t deep or anything and only last five or six fries, but still, they leave me a little breathless and focusing a little too keenly on that dimple. I know better than to read into it. Phil is taken. Extremely. Or is he? Regardless, we inhabit separate planets.
I take AP classes and blast Florence + the Machine in my earbuds.
Phil is the quarterback and homecoming king. (Seriously. That’s what he is.)
And at Batavia High School, never the twain shall meet.
“I plead the Fifth,” I say finally. I look out the window. If I don’t change the subject, Violet’s enthusiasm will feed my tiny hopes, and I will implode from possibilities. And Phil is impossible. Beautiful and impossible. Through middle school he was this gawky and goofy kid with a cute smile. But every year since, he’s grown into himself. And grown on me. Especially since our health class project first semester.
“So who was this wedding guy you texted me about? Any actual details?”
By the time we reach school, I’ve shared all the flirty memories—about Kareem, not Phil—that I know will thrill Violet. Kareem’s whispers and innuendo, his hand on my back, the PG-13 suggestive texts we exchanged after the wedding.
She jerks to an abrupt halt in the parking lot and turns to face me. “He’s Indian, goes to Princeton, and took your number. And you’re not jumping out of your seat why?”
“And he’s Muslim,” I add for full effect.
“He sounds like your parents’ wet dream,” Violet says. Noting my disgust, she adds, “It’s a metaphor. All I’m saying is, he sounds perfect on paper. And he’s older, which is hot.”
I allow myself a smile. “Well, he’s definitely more available,” I admit. “And, suitable.”
“Suitable?” She laughs. “You sound like your mom.”
“I know. But all my iconoclastic eggs are in the NYU basket. I can’t fight my mom on every front.”
Violet shrugs and takes the keys out of the ignition. “One battle at a time. I get it.”
After filing in with the other kids, we drop our bags at our lockers and grab our books for first period.
I pause to look in my locker mirror and run a comb through my long hair. I don’t need to, since my hair is generally tangle free, but combing my hair has this calming effect on me. It’s a morning ritual.
My locker is decorated with a postcard of Edward from Twilight, circa 2008, courtesy of Phil, actually. Last semester, he heard me tell a friend in health class that I refused to see Twilight even though she considered it a classic. Phil jumped into the conversation to give me a hard time about it—he claimed that he liked it, after all—and the next morning, I found this postcard taped to my locker. On the back he wrote, Sparkly vampires rule. He didn’t sign his name, but when I looked around, he was at his locker watching, grinning.
It’s embarrassing to keep a public display of affection for … Edward, but I can never bring myself to get rid of it. So my answer to this unwarranted Team Edward affiliation was to identify with Team Kubrick. Specifically, the famous, terrifying scene from The Shining where Jack Nicholson’s demonic smile and bulging eyes appear through a splintered door. I positioned it so it looks like he is leering at Edward. Plausible deniability.
Below that is a Wilco concert poster. Of course, I’ve never been to a concert because I’m not allowed, but when I dream about going to a show, Jeff Tweedy is crooning his song, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.”
“Hey, Maya.”
I spy Phil’s reflection in my mirror. Hair artfully disheveled, grin adorably rakish, dimple bared.
I try to embody Aishwarya, hoping her elegance and nonchalance will rub off. “Oh, hey, Phil.” It works. I utter three perfect syllables. Total grace under pressure.
“Listen, uh, I, want to ask you a favor,” Phil says while tapping a pencil against his left cheek. “I’m wondering if you might …”
I wonder if he’s looking for Lisa, worried she’ll see us talking.
“Lay on, Macduff,” I say. I’m a bit terse. And I’m quoting Macbeth. I’m in high school. I have to stop quoting Shakespeare. At this rate, what will I have to look forward to in college?
“Can you help me with my independent study paper for Ms. Jensen’s class? I have to read The Namesake, and I thought—”
“You thought I’d know everything about it because I’m Indian?” His request catches me by surprise. A good surprise. But also totally annoying.
“No. I mean, maybe? Sorry … I didn’t mean … I know you like to read,” Phil stammers. It’s actually a little endearing to catch him off guard.
“I do love that book. The movie, too. But it’s not only because I’m Indian, you know? Like, do you like every movie that’s about football?”
“Every single one,” he says, without missing a beat, back to form. “Including documentaries.”
I start to laugh. “Okay.”
Phil grins. The dimple appears. “As in, okay, you’ll help me?”
I nod, looking down. I don’t want to stare. On the other hand, he’s staring at me.
“Hiya, Phil.” Violet materializes at my elbow. Loudly.
“Hey, Violet.”
“I’m walking Maya to first period. Unless, of course, you want to abscond with her?”
My head jerks back up. My mortification is complete.
“Sure,” Phil says. But he stumbles to correct himself, “I mean, no. I gotta get to class, too.”
I shut my locker, ready to escape. I turn to Violet. “Let’s go. See ya, Phil.” We start to walk away.
“So maybe tonight?” Phil calls after me.
I turn my head to look back at him. “I’m working at the bookstore until seven—”
“I’ll swing by then.”
A meet-cute with the suitable Indian boy. The hot football player at my locker. I feel queasy. I was joking with myself earlier, but now I’m wondering how it’s possible that I’ve stepped into the most predictable teen rom-com ever. How is this my real life?
But I go with it. My mind plays a slow-motion close-up of Phil walking down the hall. An improbable gust of wind ruffles his just-long-enough, perfectly mussed chestnut hair. Low-key lighting casts intriguing shadows in the hall, and my filmic version of Phil turns to look at me, his twinkling green eyes catching mine.
Sure, it’s all my imagination.
Except the last part.
He really did turn to look.
The sun rises over the motel parking lot.
He stands in the middle of the small, spare room in his underwear. Despite a recent shower, beads of sweat form above his lip and on his newly shaven head. He wipes his face with the threadbare motel towel and pulls on a pair of faded jeans and an army-green T-shirt. The shirt is loose on his wiry frame. A pair of black leather boots stand at attention by the side of the bed. The young man strides over to the dirty window and lifts it the full six inches it will rise. Bending down, he takes three quick breaths of the tar-infused air.
Outside, a garbage truck pulls into the lot. It groans and screeches with its task, mechanically swallowing the contents of a foul-smelling dumpster. Neither the sound nor the stench registers. For a moment he is only conscious of the trees in the distance, across the highway, their green tops swaying.