“Hey,” I say as I approach Phil’s table for another evening of tutoring. He’s been waiting for me for thirty minutes while I finished my shift at the Idle Hour.
Phil pushes a chair forward for me.
As I sit down, I see a slice of chocolate cake with two forks resting on the plate. I smile at Phil.
“Chocolate cake is like our tradition, so …” he starts.
“So two times officially equals tradition?”
“Well, football players are superstitious creatures of habit.”
“I thought that was only for game days.”
“It is,” Phil says, dimple bared as he grins.
“Well, who am I to flout tradition?” I look away. “Plus, you know, cake is pretty much my favorite thing,” I add, raising a forkful to my mouth.
“Cake, not barfi?” Phil asks.
I’m gobsmacked. I look up. My eyes widen. “The barfi? You remember that?”
“Of course. Though the name is kind of unfortunate.”
I laugh. “Tell me about it. Like, every boy in the class started calling me ‘barfy’ or making barf jokes. But when you took one of the sweets and ate it. It, like, shut them up. I never forgot that.”
I’m not lying when I say this. I was seven and made the colossal mistake of asking my mom to bring my favorite Indian dessert to school for my birthday. Phil eating the barfi might not seem like a big deal, but to a quiet girl who was shrinking into herself with every “barfy” shout-out, Phil walking up and taking one little square of almond paste and sugar and popping it into his mouth was a lifeline.
Phil looks at the floor for a second and then back at me. “I think I ate, like, eight of them. Total sweet tooth.”
I smile. He smiles. There is smiling.
I know I shouldn’t read into Phil’s memory. The fact is, barfi is a pretty memorable word. Also, fact: two days ago, Violet and I spied Phil and Lisa kissing, and apparently making up, in an alcove by art class. I guess sometimes a barfi is just a barfi. Except when you have my imagination. Then it’s … more.
“So you guys look busy today.” Phil’s voice snaps me back to the present.
“It’s a Sunday night bookstore rager. Not like there’s anything else to do in this town.”
“You really don’t like living here, do you?”
“There are things I love about it. My friends. This place. But I want to be in New York already. You know, a place where I can live and do what I want and not be the Indian girl or the Muslim girl. A place where I can just be me.”
“Do you really feel that different here?”
“I am different. I mean, literally; we’re the only Indian Muslim family in town.”
Phil taps his pencil against his cheek. “I never thought of it that way. To me, you’ve always been the girl who knows the right answers.”
“Funny, because I don’t even know all the questions.”
“Really? What don’t you know?” Phil asks.
I hesitate, choose my words deliberately. “I guess I don’t know how to live the life I want and still be a good daughter.”
“Can’t you do both?”
“I wish. I want to go to NYU. My parents want me to go to school close to home. They want me to be a lawyer and learn to cook and marry a nice Indian doctor and—”
“You want to make movies. Like you did for class.”
“What?”
“You did three movie projects for health class. Health class. A class that requires barely any work. Like for the whole tobacco will kill you unit? You made that movie with all those clips about the smoker from The Breakfast Club …”
“Judd Nelson,” I name the actor for Phil. I’m in disbelief because Phil has memories of me. Plural. As in, more than one image encoded in his brain.
“I thought Mr. Chandler was going to die.”
“Yeah. He called it ‘highly unusual.’ For some reason he gave me an ‘A,’ anyway.”
“Of course he did. It was awesome.” Phil pauses after he says this. He looks at me. “I actually downloaded The Breakfast Club after that. My mom loves that movie, so she watched it with me. She sang along to the credits. That was embarrassing.”
I laugh. “Oh, my God. I can’t imagine watching anything with my parents that mentions drugs or even has PG kissing. We mostly watch old Indian movies together. Ancient ones.”
“There’s no kissing in Indian movies?”
“Back in the day, it was totally banned. Not so much anymore, but there’s still limits. I tried to talk to my mom about how there are all these contradictions in Indian culture. I mean, if you have a real hard-core arranged marriage, you basically have sex with an almost stranger, but modesty is this huge part of the culture, too …” And I’ve managed to bring up sex again.
Silence. An unbearably long silence. “So are you … I mean … do your parents have a guy picked out for you already?” he asks.
I burst out laughing and give him a little kick under the table. “No. I’m only in high school.”
“Good.” He seems to relax, which makes me light-headed.
“Besides, my parents had a love marriage—”
“A love marriage?”
“When you meet someone and fall in love and decide to get married. In India, it’s called a love marriage.”
Of course he’s confused. What non-desi wouldn’t be? Still, he continues gamely. “You mean dating, getting engaged—”
“In secret. It’s a lot more common for Indian Muslims here, I guess. It’s basically a don’t ask, don’t tell policy for dating.”
Phil nods and looks down at the cake. “So, um, does that mean you can’t date?” Somehow we’ve both managed to forget about eating.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell only applies to proper Indian Muslim boys. With limits.” I take a deep breath.
Phil glances up. “But that’s not how you want to do it?”
“No. I don’t want to hide anything, and I don’t want something … expected. I want to go to film school and be the first Indian American to win an Oscar, and then I can meet the One and fall in big, heart-bursting love, and we’ll travel the world, my camera ready to capture our adventures.” My cheeks flush; I know I’m blushing, but I can’t bring myself to shut up. “Oh, my God. I want my future life to be a cheesy romantic comedy.”
He shakes his head. “No,” he says. “You want it to be an epic.”
I nod. He stares back at me without blinking. And it’s not creepy at all. It’s perfect.
My phone rings. I jump from my seat. Suddenly our moment has a club-thumping Bollywood soundtrack. Maybe I should think about changing my ringtone.
I squirm, frantically checking the screen. It’s my mom. Of course it is. I let it go to voice mail and shoot her a quick text to give her my ETA.
When I turn back to Phil, he has picked up his own phone and is also furiously texting … someone. He doesn’t make eye contact.
There’s a charge in the space between us. Of course, the likeliest source of this electricity is my overactive imagination because right now he’s probably texting Lisa, making plans to meet up after this, to which she will respond with a string of heart emojis. I keep forgetting that the reason everyone seems to like Phil is because when he talks to you, he makes it seem like you’re the only person in the world even when it’s only polite chitchat. And I can’t even blame him, because it’s not pretense; it’s just being a nice guy.
I’m quiet while he finishes texting. He grins at his phone before putting it away. “What are you doing over spring break?”
The charge is gone. Like I thought, polite chitchat. I shrug. “Not much.” I think of Kareem, the date I’ve agreed to go on. I wonder if Phil is thinking about Lisa even as he listens politely to me. “My parents can’t shut down their office for vacation, so I’ll be stuck in Batavia, editing film clips, inhaling copious amounts of ice cream. Violet wants me to go to Paris with her and then just pop over to the south of Spain for a couple days to try and get some beach time. Of course, my parents would never let me go. Anyway, I’m not a beach person.”
He blinks at me, as if this doesn’t compute. “You don’t like the beach?”
“I get antsy just lying around, and I can’t really swim and—”
“You can’t swim? Seriously?”
Why can’t I keep my mouth shut? I’m always having to explain my life. I hate explaining, but out it comes. “When my mom was young and on holiday in Bombay, she saw this girl get swept out to sea by a huge wave. So when my dad tried to teach me, my mom was constantly hovering with a life preserver in hand. I couldn’t deal with her anxiety, so I gave up … We don’t take beach vacations, anyway …”
Phil sits back in his chair, disbelief written all over his face. I cross my arms in front of my chest, my standard defensive position.
“I’m going to teach you.”
“No. No. I can’t. You can’t—”
“I can. Literally.” He’s not letting me off the hook. “You know, I lifeguard at the Y in summer, and swimming is a necessary life skill. I can teach you. I want to.”
I nod along, but regret every word that has slipped out of my mouth. I don’t even own a swimsuit, something Violet teases me about relentlessly.
“It’ll be fun. I promise. I won’t let a rogue wave take you.” Phil smiles, giving rise to the irresistible dimple. Maybe I don’t want him to let me off the hook.
“Stop smiling. Fine. I’ll do it, but I’m not going to be happy about it.”
“Great. The weather’s actually supposed to be hot next week. We should take advantage of global warming while we can.”
“Don’t you have something better to do with your time than watching me potentially drown?” I’m hoping for one very specific answer, but then the image of him kissing Lisa in the art alcove pops to mind.
“I usually go to Michigan with Lisa’s family, but not this time.” Phil stares out the big plate-glass window. Then he turns back to me and says, “I guess I get to be the tutor now.”
The late-morning sun makes him squint. He hates driving east on the freeway at this hour. He leans forward in the driver’s seat, gripping the steering wheel with sweaty palms. There’s hardly any traffic. Or maybe he just doesn’t notice it. His heart beats loudly in his ears. Voices fill his head.
The repetitive, barely audible prayers of his mother.
The rasp of his father’s demands to do something with his life.
The bark of the nasty woman, telling him he wasn’t needed for a second interview, thank you very much.
The calm whisper of the instructor: relax your shoulders, drop your elbows.
The talking heads in the basement. Sweat-beaded faces, lips moving all at once.
And a lone voice of encouragement: the middle school teacher who gave him a gold star. He remembers the teacher’s name. But he won’t allow himself to say it out loud or allow it to linger in his memory. He forces the teacher from his mind.
No time for sentimentality.
He eyes himself in the rearview mirror.
There is no turning back.