What to Say Next(16)

“It was just a freak thing,” Jack says, right on cue.

It’s wrong that his words so precisely echo my father’s. He uses the same empty refrain. For the first time I hear the lie implicit in them. Realize how the freakishness does nothing to lessen the reality. It’s a misdirection. It’s a verbal sleight of hand.

Not the truth. Not truth at all.

—

That night, my mom comes into my room to tuck me in, something she hasn’t done in a long time, maybe years. These days we’ve been falling asleep mid-activity, stuffed with too much takeout. We just keep going until our bodies shut off.

“Sweetie?” My mom sits next to me on my bed, which makes the covers too tight across my neck. I don’t ask her to shift over. I’ve taken four Advil to get rid of this unidentifiable feeling, a shaky emptiness, but Advil doesn’t treat whatever this is. “I ran into Violet’s mom today on the train.”

“Yeah? She mention curry?” I ask, as if I have no idea what’s coming next. Of course it was only a matter of time before one of my friends said something to their mom and their mom said something to my mom. Like how we used to play the game telephone as kids and whisper secrets from ear to ear.

My mom laughs at my nonjoke.

“Not this time. But she said that Violet told her you haven’t been sitting with the girls at lunch.” My mom smoothes down my hair, which is two shades lighter than hers. I’ve always wanted to color mine dark brown so we could match.

When I was little, I was convinced that my mom was actually a superhero. That Mandip Lowell was just a secret identity; that every night, after I went to sleep, she’d spend her evenings fighting crime, kicking bad guys with a loud hi-yah! Now I think she could totally play one of those too-pretty cops on a network television drama. The kind that sprint down dead-end alleys on a studio set. Prop gun raised and pointed: Stop or I’ll shoot.

She’s tough, my mother. And she can run in heels.

Though let’s be honest. She’s much more likely to be cast as a terrorist or a head-wagging taxi driver or a convenience store clerk. We don’t often get to see people who look and sound like her on television.

“It’s no big deal, Mom. I just needed a little space.” She nods like she gets it. And maybe she does.

“I can’t stand the thought of you sitting alone.”

“I’ve been sitting with this guy, David Drucker? He’s okay.”

“David Drucker? Amy’s son? He used to be an odd duck.” She tugs at my hair with her finger and it springs right back into a wave. No doubt my mother is disappointed when she looks at me, her only child. Beautiful women are supposed to have beautiful daughters. At the very least, I bet she thought I’d turn out “exotic,” an obnoxious word that every biracial person has heard like a million times. Though in my case, it’s never really applied. My parents’ features have come together to form someone easily forgettable. My skin is just brown enough that in this superwhite suburb, people sometimes are rude enough to ask me, “What are you?” They seem disappointed when I don’t say Latina, which is everyone’s first guess. Like figuring out my ethnicity is some sort of fun game.

“You used to go to David’s birthday parties when you were little,” my mom says.

“He’s still totally weird, but it turns out he might be good-weird, you know?” I look at my mom and think about how there are no brown superheroes and about the fact that I’m probably too chubby to be on television. Maybe I should straighten my hair. Darken it too. Spend a little bit more time in the sun. That way my mom and I could look more alike. Without my father standing next to us, we don’t make that much sense together.

I want to tell her David was Dad’s patient, but I can’t say that word out loud: Dad.

“Really? So you want to start playing with David again?” My mom raises her eyebrows.

“It’s not like that.”

“Is he still cute?”

I find myself smiling up at the ceiling in the dark. And I almost laugh out loud, because of all the guys in my school, of all the guys in the whole wide world, I’m thinking about David Drucker. The oddest of ducks.

He is cute.

Sort of.

But he’s still David Drucker.

“Any port in a storm, my love. Any port in a storm,” my mom says, and laughs.





I cross my fingers. Childish, yes. And of course irrational. I am not superstitious. I don’t believe in made-up things like fate. I believe in science. In what we can see and feel and calculate with well-calibrated instruments. Still, three days in a row of Kit sitting at my table seems like the probability equivalent of flipping a coin a hundred times and consistently getting heads. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen.

No doubt I said something accidentally offensive yesterday, as I’m prone to do, and we will no longer be friends, if you can classify sitting together twice and talking in the bleachers as friendship. I do, of course, but I’m sure Kit has a higher tipping point. I recounted our conversation verbatim to Miney, and she said that under no circumstances should I ever talk about a girl’s weight again, even if they bring it up first. She was so adamant about this that she made me put it in the Rules section of my notebook.

As a corollary, there is also only one correct answer when a girl poses the question Do I look fat?