I Have Lost My Way(23)

“So how do we keep that from happening?” Mom asked.

“That brings us to fame,” Hayden said, ignoring her. “Sometimes, if you’re talented, if you have that something extra, and if you’re surrounded by the right people, you stand a shot at breaking out of that loop. Out of celebrity, which is ephemeral . . .” Here he exploded his hands wide open, his bird fingers soaring to the heavens. “And into fame, which is eternal.”

Hayden’s phone began to ring, rattling on the desk. The screen flashed Lulia, as if the universe wanted to confirm what Hayden had said.

“Fame,” Hayden continued. “That’s what I do. I create fame. But only under the right circumstances, with the right artists. Those who are talented enough. And hungry enough.” Here he stopped to look at me. “The question is: Are you hungry enough?”

I had no idea if I was hungry enough, what that even meant, what he was promising. But I had understood one thing. Your numbers will drop. Your fans will forget you. I knew what that meant.

“Are you hungry enough?” Hayden repeated.

Mom and Sabrina spoke as one, answering, as they always did, for me. “We are,” they said.





THE ORDER OF LOSS


PART VI





HARUN



I found James because of a dollar bill and lost him because of a fifty. Which is oversimplifying, but how else do you explain something as inexplicable as love?

“Yo. You drop this?” I looked up. There was James, holding up a crumpled dollar bill.

“I don’t think so,” I stammered. It was my first week at the community college, and though the campus was small and in the city where I’d spent all my life, I was lost. Clutching my schedule and map, I was trying to find the building my statistics class would be held in.

I looked up from my printed schedule and saw his face for the first time. Everything about him seemed to suggest warmth: the glow of his dark skin, the goatee that made him look like he wore a permanent smile, the brown eyes, twinkling, like he was in on the best joke.

“Where you need to be?” he asked me.

And I had the strangest thought: Right here is where I need to be.

James grabbed the schedule. “You’re at Newkirk. You need building G, on the other side of Bergen. Lemme show you,” he said, and took me by my elbow, which subsequently caught fire.

I paid no attention in statistics that day. I just rubbed my still-tingling elbow and thought of the boy with the laughing eyes whose name I did not even catch and whom I would likely never see again. So when I came out of the building and saw him leaning against the bike racks, my first thought was that it was a miracle. Then I remembered it couldn’t possibly be that. But when he asked me if I wanted to grab a coffee, it did seem like some sort of divine intervention.

We talked for two hours straight, pausing only to breathe. James told me he was in his second year of school, studying food management in hopes of becoming a chef. He watched cooking shows obsessively, and could take any five ingredients and turn them into something delicious. He was an only child, raised by his mom, until one weekend she dropped him off with his father and never came back. He’d recently moved out of his father’s house, and was now crashing with a cousin in the Heights while he figured things out.

I told James that I was studying business and accounting in hopes of one day taking over—or, if Ammi had anything to say about it, expanding—my parents’ auto supply business. I told him how Abu had gotten a green card from the lottery when he was nineteen, arriving at JFK with one suitcase. For ten years, he worked three jobs, sometimes twenty-hour days, sending money home each month and saving what he could until he had enough to buy a business. Only then did he go back home to find a wife.

I told him about Ammi, moving to a strange land to live with a husband she barely knew, arriving in winter, and feeling assaulted by the cold. She had cried every day and hadn’t left the house until she saw the first crocus, at which point she’d walked to Abu’s store and asked him to give her something to do. He’d taught her to do his accounting, and now she did it for so many businesses she had to turn down work. Abu sometimes joked that it was a good thing they were married, otherwise she’d have no time for his books.

At six, Ammi texted, wanting to know where I was. James and I exchanged phone numbers, and the rest of the week, we kept up the conversation via texts.

“Who’re you texting?” Halima asked.

The lie flew out automatically. “Jabir.”

“Is that a new friend from school?” Ammi asked.

“Yes,” I said. That night, I changed James’s name in my contacts to Jabir and started deleting his texts at the end of each day.

We met for coffee again, at my suggestion, away from campus, in one of those expensive cafés on the walking mall.

“You seeing anyone?” James asked me casually.

“Not at the moment,” I said.

“Not at the moment?” he repeated, a teasing drawl, as if he already knew the truth.

“I’ve never . . . seen anyone,” I admitted. “I’ve never done anything . . . with anyone.”

For a second, I was scared he’d laugh at me, or reject me, but he just ran his finger across the rim of his coffee mug, nodding, as if it all made sense to him, as if I made sense to him.