From Twinkle, With Love(2)
Meanwhile, I’m like, maybe I’ll waitress/travel after high school? Or go to film school at USC if I can get a scholarship? Or live in my parents’ house forever, decrying the death of the arts?
Maybe that’s why our friendship is as doomed as the Globe Theatre. Maybe I’m not ambitious enough for Maddie. Or cool enough. Or confident enough. Or, or, or.
A lot of your films were about being on the outside looking in, Sofia. I wonder what advice you’d give me. How do I step over the threshold and join my best friend again?
Oh, crap. Mrs. Mears is giving me the evilicus eyeicus. I better go.
Still later on Monday, June 1
My room
Hi again, Sofia!
You’ll never believe who I saw today at Perk (full name: Perk Me Up Before I Go Go, but who has the time to say all of that?) drinking coffee and lounging like the half-Indian, half-white god he is.
Neil. Freaking. Roy.
It’s a travesty, but the only class we share right now is AP English. He’s pretty bad at it, for someone who’s definitely headed to Harvard. He once asked Ms. Langford why Hester in The Scarlet Letter didn’t run away from her town in basically a big F U to society. He implied she was being dumb. And I was like, Neil. How do you not get that Hester wants to stay there and find out what the scarlet A means to her? She clearly wants to try to determine her own identity in an agentic manner versus accepting one that’s forced upon her by a patriarchal society. I even opened my mouth to say that. But then I closed it. Being a human belonging to the wallflower genus, I’m kinda used to swallowing my words instead of speaking them. (Dadi says it’s because my aatma is made of gauze and feathers, whatever that means.) And anyway, this was Neil.
So when I saw him at Perk, I almost walked right into the display by the door, but I stopped myself just in time. He was sitting there, his legs splayed like he owned the place. Patrick O’Cleary and some of the other guys from the swim team were with him, too, all of them talking about the upcoming season and how Neil wouldn’t be at school because he was going to some pre-Olympic training camp for the rest of the month.
I love swim season. Neil, in swim trunks. Broad male shoulders glistening with water. The smell of chlorine. Neil, in swim trunks.
Okay. Here’s something I’ve never told anyone: My crush isn’t just because of Neil’s looks or his hypnotizing athleticism or the fact that he’s a future physicist genius. It’s because if someone like Neil Roy went out with me, the other silk feathered hat people would want to hang out with me too. Like Maddie. Maybe I’d come out of my shell, bringing my camera with me, and people would finally listen to the stories I have inside me. I’ve always felt like I was meant to be more than an invisible wallflower. This could be my ticket to an alternate life, Sofia, a way to become one of the insiders.
I walked up to the counter, overly aware that Neil was behind me now. Was my back sweaty? Was my T-shirt sticking to me? Could he see my cringesome ratty beige bra through it? Curse you, eighty-degree summer days, when I have to walk everywhere and live in a house with no AC. I casually loosened my braid so my hair could cover what my T-shirt might not. Then I tossed a strand over my shoulder and hazarded a look at his table.
Huh. He hadn’t even noticed me.
I deflated a little. I was that overlookable? I glanced around the café at the other silk feathered hats. None of them had noticed me, either. I deflated even more, until I was about half my original size.
My gaze passed over Neil’s identical twin brother, Sahil Roy, who apparently had noticed me and was now smiling, his face bright and happy. He sat at a table with his best friends, Skid (white, short, and wiry) and Aaron (the only black and openly gay person in our class; seriously, diversity, PPC. Look it up). They were being quieter—and geekier—than Neil’s group while discussing that new alien movie, which goes without saying. They’re total groundlings too. I smiled back.
“Can I help you?”
The thirtysomething mustachioed barista behind the counter was staring at me in a way that meant he’d probably had to ask that more than once. His name badge read STAN.
“Hi, Stan,” I said. “Can I get a small iced mocha? I have this.” Rummaging in my pocket, I fished out the coupon I’d gotten for winning an essay contest before winter break and handed it over.
He barely looked at it before handing it back. “It’s expired.”
“No, no, it’s not.” I pointed to the fine print, my palms getting sweaty even at this tiny amount of confrontation. “See? It says June first is the last day to claim this. And it’s June first.”
Stan’s mustache twitched spitefully as he pointed to the finer fine print. “See that? It says June first at five p.m. And it is now”—he checked his wristwatch—“five twenty-four p.m.”
Twenty-four minutes. He was denying me for a lousy twenty-four minutes. “Okay, Stalin,” I muttered as I stuffed the coupon back into my pocket.
He leaned toward me. “What did you say?” Oh God. His mustache quivered indignantly, almost independent of his face.
“Uh … nothing. I said, um, thanks, Sta-an.” I stretched his name into two syllables to make the lie more believable and smiled weakly.
“So, are you gonna get anything or not?” he asked, eyeing me like I was a bug he’d found swimming in his perfect coffee.