Puddin'(45)

Malik.P99: Can I come see you?

My heart skips like one of Willowdean’s old Dolly Parton records.

aMillienBucks: Right now?

Malik.P99: I know it’s late.

I check the clock in the corner of my screen. It is super late. If my mom caught me with a boy this late at night, she would shriek until she turned into a pile of ashes before my very eyes.

aMillienBucks: be outside my house in an hour.

Malik.P99: Ok

I have never snuck out, but it’s time I start doing things I’ve never done before. And if Malik is going to go out on a limb, I’m willing to meet him.

I’m too nervous to duck out the front door, so I make plans to climb out my window. Thank goodness we live in a one-story.

I do a quick once-over in the mirror and cover up any major blemishes with concealer before adding my favorite tinted ChapStick. Once my parents are in their room and the hallway light is turned off, I brush my teeth, not bothering to keep quiet. It’s part of my nighttime routine, after all.

I sit in front of my alarm clock, which looks like an old telephone with a spin dial, a gift from my mom on my eleventh birthday. I’m always surprised by how good I am at sneaking around. It still shocks even me that I managed to keep the pageant a secret from my mom all the way up until the week before. But actually sneaking out? This is a whole new level of deception for me. I try to feel guilty, but I don’t. Not even a little bit.

The clock strikes midnight, and I drop my phone into my purse. After opening my bedroom window, I carefully lift the screen.

I will be totally honest and say that fitting through a tiny bedroom window was not in the Fat Girl Manual. But as the cross-stitch hanging above the scale in my mother’s bathroom reads, WHERE THERE’S A WILL, THERE’S A WAY.

Our back fence is notoriously creaky, so I’m extra careful when I open it just enough for me to squeeze past.

And there’s Malik, waiting for me under the streetlight across from my house. He leans up against a dark green Toyota RAV4, which is technically his sister’s, but he’s been allowed to use it since she left it here when she went to college in Boston.

I can say, without an ounce of embarrassment, that I have dreamed of this exact moment. Malik waiting for me across the street from my house beneath the flickering light of a streetlamp, with his fists balled up in his pockets and his penny-loafer-clad feet crossed at the ankles.

If this were one of my movies, I’d cross the street to him and we’d kiss and that would be the end. We’d live so happily ever after that the credits would roll and you wouldn’t even need to have any more details, because the rest of our lives would be wonderful, boring bliss.

But this is real life, which means this is the hardest part of all. And one of us has to break the silence.

“Hi,” I squeak.

His Adam’s apple rolls forward as he swallows. “Hey.” And then a second later, he adds, “I was scared you wouldn’t be able to get out.”

Why is the talking part so hard? Surely the kissing part is way easier to make up for all the trouble it takes to talk. I hold my arms out. “Well, I did.”

“Maybe we should go somewhere.”

“Okay.” I hadn’t even thought of where we might go or what we might actually do. “Lead the way.”

Once we’re both buckled in, Malik reaches for the radio, but then I guess he thinks better, because he pulls back. “Guess I came here to talk, didn’t I?”

I bite down on my lips, trying to minimize my smile. He turns off my street like he knows where he’s going.

“I’m shy,” he finally says. “And not in some kind of endearing way. It’s like crippling sometimes.” He pauses. “I get so in my head and I overthink every little thing. But I don’t want to be that way with you.”

“I don’t want that either,” I say quietly.

“It’s so easy to talk to you. It’s like I’m not even talking to anyone.” He shakes his head and lets out an exasperated sigh. “That didn’t sound right. I just meant that the way I feel when we’re talking online or texting is the way it feels to, like, talk to my sister or cousins. Not that I think of you as a relative or something! But like that head thing is gone. When we talk at night, I don’t think about if something will look or sound stupid. I can just be me.”

“I get that.” I’m economical with my words. I don’t want to spook him.

“But in person . . . well, first off, we’re at school. And everyone there thinks I’m just . . . when you don’t talk much, people make up this version of you that exists in their head. And it’s especially worse when you’re the only Indian kid in school. Like, I was just walking to class the other day and some kid asked me if I could look at his phone and tell him if he had a virus. Just because I look like every tech guy he’s ever seen in a movie.”

Something about his words comforts and frustrates me at the same time. I very much know what it means for people to create expectations of you based on appearance, but at the same time, I fit in here in a way that Malik doesn’t. I’m white. So as he slows to a stop at the red light before leaving Clover City, I don’t ask where we’re going. I only say, “I’m so sorry you have to deal with that.” Comparing my situation to his doesn’t really do much, but I want him to know that he’s not alone. “People have certain ideas of me too.”