I bury my face into my hands. “I saw it,” I mumble.
I feel him move onto the floor in front of me and wedge himself between my knees. He runs his fingers through my hair. “Sorry, babe.”
When I look up, he’s facing me with his elbows on my thighs. I stare into his eyes—green with gold and black specks, like a kiwi cut across the equator.
“Had a crappy day at work today. My deadbeat dad called my mom, and off she ran to meet him again. Always amazes me how she can forget the twenty thousand dollars of credit card debt I’m helping her climb out of while he sits in bars every night.”
I caress his shoulders. He looks so tired. Ever since he got promoted to manager at Tools ’N’ Tires, a retail chain hardware store, he looks less and less like the Mike he was last year when we were in school together. Over the summer he started to walk around like all the things his mom bought on credit were piled up on his shoulders.
“Come on,” he says, getting up. “Let’s pop in a DVD. What do you want to watch?”
“I have to be home for dinner,” I remind him.
“We’ll make it.”
We watch an Adam Sandler movie and cuddle on the couch the rest of the afternoon.
Chapter 4
By Thursday I have two plans. Two promising plans.
Plan A is simple: Persuade Mom to reconnect with her family. Uncle Sandeep is key in this plan. If it doesn’t work, I move to Plan B: Tell Mom nothing and convince Uncle Sandeep to take me to meet my grandparents. For both of the aforementioned plans to move forward smoothly, I need to do a bit of gardening. I need to dig deep to uncover some roots—my roots. And then there’s Plan C: If neither of these plans works, come up with a Plan C.
I rush around getting ready for school and go over ways to approach Mom—and the possible outcomes. None of them are good. Especially since I caught a piece of Mom and Uncle Sandeep’s conversation last night:
“Sharan, just think about it. You haven’t seen Ma and Papa in years! They’ve grown since then.”
“Ha! They wouldn’t know the meaning of the word! Forget it, Sandeep, they’re toxic.”
Okay, so I’ve got my work cut out for me. But I’ve got Uncle Sandeep on my side, and Mom might surprise us both. Right?
Sure. Still, I’ve got to try. If I really give it a good shot, I could have my own huge family celebration by the holidays. No more squidging myself into Molly’s family celebrations.
I hear a car horn and quickly coat mascara on my lashes. “Sammy! Mike’s outside!” Mom calls from the bottom of the stairs.
“Coming!” I fumble through my makeup case for the Brandywine lipliner and Island Sunset lipstick. Another, longer honk.
“Saaaammy!”
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I grumble, and race down the stairs.
I give Mom a quick air kiss. “Remember, I’m hanging out with Mike later tonight!”
“What? Did we discuss this?” she says, looking up from her morning schedule.
I sit on a chair to pull on my boots. “Mom—it’s Mike’s birthday!”
“Is that today? Didn’t you already see him this week? What are you two doing?”
I huff and heave myself up to pull the door open. I know Mike’s probably having a cow by now. “We’re just staying in and probably watching a movie or something.”
“What did you get him?”
“Mom, I have to go!” I wave without looking back and run out the door.
I climb into his baby—his Honda Civic, and he gives me his “what the hell?” look.
“Sorry.” I lean in for a kiss.
He gives me a quick peck on the corner of my mouth and roars into reverse, peeling out of the driveway.
“Jeez! Take it easy,” I say, fumbling with my seat belt.
“Sammy, you can’t be late every time I pick you up for school!” he says, driving with one hand on the wheel, the other adjusting the heat level. “I have to be at work, I can’t fart around anymore.”
“No one says you have to pick me up.” I pull down the sun visor to put my lipstick on. “I’m gonna be at school an hour early. I could very easily take the bus with Molly, y’know.” I haven’t told him about the Molly situation yet.
“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles. “It’s not bad enough that I don’t get to see you all day anymore. Now I have to compete with Molly and Uncle.”
I finish lining my lips, mostly to chill out before I say anything. “He has a name.”
“Oh, sorry. What is it? Uncle So-deep? Or is it Some-deep?” He snickers.
“It’s Uncle Sandeep. Cut it out, Mike. What’s wrong with you?” I hate it when he gets like this. It has been happening more and more lately. He gets mean and cold and bitter without warning, like something just sets him off.
He shakes his head. “I just think it’s weird that you meet the guy less than two months ago, and now you’re real tight. Where’s he been all this time?”
“It’s not his fault. My mom didn’t want to see him. Look, whatever—just call him by his name, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, turning down the street to Melville High.
My neck is tight, but I drop it. I keep hoping the real Mike, the one I met and used to have fun with, the cute, popular, jokester Mike, will come back full-time; that maybe being with me and remembering what things were like before will make him click back somehow.
I take a deep, controlled breath in and let it out slowly. I don’t want to fight with Mike on his birthday.
“Besides,” I say, turning to him with a truce-smile, “you’d be in college if you weren’t working, and we still wouldn’t see each other.”
“I wouldn’t be in college because I wouldn’t have the money to be in college.”
Last year when we discussed which of the local colleges we would all apply to, Mike told me and Molly he was postponing college altogether. He said it would only be for a year or so, to help his mom out with the bills. Molly and I made him swear that it would be temporary. But it doesn’t seem to be on the horizon at all anymore.
He shrugs and fiddles with the CD player. The voice of Ludacris explodes a minute later. I reach over to turn it down.
He reaches to turn it back up, but not to the level it was before.
I lean back in my seat and stare at the roof of the car. “Happy birthday,” I say softly.
He relaxes his shoulders for a second and reaches across to grab my hand. I see a flash of soft Mike, the all-alone Mike with the baby seal eyes. He brings my knuckles to his lips.
I smile, pointing to the CD player. “You heard me over all that?”
He winks. “Loud and clear, babe.”
“So, what do you want to do tonight?”
He doesn’t let go of my hand. “I dunno…surprise me.”
He pulls into the parking lot of the school, and I unbuckle my seatbelt. “You got it, see you tonight.”
He leans in for a kiss. “I’ll swing by after work.”
I give him a quick peck, wave, and slam the door. Then I walk toward the white, blocky building that is Melville High. I open the double doors and get blasted with a wall of heat. I go to my locker to drop off my books and backpack, then grab a pack of gum and walk to the unofficial smoking section in the back of the school.
Even though neither of us smokes, the smoking section is where Molly and I sometimes hang out. It’s a forgotten corner of the school that rarely gets patrolled, and students loiter freely, any time of day—even when they should be in class.
It’s seven o’clock in the morning, and daylight is anything but broad in the remote back corner. In this town in late October, the trees are already gray, poking into a dreary, slate gray sky. I huddle against the wall on a cement block that a couple of stoners propped up in place of a bench. I pop a stick of gum into my mouth and open my calculus text. But the only thing I can think of is arguments to use on Mom for reconnecting with her parents.
This plan isn’t something I’d share with Mike
—he wouldn’t understand. His whole family is here, but he doesn’t care if he ever sees them. I sigh and shut my textbook again. Another quiz I’m not studying for. Mom says I’m too smart for my own good, and it’s making me lazy. It’s true that I almost never study for tests, but somehow, miraculously, the answers come to me when the test is in front of me. Good thing, too, because Lim is one of those teachers who likes to pop quizzes on students at least three times a week. I sit like that for close to an hour—not studying calculus and instead, searching for ways to fine-tune my plan.
The double doors open. Balvir Virk, who took Latin with me and Molly last year, comes out. She’s wearing a skintight, blazing-red leather skirt with matching lipstick. Her hair is blown out and her eyes are lined in retro eighties style, like comets with tails going almost up into her temples.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
“Can I bum some gum?” she asks hesitantly.
“Sure.” I extend the open pack. “What’re you doing here so early?”
She pops the gum into her mouth, then lights a cigarette. She takes a long, deep drag. She smirks. “You think I leave the house looking like this?”
I give her a blank stare.
She laughs. “I leave the house looking like an Indian-American nun. Only to emerge—voilà!—into the smokers’ corner looking like this.” She twirls around.
“You do all that here?” I say, pointing to the school building.
She nods. “I’m fast. Me and a few other girls get here around a quarter of eight. Do you know Priya?” I shake my head. “Manavi?” Again I shake my head. “Belinder?”
“Nope.”
She half shrugs and takes another drag.
I’m intrigued. I had always glanced over her in Latin class. Who knew she had all this going on? A couple of times I had heard Bobbi Lewis whisper behind her hand that Balvir looked like a cross between a clown and a hooker.
Molly and I are well liked, but Bobbi Lewis is in a whole other stratosphere. She drives to school in her own pink Lexus. I never said anything to Bobbi and instinctively veered away from Balvir. It’s social suicide to be friends with anyone that Bobbi Lewis has dissed. I swallow the sudden lump of shame in my throat.
“It sucks that you have to bring a change of clothes to school every day,” I say, and notice her wince slightly.
She looks off into the field. “Yeah, you’re really lucky you don’t have to.” Then she turns to me. “Are you from Trinidad or Guyana…?”
Despite my very Indian name, most of the Indian kids at school assume I’m not Indian because…well, I don’t really know exactly why. Maybe it’s because I don’t hang out with them, or other Indian kids, anywhere—maybe that comes out of my pores, like a smell. And because I don’t hang out with the West Indian kids either, I kind of get lumped into this weird place where I don’t really fit anywhere.
“My mom was born in India.”
She raises her eyebrows, exhaling a stream of smoke. “No shit,” she says. “Your dad, too?”
I nod.
She flicks her cigarette and shakes her head. “I never would’ve guessed.”
At one time a comment like that might’ve made me proud. But for some reason, now I bristle. “What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound…” She drops her cigarette butt on the ground and stubs it out with her spike-heeled boot. “I mean, I knew you had some Indian in you somewhere, but I figured you were something else—Indo-Caribbean, Dominican, Puerto Rican, mixed….” She peers at me from underneath hooded eyes and shrugs. “Or else you were a coconut.”
“A coconut?” I’ve been mistaken for Dominican and everything else she listed, but a coconut?
“Yeah, you know…brown on the outside, white on the inside.”
That catches me off guard. In grade school I was called plenty of names—paki, doo-doo skin…all kinds of things to let me know my brown skin was not coveted. This is the first time someone’s telling me I’m not brown enough. It’s true I’ve always been like the center of a daisy, if daisies had dark centers. Surrounded by all these white petals: Molly, my best friend, and her family; Mike, my boyfriend, and his buddies; and just about everyone else except Mom.
But that’s because whenever I tried to hang out with the Indian kids at school, they talked about things I knew nothing about, sometimes using words in languages other than English—which is the only language I’m fluent in. Things always got real awkward real fast when we realized we had nothing much to talk about other than school. In some ways, that was even harder than the obvious differences between me and the white folks I surrounded myself with.
I’m still reeling when she opens the door. “Thanks for the gum,” she says. “See ya!”
My brain is vibrating as I walk to calculus, and math is nowhere in the mix. I take my usual seat by the window and stare at my closed textbook. By now I know there’s no use even trying to concentrate.
Molly walks in, smiling. Even though we left on bad terms on Sunday, and she has spent a lot of energy the past few days ignoring me to death, I could really use my best friend right now. I’m about to smile and wave, when I realize she’s not smiling at me. On her heels is Bobbi Lewis—the same Bobbi Lewis that we’ve hated since third grade. They find seats on the other side of the room. Together.
My world is crumbling. I can feel the tremor like an actual earthquake.
The bell rings and Mr. Lim rushes in. Immediately, he starts distributing the quiz. He places it facedown on everyone’s desk.
“Please don’t turn your paper over until I give the okay,” he says, looking at the clock. “You have exactly fifteen minutes to complete this quiz. When you are finished, turn your paper over on your desk and I will collect it. Please remember all quizzes count toward twenty-five percent of your final grade.” He looks at the class. “Any questions?” He gives the room a quick, sweeping glance, then nods. “Good. Begin.”
There is a brief rustling of papers. I turn mine over and all the questions come into sharp focus. For fifteen minutes, I think of nothing but integrals, derivatives, functions, and tangents.
I finish just as Lim announces time’s up. I look over at Molly. Her test is still faceup on her desk, and she’s busy counting something out on her fingers. In front of her, Bobbi leans back in her seat and messes with one of her French-tipped fingernails.
Once all the tests are collected, Lim introduces a new lesson for the rest of the period, while I try to keep my head from swiveling back in Molly’s direction. She, on the other hand, acts like I’ve fallen off the planet.
The teacher finally writes that night’s homework on the board and I quickly jot it down in my notebook. When I look up, I see that most of the class has gone, including Molly and Bobbi. I feel as if I’m hurtling back in time to second grade, when I stood alone in the schoolyard. A time when paki and doo-doo skin, Ahlu-wahli-ali-alia and all-you-wallies rang clear and sharp, slicing through me to a deep, soft center.
I walk slowly to my next class, AP English. I’m in no hurry to get there because Balvir is in that class with me. Her coconut remark still stings.
Am I? Could I really be what she said? A coconut. Spat out the same way as doo-doo skin.
I walk into Ms. Lesiak’s English class, taking a seat as far away from Balvir as possible.
Since September eleventh was a week after school started, Ms. Lesiak and many other teachers have themed assignments around “recovering” and “moving forward.” Ms. Lesiak is big on generating Healthy Discussion and Debate. For her class, the assignment is to write about the impact of the World Trade Center attacks on our lives.
I get a huge clenching in my belly every time the topic is brought up. Snapshots of the smoking towers flash through my head along with all the other images from that day. I take a few deep breaths and focus, instead, on going over things I need to learn and find out—if my plan is to go smoothly. (1) I need to learn more about Sikhism. (
2) I need to learn more about Indian-ness, specifically Punjabi-ness, and maybe Uncle Sandeep could even teach me a few words in Punjabi.
I start scribbling notes about where I might get some of my information. I remember to look up every now and then to nod seriously, like I’m in deep contemplation about the occasional nuggets of wisdom that drop from Lesiak’s mouth.
I tune back in for a moment when Balvir reads one of her poems aloud:
“…fear, anger, rage/dripping like acid from an IV. Sound bites and video clips/television screens showing pieces of people/living in a censored/sensory world/elaborate tales spun into explanations.”
After she sits down, the only sound is the chunk-chunk of the enormous wall clock.
Then Shazia Azem, who rarely says anything in any of the classes I have with her, now speaks up in a surprisingly strong and deep voice. “But why? Why would anyone do that? This is not the work of a deranged crazy person. These were well-educated, intelligent men who were deeply dedicated to a cause. In their countries, they might be considered freedom fighters….”
“They’re religious fanatics,” says David Eng. “There’s tons of those in the world. And some of the most brutal serial killers were educated, smooth-talking dudes.”
Melanie Castell speaks from the back of the class. “I hope we lock them all up and throw away the key.”
“But who’s ‘them’?” Adam Dodic asks without raising his hand. “I mean, is ‘them’ Al-Qaeda? People from Afghanistan? Iraq? The whole Middle East?”
“All Muslims?” Shazia adds.
David Eng nods his head. “And there’s been terrorism in Ireland, Oklahoma, Bosnia…”
Ken Ruiz, who has been jiggling his leg the whole time in the seat next to me, says, “I think it’s horrible, our policies in the Middle East—don’t get me wrong, I love Jesus and everything. And what those people did on September eleventh was horrible, but we still have to stop fighting and killing each other over oil over there.”
Balvir turns to look at the rest of the class and ends up looking directly at me, her face hopeful, as if I might be an ally. “But still…there has to be more to the story than what we’re getting on the news, don’t you think?”
Shine, Coconut Moon Page 4