Tell Me How You Really Feel

by Aminah Mae Safi

  Sana turned away. “No. It’s your dream. It’s Mamani’s and Dadu’s. It’s not mine.” That wasn’t quite true, but it was close enough that Sana let the words out of her mouth. Let the hurt that would be done by them flow freely.

  “Great, now you’re blaming me for my parents’ sins.”

  “No, you’re blaming me for yours.”

  Farrah sucked in a breath. “I don’t know what’s going on but you can’t send me away. I’m your mother. I belong to you and you to me. You’ll always be mine even if you leave home for school and don’t want me anymore. That’s how it works, kid.”

  “Go to hell.” Sana crossed her one good arm over her chest and turned away.

  The air had long gone out of the room. But now the only sound left was the faint buzzing of the overhead fluorescent light as it twitched in and out of two different shades of brightness. The nurse had even stopped shuffling papers. He froze, probably unsure of how to get out of this room, out of this situation. Sana was right there with him.

  “It’s been a long night,” said Massoud. “Why don’t I take Sana home. You can collect your thoughts and put through the insurance stuff.”

  “And you’d want that?” Farrah directed her question at Sana. She didn’t have any fight left in her.

  Sana couldn’t face her mother anymore. Couldn’t believe she hadn’t told her. She took her out. “I would.”

  “Okay then.” Farrah looked away, started talking about payment information with the nurse, who seemed happy to have any other topic of conversation to discuss.

  Sana hopped off the table, onto her left foot, using her right hand as an aid. She knew her mom thought she was blaming her for her side of the family. For her Dadu’s conservativeness. For Mamani’s controlling nature. For her yelling. But Sana needed to get away. To think. To keep from wallowing in this horrible sinking feeling that flooded her whenever she looked at her mom. To keep these complications from spinning everything out of control.

  Massoud unlocked the car and got in quietly. Sana followed suit. He drove, not at his usual breakneck pace, but smoothly, fluidly. In a way that Sana had no idea he knew how to do.

  After a long stretch of silence, filled only by the thump of the road underneath them and the whoosh of the wind over the aerodynamic lines of the car, Massoud cleared his throat. “Do you like her? And don’t pretend not to know who I mean. The girl you were with. Do you like her?”

  “She’s just a friend. We’re making a movie together.” Sana looked out the window. She’d had enough embarrassing public confessions for the day. She didn’t need to pile on.

  “I’m going to take that as a yes.” Massoud glanced over from the road for a moment.

  Sana’s eyes snapped to Massoud’s.

  “Damn,” he said. “You really do have your mother’s eyes.”

  Sana looked away again, embarrassed and enraged all at once. “And my grandfather’s.”

  “I know you don’t like me. And I know I’m the last person you’d want advice from. But as someone who’s been down this path before, who’s seen how this goes, I’m going to offer up some anyway. I don’t know if you like her or you’re serious about her. But if you are serious, even if you don’t want to admit it yet, don’t let family intervene like I did.”

  Sana looked over, ready to snap.

  Massoud held up his hand. “I’m gonna cut off whatever biting yet witty repartee you probably have lined up. Trust me. Don’t let them intervene. Make up your own mind first. It’ll be hard enough to sort through without everyone else making up your mind for you.”

  And then he turned on the radio, blasting some horrible rock from his own high school years so Sana couldn’t reply.

  19

  How to Eat Pizza Without Burning the Roof of Your Mouth

  Rachel

  Rachel collapsed into the passenger’s seat of her dad’s car. It was an older sedan, but clean and not so ancient that it would scare off any potential clients when they called for a ride.

  “Rough night?” asked Rachel’s dad, not taking his eyes off the road.

  And Rachel, too tired to come up with a version that sounded better than the truth, told him everything. About the car and the cat and the movie night and the frozen yogurt and showing Sana where she lived. She didn’t add that she was embarrassed of their apartment; her dad didn’t need to hear that yet again.

  “Mija,” he said.

  Rachel prepared herself for the lecture.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Rachel looked over at her dad and blinked. “I wrecked some kid’s parent’s car and you’re asking if I’m okay?”

  Her father looked stunned. “Of course I’m asking if you’re okay. I picked you up at a clinic. Did they check you out too or just her?”

  “They checked me out, too.” Rachel felt her voice go soft. It wasn’t like Rachel forgot that Papa cared. But the reminder was good, necessary even. Rachel didn’t want to, but she needed that kind of reassurance every once in a while. “No concussion. No head or neck damage. I got really lucky, they said. The car took most of the impact.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “For telling me.”

  Papa got that stoic look on his face. The one where he bottled up his feelings and didn’t express them. Rachel hated the expression. She wanted to wipe it off his face. She wanted to wipe the idea that men couldn’t express their feelings without being weak off the face of planet Earth. It had hurt him so much. It had hurt her so much. It was the kind of idea that had nearly destroyed them both.

  “Papa?”

  He humphed, still distracted. “Yes?”

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  He looked up then, like he’d understood what she was trying to say. Don’t worry about me, Papa. Don’t be stressed. It’ll be okay.

  He nodded. “I’ll always worry about you. That’s how it goes.”

  Rachel didn’t know what to say to that. She worried about him, too.

  What a mess.

  Sana’s arm was broken. Rachel felt worried and bruised and uncertain and banged up. She couldn’t imagine how Sana was feeling. Being yelled at by her mom after breaking her arm. And trying to cover for Rachel.

  Trying to cover for Rachel and being accused of being on a date with her.

  A date. Like the one Sana had asked her on all those years ago. Except not as a joke. As a thing Sana’s mom believed that Sana could actually be on.

  A date with a girl like Rachel.

  With Rachel.

  Theoretically.

  Every revelation was a wave of relief and nausea and fear. It was like she got to rewatch old memories from a different angle. The angle where everything that had been hidden in the first shot became clear. A flashback at the end of the film that changed everything. If she’d been sitting in the audience, watching the movie of her own life, Rachel would have probably yelled FINALLY at the screen.

  Had she honestly hated Sana all those years?

  Why had Rachel thought being asked out was a joke in the first place?

  What the hell was she going to do?

  All Rachel knew was, she had to try. She had to reach out and do the right thing, had to keep doing the right thing, had to set this all back to some kind of an equilibrium.

  Rachel looked over to her father. “Do you mind if I make a call?”

  Papa waved in the air. “Call away.”

  Two rings and the phone clicked over. “I swear to God if this is another marketing scam, I will sic my lawyer family on you so fast you won’t know what hit you.”

  “Hi, Diesel,” said Rachel, overly bright.

  “Uh. Hi.”

  “It’s Rachel.”

  “Oh, hey! I thought you were one of those guys that calls and breathes on the other end, recording people’s voices.”

  “You know they make call blockers for that?”

  “True,” said Diesel, clearly unfazed by this discovery.

  Rachel took a deep breath. “I
was calling because I was working on some stuff for the project with Sana and we were taking a break and grabbing some dessert and this cat ran into the middle of the road and the car swerved and we got in a wreck and anyways Sana broke her arm.”

  There was nothing but silence on the other end.

  For a moment Rachel thought the call had dropped.

  It was eerie, that silence. It took a moment, but Rachel almost longed for Diesel to yell at her. Or at least talk in his overly friendly way for too long and give more details than Rachel ever needed about his life. This stunned, horrible quiet was beyond anything that Rachel had ever dealt with.

  “Okay, anyways, thought you should know. I’ll go now. She was at an emergency-care clinic in Beverly Hills but I think she’s going home with her mom. Which is where you can reach her. On her phone. With her mom. I just thought she might need a friend right now. Okaythanksgoodbye.” Rachel hung up.

  Rachel shuddered out a sigh. Two thoughts fought for top billing in her mind. Neither was particularly good for the hushed ride home. She wasn’t sure which was worse: that awful, ongoing tension that had crackled across the phone or the realization that maybe Sana hadn’t asked Rachel out on a date as a joke at all.

  Sana

  It was noon when Sana woke up again. Her arm was throbbing. Small throbs at first, but pitching to a large swell. The intensity of the throbs got so bad she couldn’t sort through her own thoughts. All she could do was breathe deeply and pray for a little bit of mercy on this one. Eventually the throbbing declined in intensity again. The low level was nearly forgettable, except for when she thought about it and she realized she was at best going to be in low-level pain for the next however many days. Weeks, even.

  Sana pushed herself out of bed.

  The house was quiet—not silent, because there was always creaking and cracking and whirring in an old house. Always a small shift, a noise, a little bit of movement here and there. She was used to it, this kind of silence. The house was hers, not the way it was her mom’s through regularly installed payments, but because they kept each other company through the long, quiet hours. They were companions, this house and Sana. She did her best work, studying and reading, when she was home alone. It gave her time to think, time to breathe.

  Sana didn’t want time to think right now.

  She went into the kitchen and fiddled with the pantry stuff in there. Oatmeal, toast, cereal. She picked one and ate it. But the oatmeal could have been toast and the toast could have been cereal, for all she was paying attention.

  Toast, she was having toast.

  It didn’t taste like much, even though she’d remembered to put on the almond butter and the jam that she liked. She’d never been in a fight like this with her mom before. She’d never said anything that crossed the line, that she desperately wanted to take back but couldn’t. At least she wasn’t stuck in a car with Farrah for two hours trying to get down to Orange County.

  The toast tasted like those awful, dry, brittle crackers Mamani was telling Sana were so healthy for her. Sana put it down, checked her phone instead. She only had one notification. It was from Diesel.

  You on? He was asking about Overwatch, because that was how all their messages about gaming started.

  She wasn’t, but it was a good idea. Gimme five

  Sana booted up her well-loved laptop with the shitty graphics card.

  She logged into her Overwatch account and selected, as she always selected, Pharah.

  On

  Get ready to rumble

  Diesel played as Tracer because he liked the speed and to move through time. Also, he liked heckling the opposing team with his own terrible British accent.

  Diesel was the worst. Unless he was on your team, then he was the best.

  Sana, for her part, liked taking her giant rocket launcher and blowing whatever came into her path to bits. Sana didn’t like real guns. She played with a character with a grenade launcher. Maybe that was semantics. Adults liked to say that playing violent video games made a kid violent. But for Sana they helped her let off steam. Helped her express violence on a plane where it hurt no one. Particularly when she couldn’t run or jump and now she could only play, essentially, one-handed.

  She and Diesel were losing pretty spectacularly.

  Diesel didn’t seem to mind, though. He kept his comms on and chatted through loss after loss. The other team members they were being assigned to were less than generous about it.

  “You wanna talk about it?” Diesel asked.

  “Nope.” Sana had fired at someone flying through the air who was playing as Mercy.

  “You should, though.”

  “And yet, here I am, aiming at digital strangers instead.” Sana finally got her first kill of the day.

  “One, never call them digital strangers.”

  “Whatever.” And there it was—someone launched their own rocket at her—and she was done. Dead. Wiped out. And now to sit here, waiting to respawn. Her screen went dim with a countdown timer.

  “It’s not whatever, dude. You gotta let it out. And not on the unsuspecting people of the internet. Especially since you’re really bad at this right now.”

  Sana snorted. “You can say unsuspecting people of the internet but I can’t say digital strangers? Ugh. I wish I could actually reverse time and undo last night.”

  “Why is that?” Diesel was on the other side of the map, laying waste to the other team.

  “I might have yelled at my mom for getting pregnant with me at nineteen.”

  “You didn’t.” Diesel ran out of charge in his weapon and started punching someone on the other team. It looked so satisfying.

  “I mean. Basically I did. Once you take step one down that path, you don’t have to go all the way to step eighteen for it to hurt like hell, do you? It’s all there. It’s all implied.” Fill in your own horrible, slut-shaming adventure.

  “True.” The best thing about Diesel was that he never lied to you. It was the worst thing, too.

  Sana finally respawned and was dropped back into the game, but she still wasn’t quick enough compared to the other players.

  “Geez, I know you broke your arm but come on, I know you can click faster than that.”

  “You’re a jerk.” Sana found a bit of high ground with cover. If she could possibly not bring her whole team down this game, it would be a Nowruz miracle.

  “Does she ever ask about me? On the squad?” asked Diesel after a long pause. He’d been blinking across the map and lobbing strategic time bombs.

  “Who, my mom?” Honestly, how did everyone she played against know she was the weak link on her team today?

  “No. Maddie.”

  Sana wasn’t feeling very generous. She’d taken a huge hit to the chest and she was nearly dead again. She played as a tank and she was still being taken out, left, right, and center. It was so embarrassing. Normally she could rain hellfire on her enemies. “Nope.”

  “Great.”

  “You’re the only jock in the history of jocks to not get the girl.” Sana hopped behind some more cover, trying to run from this fight. At least she was quicker at that in the game than she was in real life now. Her leg was closer to healed, but she was still in a boot.

  “What about you? Aren’t you the one making a movie with someone you definitely don’t have a crush on?”

  “I hate you, Diesel.”

  “Just saying, we’re both sad and alone and playing video games on a Sunday rather than hanging out with the girls that we like.”

  “You’re honestly the worst.”

  “Nope, I’m the only reason we’re even playing ranked right now. You’re the worst.”

  “We should definitely not be playing ranked when I have a broken arm. This is why I am dying every five seconds. You are not helping your case at all.” Sana finally died after limping across the map, trying to save herself. Her respawn would take longer than the time that was left in the match. “Okay, that’s it. I’ve had enough humili
ation for one day.”

  “Feel any better?”

  “A little. But normally I’m better at this.”

  “Normally your arm isn’t broken.”

  “True. And Diesel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Try not flirting with other girls in front of Maddie. She hates that.”

  “She does?”

  “Yeah. See you Monday.”

  Sana logged off, closed her laptop, and shoved it into her bag. She could take a shower, but that would involve wrapping her arm in a baggie and keeping it out of the shower and washing her hair with one hand, while standing on one foot. She was well and truly not in the mood right now. Sana climbed back into bed, curled up, and went to sleep.

  20

  Double or Nothing?

  Sana

  Monday was a rainy day—oil-slick roads and unsure drivers making a mess of the city—even if it was only a light, sprinkling kind of rain. Sana had slept past the time to grab the bus to school. She begged Diesel to swing by and give her a ride—which she never normally would have done on a rainy day. Mom was still sleeping off her night shoots. And there wasn’t a replacement car for the Mitsu. Sana felt too much pride to call a ride and charge her mom. She’d get to school on her own, thank you very much.

  Sana had a message from Massoud when she checked her phone. Sorry

  Yeah, they were all sorry about something right now. Sana didn’t answer him. She got her bag for school together, grabbed a piece of toast for breakfast, and was out the door by the time Diesel arrived.

  Right now, Sana didn’t need an umbrella, so she didn’t grab one on the way out. It was probably a mistake, but you could never tell if it was the kind of weather that would get worse or suddenly clear up. Sana wasn’t in the mood to carry around any more garbage with her this morning.

  “You look like hell,” said Diesel.

  “Good to see you, too.” Sana buckled herself into Diesel’s tiny Mazda Miata coupe. He was a contrast in opposites most of the time.

  “It is good to see you, you just look like hell.” Diesel shrugged, like it really was that simple for him.