The Beauty of the Moment

by Tanaz Bhathena

  Malcolm

  In a corner of my bedroom close to the ceiling, you can see the remains of leftover wallpaper, a design that involves blue skies, clouds, and cherubs—one I would have ripped up or covered with a poster without question if it wasn’t for Mom, who insisted on keeping it there. “Now I can always be assured that an angel is watching over you,” she told me.

  A creepy, chubby angel with blue china-doll eyes and golden curls, whose beaming smile holds the hint of a sneer. After the years I’ve spent in this house, I’ve grown used to ignoring the angel for the most part. Except on days like this, when the girl I have a sort-of crush on decides I’m a loser, and the angel’s sneer seems more pronounced.

  Outside, the temperature has dropped by several degrees, but I open my window anyway and pull out the cigarette pack I always keep in the pocket of my jeans. Trees that I could’ve sworn were full a couple of days ago have now been stripped bare, the ground underneath littered with yellow and brown leaves. As the air outside my window puffs with smoke, I picture the angel’s gold curls, imagine taping his mouth shut and plucking out each perfect lock.

  “Hostile thought alert!” a voice sings out from somewhere behind me.

  “Go away, Mahtab.”

  “Why? You’re not doing anything. Except attempting slow suicide.”

  I ignore her and take another long drag. I’m pushing things by smoking in the house, especially after the old man banned it, but I know that Mahtab won’t rat on me.

  “Good thing it’s not weed,” she says. “Otherwise the room would’ve smelled like skunk for days.”

  I tap the butt into the air, allowing the ash to fall. “Quit exaggerating.” I finally turn to face my sister, who is perched on the edge of my bed, right next to my unfinished math homework.

  She rolls her eyes behind the wire-rimmed spectacles she wears at home when we have no company. “How come you’re not out with your friends?”

  I crush the last of the cigarette into the ashtray. “Ahmed has a family thing at his mosque.”

  Mahtab straightens and crosses an ankle over her knee. “What about Steve?”

  “Steve’s at Justin’s. Partying.” And hopefully feeling guilty about it, I add mentally. I know I’m being selfish, but it’s not like Steve and Justin are friends anymore. Then again, Steve has never been able to resist a party. No matter who’s throwing it.

  “You know what’s funny?” Mahtab rises from the bed. Her tone holds the sort of contempt she usually reserves for my ex-girlfriends or dictators from foreign countries. “How Ahmed and Steve actually managed to come to the meeting for the fund-raiser your sister has been telling—no, begging—you to come to over the past few weeks—” I feel the blood drain from my face as her words sink in. Crap. Crapcrapcrap. “—while her own brother completely bailed on her!” She gives me a shove that nearly makes me drop the cigarette butt.

  “Mah, I’m sorry. I … I totally forgot.”

  Since Mom died, I’ve blown off people who were once my friends, messed up so many relationships that I’ve lost count. I’ve never looked back. Mahtab, though, is the one person in my life who I’ve never wanted to let down. My stomach clenches. Maybe the old man had it right. Maybe I am a screwup.

  Mahtab rubs her upper arms with her hands. “It’s cold in here. Will you at least close the window now that you’ve finished?”

  A smoky smell still lingers in the room, but I pull the window back into place, cutting off the cold. Mahtab noisily blows air through her lips—the closest she can get to whistling her relief—and tucks her feet behind her. We both sit in frosty silence for a while.

  “So.” Mahtab breaks it again—a sign of a possible thaw. “How’s your new friend, Susan?”

  I remember the angry look on Susan’s face and feel the pinch of her words again. “She’s no friend of mine.”

  “What happened now? Did you two fight over crayons?” Okay, so maybe Mahtab hasn’t quite forgiven me.

  When I say nothing in response, Mahtab sighs. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “What’s there to talk about?”

  “Stop pretending to be stupid.”

  “She thinks that, too. That I’m stupid.” The words spill out before I can stop them.

  Mahtab blinks a couple of times. “Are you serious? She said that to you?”

  “Well, not exactly,” I admit. “But she implied it.”

  “Maybe she didn’t mean what she said. People say all kinds of things when they’re angry.” But I can hear the doubt in Mahtab’s voice. A doubt that solidifies the sick feeling in my gut.

  “That’s what Mom used to say about the old man.”

  Mahtab’s lips tighten infinitesimally; she doesn’t like it when I call our father that. In the silence that follows, I hear the disjointed laughter of our next-door neighbors. A motorcycle rumbles into someone’s driveway. A police siren blares in the distance.

  Mahtab lets out a breath that sounds like a sigh. “Susan is not like Afrin.”

  “I know she isn’t—”

  “And she’s not like Dad, either,” Mahtab interrupts. She has never stopped calling him that, never stopped hoping that one day things will change and that we will be a family once more. “What Susan said about you wasn’t right. But she doesn’t seem like someone who’d try to manipulate you or mess around with your head. I can bet that she tried contacting you after your fight. A text? A call? Something?”

  I think back to the text on my phone screen: Can we talk? Followed by the missed-call notification I haven’t yet managed to erase. Mahtab is right—manipulation isn’t exactly Susan’s game. It’s impossible when nearly every thought she has shows up in her big brown eyes. Something in my face must have changed because Mahtab clicks her tongue in disapproval.

  “Khodai!” she exclaims in Gujarati. “If I had a dime for the number of times you, Ahmed, and Steve have said awful stuff to each other and fought about it, I would be able to buy myself a new prom dress. At least let her explain her side of things. Give it a shot before you give up on her for good.”

  “There’s nothing between us.”

  “But you want there to be something.” Mahtab rises to her feet and walks to the door. “And I think she does, too.”

  * * *

  I’m nearly asleep when my phone buzzes on the table. I pick up when I see Steve’s face flashing on-screen.

  “Hey man!” Steve shouts over the pounding music in the background. “It’s your girl!”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask in a groggy voice. Is he drunk already? “What girl?”

  “Susan! They got her wasted, Afrin and the rest of them. She’s throwing up in Justin’s backyard.”

  A hundred questions run through my mind, centering around one: Who invited Susan to Justin’s in the first place?

  “Oh crap!” Steve says. “Now Afrin’s snapchatting the whole thing.”

  I leap out of bed and grab my jacket. “I’ll be right there.”

  * * *

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  My heart leaps to my throat. I had hoped to sneak out (with the car keys Freny always leaves lying around the house) unnoticed. But when I turn around, it’s only Mahtab, in her Star Wars pajamas, scowling at me from the foot of the staircase.

  I raise a finger to my lips. “Shhhh. Do you want to wake Frankenstein’s monster and his bride?”

  Mahtab’s scowl deepens, but she lowers her voice. “Seriously, Malu, it’s nearly midnight. What do you think you’re doing, sneaking out this late?”

  I know what she’s thinking. She’s remembering the other nights. The ones when I sneaked out the door, even my window, the nights when I came home reeking of booze, before my car privileges were finally taken away.

  “It’s Susan,” I say. “She’s at Justin’s party. Drunk and throwing up, from what Steve told me.”

  “Susan’s at Justin’s?” Mahtab’s face falls. “I didn’t know she knew him!”

 
“Neither did I. But she’s there. And Afrin’s filming her right now and—”

  “Wait.” Mahtab pulls out the phone she always carries with her and slides her thumbs across the screen. “Crap. It’s there on Afrin’s Snapchat. She’s throwing up.”

  I grit my teeth. Except for Facebook (which I deactivated), I deleted my own social media accounts earlier this summer after pics of Afrin and the other guy began making the rounds of Arthur Eldridge’s gossip circuit. I don’t know what game Afrin’s playing now, but I don’t want Susan involved in it. No matter how angry she made me today.

  “I’ll cover for you.” Mahtab slips her phone back into her pocket.

  “Thanks, sis.”

  “And Malc?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Please be careful.”

  Of the two of us, Mahtab takes the most after the old man. Same brown hair. Same skin tone. Same nose and mouth, only smaller. But tonight, her lower lip trembles the way it used to when she was a little girl. The way Mom’s did whenever she fretted over me.

  “I will,” I tell her. “I promise.”

  Susan

  My insides churn. I feel the tug of fingers in my hair.

  “I’m gonna title this one Girl Vomiting on Grass,” I hear a voice say. Afrin. “Very artistic, no?”

  In the background, her friends laugh like nails grating on a blackboard. I want to rip her hand out of its socket. I want to collapse on the grass. But I will likely end up falling in my own vomit. Somehow, I manage to stay on my knees, head angled over a bush, waiting for the world to stop spinning.

  For a drinking game, it didn’t even seem that crazy at first. “We call it Most Likely,” Afrin explained to me. “Everyone gets a turn and they say ‘most likely to do something.’ Everyone points at someone else in the group. You have to take a drink for every person pointing at you.”

  Easy enough. I was sure none of these people would ever say stuff like Most likely to do her homework. And they didn’t. For a long time, my shot glass lay untouched, and I laughed with the rest, pointing fingers at whoever I thought was most likely to have had a crush on Vice Principal Han, or most likely to have gone skinny-dipping, or most likely to secretly cry during sad movies.

  Then Afrin said, “Most likely to have a secret boyfriend,” and seven fingers pointed at me.

  Which was followed by, “Most likely to have a temper.” Four more fingers.

  It didn’t matter what the truth was. In the game of Most Likely, results depended on the votes, and for each vote, I took a shot, the vodka burning down my throat. I never expected to be buzzing by shot four. Or dizzy by shot seven. By the time shot nine came along, I was so sick, I could barely stand.

  “You’re on camera, Susan,” Afrin tells me now, her giggles barely suppressed. “Say cheese!”

  If I was sober, I would tell her exactly what I think of her sense of humor. But I’m trying too hard to not fall right into my own puke.

  A tsking sound in my ear. “Oh Susan. You should have known to eat a little before drinking so much.”

  “Hey, stop it, will you?” A voice that’s both familiar and not, from somewhere in the distance.

  “Loosen up, Steve. It’s not like this is the first time you’ve seen someone throw up after a few drinks.”

  “It isn’t a party without a dizzy girl,” another voice says. A hand creeps up my calf, almost ticklish in its ascent. I try to kick it off.

  “Hey!” Afrin’s voice takes on a sudden sharpness. “Back off, VJ.”

  The smack of flesh on flesh. The fingers in my hair loosen, then release. An argument breaks out somewhere above. Footsteps crunch the drying leaves in the backyard and a hand tentatively brushes my shoulder.

  “You okay, Susan?” For the first time since I’ve known him, Steve sounds scared. My vision begins to clear again and I see my coat and, thank heaven, my bag in his hands.

  “Do you want a ride home?” he asks, almost desperately.

  “No,” I manage to say, shrugging on my coat again. Dizzy though I am, I’m pretty sure Steve has knocked down more than a couple of drinks tonight. “I’ll call a cab.”

  “Are you sure? I can—”

  My stomach lurches again and I rise on unsteady feet. “No,” I insist. “I’m fine.”

  Well, that’s a lie. But it’ll be hard enough to explain the smell of booze and vomit on my breath to my mother, as is.

  My mother.

  I want to hurl again even though I’m pretty sure there’s nothing left in me to spit out.

  Steve mentions Malcolm’s name. Malcolm, who’s not even here. Who’ll laugh when he finds out what happened, the way Afrin’s friends are laughing now.

  I grab my bag from Steve’s hands and stumble back into the still-pulsing house.

  * * *

  I am not sure how I manage to find my way to the front door and outside. Or if the woman at the cab company even understood the address I slurred out to her. When I try to look at the time or the missed notifications on my phone, my vision goes blurry again. I sit on the front steps, the stone cold against the back of my jeans. A few feet away I hear laughter and the now familiar sound of hacking. It makes me want to throw up again so I bury my head in my arms. It’s only the feel of hands, warm and oddly familiar on my shoulders, that makes me look up, right into the gray centers of his otherwise dark eyes.

  Malcolm’s mouth moves before his voice reaches my ears. “Susan? Susan, are you okay?”

  My heart zigs and then zags at the hard tone of his voice. If there is a spot in the ground somewhere untouched by vomit, I want to sink right through it.

  “Go away, Malcolm.”

  Naturally he doesn’t listen and kneels right in front of me.

  “Did anyone hurt you?” he demands. “Susan, talk to me!”

  “No.” I try not to think of the strange hand creeping up my thigh. “I don’t need saving, Malcolm Vakil. I’m fine.”

  I try to rise to my feet to make this point and promptly trip over the step’s broken edge. Somehow Malcolm manages to hold me in place without falling over.

  “You’re not.” The brush of his mouth on my ear almost feels like a kiss.

  No, I’m not. I know this. But for some reason I still want to argue this point. My body, however, has other ideas and happily sinks into an embrace that smells like leather and cigarettes and boy—a sweaty musk that is uniquely Malcolm. For a long moment, I hear nothing except the sound of his breath in my ear and I am not sure if the silence around me is because of his presence or simply the result of my mind shutting down now that it knows it’s safe.

  “Come on,” he says quietly. “Let me take you home.”

  I’m about to answer—yes or no, I don’t know which—when a car horn sounds behind Malcolm, followed by the sound of tires on gravel. I pull away, seeing the dull glow of a roof light on a dark blue sedan.

  “Taxi for Susan Thomas!” a man calls out from the driver’s seat.

  My mouth goes dry. I can feel Malcolm watching me.

  “Are you Susan Thomas, miss?” the cabbie prods.

  “No,” I tell him. “I’m not.”

  It’s not entirely a lie. The Susan Thomas I know would have never gone to a party like this, let alone get drunk. The Susan Thomas I know would be at home, fast asleep, homework complete, ahead of the class in every course.

  This time when Malcolm holds out a hand, I don’t resist. We trudge along the perimeter of the house, nearly stumbling over something on the ground—a can that he kicks out of the way. As we reach the car, a series of electronic sounds pound my ears. Malcolm’s grip on my shoulder tightens before he reaches into his pocket for his phone.

  “Hey,” he murmurs. “Yeah, Mahtab. I found her. Gonna take her home. Make sure you stall in case the old man or Freny wake up, okay?”

  What time is it, I wonder. Way past Amma’s bedtime for sure.

  The cars are covered with a film of dew. I want to rest my cheek against one and cool my hot face. Why,
oh why did I ever listen to those girls?

  “It happens to the best of us,” Malcolm says, and I know that I spoke the thought out loud.

  “How come you’re here?” I ask, common sense finally catching up with me. “How did you know?”

  “Steve called. Luckily, I live only ten minutes away by car. Or maybe seven minutes based on how I was driving. Good thing I didn’t run into any cops. Or wake the old man and my stepmom.”

  There’s a note of amusement in his voice that makes me want to laugh as well. But then I think of my own father and what he would say if he saw me now. “I’m sick.”

  Malcolm holds me close, lets me tuck my nose into his collarbone. “Let’s take you home.”

  * * *

  By the time we get home, it’s after midnight, there are over twenty missed calls and even more unread text messages from my mother. Malcolm insists on taking me up the elevator to our apartment.

  “Susan? Suzy?” Amma’s panic would make someone think that I am on my deathbed. She helps me onto the couch and places a too-hot hand over my head. “Lord, what have they done to you?”

  “She’s okay, Mrs. Thomas.” Malcolm’s voice is soft, but sure. “I think she drank a little too much.”

  “Drank? My Suzy doesn’t drink!”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Thomas. I got there as soon as I could and brought her home.”

  “I see.”

  The chill in Amma’s voice is unmistakable. It makes me shiver to hear it and yet I want to laugh. Wasn’t this one of the few things my parents had argued about and Amma had worried over, before we left Jeddah? That I would change. That I would become Westernized and lose my way.

  Malcolm says a few more things, but I can no longer decipher his words. I think I manage to murmur “Good night” before sinking deep into the couch’s pillows and falling asleep.