by Barry Lyga
I nod, not even hearing her now because something else has occurred to me. It popped into my head when I said It takes the focus away from the guy making the pizza and puts it on the pizza.
“There’s one more thing we need,” I tell her. “The most important thing.”
“What’s that?”
I grab her hand, too preoccupied to be surprised by my own boldness, and drag her off to the kitchen.
Later, we watch a rough cut of that day’s new episode together. Aneesa narrates in her almost-British golf-announcer voice as I assemble a crabmeat-and-roasted-artichoke pizza atop a super-thin crust, with cheddar and alfredo sauce. It’s mouthwatering, and I cannot imagine anyone watching this—with the exception of those allergic to shellfish and super-observant Jews—who would not want to press themselves through the screen and take a bite.
Which is what’s been missing. As the pizza comes out of the oven, Aneesa zooms in for a super close-up. My hands disappear and then reappear wielding a pizza cutter. I deftly (if I do say so myself) bisect the pie on the diameter twice at right angles, then halve one of the quarters.
Then Aneesa’s hand comes into frame, snagging a slice by the crust and lifting it. With only a minimal amount of camera jiggle, she manages to follow her hand, turning the camera on herself as she guides the slice to her mouth and takes a huge bite.
And chews.
Eyes rolling in bliss.
“That is so good!” she exclaims, and takes another bite as we…
Fade to black.
“It really was,” she says now, toying with the crust of her last slice. Between the two of us, we inhaled the entire pizza while watching the rough cut. Usually we save a slice or two for Mom. Not today.
“This is what was missing.” I can’t help myself; I grin. “When I heard you narrating, like you were enjoying the whole process, that’s when I realized. We need a person. It’s about the pizza, but we need to show someone enjoying it.”
And it’s about her, too, I don’t say. About that look on her face the first time she took a bite of that pumpkin-and-manchego pizza. That look that thrilled me. If it thrills our audience half as much…
Who am I kidding? I don’t care about the audience. Just watching her.
Nodding, she types at the keyboard for a moment. Our page’s keywords are updated to include “girl eats pizza.” She pauses, thinks, then revises to “Muslim girl eats pizza.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Just sounds better. So, I guess it’s pizza every day for me from now on. Man, I’m going to get fatter than fat doing this.”
“Well—”
She chuckles. “It’s worth it.”
We touch pizza crusts like clinking champagne glasses.
And I wake up later that night, my breath hot and rapid. A part of me wishes it were just acid reflux from the pizza, but I know it’s not. It was the dream. A dream of my father.
Sitting up in the dark, I can’t remember the details, but it felt like him, sounded like him, tasted like him. He was there, in the dream, and I don’t know why, but I know that I can’t go back to sleep.
I dress without turning on the light. Two of the stairs to the foyer landing creak, but I avoid them. The front door’s hinges need to be oiled, so I sneak out through the basement instead.
No bicycle tonight; I want to take my time. It takes twice as long as usual, but eventually I arrive at my observation point among the trees, watching the still and silent trailer.
What am I doing? With the pizza stuff, with Aneesa? How have I lost sight of what’s important, what matters? The plan I’ve had for years now, the one that was coming, marching relentlessly toward me.
Is it because I’m happy? Am I happy? I don’t even know. Like love, it’s too foreign for me to translate. And does it even matter what I feel now, in the present? Does that override the past? Can it?
Do I deserve to be happy?
No. Of course not.
I lost sight, yes, but I haven’t forgotten. I promise I haven’t. I’m still going to do it. Yes. I am. I just need some more time. I’m not stalling. It’s only a matter of time. A matter of when, not if.
I promise.
The daily schedule and the new gimmick of Aneesa narrating and eating the pizza work. We burn through double digits on our subscriber count in the first week of the new, improved videos, then enter into triple digits. I at last inform Evan of my summer project, via text, and he responds with enthusiastic emoji and the news that “all the guys here” are enjoying the videos.
Aneesa has one more trick up her sleeve—a theme song. It’s bouncy and bright without being cloying or annoying. It’s absolutely perfect.
“Sounds like more than just an oboe,” I tell her. “What talents are you hiding from me?”
I could swear she actually blushes. “Just the oboe is me. The rest of it I did in GarageBand.”
We don’t necessarily go viral, but we catch the digital sniffles. Soon, we hit one thousand subscribers, and our videos begin picking up multiple viewings per person.
Along with the good comes, of course, the bad.
The usual welter of ridiculous comments and nonsense—virtual catcalls, some disturbing racist barbs, misogynist snark—begins to clutter our comment section. I want to pull the plug on them, but Aneesa shrugs it off, pointing out that some of our commenters are acting in our defense against the trolls.
“Remember,” she says, “we’re all different for a reason.”
“I’m supposed to learn something from these submoronic jackasses?”
We’re at her house, sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for our latest episode to finish rendering on her laptop. Her parents are at work and we trust you, so we have the run of the place. I still have half a glass of Mrs. Fahim’s good lemonade, but I’m too hot for it to cool me off.
“The comments are aimed at me, not you,” she points out. “Don’t get pissed.”
“That’s why I’m pissed! I don’t care what anyone says about me.”
She hmphs. “I don’t know if I should be flattered that you care so much or offended that you think I can’t take care of myself.”
“Aneesa…”
“Think, Sebastian. What’s really bothering you? Do you really think I need a big strong man to save me?”
“Hey!” I stand up, jostling the lemonade. “It’s not about that. That’s not us.”
Us. What is us?
“Then sit down,” she says very calmly, gesturing to my chair, “and stop worrying. I’ll tell you when it’s too much for me, and we’ll deal with it then.”
“How?”
“I have no idea. Fortunately, I don’t need one yet.”
I’m still angry. On her behalf. At her, too. I don’t think she needs to be rescued. But when you see your friend—or someone you think and hope might someday be more—abused, you do what you can to stop it. Who doesn’t do that? What kind of person doesn’t do that?
“You’re still upset.” She sighs.
“No, I’m not.”
“You haven’t sat back down.”
I sit. I sulk. I’m obvious.
“You act like this is the worst thing that could happen to me. The worst thing that has happened to me.”
“One guy said he has some meat that definitely isn’t halal for you to put in your mouth!”
She laughs. “And isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? That guy doesn’t know who I am or where I live or even my name. I don’t care what he says. I’ve heard worse. In person.”
It takes me nearly a minute to work up the courage, a minute spent with my chin on the table, tracing curves in the condensation on my glass of lemonade. “What’s the worst thing you’ve heard?”
She tuts and waves the question away like a mosquito. “Boring. Boring, boring, boring. What other people do and say. People who are irrelevant. Ask me something that matters, Sebastian. Like, what’s the worst thing I’ve ever done to some
one else.”
“I don’t want to know.”
She leans over the table and slides the glass away so that it’s no longer between us. Our eyes lock. “Because you’re afraid it’ll change what you think of me?”
“No. I just don’t care.”
“Friendship without conditions or strings?” She grins. “Wow, that’s really open-minded of you.”
“No. I just don’t have a litmus test for my friends, is all.”
That stops her cold. She rises and comes around to my side of the table, looming over me, sizing me up. I lean back in my chair and look up at her. “What?”
“You’re really smart,” she says. “And really mature.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
She punches my shoulder. We’ve come a long way from those early days when she wouldn’t shake my hand. “Stop it. I’m being serious. It’s a compliment, loser.”
“Putting the words compliment and loser next to each other makes for some nice cognitive dissonance.”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about. Who talks like that? Seriously. I mean, write it on your blog, sure. But who actually speaks out loud like that without rehearsing?”
“Sorry.”
“There you go, apologizing again! I’m seriously in awe, jackass. I’m not dissing you. I’m marveling at you.”
I’ve never been marveled at before. At least, not in my field of vision.
“You don’t ask your friends about the worst thing they’ve ever done because you know deep down they’d disappoint you, and you’re too noble to let that happen. That’s what it is.”
“It totally isn’t.”
“Then what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Freezing water in my lower intestine. My guts lurch and my muscles tense. I mumble something indistinct and only vaguely words.
“I’ll go first,” she says, cheerfully blazing ahead. “When I was ten, I knew my best friend liked this guy that I also liked. And I stole her diary and ripped out the page where she wrote that and left it in his locker so he would see it. She was mortified and I had broken her trust and it was pretty awful.”
“I guess so.”
“Do you hate me now?”
“Nah.”
“See?” She smiles dimples. “No big! Now you. Go ahead.”
“I don’t want to.” But.
“Come on. I just bared my soul to you. The least you can do is return the favor.”
But I suddenly do want to. I don’t know why. I don’t understand it. I’m not even sniffing around the edges of understanding it, but suddenly I want more than anything in the world to tell her. Because she thinks I think she needs help. Because she mocked me for wanting to help. Because I want to show her she’s not the only one who’s been pissed on by the world.
She’s regarding me with those quirked lips, those arched eyebrows. I want to tell her because I realize now that it’s true: I love her and I need her to know, and if I don’t say it now, I’ll never say it, and it has to come from me.
“When I was four years old, I shot and killed my baby sister.”
Her face freezes. Her expression doesn’t change, but somehow manages to become different from mere seconds ago. It’s the eyes, of course. The lips and cheeks and eyebrows stay the same, but the eyes themselves go dark, closed while still open.
With great difficulty, she swallows. “That is not funny.” Her voice, a whisper that grows without warning into a near-shout. “That is not funny! What kind of person jokes about that?”
“It’s not a joke, Aneesa. I swear.”
“Stop lying. That’s disgusting,” she says, and turns away, wrapping her arms around herself.
“Get out your phone,” I tell her, “and Google Brookdale, Maryland, toddler, sister, and shoots.”
Her back to me, I can perceive only the tightening and hunching of her shoulders, the pause of her breath. She fumbles for her phone. I watch as her fingers dance across the glass, conjuring letters, words, my past, my sins.
A pause. She holds the phone at reading distance in a hand that begins to tremble.
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” she whispers, and when she turns to face me, tears have cut trails down her cheeks. They glimmer there like the paths of falling stars.
“This was you?” Holding out the phone. I flinch at the headline: Boy, 4, Shoots, Kills Infant Sister.
It’s kryptonite. It’s garlic and a crucifix. Wolfsbane. I rise from the chair, fall back a step, then another, its glow toxic and cold and burning me.
“Don’t make me. Don’t make me read—”
“I’m sorry.”
From her for once. The satisfaction is hot gravel down my throat, settling in my stomach.
My name isn’t in the article, of course. Nor is my mother’s, my father’s, Lola’s. The victim was a minor; the shooter was a minor. The media protects us. Too late, the media protects us.
“This is really you?” she whispers, the phone turned back to her now, her face alight in cold blue, like reflections off a pool at night.
“Yes. It’s really me.”
“Fox Tail Drive,” she mutters, then looks up sharply, staring open-mouthed over the top of her phone. “That’s here. That’s where we live. It happened in the house you’re in now? You didn’t move?”
You try selling a house where a baby was killed, I want to say. But I can’t bring myself to.
“Oh, Sebastian.” The words strangle her. I worry she can’t breathe, but she keeps talking. “Sebastian. I don’t even… I can’t even… Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say something?”
“So you could hate me sooner?” I snap.
“No, you asshole!” The words explode out of her, and she actually throws her phone down on the table in outrage, finally looking up at me. Tears stream down her face. “So that I could be here for you!”
“You are here.”
“I think…” She trails off, and then, without warning, without a word, she hugs me, her arms around. It’s the last thing I expect and the first thing I want, and somehow it feels all wrong. I stand there, stiff and unyielding, mute, and we’re both silent and then—after millennia—I melt against her, neither of us speaking, neither of us moving, both of us barely breathing.
The temptation is to cry. To let my tears join hers. To commit the final sin of weakness and allow myself a relief and a release I simultaneously crave and have forfeit. But I haven’t cried to my mother and I haven’t cried to my therapist. I won’t cry to her, to Aneesa. I won’t. I bite the inside of my cheek; I focus on the familiar, delicious pain.
And this is the moment to kiss her, but this is the moment never, ever to kiss her. Because to kiss her now is to seal it with pain and shame, and nothing grows well or true or right in that blend of fertilizer. So I need to, but I can’t, and I stand steady and I hope that I did the right thing, that whatever my motivations, it was the right thing to do, that I’m not just trying to spread out the burden or entice her with pity.
She pulls back. Her gaze flickers between cold and hot, whirlwinds of flaming hail in her eyes.
“What happened?” she whispers, and I say nothing because, what is there to say?
“The story says it was an accident,” she goes on. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. I was four. I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember anything?”
“No.”
The quiet surrounds us; we are suffused by it and by the past.
With a shake of her head, she comes to the present. “So, wait. You don’t remember. So, how…? How did… One day someone just… mentioned that you’d done this?”
“No. No, not like that. I was just four. But I’ve always… I’ve always been aware that I did it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Like, do you remember learning to walk?” I don’t let her answer. “Of course not. But you know you learned at some point because you can walk and you’ve always be
en able to walk.”
She mulls this over for a moment. “It’s like that?”
“It’s a little like that.”
This seems to satisfy her, if satisfaction has any place here, at this time.
“What did you say before? ‘In a lily way…?’”
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” she says. I’ll never get it right. “It just means… It’s something we say when something bad happens.”
“Something bad happened a long time ago. Not now.”
“I don’t even know what to say. I don’t. ‘I’m sorry’ feels useless.”
“You can’t treat me any differently. You can’t do that.” I mean to sound insistent and confident, but pleading has crept into my voice. I’m begging, not demanding. “It’s not fair to treat me differently. You were the only person in this town who didn’t know. I didn’t have to tell you.”
“But—”
“No. And don’t tell your parents. They like me.”
“You think this would make them not like you?”
I think of Evan’s parents. “Well.”
“My parents think you’re great, Sebastian. My dad practically quotes you, like you’re Shakespeare or something. You think he tells every random kid he meets to call him by his first name? That’s not typical. He really likes you.”
I try not to not let my shock and my pleasure show, but I know my face betrays me. It almost always does. “Let’s keep it that way. Right now they see me, not… not what I did.”
She nods. For the first time, her hijab slips the slightest bit, and I catch sight of hair so deep brown it’s black. Then she tucks it away smoothly, so quickly that it’s gone in the instant I realize I’ve seen it.
The next time I go to Aneesa’s house, Mr. Fahim makes a joke about Saint Sebastian. Nothing has changed. She hasn’t told them.
Good.
We’re in Aneesa’s living room two days later, watching the pilot episode of Max Headroom on my laptop. She has taken my words seriously and not treated me any differently. A part of me imagined that learning about my past would either repel her or bring her closer to me, but she’s acting as though she hasn’t learned something horrific.