The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel

by Mira Jacob

  “Wills.”

  “Huh.” Jamie took a long pull. “Why?”

  Amina shrugged, not quite sure what she had asked, much less why. She looked over at Jamie, trying to gauge if it was important, but there was a little black seed of something caught in his teeth. She wanted to tell him, but it felt like too much work.

  “Remember that night at the dance?” he asked. “You looked so hot.”

  Amina smiled in the dark, deeply pleased in a way that made it seem like feminism had never existed. “Yeah, right.”

  “I was dying to do this with you.”

  “Get me high?”

  “No, dummy. Get you next to me.”

  “Bullshit. You barely looked at me.”

  “That was just part of my moves, man. Play it cool.” Jamie sucked his teeth. “I went to that stupid dance looking for you.”

  “You did?” Amina sat up, steadying herself. She peered down at him, trying to see if he was fucking with her. “Are you fucking with me?”

  “You think I wanted to be there?”

  “Aw, Jamie,” she said, more touched than she knew what to do with. She rubbed his forehead, the little patch between the edge of his eyebrow and hairline that she’d grown especially fond of, and his hand slid under her shirt.

  “Hold on a sec.” She stood up and waited for the world to recalibrate so she could walk properly.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Behind the bleachers to pee.”

  Jamie raised his head, assessing the dark hill that held the built-in bleachers. “All the way over there? Just squat here.”

  “I’m not peeing in front of you.”

  “It’s not a huge deal or something.”

  “Yes it is. It’s a commitment.”

  “What?” Jamie laughed. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve been married.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  She did not know, really, but she knew it had something to do with peeing while talking, and showering with the door open, and being optimistic in a way she had never been. Maybe someday his easiness would rub off on her. Maybe someday she’d even become the kind of woman who could hunker down in front of him, but today was not that day. “Be right back.”

  She walked across the grass and then the track and then to a little side path that led to the dirt parking lot behind the bleachers. As she rounded the corner and the field disappeared behind her, her skin tingled. It was all patches of light and dark back there. A shaggy ring of piñon trees mostly sheltered her from the bright lights of the parking lot, but the occasional patch of ground glowed eerily, like sun dappling the bottom of a lake. Amina stopped, dropped her pants, and squatted.

  Hank Franken. Every time she pissed in the open air, she thought about the boy’s weird, freckled face, teeth that seemed to always be gnashing. Senior year, Hank Franken had sat on a cactus trying to take a shit at a mesa kegger. They had heard his screams from far away, and then the cries with each step as he finally emerged into the ring of taillights, pants mid-thigh, dick cupped in his hand, begging someone to pull the needles out. Had someone pulled the needles out? Amina stood up, pulled up her pants.

  Someone was smoking a cigarette. It took a moment for Amina to realize this, and another to realize that that was a scary thing, the hair on her arms and neck rising all at once. Whoever it was, was close. Amina’s eyes zigzagged through the dark, straining. Was it a ninja? Was he watching her? She heard a small click behind her and turned around slowly, her heart seizing as an orange ember moved through the air a few feet back. Her throat went dry. Just as she felt herself tipping into a quiet, annihilating panic, the smoker took a drag of the cigarette, and the orange halo of light revealed a face so familiar that the night itself seemed to suck in sharply around her, every bit of oxygen rushing toward the flame.

  He looked the same. The exact same, his cheekbones stretched into the wide arcs that had risen after the Big Sleep. The glow from the cigarette faded, leaving a light-green smudge against the night.

  He was walking toward her. Amina understood this in some paralyzed corner of her brain, the same part that had watched countless glasses slip through her hands, plates shatter on the floor, car crashes occur in neighboring lanes, and just as she had held still in all of those instances, convinced that the damage was too obvious to actually happen, she held still now. Patches of light caught his jeans, his T-shirt, and then he was walking past her, toward the trees.

  Amina turned around, hot and chattering. Wait.

  She could not speak. He did not wait. Akhil parted the branches and walked toward the bright lights of the main campus.

  CHAPTER 6

  They were running fast across the mesa, sand flooding into their shoes, sagebrush and ditchweed tearing at their calves and ankles.

  “Hold on!” Jamie yelled after her.

  Amina felt his hand grasping for her shoulder and jerked away. He hadn’t said a word as she’d come bolting back from the bleachers. By the time she’d hit the main road out of the campus, he was sprinting alongside her, his long strides keeping pace with her frantic ones.

  “Amina, hold the fuck on!” He grabbed her hard this time, yanking her to a stop. “We’re safe. No one’s following us, I swear.”

  Amina wriggled away from him. Up in the distance, the spaded tips of the iron fence had just come into view, and she juddered toward it, loosely aware that something was not right with her ankle. She was shaking.

  “Hey.” Jamie touched her shoulder again lightly. “Hey, are you okay?”

  She was not okay. Her ankle felt like it had a pencil lodged in it. Amina stopped.

  “What happened? Was it a ninja?” Jamie asked.

  Amina shook her head, her brother’s face rushing to her like wind through an open door. She covered her face with her hands. A rasping noise came from her throat, and Jamie circled her in his arms, scrunching down to mitigate his height. He was smoothing her hair back in small repetitive movements, the kind designed to soothe cats and babies.

  “What happened?”

  She shook her head. She wiped her face on her arm, embarrassed and desperately in need of a tissue. “Let’s just go.”

  The drive home was silent. Jamie had insisted on driving her there, on helping her get her car the next day, but now, as the quiet stretched out between them, Amina regretted letting him. To be fair, he had tried to start several conversations, even trying to joke, but her inability to offer back a single word had sapped him, and they sat next to each other in the car like stones thrown together at the bottom of a pond. The car plummeted from the mesa into the valley, city blocks disappearing into the dark, smooth acreage of farmland. Soon they were winding down Corrales Road, signs for horse riders and cattle crossings flashing past them.

  “Here,” she said, and Jamie turned off of the main road onto a shorter road. She directed him over the ditch, to the dirt road.

  “Can you drive to the end?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Of this road. Please drive to the end.”

  They cruised past the entrance to her driveway, the road lit yellow and dusty in front of them. Jamie rolled to a stop at the dead end. He switched off the engine but kept the lights on, and they watched grasshoppers comet in and out of the dark. His shoulders had hitched up high around his ears like he was bracing against a blow.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded but her eyes burned.

  “What happened?”

  “I think I just got too high.”

  The wall of ditchweed wavered in front of them, a dark curtain of fronds and bugs that led to the water.

  “Sure,” he said, sounding unconvinced. She reached for him. She surprised him and his head reared back slightly as her fingers moved to the corner of his mouth, the meat of his lip.

  “Listen,” he started, in the gentle voice of easy letdowns, and she leaned forward, feeli
ng his mouth warm and still against hers. She kissed his top lip, and then, when he did not respond, his lower lip, sucking it gently. Jamie did not kiss her back, but he did not stop her either, and Amina leaned in a little more, a flash of pain slicing in her ankle as she tasted the beer and salt on him. He pulled away.

  She kissed his jaw. Her fingers found the back of his neck, and she pressed it toward her, scared that he would stop her. She did not want to be stopped. Her hand ran along his thigh, his crotch, the warm Braille of his inseam, and she was surprised by how suddenly he moved then, one hand clamping against her neck, the other finding her nipple with a sureness that pulled the air from her lungs. He shifted, coming at her now, his back rising up. Amina reached for the door handle behind her. She stepped out into the swampy air, her legs jittering as she walked to the back of the car and opened the hatchback.

  “Come on.”

  He did not move.

  “Please,” she said.

  His door opened and she slid into the car, kicking off her shoes in the dark. He slid in next to her, and the car bounced lightly with his weight. She scooted down, lifting his shirt to kiss the hairless patch of skin above his hip bone. She pulled the edge of his boxers and inhaled the root-deep smell of him.

  “Wait.”

  She did not want to wait. His cock was a lovely weight, warm and solid and as reassuring in the dark as a flashlight.

  “Amina, wait.”

  She put it in her mouth.

  “Fuck.” His hands were in her hair, cradling her skull, pushing her down farther as his hips rocked forward. He tasted like the beach, like relief.

  She rolled over to pull her shirt off, wriggling out of her shorts and underwear in the dark. She could feel his eyes on her as she straddled him, ignoring the burst of pain in her knees. His eyes were glassy slits as she rose in the dark and sank down again. One of his hands grabbed her collarbone; the other moved between her legs. She leaned into him until she could not breathe.

  “Come,” he said, and she did, easy like that, like she was a bomb waiting to go off.

  Afterward, she lay her head against the tight pillow of his biceps, the little beats of aftershock pulsing through her.

  “You scared me,” Jamie finally said with a soft laugh. Her forehead pressed against his throat so that his words hummed through her brain. “You came running out of there so fast, I thought, Someone is trying to fucking kill her. Like I was going to have to fight.”

  He rolled over a little bit, and Amina’s ear flattened against his shoulder. For a minute she imagined telling him that she’d seen Akhil behind the bleachers, that he looked like he did after the Big Sleep, but Jamie’s hand found her cheek, rubbing it lightly in a way that felt both proprietary and absent, and she realized that what had started as an effort to reclaim him, to bring the night back snug around the two of them and huddle under it like a blanket, was not working.

  She did not feel closer to Jamie now. She did not feel the slaking she had come to associate with having sex with him, that full-body release. Instead, she felt like a traitor. The car’s windows pressed in around them like eyes, and Amina had the distinct feeling of being watched as she lay there, of being judged. The Akhil sighting (which, as her high wore off, was starting to feel less like a visit from the supernatural and more like a kick from her own subconscious) had thrown a door open, allowing for a world in which she could be found disloyal by some version of her brother that had stayed stuck at Mesa Preparatory for all eternity, while the rest of them—Paige, Jamie, Amina—sauntered off into a bright, mortal future.

  “I don’t know if I can see Paige yet,” Amina said.

  Jamie stayed silent for so long, she would have thought he hadn’t heard her if his breathing had not suddenly grown shallow.

  “So don’t,” he finally said.

  “I mean, what am I even supposed to say to her?”

  “Jesus, Amina.” Her head slid to the scratchy carpet as he sat up. “Can we not talk about my sister right now?”

  “I thought you wanted to talk,” she said, embarrassed by the feminine needle in her voice. She looked at the upholstered ceiling, while he shoved his legs back into his boxers.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just thought it was important, maybe, to tell you.”

  “Where are my shorts?”

  “Here.” She lifted her leg, dug them out from under her.

  “Thanks.” He put them on awkwardly, rolling on one ass cheek, then the other. Amina sat up. “I can walk home from here, if you want.”

  “That’s not what I want.” He looked around, finding his sneakers and shoving his feet into them. “You always do this. You get quiet and then pick a fight with me and then try to leave.”

  “Always?” Her face prickled with heat. “Define always.”

  “I mean, what is this shit? Is it so hard to just tell people what’s going on? ‘Jamie, I’m sad.’ ‘Jamie, going to Mesa was the worst idea ever.’ ‘Jamie, the Paige and Akhil thing is still weird for me.’ Is that so hard?”

  “Jamie, you’re being a dick.”

  His face tightened into a scowl.

  Amina watched him carefully, her heart rabbiting around. “It isn’t weird for you?”

  “Honestly, I don’t think about it that much anymore. All of that stuff happened a really long time ago. They were just kids.”

  Amina nodded, his words turning over in her head like foreign currency, valuable someplace else. Just kids. Akhil was only ever a kid, she wanted to say; he would never be anything but a kid, but the grief behind this felt too obvious to let out, too tidal and self-indulgent.

  “What happened to you back there?” Jamie asked, not unkindly.

  Amina’s face burned. “I don’t know.”

  He took her hand, placing it in the damp patch of hair between his ribs, the one that reminded her of dogs and loyalty and protection, and she understood suddenly that she was falling in love with him. He was good, that seemed obvious enough, but there was more there, too, the way in which he felt uniquely hers, cut rough from some long-ago place and brought to her, something that she hadn’t allowed herself to miss until it had come back. And now what? Now what was she supposed to do with it? She felt his heart tapping lightly against the back of her hand and shut her eyes until that tiny pulse filled the space between them.

  CHAPTER 7

  Something was wrong with her ankle. The next morning, as Kamala unceremoniously banged open her bedroom door, raised the blinds, and pulled down the blanket, Amina let out a fractured gasp.

  “No,” she groaned.

  “Yes.” Kamala opened the dresser and threw a clean pair of underwear at her head. “And hurry up. Your father thinks something is wrong. He’s getting a scan this morning.”

  Amina sat up gingerly, staring at the bulbous knob attached to her foot. “What?”

  “He wants us to meet him at Anyan’s.”

  Ten minutes and some hobbling later they sped down Corrales Road, the air conditioner blasting dust motes down their tracheas. Amina sat forward, smothered by a film of beer and sex and weed. She cracked a window, leaning toward it like a dog.

  “Air conditioner is on,” Kamala snapped.

  “I feel funny.”

  “Oh, so now you’re sick?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Her mother looked at her disapprovingly. “I would have woken you at seven, but your father wouldn’t let me.”

  “Thank God.”

  “No thanking! Here this poor fellow is up all night tossing in bed, and now he has to go to the hospital alone!”

  “Ma,” she said in a warning tone, and her mother fell silent, grinding the truck into a lower gear as they approached an intersection.

  Amina shifted and the pain shifted with her, moving from her ankle to a small flare of guilt between her ribs. “What do you mean, he thinks something is wrong?”

  “He thinks something is wrong! Plain English! He’s getting a scan!”

  “Is
he feeling something new?”

  “How should I know? You think I am sitting there like some Diane Sawyers as he gets ready and goes? No! I am handing him one egg sandwich!” Her mother glanced sidelong at her but then turned, her whole face suddenly looking her up and down.

  “What.” Amina glared back.

  “Nothing.” On the corner, a few kids waved banners for a car wash, pointing excited sponges their way. “You were out with a boy? This friend from before?”

  “Yes.”

  Kamala’s gold bracelets clinked against one another as the light turned green, as they motored by the kids. “So bring him to dinner.”

  “What?”

  “To dinner. At the house.”

  Amina looked out the window to the parched west mesa hills. Her feelings from the night before felt like something borrowed from a dream; they might vanish if exposed to scrutiny. “I don’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  Amina shook her head. “I’m not sure if he’s quite there yet,” she lied.

  “Oh, koche, you know,” her mother said soothingly, but stopped.

  “What?”

  “No, no, nothing.”

  “No, what were you going to say?”

  Her mother looked at her, seeming to see right through her skin to the uncertainty inside. She tucked a strand of hair behind Amina’s ear.

  “There’s a brush in my purse,” she said.

  Dr. George’s waiting room rang with laughter. The receptionist’s face was in her hands, an older couple clutched each other’s forearms, and a young woman with a buzz cut wiped tears from her eyes, snorting. In the middle of them all, Thomas stood with a frozen expression of surprise on his face.

  It was the one-way-street story. Amina had heard it a thousand times before, her father recounting how on his first month in America he had turned down a road where all the cars were coming at him. “In my country, there are no one-ways!” he liked to say, “Only every-which-ways!” It was a favorite he liked to drag out for American strangers, putting them at ease with his accent, his charm, his inability to navigate spaces they had created.