Fifteen Lanes

by S. J. Laidlaw

“What do you want to eat? I’m buying.”

  Still reeling from the last five minutes of my life, I had no idea what to say. I’d never spoken to this boy before and he was offering to buy me lunch. Would it be more rude to refuse or accept?

  “Chips?” I suggested hesitantly.

  “Not going to happen, my nubile nymph.” He pursed lips that any girl would kill to have—kissing her, or just stuck on her own face. “I’m not going to be the one to destroy your perfect feline physique, so let me rephrase: Do you want a veggie wrap or a salad?”

  “Salad?”

  “Perfect choice! Aren’t you clever.” With that he sauntered off, pausing at least a half dozen times on his way to the food line to chat with people, all of who seemed utterly charmed by him.

  As surreal as the last twenty-four hours of my life had been, this took bizarre to a whole new level. VJ Patel was the local version of royalty. There wasn’t anyone in the school richer or more famous. Everyone knew he drove around in an armored car with a personal bodyguard, though apparently school regulations required the bodyguard to wait in the parking lot. The stories of his lavish parties and excessive drinking were legendary. In fact, legendary pretty much summed up VJ Patel. So … what was he doing with me?

  It was possible he felt sorry for me, but I wouldn’t have pegged him for a particularly altruistic guy. The numerous times I’d seen him on the front of the lifestyle section of the newspaper it was never in connection with anything charitable, unless he was attending a fundraising art auction or gala.

  I wasn’t thrilled about being his latest charity until a more hideous thought occurred to me. He was concerned about me gaining weight. A wave of nausea swept over me. Did he believe the hype that I was a slut? Given the photographic evidence, it was hardly surprising. The only question was, did he want me for himself or was he planning to follow his dad into the film industry, perhaps starting with a porn flick? As shocking as my behavior was to the average westerner, it had to seem worse to the Indian students. Their own films had only recently allowed kissing. Even imported western films were heavily censored.

  VJ appeared with a large Greek salad, placed it in front of me and dropped into the chair across the table. I stared at the salad. With the knot in my stomach I wouldn’t be able to force down a single bite. I cleared my throat. He grinned.

  “What’s on your mind?” he said. “Spit it out.”

  I tried to think of a tactful opener. “I really appreciate you rescuing me,” I started. “But, you should know I’m not … I’m not …”

  He arched his perfectly shaped brow. He was so good-looking he was pretty. “You’re not what?” he prompted.

  “Available.”

  “Available for what?”

  I blinked and made the mistake of shoving a forkful of salad into my mouth with the hope that it would give me time to think.

  “Sex?” he asked, leaning forward across the table. “Are we not going to have sex?”

  I couldn’t chew. His face was inches from my own and he was talking about sex. My face was suffused with heat.

  VJ leaned back in his chair and sighed heavily. I quickly chewed, swallowed and resolved to give up vegetables for the foreseeable future.

  “Well, Gracie,” he said, “I’m going to tell you something, but you have to swear it won’t go any further.”

  “Who would I tell? Everyone hates me.”

  “This secret you could probably sell to the press.”

  “The last thing I want is more attention.”

  His tone was so dramatically earnest that I wasn’t sure if he was serious, but his dark eyes searched my face as though he really was trying to decide if he could trust me.

  “Okay.” He took a deep breath. “I like boys, Gracie. That’s the truth of it. I like you too, obviously. As a person, I think you’re very interesting … but not in that way.”

  My mind was reeling. In all the stories I’d read and heard, not one said VJ Patel was gay. I was never obsessed with him or anything, but I was a major Bollywood film fan. I felt this was something I should have known. I’d seen him in at least three films playing a teen heartthrob, and I’d read countless articles detailing his latest romances. I had to hand it to him: if he was telling me the truth he was a better actor than I’d given him credit for. At another time I might have been disappointed—like every other girl in the school, I’d harbored a small crush on him—but recent events had decidedly dampened my romantic inclinations.

  Still, it was hard to reconcile the boy before me, claiming his lack of interest in girls, with all the stories. “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You don’t understand?” A smile played about his lips. “How shall I explain?” He thought for a moment. “As much as I hope we can be friends, at no point are you going to get any. I hope you’re not too disappointed.”

  I laughed.

  VJ frowned. “That’s a little harsh, pet.”

  “I’m sorry.” I tried to stop grinning but I couldn’t help it. I was just so massively relieved. “So, if you aren’t interested in me, why’d you bail me out?”

  “Who said I wasn’t interested in you? You’re the school slut. I think that’s positively delicious.”

  “I’m not really a slut.”

  “Don’t be so quick to give away your power. Remember, there’s no such thing as bad press.”

  “Look at that, she’s already got her claws into another guy.” Madison’s voice rose above the usual cafeteria babble. I looked over to discover that she wasn’t at her usual table. She, too, had chosen to sit in a central spot. But it was who she was with that took my breath away. Flanked by her usual entourage, she sat directly across the table from none other than Todd.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, more to myself than to VJ.

  He followed my gaze. “Ah, an alliance of your enemies. What can it mean? The intrigue of it all! This just keeps getting better!”

  I gave him a cool look. “I’m glad you find my life so entertaining.”

  “Of course I do. I wouldn’t hang out with you otherwise.”

  “Is nothing serious with you?” I knew I didn’t have enough friends to risk losing the only person willing to speak to me, but I was starting to wonder if VJ was really friend material.

  He straightened his face and looked so determinedly solemn that I found myself smiling.

  “There are many things I find serious. Declining achievement levels in rural schools, female infanticide and my mother’s suicide attempt after my father’s affair are all things I consider very serious. A bunch of children displaying their pack mentality by attacking a vulnerable girl is distasteful but hardly catastrophic.”

  “Did you say your mother’s suicide attempt?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too. It destroyed my family. But it also put a lot of things in perspective.”

  “So what I did, you don’t think that’s serious?”

  “You showed off your boobs. I’m no connoisseur but it didn’t seem to me you have anything to be ashamed of. You’re very thin but you know what they say about wealth and thinness.”

  “Don’t you think my behavior was a little …” I found I couldn’t bring myself to say the word, though I’d been called it so many times in the past twenty-four hours I was surprised it still stung.

  “Avant-garde, bold, even, gasp, sexy?”

  “Slutty. You have to admit, what I did was slutty.”

  “Grace,” said VJ, looking me straight in the eye without a hint of humor. “My forty-two-year-old father encouraging every young ingénue in Mumbai to think sex with him will further her career is slutty. What you did may not have been your wisest decision, but it wasn’t slutty. In fact, it was so naive it was kind of sweet. Seriously, Grace, didn’t your parents teach you anything?”

  “Apparently not,” I said wryly.

  “Well, Bambi, you’ve
come to the right place. As someone who’s spent a lifetime in the public eye, who’s had his every debacle documented, I’m going to teach you how to deal with the hunters.”

  “If you’ve had every debacle documented, are you sure you’re the best person to advise me? It doesn’t sound like you know how to avoid publicity.”

  “Avoid it?” VJ made big eyes. “Baby, why would you want to avoid it? What you want to do is control it.”

  “Like you do?” I didn’t even try to hide my skepticism.

  “Absolutely. Let me ask you one question. Did you know I was gay?”

  I paused. He had me there. Everything I’d ever read about him told the same story. He was a womanizing bad boy, in sharp contrast to his father, invariably portrayed as a dignified family man. How could the press have got it so backwards?

  “Exactly.” VJ read my mind. “The trick is to take control of your image. Don’t let it control you. Now finish your salad. You’re going to need your strength for the days ahead.”

  “Why do you even want to help me?”

  “Did your brother Kyle ever mention me?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He was on my cricket team. Last year we played a tournament in Singapore. He never mentioned that?”

  “I knew he went, but so what?”

  “I met someone at the tournament. It was the first and last time I’ve had the freedom to act on my feelings. We got a little physical and your brother walked in on us. He never told you about that?”

  “No, he didn’t say a thing.”

  “I’m not surprised. He never told anyone. He could have destroyed me, but he didn’t, and he never made me feel awkward about it either. He didn’t treat me any differently than before.”

  “You know it really isn’t a big deal, right? It’s perfectly normal.”

  “Not in my world. If the press got wind of my inclinations, my career would be over. It’s not okay for a regular Indian boy to be gay, much less a teen idol. And take a good look at my friends, wannabe starlets and sycophants. Not one of them would stick by me if my star plummeted.”

  “You don’t know that. Maybe you just need to give people a chance.” I suddenly realized I’d just parroted the same advice Kyle had given me not so long ago.

  “Has that been your experience, Grace?”

  My silence was sufficient response.

  “Do your parents know?” I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to keep a secret like that.

  “I told my mother last year. She slapped me and said we wouldn’t speak of it again.” He kept his voice level but his eyes clouded at the memory.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll do what my parents expect of me—get married, produce at least one child, ideally a boy, and never under any circumstances let anyone outside the family find out what I am.”

  I only had time for one more bite of my salad before the bell rang, but it wasn’t going down so well anyway. As I picked up what was left of it and headed for the bin, I found myself worrying about the most popular guy in school, which probably explains why I didn’t see her coming. She crashed into me, tipping salad down my shirt. The whole oily mess crashed to the floor. A crowd quickly formed, her minions already on the scene.

  “Get your cameras ready, boys. She’s probably going to whip off her shirt and start rubbing that oil on herself.”

  I stared at the mess on the floor. “Why don’t you give it a rest, Madison?” I was more sad than angry.

  “Why, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Oh, good!” exclaimed VJ. I didn’t realize he’d pushed his way through the crowd to stand beside me. “Look, Grace, it’s the wicked witch and her flying monkeys!”

  Madison glowered, but even surrounded by her supporters she didn’t have the nerve to take on the famous VJ Patel.

  “You drag me into your sordid little drama again and you’re dead,” she snarled, but she scuttled away before I could respond.

  “Hey, man, what are you doing?” asked Todd, perhaps emboldened by his own role in my downfall. “You can do better than her.”

  “Actually, man, I’ve convinced Grace that she can do better than you. Strangely enough, that wasn’t hard.”

  There were a few giggles from the crowd.

  “I’d certainly take VJ over Todd,” said a senior I didn’t know but instantly liked. This was followed by general murmurs of assent.

  Todd looked around at his faithless friends.

  “Do you know what I can’t figure out, McClaren?” Todd demanded. “How you could have believed even for a minute that I’d be interested in you. Don’t you know what a total loser you are?”

  VJ stepped up to Todd so their faces were inches apart. “You’re the only loser I see.”

  “Whatever, man.” Todd shot me a final contemptuous look before stalking off.

  I waited for the crowd to disperse before I turned to VJ. “Are you sure you want to hang out with me? People are going to wonder why you’re sticking up for me. They might even think we’re a couple.”

  “Exactly, darling. Now you’re getting the hang of it.”

  Noor

  The doctor …

  I rehearsed what I was going to say when my name was called. I’d tell them Ma was too sick to come but gave me permission to bring my brother. I’d admit he’d been coughing for several weeks but I’d lie about the blood in his spit, claiming it was a new symptom. To admit the truth would have raised questions I didn’t want to answer.

  We took two buses across town to visit a hospital where we weren’t known. I hoped there wasn’t a central registry of hospital visits. We’d been to more than a dozen throughout the city. Ma had no idea we’d visited any. She would have beaten me senseless if she’d known.

  It was the only way I could get enough medicine for Shami. Each new clinic would give him only a single injection and medicine for a week or two at most. I was handed prescriptions for the rest, which I hadn’t the money to fill. Traveling to a new clinic was half the cost of filling the prescription and had the added benefit that if his condition worsened, a doctor would catch it.

  Each new doctor had given me a stern lecture on how to administer the drugs, writing it all down so I could pass the information to my mother. Each time, I’d listened intently, folded the instructions and made a show of zipping them into my bag. Never once did I say my mother couldn’t read or that she believed doctors were tricksters and thieves. Ma said free clinics were like the fruit-wallah who gave you a slice of mango and then tried to sell you a whole one at twice its value.

  Fortunately, like every other morning, Ma was sleeping off the effects of alcohol and her night’s work. If things went according to plan, I’d have Shami back under her bed before she noticed he was missing, with another dose of drugs in his system and a small supply to keep him going.

  That day, the trip to the clinic had taken longer than I’d expected and it was already full of people when we arrived. I checked in at the front counter and was given a number in the hundreds. I could only hope that they didn’t start with number one each day but carried numbers over from one day to the next.

  The clinic was in a small section of a much larger hospital. The designated waiting area, on the second floor, was little more than a widening of the corridor with several dozen hard, molded chairs bolted together and to the floor. Every one of them was already filled, as was most of the available floor space. In some cases whole families were camped out. It was a roll call of diseases, every one present and accounted for. Running noses and hacking coughs were the most obvious symptoms, but Shami wasn’t the only child with a glassy-eyed stare.

  He’d fussed on the trip over, trying to convince me with his few words not to take him. Barely two years old, he knew where we were bound whenever we boarded a bus in the early hours of the morning. The excitement of the first time had long since passed. For him it meant poking and prodding, a painful injection and foul-tasting medicin
e. He didn’t understand that it was to make him better, and truthfully I was losing faith in that myself. This bout of bloody coughing was only his latest affliction. He was visited by one symptom after another, each gnawing at him, stealing the light from his eyes, so it seemed as he got older that he’d skipped childhood altogether and gone straight to old age.

  “Shami want ’nana,” said Shami. I held him in one arm with his own draped around my neck. He watched me as I scanned the room for a place to sit down.

  I turned my attention to him skeptically. Shami rarely expressed hunger, even less so in the past weeks. The cough had drained his desire for food, along with the energy to eat it.

  “If we leave, we’ll lose our place.”

  “Shami want ’nana,” he repeated earnestly.

  I spotted a corner for us at the end of the waiting area farthest from the doctor’s office. I took him over and settled us on the floor. I laid Shami out beside me with his head in my lap and stroked his hair. It was a relief to sit down, though I kept a vigilant eye on the doctor’s door. Shami fell into a fitful sleep despite his frequent fits of coughing.

  Two hours passed with fewer than a dozen people going in and out of the office. I looked at the other invalids and was reminded of the herd of goats that filled our street every Eid. They were petted and overfed, yet their darting eyes showed too much white. Somehow they understood death was upon them. How many of these patients knew they would never recover? A doctor’s visit was just one more item crossed off their list of chores and had less purpose than cleaning a toilet.

  Shami started another deep bout of coughing. My rag was already wet with his blood but I held it to his lips anyway so it didn’t splatter on the floor. It oozed between my fingers. I rummaged in my bag for our water carafe with my free hand. When his coughing slowed, I held it to his lips.

  “Take him outside before he makes us all sick,” scolded a woman who was seated on the floor a short distance away.

  She was round like a tomato, as were her husband and even her two young children. I wasn’t surprised at her order, though she knew very well I wouldn’t obey. Picking fights made the waiting pass more quickly. A schoolgirl alone with her baby brother was an easy target. Who would speak up for me? I looked at her gold necklace. It was only gold-plated, and the inlaid jewels were fake. Did she think she was fooling anyone?