Out of Nowhere

by Maria Padian

  “Then why did practically every other kid in this school get it?” I demanded.

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Did you send it?”

  I looked around the table, incredulous. The adults were listening carefully to her.

  “Are you really that stupid?” I said.

  “Tom,” Mr. Cockrell said warningly. “Let’s keep this civil.”

  “Every person who got that text can read where it came from, and it came from you,” I continued. I looked around the table. “You guys know how that works, right?”

  Before Cherisse came in, I had had to walk them through Facebook as well as basic texting. They’d had no idea you could simultaneously send a message to every contact on your phone. And include a photo. Only Mrs. Swift has her own Facebook page.

  Only the Aden guy seemed to understand Facebook. He had no questions about texting.

  “Great. Prove it,” she said. “Bring in all their phones. And by the way, how is it bullying someone if you don’t even know who they are? I mean, do you people know who the girl in the picture is? You can’t even see her face!”

  “We don’t know who she is, nor will Tom tell us,” Mrs. Swift explained. “We wanted her in here as well, but he’s afraid that if you learn her identity, you’ll go after her more viciously.”

  “I haven’t gone after her at all! I don’t know her!” Cherisse exclaimed.

  Mr. Aden spoke.

  “I am wondering, Miss Ouellette, if you do not know this girl, why you identify her as Somali?” His accent reminded me of Saeed’s.

  “Well, because she’s wearing that head thing,” Cherisse said. “They all wear it. The Somali girls.”

  Mr. Aden nodded thoughtfully.

  “Most of them do. Some do not. Also, many Sudanese girls wear hijab. But you do not write Sudanese slut.”

  Cherisse rolled her eyes.

  “Sudanese, Somali, whatev,” she said. “I don’t know her. All right?”

  Mr. Aden leaned back in his chair and glanced at Mr. Cockrell, who reached behind him and picked up a slim laptop. He opened it, gave it a few swift keystrokes, then turned it to face Cherisse. Her Facebook profile was displayed. With the photo and all the comments, which now numbered 108. I had opened it for them before they called her down.

  “You seem very interested in discovering the identity of this girl,” Mr. Cockrell said. “And very interested in encouraging cruel, obscene statements about her.”

  She sighed.

  “Like I said, Tom and I are in a fight. I was jealous, okay? Yeah, I’d like to know who she is. But I don’t. Is it my fault that other people are mean?”

  “We are not in a fight!” I fumed. “We are not in anything. There is no ‘we.’ ”

  “If this isn’t a fight, then I sure don’t want to be around when you two do get angry with each other,” Mr. Haley commented dryly. The adults laughed, even Coach. Unbelievable.

  “Well,” Mr. Cockrell said, “the bottom line is that the remarks are incendiary. They enter the realm of hate speech, and I’m afraid they could lead to some real trouble. Now, Cherisse, even if that wasn’t your intention, you see where it’s led, don’t you?”

  Cherisse nodded.

  “What do we think needs to happen here?” Mr. Cockrell asked.

  “You want me to take down the post? Fine,” Cherisse said. She grabbed hold of the laptop and began to pull it toward her. But this Mr. Aden guy, who sat alongside her, took hold of it himself.

  “One moment,” he said. He rummaged in a battered brown briefcase at his feet and pulled out a thumb drive.

  “Before the young lady deletes her post, I would like to make a screen capture.” He looked at Mr. Cockrell, who nodded.

  As Mr. Aden saved Cherisse’s wall post—it took a while because he scrolled through all the comments and saved them, too—Mrs. Swift spoke up.

  “What about the phone messages?” she said. “Even if you erase the Facebook post, those messages are still out there, and every person who received them could resend that picture to someone else, who can then send it to someone else …”

  “There’s no way to delete texts that have already been sent,” I explained to her. “Nice job.” I directed my last comment at Cherisse.

  “It was just a joke!” she repeated. “It’s not my fault if other people are mean!”

  “So what’s your excuse?” Coach said angrily to her. “You know, every day I ask my boys to step up. To set an example. To be tolerant of others and work hard to be a community. I’m pretty damn proud of what they’ve accomplished; it hasn’t been easy. So it pisses the hell out of me that that this sort of mean-girl crap, directed at someone you only identify as ‘Somali,’ could undo everything we’ve worked for. Pardon my language, folks. But this is bullying. Racial bullying, if you ask me.”

  Everybody started speaking at once. Mr. Haley couldn’t seem to get his head around either the bullying concept—“How can you bully someone you don’t know?”—or global texting. Mrs. Swift wanted to figure out how to kill the image on the phone. Mr. Cockrell was asking Coach if he thought Cherisse should be suspended, because if so, there were very clear procedures. Mr. Aden seemed very preoccupied with copying all the comments on the Facebook post.

  Meanwhile, Cherisse sat silently. She looked at me across the table. Subtly, she raised her right hand, pointing her index finger straight up and her thumb at a perfect right angle. A big letter L aimed in my direction.

  Loser.

  She wore this tight white undershirt with lace at the top and thin straps. She had a hoodie over it, but she’d only zipped the bottom half, so there was plenty of boob on display. Raccoon-like circles rimmed her eyes, and her hair was highlighted to a crispy yellow.

  Did she and Samira really attend the same school? Inhabit the same planet?

  Mr. Aden looked up from the laptop.

  “Okay, she can delete now, if that’s what you want her to do,” he said. Mr. Cockrell glanced around the table, and everyone nodded. They at least agreed on this much.

  Cherisse swiveled the laptop to face her. She logged out of my Facebook account, logged on to hers, then quickly deleted the post with the photo of me and Samira. The 108 comments evaporated.

  There was no trace of what she’d set in motion.

  “Are we done here?” she said, looking at Mr. Cockrell.

  “Whoa. Wait,” I said. “That’s it? She hits Delete and walks away?”

  “No, of course that’s not it,” Coach growled. “There are consequences.”

  “Can we first please decide how we’re going to handle the phone messages?” Mrs. Swift chimed in.

  Cherisse let out an exasperated sigh.

  “Okay, listen … I’m not saying I sent that picture. But if it will make you all feel better, I can text all my contacts and tell them to just forget the whole thing. Sort of a global JK, you know?”

  “What?” Mr. Haley asked.

  “Just kidding,” Cherisse and I said at the same time.

  “I believe something along those lines, perhaps with a bit more explanation than JK, is in order,” said Mr. Cockrell.

  “Like?” Cherisse asked.

  “Perhaps you and Mr. Cockrell can work that out together,” Mrs. Swift said. “I’m sorry, but I’m supposed to meet another student in my office right about now.…”

  “Unbelievable,” I said.

  Mr. Cockrell frowned at me.

  “Excuse me, Tom?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “She’s gonna walk away from this,” I said. “Punch the Delete key, send a text, end of story. You know what? I’m outta here.” I pushed back my chair. Coach rose, too.

  “One moment, please.” Mr. Aden.

  “Tom,” he said, “I understand that you want to see this girl”—he gestured to Cherisse—“punished. But how do you think that will help the girl in the picture?”

  Everyone was quiet. Including me. It was a good
question. Even if we took Cherisse out to the school parking lot for some tar and feathers, it wouldn’t erase the image she’d spread. The caption under the picture.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “And I don’t, either,” he said, smiling slightly. “I think the best thing for your friend in the picture is to leave her alone. Less attention, not more attention.”

  He was right. The last thing Samira needed was for Cherisse to be turned into some sort of example. Turn her coven of nasty girlfriends into a bunch of avenging angels. The whole thing would just drag on and on.…

  “I think we can all agree that handling this quietly would be best,” Mr. Aden said. Everyone nodded.

  “So with that in mind,” Mr. Cockrell said, standing, “Tom, thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. You can go to your first-period class now. Cherisse, you’ll stay with me a little longer. Everyone else: thank you, I think we’re set.”

  I felt Coach’s hand on my elbow.

  “Let’s go,” he said quietly, steering me toward the door.

  Out in the empty hallway, we both exhaled at the same time.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  I looked at him.

  “That sucked,” I said. “She’s getting off … with nothing! Absolutely nothing. And she has ruined Samira. Coach, this sort of shit is bad.”

  To his credit, he didn’t correct me for swearing.

  “Listen, Tom. I hear you. But Mr. Aden’s right. We need to not make this worse for your friend.”

  I looked down the long, empty corridor. My throat was dry. I was even tempted to visit the water fountain, germs and discarded cigarette butts and all.

  “I’ve got good news,” he continued. “We’re all set with Saeed. He can play.”

  “Since when?” I asked. After the past forty-eight hours, I was having a hard time believing good news.

  “I got an email this morning,” he said, grinning. “The committee reviewing the Maquoit complaint jumped right on it because I told them we’re in postseason play. They decided in our favor within ten minutes. That’s what a buddy of mine on the committee says, at any rate. So we’ve got our full team back, and a game tomorrow. Things are looking up.”

  As he said this, Mr. Aden emerged from the conference room. He walked quickly toward us.

  “Tom,” he said, “I wonder if I could speak with you?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  He looked hesitantly at Coach.

  “Nothing you can ask me that Coach can’t hear,” I told him.

  “Yes,” Mr. Aden said. “Well, I wonder, can you please tell me who is the girl in the picture?”

  “Oh for crying out loud, Abdullahi. Why?” Coach burst out. I hadn’t realized they were on a first-name basis.

  Mr. Aden stiffened.

  “I promise you, I will not tell the young lady in there,” he said, tilting his head toward the conference room where Cockrell and Cherisse had yet to emerge. “My only concern is for this girl and her family.”

  Coach shook his head slowly from side to side.

  “Right,” he said quietly. “Always got to stick your finger in it, don’t you?”

  Mr. Aden smiled.

  “But I am paid to stick my finger in it! This is my job,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, but are you a teacher?” I asked Mr. Aden.

  He held out his hand.

  “I am Abdullahi Aden, and I am the cultural liaison for schools. I work with the new immigrant students and their families.”

  “So you’re a teacher?” I repeated.

  “No, but I am an employee of the school system,” he said. He spoke precisely. Chose his words carefully.

  “Why do you want to know who she is?”

  “This is very disturbing, what that girl in there did,” he said. “This would be very upsetting to one of our Somali families. If I can be helpful to them in any way, I would like to do so.”

  Coach was looking at me while Mr. Aden spoke. I might have been wrong, but … I thought I saw him shake his head.

  “Tell you what,” I said to the guy. “Do you have a phone number? I’ll give it to the girl and her family, and they can call you.”

  He didn’t like that answer. But what could he say? Abdullahi Aden gave me his card—sure enough, it said right there that he worked for the school department—then headed for the exit, nodding curtly to Coach as he left.

  Coach smiled grimly at me.

  “Well done,” he said, clapping me on the back but offering no other explanation. “See you at practice this afternoon.”

  Later that day, after practice, Abdi and I floundered. We were close, really close, to finishing his little alphabet book, but we needed someone who could help us bridge the gap between his challenges and my cluelessness about the Somali language. And Samira was a no-show.

  Not that we had a set date and time for working with Abdi. It’s just that she was pretty much always at The Center, so I’d counted on her. Myla hadn’t come, either. The events of the weekend had set her back, and she had a paper due.

  The little dude swung a foot and looked at me like he really couldn’t believe how stupid I was. We were on the last three letters, X, Y, and Z, and while Abdi easily came up with a Somali word, xaaqin, which means “a little straw brush,” I struggled to think of a good English one. My mind kept jumping to Xerox and xenophobe, which, for obvious reasons, wouldn’t work and wouldn’t reproduce in Crayola.

  “Man, don’t you know anything?” he said crossly. For some reason he was in a rotten mood. So was I. Practice sucked, and not only because we were missing Saeed. Something was up with the other Somali guys.

  No one seemed to know where Saeed was and whether he’d gotten the message that he was back on the team. He hadn’t come to school that day, and Ismail, Double M, and Ibrahim, who all had classes with him, had no explanation.

  I got the feeling that they knew more than they were letting on. They didn’t seem surprised or upset. They responded clearly and politely to Coach’s questions about Saeed, but it was as if some curtain had dropped and they had disappeared behind it.

  When I tried to talk to Ismail myself, he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Is everything okay?” I finally said to him. He nodded. I decided to just cut to the chase.

  “I saw your comment on that stupid post Cherisse Ouellette had on Facebook. You do know that was total crap, right?”

  He shrugged and looked across the field. “Yes,” he said. But his face was unreadable.

  The rule at Chamberlain is that if you miss a practice, you miss a game. Coach was pretty frustrated that Saeed hadn’t gotten the message that he was back on, because we needed him for the next day’s game against Whittier. When practice ended, he pulled me aside and asked if I’d heard anything at all from Saeed. I promised to stop by his apartment on my way home from The Center.

  “I know a lot of things,” I said to Abdi, “but not everything.” He didn’t seem satisfied with that answer. He needed me to know everything, in that way little boys needed big boys to be smart and powerful.

  He was in for a disappointment.

  Here’s what I did know, and what I finally figured out: the whole dictionary idea was pretty much a fail from the start. That’s because there is no direct correlation between the English and Somali alphabets. Sure, we could match the words apple with aqal and boy with babaay. But their letters don’t go in the same order as ours, and when you get a little deeper into it, nothing lines up. I mean, the letters P, V, and Z don’t even exist in Somali, and some of their sounds are written by doubling our letters. Even writing Somali using the Latin alphabet was only invented forty years ago. By some African guy. I looked it up on Wikipedia.

  It’s like we’d tried to fold the two alphabets together, like the opposite sides of a single card, but because each half was a different shape and size the thing would never stand straight and the edges wouldn’t match up. We’d have a collection of same-sou
nding words and pictures in the end, but it wasn’t close to a dictionary.

  I’m not sure Abdi cared.

  “So, what is an X-word I can draw?” he insisted. I thought of something.

  “Hey, in your music class do you guys have a xylophone?” He frowned. “It’s an instrument that makes sort of a ringing noise, and you play it with a little mallet?” He still didn’t get it, so I drew a line of rectangles that started out big, then diminished in size. His face lit up.

  “Yes! Is xylo! I play it in school.” Using a different color for each bar, Abdi excitedly drew his version of a xylophone. It reminded me of the Playskool version my grandmother gave me when I was little. I could tap out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on it.

  End in sight, Abdi rapidly drew a yaanyo (a big red tomato) and a squiggly circle with a tail (ball of yarn, sort of). There is no Z in Somali, and no Samira to help us come up with a good phonetic Z-word, so I suggested zebra, and before you knew it, we were done.

  He slapped the black crayon down on the table after he colored in the final stripe on a four-legged creature that looked like a cat with a horse tail. The crayon cracked in half.

  “Yes! I go now. See you later, Tom.” Abdi grabbed his pack and dashed out The Center door without a backward look at the project we’d spent weeks finishing. The other completed pages were in a file cabinet drawer in the glassed-in cubicle, and I added these final three sheets to that pile, then slid the metal drawer closed. I figured Myla and Samira could take a look before Abdi brought it to school.

  When I left, I walked around the block to the Bashirs’ building. The sidewalk was practically deserted. The sun had set, it was getting cool, and the air was filled with the scent of dinners cooking. Cumin. Frying meat. Just before I mounted the stairs I saw a man, his back to me, walking in the opposite direction. Not in any hurry, but walking purposefully to the corner. He was slim and wore nice trousers. He carried a briefcase.

  I climbed four flights to the Bashirs’ and knocked. The building was alive with sounds, with children in hallways, with doors open so you could see into families’ private lives around the television or dining table. As I stood outside the Bashirs’ closed door, I swore I heard noise on the other side, but no one answered. I knocked again, but when the door refused to swing open, I told myself it was the neighbors I heard, and Saeed and Samira were not home.