The Whole Story of Half a Girl

by Veera Hiranandani

  Jackie must notice my face fall. “My treat,” she tells me.

  I know I can’t let her and yet these green loafers have suddenly become everything I’ve ever wanted.

  “No, you don’t have to do that,” I say, not all that convincingly. But when it comes to shoes, Jackie doesn’t need much convincing. She whips out her credit card and hands it to the saleswoman along with her red flats.

  “Wear them out of the store,” Kate says. And I do. I can’t stop looking at my feet. When I walk out of the mall, it feels like the whole world is admiring me.

  “Hiya, pumpkin,” Kate’s dad says to her as we all come through the kitchen door. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, his feet up on another chair, reading the paper. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and a tool belt around his waist. He’s tall, with spiky brown hair, and his green eyes practically have Christmas lights in them. He’s one of the best-looking men I’ve ever seen. He’s as much of a non-dad dad as Jackie is a non-mom mom. I can’t believe I’m thinking this about Kate’s dad.

  Kate walks over to him, and he grabs her around the waist and gives her a quick squeeze. She pats his head.

  “Dad, I think you need a haircut.”

  “Holy green shoes!” he says, looking at me.

  “Dad, this is Sonia. Aren’t they the coolest?”

  “Pleased to meet you, Sonia. I’m Greg and those”—he points down—“are rockin’ shoes.” I smile and quickly look to where he’s pointing so that he won’t see me blush.

  Then Jackie comes marching into the kitchen after bringing her shopping bags upstairs and flings herself into Greg’s lap. He grabs her and she gives him a not-so-small kiss on the mouth.

  “Ugh, come on,” Kate says, and grabs my arm.

  “We’re leaving for dinner in fifteen minutes,” Jackie calls. It’s close to eight. My family never has dinner on a school night past seven. And we only go out on the weekends.

  I follow Kate up to her room. It’s like living inside a doll’s house. It’s small and perfect. The bed reminds me of a cake—fluffy, white, and pink, decorated with tons of pillows. Paper patterned with little roses covers the walls. Silver-framed photos gleam on top of a heavy wooden dresser. There’s a pink-and-green-painted desk in the corner. It’s also incredibly neat. I didn’t know anyone my age was this neat.

  She opens up a very organized closet and takes out a fuzzy white and green sweater.

  “This will go perfectly with your shoes,” she says, and hands it to me. I dutifully put it on. It smells of lavender. Then she takes a lipstick out of her dresser drawer and pokes it in my direction. I take it from her and smooth on the frosty pink shade. Mom says I have to wait until I’m in high school to wear lipstick, but she isn’t here in this room, in this sweater, in these green shoes. I look in Kate’s mirror and like what I see.

  chapter sixteen

  The next day I wear the sweater, shoes, and lipstick to school and Kate’s mom gives us both lunch money. All day I get compliments on my shoes. Even Alisha says she likes them while we’re waiting after school for the bus, and she’s not the type to care about shoes. Alisha always wears the same thing to school—jeans, sneakers, and a black or gray T-shirt.

  Then she says, “You’re starting to look like her,” and frowns a little.

  “Is that bad?” I laugh, because I couldn’t look like Kate in a million years, no matter what I wore.

  “It depends,” she says in her matter-of-fact way.

  “On what?” I start biting away on my thumbnail.

  “On what you want to look like. You looked fine to me before,” she says, and shrugs. Things have been weird with me and Alisha. She hasn’t mentioned coming over to her house again and I haven’t either. Maybe I just want to concentrate on Kate and cheerleading right now. Maybe that’s enough.

  Then Alisha reaches in her jeans pocket and fishes out a shiny green rock.

  “Look, it’s jade,” she says. “Same color as your shoes.” She gives it to me. I turn the rock around in my hand. It’s cool and smooth. It makes me feel good just holding it. When her bus comes I close my hand tight around the rock.

  “Can I have it back?” she asks, and holds out her hand.

  “Yeah,” I say, but I don’t want to let it go. She wiggles her fingers and I finally press it into her palm. My hand looks so light next to hers I almost don’t recognize myself.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Kate and Jess walk past us to Kate’s bus. Jess is talking fast and loud about something and doesn’t see us. At first I think they’re going to walk by without even saying hi, but then Kate looks up and gives me a low little wave, as if she doesn’t want Jess to see. I wave back the same way and think about what we would all look like standing together, Alisha on one side, Kate on the other, me in the middle. Like a pen running out of ink.

  “What are those things on your feet?” Mom asks when I get home. It takes about three seconds for her to notice the green loafers.

  “Shoes,” I say without looking at her. I go over to the fridge and hunt for a snack. All I see is soy milk, a bag of carrots, cauliflower, and some goat cheese. I close the fridge and open the pantry. Pretzels and a cranberry juice box will have to do.

  “How come we never have any good food in this house?”

  “Please don’t talk to me that way.” Mom looks at me with her hands on her hips. “Are they Kate’s?”

  “Kind of,” I say.

  I hear the thud, thud, thud of my heart, so I grab a handful of pretzels and stuff them into my mouth. I can’t answer her if my mouth is full. She stares at me, waiting. The pretzels taste like sawdust.

  “Sonia, what’s going on?” she asks. Her eyebrows scrunch together in her sort of angry, sort of worried way.

  “Nothing,” I say, and take a swig of juice to clear away the last of the pretzels. “Jackie bought them for me.”

  “Kate’s mother?” she says, and starts sorting the mail piled on the counter. I look at Mom’s clunky black clogs that she wears every day, at her frizzy salt-and-pepper hair clamped back with an old silver barrette, at her gray pants and black sweater she’s had for years. Boy, does she need a makeover.

  “Uh-huh,” I say with a nod.

  She stops sorting the mail and looks at me through her thick brown-framed glasses. Then she looks down at the shoes.

  “How much were they?”

  I want to stuff the whole bag of pretzels into my mouth.

  “Forty dollars,” I lie.

  “First of all,” Mom says, gesturing with a piece of mail, “if you need new things, just tell me. And forty dollars is a lot to spend on a pair of such impractical shoes.”

  If only she could see Kate and Jackie’s shoe collections. “Mom, I’ve been wearing the same pair of sneakers forever.”

  “Just talk to me about it first, Sonia,” she says, and grabs her purse. “Here, please pay Jackie back.”

  I fold and unfold the crisp twenty-dollar bills. Money is a strange thing. My family has a bigger house than Kate, three cars, and has been to places all over the world. And I used to go to private school. All those things cost a lot of money. Kate’s never been anywhere far away and her house is small, but it looks nicer than ours. They go out to dinner all the time and spend eighty dollars on shoes like it’s nothing, things my family never does. Dad used to have a fancy office and probably made a good amount of money. Mom makes money too. Kate’s dad is a carpenter and Jackie doesn’t work. But they act like they have a lot more money than we do. Maybe they do, somehow. I really don’t get it.

  At dinner, Dad looks happier than I’ve seen him in a long time.

  “All right, everyone,” he says as soon as we’re all sitting down to tofu-broccoli lasagna—one of Mom’s better tofu creations. At least it has real cheese melted on top. “You’re looking at the new sales director for Riley Publishing,” he says, and leans back in his chair with his arms crossed. Mom looks sparkly and proud. It all seems to be moving so fast. Based on what Mom said
last week, I thought Dad was going to be home for a long time.

  “Hooray!” Natasha shouts while she twirls a long piece of melted cheese around her fork. “But what’s Riley Publishing?”

  “It’s another company that publishes textbooks, just like the one I worked at before but bigger.”

  “Do you sell them outside?” Natasha asks.

  Something settles over Dad’s face, something cloudy, something dark.

  “The books?” he says.

  “Yeah, do you sell them outside or in a store? Because our school had a book sale and we sold them outside.”

  “Well, this is different. I work for a company that makes books and I figure out what other businesses and schools we’re going to sell them to.”

  “Oh,” she says over a big mouthful. I can see the green, red, and white food churning around in her mouth. “Selling them outside is better if it’s a sunny day. Not if it rains, though.”

  “Natasha, I want you to understand my job,” Dad says. His voice is low and impatient. “I work for a big company that makes books for people who need to learn important things.” He gestures with his fork, poking at the air. “It’s much different from a book sale at your school.”

  Mom, who’s moving the hair out of Natasha’s eyes, stops and shoots Dad an angry glare. “Well, both ways of selling books are important,” she says in a way that means he’d better agree, and fast.

  “I just want her to understand what her father does,” he says. Mom opens her mouth to say something, then closes it again and shakes her head. She goes back to fixing Natasha’s hair, but Natasha brushes her hand away.

  “So you’re not sick anymore?” Natasha says to Dad.

  I stare at Dad. Then my parents look at each other and back at Natasha. Mom rubs her face. Dad looks down at his plate.

  Dad looks up. “I am feeling better,” he says in the same low voice, but it doesn’t sound like he believes what he’s saying. Mom nods.

  “I think your job sounds great, Dad,” I say. The clouds on his face pass. He looks at me and smiles.

  “Thanks,” he says.

  If only I could make the clouds go away forever.

  chapter seventeen

  I start hanging out at Kate’s house a lot. I go over after school once or twice a week. Mom doesn’t mind, but she doesn’t let me sleep over on school nights anymore, not since I got a D on my last vocabulary quiz. I take the bus home with Kate, and sometimes Jackie drops me back home, and sometimes Mom picks me up. We only live a few miles apart. It’s funny to think that Kate’s world has always existed so close to mine and we never knew each other until now.

  Almost every time I’m over there, Jackie takes us to the mall, and I love it in a way I never thought I would. I love the way it smells like chocolate chip cookies and new shopping bags. I love the shiny life we all lead inside, as if nothing else matters. Jackie always needs to return something or buy something, and she likes to go back and forth several times to get it right. She doesn’t work, so it’s sort of like her job. And all the trips to the mall give me a chance to spend my forty dollars quickly, before I think about it too hard. I’ve never had so much fun with money. I buy everything Kate buys, a pink tank top, jelly bracelets with glitter on them, my first lipstick, and a new Tough Love CD. I make sure Mom doesn’t see any of it.

  Sometimes it’s hard to tell who the kid is and who the grown-ups are in Kate’s house. Kate’s an only child, so it’s like her parents are her friends. When I sleep over on the weekend, Greg and Jackie take us out to dinner and the movies and we don’t get back until midnight. We eat what we want, watch as much television as we want, go to bed when we want.

  Greg couldn’t be more different from my dad. Aside from being completely gorgeous, he’s also one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He’s constantly playing these weird jokes on Kate. Once he took all her shoes out of her closet when she wasn’t home and replaced them with his own dirty work boots and sneakers. Another time he took a picture of both of us sleeping one night and taped it to the bathroom mirror. When Kate and I saw it the next morning, we almost peed in our pants we were laughing so hard.

  On a Sunday after breakfast Kate and I go back up to her room. Kate puts on a jeans skirt and looks me over.

  “We’re going to church. Want to come?” She says it in this happy way, in a way that doesn’t make it sound strange, me going to church with her. “You can wear this.” She throws me one of her skirts. It’s pink with little green and white embroidered circles on it.

  “I don’t know,” I say, as if she were asking me to go to the moon. Usually I sleep over on Friday nights. This is the first time I’ve been here on a Sunday morning.

  “Why, ’cause you’re Jewish?”

  “Um, well …” But before I can finish, Jackie’s in the room.

  “Hurry, guys, we’re going to be late,” she says. “We have to drop off Sonia first.”

  “Mom, can Sonia come?” Kate says, finishing her lipstick.

  “Well …,” says Jackie. Something flickers across her eyes. Normally she’s excited when I join them in anything. “Aren’t you Jewish, hon?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I just don’t want you to do anything against your religion.”

  I feel lost, suddenly. I look at Kate for help, but she’s busy fixing her outfit in the mirror.

  “I’m not Jewish. Just my mom is. It’s not like I’ll explode or anything.” My words surprise me more than anyone.

  Kate turns around and starts laughing. Jackie glares at her, so she puts her hand over her mouth, but doesn’t stop.

  “Well, you know best. You’re always welcome,” Jackie says in a stiff way that makes me wonder if she really means “welcome to everything except church.” She starts to walk out of the room. “We leave in ten. Quicken the pace, girls.”

  “Were you joking?” Kate says, still laughing when Jackie leaves the room.

  “About what, that I’m going to explode in church?”

  “No, that you’re not Jewish,” Kate says, her eyes beaming, all that sparkling energy focused on me.

  I don’t really want to answer her. “But what if I do explode?” I whisper, giggling.

  “Don’t worry,” Kate says, laughing harder now. “I’ll protect you!” With that she jumps on me like Catwoman and we tumble down on her soft pink rug laughing until we clutch our stomachs in pain. The funniest thing, though, is that I wasn’t joking, not one bit. I’m tired of telling people I’m Jewish when I don’t really feel Jewish, whatever being Jewish is supposed to feel like.

  Kate’s church is in a stone building that, I swear, looks like a smaller version of Notre Dame in Paris. Inside are all these stained-glass windows and shiny wooden benches, and the ceiling’s a hundred feet up in the air. I don’t really listen that carefully to the priest during the sermon, but it sounds like sort of the same stuff the rabbi talks about when we go to temple with my grandparents. I wonder why they’re supposed to be so different, being Jewish and being Christian. They both talk about what God is, and what we can do to be better people, and stories from the Bible that teach us lessons. I like the dark wooden pews, the stone floor, the echoing sounds pinging off the walls. Mostly I love looking at the stained-glass windows, the way the light shows through all the colors like jewels and makes me think of the Taj Mahal. For some reason it makes me happy.

  My house is still as heavy as burned bran muffins. It’s good that Dad’s not sulking around in his bathrobe anymore, but he works such late hours that he’s never around. Mom’s still working more too. Her classes are all in the morning now, but she spends every night in her office grading papers. We’ve been getting a lot of takeout pizza these days, something we never used to do.

  When Mom’s not working, she’s asking me how I feel about everything with wide, worried eyes. How do you feel about having new friends? How do you feel about Dad working so much? How do you feel about school? I just answer “okay” or “I don’t know�
� most of the time. She likes the “okay” answer better, but “I don’t know” is closer to the truth.

  Tonight’s different, though. I have to get my homework done early because I’m going back to Community. Not for real of course, just to see the sixth-grade play. Sam invited me before our bad conversation. It’s almost hard to believe that Community still exists, that Jack and all my old friends are just having another year as if nothing’s changed. It makes my stomach hurt to think about seeing everyone and yet I can’t wait to go.

  Dad’s expected home late because of his new job, so he’ll miss the play. I don’t really care since I’m not in it. Mom rushes us through a quick dinner of rice and beans. I can barely eat, I have so many thoughts swirling around. The drive there feels different since it’s dark out.

  When I walk through the big gray front doors, the first thing that hits me is the smell. I didn’t even know Community had a smell, but when I walk into the high-ceilinged lobby, with its big jungle-animal mural surrounding me, the combined scent of floor cleaner, and wood, and different foods from people’s lunches—hard to describe but so clear to my nose—grabs me like a fast hug.

  Mom takes my hand and pulls me and Natasha toward the auditorium. I see Iris, the art teacher, who stands at the front of the auditorium handing out playbills. “Hi, girls!” she shrieks when she sees us. Then she hands me a playbill. The play is called The Poodle Mystery. There are all these drawings in the playbill too. I see a picture of a house with a black poodle in the yard and a rainbow above it. It must be Sam’s work. We follow Iris toward three seats in the seventh row. As I walk past the rows, I see Connor O’Reilly’s father. He waves. He’s hard to miss since he’s very tall, wears his hair in a ponytail, and has a diamond earring in one ear. He’s a dog trainer, kind of a famous one actually, so he must be excited about the play. I see a bunch of other parents who know us too. Each friendly wave makes me sadder and sadder.