Karma Khullar's Mustache
Page 4
“Oh.” Mom put her bags down and pushed her dark blond hair off her forehead. “Well, I’m starved.”
She smiled a smile that didn’t reach her eyes—it just kind of settled in her cheeks. Her entire body drooped the way an empty bag sags.
Daddy inhaled, about to say something.
I hopped up and grabbed a plate and fork for Mom before he could say anything that’d ruin Mom’s mood more. Then I filled up a cup with ice water and set it at her spot.
“Thanks, love,” she said as she scooped rice onto her plate. “How are things around here? Good?”
Daddy shrugged.
Kiran nodded.
“Yeah. Great,” I said, doing my best to fill in all the empty, silent spaces. But really, instead of filling any gaps, my words bounced around the room, exposing each and every piece of awkwardness.
“Kiran,” Mom said after she’d had a few bites, “Mrs. Moore called while I was in my meeting. Give her a call in the morning. She mentioned something about needing help in her garage.”
“She could just call me,” Kiran said. “Oh, wait. I don’t have a phone.”
“Kiran—” Mom started.
“Excuse me,” Daddy said, breaking in. A piece of rice clung to his beard. “You work, so buy your own phone. We’ve already discussed this.”
“This fish is really nice, Daddy. Is it fresh or frozen?” I asked, throwing my bouncy ball of conversation out as a distraction.
“Whatever.” Kiran stood up to leave the table.
“We’re still eating, young man,” Daddy said in a voice that he clearly tried to keep steady.
“Fine.” Kiran sat back down but didn’t touch his plate.
“Raj,” Mom said, reaching across the table for Daddy’s hand.
Daddy pulled his hand back and shoveled another bite into his mouth. “The school sent over your finalized schedule.”
Kiran squirmed in his chair, suddenly intensely interested in the fish curry on his plate.
“I don’t remember authorizing two periods of band. What happened to advanced biology?” Daddy tapped his fork on the edge of his plate.
Tink. Tink. Tink.
“Do you know that frozen fish is actually more fresh—” I began.
Mom cleared her throat and raised her eyebrows at me. She then turned to Daddy. “Do we need to discuss this now? I just got home, we’re eating . . .”
“Did you know something about this, Mary?” Daddy asked, rubbing his beard the same way he did when Mom mentioned the university. The piece of rice that stuck to his beard fell onto the table.
“Well, actually.” Mom chewed the fish slowly and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Kiran is very talented, and his band teacher has given him the extra slot—”
“He’s talented in the sciences, too. Will music pay the bills? No!” Daddy rose from his chair, his voice not so steady anymore. “Being a doctor, that’s what will pay the bills. You don’t push him. Instead you let him choose.”
“You didn’t let me explain,” Mom said.
“I can explain for myself. I’m fourteen!” Kiran surprised us all with his outburst. We sat in a horror-movie silence as he shoved away from the table. “It’s my life. I can make my own decisions. Anyway, how’s that PhD working out for you?” Kiran’s eyes shot to Daddy as he said the last comment and let it settle like chopped cilantro on a finished curry.
All I wanted was to add a cooling helping of yogurt to smooth everything over, but I was running out of things to say. Even if I’d wanted to talk about my crummy day, which I wasn’t sure I did, Kiran’s outburst stirred up enough tension that I released my worries about my mustache, Sara, Lacy, and ’Stache Attacks, letting them fly across the room like a balloon you blow up and let go. For now.
Instead I focused on my plate and listened to Kiran stomp up the stairs and slam his bedroom door shut. The repetitive riffs of his electric guitar were muffled through the floorboards.
Mom poked at her plate with her fork without taking a bite. Daddy pushed away from the table, left the room, and slammed the door to his study.
“I’ll wash the dishes,” I said with a smile that tried to slide across my mouth, the muscles in my face fighting back in confusion. It felt as if someone had stuck a smile sticker on my mouth. The same as Mom’s after-work smile.
Chapter Seven
Eager to drown out the quiet that wound through the house like a giant python, I practiced my piano without having to be asked. I even went longer than the thirty minutes I typically trudged through. Then I grabbed all the recycling and went outside to divide it into the containers. This was actually Kiran’s job, but I didn’t bother making a big deal out of it. Not only because it’d set Daddy off again, but I wanted an excuse to get outside. All the air had been sucked out of the house after dinner, making it hard to breathe.
My head burst with questions, and not the easy-to-answer kind. That’s why I liked math. There were formulas for everything. Want to know how much space is inside that triangle? Easy. A=1/2 bh. No matter what shape or size the triangle, the formula’s the same. Things in life should work out as easily. Follow a basic set of rules you’ve memorized, and it’ll all work out.
I flipped through the stack of papers Daddy had put outside his study, distracting myself from trying to squish my problems into a formula. Most of the papers were printouts of how to create a website and write codes. Computer programming filled most of Daddy’s nonworking hours these days. Pamphlets he’d grabbed at the temple a few weeks ago were buried inside the stack too. We didn’t go often, only on the anniversary of Dadima’s death and for Vaisakhi or Diwali. Yet whenever Daddy went to the temple, he grabbed stacks of pamphlets and he’d tell us in the car on the way home that we should go more often. But in the same way the pamphlets got stacked and restacked and finally put out in the recycling, so did Daddy’s plans of going to the temple again.
A smaller paper fluttered out of the stack and landed on the porch. I balanced the papers on my knee and bent to pick the insert up from the floor. It read:
“Your Karma, Your Life”
A talk by Dr. Gurwinder Singh.
Come on the 23rd of September at 7 p.m. for an enlightening discussion about karma through the scriptures of Gurbani.
I tucked the paper into my back pocket. I used to love my name, but then I realized I could never find any pens or stickers with my name on them. Last year when Sara went on vacation, she found a bumper sticker that read Keep Calm and Hug Karma. I’d stuck it in the desk mirror in my bedroom. Now I collected anything with the word “karma” on it. I read the pamphlet again. Your Karma, Your Life. Actually, karma was kind of a formula. I mean, when you do good, good happens. It wasn’t exactly as easy as that, but that’s basically what it meant.
I’d asked Dadima a million questions about it, like what if I stepped on an ant on the sidewalk but didn’t mean to or didn’t even know I’d done it, would I still be punished? Dadima explained that it had more to do with my heart, and she told me to pray and recite Naam, like saying Satnam Waheguru.
I’d rather be safe and say my Satnams than end up a squished ant in my next life. But that had also been something I’d worried about. How could I be blamed for my past if I didn’t even remember it? Dadima had told me to stop worrying about it, but I never could. If Daddy was in a better mood later, maybe I’d ask him about going to the talk.
After I dragged all the recycling out to the road, the phone’s loud trill cut through the quiet night air. I wanted it to be Sara, and I also didn’t want it to be Sara. It wasn’t just today at the pool, but the bra and Oreo incident mixed with her silence today, making me question my friendship with her. She hadn’t wanted to talk-talk so much anymore even before she’d gone away on vacation. It was almost like she wished she were somewhere else instead of hanging out with me.
I just knew something had shifted in a way that made me unsure how to act around her or what exactly the state of our friendship was. Of course we�
��d both changed. Our feet had grown a complete shoe size since last year, and Sara had grown her bangs out, but it was more than that. It was like how wearing blue or pink goggles in the pool changes the color of everything. I kept wearing my same clear goggles, and Sara chose to wear green ones. We were in all the same places but were seeing things so differently.
“Karmajeet,” Daddy called.
I walked back inside toward the kitchen. Daddy stood outside his study with the phone in his hand.
“For you,” he said, handing me the phone. “Five minutes.”
That was what he always said. But because the questions and confusion I’d carried around all day were finally catching up with me, making me feel sore, I said, “Hanji.”
“Hello?” I said into the phone.
“Hi, Karma.”
My cheeks flushed at Sara’s voice, and a small ringing clanged in my ears as I pictured her sitting at the snack bar, folding her ice cream sandwich wrapper and not telling Lacy to disappear when she announced my mustache to the world.
I managed a “Hi.”
“Listen, I’m sorry about this afternoon. I didn’t know you left. I thought you just went to the bathroom.”
“Oh.”
“Really. I promise,” Sara said, her voice so serious, I almost believed her. Then I remembered that I’d smashed her nose with the volleyball. If karma was a formula, then me smashing the volleyball in Sara’s face meant I kind of deserved for Lacy to make fun of me.
“How’s your nose?”
“Fine. It doesn’t even hurt.”
“I’m sorry. It really was an accident.”
“I know. And you know, Lacy was just trying to help. That’s all.”
“Help? Tom and Derek made fun of me.”
“Well, she didn’t mean it like that. And since when do you care what Tom and Derek think anyway?”
“I don’t. I guess.” Did I?
“Look, I’ll find that article in Teen Bop about facial hair. I’ll even pull out my issues from last year too. I kind of forgot about it, plus I didn’t think you’d want me to show it to you with everyone else around,” Sara said.
I bit my lip. “Facial hair” sounded so extreme. But I had asked Sara what to do, and even if I didn’t believe that Lacy had really been trying to help, Sara wouldn’t deliberately hurt me. She might be distracted and acting different, but under all of that she was still my Sara.
“We’ll scour the magazines after orientation. Don’t worry. I’m sure no one is going to notice it. I mean, come on, the boys were just being stupid. They were totally exaggerating. I think everyone’s going to be too busy noticing Derek’s blackheads and the fact that Tom’s nose has, like, doubled in size since last year.”
Sara was being goofy and trying to make me feel better, but I just couldn’t 100 percent believe that no one else would notice my mustache or make fun of it. “I don’t know—”
“Ugh, Karma. I’m serious,” Sara said with a sigh. “Not everything is totally about you, okay? Look, no one even brought it up again after you left. Seriously. My mom took Lacy and me to get snacks and nail polish this afternoon. You really should have hung around.”
“It was really hot, and I had a headache.” It was a lame excuse when I’d said it to Daddy, and it sounded even more pathetic trying it on Sara.
“I’ve been writing out the sleepover schedule,” Sara said, skimming over my excuse. “We’ll start out with facials because our pores need lots of time to steam open before we apply masks before bed. Lacy has this completely natural recipe she said we can whip up in the blender.”
Just the mention of Lacy made my chest tingle the way it did after eating chicken curry when Daddy makes it too spicy. But Sara and I had been planning our back-to-school sleepover all summer, and I wasn’t going to let Lacy ruin it.
“I can’t wait.” I tried to say it with more excitement than I felt.
“Really?” Sara asked. “Good. Plus my mom said she’ll take us out to Supremo’s for dinner right after orientation.”
“Even better,” I said. “Do you remember the last time we went there?”
Sara genuinely laughed for the first time in a long time. “Are you serious? How could I forget? I don’t even remember what was so funny, but I still remember the burn from snorting Coke out my nose.” I smiled to myself, letting our shared memory erase some of the strangeness that hung between us.
Keep Calm and Hug Karma. I let those words settle around me. I must have been overreacting about this whole Lacy thing. Tom and Derek had teased me and started the stupid ’Stache Attack joke because they’d been showing off for Lacy. It totally wouldn’t catch on.
Plus, Sara and Lacy weren’t the only ones who could plan makeovers.
Once I’d hung up with Sara, I went upstairs and locked myself in the bathroom. I knew Mom kept her makeup on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. I grabbed a bottle of foundation and closed the cabinet.
The label said to use my ring fingers to massage it into my face. I squirted a dime-size dot onto my hand like I’d seen Mom do a million times before. Then I dipped my right ring finger in and dotted the foundation around my face, mostly paying attention to my mustache area.
Once I’d rubbed it all in, I stared at my face from every angle. I liked how it made my skin feel soft, but it didn’t cover up my mustache all that much. I did look different, though. Older. I opened the cabinet and grabbed Mom’s brown eyeliner. Sara had already showed me an article this summer about how to use it on your upper lid to make your eyes pop. Maybe if I could make my eyes pop, no one would even notice my mustache.
It was harder to do than it looked in the magazine, but I managed to get my left eye better than my right. I stood back to take in the whole look. It looked all right. I wouldn’t be able to pull it off every day because Mom would notice her foundation emptying too fast, and Daddy would go into lecture mode, “The Shabad says when you adorn yourself with paint, you are giving up control of your body and conforming to the world’s standards. Be glad Babaji created you so perfectly.”
Eye roll. Yeah, so perfect that I now had a nickname. Plus, I’m pretty sure every lady in his beloved Bollywood films wore several layers of makeup, along with jewelry and false eyelashes. I might be willing to bend the rules a bit with makeup or even lemon juice like Lacy suggested, but Daddy would really lose it if I did something drastic, like waxing. Mom’s blond hair didn’t grow where it wasn’t supposed to. It’s not like she had stuff like wax strips and tweezers just lying around. I’d have to keep it simple and hopefully come up with a more permanent plan before school actually started.
Chapter Eight
Daddy whistled loudly and shrilly as we walked down the street toward school for orientation. If Bollywood music on the radio sounded like a bird being strangled, then Daddy’s whistling without the help of the radio sounded like a bird with a seed stuck in its throat.
Our street snaked around a bend that led down to the school. My throat tightened and the insides of my ears tingled as I looked at Holly Creek Middle School. It was a huge, three-story building with lots of places to get turned around in and lost.
My old elementary school sat across the intersection from the middle school. The several one-story buildings scattered about, separated by playgrounds and gardens, suddenly looked small and babyish in comparison.
In the bathroom at home Mom’s makeup had looked good, and then when I’d put on the pink shirt with the puckered sleeves, I’d felt older and ready. But the quick glances I caught of myself in the windows of the cars parked along the street showed the regular old me.
I shrugged my sleepover bag further up my shoulder and wished I’d changed my shirt like I’d wanted to before I left. Daddy had rushed me out the door before I could change, eager to get to school and meet my teachers.
I wasn’t ready for this. Maybe I had a fever. I definitely felt sweaty and light-headed. When I swallowed, my throat felt scratchy. Maybe I had strep throat.
I jogged ahead a few steps to catch up to Daddy.
“Learning is so exciting, beta,” Daddy said. “You should be running, not shuffling behind me.”
“Hanji.” Daddy didn’t worry about clothes or friends or mustaches when he thought about school. All he worried about were classes and teachers.
We walked through the side gate and followed the sidewalk around the packed parking lot. Sara stood at the front of the school, leaning against a pillar near the entrance to the auditorium.
“Sara,” I called, and ran toward her.
“My mom left me her keys. She went in to meet the teachers. Let’s take your bag to my car.”
Daddy reached us and said hi to Sara. “I’ll meet you inside,” he said to me.
We tossed my bag into the backseat of Sara’s car and turned to go inside the school. Sara stopped between the cars and pulled at her skirt and fluffed her hair at the scalp. If only hair volume was the worst of my problems.
“I thought you were going to wear that skirt on the first day of school,” I said.
“Oh, well, last night Lacy said I should wear it today. I’m borrowing one of hers for the first day.”
I cleared my throat, trying to get rid of the uncomfortable burn that surged through my body at the mention of Lacy and Sara talking last night. When Sara had called me, it’d ended on a note like things were how they used to be—easy and comfortable. But knowing she’d also talked to Lacy turned all of that inside out, which made me shaky and confused. I didn’t know if I was mad or jealous or hurt or just tired.
The mention of Lacy’s name made me want to lash out at Sara, not to hurt her, just defend myself.
“My mom let me borrow her makeup.” I leaned closer to the car window and turned my head side to side like I could really see the difference the makeup had made.