Dorri squeezes honey mustard on a perfect row of cucumber slices. “Because I need to escape that shit-hole school. My friend Rain goes to the Collegiate downtown, where it’s reportedly civilized, but pricey. Her parents are potheads but they have money that mine don’t. Plus mine won’t pay a cent because they think I’m going through some phase and don’t want to reward it.”
Dorri places a slice on her tongue, like Casey’s mother at communion. He’s never given much thought to “good” or “bad” schools. Weren’t they all the same? You had jocks, brains, outcasts, nobodies; you had teachers who thought they could inspire you and change your life and those who counted the sleeps until summer vacation—call it what you wanted, it was all the same shit. Pick a school, any school, and Rowan would still be a genius and he would still be a nobody.
Casey waits until the row of cucumber slices is gone. “Why don’t you just do what they want to get what you want?
Dorri crunches cucumber, stares at him as if she’s lost all hope. Her long nose, wiggling as she chews, looks sharp enough to stab someone. “Listen. This is all I know. If I want to survive next year, I need tuition.”
She doesn’t mention, or perhaps is barely aware herself, that her one and only reason for being at their school has just graduated. The gorgeous, the gracious, the superior Jagat Kapur was leaving her for McGill. Nationally ranked sprinter, undisputed science fair champion, valedictorian—a brown face beloved by all. He was in a league by himself, larger than life rather than popular, leaving her happy to follow alone and admiring and invisible, eating his dust.
“Do you really think it will be any different?” Casey asks.
Dorri gets a chocolate milk from the cooler. “A university campus is about open minds. It respects different opinions. Believe me, Rain is not your average volleyball cutie. She flashes her unshaved pits every chance she gets.”
Now and then, Dorri says something that Casey can’t just let go. How can you dress like some oppressed female whose husband thinks you’re his property and still talk about unshaved pits?
“But why do you really care?” he asks. “It’s not like you’re really religious or anything.”
Dorri grabs a straw and waves it in front of his nose. “That’s not true. You think I haven’t read my Quran? You think just because I’m not submissive I don’t live by the true principles of my faith?”
She drops the straw and when she bends to get it, her pale blue polo shirt, baggy as a sack, gapes open. Casey can see the upper part of her small breasts, perfectly rounded lobes pushing up from a white sports bra. Her skin is smooth and coffee-coloured.
She jabs him in the chest with the dirty straw. “My faith is about modesty and simplicity and I’m not perfect, but it’s what I believe. Some people may call themselves Muslims, but they’re not. Too many in the Middle East are ignorant and too many here are sellouts. But at least I’m trying to live what I believe.”
Casey knows he should feel guilty for copping a look, but he doesn’t. He watches her full pink lips move over the tiny space between her front teeth and wonders how he could have ever thought she was quiet or reserved.
After a few weeks, Dorri starts to put on a little weight from snacks of stolen honey oat bread, and when Rowan tries to get him to call in sick to play Civilization, Casey brushes him off.
“Fine,” Rowan says, “go be a cog in the machine. I got worlds to build.”
Dorri and Casey speak of each other to no one, which gives an odd weightlessness, an unreality, to their conversations. She floats through his dreams headless and topless, a coffee-coloured mannequin.
“Do you always steal stuff?” he asks her.
She keeps eating olives. “This isn’t stealing.”
All his life, Casey was taught to play by the rules. His father was a former jock who revoked his son’s beginner’s licence for a week when Casey failed to signal his turn into the driveway. Where Rowan interrupted the class with random genius facts, Casey had perfect attendance.
“Yes, it is,” Casey says.
Dorri stops chewing and sighs. She wonders how one could’ve lived sixteen years on this planet and given so little thought to things. “This chain makes more money for its owners than either of us can probably hope to make in our lifetimes.”
Casey is pretty sure the place is franchised and whoever owns this one ain’t getting rich. But he isn’t absolutely sure. “It’s still stealing,” he says.
“You spend too much time playing first-person shooters,” she says. “Life is not good guys against bad guys. It’s more complex.”
Casey swears that her nose gets more beak-like when she talks like that. “You don’t know what I play.”
Dorri is never quite sure when she’s going to hurt his feelings. There’s something about him that makes her want to kick him, maybe the puppy thing. Yet she finds herself babbling to him like she hasn’t to anyone since she was small and used to follow around her grandfather like he was Allah. Sometimes, it’s as if she’s carrying the weight of 3,000 years of Persian civilization on her shoulders.
“Listen,” she says, “here’s what I know. The 1980 revolution in Iran was as much about social equality as it was about religion. My grandparents mostly left because they were worried they’d have to give some of their stuff to dirt-poor farmers.”
“Were they loaded?” Casey asks.
Dorri shrugs her shrug. “Like a lot of Iranian expats, they’re obsessed with appearances. My mother went to school to become a dermatologist and her parents never forgave her for becoming a lowly musician. My father’s mother gets her nails done twice a week and complains about our neighbourhood.”
“What does all that have to do with stealing food from your employer?” Casey asks.
“Everything,” Dorri says.
They never talked about any future plans, like the fact that Dorri already had completed the first twelve pages of a graphic novel, or that Casey really had no post-secondary plans even though Rowan talked incessantly about the two of them partnering to develop a video game set during the Big Bang. Dorri and Casey never mentioned their days outside of work, how Casey usually slept until the lunch hour, at which time his mother made cheesy scrambled eggs and pork sausages, or that Dorri could regularly sense her mother just outside her bedroom door, picking at her close-cut musician’s fingernails, stewing about her hopelessly unattractive, hopelessly stubborn oldest daughter.
But once the silence was breached, not saying anything at all is not really an option. For some reason, both feel the need to fill any lull, any quiet void between them, like those times when you lie in bed and the reality of your own death hits you square between the eyes and the only thing to do is to get rid of that thought, to think hard about something else, small and stupid, like how your gums throb a little after flossing. So Dorri tells him about the time she went with Rain to her family’s renovated caboose in a farmer’s field and how she almost ran the 200 kilometres home when Rain’s parents woke up and began preparing breakfast without any clothes on.
“They don’t mind your scarf, so why should you mind their lack of pants?” Casey asks, because he really wants to know.
“Shut up,” Dorri says. “Don’t tell me you could stand it.”
And Casey knows that she’s right, but his point is, who is Dorri to judge when they don’t judge her? But he doesn’t say this, because he knows it will make her testy, like when she talks about her baby sister. She’s told him Nina is a French horn prodigy, which is why Dorri dropped the cello, and then the oboe, and took up art.
“Music is a strictly expressive skill,” she informs him. “It appeals to our reptilian brains. But visual art or storytelling encompasses the whole of experience, including the intellect. It doesn’t matter what the artist looks like, whether they wear clown shoes or a turban, it’s about the piece of work and what it has to say.”
Casey senses that she pulls most of this out of her ass, but this doesn’t bother him much.
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Twice, Rowan comes by the sub counter uninvited and orders a cup of water, which he thinks is very funny. He acts as if he’s never seen Dorri before, and Casey knows there’s a good chance he doesn’t actually notice her. When Rowan is intent on something, he can be incredibly dense.
The first time, when he’s barely out of earshot, Dorri whacks Casey’s shoulder with the back of her hand. “What’s his deal?”
“He’s obsessed with nutrition,” Casey says. “He could tell you everything wrong with that pickle you just ate. He calls these sulphate sandwiches.”
“How can you stand it?” Dorri asks.
He tells her he’s just used to it, tells her Rowan came by because he needs to get away from his older brother, who’s home from college and still hates Rowan so much that he pounds on him when no one’s looking.
Later that night, Rowan texts Casey from the convenience store, where he’s apparently treating himself to sesame snaps: btw tell s-face that allah is a misogynist pig and see if she fatwa’s me.
Casey texts back: like u need someone else who wants you dead.
He touches the whacked spot, which is still slightly pink due to his ridiculously sensitive skin. He wonders how either of those two think they’re qualified to call a freak a freak.
As the summer drags on, Dorri and Casey also come to share a few in-jokes, a necessity of the dreary sandwich trade. One night, they notice they have a regular—a giant girl of maybe fourteen who orders the same thing every time: meatball supreme, baked sour cream potato chips, chocolate toffee cookie, large iced tea.
They decide the tiny cubic zirconia letter M around her giant neck stands for meatball, and lay bets on when she will appear, staring up at the menu as if for the first time and then ordering the same-old same-old.
Though there is never a lineup, they compete to see who can make the fastest sandwich. Dorri, not blessed with the manual dexterity of either of her parents, finds her weakness is separating the thin slices of cold cuts without ripping them, while Casey squeezes the condiment bottles so hard they tend to spurt.
He begins to try and guess what’s under the headscarf to distract her during competition. “So what, are you bald under there? You got drunk and tattooed your whole head with unicorns, didn’t you?”
“Shut up,” she says. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
“Just give me a peek,” he says. “I can keep a secret. My mom’s hair went all patchy and thin after I was born and she bought this stuff to dye her scalp. You don’t have to be embarrassed.”
“Shut up.”
“Recurring lice?”
“Shut up.”
“Bad afro?”
“Shut up. I mean it. I’ll charge you with harassment.”
Weeks go by and if you were to ask either one of them if they like each other, they would hate you for it, as if you were demanding to know which one farted.
In mid-August, a bright day that somehow smells for the first time like the dry decay of fall, Dorri is quiet, barely makes eye contact, as if they’re back at square one. When she can stand it no longer, she follows him to the soup urn and swings him around by the arm. “You want a look? Take a good look, then.”
He is very aware of her bony fingers around his bicep. “What the hell?”
She looks momentarily uncertain, an expression he does not recognize at all. “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice. Don’t tell me you’re not wondering.”
He stares straight into her face for perhaps the first time. There is something different but he doesn’t know what. Same sullen lips, same hawk nose, same black eyes. No unibrow.
“Oh,” he says.
“It wasn’t my decision,” she says. “My grandmother blackmailed me.”
He keeps staring, as if she’s daring him not to look away. The brows now arch like castle doorways over her dark eyelashes. “What do you mean she blackmailed you?”
Dorri hates herself for how she’s handling this, hates her need to explain to this freckled idiot, hates her family, hates everyone. “She said she’d contribute to my Collegiate fund if I went and got a wax.”
Casey steps away, takes a breath. “Oh. Well, that’s good, no? Now you’ll have the money.”
“Look,” she says. “I’m okay with what I look like. It’s all a freak of genes. My mother and little sister got the proportions. I look like my paternal grandmother, whose father had money, at least.”
He suddenly feels trapped on another planet where he has no idea what’s expected of him. Her voice is slightly shaky, as if she’s just getting over a cold. “It looks good,” he says. “I mean, you look good now.”
Dorri hates him most of all. “Just shut up. Okay?”
“I was trying to be nice,” he says.
“Well, don’t, okay? I was blackmailed.”
“Who cares?” he says. “You got what you wanted. She got what she wanted. I once pretended to go to a whole winter of indoor soccer practice just to make my dad happy. Turns out he didn’t even care that much, but what did I know, I was eight. Families suck.”
It strikes her that this is the most he’s ever told her about himself, and for some reason, this makes her laugh.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says, still laughing, verging on tears. “Nothing. Families suck.”
That night, Dorri writes only one sentence in her journal. Would I still love Jag Kapur if he weren’t so beautiful?
Casey dreams of plucked eyebrows dancing over coffee-coloured orbs.
Not long after, he comes home after work to find his mother kneeling at the downstairs toilet, staring in the bowl as if it holds the secret to life.
“Are you sick?” he asks. “Where’s Dad?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” she says. “It’ll probably be in the papers.”
“What are you talking about?” he asks. “What’s the matter with you?”
What she tells him is too impossible to take in. It’s as if Casey is trapped in another universe where up is down and yellow is red.
He sleeps through the next day to avoid her, is filled with guilt and relief when no eggs or sausage are forthcoming. He digs out the three badly rolled joints his dad gave him last year so he could “explore in a safe way.” Turns out pot mostly makes Casey sleepy, but it’s all he has, so he lights up, starts to cough like the half-ass smoker that he is. He emerges to find the house deserted, slinks out to work as if he’s the one who’s responsible for the snot pouring from his mom’s nostrils. When she still worked at the elementary school, she saw a lot of sick or bawling kids come through the office and she had a name for that snotty face: They’d come at you, she’d say, dragging two fingers down from her nose to upper lip, sporting a perfect number eleven.
He cycles to work through the network of smelly back lanes and it’s as if his pedalling feet belong to someone else. The few half-ass tokes of his dad’s half-assed weed cannot explain how he feels—he is outside himself, hovering somewhere beneath the low branches that hang down over the lane like Rowan’s hair hangs in his eyes. Casey is watching himself as others must see him—a skinny, sweaty ginger on a mid-price bike that’s too big for him, the kind of person who will take orders from other people for the rest of his life, the same as his poor puking, balding mother.
By the time he reaches the big-box parking lot he’s as faint as a Southern belle in the movies and nearly gets hit by a pickup loaded with drywall and assholes who don’t shoulder check. Inside, he slouches down behind the drink cooler, tries to get his head between his knees, only he’s not flexible enough.
“What’s with you?” Dorri asks.
When he doesn’t respond, she crouches down beside him, lightly touches the back of his pimply neck, the skin as white as her grandmother’s cold cream. “Hey. You okay? Are you sick?”
And it all comes tumbling out, as awful and uncontrollable as blowing chunks. How his affable buddy-of-a-dad had become infatuated with a regular passenger—a youn
gish blonde university student, a single mom who probably thought she was being nice, who appreciated all the times he waited for her when she was literally running late. How she had to take out a restraining order against him. How the fat fool still thought he loved her, how he was moving out of their house and leaving his son to pick up the pieces of his stupid, trusting wife of twenty-one years.
He tells her this even though she is possibly the one person who won’t find out by other means. In a few weeks, she’ll be at her precious civilized campus with some hippie jock named Rain while he is stuck with nowhere to hide. His mother may have been a drama queen about the newspapers, but you can bet she’ll be telling anyone who’ll listen that her husband is a stalker.
For once, Dorri feels speechless. What do you say to something like this? That his father is a product of an oversexed society obsessed with youth? She runs her thumb along the protruding vertebrae in his neck. “It’ll be okay,” she says.
Casey looks up, searches her face for something he recognizes. Her breath smells like olives as black as her eyes. They are close enough to feel each other’s breath, far closer than ever before, so close he can make out a few dark stubby hairs beginning to grow between her eyes. He takes her head in both hands, tugs hard at the stubborn scarf, pulls her close enough to let his tongue push open those righteously natural pink lips. Then he is up against the cooler, gasping for air, her fist still crushing his abdomen even after she’s disappeared.
Seemingly oblivious to it all, M-is-for-Meatball stands in her usual spot by the cookie case, perusing the menu. Dorri takes a deep, meditative breath.
“Have you decided?” she gasps.
For the rest of the week, she assumes she will call in sick for her final shift. After all, the money is in the bank, she has already gotten what she wanted. Her smug, happily married parents have grown weary of dwelling on their Dorri Dilemma and seem content to let the phase play itself out. There is a slight chance, who knows, that Jag Kapur has decided to take the local route for his undergraduate degree, that he will appear before her one day, trailed by a cluster of fawning sophomores sophisticated enough to truly appreciate him. Or perhaps there will be more Jag Kapurs, entire couches-full in the common rooms.
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