The Rearranged Life

by Annika Sharma

  And lose ourselves we do, moving our arms and swaying to the beat. Every second of my grumpy day melts away. I’m here with my best friend, and it’s special, and I can’t remember why I ever thought I was missing out on anything.

  Tonight, I am the exotic girl from the mirror, beautiful, weightless, and carefree. Sophia’s eyes light up. The people around us radiate contagious energy. We’re a happy bubble of college students.

  “What’s your name, beautiful?” says the boy next to me.

  He’s talking to me!

  Sophia gives me a discreet nod and turns away to give us a second. He’s tall, dark, and handsome, with a tribal tattoo around a built bicep he shows off out of his tank top sleeve. Tattoos are usually a turnoff, but I’m feeling a little dangerous. Maybe I won’t be unkissed tonight. Maybe this is my chance to prove Sejal wrong–different cultures can do just fine.

  “Nithya.” I say, with a confident toss of my hair and a grin.

  “Nit-ya.” The first syllable rhymes with wit, not with, but I ignore it. “I’m Jack.” He says this like I need to remember his name from now on. “Want a drink?”

  “Sure, I’ll have a Pepsi.” I trail him and his sweet smile into the crowded kitchen.

  “Nithya!” A hand touches my elbow, and there’s Luca, waiting for a big hug.

  “Luca! Tell me what’s been going on! Sophia’s out back with some friends she just made.” I roll my eyes at the social butterfly we both love. He does the same.

  “Oh, you know, this and that. Senior year means no work.” He pumps his fist into the air.

  “Speak for yourself, homie, you’re a communications major,” I mock-growl. I’m not jealous his twelve-credit workload lets him do whatever he wants. At least, I tell myself that.

  “Hey, I worked hard. I put in my time,” he protests, laughingly.

  “I gotta say, you chose your major perfectly. Good looks, salesperson qualities, sweet talker… you’ve got this made.”

  “My good looks being number one on the list of things I use to manipulate and get what I want.” He gives me a smoldering look right out of GQ, and I laugh with him.

  “Hey, my roommate is here, so I’m going to go find him.” He pats me on the shoulder as he walks off. “You guys should meet.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good,” I mumble, half-listening as he takes off. I blink twice, hard, in an attempt to refocus my blurry vision.

  Jack waits next to me, his arm protectively around my waist. This wouldn’t normally feel comfortable, but right now I’m thankful for the support. I might faint. My legs are about to give out.

  I’ve been drugged.

  y eyelids flutter open. The light pouring through the window makes me close them again. Everything from my neck to my toes throbs like it has been hit with a baseball bat. I am filled with the kind of ache you get when you have the flu and every muscle is a rubber band drawn too tight. I roll over and begin to fall asleep again.

  The whiff of cologne jolts me awake.

  There can’t be cologne on my bed. I’ve never been on a date. Sleeping with a boy in my bed is out of question… but then, is this even my bed? My sheets are pastel blue, and these are black.

  Where the hell am I?

  I remember dancing and feeling happy. I recall a guy, but his face is blurry. Sitting up too quickly makes me queasy, but when I grab the wall for support, I note that my shirt is still thankfully on. It raises questions about if anything else is amiss, though. I take a deep breath to steel myself before looking down to check that my jeans are place. They are, as far as I can tell.

  I stumble down the hallway as though wading through molasses. What if he’s still here? Did we have sex? Who was he? I need to leave. My shaky legs cause me to run into the corner as I round the bend into the living room. The impact of my head meeting the wall creates a loud thud and I cry out before biting my tongue. He’ll hear me.

  Movement in the corner of my eye stops me dead in my tracks.

  The man, my attacker, pushes a barstool under the counter. When he gazes at me, my blood freezes. He has eerily familiar, startlingly green eyes.

  His steps toward me are tentative. I shrink back instinctively, hitting the wall. He stops.

  “Nithya.”

  Just hearing my name from someone capable of this makes me want to vomit.

  “How could you do this to me?” My voice slurs.

  He looks bewildered then horrified.

  “I didn’t,” he protests firmly, not raising his voice. “I swear to God.”

  He takes two slow strides forward, his hands in the air, as if to say he won’t hurt me. I stay rooted to my spot. I don’t know why–my minimal logical processes tell me to run like hell, but something in his eyes makes me want to hear him out. He is my only witness, the only way to piece together the events of last night.

  “Luca and Sophia wanted to introduce us yesterday. He’s my roommate. They pointed you out, but you were with some guy. I left to get a drink and saw you again near the kitchen. You were a little wobbly. The way he was manhandling you just didn’t sit right. I’ve seen… anyway, it just didn’t look right. I followed and saw him push you onto the bed. I asked if you were okay, and you hardly moved. It was obvious you weren’t even awake, so I got up in his face to get him to back the hell off. He bolted, so I ended up bringing you here. I couldn’t find Sophia and Luca, or I would have taken you home.”

  It’s surreal, hearing what you did and drawing a blank. When my wisdom teeth were removed, my dentist told me a patient who is under anesthesia is still able to follow directions to open their mouth wider or to swallow. At the time, it was a puzzle to imagine a person could be unconscious and still follow another person’s orders. It seemed like a mindfuck. Not anymore.

  “So, I didn’t do anything… with anyone…” I stumble a little bit. Part relief. Part heartbreak. I need to hear him say nothing was taken from me.

  “No. I mean, maybe in the past. That I don’t know. Not last night though,” he tries to joke, and in spite of myself, I smile.

  Despite the lighthearted moment, my eyes fill with tears, which always makes things worse. Then I get angry I’m crying in front of this stranger. Sliding down the wall with my head in my hands, I wrestle the heaving sobs wracking my body.

  “Hey, hey, hey, it’s okay. Nothing happened. Here, let me get you some water.”

  He gently takes my hands, lifts me to my feet, and helps me to the counter. When he lets go, the tingle he leaves there is like a static shock winging through my palm.

  “Want to talk about something else? Like… oh, hey, how about that chemistry homework?”

  I laugh again, through tears. “What’s your name?” Sniffle, sniffle.

  “James.” He grins. And in that second, I know his is a name I will remember forever.

  ames offers me something to eat when I stop crying, a feat that takes a good ten minutes. When I look at him incredulously, he says it’s better to have something in my belly and then playfully adds that he also doesn’t want me throwing up in his apartment.

  “My first morning-after breakfast, and I didn’t do anything.” I am less burdened now by all the things I feared had happened and relief from all the things that didn’t.

  “Yikes, now I’m going to feel bad it’s only Cheerios.”

  As we eat, he ignores the occasional hiccup I croak out, and talks to me like I’m an old friend–caring and vigilant, like when Sophia has a cold and I make sure she’s stocked up on Vicks and tissues. He insists on driving me back to my place, even though it’s less than half a mile away from the Meridian, the apartment building we’re in now.

  “A BMW?!” Who is this guy? My old, well-loved Ford Taurus, parked in the driveway at home, doesn’t hold a candle to our ride.

  “High school graduation gift.” His cheeks turn pink. He reminds me of the down-to-earth celebrities in grocery tabloids who have been snapped by paparazzi, their heads ducking out of the spotlight. “A St. Clair tradit
ion.”

  “Your full name is James St. Clair?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s pretentious.” The words roll out before I can stop them as I picture estates and British nobles with three middle names. My hands fly to my mouth.

  James looks at me in astonishment and I cringe, repeating, “Oh. My. God. I am so sorry!” Over and over again. Then he bursts out laughing. It’s a delightful sound.

  “Let’s just pretend the drugs were behind that comment.” He chuckles as we drive out.

  “I am such a jerk, I am so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. You’re probably right,” he replies, cheerfully.

  I say nothing in response. I am warm from humiliation and because the memory of his laugh makes me want to hear it again. I don’t know how I feel about that. We proceed in comfortable silence for two blocks. As we pull up and he parallel parks on College Avenue, I turn to him.

  “Thank you, James.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You let me copy your chemistry homework.”

  He knows when our eyes lock, he did a lot more than that.

  “You just looked a little freaked out,” he admits.

  “More like totally freaked out.” I grin. “But between that and last night… you’ve been a superhero. Like Superman or something.”

  “You never know, I could be Bizarro.” His tone conveys he doesn’t think I’ll catch the reference.

  “No, not alternate universe Superman. Real Superman.”

  “You know comics?” He sounds impressed.

  “A little bit. When I was younger and my family went to India, my cousins had copies of every Marvel and DC comic on earth. There wasn’t much to do, I had a short attention span, and my parents needed me to shut up and sit down.” I giggle as I unbuckle my seatbelt. “I should go. But thank you for everything. I can’t imagine many people doing what you did.”

  “Well, copying homework isn’t that big of a deal. We’ve all done it,” he says, dismissing it pleasantly. He drives away after I’ve entered the building, and as I climb the stairs, thinking about superheroes and my parents’ homeland, the memory washes over me.

  When I was little, my family took us to India every two years. My sister and I were done with school and endless weeks of freedom stood in front of us. To keep us in touch with our family (and away from the television), our mom flew the three of us to Hyderabad from the end of May until the middle of August. Somehow, the stifling 105-degree heat and power outages didn’t faze us. We spent hours underneath the banana trees in the garden, playing cricket and chasing lizards out of our veranda.

  Anisha and I would spend the days before the trip make believing we were on our own, gallivanting across the world. We packed lunchboxes full of our Fisher-Price kitchenware and Barbie clothes to reenact the entire process. Deciding which clothes to pack was a big to-do, followed by creating pretend plane tickets out of construction paper. ‘Checking in’ our baggage on a makeshift conveyor belt (also known as Anisha’s bed) came next before we boarded the top-bunk aircraft. We would always pretend our flight was delayed, so we could trek across Europe while waiting for our next ride. In our minds, anything was possible. The world was our oyster.

  In real life, our arduous 24-hour long journey always culminated with a twenty-something-person welcoming party inevitably waiting a few extra hours in the sweltering heat for our late arrival. Taxi drivers and auto rickshaw drivers ambushed foreigners shouting, “Ma’am, only ten rupees!” and would grab the baggage to load onto the car before anyone even had a chance to protest that they already had transportation waiting.

  The welcome wagon would collectively exclaim how we grew up so fast and how we’re so American as they loaded our eight suitcases on top of a Fiat or an Ambassador car from the sixties. Then, a caravan of vehicles would weave through the intense traffic that seemingly had no laws, dodging cows and scooters loaded with four people at a time, before finally arriving at the family home… a safe haven for any child in a new environment.

  The first few days of the trip were always spent visiting the homes of elder relatives, catching up and answering the, “Do you remember me?” questions that were unavoidably geared toward my sister and I, as if we would forget our blood relations within two years. We would smile and name their relationship to us to play their game, and prove that, yes, our parents did teach us something though we were far away. Amma and Nanna would beam with pride as our relatives declared in awe, “Even being in a different country has not kept them from knowing who their family is!”

  The hustle and bustle of visiting would die down after a few weeks and soon my sister and I would be free to play with our cousins in the backyard garden from morning to night. We would spin thousands of rounds of Ring-Around-the-Rosie and run games of tag until our cotton clothes were soaked with sweat and our mothers would call us in for a bath–a rudimentary system involving a big bucket of cold water and a little mug to pour with. On days our parents worried about heat stroke, we would be confined to the small apartment. It was in those moments I would discover novels I’d never heard of and, encouraged by my male cousins, the Marvel and DC universes. I would devour all the comics they had and daydream about how cool it would be to be a superhero, saving people from dastardly villains and remaining humble about it.

  Older now, I know better. The real villains are greed, corruption, and cruelty, sometimes in people you thought better of. Like the guy last night, whom I shouldn’t have trusted. Then there are people like James, superheroes in their own right, who do the moral thing even when no one is looking.

  wish we knew who did it so I could kill him,” Sophia hisses, her eyes still red from our rehashing the events of last night.

  She corroborates James’ story. She and Luca went for a walk, under the impression I was with my new friend and James was getting a drink. When they came back, James and I were both MIA. Thinking I left with my attacker and James went home, Sophia and Luca ended up at our apartment.

  She feels guilty. She starts to cry when I fill her in on what James said, and can’t be comforted. I’m surprisingly calm. The tears from my meltdown at James’ have dried me out. When Sejal won valedictorian over me, something we’d both made incessant visits to the guidance counselors about, there was a short period of moping before I realized the time spent with my family was worth not joining an anti-drunk driving club. The sting of the loss remains, but I could reason why in the grand scheme of things, I wasn’t defeated. It would be the same now. I feel it in my bones. I vow not to let anyone get my drink ever again. I swear up, down, and sideways I’ll be smarter next time. I tell Sophia and myself that I’m safe, and it’ll never happen again. And nothing did, thanks to my very own superhero.

  “How did James handle you being there?” She chomps into a cheese pizza, cross-legged on our living room floor.

  “He was gentle.” I run my fingers over my palm, remembering his light touch as he pulled me off the floor and the humor he used to defuse the tears.

  “And he’s the same guy who helped you with your chemistry homework? It’s like fate.”

  “I don’t know about fate… but it’s something.” I refuse to betray that I inexplicably feel the same way.

  “How could you have not noticed that face? He’s smoking hot!”

  I laugh with her, indulging her ‘Nitwit’ jokes and pretending I’m as oblivious as she says. But even I can’t shake the feeling that something big is coming.

  When Monday arrives, and I go on my run, it doesn’t escape me that I have my class with James that morning. Don’t be silly, you aren’t going to be with him, so don’t try to get his attention. I put on a touch of makeup, highlighting my eyes, under the assumption he won’t look at me. I choose my favorite blue sundress and silver flats because they are pretty, overlooking that Sophia says the dress makes my legs look longer. I ignore the fact that he might be in the same room as I sit in my usual seat. I’ve all but forgotten about him while I
answer e-mails and look at my planner for what to study tonight, my eyes darting to the swivel chair next to me only to see if it’s occupied.

  “How’re you feeling?” James sets his books down, and I nearly jump out of my skin.

  “I’m… okay. I’m getting through it, thanks to you. How are you?”

  “Other than waking up late and running like hell to get here?” His cheeks and hands are flushed.

  Is the rest of him flushed too? God, Nithya, stop it.

  “Doing well.”

  “I didn’t notice you come in. You were stealthy,” I play it off cool and avert my eyes.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Do you know you get a really manic look on your face when you concentrate? I don’t know if it’s funny or terrifying.”

  “You aren’t the first to tell me that, sadly.” Sophia calls it my inner tigress–the ferocious focus of an animal about to pounce on its prey.

  “So, you’ve been called a nut job before? I should probably switch seats…” He pushes himself back and half-stands.

  “Well, you’ve sat next to me twice now, and I haven’t hurt you. Yet,” I say, hoping he doesn’t leave. “But class is just beginning.”

  “If that’s supposed to be comforting…”

  “I guess since you’ve saved me twice, I can spare you this time.”

  The professor turns on the mic and clears his throat, and we stop to listen. I sneak a glance at James. I’ve already noticed the big things, like the way his clean-cut, dark brown hair is tousled just enough to make my fingers long to run through it. Like how he appears more childish than manly when he smiles. His eyes, undoubtedly his distinguishing feature, crinkle with his laugh. While he’s watching Professor Griffin, however, the subtle things stand out, like how he rests his head on his interlocked hands when he listens intently.

  When I’m not expecting it, he turns to me, and I snap back to my notes, turning pink. The wrong page is on display, and I’m caught red-handed. I swear, out of the corner of my eye, I can see him grin.