Hungry Hearts

by Elsie Chapman

  Present. Actually caring about what I had to say.

  It was different.

  It was nice.

  We didn’t agree on everything. That was the best part sometimes.

  Tonight, though, we were back on his favorite topic to needle out of me—well, everyone’s favorite topic to bring up as soon as they saw my face, apparently: what Munira plans to do as a career. In the future. For the rest of her life.

  Cart not included.

  It was the type of topic I usually shied away from with even my closest friends, but Hasan just knew how to work it in and make me talk about it as well as he could sniff out whatever was left in the fridge that he might devour.

  I ended up telling him about the internship application I had taken out of the guidance office—one I hadn’t even bothered showing my parents while I considered my own feelings about it.

  The internship was in event planning, which was a little skip of the stone away from my usual, to be honest, but not so detached that I’d have trouble getting past the door. It was a boutique setup that focused on intimate weddings and bridal showers, and honestly, I watched enough Say Yes to the Dress and Cheapest Weddings in my downtime that I thought I could dig it: arranging color palettes, making bouquets, and . . . well, setting out the food.

  But at the same time, it wasn’t the cart. It wasn’t what I was always told I was good at. And I guess that scared me. A little.

  Well, a lot.

  “I like the sound of the internship, but being a wedding planner doesn’t sound like a career where you can just blend into the background. Maybe I’m meant to be a photographer. Your name’s at the bottom and you’re credited, but at the same time, you’re not necessarily as awesome or as remembered as the person in the frame.”

  “I won’t argue with that,” Hasan said, “but I will point out that a lot of photographers are burdened with awards and recognition, so if you want to skulk in the shadows for the rest of your life, I might not go that way.”

  “Okay, fine. I’m just not sure why it’s an issue if I just stay with the cart for the rest of my life.”

  “I’m not saying that you can’t. You seem to do pretty well in the food cart. I’m surprised that you’re planning your future around it but not seeing yourself as, like, co-owner or taking over for your dad when he retires.”

  “And how is that different from skulking in the shadows elsewhere for the rest of my life?”

  Hasan didn’t respond for a moment. He seemed to be staring into the distance as he bit into his lamb skewer. It was his second of the night, which made me a little proud. Apparently I was getting better, toeing the line between entirely charred and perfectly scorched. Not that Hasan ever complained about my food.

  It helped that I was working with a pretty awesome recipe. Baba had this way of drawing out the tender in his meat, marinating and using delicate pinches of spice that he dusted gently over the hills and valleys of slices and rolled balls and rural-hewed chunks destined for gyros or meat trays or to be garnished with salad within a deliciously sloppy naan sandwich.

  He always seemed so confident that, if I just watched his hands, if I took the same small pinches, my fingers would learn the same movements and be able to result in that same welcoming taste. I always kept my eyes down as I rolled ground chicken between my palms and formed fists in bowls piled high with raw, marbled goodness, hoping that if I focused on it as passionately as I tried to concentrate during prayer, I would feel something close to the way he seemed to feel about it. I wanted to. I really did. But it never seemed to work.

  I absently knocked over one of the glasses on the countertop when my elbow stretched out too far, and Hasan—who had up until that moment been nursing his glass of sour cherry juice—sat up straight.

  “What was that?”

  “That was my fault! Sorry!”

  I tugged the glasses back in line, watching out of the corner of my eye as Hasan glanced both ways on the quiet, dark street before he settled back down.

  Recently, he had been really . . . well, it sounded like wishful thinking, but Hasan was acting almost protective over me.

  It had started when I said I thought I saw the same guy lurking near the cart on the evenings Hasan tended to turn up. I’m not an alarmist, so I was willing to write it off the first few times, but Hasan nearly jumped out of his skin.

  “Where? When? What does he look like?”

  He’d never been that forceful, so I freaked out a bit myself. It must have shown on my face, because he cooled down, apologized, and said he was a little on edge due to the rumored increase in crime plastered all over the papers: kidnappings, bank robberies, and the stray appearance of some creepy guy in nineties flasher gear menacing girls in lonely alleyways.

  “You’re here by yourself most nights,” he ended. “And you’re important to me. I don’t want to see anything happen to you.”

  I didn’t understand most of his concern (city life pretty much equals crime and the occasional holdup while you’re browsing an aisle at your local deli), but I was mostly stuck on that whole “you’re important to me” line he snuck in as subtly as raisins in a platter of Afghani rice. That was enough to make me nod and smile, probably a bit gooey around the edges.

  After that, for a few weeks, Hasan had turned up a bit earlier, glowering at the gathering shadows around the cart, and the guy’s appearance turned more sporadic. It was probably a coincidence, but I didn’t point that out. Hasan’s company was worth it.

  “Anyway, don’t change the subject.” Hasan raised his eyebrows at me and took another bite. I scowled and then realized he had white sauce stuck to his collar.

  “Um . . . you’ve got a little . . .”

  I reached for a napkin as he eyed me bemusedly.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  I flushed. It was rare that Hasan even made a reference to family outside of my own. He didn’t like talking about his family. Like, at all. Any mention of them was small—“Oh, my mom cooked something like this once”—and tended to be hastily curtailed. It was odd, but I could get a hint: There was some painful backstory there, and he wasn’t ready yet.

  To be honest, and I’m not too proud to admit it, I had other things to focus on besides Hasan’s family. The thought that he was dressing down to be as comfortable as possible for his outings here—getting cozy for these marathon feasts, these moments shared with me—made my cheeks warm, as did the idea that he actually enjoyed listening to me ramble on about my family problems.

  It took me a good minute, caught up in this reverie, to realize that Hasan’s cheeks seemed similarly flushed, and that my hand had foregone the napkin to pluck absently at his decidedly clean and crisp collar.

  “Oh!” I dropped my hand like it was touching a hot pot handle. “Sorry!”

  “No harm, seriously. I’m good for a laundry run anyway.” Hasan cleared his throat.

  “Oh, you’re going now?” I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice. It wasn’t entirely over Hasan leaving—well, there was a lot of that. It was just that, even if that weird guy hadn’t appeared recently, I’d had the feeling I was being watched. Maybe those headlines had gotten to me after all.

  But I didn’t tell Baba. And I certainly wasn’t telling Hasan. He obviously had other problems.

  Hasan’s devastating smile made an appearance. “I could stay, if you’re really that lonely.”

  Tempting. Very tempting. But it was getting later, and the street was quiet enough, and I didn’t want to be that big baby who was jumping at shadows, so I let him go.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have.

  A few minutes later—or maybe it was just seconds, long enough for him to make it around the corner and out of sight—I turned away to wipe down the counter and clear off the empty containers like I always did.

  And then I was thrown forward.

  And my only thought was, Ow, who rammed their car into the cart?

  Maybe that wasn’t my first thought. Mayb
e it was just Ow, ow, ow. Because it hurt. I could feel the sticky damp of hot sauce seeping into my jeans, and my head was throbbing. And then I realized the reason I hadn’t stood up and started taking down a license plate was because the cart was on its side.

  And there was a man standing in front of it.

  I dazedly dragged myself out, a hand to my head.

  “Um . . . can I help you?”

  He just stood there, looking at me.

  He had on a fedora—a fedora—and a pinstriped suit. He really didn’t look like a paying customer for King of Kuisine, so my odds were on him being the jerk who’d just toppled over my father’s babies—both of them, literally. And then, before I could even wrap my head properly around that, he sprang up, physically, onto the capsized counter and planted his knee into the steel until it gave under him, just melted down and into a meek shelf for him like it was dollar-store plastic.

  “Girlie, you’ve got five minutes to tell me where the Comet is.”

  I grasped my ridiculous spatula and just stared at him, even as a scattering of would-be customers gaped from a safe distance. My hesitation was a mistake. He reached out, and before I could even react, he had hold of my arm.

  And then, in a slick judolike move—no, that made it sound realistic, human, like something a person actually did without it being impossible and scary—he lifted me off the ground and then smacked me back down. Hard.

  The city lights scattered about my head like bobbing, filmy stars. I, the girl who was supposed to protect King of Kuisine and my father when they both reached their middling ages, sat there on the ground and held my head and whimpered over my scraped elbows and watched as that creep trashed my life as I knew it right in front of me.

  That was the last thing I could focus on: that cart, my family’s trust in me, being crushed under his heel.

  No. That’s wrong.

  All of a sudden, there was something else. Someone else. There was a boy, in an incredibly unflattering yellow suit with a lightning bolt across his chest and a cliché mask over his eyes. And he fell from the sky like a star, in such a familiar plummet that I felt sure that this time he was going to land on the cart and get his body egg-scrambled and die and come back to sue me for not having a softer place for him to land.

  But he didn’t. He landed quietly, like a cat on velvet paws, and he saw me on the ground, and our eyes met. He rushed over to me, and he lifted me in his arms, and that was the moment when I was sure that I had succumbed to a concussion around the time the creep had slammed me to the ground, because the way he said “Munira,” so gently, like his breath alone would find all the places I was cracked and make me come entirely undone . . .

  It sounded like Hasan. And I wanted it to be Hasan.

  And even with my brain dazed and my legs aching, I was focused enough to feel guilty that I could even think of that.

  And then the fedora guy caught sight of him and snarled, and I watched as the boy in the yellow suit . . . no, it was Hasan—the boy who tried to devour me out of house and home, the boy who laughed with me and listened when I needed him to, the boy who was apparently a superhero—neatly caught what was left of our side cooler in his right hand and crumpled it and tossed it back, ablaze with a near-heavenly fire.

  And then there was this huge battle, where the Comet screamed a lot of things about how I shouldn’t have been brought into this, and the fedora guy screamed back about how he decided who was brought into it or not, and then apparently I managed to drag myself upward and bean him in the back of the head with a frying pan while shrieking, “King of Kuisine isn’t your personal playground!”

  I wish I couldn’t remember this happening.

  I also wish I could forget what happened afterward, later that night in the hospital, after my teary-eyed parents kissed my brow and tucked me in and I closed my eyelids against the raw, open devastation on my father’s face, when the boy who was the Comet and also who I thought was becoming my best friend slipped through the hospital window.

  And we fought.

  “I was careless,” Hasan admitted. “I don’t have a family who worries in the same way, and I felt that when I was with you, I was close to that. Apparently, I got too comfortable and settled into a pattern. I’m sorry, Munira. I really am.”

  “I wish I could say I get that,” I seethed back, “but unlike you, I don’t play pretend with other people’s lives when I know there’s a risk of them getting hurt.”

  “I already said it was my fault. I already said I knew he was looking for me. I don’t know what you want from me. Would you rather I left you there to die?” Hasan roughly tugged at his hair. “Don’t make me apologize for not being able to. I couldn’t do that to you. You’re the last person I could ever leave behind like that.”

  At any other time, those words would have been everything I wanted to hear, but my drama-heroine quota had run dry for the day. I was in pain, I had a needle stuck in my arm, and the boy I was starting to realize I had more than a crush on apparently was some mask-wearing, high-flying vigilante in tights who had ruined everything my parents had worked for.

  I didn’t want to admit that I might have been angrier with myself than with Hasan: for the relief that washed over me when I remembered that, even if tomorrow was a working day, there was no shift to miss. King of Kuisine was a goner.

  “No matter what is going on with you and I assume your . . .”—I waved a hand toward the costume, the glimmering arches of his brows, his whole terrible, brilliant self—“mission or saving the world or whatever . . . you should have been honest with me from the beginning that something like this could happen.”

  “Would you have believed me? If I just went, ‘Oh, hey, Munira, guess what? I’m a famous superhero, and there’s this whole organization after me because they don’t like the thought of some caped wonder boy foiling their schemes!’ ”

  “I would have tried! If you had at least done more to keep my family out of it, I would have tried.” I shook my head, both out of dizziness and to fend off tears. “And now I can’t.”

  “Munira . . .” His voice turned tender, pleading.

  “You said you didn’t know what it was like to have a family who worried about you,” I bit out, roughly. “And you’re right.”

  It wasn’t kind. I’m not proud I said it. He had all the earmarks, looking back, of the privileged but pushed-aside kid: the kid who was told he was loved, but not shown it outside of high-tech trackers and a supersuit that came with its own baggage. Afterward, I could remember how his face had crumpled down the middle and hate myself for it.

  But in that moment, I pressed on.

  “You jeopardized us. I know you’ll try to laugh this off and say something about not being able to resist the free baklava.” I raised my chin and tried to keep it from quavering. “Unfortunately, I don’t have one to give you for the road. Because, you know, our cart is down for the count.”

  “Munira,” he said again, but it sounded more defeated this time.

  And then the nurse came in, and I had to pretend that the reasons for my one-sided dialogue and tear-glazed eyes were, respectively, the soap opera rerun on my TV screen and the lack of morphine in my veins.

  End scene on our not-breakup breakup.

  End scene on my friendship with the boy who fell like a golden star.

  And of course, again, I assumed that was the last I would see of Hasan.

  Or the Comet.

  Whatever.

  * * *

  Fast forward six weeks. I was grumpily hanging out in my aunt’s café. It was no King of Kuisine. There was a lot I was finding I hadn’t properly appreciated about our little truck until it had been smashed to smithereens and had to be slowly coaxed back into the world of the living by a dedicated team of mechanics, like the fact that it didn’t involve time spent cooped up with relatives who think that seventeen is far too close to old-maid status and who you can’t tell that the last boy you were interested in turned out to be a sup
erhero and ruined your life.

  Well, not entirely. If you must know, I got the internship.

  It probably helped that Baba was still so dazed over King of Kuisine that when I brought it up at the dinner table, he blinked and nodded and went, “Well, that’s a good way to fill your time for now, sweetie.”

  Which I took as approval.

  Ma was a bit more reticent. She went in with me the first day and smiled and nodded along with the bubbly receptionist who gave me my “very own badge!” and a “brand-new locker!” and assured me that I was going “to love it here!” And then she went home and got on the phone and bragged to all her friends that her daughter, the eldest one, is now a wedding planner, and all their kids should keep her in mind for their future nuptials.

  That would probably bring up its own set of problems, but it was good to realize that the world wasn’t going to cave in and my parents didn’t really care that I was doing something outside of the cart and away from a stove. They really just wanted me to be happy. And make good money, which was why Ma instantly tried to haggle up the monthly transportation stipend I was offered.

  And a lot of the food cart regulars—well, not customers now, but friends—still came around, whenever they could. I still had Lila’s sweet confections in my life, and her friendship, which was just as sweet. Some guy actually wrote into the local newspaper trying to get a fund going for our repair fees, complaining that he had lost access to the one good halal place on Hungry Heart Row, which was flattering.

  I did a lot of eating instead of serving those days, when I wasn’t at my internship. That particular afternoon, I was seated at my aunt’s counter with a plate of rui fish and rice: a beloved Bengali dish that seemed like a good antidote for heartache. Besides, working out the bones between my lips and pressing my finger against their sharp edges was cathartic. I couldn’t beat up the guy who ruined the cart, but I could show a fish who was boss.

  I doubt I was reassuring any of the other wary regulars, who had all been informed by my aunt about my sensitive state, by gnawing on the bones.