Love Edy (16 page)

A wad of notebook paper battered the back of
Edy’s head. She whirled to see Mason straightening his powdered
wig, a wig borrowed from Edy’s father.

“We’ve been practicing our speech,” Matt
said. He cleared his throat. “’Tis
freedom
we seek.”

“Drop the mic,” Mason suggested.

Edy snapped forward again amidst a room full
of snickers. A fair assumption would have been to think they had an
allegiance to her, or at the very least, that their need to protect
her would extend to protection of her pride. Definitely, not the
case. Even though Edy’s father had expressed his reluctance at
having to miss the annual history program because of pressing
commitments elsewhere, it didn’t stop everyone—especially the
twins—from having a laugh or twenty at his expense. Cue the day of
the event and her father’s noticeable absence. Cue the twins
arriving at school, dressed as her father, with one having gone so
far as to borrow his wig.

A spitball caught her in the ear, jerking
Edy from her scowling. It had come from the seat right next to her.
Edy dug it out and careened to face Hassan, the culprit. Before she
could open her mouth with something foul, he puckered up as if to
kiss her. The smile crept to Edy’s lips without her permission.
Delayed, she chucked the offending item back. He caught it without
looking.

“Show off,” she mouthed.

She had planned this time to puzzle over the
machinations of appearance and reality in Shakespeare’s
Macbeth.
But as Edy shared too much time with a boy who
occupied too many of her waking thoughts—and all of her sleeping
ones—she needn’t a primer on artful deception.

A lot had changed since the birthday party,
and yet nothing had changed at all. She was still Edy and he
Hassan, two friends and nothing more, even while the girls around
him had tripled. Unlike before, Hassan returned their indulgent
stares and flirted when they flirted. He made dates and ventured
out, while Edy’s time with Wyatt had tripled. Star gazing appeared
to be his favorite thing.

Not long after the New Year’s, Edy
auditioned for a spot with the nation’s most prestigious summer
intensive in ballet. While her initial motivation had been the
honor of admittance, each passing day near Hassan brought another
wish, that of distance and an ease to her hurt. Only in the shadows
of her bedroom did the wounds of the day set in, anguish from
another round of heartbreak. Edy imagined that a summer apart would
do her good, giving her a chance to get over her friend in what
would be their longest separation ever. After all, only she knew
the strain of a fictitious smile during the day, book ended by
weeping through the night. Perhaps her love of dance could heal
that with effort.

Even before the letter arrived, Edy knew she
would be accepted to the School of American Ballet, an appendage of
the New York City Ballet. She was simply that good. In order for
her to attend, Edy and Hassan’s mother would spend the summer in
New York, living with Rani’s sister. Ali and Edy’s father would be
touring Europe and the U.S. most of the season, anyway, as they
were in impossible demand following the release of their new book
on the politics of social unrest. Hassan would summer at the
Dysons’ when the boys weren’t touring football camps, and Edy would
separate herself from him, as best, and completely as she
could.

Summer arrived, and with it, Wyatt’s lip
trembling tantrum about her going away. While it would have been
nice to see Hassan pitch a fit, Edy set off on the four-hour trek
to New York with a pinch of redemption. Hassan’s mother made for a
meandering sort of driver, insisting on pit stops along the way,
and Edy found herself peeking at her phone for messages from Hassan
only to find it flooded with fractured complaints from Wyatt
instead.

They got to New York eventually. Ijay and
Kala Gupta lived on the twenty-fifth floor of a gleaming,
window-laden high rise overlooking Central Park West. Their
bellman, clad in a starched crimson coat and black slacks, tipped
his gold-lined cap and greeted Rani by name. “Ted” he said simply
with a tap of his badge, before taking both Edy’s luggage and
Rani’s and leading the way up.

Rani’s sister, Kala, answered the door. She
wore a silk cream blouse that tied at the hip and smart brown
slacks, looking every bit the polished Manhattan wife and
socialite. Kala grinned perfect white teeth before embracing her
sister, skin deep pecan to Rani’s butter cream, sharp angles
against curves. Not a hair ran out of sync with Kala’s tight
pin-up, not an off-putting color, nothing overdone, as always her
make-up complimented, coolly. Perfection had always been her
mantra.

She fussed over Edy and remarked on how much
she’d grown before holding her out at arm’s length for a good look.
Two years, she proclaimed, and Edy would be all the rage. One, if
she had a growth spurt.

Yeah. Whatever.

Kala led them inside, albeit hesitantly,
fingernails picking at each other suddenly.

The condo remained as Edy remembered it:
open-air with big floor-to-ceiling windows that drenched everything
in sunlight on a good day. A view of Central Park, Central Park
Lake, and a dazzling Manhattan skyline swept them in a panoramic
arc from where she stood.

New York,
Edy thought with an exhale.
Just the place to rejuvenate, renew, and morph into something
spectacular. Just the place to meet a million Hassans or forget he
existed altogether.

“Edy?” Kala said. “You remember Ronsher,
don’t you? He’ll be here, too.”

Ronsher was the son of Rani and Kala’s older
brother. Edy turned to face him, and not for the first time, was
struck by how much he looked like his cousin Hassan. New York, Edy
thought,
would
have been the perfect place to forget Hassan,
were it not for Hassan’s duplicate parked alongside her for the
summer.

Only, Ronsher wasn’t Hassan’s duplicate
anymore. He’d staked a claim on a look all his own, a look he
needn’t worry about his cousin borrowing any time soon.

A full foot taller than the last time they’d
met, Ronsher, or Ronnie Bean, was a lean and golden boy aptly named
by the twins for his likeness to a beanstalk. He had the smile of
Hassan and the glimmer of his eyes, but oh, was he different from
what she remembered. What had once been thick and healthy black
hair fell into his eyes in fat chunks of midnight and chestnut. He
wore an ocean of eyeliner, had both ears pierced, and his black tee
fit vice-tight. Neon letters screamed “Groove, Slam, Move,” across
his ribcage as his listless eyes roved from Kala, Edy, to the
ceiling. “Emo tragedy” were the words that came to mind.

“Hey Ronnie Bean,” Edy said, unable to look
away from him, even at the risk of rudeness.

“Just Ronnie,” he amended with a great
sigh.

It was harder to see Hassan under all that,
in that,
but Hassan was still there, in the broadness of the
shoulders and the shape of the face, in the mouth that seemed
almost identical.

Edy moved to hug Ronnie Bean, then stopped
at the look he gave her.

“So, you’re here for the summer, too?” she
said, falling back into awkwardness.

“More like forever.” Bean shouldered her as
he passed and made for the hall, dismissing her in jeans so skinny
Edy could make out the curve of his ass.

“
I hope you’ll change your clothing and
your attitude while here!”
Rani yelled in Punjabi before the
door slammed soundly behind Bean.

Edy looked wide-eyed and at the women,
knowing their tolerance for American tantrums to be nil. But Kala
merely exhaled.

Ronnie Bean had spent summers in Boston.
Over time, he’d become one of them, welcomed. He was Edy’s friend.
Her good friend. Or rather, he had been.

“Ronsher moved in six months ago,” Kala
said. “I’m not sure how long he’ll be here.”

Edy remembered Bean’s dad, a civil engineer
for the U.S. Army with little patience and exacting standards. It
seemed impossible that the Ronnie Bean before Edy could be produced
by such a rigid man. Obsessed with propriety and beholden to the
old ways, Bean’s father held honor and decency, as defined by him,
in the highest regard. In short, there could be no end to the ways
Bean could have offended his sensibilities, even if he weren’t
standing before Edy looking like the Indian premiere of MTV.

The following morning, Edy rose early,
showered, dressed, and found messages from both Hassan and Wyatt.
She gave Wyatt a quick, cursory greeting, but paused long enough to
give Hassan the lowdown on Bean. What was he doing in NYC, and why
was he suddenly an asshole? When no answer came quickly, Edy rushed
to breakfast, gobbled her food, and got ready for the
fifteen-minute walk to SAB, the School of American Ballet. On her
way out, Edy discovered that Ronnie Bean had been thrust upon her,
unwilling escort that he was. He wore the t-shirt and jeans from
the day before and pretended not to hear Rani’s snort of
disgust.

Four blocks into their walk, Bean broke the
silence.

“I don’t care what you think of me, you
know. You or anyone else.” He splashed black puddles, mucking the
hem of Edy’s pants as they went.

She glanced at him. “Okay.”

“And I had stuff to do, you know.
Other
than walk the baby to school.”

“Then go!” Edy said and cut a sharp left to
avoid his splash. “Now stop before I shove you face first in the
dirt.”

Bean slowed as something like a smile played
at the corner of his lips. But as quickly as it arrived, it
departed. “Whatever,” he said. “And the minute I turn my back, the
Central Park rapist pops your cherry and dumps you in the
Hudson.”

“There’s a rapist on the loose?” Edy looked
over her shoulder, just in case.

Bean sighed. “Edy Phelps, the Boston
bumpkin.”

On the next block, he pulled her into a deli
and ordered two oversized bagels weighted with lox, tomatoes,
capers, onions, and cream cheese. Edy glanced behind them at the
door, wondering what would happen if she were late on her first day
to the world’s most rigorous ballet intensive.

“I die for these things,” Bean admitted and
tore into one ferociously.

Edy sniffed the fish suspiciously. “I can’t
imagine why.” Her stomach twisted in a merciless vice, earning a
grimace from Edy. Bean shot her a quizzical look just as her cell
phone vibrated. Edy looked down to find a message from Hassan.

Go easy on Bean,
he wrote.

Nothing more.

~~~

For two weeks, Edy’s schedule never
deviated. Pointe, variations, adagio, ballroom dancing, and
character classes, all of it arduous enough to bend bone and crack
the back. Despite Edy’s vow to put distance between her and Hassan,
they exchanged texts each morning and again at night—sometimes all
night—and sometimes long enough to line the bookshelves of the
world’s best scholar. Her texts with Wyatt were frequent more so
than long, with him checking in after this class and that one to
see how it went and what was happening next. She came to expect and
receive his irritation each day, since she only answered his
messages at night.

Something was happening with Bean, something
that Edy had noticed almost immediately. Though he bellyached about
walking her to class and missing out on much-needed sleep each day,
he never went home, or even in the direction of home, on leaving
her at SAB in the morning. After two weeks of his charade, Edy’s
mind had run through a whole mountain of possibilities, from Bean
getting hooked on some vicious synthetic drug and meeting up with
his dealer for a daily fix, to a secret girlfriend of another race.
By the time she got up the will to ask him, she’d decided that a
girlfriend might be the explanation.

They were back at his deli, him with his
bagel, Edy with a safe and rather mild fruit smoothie when she
decided to broach it.

“What’s her name?” Edy said and took a sip
of her drink. She regretted not ordering tea or some other warm
beverage. Though the day’s weather mimicked a sauna, she told
herself the heat would help her near-constant stomachaches.

“Whose?” Bean asked around a mouth full of
salmon and cream cheese.

“Your girlfriend. She must be white with all
the trouble you’re going to.” She took in his red shorts, Jordans,
and baggy tee before considering. “Or from the hood.”

Bean arched a brow. “Girlfriend?” He slung
the word back at her, simpering.

“When you leave me at SAB,” Edy rushed ahead
all the while wanting her words back. “You walk in the opposite
direction from home.”

“So? I get on the subway.”

“And go where?”

Bean snatched her smoothie for a loud,
indulgent slurp. He handed the cup back bottomed out.

“Catch you in the p.m.,” Bean said and
disappeared, insistent on the wrong direction.

The next morning, Edy woke Bean early and
told him she needed to be at SAB by eight instead of nine. He
grunted and cussed, emerging from bed in the red shorts and “Goin
Nowhere” tee from the day before. Bean showered and left his Sonic
the Hedgehog spikes damp so that they hung like well-placed
highlights accentuating a classically handsome face. The two
skipped out on breakfast and headed for the deli, offending both
Kala and Rani that morning.

“Let’s sit and eat,” Bean suggested after
ordering.

Edy hesitated. “I have to go in early.”

“Two orders of bagels and lox for here,” he
said and held up a finger to shush Edy’s protest. “You’re not fat,
even if you ballerinas are obsessed with being grotesquely
thin.”

“We are not!”

“And you don’t have to be in early, either,”
Bean said. “So humor me as if I’m Hassan.”

Orders in hand, they took a cramped table in
the corner at the back. Edy stared at the bagel Bean had ordered
for her, wondering how she could get out of eating it and have
strength enough for the day.