All We Have Left (3 page)

I, however, am intrigued.

This all goes on for a week. Me, turning in my homework on time and acing Friday’s quiz like the good girl I’ve always been, and Nick Roberts baiting Mr. Laramore under his breath and nodding his head the rest of the time to the music playing in his earbuds.

I’ve started noticing the way his soft, dark hair sweeps over his eyes, that his long fingers are covered with paint and always in motion as he taps them on his thigh, twirls his pencil, or plays with the thick plugs in his ears.

I wonder what he sees when he looks at me, those fleeting glances out of the corner of his eye. A completely ordinary girl, not cute, not awful, just
there
. My blond hair is always pulled back in a long ponytail, and my pale blue eyes look like they’ve been through the wash too many times. Nothing special, so lusterless that I wonder sometimes if I could just fade away without anyone noticing.

But Nick has caught me staring at him more than once, and he’s nodded a couple of times, like,
We’re the same, aren’t we? Even if you don’t show it on the outside, we’re alike, you and me
, and I think that he sees me, even if no one else does.

I don’t know if it’s true, but it makes me feel good, when nothing has been feeling good lately. It’s as if every nerve in my body is shrieking and no one hears it but me.

The bell rings on a cold, shiny February day, and Emi and I rush with the others toward the hall after class.

Entrepreneurship counts for college credit, which is the reason Emi and a bunch of the smart kids are taking it. I’m taking it because I figure if anybody is going to take over my dad’s climbing shop one day, it’ll have to be me. Some girls take it just because Mr. Laramore is hipster hot, if you like angsty guys in their thirties with thick black glasses, skinny jeans, and high tops. It’s a pretty diverse crowd that battles for the doorway and the freedom of the hallway.

I’m watching Nick as he slips through the door, and Emi nudges me.

“Why are you so into him?” she asks as we jostle together, caught in a bottleneck at the doorway.

Emi Yamada has been my best friend since the sixth grade. She is dedicated and somber, skinny and gangly, with short, spiked black hair and a row of rings along her earlobes. Her narrow amber-colored eyes light up the most when she’s talking about apples, clouds, and streams, which might make
you think she really likes nature, but only as wallpaper on her tablet screen.

“I was thinking I should mix it up, trade in my earrings for some plugs,” I say, fingering the small gold hoops in my ears. I’m not serious, but I really don’t know how to answer her.

She shakes her head. “They wouldn’t look good on you,” she says.

Because it’s Emi, I can’t tell if she really thinks I want a pair of ear plugs like Nick’s or if she’s trying to tell me something else.

As the jam breaks and we swirl out into the hallway, Emi and I get separated. I’m heading for Teeny’s locker when a group of mimes come down the middle of the hall, the drama kids doing live art. People laugh as they goof off, acting as if a windstorm is blowing them around the halls, and then walking a tightrope, with expressions of terror on their faces. I step to the side to let them pass.

But instead they surround me and start to pat the air all around me.

“Uh … ,” I say, because
what the hell?

People are starting to gather around, and suddenly I realize that the mimes have me in a box. They are feeling along the side of it with their hands, and Jenny Knowles jumps up to feel the top of it, catching my eye and winking as she lands back on the ground.

I don’t have freaking time for this, but it seems rude to just walk away, so I stand there as they press their palms
against the box that only they can see. The box is getting smaller, and I instinctively duck my head as Jenny pats the air above my head. Their palms are getting closer as the box shrinks and I pull my arms in tighter to my body.

I feel stupid as the crowd gets bigger and someone starts clapping as the box starts getting smaller and smaller. Soon I’m sitting on the floor, my face red as I half laugh with exasperation, and it’s then that I catch Nick’s eye.

He’s leaning up against a locker, and as I watch, meathead Lawrence Jenson catches him with his shoulder and laughs, but Nick just steps away, his eyes trained on me.

“Really, guys?” I say to the mimes, but they ignore me, and the box just keeps shrinking. I duck my head down between my shoulders. When I look back up, Nick turns his hand palm up and brings his fingers together. As I watch, he snaps his fingers back and then mouths four words at me.

I don’t get it, but then I do.

Blow up the box.

When he sees that I understand, he turns and disappears into the crowd.

“What on earth are you doing to my girl?” Teeny cries, and suddenly she and Emi and Myra are there, and they catch me by the arms while Teeny scolds Jenny and the other mimes. I let them fuss over me, but in my mind all I can see is Nick as he walked away.

I resist the urge to slam the double doors behind me as I go into my room. I’ve never been able to be like that with my father, even though Mama and I slam doors on each other on an almost-daily basis.

I wait until I’m inside the safety of my bedroom before I let myself cry. I unwind the coil of silk from around my head and hold it to my face, feeling my tears wet the scarf that Nenek made for me.

Lia wouldn’t be sitting here crying. Lia would force her parents to understand, save the world on the way to Starbucks, and make it to school on time with her deodorant and her saucy smile intact.

I look over at my desk where Lia’s life is laid out in half-inked panels of pencil drawings and bubbles of gutsy
dialogue. Having a superhero for a friend doesn’t do anybody any good when that friend is only real on paper.

I put the scarf on the bed and look at the permission slip that sits prominently beside my panels, pencils, and ink. If I don’t turn in the slip today, I won’t be able to go to the highly selective eight-week program at NYU for talented high school artists. My portfolio beat out hundreds of others, and I was over the moon when I received the acceptance. But though I’ve had the permission slip for two weeks, it still remains unsigned. My parents needed to talk about it, they said.

I know what they were thinking. They were thinking that they wished I would focus more on my studies instead of sketching. They wished their daughter wanted to be a doctor, or a lawyer like her mother, not a comic book artist. At least my parents are progressive enough that they aren’t using the Quran as an excuse to keep me from drawing comic books, but in the end it amounts to the same thing.

And now I gave them the perfect opportunity to say no. They never had to say,
No, Alia
,
we think your dream is stupid and juvenile
. Instead, I handed them the perfect excuse on a silver platter.

Yesterday afternoon, in the girls’ bathroom.

I knew I’d have to run into Carla eventually. I hadn’t seen her since the end of tenth grade, and it was already the second week of my junior year. Maybe a part of me even
wanted to run into her, wanted to yell,
How could you do it? I thought you were my friend!

“Hey, Alia, you want a hit?” Carla says when I come into the bathroom. Her voice sounds all squished, and smoke trickles from her nose as she holds the joint out to me.

Inside my head Lia shouts, “Pot is for losers, Carla!” and gives a roundhouse kick that knocks the joint out of Carla’s hand and fries it to a smoldering heap with one point of a lightning-tipped finger.

I go to the sink and stare at my plain, non-superhuman face in the mirror.

The bathroom is empty except for us, which is rare in a school with thousands of people, but this bathroom was always Carla’s and my favorite. It’s tucked down a dead-end hall on the third floor, and it’s always cold, even when it’s warm and sunny outside. The sound of faraway clanging pipes always used to make us jump, thinking it was the clickety-clack of a teacher’s heels in the hallway, and we’d giggle and make fun of each other for being scared.

“Are you serious, Carla?” I ask. “Are you trying to get kicked out?” I look back at myself in the mirror: too-round face, skin the color of lightly stained wood, and brown eyes with thick, dark lashes, which I thank God for every day. I sigh when I see my hair. It’s gone positively Medusa, despite the coconut cream I smoothed into it this morning.

“Who cares if they kick me out?” Carla exhales sharply from the corner of her mouth, a big, nasty bubble of smoke rolling toward me.

“Grow up, Carla.” I run my fingers through my hair, watching in disgust as the curls bounce back up and say,
Why, hello there!
It’s hopeless.
I’m
hopeless. If nothing else, wearing the hijab would save me from bad-hair days for the rest of my life. But I wasn’t brave enough to wear it today, just as I’m not brave enough to tell Carla what I really think about what she did to me.

“You used to be
fun
,” Carla says. “What happened to you, Alia?”

I turn back to her. “And you used to be my friend,” I say evenly. “I guess we
both
changed.”

“Aw, girlie, you can’t take stuff like that seriously. Mike? He didn’t mean anything.”

“He meant something to me.”
Or I thought he did anyway.

Carla takes another big hit off the joint, and her voice comes out all squeaky. “Remember how much fun we had last year? What changed?”

“Me,” I say, because I hope that it’s actually true.

Carla and I started hanging out the beginning of our sophomore year when I’d just moved to Brooklyn from California. She was cool and fun, which is exactly what I needed at the time. We laughed at the tourists on the promenade as they sighed over the view of Manhattan, hung out under the bridge at night and watched the strobing headlights of the cars, and snuck over to Times Square to see our favorite bands on
TRL
at MTV Studios.

I had a blast with her until she totally betrayed me, and
my parents grounded me all summer except for two weeks of camp. I wish it were easy to write the real Carla out of my life, the way I’d written her twin out of Lia’s story.

I glance at my watch and see that it’s time for Anatomical Drawing. There are no bells—my school is big on personal responsibility—so it’s up to me to make sure I get to my next band on time. At first that freedom felt too big, like I was a pet bird bursting out of its cage for the boundless sky.

“Come on, girl,” Carla is saying. “You’re like me, you know you are. I’m sorry about all that before, I really am.”

I stare at her face in the reflection of the mirror, and see that she probably
is
sorry, but that doesn’t change anything, does it? Do I want to be friends with her again and go back to being like I was last year?

“Look, Carla, it just doesn’t matter anymore. Here.” I take the joint from her, which is about to drop ash all over the bathroom floor. We both hear the familiar clickety-clack of the pipes and sort of smile, like old times. I put the joint out in the sink with a hiss and go to hand it back to her.