Blue Boy (12 page)

This is religion for me: jubilance. And so I go, again and again, into my sanctuaries, my bedroom, a blank page, and the library, where jubilant light from the stained glass oversees my new faith.

A fledgling god has to be fluent not only in dance and mirth but in speech. Eloquence and godliness go hand in hand. Or, more precisely, hand in
hands
. So it’s no small benefit that one person who is entirely supportive of my act is Mrs. Goldberg, the teacher with whom I study language arts after school every Tuesday and Thursday.

Mrs. Goldberg is about as normal-looking a woman as you could ever see. She is not too thin or too fat; her skin is not too fair or too red; her brown hair is shoulder-length and partly curly, caught between short and long. The only makeup she ever wears is a muted shade of maroon lipstick. Her outfits consist of cotton skirt-and-sweater sets and a modestly placed gold brooch at her right breast. Her gray eyes are kind, with a middling number of wrinkles surrounding them, and she smells of nice perfume.

I started studying with Mrs. Goldberg because other teachers didn’t have the time to teach me. At least that is the reason I was given. In truth, I think it’s because they just don’t know enough to be able to teach me advanced language arts. One day, when we were all going to read Roald Dahl’s
Matilda
together in class, Mrs. Nevins told us, “Class, we don’t have a large
amount
of books, so we’ll have to share,” and it took every last fiber of my being not to slug her over the head for saying “amount” instead of “number.” Oftentimes, with Mrs. Nevins, I feel like Roald Dahl’s leading lady; Matilda was too brilliant a talent for the rest of her school, too, and had to best a hefty behemoth of a principal to find happiness. But she had Miss Honey, her demure and pretty schoolteacher, to help her. That is how I see Mrs. Goldberg, who always greets me by looking up from the papers she’s grading, then gets up and pulls a chair close to her desk so we can study together.

“Hi, Kiran,” she says when I enter her classroom today. She is the only person in this school who says my name properly. She even puts a small roll of the tongue at the “r,” sounding altogether Indian when she does so. She pulls a chair next to hers and motions for me to sit down.

“How is everything going?” she asks, picking up her stack of graded papers and tapping it against the table to straighten it.

“Everything’s great,” I say, not wanting to share how unbearable the past few weeks have been.

“Kiran, I know that everything isn’t great. Is there anything you want to talk about? Any, um,
splintery
situations?”

“Mrs. Goldberg!” I say. “How did you find out?”

“Oh, Kiran, word gets around. Believe me, no place is home to more rumors than the teachers’ lounge. So what really happened?”

I proceed to tell Mrs. Goldberg everything, how Sarah and Melissa lured me to the fitness course, how they pushed me down and told me they wanted to see me naked, how I had to make up different stories to cover up the real reason I had a splinter in my butt. The whole time, Mrs. Goldberg listens quietly, nodding her head, the slight curls of her brown hair drooping as if expressing pity.

After I finish my story, Mrs. Goldberg sighs heavily and sits back in her chair. “Well, Kiran, the girls’ behavior is totally unacceptable. I will be certain to speak with Principal Taylor about this. These girls must receive some form of punishment.”

“No!” I say. “No, Mrs. Goldberg, please. Don’t punish Sarah and Melissa. You don’t understand: if you punish them, they’ll only hate me more. They’ll only find other ways to make fun of me and hurt me. Please don’t punish them.”

“Kiran, running from the problem is no solution. You have to take a stand for yourself and prevent such things from happening again. If you run from Sarah and Melissa now, they won’t only feel like they can make fun of you again—they’ll feel it is
right
to make fun of other kids. And
that
is just not right! This is the opportunity to do something meaningful, Kiran.”

“Mrs. Goldberg,” I say, clasping my hands on the table and assuming my own teacher-like pose. “Let
me
teach
you
something now. If you tell Principal Taylor about what these girls did and Principal Taylor punishes them, then I look like a tattletale. And being a tattletale is the worst thing you can be.”

I am speaking the truth. In the past, I thought that by telling on my classmates, I would put an end to the name-calling and the pranks. Once, when John Griffin, whose fists are like small hams, made me give him my lunch (a feast of
daal
and rice that he looked at with horror before throwing it in a huge Hefty trash can), I marched right into Mrs. Hatton’s room nearby and told her what he had done. I added graphic detail, saying John unlocked the Ziploc of sweaty basmati rice and threw its contents at me. I said he forcefed me the
daal
like I was an infant and he was an insanity-ridden salesman from Gerber Baby Foods. Mrs. Hatton’s red face cringed with anger and disgust, and she marched right out from behind her desk and went on the prowl for John Griffin. She found him playing with a couple of his friends out on the playground and immediately started yelling at him. I stood in the doorway from the school to the playground and watched her berate him.

Then Mrs. Hatton did the worst thing she could have done: she pointed back at me, who was cowering in the doorway. I know that she meant well, meant to show John Griffin how much he had hurt me by presenting me as a tortured victim. But even from my cowardly position, I could see the glint in John Griffin’s eye. What Mrs. Hatton did not understand was that kids like John Griffin thrive on having such an effect. They enjoy seeing people cower. And even though the first solution you might proffer, then, is to react with courage instead of cowardice, it is not such an easy proposition. Because when John Griffin and his goons corner you in the same hallway the next day and slug you with their porcine fists, when they call you a
feggit
, when you feel the actual pain of it all—not some theoretical fear that has taught you that,
ouch, a fist in the gut must hurt
, but the real, real pain of a tightly clenched ball of fingers and fire pushing too far into your groin—then you know courage is simply an imaginary construct that people have made to disguise their inferiority.

“Mrs. Goldberg,” I say. “Please don’t make me a tattletale. Please. I beseech you.”

I picked this handy phrase up from
Romeo and Juliet
and have been using it like it’s going out of style. Whenever I say it, I imagine that I’m long-and raven-locked, with white cleavage stayed by a red velvet dress.

“I beseech you, Mrs. Goldberg. I can’t deal with the extra pressure. I just can’t.” Even though I am not crying, I imagine that I am, one fat tear rolling off my chin and plopping onto the fake wooden top of her desk.

Mrs. Goldberg watches me without judgment. Her eyes don’t criticize, but they also don’t encourage. She reaches one hand forward and puts it on mine, her palm cold but soothing, like a poultice. (Another word from
Romeo and Juliet
; I said it the other day when my dad used Ben-Gay after his tennis match with Sanjay Uncle. My dad didn’t seem to understand the word; he asked why I was talking about turkey.) Mrs. Goldberg’s nods her head and relents, picking up her copy of
Warriner’s English Grammar
and asking that I turn to page 132 in my copy.

I am learning how to diagram sentences. It’s a pretty fascinating activity, one that unifies two of my greatest loves—drawing and language. Mrs. Goldberg teaches me how to find the subject and predicate of sentences, how to draw a spade-shaped diagram and place the subject on the handle and the predicate in the scoop like a piece of earth. The more intricate the sentences we choose, the more intricate the diagrams become, and I find today that there is little difference between the many-limbed bodies I draw in my blue reverie and the spindly drawings that are our grammatical fare. It doesn’t take me long to voice this perceived similarity to Mrs. Goldberg, albeit accidentally.

“Drawing these diagrams is just as fun as drawing everything else,” I say, finishing the last one with a final flourish of my pen.

“Really? And what, pray tell, have you been drawing?” Mrs. Goldberg says while taking a sip from her white coffee mug. The mug has a picture of a very red apple printed on it, the emerald sprig of a leaf curling off its top.

My first impulse is to tell her that I’ve been drawing pictures of myself from a past life, but something stops me. It feels weird even to me as I say it in my head, and I decide to proceed with more restraint.

“I’ve been drawing pictures of the Hindu god Krishna.”

“Which god is that?” she asks, not in an ignorant way but in a genuinely concerned way.

“He’s the blue-skinned god. The god of love.”

“The god of love, huh? A regular Casanova, that one.”

I let slide the fact that Mrs. Goldberg has just compared a pillar of my religion with a lecherous gigolo simply because she at least knows who Casanova was.

“So, what sort of pictures have you been drawing, Kiran?” Mrs. Goldberg asks, and once again, she mimics with ease the rolled “r” in the name.

I unzip my bright pink Jordache backpack and take out a stack of drawings that, with its bright hues of marker, looks sort of like the marked-up spelling tests on her desk. I straighten the stack like Mrs. Goldberg has done with those tests, and then I hand her the drawings. A bubble rises through me as I realize that she may not share my enthusiasm for this art, may think it odd, may think me a lunatic. As she flips through the drawings, I notice just how many peacock feathers I’ve drawn, just how garish some of the hues appear, and I have half a mind to grab the stack right back, smile awkwardly, and run out the door yelling, “See you on Thursday, Mrs. Goldberg!” But instead, I shift my focus from the drawings to Mrs. Goldberg’s face, which is static. Each time she looks at another drawing, her face seems calmer and more unmoving; the drawings are terrifying her into paralysis. When she has finally turned the last page—a rainbow of color, with a sky-blue Krishna surrounded by magenta veils and glowing golden stars—she looks at me with a face that seems years younger, smooth.

In a few seconds I will find out that Mrs. Goldberg loves the drawings. Her face will break into a proud smile and she will embrace me, her body a cloud of Folgers and that nice perfume (I’m pretty sure it’s Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds). She will flip through the pages one at a time, showing me what she likes about each one, telling me how creative they are and how sophisticated the artistry is even though I am so young. (“So young!” she exclaims over and over, as if proclaiming herself equally young with each squeal.) She will hug me again, then tell me that she is going to go to Mrs. Buchanan, the art teacher, first thing in the morning and tell her to put these drawings in our lobby’s display case. She will make me feel wonderful, accepted, and she will make me return to my talent show with a renewed sense of purpose and artistic zeal.

But let us go back to that moment of not knowing. Let us go back to the blank expression on Mrs. Goldberg’s face. For after the initial joy I feel at her acceptance, I realize that my first impulse was to expect the worst. I have been conditioned to feel ashamed. By my classmates. By the other Indian kids. By my father.

When someone motions to strike you, when someone throws something at you, you flinch or wince. But I have
always
felt that something is being hurled at me, so I guess I could say that I have lived my life in a perpetual flinch. Even though I draw my drawings in a sort of ecstatic flush, somewhere in my mind lurks a constant desire to prove people wrong, to best people by showing them how free my mind can be. It saddens me in this moment that I expect shame instead of the enthusiasm that Mrs. Goldberg so readily gives me. When, I wonder to myself, will my default emotion be confident, shameless optimism?

“Kiran, I can’t wait to speak to Mrs. Buchanan about displaying these,” Mrs. Goldberg says, taking a light pink Post-it note and writing on it with a black felt tip marker, “See Barbara.” As in Barbara Buchanan. “Why don’t you come to my office tomorrow during lunchtime and we’ll speak to Mrs. Buchanan together?”

The next day during lunchtime, I meet Mrs. Goldberg in her office. She smiles when I enter the room, and I can’t tell at first if it’s because she’s excited about my art or if it’s because I decided to use some of my mom’s Caress soap to shampoo my hair this morning and the stuff wouldn’t wash out completely and now I have a shiny, sticky pompadour. I should have learned the last time when I tried this—it was the Oil of Olay that my mother uses on her face—and though it didn’t transform my hair into the thick disaster it is right now, it made my hair shine really, really brightly.

Mrs. Goldberg doesn’t dwell too much on this, although she does do a doubletake once I come closer. “Let’s get a move on!” she says brightly, and I stride alongside her through the school corridors, feeling somewhat excited to be walking with a teacher I respect so much, and to be away from all the other kids, who are either finishing up their lunches or playing on the blacktop. I feel a twinge of guilt when I remember that I forgot to tell Cody I’d be missing lunch, and I imagine him hunched all by himself at the lunch table, munching on cold pizza or cold fries or warm ice cream. Although given our recent fight, he may not mind my absence after all.