Invisible Girl (21 page)

I try to forget about my lies when Amal takes out a fancy bead kit that she got from a friend in Georgia that has real semiprecious stones. I’m in awe as she spills out glittering purples, reds, greens, blues and yellows.

Because she has only enough beads to make one necklace, we decide to share it, with each of us getting to wear it for a week, then switching turns. For an hour, we’re deep in creative mode, trying out different orders of the beads before we finally agree on two of each gem with a big amethyst hanging from the middle in front.

We talk about maybe going into business together making jewelry and selling it to kids in Beverly Hills and getting our own label. We try a bunch of ways to combine our names and end up cracking up when we pretend-fight over choosing between “Stepham” and “Amsteph.”

When the necklace is finished, it’s stunning. Amal lifts it up to the light and we’re silent for a moment, watching the facets sparkle. “Here,” Amal says, leaning over and fastening the necklace around my neck. “You take the first week.”

I’m too stunned to even speak. Talking about sharing a necklace when it was just a pile of beads was one thing. Wearing this piece of utter beauty that we forged together is another. I blink away quick tears and remember my manners. “No, you wear it first.”

“Not for discussion,” she says in a perfect impression of the wizard, Mr. Specter. I fall away laughing, delirious that I have a friend, a private joke and my first piece of jewelry.

I want to tell her about Andrew, but something holds me back. If it were some guy she didn’t know and I had a cute picture of him on a cool phone to show her, it’d be easy. But it’s Andrew who went after her big time when she first got here. Way too weird.

I shove Andrew out of my thoughts and just try to enjoy the lightness of the moment, but the lies I told Amal’s mother swim back into my head. I miss the clean feeling I felt when I was honest with Annie about having lunch with Amal. I now feel the gray arms of my old self wrapping around me and making it harder to breathe.

Amal and I go outside to her patio. The sun is weak but warm, the air cool, with a vague prick of hope in it, like smelling the approach of Christmas vacation in the middle of a test.

We randomly toss leaves into her pool.

Amal is nothing like Annie and in some ways seems even younger than me. We’re now doing leaf races where we’re allowed to poke our leaves with sticks to get them started, but then we can only encourage them with our voices and by waving our arms. It’s really stupid and silly, but we call the leaves names like it’s a big-time horse race and we crack each other up with our announcer impressions.

A clock in the house chimes five times. Amal’s mother comes out to the pool and asks if I can stay for dinner.

“Um,” I say with my stick mid-poke on a leaf.

“I can call your aunt,” Amal’s mother says, and she and Amal give me an identical smile.

“Um, I’ll call her,” I mutter, never having thought about whether she’d really care if I came home or not, but then figuring she’d probably get mad if I didn’t because she’s responsible for me.

We get up so that I can use a phone in the house. Amal jogs ahead and whispers something to her mother, then comes back to me triumphantly. “And, ask her if you can spend the night!”

I call Aunt Sarah’s. Annie answers.

I don’t feel like letting her acid trickle into my day, so I try to get this over with as quickly as possible. One thing’s for sure, I’m not going to give up this house of shimmering warmth to make a Viper Queen happy. I walk a little away from Amal and her mother for some privacy.

“It’s me,” I say quietly into the phone.

“Who’s calling, please,” she says in her witchiest voice, even though, of course, she knows it’s me. I figure she’s decided for the moment to stay enemies with me even though I’m now with Andrew.

I’m not playing. My new self is not shaky when it comes to dealing with Annie. “Just tell Aunt Sarah that I won’t be home tonight. I’m sleeping over at Amal’s,” I say in a firm voice.

I wait for her to confirm that she’ll do this, but all she says is, “But she’s not really your aunt, now, is she?”

I quietly click off the phone, then turn to Amal and her mom and say brightly, “My aunt says it’s fine.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Voices rumble. Amal and I are in their piano room at the top of the stairs lying on the floor so that we can see into the foyer but no one can see us. She puts a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. We’re spying on her parents and their friends.

I look at Amal’s happy face and take in the moment, like I’m feeling the pulse on my life. I appreciate that it’s the same scene as with Annie, when we were hiding under the gazebo, but this time, I’m unburdened by any fear of my exposure. I can enjoy this to the fullest. I can just be a girl, hanging with her girlfriend, seeing if the grown-ups say something that we’re not supposed to hear because it’s supposedly too sophisticated for our delicate young ears.

Two loud men and their wives stand near the door opposite Amal’s parents. Everyone is speaking Arabic. It sounds like a fight, but Amal whispers that what’s going on is that her parents keep demanding that the guests stay for dinner while the guests keep insisting that they couldn’t possibly impose. This goes on for fifteen minutes.

Amal says this is not unusual and it would be shockingly rude for either her parents not to fight to have the guests stay or the guests not to fight to not impose. Finally, her mother laughs and takes one of the women by the arm and everyone goes into the dining room.

They’re going to eat a long grown-up meal. We already had some kind of really delicious lamb-and-rice dish in the kitchen earlier with Amal’s mother.

Amal decides that we’re done watching her parents. She stands up. “You want to see something hilarious?”

I nod. She turns back into their piano room, which has a huge grand piano, a gold couch with fancy wood and lots of pictures in gold frames. I follow her to the table with the pictures. She picks up an old black-and-white photo of a man with a beard and black glasses. She giggles. “This is my dad. Right after they got married.”

I take the photo out of Amal’s hands and really stare at his features. His eyes catch me. They are shy behind the glasses. Happy. His smile, with slightly protruding teeth, eats up the picture.

“Can you believe those glasses?” Amal asks and leans forward as if to share a big secret. “My dad was a major nerd. He came here from Egypt when he was ten. All he did was study, study, study. They met in chemistry class at Princeton. He was planning to be a professor and she was planning to be a doctor. He’s older than my mom. He didn’t go straight through to college.

“Anyway, my mom was supposed to marry his cousin, who was, like, really good-looking but totally arrogant. My dad serenaded my mom at her uncle’s house. That’s where she was living while she was in the United States.”

Amal walks over to a large armoire and opens it. She pulls out a CD and puts it in the player. “Wait ’til you hear the song he sang her.” She deftly pushes the correct buttons and leans back, unselfconscious and emboldened with the strength of being the custodian of cherished family lore.

I’m struck once again by the difference between her and Annie. Annie always acts as if her parents are insufferable idiots, necessary servants to fuel her numerous material and social needs. Amal has a warmth and respect toward her parents. Like even though they may be amusing to her, because they are old-fashioned and from another era, they still had a valued life history before she was born.

Old-fashioned music slips out. A voice I recognize as Ray Charles from my dad’s CDs yearns across the years.
You give your hand to me, and then you say hello and I can hardly speak, my heart is beating so, and anyone can tell, you think you know me well, but you don’t know me.

Amal and I lie on the floor, on our backs, with our heads almost touching and our feet opposite of each other in a long, unbroken line. The music swirls around us. It’s a powerful song about a guy who dreams about a girl who doesn’t dream about him.

The last lines pull at my heart in their pure longing:
You give your hand to me and then you say goodbye. I watch you walk away beside the lucky guy. You’ll never, never know, the one who loves you so, oh, you don’t know me.

I picture Amal’s dad, singing his heart out and opening up all his vulnerability to a woman who may or may not accept him.

I wonder how he could have done that. I wonder how he could have been so brave.

We have no lights on, and the sun’s last rays stretch feebly across the room. We’re still lying in our line.

“So, what happened?” I ask, and my voice floats up to the ceiling.

Amal sits up. “My mom said she saw my dad for the first time after he sang that song. She saw his courage and his kindness. She ended up dumping the arrogant cousin and, obviously, the rest is history.”

I ponder it all. A brave man in love with a woman, making a choice to act, to have her get to know him.

I think of Andrew for a moment and what I really like about him. I feel confused and uneasy thinking that the main thing that seems to attract me is his inner rage. I shiver. I don’t want to think about him now. I want to focus on the real romance of Amal’s shy but brilliant and brave dad, winning a woman away from a richer and better-looking guy.

Like the rest of Amal’s life, her origin is thoughtful, planned. Not random and angry like mine with two drunken strangers, sloppy sex and a suffocating marriage.

I almost jump when I realize that Amal’s been speaking to me. “Huh?” I utter.

“I said do you want to, like, do a routine to it?”

I’ve never done a “routine” to anything, but I’ll say yes to anything that involves staying in the magical heart of her family.

Amal starts the song all over and before I know it, I’m following along with her choreography, walking two steps to the right, two to the left, waving my arms over my head and then twirling.

The beauty of the love story washes over me again, and I think of brave people making choices about how to live their lives, and I wonder if maybe I can learn to be someone like that.

Amal and I snuggle down into our sleeping bags. She has twin beds in her room, but we both thought it’d be more fun on the floor, where we could talk. She tells me about a guy she used to like in Georgia and says that at first her dad wouldn’t let him come over because he was in a band, but she overheard her mom say to him, “You forbid it, you make it bigger.”

So then, when she wanted to have a sleepover on a school night and her mom said no, she used her mom’s own words against her and her mom just said, “Don’t get smart.”

I murmur in sympathy over the arbitrariness of adults. She looks at me expectantly. It’s my turn to tell her about Andrew, since I’m seeing him now, or about a boy in Boston and how my parents handled his interest in me. Since there’s no way I can tell her about Andrew and I don’t have a story about any boy, I figure I can just make one up and tell her about a kid who wasn’t from Catholic school and who burst into my school on a public school holiday and was chased out by the nuns. I can even see her laughing as I go into details about Sister Mary Catherine’s Irish brogue when she hollered after him that if he didn’t change his ways, he’d become a juvenile delinquent of the worst sort. I’m pretty good at that accent and I know I could pull it off.

“I’ve never had a boyfriend,” I whisper honestly. Then I take the plunge, weirdness and all. “I’m kind of going out with Andrew.”

I wait, face tight in the darkness, for her to explode with incredulity that Andrew, who she must have known liked her, could possibly like me.

But all she says is, “Tell me everything!” with normal girl excitement.

I’d like to spill the whole story to her from the beginning of my Kennedy lies right down to the moment where my life with an alkie mother was exposed to Annie as we sat down below the gazebo, to the drinking in the woods where I threw up on Andrew. Instead, I just tell her that he asked me to go out with him last night and kissed me.

“How was the kiss?”

Better than the one that made me barf.
“It was fine, I guess. Nice.”

“Well,” she says, “all this kissing boys stuff . . .”

“Yeah?” I ask, my throat catching, thinking she might somehow be psychic and see my future as a bar slut.

“I’m not going to forbid it, because it will just make it bigger!”

We both burst out laughing. The moon leaks in through the window, merging the shadows of our sleeping bags, into one, big, cozy bed.