Sister Mischief (21 page)

My friends begin to dance around me; I dance too, and watch them. Tess dances in a series of poses, more like a flip book than a movie. Marcy just sort of hulks to the beat, and Rowie tosses her head back and forth to the music, her arms like commas above her head, fluid, possessed, opaque. Watching her, I realize that this is the best birthday I can remember.

A few days later, Rowie blows up at me before we’ve even gotten to school. I guess it’s getting too hard not to sleep and too cold not to fight.

“Stop saying you want a
chai tea,
” she snaps at me in Caribou Coffee. Marcy picked us both up for school at Rowie’s this morning, under the guise of an elaborate story about a Chem problem set that took us all night. Really we fell asleep in the treehouse again and woke up in a freezing panic at six thirty this morning, so we’re both tired and cagey. “Chai
is
tea. And this chai tastes like fucking feet.”

Marcy and I exchange raised eyebrows.

“Can I have a caffe latte coffee, please?” Marcy orders. Rowie scowls.

We shamble into school, parting ways. It’s Election Day. It feels important, but my mind is foggy, overtired, elsewhere. I plunk down in AP American History to loll through an instructional video about the immigrant surge to America in the late nineteenth century.

“Some immigrant groups encountered intense discrimination upon their arrival to Staten Island and the New World,” the somber voice-over informs us. “Italian, Irish, Jewish, Hispanic, and Asian newcomers faced a harsh welcome to the United States, where many were forced by economic necessity to perform backbreaking labor in factories and fields. . . .”

Jews exist in a kind of weird in-between space in the American ethnicity spectrum, I ponder while nodding off, but being first-generation Indian would be a lot different from being just another overeducated pseudo-Heeb. Shit, Rowie’s parents were born in a whole other country, and I never even had a bat mitzvah.
⁵⁰
Marcy and Tess and me were never the kid whose house smelled like spices no one recognized; none of us grew up in the only brown family on the block.

50. Text to Marcy:
If I decided to have a bat mitzvah now, would u throw down some beats while I rapped the Hebrew monologue? Temple Beth Israel would <3 it.


The thing is, Rowie is the realest thing I’ve ever felt; just the sound of her name in my head makes me wake up a little. She makes it sound like Indians just aren’t allowed to be gay, but how is that possible? There’s like a billion people in India. If ten percent of the population is gay, that means there are at about 100 million gay Indians in the world. I don’t get it. I don’t get why we can’t just be together. I think Rowie is mad at me for not understanding it. She’s sad and I want to hold her sadness.
⁵¹
But no matter how many times I promise not to tell, she still won’t look at me when other people are around.

51. SiN:
I’m 99.9% sure I gave Rowie an orgasm last night. She finally told me that she’d never had one, which I kind of knew already, and I’ve been a woman on a mission ever since. When it finally happened, her whole body seized and she had to muffle her own face with a pillow to keep down the sound. I looked at her face afterward and there were little tear-streaks on the sides, where glasses would be if she wore glasses.


The bell rings. I zombie-shuffle to the girls’ bathroom to splash some water on my face before gym class, and while I’m washing my hands I see it scrawled on the mirror:
Rowie
+
Esme.
I rub my eyes in astonishment and look closer; it actually says
Rudi
+
Eddie,
but it still takes me a minute to recover. I see our secret everywhere. In gym class, Ms. Strybel decides to show
Bend It Like Beckham
as a “fun introduction to our soccer unit.” There’s desi-honky love floating in the ether all around me, and it’s making me
crazy.

“So Perez Hilton is saying M.I.A.’s preggers,” Tess informs us as she digs up the gossip on her iPhone at lunch.

“That’s the news you’re checking on Election Day?” Marcy carps.

“Who’s the baby daddy?” I ask.

“Hmm, let me see.” Tess scrolls down. “Apparently she’s engaged to some guy named Benjamin Brewer.”

“Sounds like a cracker name to me,” I say, looking pointedly at Rowie. “I wonder if that’s, like, a problem with her family.”

“Her dad is a Tamil Tiger.” Rowie rolls her eyes at me. “I think he’s got bigger buns in the oven.”

In AP Chem, Halverson’s droning numbingly about nuclear chain reactions, and I’m buried in Mom’s copy of
Portnoy’s Complaint.
Marcy stealth-texts me;
⁵²
I respond.
⁵³
As I struggle not to laugh out loud at my book, the term
critical mass
wrests my attention away long enough to jot down the following notes:

It’s a formula for my life,
I realize with a sinking feeling.

52. Marcy to me:
Mos def to hip-hop bat mitzvah. U look like shit. Do u ever get any sleep anymore? Story??


53. Me back:
Dbag, this is just what I look like.


I spend my last-period art elective intently building a papier-mâché sculpture of a two-headed girl with four hands.
⁵⁴
I find some random Lincoln Logs lying around and paint them into sticks of dynamite, gluing them along the spine of the body I’m sculpting.
⁵⁵
I paint
NOT
A BIT TAMED
onto one stick and set it aside. I slice open the chest and carve a window into it. I’m gluing a small parrot onto one shoulder when Ms. Mayakovsky comes over to examine my work.

54. Text from Rowie:
Still coming over for dinner tonight?


55. Me to Rowie:
You bet.


“That’s a powerful piece,” she says. “What are you going to put inside the chest cavity?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m thinking some hanging jewels and maybe some more dynamite.”

Ms. Mayakovsky studies me and my monster, nodding. “Hanging jewels would augment the suspense of the piece — that’s a good idea. I’m getting strong erotic energy from this sculpture. Failed separation, and crisis. An ominous thing in the distance. Do you have a title?”

I peer at the two-headed body. “
The Critical Mass.
”

After the interminable school day ends, I drag myself home and head straight for the couch, where Pops already has his TV tray set up in front of CNN. I plunk down my backpack and almost knock over the aviary he’s carving.

“Nice birdcage.” I steady the TV tray and settle in, leaning back and closing my eyes for a second.

“It’s a butterfly cage,” he informs me. “How was your day?”

“If a birdcage is an aviary, what’s a butterfly cage?”

“Hmmm. A lepidopterary?”

“Hm.” I nod, scribbling.
⁵⁶
“Probably not in the dictionary, but decent guess.”

56. SiN, later:
Can’t find lepidopterary / in the Oxford English Dictionary / I dig big words, but they can’t help me carry / The weight of a gay interracial literary / Mate rhymes with date / Baby, why you gotta hate / Why you say we gotta wait / We’re at a gay stalemate / Can’t equivocate and date / I hate the hook but not the taste / of how my heart dilates when I swallow your bait.


“I’m glad you approve.” He cuffs my cheek. “You look beyond tired, parakeet. Don’t think I don’t know your nights haven’t gotten any earlier.”

“We don’t really have to talk about it.” I put my notebook away and close my eyes again.

“Yeah. That’s gonna work,” he says with a snort. “Look, it’s not like I’m trying to slap a chastity belt on you.”

“Ew, Pops. Don’t say
chastity.
” I grimace.

“Calm down. I just want you to get enough sleep to be able to function. This has got to stop. You can’t get zero sleep and feel good about life. You look depressed. You’re going to get sick.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll get more sleep.” I flip the channels uselessly; the polls aren’t even closed yet, and Herb Baumgarten is leading by fourteen percent. I feel tired of the same old conflicts.

“Quit appeasing me — you’re not fooling anyone.” He puts down his knife and goes into the kitchen. “Something’s stuck in your gullet. What is it? Rowie?”

I sigh dramatically. “I don’t know.”

“More specifically?” He piles Town House crackers and cheddar jack on a plate. He knows I’m powerless before cheese.

“I guess — it’s like, are Rowie and I together? Like, actually dating, or just equivocating? Clearly I can’t even really call it
dating.
”

“What does
dating
mean? Do people still do that? I read in magazines that no one in your generation does.”

“I don’t know.” I shove my hands in my hoodie- pocket, flummoxed.

“Is Rowie — out?” he asks, slicing cheese.

“No,” I say. “I don’t even know if she thinks she’s gay. Or one-hundred-percent gay, or bi or whatever. I don’t know what to call her, and I don’t think she wants to call herself anything. God, why is it harder to know what to
call
things than it is just to do them? Like, if she’s different, and I’m different, can’t we just decide to call ourselves different the same way?”

Pops smiles sadly at me from the kitchen door. “It’s like — what do you call a secret that wants to change its name?”

I open my mouth to say something, then realize he said it. “Yeah.”

He motions to me to move the lepidopterary off the TV table and sets down the snack platter.

“Listen to me, little Rockett,” he says, feeding me cheese. “I don’t know everything. But I know questions like these are better considered after a regular amount of sleep. Take a nap now, and will you please just spend the night in your own bed sometime? Is that really so much to ask if you know you both can stay here?”

“Noof.” I work on a hunk of cheddar jack. “Noof, it issnot.” I swallow.

“Does Rowie know you told me about the two of you?”

“No,” I say. “I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Really?” he asks. “How long can that reasonably last?”

“That’s the question of the hour,” I say. “I’m going over there for dinner later, though. Dr. R invited me.”

Pops looks mildly hurt. “But I was making coq au vin. And we were bonding.”

I lay my head on his shoulder. “I’m hearing you. I just don’t want to renege on a nice invitation from Dr. R.”

“Fine, go ahead, abandon me and my chicken.” He smooths my hair, planting a kiss on my crown. “It’ll be better tomorrow anyway. Take a nap on the couch now, while I work.”

And we sit there on the couch for two hours, him whittling, me dozing, with the blare of news that isn’t really news yet in the background, seeping into my dreams.

Arriving at Rowie’s at six, I raise my fist to knock on the door, but before I strike, Lakshmi opens it.

“After dinner, do you guys maybe wanna freestyle for a while?” she blurts out.