All We Have Left (5 page)

When I walk into our narrow kitchen, my mother is sitting at the small table by the window overlooking the fire escape, sipping her milky tea. She takes one look at me and narrows her eyes.

“Is this a joke?”

Somehow I never think of her as short because when she opens her mouth all the words are tall and imposing. She’s pretty in her gray pantsuit and white silk shirt, and her dark hair is pulled back into a perfect braid with not a single hair daring to misbehave. Her face is serious and unrelenting unless she smiles, which hasn’t happened a lot lately, at least at me.

“No, Mama,” I say. “It’s not a joke.” I nervously finger the scarf that covers my hair and drapes loosely around my shoulders. I know I did a crappy job of fastening it. It keeps slipping off my head, and the pin has it all bunched up on one side.

She stares at me, her eyes unflinching, and I can just see her in the courtroom, one of her Bangladeshi or Pakistani clients by her side, giving that stare to the opposing counsel. Which is all well and good, except
I’m her daughter
; why does she want to make
me
feel like something she needs to wipe off her shoe?

“Today? This is the day you choose to wear the scarf?”

Since this is what I was basically thinking fifteen minutes ago, of course it just pisses me off even more.

“Yes, Mama, today’s the day,” I say evenly, opening the refrigerator and grabbing my lunch bag.

“I’m sure you will understand that I find your timing suspicious,” she says. “Do you think that because you have decided to wear the scarf, that your father and I will change our minds about the NYU program?”

“No,
Mother
,” I say. “I did not think that at all.” Though the permission slip crinkles inside my pocket. I hate it when she does this, makes me feel young and obvious and stupid. And while my timing may not be ideal, deciding to wear the hijab full time is a pretty big deal and why can’t she give me some credit?

My mother takes a deep breath, and stares out the window. I can hear cars going by and the excited shrills of children on their way to school. She’s not seeing them though. She’s trying not to lose it on me.

She turns back to me. “Of course it is your decision,” she says, “and I support you.” Her tone is cold and formal, as if she’s reading directly out of the “How to Be a Good Muslim Parent” handbook. My mother has been speaking English since she was four, but she also speaks Indonesian and Arabic, which gives her English a lilt that people find charming. When the sound of her voice isn’t playing hopscotch on my last nerve, I wish I had her accent. I speak English just like everyone else, and no one smiles when I talk.

“Good.” I grab an apple off the basket on the counter. “That’s nice of you. I’m sure Nenek said the same thing to you when you decided to
not
wear the scarf.”

I meet her gaze for a moment, and then turn my attention to the apple.

The silence stretches.

We weren’t always like this. Before we came to Brooklyn, Mama and I used to be close. I remember us putting on puppet shows, making bead bracelets, and pretending to batik on strips of old bedsheets, dripping crayon wax in a splatter of colors. When we moved away from California, something cracked between us, like the delicate shell of an egg that even Humpty Dumpty couldn’t put back together.

“You think I’m going to embarrass you, don’t you? You don’t think I’m a good-enough Muslim to wear it.” The fridge and the counter have grown monstrous, squeezing me so tight that there’s no room to breathe.

“It is your decision, Alia,” she says again. “But if the only reason you are choosing to wear it today is to somehow convince us that you have changed, then God knows what is inside you.”

“I
have
changed. Why can’t you see that?” I know that I sound like a whiny little girl, and I take a deep breath and try to calm down so she will listen, so she will
hear
me for once. When did her words get so much more important than mine?

“After you were caught smoking marijuana in the girls’ bathroom yesterday, Alia?” She sounds like she just heard the funniest thing
ever
, and it makes me want to scream. “Have you forgotten your father and I have an appointment
with your principal this afternoon, and that you might be expelled?”

“Just because I got into trouble with Carla yesterday doesn’t mean I’m some sort of criminal. It was her joint, not mine!” I fling my arm out dramatically, and Mama sighs, like
Really, Alia?

“You never think before you act,” she says as if she knows me so much better than I could ever know myself. “You told us after you ran away last year that you didn’t think about how we would feel, how much it would hurt us. You did it without thinking. You need to think about the consequences of your actions, Alia!” Mama sets down her cup hard enough that the milky tea splashes out onto the counter.

“That was months ago!” I say. “I’ve told you again and again how sorry I am. It was a horrible, terrible thing to do, and I regret it, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be a better person
now.
”

She wipes up the spilled tea with hard, angry swipes of a napkin and glances at her watch. “It’s not like you’ve given us a lot of reason to trust what you say, Alia,” she says with finality. “It is time for you to go to school.”

As usual, she’s ending the conversation before I have a chance to say any of the things I want to say.

I take a deep breath. “This is the last day to turn in the permission slip for the NYU program,” I say, but she has already gotten up to put her cup in the sink.

“We have made our decision, Alia,” she says, her back to
me, and I know that while it’s Mama and I fighting, she has my father’s iron will behind her. “We will see you today in the principal’s office.”

Lia would not be standing here dumbly as her mother ignores her. Lia would say:
I may not be the person you want me to be, but I am trying to be the person I want to be, and isn’t that good enough?

“I hate you!” I say, and run out of the room.

“I called him,” I announce as I come into Teeny’s room.

Three faces look up at me with identical expressions of surprise. I sit on the bed next to Emi and fight the urge to cover my ears and start
la-la-la-
ing. I debated all the way over here whether or not to tell them, but this is big, and these are my best friends in the entire world.

“You called Nick?” Teeny asks, the first one to get it.

“I called Nick,” I confirm.

“But why?” Emi asks, genuinely confused.

I hesitate, because it’s hard to explain, and I know that steady, rational Emi will never understand. Emi is insanely smart, which makes it sometimes hard for her to understand us mere mortals.

“He gave me his number, and I thought: Why not?” It
doesn’t come close to explaining the way I felt when I was doing a repeat performance of my own personal live art with my parents this afternoon—
Invisible Kid—
and how I thought, just maybe, Nick might understand.

“So are you meeting him?” Myra asks from the chair in the corner where she is busy on her phone. She’s probably already looking up “What to do when your friends act like fools,” because Myra is constantly googling
something.

“Yes.” I glance at my phone, and feel a wild fluttering in my belly. “In like forty-five minutes.”

“Okay then.” Teeny stands up and goes to her closet. “We need to get you outfitted.”

“I thought we were studying Statistics,” Emi complains.

“Really? Myra and I aren’t even
in
your Statistics block, so if you really thought you and Jesse were going to study AP Statistics at my house then you were seriously mistaken,” Teeny says over her shoulder to Emi as she starts rifling through her closet.

As smart as she is, Emi falls into this trap all the time. She doesn’t understand just hanging out with friends, so the only way to get her out of the house is to promise her a study date.

“This one’s cute.” Teeny holds up a filmy, low-cut top. The tag still flutters off the sleeve, and we all know it’s something her aunt sent her, willfully ignoring the fact that Teeny’s parents won’t let her wear filmy, low-cut stuff.

“Um … ,” I say, not wanting to sound ungrateful.

Teeny sees my face, and shoves back her mass of black
hair so she can more effectively narrow her eyes at me. “Stop looking at me like I’m feeding you to the lions. Pure laziness is not an excuse to dress like a slob.”

I obediently hold out my hand, because you don’t mess with Teeny when she sounds like that.

“You know, Hailey’s going to go ballistic if she hears you’re seeing Nick,” Myra says, putting down her phone as I pull the shirt over my plain white cotton bra.

“We’re just going to be working on our business plans,” I say, trying to tie the sash behind my back. Teeny comes over and brushes my hands away so she can do it.

“Yeah, right!” Teeny and Myra say at the same time. I can’t help but laugh with them because when Nick slid the note across my desk and said,
Maybe we can get together on our plans
with that sidelong look, we both knew he meant something else, something that made my heart race and my mouth go dry.

“I’m assuming you’ll be doing about as much studying as we are right now,” Emi says, rolling her eyes, but then she smiles.

“He’s cute, right?” I say.

“Sure,” Teeny says. “Just not your style. Don’t take this the wrong way, but he’s…”

“… more than passingly weird,” Myra says, wrinkling her nose.

Myra is plump and pale, kind and generous, and unswervingly loyal. She takes a lot of things seriously, including
global warming, listening to humpback whale songs, and fighting for the ethical treatment of frogs. But let’s face it, she’s not exactly my barometer when it comes to whether or not something or someone is weird.

“Nice.” Teeny surveys me with satisfaction. “She looks nice, doesn’t she?” Teeny turns to Emi and Myra, and they nod dutifully.

“You look hot, girl.” Teeny turns back to me and sees my face. “Why do you find that so hard to believe?”

Emi rolls her eyes, and Myra is back on her phone, probably searching: “What to do when my best friend wants to date a guy who looks like an ax murderer.”

“All we’re saying is that Nick Roberts is a far cry from Jayden Sweeny and Dalton Hodges,” Teeny says. “You know?”

“
I
wouldn’t date Nick,” Myra says, glancing up from her phone. “He looks like he’s about to rob a bank or something. What about Jerry Horbensky? He’s hot, don’t you think?”

“Seriously?” Teeny says. “Isn’t he the kid who ate his boogers all the way up to middle school?”

“I want a boy all my own, who writes me poetry and holds my hand and gives me flowers every week on the anniversary of our first kiss.” Myra looks around at us defensively. “It could happen.”

“Uh, Myra? I’m pretty sure guys like that don’t exist,” I say. “And if one did, he probably keeps a collection of girls’ underwear under his bed.”

“I wouldn’t care. Nothing would get between me and my Jerry Horbensky,” she says dreamily.

“Anyway, are we going to study at some point?” Emi says, shrugging it all off, the boys, the hormones, all the silly high school stuff that plagues the rest of us. I sometimes think that it’s not fair that it’s Teeny who doesn’t date, because if it were Emi, it wouldn’t bother her at all.

“
No
, Emi, you can study later,” Teeny says patiently. “We’re discussing Jesse and Nick. Nick and Jesse. Nessie. Isn’t that the nickname for the Loch Ness monster?”

“Nick could be that kind of guy,” I say. “Like Myra said. Not the roses-on-your-first-date kind of guy, but the kind that I can talk to, who will actually listen to me.”

I ignore the look they exchange. I can hope, can’t I?

I don’t want to listen to their concern, or even acknowledge the niggling feeling in my own stomach that is whispering:
danger, danger, danger. He’s not safe.

I feel like I’m getting ready to rappel down a big cliff and I haven’t tied a knot at the end of my rope. If I rap right off the end into free fall, I don’t even
care.