Love Edy (15 page)

“Right.” The insulted twin
gave Wyatt a once over. “He’s the one that’s here, showing up at
chapter three and wondering why he’s a minor character. But
I’m
the stupid
one.”

“You two talked enough yet?” Lawrence said.
“Or are you gonna give the password for the ADT system, too?”

Another song began. Edy made a show of
weaseling away from Hassan, only to be reeled back in and close.
She laughed, exchanging words with him that the two of them alone
would ever know. Was Hassan her date, or Wyatt’s? And was he really
so easy to forget?

It reminded him of a time with Lottie, back
in Rhode Island. Wyatt shoved the thought from his mind.

“I’d never put up with
that,” the ponytailed twin said.
“Ever.”

“You’re right. He should go over there,” the
other one urged. “As a matter of principle, they need to be
straightened out. Now.”

Wyatt looked at Lawrence, the sane one from
what he could tell. Lawrence shook his head in silent warning.
Wyatt turned away with a sigh. He waited through another song, and
then another, as annoyance ebbed to rage and rage to chilling
realization.

“You’re benched,” ponytail twin said. “How
about we give you a tour of the house in the meantime?”

Had Wyatt been in his right mind, he would
have said no. Had he not been distracted—no, dismantled—he would
have said hell no. Going anywhere with a Dyson twin was the thing
that Wyatt, of all people, knew better than to do. But he was a
slack-faced dummy in the moment, standing in old clothes, numbed by
his own stupidity.

How had he not seen it before, when Wyatt
slept with the feeling, dreamed of it, and reached for it in
slumber each night? How many fantasies had Wyatt and Hassan
inadvertently shared, yearning, haunted, defeated by the exact same
girl?

Except Hassan was a sham, a charlatan, a lie
posing as the truth.

Like family, my ass.

The twins began the tour abruptly, leading
Wyatt to a frozen-over and barren garden, worked in the spring by
their mother and an overweight younger sister he didn’t know they
had. They took him to one of their bedrooms next and showed him a
personal collection of video games and sneakers. A visit to the
room opposite meant waiting through a presentation of home-recorded
games— of high schools and colleges he’d never heard of, of NFL
teams he couldn’t care about. And through it all, he thought of
Hassan and Edy, arm-in-arm below his feet, unchallenged.

A bathroom followed on their tour, then
another, with pantries, linen closets, nonsense and more nonsense.
They worked in circles and rushed stairs and flipped lights while
laughing, losing Wyatt in shadows and snickering nearby. Wyatt
walked in the Dyson house until the new rang familiar and he tore
around stumbling on stairs. Eventually, the twins lost interest.
When they did, they gave him the relief he craved by showing him to
the front door.

“A plate for the road,” ponytailed twin said
and handed him an aluminum foil-covered dinner. “I wasn’t sure what
you liked, so there’s a bit of everything in there.”

Wyatt’s stomach somersaulted. He hoped for
some of their inch-thick steaks from the grill, flame-split lobster
tails, and skewered shrimp, basted with a thickening sauce begging
to be licked. Then he saw one of his TV dinners, with its palm-thin
chicken thigh and ice-chunked mashed potatoes. Even the weight of
this Dyson dinner strained the wrist.

But he didn’t need a handout from these
guys, especially when said handout came with the warning that he
could never be good enough for their girl. Just when Wyatt opened
his mouth to tell them so, the door closed in his face.

~~~

On Monday at lunch, Edy dropped down before
a sour-faced Wyatt, who refused to make eye contact. She opened a
greased, brown paper bag and pulled out
mattar paneer
, an
Indian vegetarian curry spiced with Rani’s heavy hand. An aluminum
foil pouch of
naan
followed it, which she unfolded before
jabbing a bit of bread in her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Edy said.

Wyatt jammed a fork into his hamburger.

“I looked for you,” Edy said. “They said you
went home. That the twins walked you out.”

Wyatt shot her a pointed look. “You could
say that.”

Edy peeled the lid off her bowl and sniffed.
Rani’s food had no equal. The road to heaven smelled like the
Pradhan kitchen.

After a sufficient amount of indulgence, she
looked up to see Wyatt’s scowl deepen two-fold.

“Give me a break, already,” she said. “You
were hanging with the guys. You know, like that spiel you fed me in
the Don Corleone speech.”

He stared. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you
know. Asking me out, ditching me at the sideline, and then trying
to find some way to make it my fault. You think because you’re
pretty you can treat me like crap. You think I’m soft, slow, a
sucker. I’m none of those things. And I won’t let you treat me like
it either.”

Edy blinked. “I didn’t know you think I’m
pretty.”

“It’s beside the point.”

Wyatt worked the fork back and forth,
wedging it from its burrow deep in his burger. “You know, the next
time you want to use me for retribution, or jealousy, or whatever
game you and Hassan happen to be playing, find someone else.”

He was right, of course, absolutely right.
She’d been self absorbed, short sighted, thoughtless. As usual, her
brain had snagged, unable to get past thoughts of Hassan. But
there’d been something else. Something far less innocent. She’d
asked him to be her date not because she’d wanted his company, but
because he was an outsider,
an other
, a sure way to rattle
them.

She’d used him. She’d used her friend.

Edy could scarcely recognize her own
thoughts these days, choked in anger, drowning in jealousy and
desire. Whatever she wanted with Hassan, whatever existed between
them, gave her no excuse for treating people like crap. She had to
do better. She would do better, and she’d start with Wyatt. Edy
reached a hand across the table and took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Will you please give
me another chance?”

He looked up as if surprised.

“Always,” Wyatt breathed. “Always.”

~~~

Edy’s father spent two and a half weeks in
Egypt before returning to the states. The first forty-eight hours
of his time in the U.S. were spent in D.C., debriefing the feds on
conditions in Cairo, Alexandria, El Mansoura, and elsewhere. He
arrived in Boston in the manner he departed, by way of a single
black sedan and overwhelming silence. Edy and the Pradhans met him
at the front yard on arrival, snow crunching underfoot in their
rush to meet him. Another legal case kept Edy’s mother away.

Sallow eyes, sunken cheeks, shirt flapping
in the wind, Edy’s father looked rung out and haggard, as if Egypt
had banned proper eating and sleep as easy as they did free
press.

Edy clung to her dad all the way to the
front porch. She had so much to tell him, about how the party went
and Ali’s dress disaster, and how on attending ballet practice the
previous day, she’d been pegged for a part in
The Nutcracker
with the company. Each year, the Boston Ballet chose the best among
their students to perform alongside the professionals for one of
their biggest shows. Last year, Edy had been the youngest ever
selected. This year, with even stiffer competition, she had made
the ranks again.

“Daddy—”

Her father glanced over his shoulder,
searching, impatient, even though he’d just arrived. It wasn’t
until Ali showed up that he deflated visibly.

“Did you want to rest, or . . . ”

“Only a shower,” her father said. “Then we
have to get to work.”

Edy’s father trotted up their abbreviated
staircase and stopped at the front door, flanked on either side by
her and Ali. For some reason, Rani and Hassan hung back near the
fence.

“You’re about to work?” Edy blurted.

If anyone had heard her, they didn’t let
on.

“But our predictions were not so far off,
were they?” Ali said. Concern twisted his face.

Edy’s father placed a hand on the doorknob
and turned. “That’s just it,” he said. “They were exacting. As
precise as a scientific calculation. The timeline of government
collapse, the uprising of the people, the bloody social protests.
Our estimation of how influential the world’s instantaneous
technology would be—Internet, cell phones, social networking—became
eerily uncanny. And they had no idea you were so involved in the
research. They would have insisted on your presence, too.”

Ali sputtered, cheeks reddening as if he
were an old lady fielding flirtations from a man half her age.

“Oh no, it was an obvious outcome
considering all of the variables,” Ali said. He dragged fingers
back and forth across his forehead, as he always did when weighing
a thousand different thoughts. “Vast income inequalities, gross
human rights violations, a mimicry of autocratic rule—”

Hassan appeared on the porch with them.
“Edy—” he said.

“Yes. Except
we
alone predicted it,
my friend,” Edy’s father said. “Anyway, we’ll discuss my
observations as soon as I shower, so we can incorporate them into
the social movement theory.”

“Dad? Tell me you’re not about to work. You
just got here,” Edy said.

Her father squinted at her as if he
surprised and disappointed by her lack of decorum.

He turned back to Ali. “Allow me time to
freshen up before we meet in my study.”

“Agreed,” Ali said.

A hand found the small of Edy’s back,
discreet under the conservative eye of Hassan’s parents.

“Come on,” Hassan said. “We’ll hound them
later.”

She shot him an impatient look. Yes, she
knew how they could be about work. Political science was the topic
of discussion too many nights a week at dinner. But his father
hadn’t been the one gone, the one dangling in the mouth of danger
with little more than a pen and textbook to protect him. He hadn’t
celebrated his birthday without his dad, or Thanksgiving for that
matter. She opened her mouth to tell him that and found the words
dissolved on her tongue, a lie never meant to be uttered.

He was as close to her father as her, more
so in some ways.

Rani stepped up to them and Hassan’s hand
fell away, smooth. While his father had been radically Americanized
and prided himself on progressive thinking, his mother still
fretted over the old ways and appearances and took to sweating
anytime they were within three feet of each other.

Like now.

“Come over to the house and help me prepare
dinner,” Rani said and dropped a critical eye to the hand that
dangled at Hassan’s side. “Afterward, the three of us can play
Scrabble.”

Edy shot Hassan a look. He was notoriously
sucky at Scrabble, known for hopping languages and creating
portmanteaus as a matter of convenience. “You have to play right,”
she warned, already warming to the idea. Cold weather and the smell
of Indian spices, an afternoon with Hassan and the fireplace
ablaze. Truth told, he could play wrong, and she wouldn’t mind
much.

“You really should expand your vocabulary
before you criticize me,” he said, and headed straight down the
walkway.

“Simpleton,” he mumbled and broke into a
run, knowing she’d chase him for the insult.

Edy took off. They sliced her yard in two
and hopped the fence that separated their homes, first he, then
she, before dashing for the front door, with Rani shouting after
them that they needed to act sensibly.

Ten

Time went on, as it had the tendency to do.
In temperamental Boston, weather held to no reason. Cold then mild,
frigid then gruesome. Edy, in an effort to find balance, in an
effort to find a semblance of her old life, concentrated on
easygoing evenness. She permitted herself no more lingering stares
at Hassan, no more indulgent thoughts hidden under cover of
solitude. He was her friend, and she had known long before these
wayward feelings emerged, that the future held no more. Old
traditions, old ways more powerful than them both meant destiny had
eked out paths determinedly separate for them both. It meant that
she would watch him grow, love and be happy with another girl, and
if she couldn’t bear that, then she couldn’t bear to have him in
her life. But there had never been an Edy without Hassan, never a
Hassan without an Edy. She would permit no one to take that from
them, not even her.

Like Edy, Hassan fell into his old tiresome
self. First at her house for breakfast, he raided the fridge, holed
away with her dad to talk football, and blitzed her with pillows if
she took her time getting up in the morning. Awkwardness melted
away between them, until nothing but old familiarity seemed to
remain. He had his new friends—football friends, cheerleading
friends, and Edy turned to more time with Wyatt. Wyatt kept her
sane and busy when homework and ballet couldn’t do the job. He
demanded little from her, and on the days when she had only cursory
attention and her own uncooperative thoughts, he contented himself
filling the silence for them both. Holidays and football marched by
this way, hand in hand through Christmas, through winter. South End
claimed their first state championship with Edy on the sidelines
screaming as a bundled up Wyatt moved brisk to keep warm. Six
touchdowns and a new record for most yards transformed Hassan from
legend to god in a single year.

Spring thaw swept through, like the opening
of rose petals when blooming, like the sweet scent of showers on a
warm May day. Fist beneath her chin, Edy stared out the window of
her AP English class, mesmerized by the patter of rain. She
imagined herself in a field bursting with orchids, bathing in
sunlight. Eyes closed, body expressive, she’d be in tune with the
pulse of the earth, with the machinations of her heart, as she
danced for an audience of one.