by Gayle Forman
I told him about Ammi, moving to a strange land to live with a husband she barely knew, arriving in winter, and feeling assaulted by the cold. She had cried every day and hadn’t left the house until she saw the first crocus, at which point she’d walked to Abu’s store and asked him to give her something to do. He’d taught her to do his accounting, and now she did it for so many businesses she had to turn down work. Abu sometimes joked that it was a good thing they were married, otherwise she’d have no time for his books.
At six, Ammi texted, wanting to know where I was. James and I exchanged phone numbers, and the rest of the week, we kept up the conversation via texts.
“Who’re you texting?” Halima asked.
The lie flew out automatically. “Jabir.”
“Is that a new friend from school?” Ammi asked.
“Yes,” I said. That night, I changed James’s name in my contacts to Jabir and started deleting his texts at the end of each day.
We met for coffee again, at my suggestion, away from campus, in one of those expensive cafés on the walking mall.
“You seeing anyone?” James asked me casually.
“Not at the moment,” I said.
“Not at the moment?” he repeated, a teasing drawl, as if he already knew the truth.
“I’ve never . . . seen anyone,” I admitted. “I’ve never done anything . . . with anyone.”
For a second, I was scared he’d laugh at me, or reject me, but he just ran his finger across the rim of his coffee mug, nodding, as if it all made sense to him, as if I made sense to him.
“I take it you’re not out to your family?” he asked.
“I’m not out to anyone.”
“’Cept me.”
The revelation stunned me, but in a good way, like I’d been a can of soda on a shelf, all quiet and dusty until someone had come along and shaken me. For the first time in my life, someone else knew who I was. The realization left me giddy, light-headed, drunk (or what I imagined drunk to be like).
“Except you,” I told James.
James smiled and licked his lips. “Seeing as you told me a secret, I guess I owe you one back.”
“You already told me about that singer you’re obsessed with.”
“Freya.” He shook his head. “Nah. Not her.” He cast his eyes downward, a little creep of red at his sideburns. He was embarrassed. I was a goner. “You didn’t drop that dollar bill.” He paused. “I did.”
“You did? Why?”
His eyes were slow and sleepy, coming up to greet mine like a morning sunrise. “To meet you.”
And with that, the can was shaken even harder, and the fizzy sensation grew more powerful than it had been that night with Aladdin, more powerful than it had been with all the crushes on boys real and make-believe whom I’d fantasized about over the years but never really allowed myself to imagine being with.
“Got another secret for you,” James said. He leaned across the table and beckoned me closer. His mouth was near my ear, his finger was on the tab. If he opened that can, there would be no going back.
“What?” I asked. Entire body liquid.
“I’m gonna kiss you now,” he whispered.
* * *
— — —
“I thought March was supposed to be in like a lion, out like a lamb,” James muttered that frigid day a year and a half later. “And it’s almost April. Ain’t supposed to be this cold.”
James wasn’t living in Jersey anymore, not going to school anymore, which was why we’d taken to meeting Thursdays in the city. He complained that one day a week wasn’t enough, and I didn’t like it either, but some days we were together ten hours and I justified that, amortized over a week, it wasn’t that bad.
James hated the cold in general, but particularly on our Thursdays, when it was a stinging reminder that we had no place to go. He’d been kicked out of his father’s place before I met him and had been bouncing from friend to relative ever since, first in the Heights, later on the Grand Concourse, and now in Inwood with a sympathetic aunt who mostly worked nights. “Come spend a night,” he wheedled. I wanted to. But I couldn’t.
“You could if you told your family,” James said.
“And how did that work out for you?”
It was a low blow—I’d since learned that the reason James didn’t live with his father anymore was that his father kicked him out after James told him he was gay—but it illustrated my point. And for this reason, it usually shut James up.
When it was cold outside, we’d meet and go to a café, station ourselves there for hours, and dream about being somewhere else. “One day, we’ll go to Brazil. Or to Fiji,” James would say. He’d seen pictures of tree houses in the Amazon, Fijian bungalows perched right over water as blue as a swimming pool. He’d pull up the images on his phone and show me. “You’ll be a pilot and fly us everywhere we want to go,” he said, even though James knew I’d long since put away my dreams of being a pilot, long since stopped plane-watching.
Sometimes I tried to picture us hiking through the rain forests, diving into that impossibly blue water, but it was like trying to read a book in a dream: I could never quite see it.
That cold spring day, Fiji seemed farther away than ever. I steered James toward the nearest Starbucks, knowing a hot chocolate and a warm corner were the best we could do.
But he didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want to go anywhere. “I’m tired of this,” he muttered.
Tired of this was a fist to the gut. Tired of this really meant tired of me.
“Is it because I’m black?” James asked. “Christian? Can’t do nothing about black, but I could convert. I had an uncle who was Nation of Islam for a while.”
It took me a moment to understand what he was saying. That he thought his not being a Muslim was the deal breaker with my family.
“That wouldn’t help.”
“At least I’m willing to try,” he said.
“You think they’d invite you for dinner? Be happy for us to have sleepovers?” I shook my head, angry. “My mother didn’t speak to my brother for six months after he married a white woman.”
“So you just gonna keep doing like this? Keep lying to them, and to yourself, because you’re too chickenshit to be true?”
“How am I lying to myself?”
“Everything you do is to keep playing the good, dutiful son, and it’s all bullshit.” He stopped and looked at me with a withering disgust. “Did you ever even tell your parents you wanted to be a pilot?”
“What does that have to do with anything? All little kids have things they want to be when they grow up. Abdullah wanted to be Bob the Builder! Halima wanted to be a Disney princess. It doesn’t mean that’s what you’re going to do. And anyway, it’s not like any American carrier would be eager to hire a pilot named Harun Siddiqui.”
“See!” James said, jabbing me with his delicate finger. “That’s just it. You write people off without giving them a chance.”
“No,” I said. “I live in reality.”
James grunted and walked ahead of me. He abruptly stopped, which I thought meant he was ready to make up. He never could stay angry long. But he stooped down and picked something up. It was a fifty-dollar bill.
My first thought was that he’d done it on purpose, but I knew James did not have spare fifties lying around. And I could tell by the surprised smile on his face that he hadn’t dropped it. He’d found it.
“We should see if someone lost it,” I said.
“And let someone else take it?” He shook his head. “Aww, hell no.”
“It’s stealing,” I said.
“It ain’t stealing. It’s finding. Anyone might’ve dropped it, but we found it.”
“It’s still wrong.”
“Think of it as a gift from God.”
“You don�
�t believe in God,” I said.
“Nah, boo. You’re the one who don’t believe in God.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Because you got no faith.”
I didn’t know what to do with that.
“Got any cash on you?” he asked.
I had twenty and some change. James started tapping away on his phone. “Between us we got almost ninety. There’s gotta be some cheap-ass hotel that rents rooms for that much.” He tapped some more on his phone, and then his face broke out into that wide-toothed smile. “Place near Penn Station, says it’s only ninety-three a night.”
“We don’t have ninety-three.”
“Close though. Come on.”
We walked to the hotel, the wind, gritty and mean, pushing back against us.
The hotel clerk told us the room was actually $125 a night, plus tax, but if we paid cash and left by the end of his shift and didn’t use the towels, we could have it for eighty.
We rode the elevator to the ninth floor. James was shaking when we unlocked the door, but he said it was on account of the cold, and the first thing he did was crank up the thermostat.
The room was ugly and dark, with a window that looked out onto an air shaft. When I imagined us being someplace together, it didn’t look like this. Or like the tropical waters in Fiji. It looked like my house, my bed.
That was my running-away fantasy. To be able to sleep like spoons in my bed at home, with James, not hiding. But that seemed so much further away than the Fijian bungalow.
We sat on opposite ends of the bed. We’d wanted this for so long, a place to be together, and now we had it and didn’t know what to do.
It wasn’t like we hadn’t had sex. In the hidden corners of Central Park, in the empty ladies’ lounge on the top floor of one of the city’s old, failing department stores, we had explored the hidden reaches of each other’s bodies. But those encounters were, by necessity, always fast and furtive: shirts yanked up, zippers yanked down, the important bits exposed but always both of us ready to make a break for it.
In truth, I was that way with James: always ready to make a break for it.
But here, in this room, with the thermostat cranked, we could take our time. Tentatively, we started to kiss, giggling nervously. We kicked off our shoes. We kissed some more, a little steadier, and peeled off our shirts. We went slow, even though it was agonizing, because for once, we could.
By taking our time, I saw things I’d never seen. A rigid scar on his left shoulder. The way the skin of his belly was a different color from the rest of him, more like my tone than his. His feet, the toes all the same length.
“My mom used to call them my ballerina feet,” he said when I commented on them.
“You never talk about your mom.”
“Nothing to say.”
“Did you love her?”
“What kind of question is that? Course I loved her.” He paused to bite his thumbnail. “And I know she loved me, but sometimes that ain’t enough.”
“You always tell me that love is all you need,” I said.
“Maybe I should start living in reality too,” he replied.
I got that bad feeling again.
“I love you,” I told him. “You know that, right?”
“But not enough to do something about it. Not enough to risk anything. I told my pops. I didn’t think about the consequences.”
“That’s not fair,” I replied. “You told your father before we met. And, I might remind you, he kicked you out.”
“‘I might remind you,’” he mimicked. “Like I could forget. And I told my pops knowing that one day I’d meet someone like you and when it happened I’d be ready.”
The heater ticked off. The room went cold. I knew what he meant, or what he thought he meant. He told his father to make a place for me. But all I heard in that someone like you was someone other than me.
“Nothin’s gonna change if you’re not willing to change it,” he said. “And if you aren’t, we’re gonna keep hiding out, paying off clerks for five hours in a hotel.”
“Four hours now,” I said. “And this was your idea.”
“Fine. You wanna fuck?” He unzipped his pants, tugged on mine.
At that moment, I wanted the chill in the room to go away. I wanted the distance between us to shrink. I wanted to buy a few more minutes of borrowed time. So I told him yes, I did want to fuck.
He lunged for me, and I lunged for him. I didn’t know if we were fighting or apologizing, declaring ourselves or saying goodbye, fucking or making love.
Maybe all of those.
After, we fell asleep curled into each other, like spoons.
I woke up, my phone lighting up with calls. It was Ammi. It was after six. I was meant to be home.
I left James in that hotel room, ran to the PATH, and ran home. I tried to imagine what it would be like to tell my parents. But it was like the Fijian bungalow; it existed somewhere out there in the world, but nowhere I could ever get to.
I got home late, concocting some lie to Ammi about losing track of time while studying for a big exam, and braced myself, as I did every Thursday, for the moment when Ammi would see through my lie with that radar of hers that allowed her to find a missing five dollars in her clients’ books, to sniff out any remotely fishy business in their ledgers. But it never happened. She believed me because, unlike the people whose books she did, she trusted me.
I pushed the food around my plate, making another excuse about how we’d had pizza during the study session. She frowned but took my plate, and I ran to the shower to rinse James off my skin.
In my bedroom, I checked my phone, but there was no text from James. I was logging on to the computer to see if he’d sent me a Facebook message when Abu popped his head in. I quickly minimized the screen.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
For the millionth time, I tried to imagine what it would be like to tell him. I am in love, I could say. His name is James.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything.”
“Why did Ammi get so angry when Saif married Leesa?”
“That woman does not always make it so easy.”
“I know, but Ammi was angry before she even met her.”
Abu sighed and came to sit down on the edge of Abdullah’s bed. “You must understand, beta,” he told me. “Your mother left her family behind to move to America. And sometimes she feels like America is making strangers of her children.” He paused and smiled. “Why? Have you met a girl?”
I am in love. His name is James.
“No,” I said, for once telling the truth.
Facebook pinged with a message, and my heart surged with the thought of talking to James. “I should get back to my work.”
The message was not from James but from my cousin Amir. We had not seen each other since that time he came to America, but over the past few years we had reconnected online.
How are you doing, cousin? read the message.
Not so good, I wrote.
He was online, even though it was five in the morning there. I saw the dots as he typed. Tell me what is wrong. Inshallah, I can help.
The words I could not confess to my father rose up in me, desperate for an audience, and my cousin, ten thousand miles away, the seed of it all, seemed not only safe but like qismat, like fate.
3
HUNGER
As they’re finishing up at the urgent care clinic, awaiting Nathaniel’s discharge papers, the doctor asks Freya for her number. And even though the doctor has provided ample evidence that he is both incompetent and a creep, and even though Freya’s creep radar is so finely tuned she could sell it to the CIA, the request does something to her heart. She designated herself Nathaniel’s emergency contact, and now the doctor is officially a
ssigning her that role.
Freya is never in charge of anyone. Someone has always been in charge of her: first her father, then Sabrina, now Hayden. She writes down her number for the doctor, a little embarrassed by this surge of good feeling.
She is Nathaniel’s emergency contact. For today, anyhow, she is in charge of him. She no longer cares about whether or not he will sue her or whether Harun will sell her pictures. She is someone’s person.
After Freya hands him the paper, the doctor folds it into a square and deposits it into the breast pocket of his lab coat and with a smarmy smile asks: “You like martinis?” It takes Freya a moment to realize that she got it wrong (what else is new?) and the doctor is hitting on her.
Freya is an empty vessel once again, emptier yet for having been, at least momentarily, full. Just like that, she’s in a foul temper—extreme moodiness is evidence of diva mode, per her mother—feeling worse than she did after the miracle doctor sent her away with no miracle. Worse than she did in the park after she’d seen Alex Takashida’s Facebook post (She said yes!).
Freya never gets asked questions she wants to say yes to. Freya is in charge of no one. Freya is liked by millions, needed by none.
Fuck it. She no longer cares if Harun has pictures of her on his phone. Let him sell them. Why shouldn’t he cash in on her somewhere-between-buzz-and-celebrity status before it’s too late? Someone ought to.
Her mother was right. She should just go home and watch Scandal.
Except she doesn’t want to go home and watch Scandal. She doesn’t want to do anything. The last few weeks have been bleak. Whole desolate stretches of hours. The thing that used to soothe her—logging on, chatting with her fans, or at least seeing what they were saying about her—now torments her. She can’t stop hearing Hayden’s prophecy: your fans will forget you, your numbers will drop, you’ll go back to being like everyone else.
