by Paula Jolin
“But you wear jeans and T-shirts, not like that . . .” He didn’t say “ninja-freak Sherine,” but the words hung in the air between them. She turned to go. He put one hand on her arm, touched her through the fabric of her jacket, and it was like a vise grip, pulling her into another world.
“I’m religious,” she said. “It’s not my parents. Well, it is, but it’s me, too. God says no boys.”
“God doesn’t say anything against talking, though, does He?”
He did, actually. But Aliya let it go, and she let the hand stay, and that was the beginning of her new, secret life. They never talked about religion again, not when she asked him to stop smoking up and he did, not when she went on at him for hanging around Glimmer Collins and he said, what was he supposed to do, when Aliya was too ashamed to be seen with him? Not even when he kissed her for the first time. Or the second time. Or the third . . .
A car swerved, splashed through a puddle, honked. The driver rolled down the window and leaned out. “What are you, high or something?” The words, the accent, were American, but Aliya ducked her head anyway, hoping it wasn’t someone she knew. The Arab community was full of people who spoke perfect English and would still ask Mama what she meant by letting Aliya meander the streets alone, and almost at night.
Meander, that’s exactly what she was doing. Just because this was Armitage, three streets before Roosevelt, didn’t mean anything. She wasn’t going there. Well, if she did, she was just going to walk past Gillian’s house. After all, what was that about an envelope? He never slipped an envelope through the slits in her locker. At school, the day after it happened, she went straight there. She couldn’t stand even one more second of knowing that his notes were piled up inside, with the drawings and the jokes and the pineapple-scented stickers to remind her of the afternoon he’d introduced her to virgin piña coladas. Her locker, more full of him than anyplace else in school.
She took everything out that day, and she hadn’t been back there since.
She cut through the library parking lot, jumped the railroad tracks behind, moved into the chic part of town: rows of old tenement houses and duplexes remodeled into single family homes. The illusion of city, with all the comforts of suburbia. Aliya looked up and down Coville Street, sure that she scented dog, which made her think about Rambling. Dirty, wild things, dogs, always slobbering on you and leaving stains on your pants, and her parents said it was irreligious to keep them in the house—Godless Americans. But she liked Trevor’s dog. He was the not-too-friendly type, keeping his distance until he got to know you, and even then, he didn’t slobber.
She turned the corner. Up ahead, three duplexes away, she could make out the Roosevelt sign. Shock you out of your pious Muslim girl mind. Maybe he was in heaven, and the Christians were right all along. No virgins (not that she wanted any, thank you very much), no rivers of honey, no olive-tree gardens. Just men in white robes, wandering through clouds and strumming harps.
Of course, Trevor might’ve found himself in hell.
Roosevelt Street, thank God. She put her hands in her pockets, pushed them down hard. This was 41, which meant 42 was right over there. Gray house, not big, not small, empty driveway, black front door. Wildflowers blowing in a footlong strip of garden. An open window right above it.
Was it Aliya’s fault the voice with the Caribbean accent floated out loud enough to reach the islands? Or that it was saying something that sounded like, “Trevor wouldn’t want—”? No. Of course, crouching down, skirting her way past the rosebush and into the nook below the window . . . hard to blame someone else for that.
No time for quibbling. She sent a little prayer of thanks to her God—He was still there, even after all she’d done— and settled herself down to hear something.
THREE
“LOOK, EMMIE—NO, I get that.” Gillian flicked her cigarette ash into the silver pen case her father had won at Games Day twenty-three years ago. An empty peanut butter jar sat next to it, but why bother? “I get it, but really, suicide? Don’t be ridiculous. Who told you such rubbish?”
Emmie squawked on. Not answering Gillian’s question, of course, but going on and on about how she was through. “. . . It’s over, Gillian, I’m done with it, and nothing you can say will change my mind.” Stupid drama queen. The sort of bitch Trevor would sign up.
“I’ll look into it, Emmie, I will, but we’ve got you lined up for three—” Interrupted again. Gillian looked down at the list of ten names in her hand. Seven were crossed through with large Xs. Emmie Randolph had been written across the top, in capital letters. See what came of going partners with a white boy? You never knew what they’d do, those damn white people. Drive their cars off a cliff as likely as show up at your door with flowers and a scheme.
Tears? Not Gillian Smith. She barely knew the boy.
She shivered. Stupid wind. Stupid too-thin sweater. Stupid cold weather, enough to drive a person mad. No wonder people went off cliffs up here. She shot a glance at the halfopen window across the room. Easy enough to close it, but then her clothes would smell like smoke. In Trinidad—oh, those magic words—people didn’t have this problem. They 15 kept their windows open all night and fell asleep to the scent of the ocean breeze.
She shifted the phone from one ear to the other. “What? Secret girlfriend? What’s a ‘secret girlfriend’—she worked for the CIA? Girl, you’re talking shit. Who’s telling you all this?”
Squawk, squawk, squawk. It was Trevor’s fault that Emmie was freaking out, all of it Trevor’s fault, really. Why did she listen to him in the first place? So many empty promises. Too bad the dead don’t make deliveries.
“Emmie, Emmie, calm down. Do you really think I’d be involved with a druggie? . . . What? I’m from Trinidad, girl, not Jamaica, and no, people don’t make a living ‘smoking rope’ back home.” Damn Americans. Get a map, learn some geography. “No, look, let me keep your name on the books— you’re down for Arthur at Chelsea Prep, Matthias at the Jewish Day School, and Nick . . . Emmie? Emmie?” What the fuck? She shook the phone. Damn girl had not hung up on her. “I’ll keep you on the list then,” she told the phone. Then she snapped it closed.
Another girl, one whose bank account was not sinking into double digits, would have thrown the phone across the room and damn all if it broke, but no way was Gillian picking up the pieces and asking that man for another cell phone.
No need to be cold one more second though. Who was here to smell her anyway? A last drag on the cigarette and she crossed the room, chucked the butt through the open window, and lifted her hands up to slam it down. Caught sight of the girl hiding below.
Was she for real? Gillian blinked hard—girl still there. A tramp, a beggar, a nowherian? Did they have anything to feed her? There was leftover curry in the pot and maybe some rice in the fridge . . .
Except, wait, not a beggar. This was a girl from school, from the other side of her own Am Civ class even—what was her name, Aisha, Amira, Alina?—one of the ragheads, anyway. Of course, Americans wouldn’t say “raghead”; they talked all pretty with their “Arab Americans” and “African Americans,” but it was other words they were thinking, and they’d spit in your face as soon as offer you a ride home. In Trinidad, they said the words, and then linked arms and headed off to the beach. Gillian stuck her head through the window. “What are you doing, spying on me?”
The girl jumped so hard she bumped her head against the window ledge. “I’m just cold,” she said. “There was warm air coming through the window, so I figured I’d—”
“You think I’m stupid?” Gillian pulled her head back, yanked the window all the way up, and gestured at the girl on the ground. “In.”
She didn’t move.
“Get your butt inside.”
One more minute and the girl bent her head, braced her arms, and wriggled her skinny Arab ass through the window. “What?” she asked, getting to her feet. She pushed masses of dark, curly hair off her face.
Wait her out.
Except that waiting, well, not exactly Gillian’s hand full of high cards. “You’re out there spying on me, and you ask me what?”
“I wasn’t—”
Gillian picked up the phone. Everything happens for a reason—if she’d thrown it against the wall, where would she be now? “I’m going to call the police. Or better yet, immigration.”
Spygirl raised her eyebrows and power shifted. “I was born here,” she said. Too polite to add idiot. “Could you please close the window?”
Gillian wavered. She was freezing, too. Slam. “So? What the hell is Nick’s problem? He doesn’t have the balls to stalk me himself?”
“Huh?”
Gillian waved her cell phone in the girl’s face. “You think I won’t press charges?”
“Are you nuts? All I was doing was sitting under your window. What do you think the police would do? Tell me to run along home and stop bothering you. Then they’d tell you to stop bothering them.”
Gillian turned away. The list was still in her hand. Scratch Emmie’s name off? Really, what was the point? She crumpled it into a ball and sent it arcing toward the wastebasket, except that it missed, hit the carpet, rolled under the bed. “Whatever,” she said. “Get the hell out of here. Tell Nick I don’t give a flying—”
“I didn’t come here because of any Nick,” said the girl. “I was sent here by someone else.” She was staring at the wall over Gillian’s head, her eyes unfocused, almost as though she was in a trance. Was she on drugs? Gillian’d heard a million stories about the shit they did in Saudi Arabia—or maybe that was Pakistan. Opium laced with cyanide, make you the highest kite in the atmosphere.
There she went, sounding like Emmie, mixing up parts of the world she’d never been to and labeling them “druggie.” When did she turn into an American?
“Trevor.”
“What?” Gillian stared. “Who?”
The girl lowered her eyes, turned her head aside. “Trevor Sanders, you know, he was, uh, he passed over last week.”
Passed over? She sounded like some kind of fake medium. Still, how did she guess Gillian and Trevor were anything to each other, anything at all? “What’s that? Trevor Sanders told you to come here?” No way Gillian was discussing business with this girl come out of nowhere. “Are you sure you’re not looking for that cheerleader Shimmer, or Shimmy, or whatever, the one he was all over at the last football game?”
Spygirl wasn’t looking dreamy now. “Glimmer, her name is Glimmer, and he didn’t have his hands all over her—she chased him, but he, he had other, other things on his mind.”
Gillian dropped down onto her bed. She didn’t invite the girl to take a seat. “It’s Aisha, right?”
“Who? Me?” By now she was picking at a broken nail. “No, I’m Aliya. Aliya al-Najjar.”
“What has Trevor got to do with me—or you, for that matter?”
The nail came off, and Gillian watched Aliya start right in on the next one. Could have used a manicure, that girl, dark red polish would look great on her. But Arab girls were all hide-your-light-under-a-veil, even the ones who didn’t scarf. “I got an e-mail from Trevor today,” said Aliya. “He wanted me to give you some envelope he left in my locker. Said it was really important.”
Gillian stared. Stared again. Stared some more. “Uh, dahlin,” she said at last, in her most gentle voice, “you know Trevor’s dead, right?”
“I know.”
Right. Gillian wanted to think about that envelope—was it full of money, her money, or maybe a passkey to a safedeposit box somewhere? But she put on the breaks, because the girl looked about to pass out, and Gillian didn’t trust her anyway. Not a centimeter. “So Trevor’s dead, and he’s sending you e-mails from heaven? Who knew God had wireless?”
Aliya looked down at the carpet, up at the ceiling, at the first window, the second window, and finally settled on the carpet again. She blinked those big dark eyes a couple of times, even wrinkled that sharp Roman nose, but she didn’t say anything.
“Tell me this, then,” said Gillian, when she couldn’t stand to look at the hesitant girl another second. “Probably a hundred thousand people died in the last twenty-four hours, all with devoted loved ones wailing and ripping their clothes. How come Trevor’s the only one who learned how to send an afterlife e-mail?”
Still nothing from the girl but blinking eyes, wrinkling nose.
“And why, of all the people Trevor knew, why pick you?”
Spygirl broke. “We were friends,” she said. “Closer than anyone knew.”
“And the e-mail from heaven?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
“So?”
Aliya bit her thumbnail so hard, Gillian thought the whole nail would come right off. “In Syria,” she said, “we have this stuff we do, kind of like magic, but it’s all caught up with Islam—I mean, strict religious people like my parents wouldn’t go near it, they think it’s haram, that’s forbidden, but my great-aunt, well, some other people, they see it more like a shortcut. To getting the things you really want. I mean, you should only do it if you’re desperate.”
Gillian knew all about desperate.
“So, well, last night, I was a little—I was out of my mind. I really needed to talk to Trevor, and since my great-aunt taught me how to do it, well sort of, I, well, I tried it. Some of the magic.”
“Nowadays magic’s on e-mail, too?”
Aliya rubbed her lips together. Bit the bottom one. “I told you you wouldn’t believe me,” she said. “All I know is, last night I tried to contact Trevor, and this afternoon I got an e-mail. And the e-mail said to give you the envelope, so here I am.”
“And you never thought, could be a glitch in the program and Trevor sent it, oh I don’t know, last week, when he was still breathing?”
Silence. Gillian would bet her life savings—all the money Trevor had been keeping for her until the end of the year, all the money that was, maybe, in that envelope—that Aliya had thought of the glitch thing herself, knew that was the truth. She just didn’t want it to be.
“The important question,” Gillian said, “is why Trevor was writing to you at all.”
“No,” said Aliya. “The real question is why he was writing to me about you.”
“Trevor and I were running a business together.” Gillian talked tough, but she almost always folded first, damn it.
“What kind of business?” Did Aliya look relieved? That girl had it bad for a dead boy. “A start-up?”
“A none-of-your-business business,” said Gillian. Then, because she couldn’t wait any longer: “So, Secret Girlfriend, where’s my envelope?”
Aliya’s eyes fluttered up. “Well, that’s the thing, he never left me any envelope. He said he did, in the e-mail, but I’ve been all through my locker, and—”
The cell phone was out of Gillian’s hand, skimming across the floor, crashing into the corner, before she could stop it. “Jeezan ages—do I look stupid to you?” The whole thing was lunatic. Gillian’s suspicions of Nick Loring came roaring back, and she spoke too loud. “Get out. And tell whoever sent you, I’m not as stupid as they obviously think I am.”
Aliya headed to the window.
“Not the window. I do have a door, you know. No broughtupsy, that’s what’s wrong with you.”
Aliya stopped in the doorway, looked over her shoulder at Gillian. “He really did send that e-mail today. I came here because—well, never mind.” Then she said it anyway. “Because any connection with him is better than none.”
Aliya’s footsteps clipped down the hall. Gillian pictured the unwashed dishes lining the kitchen counter and wished she’d shown the girl a careful route to the front door. What did Aliya know about living with a man who thought that bowls and spoons and cartons of milk made beautiful decorations? She probably had a stay-at-home mom who spent all day filing things in cupboards.
The footsteps faded. Gillian fished the crumpled paper out from under the bed and smoothed it out. Then she
sat down at her desk, flipped up her laptop, and turned it on. Two minutes—stupid slow computer—and she was opening Firefox. Her fingers tapped out an address and she ended up at the Fillmore High Web site. The prompt asked for her name. Aliya Najjar. Password: Trevor.
Bingo, first try. Trinidad primary schools taught logic so much better than the Americans. She opened Aliya’s inbox, found Trevor’s e-mail at the very top, dated more than ninety years from now. Some ghostly trick, or just Aliya’s prank? She leaned across the desk and switched on the printer.
Way out past Hilton Street, somewhere on Kelly Boulevard, there was an obeah man. She’d never been—she didn’t believe that nonsense, she was an educated Trini—but desperate times and all. And she’d pit Caribbean black magic against Middle Eastern mumbo jumbo any season of the year. Even winter.
FOUR
DING-DONG. The door swung open, and the heavy scent of garlic and lard came out to meet her. Gillian caught her breath. Garlic and lard, a lethal combination in obeah. Behind the door, a hallway stretched long and dark before her, candles flickering behind wall sconces. She got a whiff of murder-mystery novel before the tall, thin man came into view. He wore a white robe that came to his knees and a white turban wrapped around his dark head. The skin on his face was like paper; crepe-thin but not wrinkled. “Come in, Gillian.”
Now that was creepy.
She covered fast. “Hi, I’m Gillian Smith, you know my father, Derek Smith? He’s an architect over at Mowbray Associates. Anyway, I have a problem, my cousin Kevin, Kevin Durrani, maybe he’s the one you know? He thought you might be able to give me some advice.” Some cover. Hopeless, that’s what she was.
“Come in, Gillian,” the obeah man said again. He moved to the side, and Gillian entered the dark hallway. The door slammed shut behind her, candles flickered, and Gillian shivered. What the hell had Trevor gotten her into now? If he’d kept his damn eyes on the road . . .
She followed the old man down the hall. He shuffled along in leather sandals that had to be imported from Trinidad—and who was he kidding, sandals in a New England winter? Although the house was toasty warm. Trust a Trini to know something about heat. Probably scamming the electric company, getting twice the heat for half the price. Then again, maybe he was heating it by obeah.
