Sixteen

by Megan Mccafferty

  —Don’t get off the subject, Carmen cut in. —Listen, Suze, consider it an emergency birthday present.

  —I know, but it’s just my parents. You know how they are.

  —Who’s about to turn sixteen? You or them? said Carmen, eyes smirking. —You know, Suzy, I’ve about had it with these excuses. There’s always something with you. You’ve been getting a little too big for your boots lately is the feeling I’m getting. I know your ’rents don’t want you to be like us. But what’s wrong with us?

  Sulk bit her tongue tip. It was true, about her parents. That’s why she never invited the posse over, only Gemma on her own. And if her parents knew the half of it, it’d be doubly true. Already she couldn’t attend the same parties, where they were convinced sperm could cantor across carpet, hurdle a TV screen, and up-wriggle a pair of boot-cuts to impregnate a girl. (That’s why it’s called a shag rug, Gemma had snickered, employing a bit of the British slang she’d brought over from her own motherland.) Where boys were certainly slipping pills in these girls’ drinks and making promises that had always been broken.

  —Or, actually, what’s wrong with you? Carmen challenged now, her words glinting as if rubbed on stone. —Don’t you want it?

  Of course Sulk wanted. But she didn’t know what, or where. She knew she lay awake at night with this wanting, like a new tensely wound organ, hands pressed to lower belly to keep it from rupturing skin. Her belly had been aching for days now, around the button, like a cord yanking her out of herself. Too many boys, boys. What to do with them? They made her feel breathlessly cloddy when she had to interact with them, especially the ones who ran around chasing balls on fields as if engaged in some primordial dance with the Nerf god. Their voices were like the bottom of boats. Their throats bobbed when they talked as if they couldn’t get out what they really wanted to say. They looked like they knew different things.

  Take Lane Hallestorm, the one the Bees were eyeing at the moment, even Carmen, who was with Sledge but always stocking up for the winter. He was one of the ones who looked like he could break you and you should be grateful he hadn’t already. His face was all carved ice. The one who swept you in his view for a second and made you feel he’d held you an eternity. Lane Hallestorm, the Bees swooned, always first-name-last. Not like Gem’s ex Ryder, who was out of school and therefore had only one name. Nor Abhijit, who also went by one name—Abe, just like Sulekha was Suzy— because as the only other Indian at Royal Oak, he was too contexted.

  —Lane Hallestorm. Sulekha swooned now. Not so much because of the boyman himself, but because swooning felt so good, a sheer relief to hear how her voice took on the swooping frequencies and flavor of theirs when she did.

  Carmen relaxed a notch, even as she said, —I know it’s your birthday, but we can’t promise a miracle, Suzy. We’ve only got twenty-four hours.

  —It doesn’t really matter who it is, Poppy said, shrugging, sucking her words out a deflating bubble. Sulk imagined them floating around in there, a cartoon caption. —Just get it out of the way.

  —You can’t be a baby forever, whatever your parents think, Gemma agreed in her new hive voice. —It’s only a kiss. No rubber, no pill. You don’t even need your nappies.

  That was a new-old development; Gemma had forcepped from her vocabulary most of the British English terms that had set her apart as a kid in this town. It’d been part of Sulk and Gem’s Wild West pact. But that pact was cracking, and Gemma’s kind of different now held its charm, while Sulk’s just slowed the posse down.

  —Yeah, Suze. You kiss him, diss him, then text in.

  That she had to be with a boy to be one of the girls seemed ironic but incontestable. Sulekha could read Carmen’s unspoken thought as if she were subtitled:

  Do this and you can buzz with the Bees.

  They called themselves the Bees ’cause they could make honey and sting. Honey with their smiles and sting with their tongues. Sometimes they honeyuttered and glance-stung. Rarely did they honey-honey sting-sting.

  At first Sulekha had thought the name was because of their grades. Sulk had never seen a B on her own report card. But sometimes she longed for one, voluptuous. She sometimes longed to make a mistake. What might happen then?

  The bell dddrrringed. The Bees headed off in one direction, Sulk in the other.

  Later, when she got on the bus, Sulekha took the window seat, leaving room just in case. But Gemma sat behind her, silent. So Sulk was surprised when she descended at her stop, even though her own was still four away.

  When the bus was out of view, Gemma grabbed Sulk’s elbow.

  —Damsel, I’m distressed, she said.

  That was cowgirl code for sorry and Sulekha softened. Gemma rarely used their lingo in posse mode anymore, or even one-on-one.

  —About the nappies. I know you’re not a baby. I don’t know why I say those things sometimes. It’s like someone else’s words are coming out of my mouth.

  —I know what you mean, said Sulekha, and she did. —Like a bandit ventriloquist.

  —Sounds like our next song, Gemma said, smiling sadly.

  She hadn’t talked about the songs in ages. Sulk felt a tug of hope.

  —Gem, I know they don’t really like me. I’m sorry, too. I know it’s hard for you.

  —We just need to all get along, said Gemma too earnestly. She squeezed Sulk’s hand, then dropped it as if it were too hot. —I want them to see the damsel I see. But you’ve got to buzz with the Bees. Don’t make me choose—stick with me.

  Sulekha looked at Gemma and the goldrush eyes that were so familiar when no one else was watching. She knew she wouldn’t make her choose. Because now the choice Gemma would make was clear.

  —After tomorrow, said Gemma, closing her eyes. —We’ll all be the same.

  —I’ll be there, said Sulk. And then, to remind Gem who they were: —You know I love you, lonestar.

  —We can’t keep talking like that, Suzy, Gemma said, and the name made a funny-mirror sound coming from her mouth. —Especially not in front of the Bees. I’m sixteen now, you know.

  Gemma got her period first; Gemma wore a bra first and took it off first, and now, though they were only months apart, it seemed as if mysteriously dense and ambiguous years were accumulating between them.

  —I know, Sulekha said.

  Gemma tapped her shades off head and over eyes and Sulk popped up double in the glassy lenses. She looked redundant. Gemma waved, turned, and walked away.

  At home Sulekha kicked off her clogs in the foyer. She’d stashed the boots safely in her locker. Her mother had just shaken her head, with a funny little illegible expression, when she’d first worn the lime-and-sage cowkicks home two Septembers ago. She’d told Sulekha they were meant for a boy, and later turned back to the kitchen temple, the low candle glowing and the small ultrasound beside it, its speck of bright, brief life petaled from view by the curling edges. Sticks and stones; the unspoken in that was enough to make Sulk start sneaking them on at school instead, and it was strangely sweet turning secret, breathtakingly boundless going outlaw.

  Unbaby was the unspoken. And since his unarrival, Sulk’s mother had begun to cast her eyes around this house they’d lived in for a decade as if startled to find herself in it. When Sulekha first heard the word stillborn, she thought it meant that despite everything, he’d still come through, was still born, this little one she already loved. She didn’t realize that that everything included his negation until she saw how her mother’s eyes chasmed after, how even she and Reshem no longer seemed to shine in them.

  The house as usual was unbearably quiet without Reshem home. Long nights with only the thud of the dishwasher tablet releasing, the train-track spin cycle, a hiss of eraser to page. Television tuned low, an occasional uprising of programmed laughter; thick, silky rugs muffling footfall. Shh, Baby is studying. So silent the swirling dust motes hovering in the paned light ached her ears.

  Reshem was in New York. Before she left, she chopped her hair, strea
ked it sunflower and satsuma and still blacker between. She began to look like a boy and the boys began to look at her: the Big Y baggers, the fertilizer company kids who came to lay the mulch, the paperboy with his topply twelve-speed, even her father’s whiskey-grinned colleague. But mostly the Radio Shack manboy with the dyed-blond dreadlocks; in this case Reshem had gazed right back, all summer long.

  Sulekha recalled watching through the family-room window that week before Reshem left home, how her sister had huddled on her haunches and wept alone in the driveway, a staticky silence when that dyed-blond boy stormed off, just as tired of being hidden from her parents as they were of their true daughter being withheld from them.

  That night, contemplating Reshem in her carefully ripped jeans and CBGBs T-shirt, her hair scuffed and face the most visible part of her, as if she were floating neck-deep in the black lake of the driveway, Sulekha remembered another Reshem: Monsoon Reshem, how she’d always prayed extra-hard for the rains, and when they came, ran from the swinging bed in Smita Villa out into the gray embrace of it all, spinning sun and moon, Surya and Soma, from her sari silk, her hair so long and even longer wet, her eyes so bright and even brighter then.

  Her heart went out to Reshem. But what Reshem didn’t know was that inside her mother was weeping as well, before the goddess Laxmi, her father watching as well, from another darkened window. And caught between them, Sulekha fell mute, could not cross over to either side, straddle their pain and bring them together.

  They seemed so confused by their children lately. Almost afraid of these creatures they’d birthed and fed and who were now sinking roots in foreign soil, flourishing like exotic plants and branching out in unforeseen directions.

  Sulk switched on the computer and was grateful for its noisy hum. Half-smiling at the cheery face signaling the system was ready to go, she spelled in her password: Gem4Ever. It seemed unlikely Gem’s was still SulkOnly.

  Like a bandit ventriloquist, Sulk thought to herself. It would be their next song if only Gemma let it. Tongue-tied, you’ve twisted / The words from my mouth / And oh, now I miss them.

  A missing period. But Sulekha knew those were unspoken words bundled at the bottom of her belly. She felt like some of them got said unspokenly when she was around Gemma, even now. But she missed the days they were sung.

  Sulekha wrote the words and Gemma sang them into the air like a paper airplane with a message that reached everyone. Gem strummed Sulk to new places; Sulekha’s words meant something else on her friend’s tongue, sunk in another salt and sweet. Or maybe they found their true meaning in Gemma’s mouth: She made sad things ring joyful; if you said you were blue, she made blue sound like the most beautiful hue to behold, the stroke to paint the world with.

  —Cowgirls and indie boys, Gem rambled that last time.

  —Give us another choice, Sulekha inked.

  —Cowgirls and indie boys.

  —Sing in another voice.

  Sulekha loved Gemma. She loved her so much she wished she could have cried the tears Gemma left on Sulk’s pillow for days after Ryder rode off with her innocence. Sulekha knew every shift of her face, every flick and nail-pick of her fingers. She didn’t know how to play the guitar herself, but she memorized the shapes of Gemma’s hands on the frets, a sign-language counterpart to the voice that glowed like hot stones.

  She loved her so much it broke her heart when Gemma frosted her words around the other girls, ice not to skate on; alone, they’d always been summerfield tones.

  But on IM it was reassuringly different. She saw lonestar was online and shot off a Howdy, pardner. Moments later, the comforting tinkerbell ring:

  lonestar: u doin ur xoxos?

  Damsel: How will I know what to do?

  lonestar: nuttin 2 do m8.

  Damsel: But what will it be like?

  lonestar: like rollng ur tung bk on itslf. try.

  lonestar: u try?

  Damsel: Yes. Two cavities.

  lonestar: like som1 talk in ur mouth som1 put words in ur mouth.

  lonestar: got it?

  Damsel: Got it.

  lonestar: gr8.

  lonestar: feel ur way.

  Damsel: I feel your way.

  Damsel: Lone?

  Damsel: Miss you.

  lonestar: missu2.

  lonestar: go west.

  Damsel: But I have so many questions.

  Damsel: ??

  No reply, and when she glanced at the box she could see charmincarmen now up and online. For a while she stared at the two names fixed in the upper-right corner of her screen, as if waiting for them to do something. She felt she was spying somehow, and clicked the corner X to close the box. A half hour later, after finishing The Scarlet Letter, she fired out another question mark.

  lonestar is not currently signed on.

  Go West. That’s all Sulekha had been doing for the decade since coming to America. For a moment, her classmates were fascinated with her culture: There was a brief hip wink when they turned expectant faces to her over desktops and under monkey bars and looked for kamasutronic elucidation to shoot out from the space between her brows and zap them enlightened. Madonna was doing yoga. But Madonna was also having sex (which, it occurred to Sulekha, must have been pretty good with all that yoga). A few indie movies with Indie themes came out and played at the art-house cinemas near college campuses. Movies with Indians playing—Indians! And Indians—having sex!

  None did yoga.

  At first her parents had been excited about this focus on the motherland, but subsequently didn’t know quite what to make of it when it came packaged for America. Sulekha was not one of the new harmoniously whole South Asians, like her sister was determined to be in her new interdisciplinary life. She didn’t like bindis—she had enough to contend with in the form of round red facial explosions that occasionally, irreverently, appeared left of center, like one of Carmen’s stickons with faulty adhesive. Sulk begged for a nose ring in India, but no longer wanted it in East River, ever since she’d been asked on the seesaw if it was a perma-booger (a thump as she slid off and bumped her gnomelike interrogator to the sandy ground). Her parents refused to let the hole close, insisting it looked lovely on her. But then, years later, when they saw that half the girls at Royal Oak sported a nasal stud, they urged Sulekha to take it out.

  —Why now? Sulk had asked, joining the tiny diamond with its pair in her ballerina box.

  —Because we can’t make them take it off, her mother replied.

  The hole didn’t close. Sulekha’s tongue weakened. She found asafetida disturbing and cayenne too hot. She had to spoon sugar in her mouth to stop the burning.

  —You had no trouble with that in India, her mother worried.

  But the same tongue in a new American context tasted things differently. Sulekha longed for the spaghetti and meat-balls at Carmen’s, the twinklingly lenient TV dinners at Gemma’s, doughnuts that left your fingers shiny and sticky and salaciously oozed yellow cream.

  So no yoga, no bindis, no nose ring (but a nose hole); no Bharat Nãtyam, no vegetarianism, better Spanish than Marathi. The Bees were tongue-cluckingly disappointed; it had been an opportunity for Sulekha to redeem herself for her difference, to exoticize it, and she’d failed miserably. To make matters worse, Sulk didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t party, and she certainly didn’t kiss. She did study; she did get good grades. She did think about drinking, smoking, and kissing.

  Still she couldn’t actually see herself engaging in these activities. It would be like picturing her parents. But she could imagine Carmen and Sledge, Carmen and Lane, Marisa and Ethan, and, mostly, Gemma. She didn’t have to conjure much with Carmen, who thrived on sharing technique in the gym at school dances. Or Marisa, who spilled all the d’s for the Bees and seemed to enjoy that more than doing it, even. That was all they ever talked about, in fact. They were on to more advanced forms of kissing these days—capital K, with other body parts— but it was all the same set of hieroglyphics to Sulk.r />
  Envisioning herself with one of the boymen was tough; she was always invisible in these equations, the boys even more delineated in her mind than they were in the lockered halls before her. With Gemma it was just the opposite. Gemma kissed invisible boys in Sulekha’s mind. Sometimes the boys shape-shifted, from Lane to strangers to Omar Sharif. But always at the meltiest end of Sulk’s imaginings they vanished again.

  Now she recalled an image from a movie she’d once seen: a woman stripped to skin on a wild horse at a hacienda, doubly bareback. She couldn’t remember much else about the film. But she could hear the hooves strike dust, see the surrender of flesh on flesh, human hip on horse’s haunch, and that flying, fiery hair, like a flag to somewhere else.

  Her hands worked a swirling script between her legs till the ache spasmed, left her throbbingly boneless in the swivel chair. She lay back panting gently, feeling ashamed and amazed.

  Sulekha finished her homework. She helped her mother with the rest of the meal, chopping up onions under cold water, crushing cardamom with mortar and pestle. She cleaned up after, careful to twist-tie the excess oil into double plastic bags so as not to clog the drain, wiping the floury countertops back to peach. She poured iceless water into stainless-steel cups, folded paper-towel triangles, and laid it all out: fresh saag studded with garlic cloves, sweet thick dahl and rice, okra.

  Her father was home early, whistling as he entered as if a golden retriever might be waggingly waiting around the corner. He washed his hands, Sulk’s mother washed hers, and then Sulekha did, too, at the kitchen tap. At the table, which was square, her sister’s spot, as usual, gaped.

  —So Reshem cannot come until Sunday, Daddy, her mother told her father. —Too much busy-busy college business. She has to think .

  —About what? She can think here, can’t she? her father wondered.

  —Apparently not.

  —Baby, beta, I hope you’re not too disappointed, he said, turning anxious eyes to Sulekha. —I know you’re missing your sister these days.