“Dad, it’s not normal to sleep in the middle of the afternoon.” He was about to leave, but Mohan Lal called him back. Siddharth paused, wondering if his father was going to ask him about school today. If he asked, Siddharth would tell him all about Luca and Sharon.
Instead, Mohan Lal said, “Son, come back and wake me in another ten minutes.”
Jerk, Siddharth thought. He headed to the kitchen and opened a bag of Doritos, then topped them with cheese and microwaved them. He poured out a Coke and sat by the round kitchen table on a wrought-iron chair that had been reupholstered by his mother several years earlier. After he finished his snack, he picked up the cordless phone to call his brother, though as usual, Arjun wasn’t home. His roommate said he was at the library, but Siddharth knew he was probably out drinking beer or screwing some girl. That was what people did at college, according to Sharon.
His mind returned to Sharon and what had happened today. She was his friend, and he’d acted like a coward; he would have to make it up to her. His heart was thumping rapidly—he needed to calm down. He needed to watch something. He threw on The Karate Kid, one of his favorite movies. He had seen it almost twenty times but still liked anticipating what would happen. He had discovered that rewatching a light movie could allow him to stop imagining certain things over and over, like the image of glass from the windshield piercing his mother’s eyeballs, of her seat belt slicing her neck. Movies allowed him to stop thinking about lots of things—if she had thought of him before she died, if she knew that it was all coming to an end.
* * *
As he rode the bus to school the next morning, he felt that it was going to be a bad day. Luca was going to say something to them, and then he would have to stick up for Sharon. He would defend his friend, even though Luca would mock him. Even though Luca would call him a faggot. Fortunately, the morning was totally uneventful. Nobody at school said anything to him, and he felt like he was invisible—even to his teacher, Mr. Latella. Sometimes he minded being invisible, but today it was a good thing. As the hours passed, he told himself that he’d blown everything out of proportion. He told himself that everything was totally fine.
He felt calm and contented as he plunked his tray of soggy pizza and chocolate milk onto his lunch table. While Sharon ate one of her peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, he asked her about her trumpet lesson, and if her mother and brother had made up yet. But she only responded with nods and one-word answers. He got nervous and started talking about his own life for a change. He told her about Mohan Lal’s book contract, explaining that his father would soon be a famous author. He told her that once they were rich, they would probably buy a house in Fairfield or Woodford, that his father would trade in their minivan for a Mercedes.
“Great,” said Sharon, arching her dirty-blond eyebrows. “I’m real happy for you.”
He finished his pizza and wiped the grease from his lips with a paper napkin. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone approaching. His stomach tightened, and he grabbed his neck. Shit, he thought. Fucking shit. It was Luca Peroti, and Eddie Benson and David Marcus were following behind.
The three boys sat down at an empty table nearby. At first they just sat there snickering, but then Luca started coughing. Siddharth could tell it was a fake cough. He smiled at Sharon and rolled his eyes, but she kept her gaze fixed on her plastic cup of pudding.
Luca mumbled “slut” loud enough for both of them to hear, and the other two boys started coughing too. Eddie coughed and said, “Sharon.” Then miniscule David Marcus coughed out the word “Is.” Luca kept on going with “slut.” “Sharon.” Cough. “Is.” Cough. “A slut.” Cough.
He told himself that everything would be fine, but he couldn’t untangle his neck muscles. He turned to Sharon, whose face was bright red. She said, “Get a freaking life, Luca.” The three boys chuckled. Siddharth wished she hadn’t said anything. He wished she had just remained silent and let the moment pass. He noticed that her lips had begun to quiver and realized that now was the time. The moment for him to act had arrived. But he couldn’t move. All he could do was grasp his neck and stare at Sharon. He noticed she was wearing hoop earrings today, not her usual silver studs. His mother had once said that hoop earrings were cheap. He wondered if Luca was right about her. Maybe she was a slut.
Luca and his crew restarted their chanting.
“Just leave us alone,” said Sharon. “If you had a life, you would leave us alone.”
Eddie removed his baseball cap and started looking around. “I thought I heard something,” he said. “Must have been a fly.”
Luca said, “Kid, I think you’re right. It was that slutty fly over there. I think she was talking about your mom.”
Both of Sharon’s fists were clenched. “Jesus, Luca. For God’s sake, I didn’t even do anything.”
“Yeah, right,” said Luca, still laughing.
“Those drawings,” she said. “They aren’t even mine.”
Siddharth couldn’t believe it. Was she betraying him?
“Sure,” said Eddie. “They belong to some other slut.”
Sharon turned to Siddharth with teary eyes, her lips pursed. He clutched the table and readied himself to speak. Yes, he had to do it. He had to do the right thing. For Sharon.
“Say something,” she whispered.
“Yo gaylord,” said Luca, “you gonna save your girlfriend?”
“He’s not gonna save anyone,” said Eddie. “This kid’s dad is a commie. That’s what my pop told me. I bet Siddharth’s a pussy too.”
Siddharth swallowed again, and the air went down his throat like little bits of metal. He hated Mohan Lal, but he hated Eddie more.
“Siddharth!” Sharon stood up, her eyes going wide.
“Shit,” said Luca, clapping his hands, “I think they’re breaking up.”
Siddharth gritted his teeth. Those shitty stories and those shitty illustrations—they were all her fucking idea in the first place. He suddenly realized something: he wasn’t even twelve years old, and he already had too many people to worry about. He didn’t need to worry about someone else. He didn’t need to worry about Sharon.
“What?” he said, throwing his hands in the air. “What do you want, Sharon?”
She broke into a jog and headed toward the exit. The lunch monitor yelled after her, but she kept on going.
4
My Father’s Tree Houses
Siddharth daydreamed as Mr. Latella droned on about an upcoming independent book project. Students would have to read a novel by themselves, and they would respond to it by creating an art project or a five-page report. Upon hearing this news, the class let out a collective grumble. “This is baby stuff, guys,” said Mr. Latella. “They’re gonna eat you for breakfast in junior high.” Alyssa D. raised her hand. She was one of the hot girls. Her bangs had been sprayed into a blond tidal wave. Alyssa asked the teacher if she could read To Kill a Mockingbird, and Mr. Latella said he would be impressed if she could manage such a big book. He gave her a high five, her reward for saying something that pleased him.
Siddharth gave his head an almost imperceptible shake. Alyssa D. was an ass-kisser—what his father called a brown-noser. Mohan Lal had told him to avoid brown-nosers. Siddharth turned toward the window and stared at a few ravens sipping water from a puddle on the crumbling tennis courts. A dream from last night was looping in his mind. In it, his mother had returned from the dead. But she had cancer and would only survive for three more months. When Siddharth started crying, his brother punched him in the arm. “This is objectively good news,” said Arjun. “It’s good news, and you should be grateful.”
Over the past two weeks, Siddharth had had several bad dreams, and his life had become painfully lonely. After the incident with Luca Peroti, Sharon had started sitting at a new lunch table on the other side of the cafeteria, which contained a mixture of girls—girls who seemed younger than their age and talked about horses, and girls with tight shirts and too much hairspra
y who hooked up with older boys from West Haven. When Mr. Latella noticed Siddharth eating alone, he made him sit at a table with freaks like Bobby Meyers. Bobby was practically a midget and had lots of acne, and he always dressed as if he were attending a dinner party. His grandfather was from Russia, so people called him a commie too.
Siddharth could have hung out with Bobby during recess, but he usually preferred to remain alone. Sometimes he got a special pass for the library so that he could read or draw. Occasionally Mr. Latella let him stay inside and do things around the classroom, like staple portraits of Jackie Robinson and Ronald Reagan to the rear bulletin board. As Siddharth completed these chores, Mr. Latella lectured him. He said that it wasn’t healthy for young people to be so solitary, which made Siddharth want to punch him in the face. But he just shrugged, explaining that being alone gave him a chance to think. Mr. Latella told him that a sixth grader shouldn’t spend so much time thinking.
The crows outside leaped from the tennis court to a rusty fence that was slowly collapsing. As Mr. Latella babbled on about the independent book project, Siddharth sat at his desk wishing he could go back in time, like in one of his favorite movies. If he could go back in time, he would do the right thing with Sharon. He would tell Luca Peroti the truth about his drawings. A few days earlier, he had tried calling Sharon to apologize. Her brother said, “Hang on a sec,” but then came back to say that she wasn’t home. As Siddharth recalled the phone call, anger smoldered inside of him and burned away his remorse. Screw Sharon, he thought. He decided he was glad about what he had done. He was glad that her parents had gotten divorced. She deserved that—for being such a bitch to him.
A loud bang went off near his right ear.
He jumped in his chair, and his eyes flashed open. Everything was blurry for a second, and he struggled to remember where he was. He turned his head to find Mr. Latella standing a few feet away from him. He had no idea how long he’d zoned out for. He had no idea why his teacher was staring at him. He swallowed, tried to moisten his mouth, but his tongue felt like one of the crinkled leaves outside the window.
Mr. Latella’s hairy, ringed fingers were grasping Siddharth’s desk, and he was breathing hard. Like an angry bull. “Earth to Siddharth,” said Mr. Latella. “Where exactly are you right now, Mr. Arora?”
He shook his head to straighten out his mind. Everyone’s eyes were on him, and he needed to do something. He needed to prove that he was normal. What if he pushed Mr. Latella’s hand off his desk? What if he said something funny—that there was a girl outside who was so slutty that she was fooling around with a black crow?
“I asked you a question,” said Mr. Latella. “Do you have any ideas for a book?”
“A book?” he whispered. Alyssa D. caught his eye. She was smiling. Did she want to help him? No, she was holding her chin. She was holding her chin to keep from laughing.
“For your independent book project?” Mr. Latella wheezed between his words. “The one we’ve been discussing for the last twenty minutes?”
Come on, he told himself. Think, you idiot.
Mr. Latella gripped his fat, red neck and put one of his wingtip shoes on an empty chair. “You’re in sixth grade now, Siddharth. Do you really think this type of behavior is appropriate?”
Bastard, thought Siddharth. The classroom was silent for a few seconds—seconds that felt like hours. He closed his eyes, hoping that his teacher would vanish. But when he opened them, Mr. Latella was still glaring at him. His mind returned to the concept of time travel. If time travel were possible, he would go back to last July, when there was no school. When his brother was still at home. No, he would go further back. He would go back to his mother’s last day on earth. He would intercept the call from the hospital and say that she wasn’t home.
Luca Peroti shouted, “Hey, Mr. Latella!”
“Not now, Luca.”
“But I have a question.”
“What?”
“What about Playboy?” said Luca. “Can I read a Playboy for my project?”
Siddharth relaxed for a moment. Was Luca trying to help him?
Mr. Latella’s mouth was wide open, but the wall phone buzzed before he could reprimand Luca. He took the call, then pointed at Siddharth and snapped his fingers. “Today’s your lucky day, mister. Ms. Farber wants you—on the double.”
Luca said, “Yo, Siddharth, have fun in the retard room.”
The entire class broke into laughter.
With his eyes fixed on the floor, Siddharth grabbed his backpack and left the classroom.
* * *
He sipped some water at the handicap fountain, then grazed his fingers against the smooth cinder-block walls. He palmed the cold steel of a bright red fire extinguisher, wondering what would happen if he pulled a fire alarm. Today he wasn’t in the mood for Ms. Farber. He didn’t feel like hearing about the different stages of grief. He didn’t feel like hearing about the way death changed your relationship with the people you love, so that grieving people have to mourn twice—for the people they lost, and for the people who are still living but will never be the same again. Today he wasn’t in the mood for any of that bullshit.
The first time he saw Ms. Farber was at the beginning of fifth grade. Mohan Lal hadn’t told anybody at Deer Run Elementary about Siddharth’s mother, but his teacher, Miss Kleinberg, sensed there was some sort of problem. She thought he was too quiet, so she referred him to Ms. Farber. Ms. Farber had called him and Mohan Lal into her office, and she asked them if Siddharth’s mother was a fluent English speaker. She said, “I know you’re a professional, Dr. Arora. But what about your wife? When one parent doesn’t speak the language, it can have a serious impact on the child’s vocalization.”
Despite that dreadful initial encounter, over the past year Siddharth had actually enjoyed some of his visits to Ms. Farber’s office. Since their initial meeting, he had been to her office eleven times. Sometimes they talked about simple things, like his favorite television shows or what he was reading at school. Ms. Farber asked him whether he missed his family in India, about the differences between his two schools. He told her that his old school was better, but that all schools sucked. India was dirty and poor, though his father’s older brother was rich. This brother had two drivers and had just gotten cable television. When Ms. Farber asked him how his father was doing, he usually lied. He told her that Mohan Lal was going on three-mile walks every day, that he cooked a three-course dinner every night.
Ms. Farber sometimes asked him to draw pictures. She usually let him draw whatever he wanted, so he made mountains with ponds and evergreen trees, just like his mother had taught him, or he sketched cubes and bowls and then painstakingly shaded them in. One time, she asked him if he would be willing to draw a picture of his family, so he’d made a quick sketch featuring him, Mohan Lal, and Arjun. He thought that their bodies and clothes had come out realistically. Their facial features, however, were the work of a child. Ms. Farber held up his sketch and smiled. She told him he was very talented, and that she also liked to draw. “Honey, do you mind if I ask you something?” He shrugged. She said, “Is someone missing from your picture? You don’t have to talk about it, but I think someone might be missing.” He had wanted to say, Duh, what the hell do you think?—but he just looked down and bit a piece of skin from the inside of his mouth.
He took his time walking down the hallway to her office. He paused outside her door, hypothesizing about what they would talk about. Had she heard about his fight with Sharon? Had she found out about the illustrations he had made for her stories? If she’d been told about them, she would think he was some sort of pervert. When he peeked in through the glass pane above her doorknob, it felt as if someone had kicked him in the groin. His father was right there in Ms. Farber’s office.
Mohan Lal was sitting on a tiny student chair at the reading table; his knees jutted upward, almost to the level of his thick black bifocals. Siddharth prayed that he was either dreaming or hallucinating. He
bit down hard on his tongue but didn’t wake up. This was real. And the fact that his father was at school could only mean bad things. Either they’d found out he was a pervert or something was wrong with Arjun.
As he stared into Ms. Farber’s office, he was astonished by what was happening. Ms. Farber was leaning her head back and laughing. He had been imagining the worst, but Mohan Lal was grinning. He was grinning and talking and gesturing with his hands, the way he used to tell jokes at dinner parties—the way he used to discuss politics with Barry Uncle when they were drinking. Saliva flooded Siddharth’s mouth. Bitter saliva. It tasted like battery acid.
He pushed open the door. Mohan Lal turned toward him and waved.
“Good morning, Siddharth,” said Ms. Farber, flashing her toothy smile. He liked her, but he didn’t like that fake smile. She was wearing a white jacket with puffy shoulders. It looked weird, or maybe Oriental, and the shiny scarf around her neck seemed foreign too. Mohan Lal was wearing a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, and a yellow tie that Siddharth and Arjun had given him on Father’s Day three years earlier. Mohan Lal patted the empty chair beside him, and Siddharth took a seat. He scrunched up his face and gave his father a look that was supposed to convey several questions. What the hell is going on? How could you do this to me again? Is everything okay with Arjun? Mohan Lal winked at him, then turned to Ms. Farber.
“You really said that, Dr. Arora? And they really believed you? I tell you, you need to write that one down and send it to the New Yorker.”
Mohan Lal grinned at her. “If I did, people would think it was a fiction.”
Ms. Farber shook her head and smiled. “Well, thankfully, not everyone in this country is quite so ignorant.”
“Of that I am certain,” said Mohan Lal, pointing his right hand toward Ms. Farber. “And you can’t blame the people. They only know what they are taught by media.”
“Oh, you’re being too nice,” she replied. “I mean, tree houses? Come on. How could they think that about such a well-spoken man?”
South Haven Page 5
