It is an excellent spot for watching everyone without being noticed. Most students use the main doors to exit the building and cross the street to the tiny pizza parlor on the other side. Moments later, they emerge again, carrying big slices on cardboard trays. Though I can’t see the pizza from here, I guess by the happy expressions on their faces that it’s a lot better than the cafeteria’s unappetizing version.
Though the canteen at Qala Academy is little better than the Arthur Eldridge cafeteria, no student is allowed to leave campus for lunch over there, especially not the girls. Alisha often grumbled about the double standards surrounding this decision—“At the boys’ section, the seniors are allowed to go out with permission! Admin acts like we can’t even cross the road alone because we’re girls!” In this particular instance, I understand why she keeps calling me lucky to have moved to Canada.
I look at my lunch for the day—cucumbers and cream cheese on brown bread. “I’m tired of eating dosa all the time,” I told Amma last week. With the stress of settling in, I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth. How on my first day here, when I opened my plastic box to the mouthwatering scent of a paper-thin rava dosa and coconut chutney, I heard a girl behind me complain about the “stinky curry smell” in the lunchroom.
I bite into the sandwich, wondering what it would have been like if I had screwed up the courage to turn around and educate the girl about the difference between curries and chutneys, to point out that if it was made in France, the dosa would be called a savory crepe. But in that moment my body simultaneously grew hot and cold, cheeks burning with embarrassment, jaw frozen shut, the way it always does in these situations. The comeback, as usual, came long after, when I was home in bed.
The cream cheese sticks to the roof of my mouth. I crumple the aluminum foil I packed the sandwich in, molding it into a hard silver ball.
To distract myself, I pull out my sketchbook and draw the beginnings of a face: an elderly Indian woman I saw on the city bus this morning. She wore a sari and coat, her socked feet stuffed into Crocs. I outline her mouth, the gentle slope of her nose, the small, bright eyes that twinkled when she saw me looking. Once I have the basic shapes done, I add texture and shadow: crosshatching the arch of her feathery brows, rounding out the lower half of her right cheek, emphasizing the slight indent in her chin. I’m drawing from memory, which means I’m likely getting some of the details wrong, but my new art teacher Ms. Nguyen said it’s good practice to draw faces to scale—even as a caricaturist. “You need to learn the rules first if you intend to break them,” she told me.
After a few moments, I’m stretching my arms out, trying to relieve them, when I spy a shadow from the corner of my left eye.
It’s him. The boy from English. Malcolm Vakil or the Troublemaker as I think of him, with his spiky hair, baggy jeans, and thick silver chain around his neck. Up close, his nose is flatter and even more off center than I first perceived. Earlier this week, I tried to draw a caricature of him, focusing on the nose and that terrible porcupine hairstyle. Caricature comes from the Latin carricare, which means to load or exaggerate. By its very essence, it should have allowed me to focus on his imperfections, reminding me that he isn’t as attractive as I once thought. Instead, I found myself outlining his strong jaw and the scar on his chin that could almost be mistaken for a cleft. I spent nearly an hour with my watercolors trying to match the exact shade of his eyes, which are unlike any I’ve seen before: brown with gray circling the pupils.
His stares make me nervous. Then there’s that jolt I felt in the classroom when his hand brushed mine. I don’t know what to make of it, what to make of him. When Alisha and I envisioned a boyfriend from my new school, we went the usual unimaginative Prince Charming route. Blond hair. Blue eyes. A younger Duke of Cambridge lookalike without the British accent and the bald head. Only, in the time I’ve been here, no white boy has ever caught and held my attention for longer than a few beats.
I watch the tall bearded boy next to Malcolm—Ahmed Sharif, I think his name is. I’ve seen Ahmed several times in my building. He lives a couple of floors above mine and each time we run across each other in the elevator, he nods at me and smiles. I’ve now slowly begun to smile back. Ahmed does not intimidate me the way the other boys at school do, does not make my skin break into goose bumps every time he’s in my presence, the way Malcolm does.
As if sensing my thoughts, Malcolm turns, his eyes finding mine. A side of his mouth curves up. A smile. I snap my book shut and tear my gaze away, pretending to look for something inside my bag. I don’t look up. Not when they approach the staircase I’m sitting on. Not even when the toe of Malcolm’s sneaker lightly nudges mine on the way in.
I do nothing until their voices disappear, contained once again by the door behind me clanging shut. My breath rushes out, as if I’ve been holding it for too long, and I feel like an idiot because of it.
I pick up my phone and scan it for texts and emails. A forwarded message from Appa with a link to the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto: You should go with Amma. Picture texts, mostly quotes from the Bible and jokes in Malayalam from family members in India. Nothing from Alisha even though I can see she read the long text I sent her last night.
“Come on,” I mutter. “What kind of friend are you?”
It’s two weeks into September and the trees are ablaze with yellows and reds. September is mock-exams prep month at Qala Academy, when everyone from Classes X and XII starts studying for the central board exams set in New Delhi, India. Unlike regular school exams for other classes, which start and end in February, the boards start in March and can go all the way up to April, depending on which subjects you’ve taken. Brutally designed and unforgivingly marked, these exams decide the fate of every Indian who graduates from a CBSE-affiliated school anywhere in the world and plans on applying to colleges in India. Alisha told me once that the most competitive colleges evaluate your board exam results from both Classes X and XII, making the process even more challenging.
The memory of this makes me feel simultaneously relieved and guilty. Of course Alisha hasn’t forgotten me. She has exams to deal with. Also, as head girl, she has more work piled on her than before. I now feel silly over my jealousy about the Instagram video she and my old classmates posted about their visit to the art museum in Al-Balad. It’s not Alisha’s problem that I haven’t been able to make a friend at school yet. Rationally, I know this.
But Alisha isn’t here. In a country where, in spite of speaking the same language as others, she would be judged on the South Indian lilt to her accent rather than on her words. Buffered by the same girls she grew up with since kindergarten, my best friend does not feel the sting of being snubbed outside classes or the bone-deep loneliness that settles in at seeing groups of kids chatting together at recess. I’m about to go back into the school building, when a voice calls out my name.
“Hey, Susan! Wait up!”
A girl I recognize vaguely from physics appears from somewhere in the middle of the parking lot, her bright blue jacket capturing my attention first and later her eyes: a pale azure tint that matches the September sky behind thick, black, square-framed glasses.
“Heather Dupuis,” she says, holding out a hand before I make the attempt at recalling her name. “We’re in physics together.”
“I know. I mean, I’ve seen you.”
I clamp my mouth shut. Two weeks of not speaking at length to a classmate and I automatically lose the ability to form sentences. But Heather only smiles. She wears skinny jeans ripped at the thighs and knees, a soft white sweater, and the lightest traces of lip gloss and liner. Her freckled cheeks are free of makeup and her curly red hair is braided neatly over one shoulder.
I force myself to not look at my own outfit: jeans bought to spite my mother who called them “elephant-legged” and the oversize red polo I carelessly dumped into a handcart at Walmart without even trying it on.
“I’m sorry for interrupting your lunch,” Heather says, eve
n though I’m clearly finished and she is not interrupting anything. “But do you happen to have this weekend’s physics homework on you?”
“Sure.” I unzip my bag to pull out the strange three-ring-binder that I use now instead of actual notebooks and pull out the sheet where I scribbled down the homework. “You can keep this if you want.”
“What?” Her eyebrows shoot up. “Won’t you need it as well?”
“Page 42. 1a, 2c, 5d, e, and f.” I recite the assigned problems from memory. “I think I’ll be okay.”
Heather grins, impressed. “Wow! That’s amazing. Do you have a photographic memory or something?”
I shrug, partly pleased, partly embarrassed. “I’m good at remembering things.”
The sort of memory that’s both a blessing and a curse because I remember everything I read. Word for word.
“Wow, I wish I was that good at remembering things. I can barely remember my locker combination most days.” Heather tucks the paper into her binder. “Thanks so much! You’re the best.”
“You’re welcome,” I say, smiling at the genuine gratitude in her tone. At Qala Academy, all I would’ve received for any kind of help I gave out was a nod and a quick Thanks—like nothing less was expected from the Smartest Girl in Class. As Heather leaves, my phone buzzes, the screen lighting up with a text.
Alisha: hey! sorry didn’t write back before! wanna chat this weekend?
I grin. Yes! I text back. I feel like we haven’t talked in WEEKS!
Alisha: MONTHS
Alisha: NO YEARS
Alisha: WHY’D YOU GO TO CANADA AND TAKE MY BFF WITH YOU????
I text back a series of heart emojis, my world temporarily restored.
* * *
I drew a caricature of my physics teacher at Qala Academy in Class XI, during an especially boring chapter on relative velocity. While Verghese Madam stood by the blackboard and lectured, I added details to the sketch in my notebook. A flaring nostril. A curl matted to the forehead. An extra layer of flab under the starched folds of Verghese’s gold-bordered kanjivaram sari.
It took thirty minutes for Alisha to give the game away, the snort lodged in her nostrils bursting into the air like a fart in the middle of a eulogy. It took another thirty seconds for Verghese to locate the culprit—Soo-sun!—before throwing a piece of chalk at my head and telling me to report to the headmistress for disrupting the class.
At Arthur Eldridge, it takes a grand total of two weeks for our English teacher to scold Malcolm for snickering with Ahmed in the back row. On the other hand, it takes about three seconds for Malcolm to smile in response and tell Mr. Zuric to screw off.
Mr. Zuric, with bachelor’s degrees in arts and education and a master’s in English literature, according to the biography in my course outline, a man twice as tall as Malcolm, blinks like an animal caught in the headlights of a van. His thick, pigmented hands fumble with the clip-on tie at his throat.
“What did you say?”
“I said, screw off,” Malcolm repeats calmly. “Sir.”
Giggles erupt in the classroom. Beside me Steve begins mumbling gibberish the way Mr. Zuric does when he’s talking out loud to himself or writing something on the blackboard. It makes Ahmed slam a hand on the table before covering his face, shoulders shaking.
“You shouldn’t say such things,” Mr. Zuric says, his face pink, his humiliation as palpable as the dried gum on the underside of my desk.
Our English teacher can recite yards of Shakespeare without looking into a book. But he is incapable of handling a rowdy class—especially a boy like Malcolm, who’ll walk out, whistling, before Mr. Zuric even thinks of throwing him out.
After class, I’ve often seen Malcolm mimicking Mr. Zuric’s unintelligible responses for his friends. He usually performs the acts right in front of my locker, leaning against the metal door, rotating the numerals of the sleek gold, single-digit combination lock Dad sent me from Jeddah. It’s my lock that interests him, I suppose: the only gold one in a row of round double-digit steel combination locks with fat bellies and dark blue dials. Whenever I approach, he moves away with a grin on his face—the same grin he gave me the day before school started, when I was looking at him from my bedroom window, still thinking about stupid things like being able to talk to a boy.
I no longer want to talk to Malcolm. And I think he senses that from the way he smiles whenever I hurry away, preferring to lug my four-pound textbooks in a backpack rather than putting them away in a roomy metal cabinet.
“Malcolm Vakil? He’s not even handsome,” I overheard a girl say in physics class this morning.
“Yeah, but he’s so … cool.” A giggle. “That don’t-care attitude of his? It can be a turn-on.”
“He’s still giving old Zuric a hard time. It was funny at first, but now it’s only getting disruptive.”
“Malcolm wasn’t always like this,” Heather Dupuis said. “I still remember him from middle school. He was really nice back then. Friendly. The teachers thought he would be on the honor roll. But everything changed after his mom … well, you know. One day he came to school with bruises over his face. He told the teacher it was a biking accident, but everyone knew he was in a fight of some sort. He always is.”
The conversation remains at the back of my mind, bubbles to surface in English class, when once again Mr. Zuric calls Malcolm to the front to pick up his assignment and the latter deliberately aggravates him by taking more time than needed.
On the way back, Malcolm slides his fingers across my desk. When I look up, he raises an eyebrow and winks. I glare at him wishing that Mr. Zuric could, like Verghese Madam, throw a piece of chalk at that spiky little head and hit the mark with painful accuracy.
* * *
On Saturday morning, Amma and I go shopping at the Indian grocery store about ten blocks away from our condo, Amma muttering all the way about how inconvenient it is to lug our groceries back home on a crowded bus and how awful the transit system is over here. She’s talking so loudly on the way back home that, at one point, a couple of other passengers on the bus turn around and watch us with raised eyebrows.
“Amma, please!” I finally snap, feeling embarrassed. “People are staring. Also, I don’t see what the big deal is. Other people take the bus, too!”
It’s only when I finish that I register the silence around us, the smirks on the faces of some of the passengers, the fury and shame in my mother’s eyes before she turns away from me.
When we get back to the condo, Amma and I are no longer talking and I’m more than ready to lock myself in my room with my homework.
Can’t wait for our call, I text Alisha, wishing I didn’t have to wait another whole hour to Skype her. The message remains unread and, after a few minutes, I decide to get a head start on my calculus problem set.
An hour passes by. I log on, figuring Alisha will be here in a few minutes. When I finish the calculus, I look up: ten minutes gone. I send her a text—waiting for you—and decide to check Facebook. Another four minutes. By the time Alisha finally pops online, another whole hour has passed by, interspersed with a slew of missed calls and unread texts from my end.
“I’m so, so sorry, Suzy! I turned off my phone and my headphones were plugged into the computer!” Alisha lets out a whoosh of air. “With that badminton final against Abu Dhabi and that English debate on Monday, it’s so busy right now, I’ve barely any time to breathe!”
I’m tempted to tell her that I’m busy, too. The time I spent waiting for her could easily have been spent working on the King Lear essay that Mr. Zuric assigned us this Friday, five minutes before class ended. But seeing Alisha’s frazzled face now, her hair a mess the way it usually is after studying long hours, I feel my annoyance dissipate. “It’s okay.”
I tell her about my new school and classes, pleased when she laughs at my commentary about the cafeteria food. I also bring up the locker situation, finally admitting that it—Malcolm, a voice in my head corrects—bothers me more than I expe
cted.
“Ignore him,” Alisha says. “What’s the point of having a locker if you don’t use it? I’d kill to have a locker!”
“I’m not used to it.” This is partially true. There are, after all, no lockers at Qala Academy. “Alisha, he … he stares at me. It makes me uncomfortable.”
“What do you mean, he stares at you?” A frown mars Alisha’s forehead. “Is he like, being perverted or something?”
“No,” I say slowly. “It’s not like that.”
Malcolm does not leer at me or block my way when I need to use my locker. He always looks me in the face, as if mapping its contours, those too-pretty eyes of his clouding over with disappointment when he doesn’t find what he’s looking for.
“You know what, forget it. Forget I said anything.”
“Hmmm.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What you’re not used to is boys hitting on you.”
“He’s not hitting on me!” I clap my hands over my mouth and whip my head around to make sure Amma is nowhere near my room.
Alisha rolls her eyes. “Chill, no one’s there. Let’s go back to this Malcolm dude—”
“Let’s not,” I interrupt, regretting having brought up the topic in the first place. “He’s not important and it doesn’t matter in any case. I barely use that locker. I don’t have gym or a class where I’d need it to store clothes or stuff like that.”
“What about art? Don’t you need to store supplies?”
I say nothing.
“You are taking art, aren’t you?”
“Yes, yes, I am. But we don’t need to. Get supplies, that is. The teacher provides everything here.”
The teacher, Ms. Nguyen, who is only a few years older than us, squealed with delight when she saw my caricatures. “This is so good!” she said, holding up the one I made of Verghese Madam. “Almost professional.” She even asked me to do something with them for my final project, worth 30 percent of the class grade.
The Beauty of the Moment Page 4
