by Barry Lyga
Aneesa and her mother arrive home to find Joe and me fragging aliens in Halo. I suck at it, my reflexes dulled from years of Intellivision and Atari 5200 games. Mr. Fahim doesn’t care. He claims I’m better than his wife, but not as good as Aneesa, which is “the sweet spot.”
Aneesa seems rattled to see me. A silent communication passes between her and her father, then her father and her mother, and then the adults leave us alone together in the living room.
“How are you doing?” she asks.
I’ve imagined this moment for a while now, speaking both sides of the conversation in my head, configuring and reconfiguring her responses and my responses to her responses, constructing a conversational flowchart designed to land me at the optimal conclusion.
And in an instant, I toss it out. Small talk and caution will get me nowhere.
“You told me the truth,” I tell her, “the last time we saw each other.”
“Not all of it,” she says, interrupting my flow.
“What do you mean?”
She fidgets for a moment. Then: “Look. I was afraid. Moving here. It’s not exactly—”
“Not exactly the most diverse place.”
“Yeah. And I was worried about fitting in, and I grabbed hold of the first friend I could find. And then we actually became good friends. Such good friends. And I felt bad that you wanted more.…”
“Don’t worry about… Look, just… It’s time for me to tell you the truth.”
From my pocket, I produce five sheets of paper, stapled together. I hand them to her.
Without a word, she scans the top sheet. Says “Oh” very quietly. And then she reads.
I guess I had hoped—or some part of me had, in any event—that it would make her cry. It doesn’t. It just makes her quiet for a long time, longer than it takes to read.
Finally, she speaks: “So, not to put pressure on you or anything, but I totally have an idea for a new pizza.” The bounce and the lilt of her voice are like a balm, like a good memory too long neglected.
“Since when do you come up with the recipes?” I challenge her.
“Hear me out: deconstructed pizza.”
I blink, then grin. I can already see it: thin wafers of crust with a tomato dipping sauce and cheese wheels on the side. “Derridare I?” I ask her.
Just like I knew she would, she catches my Derrida pun and fires back: “I de Man you do so!”
She returns my grin, and for an instant, none of it ever happened. Which is wrong because our lives are the sum of our mistakes as well as our triumphs, right?
But the grin is good and so is mine, and it feels right, and then she sighs and brandishes the rolled-up papers. “This, by the way?”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
We wallow in a moment of blissful silence.
And she looks up at me, impassive for a moment before the eyebrows arch in that Aneesa way, and she says, “You’re pretty much the best person I’ve ever known. I wish I were in love with you.”
“That’s okay.”
“Are you really going to turn this in for a grade?”
I nod. “Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow
Sebastian Cody
ACAS Assignment
October 28
Period 1
Assignment: Write a personal essay about a significant event in your life, and what you would or would not change about it.
BOY, 4, SHOOTS, KILLS INFANT SISTER
That’s what you want to hear about, isn’t it? That’s what you want to know. You want to know what happened and how it happened, the things that don’t make it into the news, the things that never leave my head, the things my mother said, the things my father did.
But you don’t get those things. They’re not yours.
And besides: That moment was not my most influential. That moment does not define me. I’ve never even read that article, only the headline.
When I was four years old, I killed my baby sister. It was an accident, but not the sort that you can apologize for and fix. You cannot repair this mistake; it lives on.
So do I.
I thought my sister was consigned to the memory hole, that she’d been erased from the world as a consequence of my actions. But I’ve come to realize recently that even the things in the memory hole still existed. They still happened. Just because Big Brother tried to make them disappear forever didn’t mean they never existed in the first place, no matter how well-executed the erasure. If there’s one Winston who defies Big Brother and fails, there will be another who succeeds. Someone has to destroy and re-create the documents. Someone knows. Someone remembers.
Everyone thinks “poor kid.” Everyone thinks “Thank God that’s not me.” But you know what? I’m okay being me. No matter how bad it’s been for me, it’s been worse for someone else.
This essay is supposed to prepare me to think about myself critically, a way of examining myself in preparation for writing a college application. So I want to say this: Any college that wants to hear about something that happened when I was four years old—any person who wants to hear about it—is crazy. It’s impossible to apply autocriticism or self-reflection to something so remote.
And it’s also ridiculous to expect teenagers to have a “significant event” in their lives that is even worth writing an essay about. Some will, but most won’t. And as a consequence, your end result is essays that inflate the common and the mundane into the spectacular and the unexpected, all to meet the criteria of an assignment whose value is dubious at best. It’s encouraging solipsism of the worst sort. Better off asking us to describe some significant world event and how we responded to it. Or some small event that no one cares about, but we do, and then explain why.
Because here’s something else that I’ve learned—rarely do the “significant events” in our lives change us. At least, not in any way we want. The people who suffer tragedy and go on to greatness? They’re the stuff of movies and TV shows and books, and—only very rarely—real life. Most of us just go on, the walking wounded, dealing with our lives. This doesn’t make us bad—it just means we’re not superheroes. It means we’re just people, like everyone else.
But I’ll bite. I’ll play.
In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years, I met someone new in my neighborhood: Aneesa. We quickly became friends. We bonded over a mutual sense of humor and a love of pizza, yes, but I think we bonded more over our differences than our similarities. I’m not religious, but I’m told that’s God’s point. If so, I applaud God’s thinking.
She was funny and quick-witted, and she cared for me in a way I wasn’t used to, a way I couldn’t really process. She laughed at my jokes even when they weren’t funny. She listened to me and didn’t try to fix things. She was open and kind, and when she raised her eyebrows, I thought my heart would stop beating in my chest. Unconditional acceptance. She wasn’t afraid to look at the darkness and keep smiling. Unlike everyone else, who either looked and then looked away, ashamed, or gawked.
But more important, she was different. She was like no one I’d ever met before. And, to my shame, I allowed that to consume me. I was so used to being an outcast that I thought only of what made her different, too, thinking that this bonded us, that I couldn’t possibly have anything to offer other than commiseration.
And I fell in love with her. Far too hard and far too soon. And I just assumed that the feelings were reciprocated. Not really because of anything she did—though I convinced myself certain things mattered more than they did—but mostly because that’s what I needed in the moment.
I treated her like a remedy, not a person.
Someone told me at one point that Aneesa had put me in the friend-zone. Which everyone knows is a horrible place to be. If you’ve ever seen the old movie Superman II (from 1980, and if you haven’t, you should—the Donner Cut is particularly righteous), you can imagine the friend-zone as being like the prison where they keep the villains from Super
man’s home planet—a flat, featureless mirror-like surface that spins and wheels through space for eternity, with no way out. All you can do from there is look out into the universe and see what you don’t have, what you can’t have, what you’ll never have.
She and I built something together, something not just cool, but also worthwhile. Productive, even. And fun. And I’m not going to let it go away just because of the past. I won’t let history topple tomorrow.
So, what is my significant event? I’m getting there. All of this critical self-reflection takes time. If it were quick and easy, what would be the point?
We—all of us—keep pigeonholing each other. Muslim girl eats pizza is somehow more compelling than girl eats pizza. Or just person eats pizza. Harry Potter is the boy who lived, and I’m the boy who killed. Aneesa wears hijab and everyone thinks they know who and what she is. Friend-zoned is worse than boyfriend.
And it’s all crap. Because I’m also the boy who invents pizzas, and she’s funny and fun and plays a mean oboe and—despite what some idiots say—is not out to destroy America.
I realize now that she made it possible for me not to think about other things, things I’m not going to talk about in this essay because they’re none of your business. They’re no one’s business. And that, truly, is the major life-changing moment I’m writing about. My epiphany, if you will.
Some things are private. And they should stay that way and they get to stay that way. This isn’t preschool; I don’t have to share.
I don’t have to tell unless I want to. My “significant events” can be personal and hidden and they’re still real. They still count, even if I don’t perform an autopsy on them in order to please you or some college admissions board. They’re still mine and they still matter, even if I’m not willing to take out my Aztec ceremonial mosaic-handled knife and sacrifice them on the altar of the almighty God of Grades.
The word autopsy is just a letter-swap away from being auto-spy. I’m not going to spy on myself for you. Big Brother has enough Thought Police. He doesn’t need me informing on myself.
That’s what I learned: People can wonder and ponder and imagine all they want. But their curiosity does not entitle them to enter my world.
One other thing I learned, and this one may be even more important: The key word in “friend-zone” is friend.
LOWE COUNTY TIMES
Boy, 4, Shoots, Kills Infant Sister
BROOKDALE, MD.—Police and EMTs responded to a 911 call on Tuesday night on Fox Tail Drive, where a four-year-old boy shot his infant sister, aged four months, in the head. According to police, the toddler was playing with a gun left unattended by his father. The infant was pronounced dead at the scene.
Prosecutors are declining to discuss the incident as the investigation is ongoing, but it is believed no charges will be brought. The boy’s name is being withheld since he is a minor. Consequently, the Times will not reveal the names of the parents, as that would expose the child.
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Acknowledgments
I can’t get anything done without the people who tolerate me on a daily basis and make it possible to write in the first place.
Thank you to Morgan Baden, Eric Lyga, and Paul Griffin, beta readers par excellence.
Thank you, too, to my agent, Kathleen Anderson, for always pushing her hardest, both on the books themselves and for the benefit of my career.
My editors on this book, Alvina Ling and Allison Moore, questioned me where I needed to be questioned and pushed where I needed to be pushed. Thank you so much.
Thanks also to Nikki Garcia, Kheryn Callender, Victoria Stapleton, Jessica Shoffel, Marisa Finkelstein, Jeff Campbell… the whole team at Little, Brown, especially the folks in Marketing, Sales, Publicity, and Production. It takes a lot of people to make a book… and the LB people are the best.
Special Thanks
I’m not a Muslim. So I’ve relied on research and honest talk for my portrayal of Aneesa and her family.
I am forever indebted to Zohra Ashpari, Kaye M., Ardo Omer, and my dear friend Daniel Nayeri for their time, understanding, and generosity.
This is fiction and I’m not perfect, so I’m sure I’ve made mistakes. Hopefully, they aren’t big ones.
Resources for Help
Dark thoughts? Thinking of suicide?
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
1-800-273-8255
suicidepreventionlifeline.org
Specifically for Youth:
suicidepreventionlifeline.org/help-yourself/youth/
Live Chat @ ImAlive
imalive.org
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention
afsp.org
Ending Gun Violence
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence
bradycampaign.com
Be SMART
besmartforkids.org
Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America
momsdemandaction.org
Report a Hate Crime
First, contact local law enforcement.
Then: Southern Poverty Law Center
splcenter.org/reporthate
