by Laura Goode
I smile calmly. “My homies are super special. They threw me a birthday party.”
“Yes! And it’s better that way.” Dr. Rudra pats me on the elbow. “You girls have enough to worry about, between making excellent grades and working on your music. Rohini never lets me hear any of it, of course, even though I’d like to.” She looks meaningfully at her daughter, who doesn’t respond.
“I’ll rap for you, Dr. R.,” I say shyly. Rowie’s head jolts up like she’s been electroshocked. “Don’t worry, Ro, I’ll keep it PG. Mostly. Marce, can you drop me a beat?”
“Oh, good!” Rowie’s mom claps again, looking delighted. “I’m so curious, and Rohini won’t indulge me.”
“Unbelievable.” Rowie hides her head in her hands.
“I know just how you feel. Okay, be warned that this is, like, a super rough draft. SheStorm?”
Marcy beatboxes a mid-tempo backbeat. I take out my notebook and open it to the new lyrics I’ve been toying around with. Go, I will myself.
“When I was just a young one, my papa told me
‘Girl, you gotta be your own girl, wield your words like guns
You gotta keep it peaceful but you gotta play it tight
Gotta treat your people like you see what’s wrong and right
You gotta be a smart girl, best be erudite
Ain’t no one gonna tell you how to be your own light.’
Then my mama up and left me
When I was teeny-weeny
When I asked my daddy why
He said she needed to be free.
We all gettin’ free, gettin’ free, been gettin’ free since ought-three
I got my bitches in their niches and we all be gettin’ free
I got this open can o’ whoop-ass and a fire in my eye
So I gotta ask my mama, gotta ask her why
She couldn’t stick around and couldn’t realize
That I was driving sideways and needed her to guide, fighting eyes open to a mama gone blind
And I say hey mama, hey mama, why you up and fly?
I’m seventeen now and I don’t know how to cry
Don’t know how to grow or how to prettify
How to clarify, verify or bear this burden till I die.”
There’s more, but I’m so keyed up and out of breath that I have to stop.
Dr. Rudra is looking at me with a strange expression on her face. She reaches out and takes my hand. The girls are silent.
“I think that sometimes you don’t think that anyone is listening,” she says very slowly, “but you must believe that we are listening. You have something to say, and we are listening.”
“Girl, is that some new flow?” Rowie asks, her intoning all the same shades as her mother’s. “I don’t think I’ve heard it before.”
This is all getting kind of heavy now. It’s so much easier being a smartass.
“Yeah, it’s just some shit — oh, fuck, sorry — some stuff I’ve been dicking around with.” I wish everyone would go back to their lunch.
Rowie smiles a little mournfully; there’s something faraway in her voice. “I didn’t know you could do that shit without me.”
Dr. Rudra says something rapid and snappish to Rowie in Bengali. Rowie mutters a word or two back and shuffles in her chair, crossing her arms. She cracks a grin at us.
“She told me to watch my mouth.”
We laugh. “Rowie’s got some bad influences on her,” I say. “Dangerous American hussies.”
“Yo, Ezbones, we should lay down some beats to what you were just spitting,” Marcy throws in. “It was — that was real.”
“Couldn’t help but notice you hadn’t gotten to a chorus by the time you stopped,” Rowie says with a smirk.
“All we have to do is pull a hook and some vocals into it,” Tess adds. “Those lyrics’ve got a heartbeat if we can give them a skeleton. That was really beautiful, Ez. I’ve never heard you write about your mom before.”
“Okay!” I cry brightly. “Would you look at that, it’s subject change o’clock again! Getting a little hot in hurr.”
“No, dude, it’s time to make this track happen,” Marcy insists. “This is the next song in our arsenal. If we can get it together, that means we’ll have, like, a good three or four songs down hard for our concert.”
“Our huh?” Rowie stops her. “Since when are we having a concert?”
“Well, after 4H’s celebrity turn on the six o’clock news tonight, people might be more curious about what we have to say, don’t you think?” Tess reminds us.
“Are we talking about Sister Mischief or 4H here?” I ask.
“Does it matter? At a concert, we could charge for admission and make some money for real equipment,” adds Marcy, getting excited.
“We could bring back the telegenic goats,” Tess says.
“Would someone care to fill me in here?” Dr. Rudra asks. “I still haven’t heard the details of today’s disaster.”
“It was so ridiculous. Basically some hockey morons got together and decided to cover the school in soap and Crisco and let a whole bunch of goats loose so we could all get out of school early on Halloween,” Rowie explains.
“Goats?” Dr. Rudra drops her fork in disbelief.
“We saved them. And then KIND-11 News showed up and Esme told them that the administration had no right to prohibit hip-hop on campus when they couldn’t control cruel antics like that.”
“Point well taken.” Dr. Rudra nods. “This is America, isn’t it? Isn’t freedom supposedly why we all came here in the first place?”
“Damn straight,” I say, pounding the table. “Pardon my Bengali.”
“So,” Rowie continues hesitantly, “we’re starting a student group to listen to and discuss music and, um, culture and sexuality. Because shouldn’t we be able to study what interests us? What’s relevant to us?”
“So,” Marcy interjects, “this is the perfect moment to make our Holyhill debut. Then they really won’t be able to ignore us anymore. We have to put on a concert.”
“Sometimes I think you have no idea how much you are like me.” Dr. Rudra looks lovingly at Rowie. “Always curious. Always stirring up trouble.” She smiles. “It is good to question. To demand to know.” She gets up and begins to clear the table. “Go work on your new song.”
“We can help you clean up!” I say. “You made such a nice birthday lunch.”
“No, you have important things to attend to. And it’s Halloween. Go enjoy yourselves. Write big songs. Go.” She shoos us out of the kitchen and we trot downstairs to Rowie’s room. Rowie’s mom is the best mom I’ve ever had.
I brush my fingers along the tapestries hanging above the stairs as we thunder down to Rowie’s room and they leave a fine mist of dust on my fingertips. I’m getting too tangled up in Rowie’s house; it’s getting too tangled up in me. Going downstairs and seeing the treehouse out the window is like walking into a church where people are talking too loud.
Tess ambles over to Rowie’s piano, sitting at the bench with purpose for her warm-up. When she lifts the cover off the keys and opens her mouth to sing, I understand anew what it is about her voice that makes church ladies twist in their seats. The voice — hers — is gritty, mettlesome, riven with glittering edges. She sings her favorite hymn, and it chills me; when Tessie sings, I believe her:
“My life flows on in endless song:
Above earth’s lamentation,
I hear the real, tho’ far-off hymn
That hails a new creation.”
Marcy whips her laptop out of her backpack and makes a few hasty clicks, then softly introduces a backbeat into the hymning. A wide smile spreads over Tess’s face, but she doesn’t miss a beat. I notice something strange happening: Rowie is singing, faintly, along with Tess. For all of us, the singing territory has always been firmly ceded to Tess. But the way Rowie’s singing right now, it’s like she doesn’t even realize anyone can hear her. Her face is like a chick’s first peck out of t
he eggshell, as raw, as vulnerable. In the vector of her closed eye I see the subtle birth of a tear, a tiny groundswell from dry brown earth. Her face is like she’s singing because she doesn’t have a choice.
“Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul —
How can I keep from singing?”
My throat closes; the breath catches. Carefully, so gingerly, I reach out and place my hand on hers, not asking for a reciprocal grasp, just touching. Her eyes spring open, stung, caught, but she stills her hand and holds my gaze for a moment, toeing the border of a smile. Not knowing what else to do, I smile back, willing the song not to end. With her hand in mine, I look at Marcy and Tess and wonder what would happen if they knew. Tess’s eyes are closed, and Marcy hunches over the computer, pulsing with the beat; neither of them seems to feel me watching. If they really love me, I think, if I trust them enough to tell them all about my mom and something that might be faith, what could possibly happen if they just knew?
The song does end. I knew it would. Tess gives a layered-arpeggio flourish at the end, working hand over hand up the keyboard, and Marcy seamlessly concludes the percussion. Collectively, we take a breath; a beat passes. Marcy puts on Jay-Z’s “Roc Boys” and grins. Tess claps the cover back onto the piano.
“Birthday dance party!” Marcy hollers, grinding up behind me.
My friends begin to dance around me; I dance too, and watch them. Tess dances in a series of poses, more like a flip book than a movie. Marcy just sort of hulks to the beat, and Rowie tosses her head back and forth to the music, her arms like commas above her head, fluid, possessed, opaque. Watching her, I realize that this is the best birthday I can remember.
A few days later, Rowie blows up at me before we’ve even gotten to school. I guess it’s getting too hard not to sleep and too cold not to fight.
“Stop saying you want a chai tea,” she snaps at me in Caribou Coffee. Marcy picked us both up for school at Rowie’s this morning, under the guise of an elaborate story about a Chem problem set that took us all night. Really we fell asleep in the treehouse again and woke up in a freezing panic at six thirty this morning, so we’re both tired and cagey. “Chai is tea. And this chai tastes like fucking feet.”
Marcy and I exchange raised eyebrows.
“Can I have a caffe latte coffee, please?” Marcy orders. Rowie scowls.
We shamble into school, parting ways. It’s Election Day. It feels important, but my mind is foggy, overtired, elsewhere. I plunk down in AP American History to loll through an instructional video about the immigrant surge to America in the late nineteenth century.
“Some immigrant groups encountered intense discrimination upon their arrival to Staten Island and the New World,” the somber voice-over informs us. “Italian, Irish, Jewish, Hispanic, and Asian newcomers faced a harsh welcome to the United States, where many were forced by economic necessity to perform backbreaking labor in factories and fields. . . .”
Jews exist in a kind of weird in-between space in the American ethnicity spectrum, I ponder while nodding off, but being first-generation Indian would be a lot different from being just another overeducated pseudo-Heeb. Shit, Rowie’s parents were born in a whole other country, and I never even had a bat mitzvah.50 Marcy and Tess and me were never the kid whose house smelled like spices no one recognized; none of us grew up in the only brown family on the block.
50. Text to Marcy: If I decided to have a bat mitzvah now, would u throw down some beats while I rapped the Hebrew monologue? Temple Beth Israel would <3 it.
The thing is, Rowie is the realest thing I’ve ever felt; just the sound of her name in my head makes me wake up a little. She makes it sound like Indians just aren’t allowed to be gay, but how is that possible? There’s like a billion people in India. If ten percent of the population is gay, that means there are at about 100 million gay Indians in the world. I don’t get it. I don’t get why we can’t just be together. I think Rowie is mad at me for not understanding it. She’s sad and I want to hold her sadness.51 But no matter how many times I promise not to tell, she still won’t look at me when other people are around.
51. SiN: I’m 99.9% sure I gave Rowie an orgasm last night. She finally told me that she’d never had one, which I kind of knew already, and I’ve been a woman on a mission ever since. When it finally happened, her whole body seized and she had to muffle her own face with a pillow to keep down the sound. I looked at her face afterward and there were little tear-streaks on the sides, where glasses would be if she wore glasses.
The bell rings. I zombie-shuffle to the girls’ bathroom to splash some water on my face before gym class, and while I’m washing my hands I see it scrawled on the mirror: Rowie + Esme. I rub my eyes in astonishment and look closer; it actually says Rudi + Eddie, but it still takes me a minute to recover. I see our secret everywhere. In gym class, Ms. Strybel decides to show Bend It Like Beckham as a “fun introduction to our soccer unit.” There’s desi-honky love floating in the ether all around me, and it’s making me crazy.
“So Perez Hilton is saying M.I.A.’s preggers,” Tess informs us as she digs up the gossip on her iPhone at lunch.
“That’s the news you’re checking on Election Day?” Marcy carps.
“Who’s the baby daddy?” I ask.
“Hmm, let me see.” Tess scrolls down. “Apparently she’s engaged to some guy named Benjamin Brewer.”
“Sounds like a cracker name to me,” I say, looking pointedly at Rowie. “I wonder if that’s, like, a problem with her family.”
“Her dad is a Tamil Tiger.” Rowie rolls her eyes at me. “I think he’s got bigger buns in the oven.”
In AP Chem, Halverson’s droning numbingly about nuclear chain reactions, and I’m buried in Mom’s copy of Portnoy’s Complaint. Marcy stealth-texts me;52 I respond.53 As I struggle not to laugh out loud at my book, the term critical mass wrests my attention away long enough to jot down the following notes:
It’s a formula for my life, I realize with a sinking feeling.
52. Marcy to me: Mos def to hip-hop bat mitzvah. U look like shit. Do u ever get any sleep anymore? Story??
53. Me back: Dbag, this is just what I look like.
I spend my last-period art elective intently building a papier-mâché sculpture of a two-headed girl with four hands.54 I find some random Lincoln Logs lying around and paint them into sticks of dynamite, gluing them along the spine of the body I’m sculpting.55 I paint NOT A BIT TAMED onto one stick and set it aside. I slice open the chest and carve a window into it. I’m gluing a small parrot onto one shoulder when Ms. Mayakovsky comes over to examine my work.
54. Text from Rowie: Still coming over for dinner tonight?
55. Me to Rowie: You bet.
“That’s a powerful piece,” she says. “What are you going to put inside the chest cavity?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m thinking some hanging jewels and maybe some more dynamite.”
Ms. Mayakovsky studies me and my monster, nodding. “Hanging jewels would augment the suspense of the piece — that’s a good idea. I’m getting strong erotic energy from this sculpture. Failed separation, and crisis. An ominous thing in the distance. Do you have a title?”
I peer at the two-headed body. “The Critical Mass.”
After the interminable school day ends, I drag myself home and head straight for the couch, where Pops already has his TV tray set up in front of CNN. I plunk down my backpack and almost knock over the aviary he’s carving.
“Nice birdcage.” I steady the TV tray and settle in, leaning back and closing my eyes for a second.
“It’s a butterfly cage,” he informs me. “How was your day?”
“If a birdcage is an aviary, what’s a butterfly cage?”
“Hmmm. A lepidopterary?”
“Hm.” I nod, scribbling.56 “Probably not in the dictionary, but decent guess.”
56. SiN, later: Can’t fi
nd lepidopterary / in the Oxford English Dictionary / I dig big words, but they can’t help me carry / The weight of a gay interracial literary / Mate rhymes with date / Baby, why you gotta hate / Why you say we gotta wait / We’re at a gay stalemate / Can’t equivocate and date / I hate the hook but not the taste / of how my heart dilates when I swallow your bait.
“I’m glad you approve.” He cuffs my cheek. “You look beyond tired, parakeet. Don’t think I don’t know your nights haven’t gotten any earlier.”
“We don’t really have to talk about it.” I put my notebook away and close my eyes again.
“Yeah. That’s gonna work,” he says with a snort. “Look, it’s not like I’m trying to slap a chastity belt on you.”
“Ew, Pops. Don’t say chastity.” I grimace.
“Calm down. I just want you to get enough sleep to be able to function. This has got to stop. You can’t get zero sleep and feel good about life. You look depressed. You’re going to get sick.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll get more sleep.” I flip the channels uselessly; the polls aren’t even closed yet, and Herb Baumgarten is leading by fourteen percent. I feel tired of the same old conflicts.
“Quit appeasing me — you’re not fooling anyone.” He puts down his knife and goes into the kitchen. “Something’s stuck in your gullet. What is it? Rowie?”
I sigh dramatically. “I don’t know.”
“More specifically?” He piles Town House crackers and cheddar jack on a plate. He knows I’m powerless before cheese.
“I guess — it’s like, are Rowie and I together? Like, actually dating, or just equivocating? Clearly I can’t even really call it dating.”
“What does dating mean? Do people still do that? I read in magazines that no one in your generation does.”
“I don’t know.” I shove my hands in my hoodie- pocket, flummoxed.
