by Maria Padian
“She likes my girlfriend just fine,” I said, but instead of kissing her again I turned back to the book. I needed to at least look at the stuff, if not learn it.
Cherisse made this pouty face and threw herself back into the cushions.
“I don’t think you like your girlfriend,” she said.
I smiled but kept my eyes on the open pages.
“I like my girlfriend just fine,” I told her. “What I don’t like is failing physics.”
She bounced back up. The lips were near my ear again.
“I’m a bad influence,” she said quietly.
“Yup,” I agreed.
She kissed me behind the ear. Planted a trail of kisses down my neck.
“I’m a distraction,” she continued. She placed one hand on my knee and slowly began sliding it up my thigh.
“Definitely,” I said.
The French doors swung open. Cherisse’s hand shot to her side.
“Almost forgot napkins.” Mom in the entry, holding a thick white wad. Her eyes flickered briefly over the scene. Cherisse had gone rigid. Mom dropped the napkins on top of my physics book and as she exited spread the doors open wide.
“Whatever,” Cherisse grumbled, pulling a notebook from her backpack.
A few minutes before eight Cherisse was searching through the couch cushions for the remote and I’d only made it through one of the sections we were getting tested on the next day. It was clearly gonna be another sleepless night for Tommy: I’d stayed up way past midnight the night before finishing my Scarlet Letter essay. Plus I kept having all these weird dreams. About a certain Mumford student. I’d dreamt she came to The Center on Friday wearing a hijab and a long skirt, and it was embroidered all over with ornate letter L’s.
“I’m going to wear this to the Somali restaurant tonight,” Myla said in the dream, “so they’ll know I’m a lesbian.”
Clearly, my brain was on overload, trying to process all the junk going on in my life. Not the least of which was my overwhelming sense of Catholic guilt that I needed to come clean with Cherisse and tell her about Myla. Although I wasn’t sure what I’d tell. Was I “seeing” her? No. Were we friends? Hardly. Did I even find her attractive? Well, yes. She was adorable. Different. Surprising. In a good way.
Yeah. I would have to say something. I just didn’t know what. Or when.
As I marked my place in the textbook and began clearing papers off the coffee table, I heard the kitchen door open and shut, followed by slightly raised voices.
“I’m sorry, Maddie, but the kids are working in there right now,” Mom said.
“Oh, pish! They can take it up to Tommy’s bedroom,” I heard Aunt Maddie say.
“Uh, no.” That from Mom. Then footsteps headed toward the den, and the sisters appeared.
“Busted!” Maddie crowed when she saw the television on. “Your mother thought physics homework was going on in here.” She flashed Mom this smug smile, then settled herself beside Cherisse on the couch. “My TV’s broken,” she explained. “And you know I can’t miss Survivor.”
It’s hard for me to get my head around how someone like Maddie, with such high-minded ideals about practically everything, can be such a reality-TV junkie. But she’s obsessed with Survivor—a little trait, my dad likes to point out, that makes her human. “Otherwise,” he says, “she’d be insufferable.”
As Maddie snuggled in, Cherisse unearthed the remote, and the part where they show what happened on the last episode started rolling. Mom had the pissed-off-and-defeated expression going. She always hates the way Maddie barges in unannounced. Bosses her around, like they’re still kids.
“I am so glad they voted off Bobby T. last week,” Maddie said to Cherisse.
“Totally,” my girl murmured in agreement.
Mom turned on her heel and walked out.
“Now she’s mad at me,” Maddie commented without removing her eyes from the screen.
“Yeah, welcome to the club,” I sighed.
She didn’t reply until the commercial break.
“So, how’s it going?” she said when the Geico gecko appeared. There was that certain something in her tone. Open up to me, Tommy, it said.
“Fine,” I auto-replied.
“Honestly,” she said. I shrugged.
“It could suck more, I suppose. At least, that’s what everyone keeps reminding me.”
“Can you believe he has to do a hundred hours of community service?” Cherisse said. “For, like, a joke? Just pouring some paint on a stupid rock?”
Maddie frowned.
“Sweetheart, am I really hearing this? Do you not get what Tommy and the amazing Donnie Plourde did?”
Cherisse rolled her eyes. She reached for another handful of chips.
“Okay, I’m not going to waste my breath,” Maddie said impatiently. She turned to me. “Your mom tells me you’re volunteering at K Street?” I nodded.
“Have you met the guy who runs it, Joe Faulkner?”
“No, I’ve mostly been working with a student volunteer there. Everybody talks about Joe, but whenever I’m there, he’s out.”
“I know him—he’s awesome. When you do meet him, make sure you tell him you’re my nephew,” she said.
I nodded. Maddie knew every do-gooder in Enniston.
“I’m helping kids do homework there.”
Maddie smiled.
“You’ll be great at that,” she said. She reached for some chips. The smile vanished.
“Eww! Who spilled salsa in the basket? It’s leaked all over the coffee table.” She grabbed a few napkins from the wad and started mopping salsa.
“So here’s a question,” I said as she mopped. “What do you know about Somalis and dogs?”
Maddie scrunched the wet napkins into a tight ball.
“They don’t touch dogs,” she said simply.
I slapped my knee.
“Now how did you know that?” I demanded.
She shrugged.
“I know Somalis. I’ve been to their homes; they’ve been to mine. And when they come to my house I have to lock Ginger in the bedroom.” Ginger is her golden Lab.
“Why do you lock Ginger up?” Cherisse asked.
“They consider dogs to be unclean animals. If they touch a dog, they have to wash seven times, or—”
“Give money to seven orphans, or feed a poor man seven days,” I filled in for her.
Maddie grinned.
“See? You’ve learned something,” she said.
Cherisse burst out laughing.
“Oh my God! That is seriously the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”
Wow. If I could have magically made a giant hole appear that would have swallowed Cherisse right then and there and saved her from the storm she’d just unleashed, I … might have. One part of me was sort of curious to see what my politically correct aunt would say. But another part of me felt that no one, not even I-say-things-that-make-me-sound-dumber-than-a-bag-of-sticks Cherisse, deserved to be in the crosshairs of Maddie on a shooting spree.
My aunt attacked.
“Stupider than immaculate conception? Stupider than transubstantiation? Papal infallibility? How about the ascension of Mary? Now there’s one of my favorites. You know, when the mother of Jesus doesn’t just die and rot like the rest of us, but the skies open up and she floats to heaven?”
Cherisse stared at her, dumbfounded. Probably wondering what the hell Maddie was talking about. I was pretty amazed that they’d gone from Bobby T. to the foundational beliefs of Catholicism in under five minutes. But a Maddie rant can happen that fast.
“Let me ask you something, dear. What do you think you’re doing every Sunday at mass when you take communion? Oh, never mind, I’ll tell you. You are eating flesh and drinking blood. Not a symbol. The. Real. Thing. That’s what Catholics believe. The priest gets up there on the altar and does his host thing, and poof! Flesh. Blood. And not just anybody’s. It’s Jesus. That belief is what separates us Catholics fro
m the rest of the Christian crew. Now, if you went up to one of those Somali kids at your high school and told them the basic tenet of your faith was something they could most closely equate with cannibalism, what do you think they’d say?”
Cherisse looked like she might cry.
“Gross?” I suggested. But nobody laughed.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Aunt Maddie said evenly. She settled back into the cushions. On the television, Jeff Probst explained what the contestants had to do in order to win immunity. I was guessing Cherisse would’ve considered walking over hot coals to earn immunity from my aunt right then. I considered saying something. Something comforting to poor Cherisse. Something to Aunt Maddie, letting her know how annoyed I was at her not only for butting into our evening together but also for practically gutting my girlfriend.
For some reason I didn’t. Then Aunt Maddie abruptly got up and left the den. She closed the French doors behind her on the way out.
“You didn’t tell me your aunt was a bitch,” Cherisse said nastily.
There are moments in life when the fog suddenly lifts. Aha moments. Lights-on moments. They don’t happen often, and in my case, not nearly as often as they should. But Cherisse’s comment sparked one of those moments.
And I realized it was time to vote her off the island.
Chapter Sixteen
At practice the next day, I told Saeed about Project Abdi. He hadn’t heard of it.
“Samira didn’t tell you we’re going to be working together?” I said. We were warming up with passes: sharp, accurate kicks, beginning at ten feet apart, then slowly stepping back and increasing the distance.
“No,” he said, shrugging.
“It’s not like it’s a huge deal or anything. But I figured, since she knows you and I are friends, she might have said something.”
“No,” he repeated. Fired a pass at me. I took a few steps back.
He had something else on his mind. Right before practice started, Coach called all the Somali guys over. Nothing bad. He wasn’t angry or anything. But he seemed to be explaining something to them, and they were all nodding. Then practice started as usual, but Saeed seemed to have a cloud hanging over him.
“What birthday you got, Tom?” A strange question, coming out of nowhere.
“November fourth. Pretty soon, actually. Why? When’s your birthday?” Bam! I lasered one back. Saeed stopped it, settled it. Looked at me.
“Don’t got one.”
I smiled at him.
“Of course you do. You’re here, right? Alive, on this planet?” I signaled with both hands: C’mon, pass back.
He kicked. He shook his head.
“No,” he said.
“No, you’re not alive?”
“No, I … don’t know. Don’t know it. It in rain season, my mother say. But I don’t know when that in Amreeka.” He stepped back. I passed to him.
“What does it say on your birth certificate?” I asked.
He frowned. Shook his head, uncomprehending.
“Papers, from when you were born?” I tried. Saeed looked at me like he couldn’t really believe what I’d just asked him.
“Tom, we got no papers.”
“Dude, you must have something. I mean, what do you use for identification?” He didn’t answer. “ID. Like, your Chamberlain card?”
“Yeah, ID,” he said, nodding. “I got green card. That it.” Stepped back. Kicked to me.
“So isn’t your birthday on your green card?” I asked.
“It say January one,” Saeed replied.
“Seriously? You’re a New Year’s baby? That’s cool. Around here, if you’re born on January first, you might get your picture in the paper. See, you have a birthday. We’ll have to throw you an epic party this New Year’s Eve!”
Saeed didn’t seem impressed by my proposal.
“We all January one,” he said. “All Somali peoples.”
“Yeah, right.” I grinned at him. I fired the ball.
Saeed picked it up. He walked toward me. No one seemed to notice that we’d stopped drilling.
“In camp, at Dadaab? When you gets to leave, you answer a lot of questions. But some things, you don’t know. And some things we got no paper. So for everyone, for birthday? They January one.”
“Saeed, that’s ridiculous. Even if you don’t have birth certificates and papers, why didn’t you just tell them your birthday?”
“I don’t know, Tom! No one know!” He sounded like he couldn’t believe how stupid I was being.
I mean, I got that in a refugee camp you didn’t have nice file cabinets with your paperwork all neatly put away. And all the things we do with our babies over here? Wrapping tiny plastic hospital bracelets around their wrists, or putting their pictures in the newspaper if they manage to be the first one born in the new year? Not a lot of that happening in refugee camps. I’d seen the photos of how Saeed and families like his had lived in the camps … in these little houses they made from branches and sticks. Carrying water in plastic jugs. A lot of them had run for their lives with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. So yeah: no birth certificates.
But I didn’t understand why he didn’t just know the date.
Then something occurred to me.
“Saeed,” I said. “What was Coach talking to you guys about?”
“They asking how old we are. Monday we bring green cards to a meeting at school. But I do that, you know? When I come, first time? So … I don’t know.”
“Who, Saeed? Who is asking how old you are?” He shrugged.
“I don’t know. Some peoples.”
“Mr. Bouchard! Mr. Bashir! I don’t recall excusing you from drills!” Coach’s voice boomed at us.
Saeed turned to run back, but before he could slip away I grabbed his arm.
“Saeed. Do you know how old you are?”
He hesitated.
My heart sank.
“Eighteen,” he said, then trotted back to position. I watched his retreating back. The guy was so damn thin. You could see every sinew in his legs, his bony knees. He didn’t grow up like we did, with slabs of bloody steaks on the grill and endless amounts of butter and milk. He ran like a gazelle, but he was slight. He could’ve passed for sixteen.
Or an undernourished twenty.
You can’t play high school sports if you’re twenty. Hell, you can’t stay in high school. It’s called aging out, and you either have to go to continuing ed or get your GED if you want to graduate.
You sure as hell can’t show up out of nowhere and start beating all the white guys whose parents have been dragging them to soccer fields and watching their games and paying their club team fees since they were five and scarcely knew how to kick a ball in the right direction.
At least, not without answering some tough questions.
For some reason I was actually on time for homework help that afternoon. Or maybe it wasn’t such a mystery. Maybe I had some incentive to get my butt right over to the K Street Center. I must have been moving fast, because I managed to shower at school, change into a clean shirt and jeans, and still arrive before Myla and Abdi.
Samira was already there.
It wasn’t one of her hijab days. Instead, she’d tied her hair in this Chamberlain blue bandana. She wore a long-sleeved Chamberlain T-shirt that said VARSITY GIRLS SOCCER, plus big gold earrings. Peeking out from under her long skirt I saw sneakers and the cuffs of a pair of warm-up pants.
She sat at one of the long tables and had set out a stack of blank white paper, an old soup can filled with colored pencils and markers, and a box of crayons. Good thing one of us came prepared.
“Hey,” I said, pulling up a chair across from her. She didn’t glare, which I took as a step in the right direction.
“Hello,” she replied. She leaned to one side, rummaging through the backpack she’d placed on the floor. She pulled out a slim paperback with a bright orange cover and placed it on the table between us.
> “Just get off practice?” I said, gesturing to her shirt. Joking. I knew Samira didn’t play sports.
But then she smiled. A real smile.
“I am manager of the girls’ soccer team now,” she said.
“Seriously?” I said. I tried to imagine Samira hanging with the jockettes on our very blond and fairly aggressive girls’ soccer team. The rumor was that they could beat us boys, but we never agreed to play them. “When did that happen?”
“Yesterday,” she said. “My cousin, Fatima? She plays on the JV team, and sometimes I go watch her. When I was at her game yesterday, the varsity coach saw me. And she knows I am Saeed’s sister. So she asks me if I know the rules, and I say, ‘Sure, I know the rules! I watch my brother all the time.’ So she asks me if I can help with the book. You know the book?”
“Sure,” I told her, my surprise growing. The book was where you kept track of the team stats throughout the game. You had to know the players and the game really well in order to accurately record all the assists, goals, penalties, whatever, for the book.
“So I help her that one time, and then she asks if I would like to do it all the time. And be manager. So I said okay.”
“Cool,” I told her. “So now you’ll go to all their games. Away games, too?”
“Yes, but you will have games at the same time, so we can still work with Abdi together,” she said. It took me a second to catch up with her. She’d moved from soccer to scheduling to Project Abdi in a single bound. She’d also switched from smiling to businesslike in a nanosecond. She picked up the paperback she had placed on the table.
“Do you know this book?” she asked, handing it to me.
“A Somali Alphabet,” I read aloud. “Alfabeetadda Soomaaliyeed.”
A sound emerged from Samira. I looked up to see her hand over her mouth. She was struggling not to laugh.
“AL-fah-BAY-tah-dah SO-mah-lee-ED,” she said carefully, lowering her hand.
“Right. Like you said.” I grinned at her. I flipped through the pages. It was a kid’s book, almost looked like a coloring book because all the illustrations were black-and-white pencil drawings. On each page was a letter and a Somali word starting with that letter. Each word had its own picture, and a definition in both English and Somali. “Looks like Abdi’s project has already been done.”
