The Whole Story of Half a Girl

by Veera Hiranandani

  “But you’re not white,” I say.

  “I’m not black either. Indian is considered Caucasian, which is technically white. Or at least it was when I was growing up.”

  Mom steps in. “Sonia, do you want to know what you should call yourself?”

  “I guess white, right?”

  “It’s up to you how you want to identify yourself. You could call yourself white, or half Indian. Or even half South Asian American.”

  “Yeah, but there’s the Jewish part too.”

  “But that’s your religion, not your ethnicity.”

  “Sometimes people who are half white and half black call themselves black because they look black,” I say. “So I could call myself Indian and not white at all, since I look Indian. But according to Dad Indian is white. Only it’s not white. Dad’s skin looks a lot closer to black than white.”

  Dad looks at his hands and turns them faceup and facedown as if it’s the first time he’s ever seen them.

  “How do you see yourself?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. I thought you guys were supposed to tell me.”

  Mom and Dad look at each other.

  “Are you sure nothing happened at school to bring this all up?” Mom asks.

  “Yup. Just curious. No big deal.” If I tell them about the way the white kids and black kids don’t sit together at lunch, Mom would race to call the PTA and arrange some kind of multicultural day. She did that stuff at Community, but Community was already blended together.

  Mom lets a breath out and seems relieved to be done with the conversation. Dad’s lost in his thoughts. I ask to be excused and run up to the den to dial the white push-button phone. Sam answers and her voice spreads over me like a mouthful of chocolate.

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Hi,” Sam says, sounding less excited than I had hoped. “How was it?”

  “Well, I survived. The place is huge,” I say, and swallow hard. Before I called, I couldn’t wait to tell Sam about Kate and Alisha and the strange way everyone sat in the cafeteria. Now the words seem too heavy to hold on my tongue. “But I want to know more about your day. Tell me everything,” I say instead, knowing it will hurt. Sometimes that kind of pain feels good, like a scab you just have to pick at even though you know you shouldn’t. She tells me they made fortune cookies and Jack had everyone do trust falls at recess. And he said there was going to be more math this year. And everybody has to think of a project for the science fair in October. And they’re already starting to write the play for November. I pretend I don’t hear that part.

  “And,” she says, “Siri wears a bra now.”

  “Whoa!” The word “bra” rings in my ears. I look down at my board of a chest. Siri wears a bra now. “Does she really need one?” I ask, laughing.

  “I think so,” Sam says. “What’s so funny about it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that last year we were …” I stop. I don’t know what I want to say anymore.

  “I’d better go. My mom’s calling me,” Sam says.

  “Okay.” After we hang up, I lie down on the rug and stay there for a while, alone in the den, holding the phone in my hand.

  chapter eight

  The next day at school I see Alisha get off her bus. It’s a different bus, blue and white instead of yellow. I recognize some of the kids from lunch who get off with her. Alisha looks up at me and I wave. She waves back and starts walking toward me. Her hair is scraped back in a tight bun like it was yesterday. She looks older than the rest of the kids here—taller, at least.

  “Hi,” she says, and clutches her notebook to her chest.

  “Hi,” I say back. And we walk through the front doors together. “Why isn’t your bus yellow?” I ask her.

  “It’s a city bus from Bridgeport, where I live,” she says, searching my face, expecting something from me. What, I don’t know.

  “Cool” is the only word I can think of. I thought everybody who went to this school had to live in my town. Bridgeport was pretty far away.

  “Some kids in my neighborhood are bussed here because our school isn’t that good,” she explains, and looks at me hard and straight. She’s really good at eye contact. My mother always tells me to make eye contact with people, but I don’t like anyone’s eyes on me too long these days.

  “Oh, right,” I say, like I know all about it. Why only some kids? Why do some people have to go to the bad school and what’s wrong with it anyway? I want to ask these things, but I don’t.

  “Did you just move here?” she asks.

  “No. I went to a different school,” I say. She asks where and has an excited edge to her voice. It feels so good to tell someone who I am and where I came from. I tell her about Jack and Sam. I tell her about the food Jack taught us how to make. I tell her about the stories and plays we wrote, and the sixth-grade play that I’ll miss, and all the camping trips I’ve gone on. I feel like I’m describing a foreign land and she drinks it in, doesn’t say a word until I’m done.

  “That’s not real. It can’t be real,” she says, rushed and sputtering. “I wish I could go to that school. How come you don’t anymore?”

  “Well, my dad lost his job and we can’t afford it.” After these words fall out of my mouth, my chest tightens. Maybe I’m not supposed to tell people this.

  “Oh, it’s a private school,” she says as she stops walking. “Did you have to wear uniforms? My cousin goes to boarding school and he wears one. He has tons of homework and the teachers are really strict and lots of the kids are really snobby and rich. All everybody talks about is getting into Harvard.”

  “Community isn’t like that,” I say. Before I can say anything else, the bell rings and we rush to our separate homerooms.

  Later that morning during English, another pink polka-dotted note comes flying onto my desk.

  Hi! Sorry we didn’t sit together at lunch yesterday. Do you want to today? Check out Mrs. Langley’s shoes. Could they be any more grandma?

  Kate

  I wanted to sit with Alisha, but maybe Alisha doesn’t believe me and thinks I went to one of those fancy private schools like her cousin goes to. Maybe she thinks I’m rich and snobby. Maybe I am, I don’t even know anymore.

  What’s funny is that at Maplewood, the school that people don’t need extra money to go to, everyone seems to have plenty of money. The kids show off their iPods and cell phones, something my parents would never buy me. We don’t even have cable TV. I see other parents dropping off their kids in fancy cars like Mercedes and BMWs.

  At Community nobody seemed to care so much about what they wore, and no one had iPods. But Alisha isn’t like most kids here. She’s wearing the same black T-shirt and jeans she had on yesterday. And she doesn’t seem to have an iPod or a cell phone either. But if she doesn’t like me just because I went to private school, that’s not really fair.

  Mrs. Langley paces across the front of the room in a gray dress and rubbery gray shoes. Swish, clomp, swish, clomp. She writes more vocabulary words on the board, the chalk crumbling in her hand—“efficient,” “formulate,” “genre,” “hazardous” … I wonder if that’s all we’re going to learn?

  I write my reply under a cupped hand and throw it onto Kate’s desk.

  But how do I know you mean it?

  Sonia

  Kate’s eyebrows knit together as she reads it. I wonder if she can make out my handwriting. Most of the time I think much faster than I can write and it comes out like “chicken scratch,” as Mom calls it. Each letter in Kate’s handwriting looks like a fat little happy man. It’s chunky and neat, every letter the same height. She writes something back and looks around. My heart beats faster and I can feel sweat tingling under my arms. Maybe I need deodorant. The note lands on my desk.

  I’ll meet you by your locker just before lunch.

  xxoo,

  Kate

  I look over at her and smile. Her head is bent over a lavender piece of paper as she writes another note. I wonder i
f she writes notes to people all day. A few minutes later she chucks it at another girl, one of the three Jessicas in our class. This Jessica is short and wears her long brown hair in a high ponytail. She also wears really tight clothes. She’s always chewing on her nails, giving people sideways looks, and whispering in Kate’s ear.

  Just before lunch I walk slowly to my locker, wondering if Kate will be there. She isn’t. I open it and grab my lunch, another tuna sandwich, but this time with green apples chopped up the way I like. Mom even put in a piece of nut candy from my aunty, who brings a ton back every time she visits India. It’s made from cashew nuts and has the thinnest shaving of real silver on top. When I eat it, I feel like the Indian children’s book princess my parents named me after.

  “Hi,” I hear behind my back. I whip around. Kate stands there, her hands on her hips, blue eyes shining.

  “Ready?” she says.

  “Yup.” I close my locker and clutch the paper bag. Her hands are empty. I wonder if she doesn’t eat lunch and then I remember that the cafeteria sells food. Yesterday tons of kids lined up for chicken nuggets, hamburgers, and hot dogs. My old school didn’t have a cafeteria.

  “Oh, you brought,” she says, eyeing my lunch bag.

  “Uh-huh,” I say, like I’m carrying a bag of dead rats. Jessica comes up to both of us and we join the flow of the crowd shuffling toward the cafeteria as all the kids pour out of their classrooms. Out of the corner of my eye I see Alisha meet up with some of the other kids from Bridgeport.

  “So I heard Peter Hanson likes you,” Jessica says to Kate. Then she flashes her eyes over me, doesn’t say a word, and turns back to Kate as she twirls her thick ponytail. Her fingernails are painted bright red. Mom would never let me wear red nail polish, even though my ten-year-old cousin has worn nail polish since she was like four years old. But Mom says nice Jewish girls don’t.

  “Shhhh,” Kate hisses, “he might hear you.” Then she bends toward me.

  “That’s Peter. Right. Over. There.”

  I glance over my shoulder in the direction of where she’s pointing. She grabs my arm.

  “Don’t look!” Jessica whispers fiercely. I’m not sure why everything has to be so top secret. And it’s not that I don’t like boys. I do. I’ve even been in love before.

  Connor O’Reilly was one out of four boys in my old class. The other boys were just my friends and so was Connor, until one day out of the clear blue sky I noticed how long his eyelashes were. Last fall, our whole class took a hike to an old cemetery to do grave rubbings. Connor and I had stopped in front of the same gravestone. At first I noticed the stone because there was a big dove imprinted on the front that was perfect for a rubbing. Then we looked closer. It said:

  Grace Wheeler

  Our precious little bird. Too short a flight.

  May God keep you in peace.

  1914–1919

  I sucked in my breath when I read the dates and everything around me went slow and heavy. The other kids stepped around the crushed leaves and sticks with their rolls of paper and charcoal. Grace Wheeler’s whole life had only been five years long. Connor knelt beside me and traced the dove in the stone with his finger. I looked at him and his eyes were down. They were the most beautiful eyelashes I’d ever seen. Suddenly I felt shivery and warm and wanted to hold his hand. It made me feel okay about Grace Wheeler, because Connor and I were there together, sitting with her. After that, Connor wasn’t just Connor anymore. But Sam liked him too, and since there were six girls and only four boys in our class, everyone had to share. I was sure I loved Connor more than Sam did, but Connor said he liked us both the same.

  We make it to the cafeteria and the noise is deafening. Teachers are calling out things like “Slow down, everybody” and “Shhhhh” and “No running!” Jessica and Kate go over to the line at the lunch counter. I don’t know what to do. It’s stupid to stand in line if I’m not getting any food, but I don’t want to go and sit at the table without Kate.

  “Hey, stand in line with us,” she says, and pulls me toward her and Jessica. She’s a little grabby, but in a good way, like she’s stopping me from falling.

  “Who told you about Peter?” Kate asks Jessica. She seems calm now, like she doesn’t care. Jessica’s eyes light up.

  “Ann told me. She heard it from Liz.”

  I reach the lady at the big metal counter and back away to let Kate and Jessica order. The lady is very fat, with cheeks as red as tomatoes. She has her hair bunched inside a net and looks really angry. Kate and Jessica order the same thing—chicken nuggets and M&M’s. Mom would flip if I ate like this. The only junk food we ever have in the house is ice cream or oatmeal cookies. The fat lady turns around and grabs packs of candy off a shelf, and little cardboard containers of the chicken nuggets from under an orange heat lamp.

  I walk behind Kate and Jessica as they march over to the same table they sat at yesterday. It’s all girls. At Alisha’s table the boys and girls sit together. I sit on one side of Kate and Jessica sits on the other. Most people have cafeteria food, but one girl starts unwrapping what looks like a bologna sandwich. I can tell from the pink Band-Aid color, the round edges of meat. A bag of corn chips sits by her too. Another girl has potato chips and cookies and some kind of sandwich, possibly turkey, on white bread. The rest have chicken nuggets.

  A group of boys in our grade sit at the table right behind us. One of them, Peter Hanson, throws a paper airplane over at us. It floats above my head and lands right on top of my tuna sandwich.

  “Open it,” Kate says, her voice hushed and excited.

  My fingers feel shaky as I unfold the airplane because everyone at the table is staring. Hi, Kate, it says. I read it out loud. It all seems so funny—the airplane note, the little pieces of chicken nuggets, the round bologna meat, the boys at one table and the girls at the other. I roll my eyes. Kate starts to laugh. Then I start and I can’t stop. My laughter spills over to Kate and she grabs me again, holds on to my arm, and we both tumble around in our sounds for a few more seconds before we stop, wiping laugh tears from our eyes. Jessica just stares at us.

  “What’s so funny?” she asks over a mouthful of M&M’s.

  “Nothing,” Kate says, and grins. A leftover giggle ripples through me. The cafeteria must be a hundred degrees.

  Kate crumples up the airplane and tosses it behind her. I don’t dare turn around to see where it lands. Then I catch Alisha looking at me all the way from her table, but she turns away. She unpacks her lunch and takes out her notebook. She bends over it, pen in hand.

  chapter nine

  When I get home from school, Dad’s study door is closed and Mom’s not home. I open the fridge and take out a small carton of hummus and a bunch of baby carrots. Natasha’s already watching TV in the den because she gets home a half hour earlier than I do.

  “Mom said only an hour a day,” I warn as I flop down next to her on the couch.

  “I know,” she says, making a face. “I have a half hour more.” She holds out her hand for some carrots.

  “Get your own,” I say, shoving her hand away. I look back at the TV. Tom’s building a mousetrap for Jerry out of matchsticks. Then Tom catches Jerry in the mousetrap and strikes a match, but Jerry chews his way out the back of the trap before it bursts into flames and catches Tom’s tail on fire. I sit back, certain of what’s coming next. I feel the rush of energy from her before it happens. Natasha turns and tackles me. The carrots and hummus go flying. Even though she’s smaller than me, she’s strong, a “little powerhouse,” as Mom says. I grab her arm and twist it.

  “Ow! Cut it out!” she yells.

  “You made me drop everything!” I yell back, and twist her arm more before letting go. She grabs my hair. “Get off,” I say, and grab her arms again. We fight a lot lately and for some reason it feels good. I’m not even that angry with her. I wonder if she likes it too. We both keep on yelling, shoving, and grabbing. My hand goes into the hummus. I’m about to wipe some on her face when I
hear Dad.

  “Girls!” Our father appears at the door like a big, dark shadow. He’s still in his bathrobe. His face looks gray as stone. We freeze for a moment to take him in, and then yell over each other, trying to explain the fight, blaming each other for different things.

  “I don’t care what happened!” Dad yells so loud I feel sick. “Clean up this awful mess!” he says, and kicks a carrot on the floor. It springs up and hits the closet door. “Stay in your rooms until dinner.” He leaves the den, slamming the door, making the whole room shake.

  Natasha and I quietly gather the carrots and I run to the kitchen to get a sponge for the hummus. Natasha looks at me wide-eyed, an embarrassed smirk on her face. I continue wiping up as if it’s no big deal, even though I can hear the blood pulsing in my ears, feel my throat getting tight. But I swallow it back, the thought of crying. I swallow and swallow.

  Dinner is quiet. Mom makes vegetable lasagna, which I normally love, but tonight I can barely taste it. Natasha squirms in her seat and eats with her hands until Dad reaches out, brushes her hands away from her mouth, and points to her fork. I concentrate on my food, shoveling in forkful after forkful.

  “Mom,” I suddenly say, “can I buy lunch at school from now on?”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Because everybody does.”

  She looks at me and chews.

  “That’s not a great reason,” she says.

  “Forget it,” I say, and try to look really sad.

  “I made a new friend today!” Natasha declares.

  “That’s great, sweetie,” Mom says. “What’s her name?”

  “Jared.”

  “Oh, a boy,” she says.

  “Yeah, and he likes more colors than I do.”

  I slouch and roll my eyes. Now Natasha’s off talking about all her strange art stuff that Mom finds so fascinating. For the rest of dinner I know they’ll be talking about all the colors of the universe. Natasha loves to paint and draw and she’s obsessed with colors, weird ones like fuchsia and lime-green. She actually makes some pretty cool pictures, but I’m not in the mood for Miss Artist and her new color-loving friend.