He didn’t.
Bitter, frantic jerks, ensued—first Bean, then the other guy—isolated pops and snaps, followed by disturbing, joint flexing contortions of the body. Edy pushed closer for an examination of their technique, until an Asian chick shoved her back rough and laughed at her Harvard shirt. Slides, glides, mocks of gravity pursued—Edy knew these tricks and yet didn’t know them at all, she’d done them and yet never had. It was foreign, familiar.
This was ballet, she told herself. But how could it be? No training commenced here. Flourishing and controlled, balanced and bursting, fluid and fire. Ballet, as polluted by life. This was freedom, dance without dictation. While she loved the sculpted beauty and control of classical ballet—this—this was life as life came: sudden, rearranged, burned down, and hurled back up.
Life on her terms, whole, bold and unapologetic.
She wanted that.
“Teach me,” Edy said the moment Bean returned.
He snorted and looked past her to the dancers.
She stepped in front of him, nose to nose, close enough to kiss.
“I need this, Bean. Please. Teach me.”
He looked at her as if trying to determine what she was and when she’d become it.
“First, speak English,” Bean said. “We’re not back with the villagers. Second, and more importantly, b-boying, krump dancing, it’s about anger, frustration, rage—raging back. It can’t get you into Harvard. It can’t get you into City Ballet. It won’t get you the family’s approval.”
They turned back to the pit. This time, a pair of stick figure blondes in baggy jeans and oversized tops whipped and cavorted, both spastic and graceful at once.
“I don’t care about their approval,” Edy said. “I want to do something for me.”
Bean looked at her as if she were the new toy everyone had been raging about.
“Well, well,” he said. “You just got interesting.”
“Bean—”
He slipped into the crowd before she could say more. Halfway to somewhere, Bean stopped by a rakish blond guy with a neck half as long as his arm. A conversation ensued, maybe even an argument, before the two melted into darkness together.
Three renditions of an 80s hip hop remix later, and Edy’s bladder pressed to her belt. She could stay rooted no longer. Maneuvering through stacks of sweaty teens, she kept her gaze trained for a glimpse of Bean as she made her way to the back. Edy found the bathroom near a cushioned bench no one dared use. A turn of the knob and a fruitless shove later had her noticing the out-of-order sign on the girl’s bathroom door. Great. Not only couldn’t she find Ronnie Bean, but even if she did and they left that moment, she’d pee her pants long before home.
After a surreptitious glance around, she jammed a shoulder in the men’s bathroom door. It swung open, and the pungent musk of urine waved hello. The imminent threat of wetting her pants pushed her forward, but her gag reflex revolted nonetheless. Sideways, Edy sidled, heart thumping, as she suppressed an irrational fear of her high school principal snatching her from the stall with her pants down.
Edy grabbed a toilet toward the back, where she could wait and listen should someone join her. Quickly, she snatched down her jeans and hovered over. Never had she been one to sit on a public toilet; she certainly wouldn’t start in a pee-stained nightclub.
In the stall across from her, someone exhaled. A groan followed, then a squeak of rubber on linoleum. It wouldn’t have been so bad had she not been in a men’s restroom. Maybe her heart wouldn’t have tried to leave her body in a pitch of fright. Whatever the reason, Edy cut short her peeing, wiped, flushed and yanked her pants up. She wanted out of there. She wanted away from whatever was making that sound.
Another groan.
Edy burst out of her stall and hurried to wash her hands. A slip in a puddle of liquid brought her down hard, chin to floor in a head-jarring slam. A burst of pain swallowed Edy’s head, ricocheting in blind, unforgiving waves. The stench of urine filled her nose as Edy’s vision became one white blur. She rolled onto her back with a whimper as the stall next to hers opened.
Two bodies stepped out.
“Edy. Can I not take you anywhere?” Ronnie Bean asked, sounding resigned.
“She looks hurt,” the second boy said. “What do you want me to do?”
Bean sighed. “Help me get her off the floor. I have no idea how to explain this.”
~~~
“So, obviously now you know,” Ronnie Bean said as they emerged from the subway station. On the horizon, the first rays of sunlight peeked out through early morning haze.
Bean shot Edy a look of loathing just as the last of the roast beef from Nick’s All Night Deli slid from her cheek and hit the sidewalk. Whatever. It had warmed too much to be useful anyway.
Edy had already made up her mind that Bean’s business was Bean’s business and no one would get it out of her. Still, they’d been friends once. Good friends. And she had a question.
“Your father—”
But she got no further, remembering what Hassan’s mother once said:
“Homosexuality is rampant in the western world. It’s so because western cultures are so experimental, so unorthodox—so rewarding of individuality for individuality’s sake. Homosexuality is a road to recognition, nothing more; a quest to seek attention.”
Her views hadn’t surprised Edy. When they tucked away, just the two of them, Rani pressed on with passion about the plight of women in India, spousal abuse, the dowry system, and female infanticide. She detached from it all though, as if her parents hadn’t given Ali’s family a dowry, as if her worth as a daughter and a potential had never been the subject of scrutiny. Rani Pradhan hauled double duty as a covert detractor and open advocate of the old ways. Long story truncated, Bean had no allies.
“I’m not ashamed of what I am,” he said. “They don’t have to accept me. It’s just that I—”
“Need a place to live,” Edy supplied.
“And food to eat,” Bean said.
The plight of every kid everywhere. Not prepared enough to be independent, yet needing it so desperately.
Rani didn’t take Edy’s face so well. While Kala sat stoic and stirring her tea, Bean did all the talking, telling a tale that looped endlessly and proved no respecter of common sense. Edy, he said, had taken to training on the stairs. Up and down she ran until she grew so fatigued she tumbled face first. Bean, who happened to be checking for mail in the middle of the night—no, he wasn’t expecting any—found her, in the stairwell.
To Bean’s credit, no onslaught of logic could wither his story. Rani pointed out that she’d seen them both go to bed, that it was absurd for someone not expecting anything to rise in the middle of the night and check the mail, and that Edy had no need for stairwell aerobics when she got plenty of exercise everyday at ballet. Still, Bean remained rooted. Edy, never adept at lying, did her part by keeping up groans of pain to elicit sympathy and a softening of their culpability.
To God be the glory, they got away unscathed.
Bean began to open up to Edy, little by little, day by day. Silent mornings of walks to school turned into long meandering strolls where they talked about everything and everyone, no one and nothing. They made plans for some nights and seemed not to know each other on others—Edy figured those were the evenings he went to dance. She would beg him, of course, for a chance to see the pit and the dancing that haunted her dreams. But Bean wouldn’t budge. Not only did he think her interest ridiculous, he didn’t even believe she had what it took.
“So, does your mom still treat you like crap?” he said when she asked yet again to accompany him.
“One has nothing to do with the other, Bean.”
“You’re wrong,” he said and swung long legs up on his bed. He leaned forward, eyes dark and intent on her. “The last time I saw your mom, she thought Hassan a king and you the pauper. She thought you were simple and spoiled, maybe even stupid. She thought every choice you made the wrong one and she
called you weak and whiny every chance she got.”
Edy looked away from him, eyes watering in the suddenness of his attack. “Shut up, Bean. Shut up about my mother.”
“Not yet. Not until I figure out why you’re never smart enough, never good enough, why no matter what you do, you can’t earn her love—and that fact doesn’t even make you mad.”
“Shut up!” Edy’s arm flung out, smashing a lamp to the floor in her path. The light flickered before tapering out completely. “Just . . . shut up before I kick your ass.”
A vortex of blackness swallowed her, wild anger, dominating fury. Never had she wanted to attack someone, but her hands, her body felt raw with the power of fury. She could smash Bean’s face, dent him, make him feel the inexplicable humiliation she felt. And yet, somehow, savagery was hardly enough.
“Are you mad at me?” Bean said as she sank onto his bed.
She may or may not have nodded. Eyes on her feet, Edy contemplated his words, how alone she felt, how uncertain. He’d been right about her mother, about her impatience, her hostility, her preference for her Hassan. In the wake of it, in the wake of that truth, she felt like nothing, like less than nothing if possible.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” Bean said. “But it was the only way.” Already, he was on his feet. He ushered for her to move from the bed, then began shoving furniture into a corner.
“What are you doing?” Edy said.
Bean grinned. “Continuing our lessons. Part one was helping you find your fury. Part two is showing you what to do with it. Are you ready?”
Edy swallowed. “Maybe.”
“Well, ready or not, here I come.”
Bean hesitated before giving her a once over. “One more thing. You might want to invest in a sports bra. You’ve been sprouting like crazy as of late.”
Twelve
Summer ended and Edy’s father arrived to bring them back to Boston. She hid her disappointment at the absence of Hassan with the smile of her mother, the smile of a practiced politician. But she had missed her father, who had somehow managed to lose even more weight over the months and stood gaunt before her, like a man in desperate need of a fried chicken dinner with all the fixings.
Her new breasts were a non-topic. Edy’s father paused only briefly to note them, before sweeping her up in an embrace and a smile. He had missed her; that much was obvious, even if all his time had been occupied by conferences, speaking events and the occasional guest appearance on cable news.
Bean said goodbye to Edy, in that classic, awkward Bean way. He looked past her first, then at her, then past her again, before rushing Edy for a hug. In the weeks following the discovery of his sexuality, they’d come to know things about each other—the secrets that were still technically secrets. His being gay had never been uttered nor her feelings for Hassan, but both understood nonetheless.
“Call me sometime,” Bean said. “Let me know how the dancing’s going.”
And that was the other thing. The new thing. The obsession with street dance.
“Lucky you,” her father said as they pulled away from the curb. “To have Ronnie Bean with you for the whole summer.”
Edy smiled. She had been lucky. Before Bean, Edy’s mother had been little more than an oddity to suffer, a difficult person dismissed by others as such. But Bean had been the first one to see the impossibility of being her daughter. It had done something for her, validated her in some way.
On the ride back to Boston, her thoughts turned to Hassan. Would he be home, waiting for her arrival? She hadn’t called, and only a brief text from her to him said that she’d be leaving in the a.m. Obviously, he hadn’t been willing to alter his schedule to see her. Otherwise, he’d be in the car. Maybe he’d only see her when it was convenient, at dinner, maybe tomorrow or the next day. She wished she didn’t care. She made up her mind not to care. Still, Edy glanced at her phone. He hadn’t even replied to her text.
At mid-afternoon, they pulled into their driveway. Edy spotted Hassan, perched on his porch and chugging a Gatorade, his hair like a flag in the wind, longer than she remembered. He stood taller, body weighty and raw with power, muscles like armor. Summer basked him from pale butterscotch to a rich, glistening copper. When their car came to a stop, his mouth curved to the shape of her name.
Edy burst out, sliced the space between them, leapt the fence, and found him in an instant. He snatched her before her foot could hit the porch, whipping her into a crushing embrace. And still, they weren’t close enough. Not nearly close enough for an entire season apart. But then he pulled away as suddenly as he had snatched her.
His gaze ran the length of her body and a shuddering exhale escaped.
“Oh,” was all he managed.
She flashed hot under the weight of his sigh, lashes lowered, breathing forgotten. Awareness overwhelmed her. Awareness of the single step that would take her back to him, of the air that hung between them, of her pounding pulse and fingers that ached to touch him.
Of words she didn’t dare say.
“Edy.” His green gold eyes clouded with some complicated emotion. Hassan opened his mouth and let it hang, and then surprised her with his choice of words. “What . . . happened to you?” he said.
That.
An A cup, then a B, then a B pressing over to a C.
Spell broken, she shoved him in the chest, only to find that he didn’t budge.
“Pay attention in anatomy class and maybe you’d have a clue,” Edy said.
But the sass didn’t hold and her eyes were too drawn to the arms of a titan, to a chest carved for a god. Rich golden skin sheathed a body taller, harder and more defined than it had been only months ago. He’d been pushing himself, punishing himself again, and goodness, the results were glorious.
Edy looked up, registered his raised eyebrow, and realized she hadn’t been careful enough in her assessment. “Did you give up and finally go for the steroids?” she said in attempt to hide her blush.
Lawrence stepped out the Pradhan front door.
Hassan glanced at him. “His dad tried to talk me into doing steroids like he used to, but I told him—”
“Suck one.” Lawrence snatched Hassan’s Gatorade and upturned it for himself, chugging out a third. He, too, was bigger than Edy remembered.
“We’ve been hitting the gym like crazy,” Hassan admitted and peeled the bottle from Lawrence’s grip. “We need a repeat come fall. And with the twins attracting college scouts this year, me and Lawrence figured we could give them something to look at, too.”
Edy looked up to find Lawrence surveying her discreetly. First a glimpse, then another, then a third.
Hassan caught it too. “You all right there?”
But Lawrence only grinned. “Gonna be a real interesting year,” he said. “Real interesting.”
“Well, who asked about your interests? What is this, a questionnaire? Get back in the house, already.”
Hassan shoved him. Lawrence stumbled on the threshold, laughing and even chancing a glance back before the door slammed in his face.
When Hassan turned back to Edy; awkwardness fell between them. His gaze dropped, and his hands found his pockets.
“I should go,” he said. “More gym time and—”
Of course. Of course he wouldn’t change his schedule for her. Her arrival meant little in the grand scheme of things.
“We’ll talk later, okay?” Hassan said, still treating her to the top of his head.
“Yeah. Fine. Whatever.”
She had other friends to see. Well, one other friend to see. At least Wyatt could be trusted to muster up the proper amount of enthusiasm for her return. Without wasting a goodbye, Edy headed across the street.
~~~
Roland Green leaned against the parched white door streaked in dirt and tapped two times. It rattled with the motion before Wyatt threw it open.
“Boy,” he said. “There’s a black girl here to see you.”
Wyatt’s eyes widened at the t
hought of it.
“What did you say?”
“Black girl. Got a nice little body on her, too. Downstairs waitin’ on ya.”
Roland grinned. Still, Wyatt hesitated. There were no girls unrelated to him that came to see him, black otherwise. No girls but Edy, and yet his father had made the body comment. Years of suffering his wandering eye and lewd comments had taught Wyatt what his father did and didn’t like. Flat-chested girls, no matter how exquisite, were not one of them. Wyatt had no idea who waited downstairs.
“She looked anxious to see ya,” his dad said, nudging him and grinning, nudging him and grinning.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah! Now quit looking’ at your old man and get down there, already.”
Roland yanked Wyatt from the shadows of his room and pushed him toward the stairs. Wyatt descended a creaking staircase into darkness.
“Edy?” he called.
“Wyatt?”
She rose from the Green family couch, an old leather concoction riddled with lumps.
“Wyatt!” she cried, and he plowed his way down.
On the last stair, he froze. There was Edy. And there was the body. Goodness, what a difference a summer could make.
Edy bit her lip and looked down. “So, they didn’t get past you either, huh?”
Shame stained Wyatt’s cheeks and forced his gaze down, away. Words fumbled in his mouth for purchase. She had been pretty before, beautiful in a sweet, cherubic sort of way. He’d appreciated her then. He couldn’t have her thinking that her body mattered to him. “They’re gorgeous,” he said.
Oh God.
He choked on nausea and humiliation, both in ample supply.
Calm down. Get away and calm down.
“Let me get you some water. Let me just . . .excuse me.” Wyatt ducked into the kitchen, body rattling like a subway station when the train finally blazed through.
“Wyatt?” Edy called.
She even sounded like Lottie. Was that possible? Was it possible that the girl he now loved could be so similar to the one who had ruined him?
Gripping the edge of the sink, Wyatt watched the water drain, willing himself to relax. He was overwrought, his dad always said. High strung, even as a baby.
Love Edy Page 14
