All We Have Left

by Wendy Mills

  That afternoon, I weave my way through Dad’s climbing shop, waving at Grill, the shop manager. I go through the door marked No Entry and climb the narrow staircase to our apartment. Dad is watching TV in the living room. I know he should be working, know it because of the exasperated look Grill threw at me, but it’s not like it’s unusual lately.

  “Hi, Dad.” I open the fridge and pull out a jug of OJ. Mom’s got dinner in the oven, so she must be off to another committee meeting, or whatever it is she does to make sure she’s not at home as much as possible.

  “Keep it down, will you?” Dad says, his attention fixed on the screen.

  Being as quiet as possible, I rinse my glass and put it in the dishwasher.

  Mom comes into the kitchen, a whirl of motion as she checks the casserole, sends a quick text, and then turns to me.

  “Hi, honey,” she says, but her gaze slides off me as if I’m a big stick of butter. She doesn’t really see me. She hasn’t for a long time.

  “I have a school meeting tonight.” She adjusts her dress, which used to be her favorite and is just a little too tight, and runs her hand through her silvering blond bob.

  When I meet her former students, they rave about her. She’s the best, most conscientious, most inspiring fourth-grade teacher on earth. She must be a great mom, I’m so lucky.

  Right, okay, if you say so.

  I think about how, over Christmas break, I found her asleep with her head on the kitchen counter, her well-worn Bible in her hands. In front of her was a perfect chocolate cake with thirty-three candles on it, all burnt down to smoky nubs, the cheery red wax melted all over the top of the cake.

  I must have made a sound, because my mother woke up and looked at me blearily, and I wondered how much of the bottle of wine beside her she had drunk. She’s a lightweight, and I hardly ever see her drink. My dad takes care of that for the both of them.

  She saw me staring at the cake. “He should have been here,” she said. “He should have been here to blow them out.”

  It hit me then that it was Travis’s birthday. My brother Travis who died in the Twin Towers almost fifteen years before.

  Part of me wanted to yell, But I’m still here. Doesn’t that count for something?

  She got up unsteadily and went to her bedroom, and I was left staring at the smoldering cake.

  Of the three children my parents brought into this world, one is dead, the second is in Africa, and then there is me. The unwanted, invisible kid they still have to act like they give a damn about.

  I haven’t been able to get the picture of my mom and that sad melted cake out of my head, and it makes me want to scream until someone hears me, but the screaming is only in my head.

  “Gerald,” she says now, a little sharply, and my father looks over at her. “I’ll be back late.”

  Their eyes lock for a brief moment, and some sort of private conversation flows between them, and it could be, Gerald, maybe you should cut back on the beer and Susie, when the hell was the last time you were actually here for dinner?

  As a kid, I used to bounce up and down and demand the “bike story” from my mother, because when you’re five, stories about your fledgling parents seem like something out of a fairy tale.

  It was the story of how they met. Dad was finishing up college and working as a bike messenger in the city, and Mom was doing her first student teaching assignment. On her way home one afternoon, she saw a group of older kids start messing with one of her students. Mom, young and fearless, jumped into the fray and stared down the group of hoodlums. Enter Dad like some sort of freaking superhero. He had no brakes because he had stripped them off his bike so he could go as fast as possible. He rode right up to Mom and a cowering Juan Arias and jumped off. His bike flew into a nearby van, and Dad told the hoodlums to go packing. In the story, they actually do, and in the story, it was love at first sight. Mom’s hero.

  It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that Mom always told the story fast and bitter, as if by then she was having to convince herself that the younger her and Dad had existed, that they weren’t just a young couple in a love story.

  There were no other Mom-and-Dad stories, but in my mind I’ve filled in the rest. They were married, moved from the city to the Gunks, and had two boys, first Travis, then three years later, Hank. Everything was fairy dust and perfection. Then, almost seventeen years after Travis was born, an accident came along and they named it Jesse. Two years later Travis died in the Twin Towers and Dad decided to hate everyone and Mom started running so fast she left the rest of us behind. Hank just fell off the freaking page completely, and sometimes I wished I could follow him.

  The end.

  My dad mutters something, and my mom stands there for a moment, her face perfectly blank, and then she drops a quick kiss on my forehead and is gone.

  “I’m going over to Teeny’s. We’re studying for a Statistics test.” I feel like I’m whispering, though I’m pretty sure I’m not.

  “Why can’t you be friends with normal people?” Dad doesn’t look at me.

  “They are normal people.” But I say it under my breath. Avoiding confrontations is my specialty.

  I feel myself shrinking, like the atoms inside me are deflating one by one. I think of Nick then, his face shining with something like sympathy as he watched the mimes put me in the box. Then I think of what he mouthed:

  Blow up the box.

  Chapter Five

  Alia

  I hold up my favorite long-sleeved yellow shirt against my chest and eye myself in the mirror. The yellow fabric does nice things for my dark hair, but it just isn’t right. Nothing seems right today.

  I flop down on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Grounding me so I can’t attend the NYU program might not seem like a big deal to my parents, but to me it feels like the continuing game of Whac-A-Mole I play with them. I dare to dream, and they wallop it into oblivion.

  I’m lying on a pile of clothes, and I fish out a silky blue shirt and hold it up in the air above me. Superheroes get to wear masks and capes and pretty much anything they need to keep their identity a secret and kick some major butt in the process.

  I wish dressing for school was that easy.

  I throw down the shirt and roll over to look at the white scarf covered with swirling yellow designs and delicate flowers in green and crimson. Finding something to wear with it is harder than I thought it would be. Tanjia got a party and a new wardrobe when she started wearing the hijab, and the thought of a hijab-themed shopping spree with Tanjia and Kaitlin cheers me up a tiny bit.

  I jump off my bed, dislodging piles of clothes and tripping over my track shoes as I lunge for the radio.

  Music. Music is what I need.

  I flip through radio stations until I find a good song, Blink-182’s “The Rock Show,” and turn it up as loud as I dare. I dance around, jumping on the bed and off again, knowing that Ms. McGillicuddy downstairs will probably “have a word” with my mother about my thumping around, but not caring. I might not be the best dancer in the world, but I have dancer friends, and I’ve seen their moves. I shimmy my hips and wave my arms around and then catch sight of myself in the mirror and collapse on the bed, because it. Is. Not. Working.

  Lia in a dance club, really breaking down her moves, while the people who are talking about her all mean just stand around with their mouths open.

  I can see the panel in my mind, and I almost grab my notepad, but I don’t have time, and besides, Lia would never be caught dead in a nightclub. She knows better.

  I wonder again if it’s worth wearing the scarf today. There’s so much going on, but if I don’t do it now, then when? I’ve thought about it for months, since camp, but when the first day of school came, I put on my regular clothes and marched off to the subway, pretending I didn’t notice the disappointment in Tanjia’s eyes.

  “Alia! Turn down the music, you’re going to wake the entire building!” my mother yells through the French doors into my room,
which used to be a dining room until my parents turned it into a bedroom for me.

  I want to turn the radio up and up until I don’t hear the disappointment and frustration in my mother’s voice.

  “Alia!” Mama smacks her hand on the outside of my locked bedroom door.

  “Yeah, okay, I heard you.”

  I turn down the radio and glance at my desk. Lia’s face, confident and strong, stares back at me, and I swear she winks.

  “When I was stuck at the bottom of the Hudson River after the Evil Mad Doctor turned me into a squirrel and locked me in the trunk of a Camry, who was there to save me? That’s right. No one. It was all me, baby.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I mutter, picking up the yellow shirt.

  I need to get going or I’m going to be late for school.

  When I walk into our narrow kitchen, my mother is sitting at the small table by the window overlooking the fire escape, sipping her milky tea. She takes one look at me and narrows her eyes.

  “Is this a joke?”

  Somehow I never think of her as short because when she opens her mouth all the words are tall and imposing. She’s pretty in her gray pantsuit and white silk shirt, and her dark hair is pulled back into a perfect braid with not a single hair daring to misbehave. Her face is serious and unrelenting unless she smiles, which hasn’t happened a lot lately, at least at me.

  “No, Mama,” I say. “It’s not a joke.” I nervously finger the scarf that covers my hair and drapes loosely around my shoulders. I know I did a crappy job of fastening it. It keeps slipping off my head, and the pin has it all bunched up on one side.

  She stares at me, her eyes unflinching, and I can just see her in the courtroom, one of her Bangladeshi or Pakistani clients by her side, giving that stare to the opposing counsel. Which is all well and good, except I’m her daughter; why does she want to make me feel like something she needs to wipe off her shoe?

  “Today? This is the day you choose to wear the scarf?”

  Since this is what I was basically thinking fifteen minutes ago, of course it just pisses me off even more.

  “Yes, Mama, today’s the day,” I say evenly, opening the refrigerator and grabbing my lunch bag.

  “I’m sure you will understand that I find your timing suspicious,” she says. “Do you think that because you have decided to wear the scarf, that your father and I will change our minds about the NYU program?”

  “No, Mother,” I say. “I did not think that at all.” Though the permission slip crinkles inside my pocket. I hate it when she does this, makes me feel young and obvious and stupid. And while my timing may not be ideal, deciding to wear the hijab full time is a pretty big deal and why can’t she give me some credit?

  My mother takes a deep breath, and stares out the window. I can hear cars going by and the excited shrills of children on their way to school. She’s not seeing them though. She’s trying not to lose it on me.

  She turns back to me. “Of course it is your decision,” she says, “and I support you.” Her tone is cold and formal, as if she’s reading directly out of the “How to Be a Good Muslim Parent” handbook. My mother has been speaking English since she was four, but she also speaks Indonesian and Arabic, which gives her English a lilt that people find charming. When the sound of her voice isn’t playing hopscotch on my last nerve, I wish I had her accent. I speak English just like everyone else, and no one smiles when I talk.

  “Good.” I grab an apple off the basket on the counter. “That’s nice of you. I’m sure Nenek said the same thing to you when you decided to not wear the scarf.”

  I meet her gaze for a moment, and then turn my attention to the apple.

  The silence stretches.

  We weren’t always like this. Before we came to Brooklyn, Mama and I used to be close. I remember us putting on puppet shows, making bead bracelets, and pretending to batik on strips of old bedsheets, dripping crayon wax in a splatter of colors. When we moved away from California, something cracked between us, like the delicate shell of an egg that even Humpty Dumpty couldn’t put back together.

  “You think I’m going to embarrass you, don’t you? You don’t think I’m a good-enough Muslim to wear it.” The fridge and the counter have grown monstrous, squeezing me so tight that there’s no room to breathe.

  “It is your decision, Alia,” she says again. “But if the only reason you are choosing to wear it today is to somehow convince us that you have changed, then God knows what is inside you.”

  “I have changed. Why can’t you see that?” I know that I sound like a whiny little girl, and I take a deep breath and try to calm down so she will listen, so she will hear me for once. When did her words get so much more important than mine?

  “After you were caught smoking marijuana in the girls’ bathroom yesterday, Alia?” She sounds like she just heard the funniest thing ever, and it makes me want to scream. “Have you forgotten your father and I have an appointment with your principal this afternoon, and that you might be expelled?”

  “Just because I got into trouble with Carla yesterday doesn’t mean I’m some sort of criminal. It was her joint, not mine!” I fling my arm out dramatically, and Mama sighs, like Really, Alia?

  “You never think before you act,” she says as if she knows me so much better than I could ever know myself. “You told us after you ran away last year that you didn’t think about how we would feel, how much it would hurt us. You did it without thinking. You need to think about the consequences of your actions, Alia!” Mama sets down her cup hard enough that the milky tea splashes out onto the counter.

  “That was months ago!” I say. “I’ve told you again and again how sorry I am. It was a horrible, terrible thing to do, and I regret it, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t be a better person now.”

  She wipes up the spilled tea with hard, angry swipes of a napkin and glances at her watch. “It’s not like you’ve given us a lot of reason to trust what you say, Alia,” she says with finality. “It is time for you to go to school.”

  As usual, she’s ending the conversation before I have a chance to say any of the things I want to say.

  I take a deep breath. “This is the last day to turn in the permission slip for the NYU program,” I say, but she has already gotten up to put her cup in the sink.

  “We have made our decision, Alia,” she says, her back to me, and I know that while it’s Mama and I fighting, she has my father’s iron will behind her. “We will see you today in the principal’s office.”

  Lia would not be standing here dumbly as her mother ignores her. Lia would say: I may not be the person you want me to be, but I am trying to be the person I want to be, and isn’t that good enough?

  “I hate you!” I say, and run out of the room.

  Chapter Six

  Jesse

  “I called him,” I announce as I come into Teeny’s room.

  Three faces look up at me with identical expressions of surprise. I sit on the bed next to Emi and fight the urge to cover my ears and start la-la-la-ing. I debated all the way over here whether or not to tell them, but this is big, and these are my best friends in the entire world.

  “You called Nick?” Teeny asks, the first one to get it.

  “I called Nick,” I confirm.

  “But why?” Emi asks, genuinely confused.

  I hesitate, because it’s hard to explain, and I know that steady, rational Emi will never understand. Emi is insanely smart, which makes it sometimes hard for her to understand us mere mortals.

  “He gave me his number, and I thought: Why not?” It doesn’t come close to explaining the way I felt when I was doing a repeat performance of my own personal live art with my parents this afternoon—Invisible Kid—and how I thought, just maybe, Nick might understand.

  “So are you meeting him?” Myra asks from the chair in the corner where she is busy on her phone. She’s probably already looking up “What to do when your friends act like fools,” because Myra is constantly googling
something.

  “Yes.” I glance at my phone, and feel a wild fluttering in my belly. “In like forty-five minutes.”

  “Okay then.” Teeny stands up and goes to her closet. “We need to get you outfitted.”

  “I thought we were studying Statistics,” Emi complains.

  “Really? Myra and I aren’t even in your Statistics block, so if you really thought you and Jesse were going to study AP Statistics at my house then you were seriously mistaken,” Teeny says over her shoulder to Emi as she starts rifling through her closet.

  As smart as she is, Emi falls into this trap all the time. She doesn’t understand just hanging out with friends, so the only way to get her out of the house is to promise her a study date.

  “This one’s cute.” Teeny holds up a filmy, low-cut top. The tag still flutters off the sleeve, and we all know it’s something her aunt sent her, willfully ignoring the fact that Teeny’s parents won’t let her wear filmy, low-cut stuff.

  “Um … ,” I say, not wanting to sound ungrateful.

  Teeny sees my face, and shoves back her mass of black hair so she can more effectively narrow her eyes at me. “Stop looking at me like I’m feeding you to the lions. Pure laziness is not an excuse to dress like a slob.”

  I obediently hold out my hand, because you don’t mess with Teeny when she sounds like that.

  “You know, Hailey’s going to go ballistic if she hears you’re seeing Nick,” Myra says, putting down her phone as I pull the shirt over my plain white cotton bra.

  “We’re just going to be working on our business plans,” I say, trying to tie the sash behind my back. Teeny comes over and brushes my hands away so she can do it.

  “Yeah, right!” Teeny and Myra say at the same time. I can’t help but laugh with them because when Nick slid the note across my desk and said, Maybe we can get together on our plans with that sidelong look, we both knew he meant something else, something that made my heart race and my mouth go dry.