by Wendy Mills
What the …?
Hailey comes slowly over to us. She is all wavy blue-black hair and dark eyeliner and breasts. They are roughly the size of the Grand Tetons and are on display in a low-cut tank top barely covered by a flannel shirt, despite the cold.
“Hey,” she says, and her voice is unenthused.
“Hey.” My voice is equally unenthused.
“She’s coming with us?” Dave nods at me. He doesn’t seem unfriendly, just sort of surprised.
Nick seems completely unaware of any awkwardness. “Yeah, she’s coming with us.”
Hailey gives me a measured stare, shakes her head, and looks away.
“Let’s start at the bathroom. They’ve already buffed us out from last time,” Nick says. “Jesse, be our lookout, okay?”
I go where I’m told, though I have no idea what I’m supposed to be looking out for. Shooting stars? Clowns doing magic tricks? An exploding bathroom?
The park is empty, and I stand under a tree. Nick, Dave, and Hailey are in the shadows near the restroom, and I hear bags unzipping, and then the unmistakable shk-shk-shk of a can being shaken rapidly. A few moments later I smell paint.
I get it now, and my palms go sweaty. I look across the baseball field, blanketed in snow, but I don’t see anyone. Cars are moving on a nearby street, and I watch them, hoping one doesn’t turn into the park, police lights flashing.
I’ve never done anything illegal in my life. I’ve always been the good kid, the take-up-as-small-a-space-as-possible kid. What have I got myself into?
It’s over in a couple of minutes. The smell of paint fades, and I can hear bags being zipped back up.
“Wanna see?” Nick calls softly, and I go toward the back of the restroom.
A word in big, black bubble letters covers the side of the building. It’s dark, so it takes me a minute to get it.
NOTHING
Just like Nick’s tattoo.
“What does it mean?” I ask.
“Mean? It’s our tag. It’s our name. Haven’t you seen it before?”
I shake my head. I’d noticed some graffiti here and there, but I’d never paid much attention to it. The scrawled words were usually cleaned up by the store owner by the next day, something ephemeral and loud, but quickly silenced.
Nick seems disappointed. “That’s why we’re bombing tonight,” he says. “The goal is to do as many tags as we can. Eventually they’ll have to notice.”
Nick has it down to a science, so it takes him only a few minutes to do each tag. Hailey and Dave carry the paint, I act as lookout, and Nick does the tag, writing “Nothing” over and over again, on the side of a bank, a bus, on the sides of closed shops. Behind a Mobil gas station, I watch him. He’s so intense, his teeth indenting his lower lip as he concentrates on the long, sure strokes. I am imagining him focused on me like that when a car pulls into the parking lot.
“Go, go, go!” Dave yells, and he and Hailey grab the bags and take off. Nick stays a moment longer to finish the tag, and then grabs my hand. He pulls me down an alley toward a fence at the far end, and we both duck to avoid a window AC hanging precariously out a first-story window.
“Hey! Hey!” someone yells, and I can hear the sound of heavy footsteps.
Nick and I hit the fence together with a clatter of squealing metal. Dave has already made it to the top and leaps down. Hailey is having more trouble, making mewling sounds as she climbs. I swarm up the fence, Nick right behind me. I stop and look down at Hailey. Her face is panicky and pale as she stares up at me, and I reach my hand toward her. She hesitates a moment.
“I’m so tired of you kids!” someone yells from behind us. “I’m calling the cops and you’re going to PAY!”
Hailey grabs my hand and I pull her to the top of the fence and we jump together. I land lightly, feeling a thrill of something unexplainable and addictive. We head down the road, and I hear the guy chasing us hit the fence and a dog barking frantically. I put on another burst of speed.
Nick is laughing as he runs.
We duck down another back street and eventually emerge onto Main Street. Music blasts out of a coffeehouse hosting open-mic night, and a group of college kids tumble out like big colorful turtles in their heavy coats.
“Hell yeah.” Nick grabs my hand and pulls me close as we climb the steep hill. I can’t tell whether he’s doing it because he wants to seem like a couple of kids just looking for a bar or because he wants to be that close to me.
A black-and-white cop car cruises by, and slows near us. I hold my breath, and Nick runs his hand up my back and into my hair. He pulls my head over and gives me a casual kiss, but it’s enough to make sparks shudder through me.
He doesn’t seem to notice.
“Still watching?” he says out of the corner of his mouth to Dave.
“Nah, he’s gone,” Dave says, glancing over his shoulder.
Nick doesn’t let me go though, and I snuggle close to his side as we walk up the steep sidewalk. I see Hailey’s face, and for a moment I feel sorry for her. Then Nick pulls me in for another kiss, and this one is longer. My head is swimming when he lets me go and keeps walking.
“Where are we going to hit next?” he says.
Emi and Teeny are in A lunch block with me. I slide into the seat across from them with my tray of chicken bites, even though it’s barely 11 a.m., and I’m not even remotely hungry. I’m still jittery from last night, but I force myself to open my milk with steady hands. Then I realize they are both staring at me.
“What?” I say, feeling guilty and buzzy at the same time.
“You look … weird,” Teeny says. She flips her hair behind her shoulders and leans in. “So, spill. I texted you like fifteen times last night during Bible study, and you never said peep back.”
“I did too,” Emi says sourly. “I wanted to know if you got the answer to number fifteen on our Statistics homework.”
“I wanted to know if you made out with Nick Roberts,” Teeny says, and grins at me. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say yes.”
“Maybe,” I say, but my smile gives it away.
“What did you do? Did you go anywhere?” Teeny asks.
“Did you get the answer to number fifteen?” Emi says.
Teeny and I stare at her and burst into laughter.
“What?” she asks defensively. “Statistics is next block.”
“We just … hung out,” I say, because it feels disloyal to talk about the bombing run that put the word “Nothing” on sixteen different buildings last night. And while Teeny is pretty open-minded, she is really only a good girl who pretends to be bad. I know she would be shocked. And Emi … Emi would never understand.
I should be shocked too, but for some reason I’m not. The thrum of illicit excitement still courses through me.
“Hung all over each other is more like it,” Teeny says with a smirk. “Is he a good kisser?”
“Um … yes.”
Teeny starts to laugh, then glances up over my shoulder, her eyes widening.
I feel a hand on my shoulder and turn to see Nick standing behind me.
“Do you want to eat with us?” he asks, looking adorably uncomfortable.
I throw a glance at Teeny and Emi. “You guys want to come?” Something like pleading creeps into my voice, because I know what they’re going to say. It feels like a moment when you think, I bet I can beat that train or That dog looks friendly, but Nick is looking at me with those eyes that seem to see the small, scared part of me that doesn’t want to feel that way anymore.
“No, you go on, girl,” Teeny says, eyeing Nick narrowly.
I get up and take my tray. “I’ll see you in Statistics,” I say to Emi.
“Okay,” she says, and mouths be careful, but it’s too late.
Nick and I don’t talk as we walk to the other side of the cafeteria to where Dave is sitting. I don’t know whether Hailey is in this lunch block or not, but she’s nowhere to be seen. In the fluorescent lights of the
cafeteria, Dave has obvious zits and his gray “Two Time World War Champs” T-shirt is stained and straining across his broad chest.
Nick, on the other hand, looks just as good as the laughing boy I remember from last night, the silver ring in his eyebrow flashing, the smell of paint still on his hands.
“Okay, so what I want to know,” Dave says as I sit down, “is where did you learn to climb like that? You went up that fence like it was nothing.”
“I climb,” I say. “You know, the Gunks and stuff? My dad has owned the climbing shop for like thirty years, and I’ve been climbing since I was a kid.”
“You must really be into it,” Dave says. “I’ve gone out a couple of times, but it was never my thing.”
“I’m pretty into it,” I agree, though it’s a far cry from how I really feel about climbing. It’s the best thing in the world.
“I think she did good last night,” Nick says, sneaking one of my chicken bites.
“You going to help get us some paint?” Dave asks.
“What?”
“We have to be careful about the paint,” Nick explains. “We can’t just go down to the hardware store and buy a case. So we either find someone to buy it for us, or steal it.” Nick watches for my reaction, and I carefully keep my face blank. “She’ll help us get paint,” he says to Dave.
I nod, because of course I will, and he knows it. I’m blowing up the box, and it feels dangerous, and wonderful, and completely necessary.
“Hailey is not going to like it,” Dave says.
“Hailey’s just going to have to deal,” Nick says. “Jesse’s part of the crew now.”
Chapter Nine
Alia
As I walk back toward my building, the trees sway in the light breeze, occasionally sending down a single gold leaf or a sprinkle of drops left over from last night’s rain.
I walk slowly, stepping aside to let a group of clean-cut Jehovah Witnesses pass. Unless I want to run into my mother again, I’ll have to wait until she leaves for her office. A part of me whispers, Lia wouldn’t be hiding down the road from her building. Lia would breeze in and face her mother with her head held high.
As if on cue, my mother comes out of our building. She’s talking on her cell, and she balances it against her ear with her shoulder as she stops under the green awning and fusses with her bag.
She has to pass me to get to her office, and I dive between two parked cars and crouch down. I wish I had Lia’s camouflage burqa; I’d just drape the voluminous folds of the cloak around me and I’d magically fade into the car behind me.
I hold my breath as my mother gets closer and duck my head. Mama’s almost even with me, but she’s so caught up in her conversation—I wonder which auntie she decided to call to complain about me—she’s not paying attention to anything else. She almost steps in front of a cab, and then steps back onto the curb, waiting for the morning traffic to lighten up so she can cross the street.
She’s past my hiding place, so unless she turns around she won’t see me. I can hear her though, her low, musical voice agitated as she punctuates each word with a quick jab of her hand.
“That’s what I told her, Maysan, but did she listen? Of course not.”
Maysan. One of my aunties from California. She’s my mother’s best friend, with an easy smile, long brown hair, and beautiful eyes. Not actually a relative, but one of the big circle of aunties and uncles that make up my extended family.
I was fifteen when Mama landed her dream job in Brooklyn as an immigration lawyer. Dad is a computer whiz, so he can find a job anywhere, and I remember long conversations between them on our sunny porch, my mother talking fast, her hands flying, and my father nodding, saying, “Asmara, if you need this, we will go.” So it was her fault that we moved here, so far away from everybody we knew and loved.
After we moved, I began hanging around Carla Sanchez and her girls, and Mama and I went from not fighting, ever, to having these epic blowouts that blew up the walls of our apartment.
Mama glances at the traffic and looks down at her watch. “I just keep thinking of her running away last year, Maysan,” she says, and really? Really? Why does her voice suddenly sound watery, as if she’s trying not to cry?
When Mike Stanley asked me out near the end of my sophomore year, I made the big mistake of telling my parents, instead of making up some fake story like Carla told me to do. I don’t know why I thought they would say yes, maybe because they’d never made a big deal about me not dating before. It was just understood that I wouldn’t. Things spiraled out of control, and I fled to Carla’s for two nights. But I learned my lesson, I came home, and why does it sound like she’s about to cry?
My mother’s voice fades as she heads across the street. I remain crouching between the cars, knowing it’s safe to go back to the apartment to get my gym clothes but suddenly wanting to hear what else my mother has to say about me. So many of the words lately have been brutal and hard; hearing her talk about me in that soft voice felt like peering into a secret part of her that has been closed to me for a long time.
I stand and watch my mother, a short, determined woman even in heels, her head held high, disappear down the street. Part of me wants to run after her, give her a hug, tell her I’m sorry.
Sorry for what, though?
I mean, I’m sorry for running away, but I’ve apologized for that over and over again.
Now it seems like I should be apologizing just for being Alia.
Instead of going after my mother, I throw my half-empty coffee cup away and head for home.
Our corner apartment is in an old prewar building, full of high ceilings and pretty decorative molding, and stacked with colorful paintings. It’s smaller than where we lived in LA, but I love being able to go up to the roof. Sometimes my father will come up when he gets home from work, and we’ll stand in the soft silence, taking in all those buildings. My father would breathe “Allahu Akbar” as the moon slipped into view, and I would slide my hand into his.
In my room, I gather my clothes and tennis shoes, already dreading the conversation with my new gym teacher about why I can’t wear the issued shorts and T-shirt. Wearing the hijab full time means that I will also be wearing clothes that cover up my chest, arms, and legs, at least while I’m in public. I sigh as I look at my closet full of cute short-sleeved tops.
The end of my scarf catches on the corner of the desk, pulling it across my face. I blow out in exasperation, the silky material puffing away from my mouth, and try to fix it. I wish Nenek were here to help me with it.
I wonder what my grandmother would think of me today. I miss her warm hugs, sweetly pragmatic wisdom, and bakso soup, full of golf-ball-sized meatballs and garnished with fresh shallots and boiled egg. Most of all, I miss her love, which is big enough to embrace me and all my mistakes. It’s not that I think my parents don’t love me, no matter how many mistakes I make, but it’s their job to teach, to judge, to correct. I know this because they’ve told me enough times.
My grandmother’s job is just to love.
I go into the kitchen and pick up the phone, dialing the familiar number.
“Nenek?”
“Lala!” my grandmother says, and I feel her love for me flooding through the telephone line. I realize belatedly that it must be super early in California, but she sounds wide awake.
“I decided to wear the scarf today, Nenek.”
I imagine her sitting in her cozy kitchen, her round, wrinkly face framed by a scarf the color of sea foam. I used to be so embarrassed walking with her when I was a kid. Not that anyone seemed to pay any attention to her scarf, but I didn’t understand why she wanted to look different from everyone else, why she wanted to stand out.
Now I understood. Because I am different, but the same, and it’s all mixed up in my head.
“I am proud of you,” Nenek says. “I know it can be a very hard decision.”
“Were you mad when Mama decided not to wear it?” I ask, settling my bu
tt against the edge of the counter and twirling the phone cord through my fingers.
“Mad?” she asks and laughs, melodic and tinny with distance. “Why would I be angry about a choice that was your mother’s alone?” She is silent for a moment. “I suppose,” she says, “in some ways it felt as if she was letting her culture slip away like sand through her fingers. But I understood. And she is a good Muslim, and that is what matters.”
I know that there are some women who believe that wearing the scarf is their duty, that God asks it of them. There are also Muslim women like my mother who think that wearing the hijab is a personal choice, and that the tradition of covering a woman’s hair is a cultural interpretation of the Quran. It’s all pretty confused in my head, and I really don’t know what to believe. But I think wearing it will make me a better person, and that’s what I want desperately right now.
“Everybody is so mad at me,” I say softly as I wind the cord so tight around my hand that the tips of my fingers turn white.
“And why is that?”
I tell her what happened with Carla yesterday, and she lets me talk, lets me tell my side of the story, and when I am done she doesn’t start talking right away. I’m thinking about how my grandfather used to carve masks out of wood. When I was younger I would try on the different masks, royally nodding as Princess Candra Kirana, or clowning around as a jester in a half mask with a big black mustache. In the end though, I always had to go back to being ordinary Alia.
“I have never told you the story of how I came to be in America,” my grandmother says after a moment.
I know my family is from Indonesia, and that my grandmother and grandfather had come here when my mother was just a kid, and that my father and mother married soon after college. I didn’t realize that there was more to the story than that.
“The country we come from is beautiful,” Nenek says, “more beautiful than I can put into words. Thousands of islands strung like pearls on a necklace, pink petals floating in the rain puddles, and the water touches the sky. Your mother was only four years old when everything went bad. There was a coup, and your grandfather was thought to be a sympathizer. We had to go into hiding. Thousands of people died, and the streets ran with blood. Literally, I am saying. Your mother wandered out one morning before I was awake, and when I finally found her, her feet were red with the blood of the people who had been murdered and left in the street. I scrubbed and scrubbed them, but even when they were pink and clean, I cried, because I knew it would never come off.
