What to Say Next

by Julie Buxbaum

  Here’s the sad and horrifying part: The second I put on my Indian clothes, an alert goes out to her parents, yet when my dad died my mom didn’t even call them until the day after the funeral. My mother explained to me that she knew they were traveling to a wedding that weekend and couldn’t get back to the United States in time, so there was no point messing up their plans. Honestly I think my mom didn’t want to know if they would come to pay their respects.

  Of course I like to believe they would have. They may not have approved of my mom marrying my dad, but they’re not monsters. They’re just backwards. And, okay, a little bit racist. Oddly enough, though they may not like the fact that I’m half white, they always compliment me on the color of my skin. So fair, Bibiji always says, like that’s a wonderful, important thing, the fact that I’m a couple of shades lighter than my mother. And I can see you enjoy your food.

  “I’ll help you figure it all out,” I say to my mother. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, honey, don’t say that. It’s going to be fine. You have nothing to be sorry for. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  I make myself busy dishing out the food, spoon out huge piles onto our plates. There are people who don’t eat when they are sad, who lose their appetite and get crazy skinny. My mom and I are not those people.

  “I love you, Mommy,” I say. As soon as the words are out, I feel bad again, because it makes her eyes fill. I want her to know that I realize just how lucky I got in the mother department. That if I had to pick anyone in the whole world to go through this with, to have as a mom, it would be her. Only her. This is partially grief talking. Before all this, my mom often annoyed the crap out of me. She’s master of the subtle criticism disguised as a suggestion: Why don’t you straighten your hair? Don’t you think your nails would look so much better if you didn’t bite them? That shirt is a little frumpy, no? Now, though, I feel stupid for caring about that sort of thing. She could die tomorrow. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “No. Good crying, I promise,” she says, blotting under her eyes with a paper towel. It doesn’t look like good crying. She looks on the verge of unraveling into a mess of tears and snot. Nothing like the woman she must have been at work today: fierce and tucked-in and totally under control. “I’m just so grateful that I have you, Kit.”

  I know she doesn’t mean for her words to sting, but they do.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I promise, and hold up my finger for a pinky swear.

  “A whole month without him,” she says, ignoring my outstretched finger. “How is that even possible?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Kit?” I wait for her to finally say it, to just go ahead and mention the accident outright, and then maybe murmur a few empty words that are supposed to be comforting. I brace myself to talk about all the things she’s refused to talk about until now. “You have a little scallion in your teeth.”

  She sits at my table again. I didn’t expect her to. Told myself it didn’t matter. That I’ve sat alone 622 times, and that I like my ritual—the way I wait for Disher, the lunch lady, to be the one to serve me because she always wears gloves and, on good days, a hairnet; the way I spread my food out in front of me in the order I want to eat it, one bite from each plate, small to large and back again; the way I switch my music over the second I sit down, from Mozart, which is best for hall navigation, to the Beatles, which is social in the way the midday meal should be. That it would be okay too if we didn’t ever talk again. I have two new Notable Encounters to add to my notebook now, one in which I made Kit Lowell laugh.

  Out loud.

  She even threw back her head.

  “This okay?” she asks, though she’s already sitting down. She doesn’t wait for my answer and instead reaches into her backpack and takes out an elaborate assortment of what appears to be leftover Chinese food. Probably from Szechuan Gardens, which is both the number-one Yelp-rated Chinese restaurant in Mapleview and also the only Chinese restaurant in Mapleview. I’m particularly fond of their hot and sour soup.

  “You are always most welcome.” From the look Kit gives me, I surmise this must be a weird thing to say. Usually the truth is. I can’t think of many people I would actually welcome to my table—maybe José, who wears bifocals, or Stephanie L., whom I’ve never heard speak out loud. On second thought, maybe not. José would ask me to join the Academic League, which has happened twenty-six times in the past three years. Stephanie L., though on the plus side decidedly nonverbal, looks like someone who would be a loud chewer. I have misophonia and would prefer not to be enraged by her rabid mastication.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Kit asks. I refrain from pointing out that she just asked me a question by asking me if she could ask me a question. When I noted the same thing to Miney recently, over our thrice-weekly prearranged FaceTime call, she said, “Little D, why are you so freakin’ annoying?” Which is, of course, also a question, but a rhetorical one.

  “Sure,” I say now to Kit.

  “Why do you always sit alone?”

  I shrug, which is not something I often do, and it feels funny, that up-and-down shimmy of the shoulders. A little exaggerated. Like a confused person in a play.

  “I’m not sitting alone right now.”

  “You know what I mean,” Kit says. She is eating an egg roll and her lips are glossy with its grease. Only Kit Lowell could turn food into makeup.

  “There aren’t that many people at this school I’d like to sit and eat with,” I say, proud of myself for not adding what Miney would call “too much information”: When I say there aren’t that many people, I really mean only you, Kit.

  “We’re not all terrible, you know,” she says, and makes a hand gesture that I take to mean there are a lot of people here to choose from, though it’s entirely possible she is just shooing away a gnat. I put the odds at eighty to twenty I’m right.

  “Did you know we will spend one hundred eighty-five and a half hours in this cafeteria this school year alone? That seems like a lot of time to spend with people with whom I have nothing in common except for three insignificant coincidences. One: We, like millions of other people, were born in the same year. Two: We happened to be raised in the same small town. And three: Our parents chose to send us through the Mapleview public school system.” While talking I count the numbers one, two, and three on my fingers, which my mother claims is obnoxious, and on reflection, I agree, but it’s a hard habit to break. “On the parental level, I can see how this is enough to form a friendship, given all the shared choices—where to move, when to have kids, et cetera—but for me, particularly because I didn’t choose any of this and wouldn’t have chosen any of this if I were given any say in the matter, which I decidedly wasn’t, it’s not enough commonality. And a lot of these people you claim are not so terrible tend to be not so nice to me. So to answer your original, but not first, question—I think it might have been your third, actually—I have better things to do with my time than to waste it on…” After erring on the side that it was a gesture and not a swat, I copy Kit’s wavy hand motion, which also feels a little theatrical, but appropriate and also very, very Kit. “These people.”

  “Nice speech,” she says. “I feel that way too sometimes. Not the people-not-being-nice thing so much, but the nothing-in-common thing. Who knows? Maybe everyone feels like that. I didn’t ask you what I really wanted to know, which is, I guess, my third or fourth question: Do you get lonely sitting here? Being by yourself all the time?”

  I look up at her, meet her eyes. Green, green, green. Today she’s not wearing a man’s shirt. Instead she has on a sweater that looks soft, the kind that when I was a kid I would stop and pet whenever my mom forced me to go shopping. It’s light yellow, the color of a baby chick. She wears a thin gold necklace with a big scripted K charm that she massages a lot with the rhythmic rubbing of forefinger and thumb, like it’s a cross or rosary beads. Her jeans are ripped and her knees peek out of the holes. I wonder if they are c
old.

  The cafeteria is loud, so much louder without my headphones, which I took off when I first saw Kit head toward me and this table. I remember now why I like to wear them.

  “You’re up to five questions,” I say. “And, yes, of course I get lonely. Just like everyone else.”

  “See, you have more in common with us than you thought,” she says, and smiles, like what I said was something happy, not sad, which is weird, because I thought it was quite clearly the latter.

  “My turn for a question,” I say. A declarative statement, albeit a superfluous one. “What made you pick my table?”

  “Honestly? I knew you’d leave me alone if I asked you to. I’m not dealing so well at the moment, if you hadn’t noticed.” I hadn’t noticed, actually, but I don’t say that. She looks fine to me. Much better than fine. Luminous, even. “And I just can’t take everyone, you know, watching me all the time. Like if I were eating this in front of Vi and Annie, they’d be all judgy about me eating my feelings about, you know, everything, which of course I know I am. I really don’t need them to hint that I don’t want to get any fatter.”

  “That would imply you are already fat,” I say. “And you’re not fat. I mean, you’re not skinny either. I’d say you are average weight for your height, maybe five pounds above average in your legs.”

  She laughs. This is the second time I’ve made her laugh, and it feels just as good as the first.

  “Thank you for that,” she says. “I guess straight-up honesty was one way to go.”

  “You’re welcome. You shouldn’t worry about your weight. You’d still look beautiful fat. You have plenty of room to grow.” I try to make eye contact again, but this time she’s the one looking away. Her cheeks are flushed.

  “Are you warm?” I ask.

  “It’s freezing in here.” It’s approximately sixty-six degrees inside, but maybe it feels colder to her because of her bare knees.

  “Do you have eczema?” I ask. Clearly her sympathetic nervous system has caused her blood vessels to dilate. The best way for me to figure out the cause is by process of elimination. I am not good with social niceties, but I know enough not to ask outright if I’ve embarrassed her.

  “That’s random. No. Why?”

  “No reason.” Ha! Another lie. I’m getting good at this. “I like that expression. Eat your feelings. I keep a list of idioms. I’ll have to add that one.”

  “You’re an idiom,” she says, and at first my stomach drops—she is making fun of me—but then I look up and see she’s wearing a friendly smile. This is good teasing, I think. This is banter, like in the old romantic comedies my mother likes to watch. I’ve never been much good at banter, which necessarily requires quick wit and an understanding of what to say next.

  “Thank you very much for that,” I say. And then it’s my turn to blush. No need to go through a process of elimination. I know what caused it.

  —

  I watch a lot of movies, mostly as sociological research but also because I have a lot of time to fill, and what I’ve gleaned from them is that teenagers are supposed to actively dislike their parents. We should ask to be dropped a block away from school and on Saturday nights complain about our curfews. We should steal from our parents’ liquor cabinets, get drunk in parking lots with our friends, and make stupid decisions that lead to avoidable car accidents. We should get particularly annoyed when our mother or father asks us questions about anything involving the future or planning.

  One benefit to being different is that none of the above appeal to me. My parents did a terrible job of naming me, and my mom takes, on average, an extra thirteen minutes more than necessary to buy toothpaste. My father tends to give long lectures on topics I only have a marginal interest in, like traffic patterns and ornithology, and Miney left me behind to go to college, but I like my family. I actually look forward to our after-school discussions.

  “How was your day?” my mom says today, as she does every day when I get home from school. She puts a lasagna in the oven. Today is Tuesday, which is a pasta day. Lasagna is broadening the category a bit, but my dad and I try to be flexible. Tuesday also means that I have a guitar lesson, which I love even more than I hate my teacher, Trey, which is to say a lot, and that later I will do sixty-three minutes of martial arts training.

  “Kit sat at my lunch table again.”

  “No shit,” my mom says. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” I say, and let her no shit pass without comment, even though she knows it’s an expression I do not like. It makes me think of constipation, which makes me think about grunting, my least favorite noise, after squawking and chewing. I also have a list of favorite noises. It has one item on it: Kit’s laugh.

  “Did you talk? Did you take off your headphones?”

  “Of course.” My conversation with Kit is another Notable Encounter, a positive Notable Encounter, so pleasant that I don’t want to put it in my notebook. I want to pretend, for just a moment, that this is not a rare occurrence, that this sort of thing happens to me all the time. That I’m not the sort of person who even requires a notebook in the first place. “I know she thinks I’m weird, but it’s like she appreciates my weirdness. Like you guys, and Miney sometimes. Does that make sense?”

  I ask this question a lot—Does that make sense?—usually to my family, because I appreciate clarity and assume others do as well. Much like ordering steak and naming children, language seems inherently and irrationally optimistic; we just assume other people understand what we are talking about. That we are, as the idiom goes, on the same wavelength. In my experience, we are not.

  “Total sense. I can see you being friends with Kit, actually. She’s always been a nice kid. She used to come to all your birthday parties when you were little. Did you know that?”

  “No, though I’m not sure which birthday parties you attend when you’re little is a fair reflection of your future character.” My mother doesn’t sigh—she’s good at suppressing the impulse—but if Miney were here that’s exactly what she’d do. I’ve gotten better at hearing myself lately, I think. If she did sigh, I’d have deserved it. “I mean, you’re right. She’s nice.”

  “And freakishly smart, like you,” my mom says.

  “Not sure the word freakish applies in any way to Kit. She’s exceedingly normal.”

  “And pretty,” my mom says.

  Pretty doesn’t fit Kit.

  It’s too small a word. Like her name.

  “Not pretty,” I correct her. “Beautiful.”

  —

  Trey’s on time, like usual, since he knows I don’t like when people are late. He’s wearing what he always wears: a conch shell on a leather string around his neck that he got in “Bali, man,” a ratty T-shirt with either a slogan (JUST DO IT!) or a platitude (YOLO!), and flip-flops, even though it’s winter. He’s a student at Princeton, but he looks nothing like the guys on the cover of the university brochure he once brought over for me. He does not wear khakis or belts or a blazer, and he’s not white. I once asked him what he was, and, after he explained that was a rude question, he said a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian (Southeast Asian, not Native American), and half African American. Kit’s half Indian, but she looks nothing like Trey, which is just another example of why genetics is such a fascinating field.

  “How’s things, buddy?” Trey asks after we run through a few finger-warming exercises. I realize this is what people call small talk. I also realize the world would be a better place without it.

  And why call me buddy? We are not friends. We are teacher and student.

  “Fine,” I say, and motion to the guitar to keep us on track. Maybe Trey has ADD. I should look up the diagnostic criteria in my DSM.

  “So hear me out,” he says, and I groan, because this is the thing about Trey, who, oddly enough, is the only person in my life who seems to have the exact right name: He’s a kick-ass guitar teacher, but he doesn’t stop at teaching me guitar, and I wish he’d learn to stick to h
is job. He likes to lecture about life and give me pointers for my notebook and “challenge” me to do things I’m not comfortable with. Like talk to someone new each week (which I did, finally, but I might keep that to myself because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction). Or ask to borrow a pen from a classmate (which doesn’t even make sense, since we all use laptops). Or join the Academic League (which seems to be a running theme in my life).

  So hear me out is code for I’m about to ask you to do something you don’t want to do. I’m not usually good at understanding subtext, but Trey keeps things pretty simple. “There’s this showcase I’m doing.”

  “No,” I say.

  “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

  “No,” I say again. “Let’s work on ‘Stairway.’ ”

  “I want you to perform.”

  “No.”

  “It’s at a café. Totally low-pressure situation, and a bunch of my other students will also be there.”

  “Nope. Not going to happen.”

  “David, this will be good for you. And I think you’ll like the others. They’re all a lot like you.”

  “Like me…how?” I ask, because even though I don’t know what he means, I still don’t like where this is going.

  He pauses. Strokes his chin, which is hairless. A total Trey gesture, which I’ve imitated a few times in the mirror. It did not suit me.