Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

“Hm,” she says. They are sitting on a cement bench outside school, staring with false interest at a fire hydrant. Her wrist feels choked by the Ace bandage, which she wrapped too tightly in the morning. Fish has been kind enough to offer her a copy of all his class notes, sparse and careless though they are.

“She told me to come to her house after school. I thought it was for Bible study, but I went anyway. I guess she was rebelling against cultural constraints and whatnot.”

“If I rebeled in this way, my grandmother would send me to a convent.”

“I guess fourteen is kind of young,” Fish admits. “But actually I was really grateful to that Mormon girl. I’d never want to be someone’s First Time.”

“Me too.”

Some lies should be properly checked and fueled before launch, but Anju let this one tear out of her mouth prematurely. He glances at her, waiting for her to continue.

With outward calm, she focuses on the fire hydrant while synapses go firing along the corridors of her brain, trying to gather bits of information from music videos and movies, though the raciest she has seen is the kind that cuts from the first turbulent kiss to the morning after, when people are sucking on cigarettes, sheets tucked under armpits, looking languidly out of windows.

“How old were you?” Fish asks.

“Sixteen.”

“Oh, so pretty recent. Who was the guy?”

To manufacture a whole new person and past is a staggering task, so she calls upon a name she knows from years ago. “Sri Ram. A Hindu. He was writing me love notes….” (Abort , her brain blares. Dead end. Abort.) “But he died. Killed in a paper mill. Chopped him to death.”

“Wow.” Fish looks at her, then back to the sidewalk. “Sorry.”

A bloated pigeon goes waddling after a hunk of bagel on the sidewalk, a wealth of food until several others join in, culling what they can. Fish and Anju watch the staccato rhythms of their pecking for an appropriate period, to honor Anju’s fallen First Time.

“You’re really nothing like I thought you were,” Fish says, his voice lightly glazed with awe.

AND THEN THERE IS the side she preserves for Ammachi and Melvin. Every phone conversation has the same cadence and content, so that the questions and answers, leading one to the next, take on the cadence of a broken alarm clock.

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Are you eating?”

“Yes.”

“Are you studying?”

“Always.”

At times, Ammachi drops in a bit of gossip or a reference to a sermon, until her fear of raising the Solankis’ phone bill overcomes her and she announces that it is time to hang up. During his phone time, Melvin focuses on the process of acquiring a green card. He seems to entertain the naïve, infuriating notion that permanent residency can be procured in a matter of weeks, based on vague testimonies from a friend of a friend of a friend. Anju hates these blurry suspects, the way they raise reckless hopes.

“Not everyone gets it,” Anju insists. “And it must take time to apply.”

“Then why haven’t you started?” Melvin asks.

How can she tell him that, for the first time, she is beginning to doubt the merits of staying here at all?

There is something at school called the Pit, Fish has told her, a backstage section of the school auditorium where girls gather to do unspeakable and legendary things with recorders and ice cubes, pawing at each other behind the scrim of a painted shtetl used for last year’s production of Fiddler on the Roof . One girl, naked, wrapped herself in the American flag used for Student Council meetings and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” which was videotaped and posted somewhere on the Internet. Sometimes girls can be seen casually leaving the auditorium, tightening their ponytails, twisting their skirts back into place. They roll their eyes at the term “lesbian.” “I’m just so over it,” the Birthday girl said, during the Women’s Rights unit in Social Studies. “I feel like we should be postgender already.”

These are the times when Anju feels paralyzed, caught in the eye of a stormy confusion to which she does not want to know the answers. Such things are not discussed during phone conversations with Ammachi and Melvin. Even knowing of the Pit seems a kind of sin.

But Anju wishes her family could know something of her hardships, which are mostly hardships of the heart and therefore impossible to utter. She wants them to know her loneliness without having to say the word “lonely,” which does not fall easily from her mouth. She wants them to pity her and praise her all the same, but more, to know her nightmares, such as the one in which she lies supine on the floor of the 1 subway train as sneakers and heels trample her face and chest, leave her drained of voice and breath, while overhead a voice announces that the 1 train is not the 1 train but a new train called the Wrong Train, making no stops until Mexico.

All this until she snorts herself awake against a goose-down pillow, swaddled in Egyptian cotton sheets.

AS PROMISED, Anju brings the paintings to school, scrolled within a tube Miss Schimpf gave her. She arrives at her locker to find a note taped over the grating: See me to set up!!! Miss S . Beneath the three exclamation points, a smile.

The art show is being hung in the Fine Arts Wing, a carpeted haven of crisp, conditioned air, cushy armchairs, and orange pots of polished ficus plants. Few people visit the Fine Arts Wing, usually potential donors or visiting parents, leaving its bathrooms the most civilized of the building.

Miss Schimpf has never looked more buoyant, more alive within her small province of influence, plotting the positions of various fruit still lifes and pointillist portraits of horses. Her bangles are perpetually clattering as she directs the students, gesturing to a wall, using two fingers to draw a square in the air.

Students are pinning up their pieces, asking one another for opinions on what looks askew. Everything looks askew. In one series, the fragments of a face are rendered in terrifying close-up, the hair sprouting in thick, snaky locks, the gaze cloudy and detached, like that of a slain animal.

Below these pictures, on a small white card:

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

by Greg Pfeiffer

I am interested in the protean nature of identity, as expressed through a multiplicity of facial distortions rendered by Xeroxing my face …

A pair of hands clamps down on Anju’s shoulders, startling her.

“Anju, I need you to do an artist’s statement,” Miss Schimpf says. “Just the usual I am interested in this or that idea, this inspires me, I am compelled by … Maybe you could mention commercial art in India and its overlap with calendar art or Hindu religious iconography as depicted by Raja Ravi Varma.” Noting Anju’s stricken expression, she adds, “Or just write your name.”

Miss Schimpf leads her to a vacant section and shows her how to mount and hang the three paintings. She then hurries away, calling out the name of a student who has hung his mobile too low.

Before unscrolling the paintings, Anju takes a blank card and writes her name in tiny letters. She pins the card to the wall, below the space where the paintings will go, and takes a step back.

The card is a small scrap in a corkboard sea; most would not even notice it. Her card — claiming nothing, compelled by nothing — is the closest she has come to honesty in a long while. The bell chimes twice, signaling students to first period, but she cannot pull her eyes from her signature, the fine tremble in the line, as if she forged it. The n in “Melvin” trails off in a way that she meant as a flourish, but instead looks like a short bit of string that, if tugged, would quickly unspool her name.