Tania James - Atlas of Unknowns

When she reaches the second-to-last stanza, Mrs. Loignon looks at Anju. “Go for it,” she says with a smile, as if bestowing Anju with a gift.

Anju wishes this gift came with a return receipt. She hates reading aloud. Her w ‘s sound like v ‘s. Her voice, stiffened into submission, takes on the lilt of nursery rhymes.

Let us roll all owver strength and all

Owver sweetness up into vun ball,

And tear owver pleasures vith rough strife

Through the i-run gates of life …

After Anju finishes the last stanza, Mrs. Loignon asks what the speaker is proposing. In response, a mere shifting, a few pairs of eyes looking up.

“He’s proposing to bone his coy mistress,” says the cannon cartoonist.

Mrs. Loignon glares at him with predatorial stillness until he mutters an apology. She employs the silent reprimand whenever someone has broken the cardinal rule, the only rule, of creative writing class: This is a safe space . Anju hardly understands the rule, as being called upon to read aloud, in her opinion, creates an atmosphere of utmost threat.

Toward the end of class, Mrs. Loignon collects the student poems assigned from last week and selects a few at random to read aloud. She never reveals the name of the poet, though no one in the room has mastered the art of the poker face. The poet wears one of two masks: stunned, vacantly staring into his binder, praying for the end; or the twitchy smirk, the fidgety hand, quick to claim the page as her own.

Anju can hardly tell what is good or bad. She thinks only in terms of Pass or No Pass. Fish has told her that no one fails this class, but to write of feelings? To be given no other instruction? Facing the blank page, she is a raft at sea. She needs sails, a life jacket, an anchor, and a direction.

So far, she has been recopying the literature poems and substituting synonyms from a thesaurus (“perambulate” instead of “walk,” for example; “mechanism for transport” rather than “chariot”). Her creations sound much more complicated, and therefore artistic, than the current selection from which Mrs. Loignon is reading aloud, entitled “Vegetarian’s Complaint”:

O Trout, Tilapia, all ye watery prey ,

No one is spared from Fish Patty Day .

Battered, fried beyond compare ,

A Fish is not meant to be shaped like a square .

Mrs. Loignon pauses before reading aloud the next poem. Her eyebrows rise as she scans the lines, and at the end she utters a satisfied Mmmm .

“‘Meditations on a Dark-Eyed Girl’”

While Mrs. Loignon reads, Anju watches Fish out of the corner of her eye. His lips are moving just barely, perhaps along with the words though she cannot tell. His eyes are intent on the page, his pattering fingers claiming the poem as his own.

… and shadows of thinning trees

like writing on the wall

Tell how seasons, like people, will pass .

But it’s when I sleep that time goes still

With the moon as witness at the windowsill .

So whatever I have kissed in dreams

I’ll keep at least in part .

The words rush a foreign warmth to her cheeks. The poem pins her to her chair. Not for all the A-pluses in the world would she turn her head, just then, to meet Fish’s gaze, but she does notice the cannon cartoonist vengefully footnoting his textbook: I wouldn’t fuck Loignon with a stolen dick .

WHEN ANJU WAS TWELVE, she came quite close to having a boyfriend.

In school, the word used for a girlfriend or boyfriend was “item.” Her almost-item’s name was Sri Ram. Theirs was a doomed affair, not only because Sri Ram was Hindu, but also because a girl who was rumored to be kissing a boy could just as well flush her reputation down the commode and plan for a life of parentally enforced celibacy.

They did not exchange kisses, but love notes.

His first, smuggled into her hand on the morning of the first day of school: “I like your skirt. Will you be my item?”

Because everyone wore uniforms, Anju had not been impressed by his compliment. He was a scrawny, sleepy fellow, seemingly incapable of lifting anything other than his own satchel, but the brazenness of the note charmed her. New to the class, she felt invincibly impulsive and wrote on the back of his note:

“Would you convert?”

She had no hopes that he would convert, certainly not on account of a gray skirt, but she had thought the rhyme rather clever. And if he liked her at all, it had to be for her cleverness, as she had little else in her corner.

Before class began, Anju stuck the note in her pocket, her hands placed atop her math notebook, her knees bouncing beneath the table. Linno, sitting next to her, told her to stop shaking the bench. Anju was doubly anxious, as it was her first day in Linno’s math class, two years beyond her own peers. The classroom was nearly identical to her old one, the painted walls molting in patches, the buckling wooden floor, the rows of long tables and benches that made it difficult to rise from the desk in a ladylike way. But now, Anju was anxious for different reasons altogether, aware of a pair of eyes at the rear of the room, pressing into her back.

Sister Savio took roll call. Present, Sister … Present, Sister … Anju was focused on the present in her pocket.

“And Linno Vallara,” Sister Savio said. “Next time sit in the middle of the bench. You’ve gotten so big you might tip the whole thing over.”

Anju’s knees stopped. Her heart seemed to delay between beats.

Laughter spilled from the back of the room to the front, and out of that chorus she could distinguish the timid chortle of Sri Ram.

For the rest of class, she pictured herself choking Sister Savio with her eyeglass chain. Sri Ram she would kick between the legs, as this region, to her limited knowledge, would summon the greatest amount of pain. But neither image brought peace because she felt more than rage. She was shamed by her own shame, made worse later that day when Linno told their father that she would not return to school. Anju’s first day would be Linno’s last.

Several days later, after recess, Anju laid a cushion of cow dung on Sister Savio’s seat, leaving Sister Savio with a bull’s-eye on her rear for most of the day. Unfortunately, Anju had not washed her hands with enough soap, and after sniffing each student’s hands, the headmaster ordered her to stay after school. Anju received a paddling that prevented her from sitting properly for days, her rear marked far more severely than that of Sister Savio.

And like a true amateur in the art of love, Anju left Sri Ram’s note in the pocket of the very skirt that had wooed him. One minute Anju was standing at the kitchen table, adding fractions, and the next minute Linno’s open palm was on the corner of her book. In it: the crumpled piece of paper.

“Are you crazy?” Linno scolded her, though her eyes were ravenous for details. In the midst of laundry, she had discovered a scandal. “What is this? Who are you trying to convert?”

Anju looked at the crumple, which had once held such sweat and hope. She thought of Sri Ram, who had reportedly passed the exact same note to five different girls in the random manner of a fern casting spores into the breeze. Sri Ram had stopped talking to Anju as soon as he realized that she and Linno shared a last name. She thought of the seat next to her, where Linno used to sit, unoccupied for the past three days. Its emptiness — impossible to admit aloud — was a comfort.

But for Linno, Anju conjured a story of how Sri Ram had fallen madly in love with her, how he had wanted to convert her to Hinduism, how she had refused him, citing the First Commandment, and had traipsed away in her gray skirt, leaving him with eyes wet and tortured. And as with all her little fictions, the deeper she mined the details (her braids: swinging; his lower lip: trembling), the more the melodrama gained a truth in which she could believe.