Xhenet Aliu - Brass

You shrug, your shoulders rolling high in the pantomime of a shrug, a shrug that the people at the back of the theater would tell you to tone down.

“Guys, come on, it’s Christmas. I wasn’t trying to start anything. I was just trying to make conversation,” Greta says.

“That’s what happens when you make conversation about the rest of us being idiots,” Mamie says.

“I never said you were idiots, I just said don’t rely on people around here for academic guidance.”

“Well, who is she supposed to rely on, you? You who checks in once or twice a year when there’s free food on the table?”

“Yeah, I wonder why I would possibly want to not come back here,” Greta says, finally pushing her plate away.

“I know, it’s so awful here, and it’s so great where you are. You’re doing so much better than the rest of us with your name-brand college degrees.”

Greta appears shocked that her well-being is not apparent to Mamie.

“I’m happy,” Greta says. “I’m so happy.”

“In any case, it’s not like it’s too late. She can still send out more applications if she needs to,” your mother says.

“No, I can’t. It’s like seventy-five dollars for each one,” you remind her.

“They’ll waive the application fee for some people,” Robbie says, deciding to be helpful now that you’ve decided there’s no point in bothering with any of it.

“Really?” your mother says.

“ Some people. That means poor people,” Mamie says.

For a moment the silence that everyone was hoping for comes to be, and it brings none of the relief that, seconds ago, it had seemed to promise.

“What?” Mamie says. “That’s not us. We’re not poor. All of us work. All any of us have ever done is work. We don’t need handouts.”

“It’s not a handout. It’s like a scholarship to apply,” Greta says.

A need-based scholarship, which you earn by being a docile, poor, free-to-reduced-lunch–getting bastard child. You think that, but you don’t say it aloud. You’ve stopped saying anything aloud, in fact, and once again, it doesn’t even matter. Everyone else is doing the talking for you, deciding what’s right or wrong for the Luljeta Hasani they decided is sitting with them at the table, whether or not she should be proud or ashamed of being an aspirational charity case. You don’t even have the same name as these people. You resent being their obligation as much as you suspect they secretly resent you for the same. You don’t even want the parents of some packaged food product heir to cover your application fee to Wesleyan or Bucknell via their contributions to the school’s never-ending capital campaign, so happy were they that the school found no hard evidence of the trumped-up allegations lodged against their son the second semester of his freshman year. Their boy was a good boy, their boy was a gift bestowed upon them late in life, after eight rounds of fertility treatments and, ultimately, the egg of a well-compensated nonsmoking Bucknell coed with no family history of heart disease, addiction, mental illness, or brunettes. It’s dumb, maybe, but you wonder what it would be like to be a gift to your family instead of a burden. You wonder what it would feel like to be a happy surprise, the kind a father celebrates in a smoky room among friends who’d never seen him smile quite like that, instead of the kind a mother doesn’t really know what to do with when she wants to go bowling with some co-workers on a Tuesday night.

Your phone buzzes in your pocket. There’s a message from Yllka: This year my present was you, it reads. And another from Teena informing you that she’s told her parents she was with you, in case they call looking for her. And another from Ahmet, not really a message but a series of seemingly unrelated emoticons that you’d have to be an Egyptologist to decipher. Three texts from three different people in a day; it’s possibly a record for you. Meanwhile, the people whom you sit among continue shrilling at each other, supposedly over your future but obviously really about their own histories, begrudging each other for past betrayals and ingratitude and dinner conversations turned ugly.

“Well, don’t worry about me ruining everything, I have to catch the six-twenty train back anyway,” Greta says.

“What?” you say. “I thought you were staying overnight.” Six-twenty is three hours away, not enough time to clean up, eat dessert, clean up again, watch two hours of NCIS reruns on TV, and confide in Greta that you were on the verge of something big, that you’d received an invitation to explore your past and, you assume, form a future that is tenable on account of a stronger, reinforced foundation.

“I’m sorry, Lulu, I’ve got a thing I have to go to that I really can’t get out of,” Greta says.

“But you can get out of being with your family? Lulu’s been counting down the days till you got here,” your mother says.

Greta looks at you with the same smile she always gives you, which previously felt tender and affirming and seemed to say: Save yourself. We are not your sole progenitors and we are not your sole fate . Only now it feels condescending and obligatory, as if, in addition to learning how to be cool from her stupid rich friends, she also learned how to smile in the gracious, empty way of well-bred rich people, mimicking the smiles her friends give their doormen when they hand over a Christmas card with a pathetic twenty-dollar tip at Christmas. You realize that you’ve had Greta wrong this whole time: the lesson hasn’t been look what you can do when you apply yourself, it’s look what happens when you don’t stop running: you turn around to find that the life you thought you abandoned has been only one crescent roll behind you this whole time.

“It’s fine. I don’t feel good, anyway,” you say.

“Don’t be like that, Lu. I wish I didn’t have to go,” she says. “You should come see me next weekend, okay? And we’ll see each other all the time once you’re at NYU, right?”

“Yup,” you answer. “All the time.”

“Well, silly me, I thought I’d get to spend a whole holiday with my family,” Mamie says.

“If we don’t get to spend the whole day together, then let’s just not be assholes for the time we do have, okay?” your mother says. “Now who wants cake?”

“I do,” Robbie chimes in.

You think, Yeah, who wants cake indeed.

It looked like I was the only person on the East End who didn’t get an invitation to the party happening in our apartment when I walked in after my double shift at the Ross. Bashkim and Gjonni were sitting at the heads of the kitchen table, the other chairs filled with guys I’d never met, all of them leather-brown, all of them with scars across their brows or cheeks or necks, like factory seconds from a set of dishware. A few others improvised seats, like an Igloo cooler that wasn’t ours, a stack of telephone books stolen off of every front step in the neighborhood, a case of industrial-size stewed tomatoes stood upright, obviously borrowed from dry storage at the Ross and almost certainly going back there afterward.

“Beautiful, beautiful!” the men called out, so I turned behind me to see what they were looking at before I realized they meant me. When I turned back to face the room, I was surrounded by wet lips searching for my cheeks. They grabbed my hands and shoved wrinkled dollars into my palms, which I wasn’t ready for, so the bills floated to the floor.

“Look at her, just like a woman, throwing away money,” Gjonni said. He gathered the bills in his hand and pressed the pile into my arms, and I cradled it tight like a child against my chest. “But see, a good woman, a natural mother,” he said, pressing his hand into my belly, which was as puffy from Pepsi bloat as it was from the future human living in there. The men laughed, and then somebody said something I couldn’t understand, which made them laugh harder, and made me want to run.