Xhenet Aliu - Brass

I’m pretty sure that I never made a sound, that it was Yllka who did all the yelling and screaming when I came to, while Janice pulled me up and checked me for fractures and then brought me outside with a glass of water when it was clear that nothing was broken. She asked how my stomach felt and I shrugged and she asked if I thought something had happened to the baby and I shook my head, and then she didn’t ask any more questions, just rubbed little circles on my back and said, “I know, I know.” I’d never thought that much of Janice, but there was something in the way she sat there that made me think that she did know. Everybody except for me seemed to have already learned it, whatever it was. Then Janice had to go back to her tables and to mine also, because Yllka forbade me to go back inside. For my own good, she said, not for Bashkim’s.

So I don’t remember everything about that night, but I did come out with something better than memory, which was a little bit of foresight. When I got home I pulled the leftover money Bashkim had given me for the doctor from my pocket and tucked it into a little flour tin someone had donated to us as a housewarming gift that had been sitting empty behind a box of potato flakes and a couple of cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle. A rainy day was coming, it was almost certain, and I was going to need some shelter.

You have to start taking Ahmet’s phone calls before you can ask him for his car.

You learn more about him. His father runs a Subway franchise somewhere out on the West End. He expects Ahmet to work there and, eventually, take over, but Ahmet has different plans. He’s majoring in business at UConn Waterbury, and he knows what a dead end a Subway life would be for him, that weird Subway smell infusing his entire wardrobe, the complaints of too little meat and too much shredded lettuce by customers in desperate need of an extra serving of vegetables. He’s a modern guy, and his father is an old-fashioned guy, and he doesn’t understand why his father would bring them all the way to America just to live the same old bleak Communist Subway lifestyle, with its beige turkey slices that lead to satiety but never pleasure.

“Nah, man, nah. Panera Bread, that’s where it’s at. That’s what I’ma get me,” Ahmet says.

He speaks so naturally in such an American vernacular that the slight accent seems almost like an affect, but affects are generally adapted to impress people, whereas Ahmet’s unplaceable one only confuses them. But Ahmet himself is not confusing. Ahmet himself is as transparent as the Sprite Zero that fills his ever-present Subway beverage canisters. He knows exactly what he wants and expresses it without reservation: first Panera in the ShopRite plaza on Chase; the second in Watertown next to the old two-screen cinema run by some distant relative of his; the steel-gray carbon-look vinyl skinz over the gas tank of his Kawasaki; and a nice girl. He’s way into this hypothetical nice girl; not old-fashioned, not a subservient housewife like his mother, but nice . Someone who could run the books at his shops, like Yllka, but do it with a smile on her face, very unlike Yllka.

He talks about this nice girl, but meanwhile, he’s spending more and more time with you. You aren’t nice, no matter what ribbon you’d been handed back in kindergarten. You’ve shed the teacher’s pet thing entirely over the past couple of weeks, acting surly and handing in assignments days late, and you’re building up to skipping them altogether. What difference does it make, anyway? The $462 your mother managed to deposit in your college savings account won’t pay for a semester at Western Connecticut State University any more than it would have paid for the same at NYU. Clearly that’s how much investment has been made in your future: the equivalent of a new futon from Bob’s Discount Furniture. It’s about as much investment as had been made in your past, and only recently have you acquired the wherewithal for that to piss you way the hell off.

So Ahmet doesn’t have a nice girl, or a good girl, or a smart girl, he has you, who every night falls asleep fantasizing about having punched Margarita right in the mouth, then coming home to tell your mother that you wish it had been her, with all her lies and silence and big talk about wanting what’s best for you without ever once really planning for it. He has you, who won’t even put out, not even a little bit, not even a kiss on the mouth.

That last part is what makes him think he has a nice girl. It never occurs to Ahmet that you would be willing to put out if he were a bearded denim model prone to bouts of depression that only you could talk him through. Ahmet is just a regular nice guy, one who deserves a nice girl with a moral code that truly forbids putting out, and you feel bad that what you really seek from him is not the day’s surplus white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies, which he offers via text at 10:01 P.M. every night, or the tight abs that he somehow finds time to work on at Gold’s Gym between work and school and little not-nice-girl you. What you really have your eye on is his Civic hatchback, a compact, reliable thing whose backseat folds down into something approaching a sleeping cabin and whose efficient Japanese engine could get you to Texas with the $462 previously earmarked for a semester of medical sonographing textbooks.

“I need to do it. I need to meet my family. My Albanian family,” you’d emphasized. You strategized this, knowing that even if Ahmet is the Panera to his father’s Subway, he could never bring home someone without Albanian blood.

“Yes, yes, you should. It’s wrong that you don’t know them. I can’t even imagine,” he’d answered.

And after two short weeks, you announce that you are going. You are going to Texas, come hell or high water, dammit. You’ll be leaving on Friday, coincidentally a week before his spring classes begin.

“What? How?” he asks. He appears genuinely hurt that you’d make a decision that large without consulting him, your fake short-term boyfriend.

“Greyhound, I guess. Or I’ll hitchhike. It doesn’t matter, I’m just going to go.”

He slaps an open hand onto his forehead and holds it there, like he’s holding a compress onto an open head wound. “Hitchhike ? For serious? You? You want to be raped and murdered?”

“I don’t want to be.”

“That’s just…It’s just crazy. What does your mother say about this?”

“She says fine, what does she care?”

“Your mother says she doesn’t care?” he asks, incredulous.

“She doesn’t not care,” you say. “It’s just, like, I’m basically an adult, and of course she understands. Who wouldn’t understand wanting to know your own brothers and sisters, your own flesh and blood? I mean, what’s more important than family?” you say, and you don’t even care that you’re mostly just quoting the Kardashians.

Ahmet understands this, though, because he is the type who will shake down his sister’s thug boyfriend if he keeps her out past 11:00 P.M.

“I just wish you wouldn’t take the bus,” he says. “You know there’s crazy people on those things, right? Like, guys with swords that will take off your head?”

“I’d rather not take the bus, too,” you say. “But.”

“But what?”

“But I can’t afford to fly, and I don’t have a car.”

At first he’s silent. He shakes his head, takes a sip of his Sprite, leans back in the seat of the Civic in the Stop & Shop parking lot where you hold most of your dates.

“What if I come with you?” he says.

“What? No, I can’t ask you to do that,” you answer, and in fact, you asking him to escort you is not at all a part of the plan. Why can he not see that you just need to temporarily relieve him of the glut of motorized vehicles on his hands?