Xhenet Aliu: Brass

“Margarita has her issues, but she has the right to a public education, too, and until today, her outbursts haven’t been quite so violent,” Mr. DiPietro tells her. “We’re like the police: we can’t act, we have to re act.”

“That’s bullshit,” your mother says. “You acted when you set up a dress code. You acted when you brought in drug-sniffing dogs last year.”

“I understand that you’re upset,” Mr. DiPietro says, obviously speaking exclusively to your mother, because he looks only at her when he’s talking, as if you’re not only half blind at the moment but fully deaf. You will most certainly not be mentioning your NYU rejection to her, because you can imagine her on the phone with the admissions office, doing her shrilling with them, as if the key to upward mobility were indignation instead of having enrolled you in a CCD class as an extracurricular ten years ago. She’ll try to convince you that the system is bullshit and rigged and that you’re better than all of those Long Island princesses anyway, when one look at their eighty-dollar Urban Outfitters maxi dresses and you know that’s not true. You’re fourth best at Crosby High, you’ll tell her, and she’ll think you’re bragging about it.

You hold a cold compress over your bad eye and fix the other eye on the diploma on Mr. DiPietro’s wall, an MEd, cum laude, from some online university you’ve never heard of. Even with the stark purple bruise already forming over your right eye, you apparently disappear completely in a room. Only your mother and, in a way, Margarita ever bother to drink you in. Even your father ran back to Albania once you stopped causing trouble in the womb, as if you were superboring even to the person whose interest in you was supposed to be innate. Your mother had told you that he got mired in a green card fiasco and decided to stick around once the country formed a tenuous Balkan democracy, but you always suspected the decision was personal, not political. Your mother said he was an asshole anyway, and you were better off without him, but at least she got you out of the deal. That’s what she explained, and whenever she said it, you wondered if that last part was supposed to sound as sarcastic as it did to your ears.

Your whole life was supposed to be about proving that you’re as unlike your loser transient father as possible.

But you can’t beat nature, as NYU has so kindly reminded you. As Margarita’s been reminding you for years.

Your mother and Mr. DiPietro continue to argue the nuances of Crosby High’s disciplinary policy, and you wonder, not for the first but for the most substantive time, what happened to the man responsible for your hearty gapless thighs, your mane of thick hair, which Supercuts employees admire but which can’t be controlled outside of their chairs, the well of rage that you have just begun to lower your bucket into and drink from. You’ve always known you were unlike your mother, who seems more pestered by rage than driven by it. She wants things easy. She wants you to prep for fields such as nursing and early childhood education, which will lead to the kind of life in which you’ll vocate Monday through Friday and vaguely recreate on Fri/Sat/Sun until retirement, which you’ll spend in a condo with a trio of small, goopy-eyed terriers. Your mother’s plan has been for you to be the first in the family to never have to rely on government assistance, to live a life of such comfort that when early heart disease sets in, you won’t even have the will to swallow your daily prescribed beta-blockers. Your plan, meanwhile, is to bloom into something freakish but interesting and impossible to ignore, like a corpse flower. In your room before your mother comes home from work, you’ve already experimented with the heavy eyeliner and matte lipstick you’ll wear, the shade of red on your lips becoming a signature. It’s Luljeta Red, your peers will say. Your peers will use your name as an adjective. You’ll be wild and mysterious, like the father you’re not supposed to want to resemble.

But who knows, maybe your father is actually interesting, like many assholes are. For the first time, you consider this possibly worth a look.

Mr. DiPietro tells your mother that Margarita will likely be expelled.

“I damn well hope she’s expelled. I hope she’s arrested. I haven’t ruled out pressing charges,” your mother says.

“Unfortunately,” Mr. DiPietro says, “Luljeta will also have to be suspended.”

Your mother pauses, throws her right hand to her heart, and shrieks, “What?”

“We have a zero-tolerance policy for fighting,” Mr. DiPietro says. “Believe me, I have no doubt that Margarita started this fight, but it takes two to engage.”

“Engage? Engage? Standing there while someone rams a fist into your face is engaging?” your mother says.

“Witnesses have told me that words were exchanged,” Mr. DiPietro says.

“Do you even know Luljeta? Ask her teachers. Ask anyone. She would never engage, ” your mother says.

“I did engage,” you say, interrupting your mother. It stops her midsentence, and she and Mr. DiPietro stare at you, the way patrons in a Wild West saloon might when a stranger steps through the swinging doors.

“What?” your mother says, once she can move her slack jaw again.

“I did engage,” you repeat.

“What do you mean, ‘engage’?” your mother says.

“She called me a terrorist and a camel jockey and I told her she was too stupid to live if she thought there were camels in Albania,” you say. You’re aware that these words are perhaps lightly embellished, but it feels good to release them nonetheless. You’re getting the chance for a do-over, and how often does that happen?

“And then what?” Mr. DiPietro asks.

“And then she said she was going to do me like Osama bin Laden,” you say, though you are fairly sure that Margarita has no idea what happened to Osama bin Laden, because that would require the literacy to read a newspaper. “So I told her she was late for her post on Cherry Street and I started to walk away, and she hit me from behind.”

“She hit you in the eye from behind?” Mr. DiPietro asks.

“No, it spun me around when she hit me from behind, and then she got me in the eye. She had to sucker punch me because she’s a dumb sucker bitch, and if I see that dumb sucker bitch again I’m gonna kick her so hard she’ll abort her next kid before she even conceives it,” you say, and it surprises even you to hear those words from your mouth, just as the immediate endorphin high that follows surprises you. The throbbing in your skull subsides again, and it reminds you that pain, which you’ve always thought of as an exterior force introduced to the body, is in fact caused by your own nerve endings sending self-preserving Maydays to your brain. If you could just order your brain not to answer, you could win. There are entire self-help aisles in Barnes & Noble devoted to this kind of thing, and look at you, you’ve read not a single book on it, and yet there you are, feeling pleasantly numb and even slightly awesome.

And then the pain rushes back, because your endorphins, frankly, are not terribly practiced things. You’re not used to acting out in ways that satisfy your most primal impulses.

You decide right then and there that you’re going to have to work on that. It’s in your nature. It’s in there somewhere.

For the first few minutes of the drive back home, which is where you’re to spend the next three days, per the pink piece of paper signed by Mr. DiPietro, your mother is strangely quiet. It’s you, in fact, who breaks the silence, when you ask where you’re going, after your mother begins taking roads in the opposite direction of your apartment.