Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Excuse me?”

“I was the only one who knew about him. Really knew. I’m the only one who could have stopped it. I guess I just … fell asleep at the wheel, you know?” It was a horrible pun. The hideous noise, the laughter, was coming from between her throat and her heart, some place that if stepped on would paralyze her instantly and forever.

Hang up, Ami .

“Did you have dealings with Bobby McCloud prior to his suicide on Wednesday?” the woman on the phone was asking. “Did you know him before this encounter?”

“But are you supposed to believe everything he says? Ben Kingsley, for the love of God!”

“Excuse me?”

Hang up NOW .

“Ben Motherfucking Kingsley,” she gasped, her shoulders shaking.

“Ms. Eapen, did you or did you not know Bobby McCloud before his death on August twenty-sixth?”

Amina laughed and laughed and laughed. She needed to hang up the phone, and she did, but not before whispering, “I’ve known him all my life.”

August 29, 1982, was full of promise. Clear and sunny and just a little too warm for the teal corduroys that Amina insisted on wearing, the day swam brightly in front of the car as Akhil pulled down the driveway, beckoning them toward the first day of school. The air smelled sweet and green; the rearview mirror held their mother at a safe distance at last. Amina watched Kamala recede, small and jittery in a pink nightgown that all but swallowed her.

“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” Amina asked. The trees curled in, obscuring the front door.

Akhil frowned, thinking this over. He thought it over the entire length of the driveway, and the dirt road after that, and then the main road. He stopped at the intersection that would lead them to the west mesa, to school.

“Who fucking knows anymore,” he said.

Mesa Preparatory was unquestionably pretentious. Just what pretense it was operating under was not apparent to most of its inhabitants — the progeny of New Mexico’s elite — who, despite their supposedly cosmopolitan upbringings, knew very little about Andover or Exeter or Choate, much less what their brick-building campus, nestled into the west mesa of Albuquerque, was striving toward. What they did know was that they went to the most expensive private school in the state, that the soaring expanse of their green soccer fields drew the envy of other schools choking on dust, and that uttering the word Mesa when pulled over by Albuquerque cops had a beneficial effect on anything from a speeding ticket to a DUI.

“Welcome back to Athens in the desert!” Dean Royce Farber crowed at the morning assembly, releasing a flurry of eye rolling but also a sense of self-importance that defined Mesa students for better and worse.

The summer of 1982 had been about as long and hot as any in New Mexico, and the gymnasium sweated scents of overly chlorinated pool, recently varnished floors, new jeans, pencils, erasers, sneakers, notebooks, and hair shampooed with Vidal Sassoon. Under the darkened scoreboard, administrators and faculty sat erect in their folding chairs, legs crossed and ties knotted. Sports coaches stood behind them, green-and-black tracksuits gleaming like beetle shells.

“No matter where you were this summer,” Farber said, raising his head and pausing, as though weighing the air with the bridge of his nose, “chances are that if you’re a Mesa Preparatory student, you were making a difference.”

Amina stared at the legs of her new cords, already hating everything. Why hadn’t Akhil mentioned that she was supposed to be making a difference this summer? Memorizing the words to every Air Supply song ever written was hardly interesting. Roaming from one end of the Coronado mall to the other while waiting for Dimple to come home from camp in California was borderline pathetic. Even her outings to the Rio Grande with her father’s old Nikon seemed painfully tame for something she had just an hour ago considered adventurous. She scanned the faces framed between upturned collars, the hair side-parted and gelled, the eyes searching out one another’s flaws without ever seeming to leave Dean Farber. She looked for Dimple.

“I know that many of you spent your summer embroiled in activities with your family, taking vacation in a variety of locales, and I imagine it is hard to come back to campus. Nonetheless, I’d like to welcome you back to the Mesa Preparatory family, and introduce a few new members of our faculty and staff.”

Embroiled in activities? There was a beehivey quality to the phrase that made her think of thin limbs working in unison for some greater, sweeter good. As for her own family, Amina couldn’t even remember the last time they had eaten dinner together, much less embroiled themselves in any activity that didn’t involve a television set. Which was not to say there were no family activities at all. In June, for example, she and Akhil had witnessed a spectacular fight that left her parents haunting opposite areas of the house (mother, garden; father, porch). All of July there was father hunting, an activity never mentioned aloud but practiced with alarming diligence, whether it was Kamala staring at the clock at dinner or Amina checking for the balled-up men’s socks left in the bathroom hamper, or Akhil staring furiously down the driveway. By August there were even sessions of group longing, a sort of inverse Quaker meeting, in which all three remaining Eapens sat on the couch and didn’t say a thing about his near-total absence.

Amina looked around the gymnasium to the other dark heads nestled in with the lighter ones. Jules Parker, the black kid, was staring at the scoreboard with an open mouth that suggested hunger. A few rows beneath him, Akhil looked half asleep. It was a blessing, really, the reality of her brother blunted by something as tame as boredom. Akhil had become intensely articulate and demented in puberty. A deadly combination of political conviction, quick temper, thick chub, blooming acne, and antagonistic views he would defend until hysterical had made him nearly impossible to have in the house.

Outside the house was worse. In the previous spring alone, he had become engaged in an “abusive interaction” with the PE coach over the merits of running, a heated exchange with his French teacher over the country’s “limp-wristed approach to democracy,” a locker room fight with four boys who called him Tonto, and a time-intensive protest of Reagan’s nuclear-arms policy, in which he chained himself to a desk at school and had to wait the eight hours it took the superintendent to locate the bolt cutters.

“Those of you entering your freshman year might feel uncertain about your future,” Farber was saying. “Perhaps you’ve heard about the rigorous course load here, or the demanding schedule we keep, or our standards of academic and athletic excellence.”

A derisive murmur came from a few rows behind Amina, followed by a burst of laughter. Amina turned to see Dimple tucked like a chick between the preening bosoms of three sophomore girls who’d apparently decided she was too cool to endure the usual freshman awkwardness.

“I say this to you: There are times that you will be scared. There are times when you will question your ability to take on the day. But I would ask that you remember in those times that more is expected of you at Mesa Preparatory because you are simply capable of more . And now, I’d like you all to rise for the school motto.”

Four hundred Mesa Preparatory students rose to face the flag emblazoned with their school seal. Akhil had at least prepared her for this much. He had even gone so far as to imitate it, face glazed, voice psychotically pleasant.