Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“Timendi causa est nescire,” the students chorused, and Amina mouthed along the way she sang church hymns, uncommitted to the sound of her own voice. It left her feeling like a traitor, though who she was fooling — God or Dean Farber or herself — was a mystery. Ignorance is the cause of fear , indeed.

“He’s totally been checking me out.” Dimple jostled the load of books in her arms, trying to smooth them into an orderly pile. They were walking back to the freshman building together, Dimple having detangled from the sophomore girls to catch up with Amina.

“Dirk Weyland?” Amina asked.

Dimple’s face slid into the cold look she’d picked up at camp, along with an entirely new vocabulary, bleached hair, loads of string bracelets, a vague disdain for everything but the beach, and familiarity with the bases as applied to the human body (she had been to third twice in July).

“I just didn’t know that you guys had talked or anything,” Amina said.

“We haven’t really, but I’ve seen him watching me. And Mindy said that he’s going to be at David Lewis’s party this weekend. So.”

Mindy . It was strange that a name Amina hadn’t even known until a few weeks earlier could have become a constant pinch in her breathing. Mindy Lujan, the sophomore who’d taken freshman Dimple under her wing; Mindy Lujan with her feathered hair, bullying blue-lined eyes, and potty mouth that rivaled Akhil’s, managing to use fuck as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, often in the same sentence, as in, “Who the fuck does that fucking fuck think she’s fucking with?”

“Doesn’t Dirk have a girlfriend?”

“Ami …” Dimple sighed. “They’ve been seriously breaking up all summer. You know.”

Amina did not know, nor was she under the delusion that she suddenly would know if she were invited out with the volleyball team and given the opportunity to glean the kind of details that passed for currency at Mesa.

The crowd was thicker as they neared the building, everyone trying to squeeze through the glass doors like salmon in a fish run. The tide of students pushed them into the locker bay, where Dimple stopped and fished around in her bag with one hand, pulling a crumpled schedule from it. “What do you have now?”

“English, then photography, and biology. What about you?”

“Bio with Pankeridge?”

Amina looked down at the slip of paper on top of her English book. “Yes.”

“Oh, thank God. We have bio together.”

Amina tried not to smile. Her smiles, she knew, had the opposite effect that they used to on her cousin, placing an unmistakable damper on whatever warmth had summoned the gesture in the first place.

“Did you hear that some girl got kicked out last year for not being able to complete any of her dissection labs? Her life was, like, so over.” Dimple looked smaller suddenly, more like the girl who cried into Amina’s hair before she left for camp.

“That’s not going to happen to you.”

“What if it does?”

“We won’t let it.” Amina said, and was privately elated by the look of relief in Dimple’s eyes. “So I’ll see you at lunch?”

“What? Oh.” Dimple looked back at her schedule, pretending to see something on it. “Maybe. Let’s just see how it goes, yeah?”

“Right,” Amina said, and turned to find her way to her next class on her own.

In the car on the way home, Akhil smoked furiously.

“Fucker. What a fucker. Capable of more! And the worst part is he believes it! They all fucking do.”

Every window in the car was open, Iron Maiden was screaming from the stereo, and still she could hear him perfectly. The mesa rumbled by in a blur of dust. Amina’s hair whipped around her face.

“And you know what the most unbelievable thing is?”

“Can we roll up a window?”

“That he thinks we’re on his side. As though he can dictate the terms of our fucking mental growth!”

Amina started to roll up her window.

“Not right now! I’m trying to think.”

“Can you maybe do it without all the expletives?”

Akhil flipped down the volume, smashed the cigarette between his lips and sucked it, squinting at her. He blew out smoke. “Who do you have for English?”

“Mr. Tipton.”

“Goddamn prick.”

“I thought everybody loved him!”

“Because they’re sheep. Don’t start quoting him unless you want me to leave you on the side of the road.” Akhil accelerated. Spirals of dust blossomed behind them. He jammed in the lighter and opened the glove compartment. “Who else?”

“Messina for photography.”

“I heard she’s okay.”

Mrs. Messina hardly looked okay, with her deathly pale skin and mud-colored lips and smell of patchouli, but Amina nodded. “Gerber for history.”

Akhil shrugged. “Whatever. What about bio?”

“Pankeridge.”

“Ballbuster. Don’t screw up the labs.”

“Great, Dimple’s already freaking out about the whole dissection thing.”

“She should be. She’s fucked if she can’t nail it.”

Amina stared out the window. She was always messing up with Dimple these days. Not being interesting enough, not getting things that were supposed to be obvious. Her cousin hadn’t really wanted to talk about the blurry pictures Amina had taken when she got back from camp, or the ridiculousness of Akhil’s “Mad About Mutually Assured Destruction” campaign. She had scanned Amina’s room like it belonged to someone else’s kid sister, and shrugged at the possibility of walking to the Rio Grande. In fact, the only aspect of Amina’s life that seemed worth commenting on was the seethingly quiet Kamala, whom Dimple had immediately pronounced “a serious mental case.”

“I don’t want to go home,” Amina said.

Akhil took a long drag, flicked the butt out the window. “I’m sure Mom’s fine.”

“All day? Without anyone?”

“Well, maybe she’ll get it together. Maybe that will be a good thing.”

“So she can be more like Monica?”

“I don’t think he meant that.”

The words had haunted them, of course. Never mind that outwardly they reassured each other that the fight in June was just one more skirmish in their parents’ never-ending battle; inwardly they felt damned by the very sight of it, instantly hardened, their hearts crystallized with shock. What on earth could have prepared them for the late-night return from an office party, the car idling in the driveway, lights on, doors flung open, their mother screaming like her back was on fire? The noise alone had brought them running to the front door, and as all children are riveted by the sight of parental demise, what they saw kept them there. They had never seen their mother drunk before (and, in fact, would never see her drunk again), but there she was, lit from the knees down by the car headlights, sari pooling at her feet, screaming, “Go live with your precious Monica in the hospital then!” like she was a soap opera star.

“Drinking like that in front of the people I work with?” Thomas had shouted, pacing the driveway. “What do you think they think of you now?”

“Isn’t that what you yourself told me? ‘Monica this and Monica that and why can’t you be more like Monica?’ ”

“Monica can hold her liquor!”

“Monica is a whore .” Kamala stumbled a little, frowning down at her ankles.

“She is my assistant, Kamala. You will not talk about her that way.”

“Touching you!”

“The Americans do that! It’s their way. You would know if you knew any!”

“Now he’s going to start again about this job business, and I tell you, I will kill him. I will kill him to tiny pieces!”