Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

“What’s his duty?”

“To defend his country. And his family.” He sniffed like this was something he’d done himself. “His honor.”

“What about a man who doesn’t have any of those things?”

“Everyone has a country.”

“Not necessarily,” Gina Rodgers said, her eyes locked on Mr. Tipton. “There are dissidents. And expatriates. And the classic firstgeneration immigrant caught between the country left behind and the new land. There’s—”

“Amina, what do you think?” Mr. Tipton asked.

“What?”

“How would you define a good man?”

Amina chewed the inside of her cheek, all her answers trapped inside a swirl of thinking so thick she had trouble making any words at all. Hands rose on all sides of the room like tulips blooming for the sun. The bell rang.

“You know, you’re going to have to speak eventually,” Mr. Tipton said as she was packing her stuff to go. “It’s English class. Speaking is important.”

“I know.”

“Don’t tell me you’re bored with Hamlet already.” He smiled.

“No. It’s just … I don’t know. One person’s good man is another person’s, you know, dad.” She flushed. “Or ghost or whatever.”

“See, now, why didn’t you say that? That’s exactly what Hamlet is about — the complexities of sincerity, the relevance of sanity. In fact, there are debates about whether or not Hamlet is crazy or just pretending to be crazy. I’d be interested to know what you think.”

Amina nodded, like Sure, yeah, I’ll do that , but really, she would have been interested to know what she thought, too.

At least she had her art. Downstairs forty minutes later in the photo room, everyone stared at the board with nervous excitement. It was a thrill, the last twenty minutes of class devoted to critique, the curiosity about what others had come up with and how you measured against it. There was a rule, of course, to look at all the pictures for at least two minutes before talking. Amina’s eyes flashed quickly over the others but returned to her own, fascinated by the angle, by the cut of her own face. When had her jaw gotten so sharp? She had done much better with the self-portrait assignment than she had with the last. Part of it was getting more familiar with the printing process; the dodging helped where her own knowledge of the camera fell short. And really, she had gotten the perfect picture, setting her desk lamp at a ninety-degree angle to her body so that most everything around her was blanketed with darkness while the side of her face pressed into the light. She hadn’t even bothered to print the more mundane shots — this, she knew, was rare perfection.

“Well?” Mrs. Messina asked. “What do we think?”

“I like Sarah’s,” someone in back of Amina said, and she turned. Tommy Hargrow, the oldest of seven Mormon kids. While Amina wasn’t totally sure exactly what being Mormon entailed, it was always the first thing said about Tommy, the second being that he had six siblings. He studied the board. “I think there’s something interesting about it.”

Amina looked back at Sarah’s picture. It showed her teeth glistening with a goofy smile, her hair weightlessly suspended around her face, like she was underwater.

“I was on the trampoline,” Sarah offered.

“We don’t talk about our own images unless we’re asked a question,” Mrs. Messina reminded her. She looked at the photo. “It is interesting to me that Sarah decided to edit out the trampoline, though. Class, what do you make of that?”

Amina made nothing of it. The image was silly, too stagy, too juvenile. She studied her hands.

“I like that there’s no, you know, background or whatever,” someone said.

“Context,” Mrs. Messina said. “What you’re talking about is context. We can’t place Sarah, exactly, though we know she’s joyous. I see at least four pictures on the wall that do the same thing. Take a look at Amina’s.”

Amina looked down, trying not to smile. There was a long silence.

“Where are the rest?” Mrs. Messina asked.

“I don’t have any others.”

“You only took one picture of yourself?”

“I didn’t like the others.”

“Next time, bring them.” Mrs. Messina turned to the class. “Listen, you need to keep in mind that we want to see a good sampling of your work. What you like at this point isn’t really important because you haven’t figured out your own eye yet. This, for example, makes Amina look pretty , and maybe like she belongs on an album cover, but beyond that, I’m not really seeing her at all. Her other photographs might have shown me something different. Now let’s take a look at Tommy’s.” Amina sat very still, suddenly aware of how little she was breathing. How dare Mrs. Messina single her out? Sure, she only had one photo up, but at least it wasn’t total crap like the ones Missy Folgers had taken, placing all of her horse-riding ribbons in the shape of a horseshoe around her head.

She looked at Tommy’s pictures. Three showed him on an abandoned baseball dugout. The last four were of him at dinner, sitting very still while his parents and six siblings swirled around him, in varying degrees of sharpness.

“I love them,” someone said.

“Value judgments are useless here. What do you love about them?”

“They’re good.”

Mrs. Messina sighed. “Why?”

“They make me sad,” Missy Folgers said.

Mrs. Messina nodded. “Good. How so?”

No one said anything. Amina stared at the last photograph. It was the loneliness. It was the way Tommy seemed to be talking to the camera because there was no one else to talk to. She stared at the floor miserably, barely aware of the assignment for the next week landing in her hands until Mrs. Messina started reading from it.

“Over the last weeks, you did a portrait of yourselves. Over the next two, I want you to turn the camera on your family. We’re learning to tell stories here, so think about action. Okay?”

People were collecting their pictures from the blackboard, and Amina hurried up with them, snapping hers down. She stuffed it into her backpack, not caring as the paper bent and creased under her hand.

“Overpopulation. Truncal obesity. An excess of body hair. This is what we offer the world,” Akhil announced the following Saturday. Amina and Dimple sat on rusty lawn chairs on the Stoop, the tiny corner of roof accessible through Akhil’s bedroom window, while Akhil himself paced, chain-smoking with one nervous eye on the locked bedroom door. Downstairs, a chorus of parents’ voices rumbled with post-meal chatter.

“Speak for yourself, dude.” Dimple frowned, pulled at her split ends. “I’m not the fat one.”

“Hit puberty and we’ll talk.”

“Oh, is that what happened? Good to know.”

Amina kicked Dimple’s ankle.

“Ow. Like it’s my fault he’s fat and angry about it,” Dimple said.

Akhil exhaled a cloud of smoke. “At least I’m not trying to be white.”

“I’m not trying to be anything,” Dimple sighed, rolling her eyes. “I just am .”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever.” Dimple looked up at the sky. “So how long does this take anyway?”

Akhil and Amina were waiting for the annual migration of the snow geese, as they always did in the fall, scanning the sky for the first wave of some twenty thousand birds that made their journey from Canada to Mexico.

“They said on the news that they were in Santa Fe yesterday,” Amina said.

“Well, how long is that?”

“You have somewhere better to be?” Akhil asked.

Amina turned the lens on her cousin’s ear, the recently pierced cartilage swollen under three silver hoops. She pulled the focus tight. “I think you’ve got an ear infection, Dimp.”