Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

The next morning the bag was gone. Akhil did not say anything about it as they ate their toast alone in the kitchen. And Kamala did not come out at all, even as they washed the dishes and packed their bags for school, though Amina thought she caught a glimpse of her mother’s dark head looking through the dining room window as they pulled out of the driveway.

Nobody at Mesa Prep was prepared for the mid-semester arrival of Paige and Jamie Anderson. By late February, any luster of new lives or new possibilities had been dulled into the routine of schedules and cliques. Students clustered in the quad in the morning, bored to death with one another and staring sullenly toward the parking lot, as though daring it to spit out something worth looking at. So there was a pause as the two figures crested the asphalt horizon, a round of glances exchanged. Bodies turned slightly on benches. Words trailed off into the morning. Were they real?

Wearing down coats, hiking boots, and blank faces that gave nothing away, Paige and Jamie arrived like orphans, a hint of tragedy, bravery, and unmentionable events following them with the persistence of a shadow.

“Who’s that, Snow Fucking White and the Disco Dwarf?” Mindy said, watching them cross the lawn that first morning.

“Shut it, Mindy,” Akhil said, proving that while Mindy’s remark was overzealous, her move to ostracize the Andersons was actually highly instinctual, the tactical response of one species whose time has been eclipsed by another. There was a palpable knowingness, along with several other features, on the approaching Andersons that would wipe the likes of Mindy Lujan off the Mesa Preparatory map, including:

1. Paige’s thighs (curvy)

2. Paige’s breasts (hidden by her white jacket, but clearly visible in outline, like croquet balls covered in snow)

3. Paige’s neck (long)

4. Paige’s cheeks (ruddy)

5. Paige’s mouth (large and slightly blurry at the edges, as if the lips hadn’t been told where to end themselves)

6. Paige’s hair (shiny, black, bobbed)

7. Jamie’s Afro (huge)

To be clear, Jamie’s Afro (yes, he was white, but what else to call it?) was not in itself attractive, but somehow the sheer wildness of it, with outer limits reaching a blond radius twice as wide as his actual head, served as a brilliant counterpoint to his sister’s tidy black locks, baby’s breath to her rosebud. It made her, if possible, more perfect. No one said anything else as they walked past, disappearing into the dean’s building.

“What’s their deal?” Akhil said as they were lost to the bright glare of the closing door.

“Only one way to find out.” Dimple slid her books off the concrete bench and followed them.

Unsurprisingly, it was Dimple who broke the first legitimate scoop on the Andersons, some four hours later in biology class. She walked in past the chalkboard, where the words interphase, prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase swirled yellow against green, and winked at Amina. When Ms. Pankeridge stepped out of the room five minutes later to find more pipe cleaners for the mitosis models, Dimple announced, “They’re intellectual refugees.”

“What?” Hank Franken asked, working his pinkie finger steadily into a Styrofoam ball.

“The Andersons. They got kicked out of St. Francis’s.”

“Bullshit. Says who?”

“Says them.”

“Hicked hout?” Gina Rodgers asked, her lips clamped over two pipe cleaners.

“That’s why they’re here now. Apparently their grandfather had to bribe the school or something so Paige could graduate on time.”

“Kicked out for what?” Amina asked, and Dimple smiled like she’d won the $25,000 question.

“Atheism.”

A small murmur went up in the room, followed by a few nervous glances. While everyone knew better than to actually believe in God, the outright denial of one seemed dangerous and possibly gauche.

“Can they really kick you out for atheism?” Amina asked.

“They’ll kick you out for anything,” said Hank, his fingers now deeply rooted in five separate balls so that when he raised his hand, it looked like half a solar system. “Those nuns are relentless.”

“What exactly did they tell you?” Amina asked.

“Well,” Dimple began, looking coolly around the room, “when I asked him why they were starting here in the middle of the second semester, he said because legally, the U.S. required schooling until the age of sixteen, and that St. Francis’s had become untenable for him. So then I said, well, thank God they had room for you here so late in the year, and he said God had nothing to do with it, his grandfather’s checkbook did.”

“And that makes him an atheist?” Amina asked.

“Pretty much,” Dimple said.

After dinner, Akhil stood stoned on an aluminum ladder, head, hand, neck, and wrist all craned toward the ceiling. Downstairs, they could hear Kamala cleaning the dinner dishes, bursting with the first bars of “The Sound of Music” every few minutes.

“Dimple says they got kicked out for being atheists or something,” Amina said, lying on Akhil’s bed.

“That’s a load of crap.”

“How do you know?”

“Because Paige is in Mathletes.”

“So you talked to her?”

He looked from the piece of paper in his hand to the ceiling, studying it for long seconds before drawing a single long, skinny line. “Does Che look like a girl?”

“Is he the bald one?”

“Fuck you. The bald one is Gandhi. You can tell because of his glasses.” Akhil climbed back up. “And anyway, of course I didn’t talk to her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she’s, you know.” Akhil mashed the paintbrush down in the can. “Pretty.”

“And Mindy will get jealous?”

“No. We broke up yesterday anyway. I mean, we’re still, you know, seeing each other, but we’ve decided not to be exclusive. But anyway, Paige told Mr. Jones that her father didn’t think St. Francis’s was academically rigorous enough. You really don’t think that looks like Gandhi?”

“It looks like a baby.”

“But the eyes are good, right?”

“Kind of, but they’re in the wrong place.”

“Oh, that’s all? Fucking great.”

“Make them lower.” She went to his desk, opened up his history spiral. She drew an egg on the paper and then drew a light line across the middle. “Like this. Everyone always thinks eyes go high on the head but they’re usually more in the middle of it.”

Akhil was quiet, pink eyes scanning the paper. “Hey, Ami, maybe you could—”

“No.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“No. How much?”

“Two bucks a night.”

“Three.”

“Please? I’ll take you to Coronado mall this weekend.”

“Two seventy-five.”

Akhil groaned. “Seriously. Please.”

Amina considered it. This money, combined with what she was making on Akhil’s “flash sleeps,” as she’d begun to think of them, would put her in fine contention for getting at least an extra roll of film a week. “Fine, two. But just the drawing. I’m not painting anything.”

“Deal.” He looked back down at the paper. “Where do the mouths go?”

“Dunno.” Amina took the pencil from him and started up the ladder. “I’m bad with mouths.”

“The river is crucial to understanding every other element in these pages,” Mr. Tipton said the next day, holding up Heart of Darkness . “Who can tell me what it signifies?”

The door opened, sending in cool air and swiveling heads from the board to the doorway. Amina saw the fuzz of the blond Afro, then studied her notebook as the rest of Jamie Anderson materialized. Mr. Tipton crossed the carpet to shake his hand.