Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

Yes. She was still there. Right there. Ammachy’s teeth and eyes were the only bit of white in that corner, but the happiness that radiated out of them pushed up from the photograph like starlight. Well, then. Amina placed her thumbs on the top edge of the picture and ripped it clean down the middle. She stacked the halves and ripped them again, and then one more time, until they were inch-big scraps on the desk table. She picked up her trash can and swept the whole pile in, piece by piece. When she was done, she pulled out her Air Supply poster.

Back at school a week later, the whispers were everywhere. They followed her from English to biology, moving from the back of her neck to the space behind her ears as she opened her locker. A few of the kids in her class had tried to talk to her on the first couple of days back but soon gave up with an air that suggested they had just been doing her a favor in the first place. Crowds parted as she walked through them, heads ducked fast to homework when she entered classrooms without teachers. Kids whose brothers and sisters were in Akhil’s class talked to everyone else like they had extra insight.

“What?” she had shouted at Hank Franken that Friday, when he was staring at her. He dropped his pen and Dimple had also glared at him then, but later, sitting on the deserted track field with Amina, she looked uncomfortable.

“No one is trying to make you feel bad, you know. They just don’t know what to say. That’s what they tell me, anyway.”

“Why are you even talking about it?”

“What?”

“Don’t ever talk about my family with anyone again.”

Dimple blinked, looked confused. “Right. Okay. Listen, I only say anything when people tell me that they’re sorry or something, and even then I barely say—”

“What are they sorry to you for? You aren’t even really related to us.”

It shouldn’t have felt good to see the naked hurt in Dimple’s eyes, but it did. It felt like sunlight on cold fingers. Amina leaned into the air and felt something snap between them. She watched Dimple’s mouth tremble.

“Maybe you should sit alone if you need to cry,” she suggested.

Dimple jumped up, and she was yards away before Amina stopped smiling. She watched until Dimple turned and walked across the parking lot, taking a seat on the low wall there. And for the first time since his death, Amina felt the urgent need to talk to Akhil.

A few nights later the doorbell rang. Up on the Stoop, Amina dropped her cigarette across the laces of her Adidases, which began to smoke immediately.

“Shit!” She whacked at them.

The whole smoking thing was not going well. Despite diligent practice every evening, she was no better at inhaling than she had been in the spring, and she was actually worse at holding the damn things. Why did they always insist on jumping out of her hands? What was she doing wrong?

Fucking Akhil, she thought, climbing in through his window. It was another new habit, always thinking fucking before Akhil. Fucking Akhil should have taught me how to smoke, and how to do fucking trig, and how to pack a fucking bowl. Now I am fucked by everything I don’t fucking know .

Amina walked down the hallway, flipping on lights and trying to wipe the smell of smoke off her hands. Sanji would not care, of course, but if it was Raj or Bala, or worse, Chacko, she was sure to get a kind-but-stern talking-to that the others seemed determined to give her, as if to reassure her and themselves that there were still rules worth following. The doorbell rang again.

“Coming!” she yelled loudly, passing her parents’ bedroom door and halfheartedly hoping Kamala would come out with some level of concern about who was at the door or why. But no, of course not. Charles Manson could be ringing with the entire Family and a bag of knives, and Kamala would probably just wait in bed for them to dismember her. Amina opened the door.

“Hey.”

It was not the Manson family. It was not any member of the Ramakrishna or Kurian family either. It was Paige Anderson, looking beautiful and out of place, like a deer at the edge of a paved road. Amina stared at her, every normal-sounding greeting drying up in her throat. It wasn’t so much that she hadn’t seen Paige since the accident (she had, alone at school, sitting with various books plastered over her face), but somehow the reality of her — bob grown past her shoulders, body tucked into a somber navy dress, cheeks still permanently flushed — felt disconcerting. She was so real, standing there, so fraught and insistent and alive . It was like looking at a bare, beating heart.

“Can I come in?” Paige asked.

Here? Amina thought. To this house? But her body moved to the side like it was some normal thing, and Paige walked in. Behind her, Amina caught a glimpse of a figure in the passenger seat of the Andersons’ Volvo in the driveway.

“Is that Jamie?”

“What?” Paige looked anxiously over her shoulder. “Oh, yeah. He didn’t want me to come alone.”

“Does he want to come in?”

“Oh, no. He’s just keeping me company. I, uh …” She cleared her throat. “I was hoping I might talk to your parents.”

Amina shut the front door. “My parents?”

“Your dad?”

“He’s still at work.”

“What about your mom?”

“My mom?” Amina said, face hot from catching what felt like some sort of repeating disease, one in which you were doomed to echo someone else’s bad ideas instead of strenuously objecting to them. “She’s in bed.”

Instantly, whatever had been powering the light in Paige’s face — nervousness, anticipation, bravery — was snuffed out. Her shoulders dropped and she looked lost, the foyer rising up around her. When her eyes moved from the stairs to the darkened landing above them, Amina felt sorry for her.

“You want to go up?”

“What?”

“To his room. It’s upstairs.”

“Oh …” Paige blinked several times, considering it. She took a deep breath and looked at Amina. “Okay. Yes.”

If it was strange to have the Ramakrishnas and the Kurians upstairs, it was doubly strange to have Paige there, staring at the row of Akhil’s school pictures in the hall with the intensity of someone trying to find the you ARE HERE stamp on a mall map. She studied his younger photos (third grade, buckteeth; fifth grade, buckteeth and mustache) before stopping at his senior picture, the one taken after he’d woken from the Big Sleep and before he’d met her. Her forehead pleated.

“He never invited me over here,” she said, and then looked at Amina like that fact was important somehow, like it was a mark against her instead of the Eapens.

Amina motioned to Akhil’s room. “You can go in if you want.”

Paige nodded, walking past her quickly, but when she entered the room, she stopped suddenly, as though she’d hit an invisible wall.

“Oh,” she said, covering her face with her hand.

It was not an oh of disappointment or an oh of surprise but an oh that Amina had never heard before, scraped raw with an emotion Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible desire. She watched as Paige crossed Akhil’s room, undistracted by all the usual things that stopped people — the Greats, his desk, the leather jacket hanging from his chair — and moved straight for his hamper, which she opened up, pulling out a forgotten T-shirt and crushing it into her face. “Oh,” she said again, muffled. Oh . And even if Amina didn’t yet know what it was to love like that, to burn until your spine has no choice but to try to wind itself around an empty shirt, she understood for sure that the people who said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all were a bunch of dicks.