Mira Jacob - The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

She did not feel closer to Jamie now. She did not feel the slaking she had come to associate with having sex with him, that full-body release. Instead, she felt like a traitor. The car’s windows pressed in around them like eyes, and Amina had the distinct feeling of being watched as she lay there, of being judged. The Akhil sighting (which, as her high wore off, was starting to feel less like a visit from the supernatural and more like a kick from her own subconscious) had thrown a door open, allowing for a world in which she could be found disloyal by some version of her brother that had stayed stuck at Mesa Preparatory for all eternity, while the rest of them — Paige, Jamie, Amina — sauntered off into a bright, mortal future.

“I don’t know if I can see Paige yet,” Amina said.

Jamie stayed silent for so long, she would have thought he hadn’t heard her if his breathing had not suddenly grown shallow.

“So don’t,” he finally said.

“I mean, what am I even supposed to say to her?”

“Jesus, Amina.” Her head slid to the scratchy carpet as he sat up. “Can we not talk about my sister right now?”

“I thought you wanted to talk,” she said, embarrassed by the feminine needle in her voice. She looked at the upholstered ceiling, while he shoved his legs back into his boxers.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just thought it was important, maybe, to tell you.”

“Where are my shorts?”

“Here.” She lifted her leg, dug them out from under her.

“Thanks.” He put them on awkwardly, rolling on one ass cheek, then the other. Amina sat up. “I can walk home from here, if you want.”

“That’s not what I want.” He looked around, finding his sneakers and shoving his feet into them. “You always do this. You get quiet and then pick a fight with me and then try to leave.”

“Always?” Her face prickled with heat. “Define always .”

“I mean, what is this shit? Is it so hard to just tell people what’s going on? ‘Jamie, I’m sad.’ ‘Jamie, going to Mesa was the worst idea ever.’ ‘Jamie, the Paige and Akhil thing is still weird for me.’ Is that so hard?”

“Jamie, you’re being a dick.”

His face tightened into a scowl.

Amina watched him carefully, her heart rabbiting around. “It isn’t weird for you?”

“Honestly, I don’t think about it that much anymore. All of that stuff happened a really long time ago. They were just kids.”

Amina nodded, his words turning over in her head like foreign currency, valuable someplace else. Just kids . Akhil was only ever a kid, she wanted to say; he would never be anything but a kid, but the grief behind this felt too obvious to let out, too tidal and self-indulgent.

“What happened to you back there?” Jamie asked, not unkindly.

Amina’s face burned. “I don’t know.”

He took her hand, placing it in the damp patch of hair between his ribs, the one that reminded her of dogs and loyalty and protection, and she understood suddenly that she was falling in love with him. He was good, that seemed obvious enough, but there was more there, too, the way in which he felt uniquely hers , cut rough from some long-ago place and brought to her, something that she hadn’t allowed herself to miss until it had come back. And now what? Now what was she supposed to do with it? She felt his heart tapping lightly against the back of her hand and shut her eyes until that tiny pulse filled the space between them.

Something was wrong with her ankle. The next morning, as Kamala unceremoniously banged open her bedroom door, raised the blinds, and pulled down the blanket, Amina let out a fractured gasp.

“No,” she groaned.

“Yes.” Kamala opened the dresser and threw a clean pair of underwear at her head. “And hurry up. Your father thinks something is wrong. He’s getting a scan this morning.”

Amina sat up gingerly, staring at the bulbous knob attached to her foot. “What?”

“He wants us to meet him at Anyan’s.”

Ten minutes and some hobbling later they sped down Corrales Road, the air conditioner blasting dust motes down their tracheas. Amina sat forward, smothered by a film of beer and sex and weed. She cracked a window, leaning toward it like a dog.

“Air conditioner is on,” Kamala snapped.

“I feel funny.”

“Oh, so now you’re sick?”

“Not exactly.”

Her mother looked at her disapprovingly. “I would have woken you at seven, but your father wouldn’t let me.”

“Thank God.”

“No thanking! Here this poor fellow is up all night tossing in bed, and now he has to go to the hospital alone!”

“Ma,” she said in a warning tone, and her mother fell silent, grinding the truck into a lower gear as they approached an intersection.

Amina shifted and the pain shifted with her, moving from her ankle to a small flare of guilt between her ribs. “What do you mean, he thinks something is wrong?”

“He thinks something is wrong! Plain English! He’s getting a scan!”

“Is he feeling something new?”

“How should I know? You think I am sitting there like some Diane Sawyers as he gets ready and goes? No! I am handing him one egg sandwich!” Her mother glanced sidelong at her but then turned, her whole face suddenly looking her up and down.

“What.” Amina glared back.

“Nothing.” On the corner, a few kids waved banners for a car wash, pointing excited sponges their way. “You were out with a boy? This friend from before?”

“Yes.”

Kamala’s gold bracelets clinked against one another as the light turned green, as they motored by the kids. “So bring him to dinner.”

“What?”

“To dinner. At the house.”

Amina looked out the window to the parched west mesa hills. Her feelings from the night before felt like something borrowed from a dream; they might vanish if exposed to scrutiny. “I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

Amina shook her head. “I’m not sure if he’s quite there yet,” she lied.

“Oh, koche , you know,” her mother said soothingly, but stopped.

“What?”

“No, no, nothing.”

“No, what were you going to say?”

Her mother looked at her, seeming to see right through her skin to the uncertainty inside. She tucked a strand of hair behind Amina’s ear.

“There’s a brush in my purse,” she said.

Dr. George’s waiting room rang with laughter. The receptionist’s face was in her hands, an older couple clutched each other’s forearms, and a young woman with a buzz cut wiped tears from her eyes, snorting. In the middle of them all, Thomas stood with a frozen expression of surprise on his face.

It was the one-way-street story. Amina had heard it a thousand times before, her father recounting how on his first month in America he had turned down a road where all the cars were coming at him. “In my country, there are no one-ways!” he liked to say, “Only every-which-ways!” It was a favorite he liked to drag out for American strangers, putting them at ease with his accent, his charm, his inability to navigate spaces they had created.

“Amazing country you have here!” Thomas said now, looking comically perplexed, and a new round of laughter pealed forth. He held out an arm and Amina limped into it.

“What’s wrong with your foot?” her father asked.

“Twisted it a little. It’s fine.”

“You must be the daughter,” the woman half of the older couple said, smiling at her too familiarly.

“Yeah.”

“We’ve heard a lot about you.”

“You got the scan?” Kamala asked.

“Amina is a photographer!” Thomas said with a flourish, like she was a rabbit he’d pulled from a hat.