I would give away any of my toys except the pink hair doll dad calls “punkie” if my kitty would stand on my legs and on my chest and I would want no other blanket even though I get cold when I sleep but my kitty doesn’t do that. Maybe it’s because when mommy got me my kitten for my fifth birthday I thought I would be able to squeeze her and she didn’t want me to and I wouldn’t have squeezed her if she didn’t want me to and then I went to school with bandaids all around my face and my teacher Ms. Whitehead asked me is everything alright at home and I said no because now she will always only put her face by my feet (even though we clipped the toenails so she wouldn’t get scratched) and she will always put her feet by my face (and we don’t declaw because of the ethical issues) and I just want to kiss her and it’s not fair and she hates me.

Kat, she doesn’t hate you. Remember? That’s called an ANT: Automatic Negative Thought. When we have ants, what do we do with them?

Squish them?

We squish them, that’s right. When you have these negative bad thoughts, you can pretend they’re ants, and squish them, and let them disappear! They’re not always true. Maybe your cat is just having a bad day. You have bad days, sometimes, right?

Well I’m already six and my kitty didn’t fix it for my birthday even though that’s what I was thinking when I blew out the candles really hard. Well I blew out the candles really hard too because it took three tries but I wished her to start kissing me super super hard (but we don’t always get what we want, and that’s okay). And then I was like does she not like me anymore and that’s why I was crying and not because I was having nightmares and mommy was like let’s go see a counselor and I thought it was like the principal so I didn’t want to because I’m always in trouble for talking (which just happens when we have a lot to say, which means we’re smart, which you are). Ms. Whitehead says be quiet and then I get scared and I stop but sometimes I forget and then I talk and she gets really scary and says do you want to go to the office and I really don’t because dad goes to the office and always comes back sad or mad even though it’s not the same office I think. And then Zohra or Thomas (whose dad is a drunk, so don’t worry about him, honeybear) won’t talk to me because they don’t want to get in trouble and that’s why I was crying when I was home yesterday because they didn’t like me anymore but I just forgot to not talk, I didn’t do it on purpose I promise (and we all make mistakes, it’s okay Kit-kat, I love you) and I don’t like crying because it reminds me of my nightmares, oh right! mommy said we’re going to the counselor again and I didn’t want to but mommy said you would help fix my nightmares and I could also get Wendy’s when we go home for dinner if I went and when I leave can I take the rake thing with the sand and the rocks and trees and the little weird blue guy statue? There’s no ants in there right?

Danny’s eyes looked like bug eyes, and although the kids in Ms. Lindegaard’s first grade class would say so, it was not for this reason that Thomas believed it. Thomas did not corroborate this schoolyard gossip, in part because Danny was his best friend and in other part because Danny was really strong and threw rocks at insects, walls, people. Thomas had no wish to be pelted, so he continued to believe it, though quietly. 

When the book fair came to school and the library shelves were decked in banners red and gold, Thomas used the seven dollars Mom gave him to buy ‘The Bug Book.’ On page 27 lay a two-page feature on the boll weevil that Thomas would later, in his college days and in nostalgia, relate to the centerfold of an adult magazine, and he would be laughed at. Danny’s eyes looked like the boll weevil’s eyes. Many other children in Ms. Lindegaard’s tried to label Danny’s eyes with a specific bug or perhaps a frog or toad, but Thomas knew the truth and he kept it all to himself.

***

Thomas was watching cartoons when the doorbell rang and Mom asked can you get it please I’m making dinner, but he didn’t. It was his favorite cartoon, the Pink Panther, and while he had this episode committed to memory, he still wanted the closure so he replied that it was almost done and Mom replied go now or you’re grounded. He went. 

It was six-thirty, almost dinner time, and Danny was on the doorstep. His bicycle helmet was quite an eyesore, but as a first-grade boy, his conviction was that the spiked green mohawk on the helmet was the epitome of sex appeal. No one had a crush on Danny, but Thomas thought him quite astute, and so featured front and center on Thomas’ past Christmas list was A Spiked Green Mohawk Helmet. He didn’t get it, but at least he didn’t get coal.

Danny was here with his near-daily humble request of Mr. and Mrs. Cortez to allow their child to graze and roam the suburban sidewalk for an hour or two or hopefully until bedtime. Thomas craned his neck backward and hollered, kicking off his negotiation weakly—a ‘please’ in sentence one, an ‘I promise’ in sentence two, and an ‘I really want to’ in sentence three. It was frustrating to him at the time that he would so poorly relay his desires and his deserveds. He would learn eventually, when he had more cards and he had to hold them even closer to his chest and he would grow (a future size XL) to accommodate them.

Mom hollered back no. Thomas unwound his neck back toward Danny, who stood unconvinced and told him to try again. Mom hollered come back inside right now you need to eat dinner. Thomas said wait here I’ll be right back to Danny, whose attention disorder was not conducive to waiting, much less in front of a door with paint that was already dry, but he tried to comply anyway.

***

Both parents were seated at the dinner table, seemingly enamored by the boxed Parmesan and mushroom risotto in the center of the square table that hosted all their meals, with one yellow table cloth, three sets of silverware, and one bulbous light fixture. Mom was unusually quiet, and Dad was in the midst of his evening sulk. When Thomas approached the table, Mom told him that he must eat dinner before he can go play and no he cannot go tell Danny that he must eat dinner first, in fact he must eat dinner right now, did he wash his hands, and no he cannot have a coke with dinner. Thomas felt that it wasn’t appropriate for him to leave Danny at the door, but Mom said that her and Dad were already at the table and he needs to be respectful of their time. Sitting so that his mother was at his left and his father at his right, he complied. He shifted the glass of water he was dealt so that it sat directly behind his plate, only because it was quite a bit shorter than the beers on each side, and it thus mimicked the family arrangement, and he felt proud at this little pattern game. Mom and Dad did not notice.

Thomas did not want to have a belly like Dad’s, so when it came time to serve himself his helping of risotto, he resorted to three and a half spoonfuls. When he nearly escaped with just three, Mom served him another because you need to eat, of which he returned half to her plate because I’m not hungry. Mom caught him looking at his own belly. She lifted his shirt further, and said oh the scar is coming along quite nicely and soon it’ll be almost gone don’t worry. He was not worried; they were worried about it, however, not because appendicitis can come back, of which Thomas was a little afraid, but because the ambulance cost a lot of money, which made no sense if they didn’t get to drive it or even keep it. So he asked why.

Mom said that hospitals cost a lot of money because we don’t have insurance anymore, to which Dad said we would if you found another job, to which Mom said John please you know I can’t manage that with Thomas and everything, to which Dad said well we shouldn’t have taken the ambulance anyway we could’ve just driven him to the hospital, to which Mom said that’s not a risk we can afford to take, to which Dad said well we can’t afford shit anyway and certainly not an ambulance, and then Mom covered Thomas’ ears and said John please not in front of him, and Thomas did not care about the ambulance anymore.

Mom then began to whisper, and Thomas had only heard her whisper on the last lines of lullabies when she thought he was asleep, which was a trick he learned from the Pink Panther where he takes very deep breaths and keeps his eyes just slightly open. She whispered softly, coldly unlike her lullaby whispers, and intently watched her fork knead the risotto, and let Dad know that she ran into Jane at the hospital when Thomas was put under. Dad remained still, but he looked up, eyebrows furrowed, and asked who—and Thomas knew it was suspect just by hearing it even though he was also staring at his risotto, all three and a half spoonfuls. Jane like Chris’ wife like Jane my cousin, you know, the nurse. Dad said oh like he had to work to remember. Mom said that Jane found another woman’s clothing in their bed last Saturday, and that Chris, your drinking buddy, said he was out playing poker that night with you. Dad forced her to continue, nodding and nodding, as if her statement wasn’t a prerequisite for explanation, while he continued chewing on the grainy mash.

***

Mom asked Dad do you know what happened?

Dad said no, we were playing poker and he left.

Mom said he confessed to Jane and you can tell me.

Dad said confessed what?

Mom said you know. Mom said I don’t have to tell you.

Thomas had one spoonful left, but he wasn’t hungry anymore.

Dad said I didn’t do anything, I went and played poker.

Mom asked with who?

Dad said the rest of the group still meets even if Chris doesn’t come.

Mom took a deep breath and stopped whispering. Mom asked what does that mean?

Dad said Chris doesn’t come.

Thomas didn’t know why they were talking for so long when they could talk for much shorter if Mom and Dad could just talk like friends like him and Danny. Then he could go play with Danny or they could all go to the park or maybe they could

Mom said what the fuck John you’ve been playing poker together for months.

Dad said I have but Chris hasn’t. When we go to play poker, Chris goes to her house. Usually. Maybe this time he didn’t. I don’t know.

Mom said why didn’t you tell me she’s my cousin I can’t believe this what do I tell her.

Dad said I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me much. Just to tell you that he’s at poker.

Mom said what about their kids?

Dad said their youngest is a freak anyway, the oldest an idiot.

Mom: John you’re a fucking asshole. 

***

Dad then said hey at least I only assisted in the crime, but pleading accomplice was not gratifying enough to Mom who believed that John you may as well have cheated on me—for all I know you are! Thomas did not hear everything, but Dad did forgo his no bad words rule again with a mumble mumble keep fucking assuming things mumble, and Thomas knew that he was only mad because he was caught because that’s when Dad mumbles, and although he wouldn’t remember this idiosyncrasy, he would grow to live it. 

Thomas wondered, even guessed from his recently-unappendixed gut, if there would be a similar mumble granted for Dad’s friend from college with the red lipstick and cloying voice who would help him fix the bed—and it was a surprise and I wouldn’t want Mom to stay tired would I, so I didn’t tell Mom— and she doesn’t look like she knows much about fixing beds and I’m good at Legos so maybe he should ask me. 

Mom huffed and puffed and the house was in surefire danger of being blown down, but she contained the blast by rushing into her bedroom with a prompt and familiar slam and lock. Dad seethed, tapping away with his right hand at the edge of the yellow tablecloth, and with his left, gripping tonight’s fourth cheap beer. His thumb depressed the logo on the can. Dad glanced left and looked at Thomas not with disdain or anger but maybe with a spittle of regret—truly, he looked at him to say what a sorry little state you’re in and if it wasn’t for your appendix perhaps I could afford a better beer tonight and in a bottle not a can and perhaps I would be able to work longer hours and perhaps I could go play outside with my college friend instead of you playing outside with Danny like you always beg to do. Thomas’ eyes also issued a statement, but it was lost in the clamor of Dad’s stare and the cacophony of his own thoughts.

Rather than endure it any longer, Thomas stood up and brought his plate to the sink. A few select grains of rice remained, which was a rarity for Thomas, who was often familially discussed as having a tiny appetite for a growing boy. Tonight, however, he knew better than to try leaving behind some dinner on his plate. He did not want the children in Africa to know, but he really didn’t want Mom or Dad to be any bit more upset.

It was now seven-thirty, a time Thomas knew he could not trust because the microwave clock was always a few minutes askew, which he remembered very well because missing the bus again means Mom and Dad have to drop him off means they are angry. He remembered Danny, and that it had been almost an hour since he was left at the front door. The door was a mere twenty steps away, and Thomas made this journey back to his friend unhurriedly and coolly, because the Pink Panther had shown him the most effective method to avoid being questioned was to act as if you shouldn’t be. Thank you, Pink Panther, Thomas thought.

***

Thomas found Danny still outside and quite joyful—relishing in the peril of stepping on and around a fire ant pile in the driveway—and he was so joyful in fact that he forgot to ask why didn’t you come out sooner or even worse, throw rocks. Thomas joined in the torment. 

Some time passed, marked mostly by the thuds of hopscotch jumps onto ant mounds. Eventually enough had been squished, smooshed, or stomped for Thomas to inquire about Dad’s habits and why Mom was upset and why their bed was always broken. Danny continued to stomp. Thomas did not. Earnest and unsuspecting, Danny answered, to his confusion, that his Dad had only fixed the bed once, when their box spring bent—and not every church Sunday—and he even let him help.

‍

Willow Smith whipped her hair back and forth

and I hated the song

a parasitic earworm

and hated her too

because she was the first ten year old

with a double platinum single,

and I didn’t know how to make music but I knew

that it lacked originality

and my father’s doctrine of Weather Report and Jethro Tull

would give me a headstart,

and I didn’t know what an industry plant was

or the mycorrhizal network of Hollywood

that operates in the interstices

of the public eye,

and I didn’t know how but

all I knew was that

I had less than a year left

to beat her,

to be the first nine year old,

and this yearning for accolade and approbation and applause persisted well after

I made my first song seven years later

when,

even in the 2007 Camry—

spilled hot chocolate mix

that stains your jeans,

GarageBand mix

for my rattlesnake speakers,

general discomfort

to juxtapose the dulcet guitar—

Lily said:

This sucks.

‍

You chew on your dainty porcelain with your gapless teeth. One crunch after the other, it is heard around the world and we all listen, and even though the ceramic is in your mouth, we are cut. It is not like when you sink your gapless teeth into my clay. That is silent and apathetic, with your mouthful of mush and your face full of pity. I feel sorry for you because you do not taste it right—but you also did not mature your taste buds on the third-grade-cafeteria-table-brown-paper-bag-test the way I did.

I have become used to the crunch of your gapless teeth on your dainty porcelain, and it is no longer cacophonous—no longer mouth nails on my chalkboard skin—now that I refuse to join your supper, and now that I refuse to bite.

I’ve been watching you chew for my whole life:

crunch after crunch after crunch on pretty girl
after no thanks of ugly girl after crunch on pretty boy

after ew no of my mother and all my family and now my daughter

after yet another crunch on the pretty pigments

and each crunch taught me that I need sunscreen more than they do because I may as well compensate if I am to compete and so I—begging to my inimitably dark reflection in the bodega shelf—choose the foundation that I did not grow up on and I choose a foundation that is just a little more dainty, and then I am silica and not lakshana.

That is not my lakshana because my lakshana is

my lakshana 

is beauty

is grace

is not Miss Anywhere but it is certainly not here

is really my pageant where I am judge, jury, and executioner

and it is not a poison like your hydraulic adherence to gnashing delicate dainty porcelain—not china nor a delicacy, don’t you misunderstand it. 

It is poison for me, and you have poisoned my mother—I do not forgive, much less forget—with such virulent and prescribed poison that when she taught me to carry my clay, it was fuller’s earth she gave me, and when I inquired hi I did some research and this not just an ayurvedic Cetaphil it is a facial bleach, she did not know that the purpose (not side effect) was to turn skin more normal more lovely because her mom was poisoned too and the multhani mitti was an heirloom—and now I clutch my lakshana for my amma’s mom’s mom who covered her ears from the crunch crunch crunch, and now I shield my lakshana and her small-and-attached earlobes as much as the ears themselves and I shield the crooks of my daughter’s nose and elbows and all other crooks—and now I heat my lakshana in the office microwave and take big fucking bites, and I let the smelly adoration trickle out of my mouth, and I hope you find your lakshana too—and now I pray for my mother, in the morning, in the mirror, when I throw water on my cheeks to wash and not wash away.

***

I have recently undertaken praying for my Nikita. You have poisoned her, too.

***

Yesterday, I was let down. My mother was the courageous ship, I was the brave settler, and my daughter, or so I thought, would not need to be brave or courageous; this would be home, land at last. Yesterday, my Nikita was calm when she walked through the door, sixty feet from the bus stop, stoic like parents are. 

Either she was afraid to tell me something, or the bus wasn’t her favorite part of the day for once, or both—and I saw in her face that her lakshana was encouraged for the first time to shut the fuck up. They probably didn’t say that, because third-graders don’t use such adult words as ‘shut the fuck up’ for their adulterated feelings—especially not in school—but they are armed with equally tasteful euphemisms for my girl to soak up, and soak them up she does because children are sponges. You do not wash your sponges after doing the dishes, airing your dirty laundry, and your sponges smell like your shit. Yesterday my daughter smelled your shit. Yesterday I was let down because I know that I was not enough to satisfy you and so you taught your kids—and I was let down because I know that she does not know that her paper bag tests have already begun—and I was let down because she thinks her lakshana is tightly wound around your fingertips. I reminded her to yank it back. This is still not home for her like I thought it would be, even though she says ‘munk’ not ‘monk’ and her clothes are from Malls not Marshalls.

She asked for hand sanitizer this morning, already late for school. We had only just buckled in, after a hurried breakfast matinée of Jessie, and when I performed the typically giggly reminder of ‘buckle buckle’ she did not reciprocate with her usual ‘okay okay’, but instead thrust it upon me that hand sanitizer was a necessity and we would leave on her terms. I knew why, and still asked.

“My hands smell”: the truth

“No they don’t”: lie

“Like paratha”: the evidence

“So?”: feign ignorance

“Please?” 

I obliged. We were not leaving on my terms. We were not leaving on her terms either, but instead on the terms of your porcelain-barbed shit sponge. I reminded her to clutch it again, to yank it back, but she is not old enough to know she has lakshana, only to think it when prompted. 

In the car ride back, when she was unsafely tucked away in school for a few hours, I called to mind the faces of each indiscriminate child I had seen her with. Who was it? Was it the fat boy with the ginger hair? That ugly child with the crass father who wore shit-stained Skechers and basketball shorts to the second-grade play? The school’s name begins with ‘St.’ and he chose shit-stained Skechers. He looked the type to gleefully infringe on my lakshana, and his son, my daughter’s. I heard his beer-bellied laugh, and saw his full grin, and condemned his son’s raucous behavior from the one time at Parent’s Visit Day when his son threw the class fish across the room at another boy. I saw son in front of father, both with:

face muscles erect in a pumpkin’s smile

plaid shirt selfishly unbuttoned

derelict sneakers with a margarita rim of mud, dirt, grass, and dogshit. I gifted the fat ginger boy the same shoes, not only because I could not remember the (I’m sure, tasteless) shoes the fat ginger boy wore, but also because it fit my narrative.

I did not ever ask my Nikita who her arbiter of hand smell was, and why they were so merciful to peanut butter jelly and cinnamon roll and french toast—but not the savory kind, not any breakfast I make. 

It did not matter. I was grateful for this artificial father-son pair. To hate two in theory is less suffocating than to hate you in truth. I sat in the garage.

***

There was no smile on my daughter’s face, today, again—only defeat, betrayed by vacuum eyes. We ate dinner quietly. Time moves so quickly for children, but I was more impatient. She noticed. I waited for her to talk. She had plenty of time because she was not eating with my daughter’s gusto: no haldi peppering her chin from the mouthfuls too full, no fervor to mix together the dahi and the chawal and the kadhi, and no lackluster attempts at napkin use. No big fucking bites.

I asked if I made dinner poorly today. I didn’t. She said I didn’t.

I asked what was wrong. She said nothing was wrong. I should’ve known.

I asked why she didn’t want to spend this Tuesday afternoon at the after school YMCA, the commune of all her best friends, especially Safiyya who she adores the most and always wants to sleep over with, come to think of it, Safiyya has been absent in her chattering this week, so is it Safiyya? I hope it is not because at least you can laugh off the little fat shit-stained-Sketcher-adorned white boy—not another brown girl. 

I asked myself if it was worth it to push all these buttons. She looked about to cry.

I asked her if she wanted to talk. She said no.

“Okay. I love you.” We finished dinner, and she went to her room to do homework. We did not watch Jessie tonight, but maybe it is best—she finds the Ravi voice funny and I do not want her to think that she can make you laugh like that ever, so

***

Ten minutes ago, my Nikita entered my room, inquisitive but not curious. She did not want to learn. She wanted to know. At eight years old, she wanted to know—but I didn’t know how to tell her to stop the hurt without looking the hurt in its vacuous blue eyes and rejecting its perverse advances again and again and again.

I told her they did that to me too: the cafeteria tables; the high school resistance friend group I was in that was labeled the Nonwhites; watching my father receive citizenship after me and the officer correcting him when he pronounced it indievisible and not indivisible (which I have since never fucked up) in the pledge of allegiance. I told her that I never pledged allegiance again. I handed her every ounce of my resentment and told her that here is the homeschool education my daughter will receive and it will help my daughter compete and not just compensate for the homeschooling that you received and will pass on to your children. My daughter will learn to eat clay, and porcelain, and everything else she wants to eat, but she will never eat dahi and chawal and kadhi without taking big fucking bites and letting the adoration spill all over the place, the peppered haldi-stained orange-colored adoration that will stain her clothes until she is old enough to cook for herself, having moved out, and then once again when she remembers that what she misses most about being my daughter is ghar ka khana, having watched a Youtube video on Sindhi kadhi.

***

Tomorrow, when my Nikita comes home, there may not be a smile on her face. There may be bits and pieces of her that your kids’ bite-corrective-braces (soon to be gapless) tore out of her 8-year-old heart again—and your kids, with their shit-stained Skechers and splintered porcelain and proper elocution and pretty faces and thrown fish for which there was no punishment nor castigation, will walk the sixty feet from the bus stop having blissfully chewed another day. It will not always be like this. Some of your children will learn to taste, and I thank you and/or them, sure, but others will sink their teeth in and

deny agency and

bite at my daughter’s not-as-pink areolas and

for a moment relish in the shame of having put themselves out for unrefined clay and

tell her to feel grateful for the missionary work and

assume their missionary works and

relish in the pride of having taken a dose of something different, abnormal, not from here, from someone who is not at home and I imagine your children as such because, after all:

they are your children, and my daughter is my own.

‍

Mateo was puzzled. While he had watched a handful of romantic comedies with his mother in his childhood, there was no drafting process for the love letters in the films. They simply just appeared. Gerard Butler, there with his profound declaration of love, endearingly disheveled hair, and double-digit-priced bouquet of flowers, had no dearth of confidence and Mateo believed that he would be the same, if only he had the money, face, body, profundity, and height. The doctor informed him at his last well-check that he had not yet ceased growth, and he was happy to hear that because sometimes when his mother chastises him for making the same mistake twice, he wonders if he has already reached the ceiling for emotional growth. At least he will be 5’8” someday, if everything goes well.

There, however, wasn’t time for dillydallying. If Isa showed her friends this letter, and it wasn’t so refined that she swoons and holds it to her heart and pupils dilated, heart racing, grabs the nearest writing implement in such a haste that it doesn’t matter if it’s out of ink, she’ll scratch her requitement into the sticky note—if it’s not so refined, she may show her friends who will giggle in a gaggle and his confession will become everyone’s reading material at lunch, passed around the tables both like convenient exposition is in his mother’s Hallmark rom-coms and like fruit during the weekly food fights.

They had, after all, been dating for a whole three weeks, ever since second period math on the Monday where he asked her to be his girlfriend because all the sixth grade boys were asking the girls they had crushes on. She refused at first, but later found him at lunch and said that she changed her mind. It was that her friends were teasing her and she didn’t want to be teased. However, she insisted that friends should not interfere in matters of love. Frazzled, but aching to rid himself of the shame of rejection and his peers’ perception of that rejection, he paid no mind to it and accepted. Now, three weeks since, he was ready to utter the magic three words, only he was too nervous to utter them aloud and instead found a nest in the timeless act of a love letter.

So, seated as his desk, lights dim, door locked under the guise of showering (which would limit him to a tight 20 minutes before his father would turn the water off and knock until he responds, perhaps even accuse him of masturbating in which case you should just turn the water off and continue, I don’t give a damn what you do, just don’t waste our utility bill), Mateo put his pen to the paper.

***

Dear Isa,

The past three weeks have been magical.

In Mateo’s hardly pubescent experience with love, there were not words to describe their relationship. No one had ever made him feel like this, and no one, he was sure of it, ever would. He knew this, and yet he chose the word magical because his father said it to his mother about a dress she was nervous about a long time ago when she used to get nervous about those things, and in the story his father relates at every opportunity to prove his romanticism, his mother seemed to relish in the adjective magical.

 You have shown me what love feels like. I feel butterflies in my stomach when I see you. You are so pretty, especially the bows you wear in your hair. They are very cute. My favorite is the red one. 

The harsh truth that Mateo, still amateurish in his love letter writing education, was conscious enough to avoid sharing was that he actually did not like the red one so much as he hated her baby blue bow. It was polka-dotted, appeared far too childish for sixth grade, and one time his friend mocked her baby blue bow in a private conversation over a game of Mario Kart, and he has since been sure that he will not be the boyfriend of someone who his friends laugh at. The red bow, if she digests his compliment as he wishes, will serve to alleviate that concern. When she was wearing the red bow last week, another boy called her hot in front of Mateo. Mateo, smug-faced and chest-protruding, claimed her as his girlfriend. That was his romantic comedy moment, and he felt both like a chivalrous knight and a philandering stud. In his eyes, he had the best of both worlds.

Your smile lights up the room, and your hair smells very nice. I wish everyone smelled like you, except I don’t, because that would mean that you wouldn’t be as special, and you are very special. You are exquisite.

His first request of relationship advice from his mother was recent, and in it, she reminded him to use a condom if he has sex (although he was so terrified of the idea of failing to perform, even having never kissed anyone, that this advice would do nothing but instill the nerve-wracking idea that Isa desiring sex soon was inevitable). Her other advice was to make women laugh, as that is why she married his father, but he did not find his father very funny. Alarmed by the recent unit on inheritance in biology, he hoped that his father’s humor was a recessive allele.

When my parents dropped us off at the movies on Wednesday, I was really proud to call you my girlfriend. My mom said she liked you, and my mom wasn’t even going to let me date until I mentioned you, so it’s a big deal. 

I want to kiss soon, if you’re okay with that. I know Maya and Jin kissed in the boys locker room, which is weird because it’s not romantic in there. I think we should go on a date and kiss.

Isa was the object of all desire and the source of all beauty to Mateo and in no uncertain terms was this true love. She deserved the world, and Mateo, moved by his own expressions of infatuation, wanted to give it to her. If that meant last birthday’s $50 in cash from Grandma Sofia was to be used for Isa’s pleasure, he could only hope that he would earn it back some day.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say was that I love you. I will love you forever, even when we’re old and even if we stop dating. You make me so happy. I think about you when I wake up, and I think about you when I go to bed. I haven’t been able to dream about you yet, but I’ve been trying really hard so I can think about you even more. 

These sentences were the few in the marathon of fleshing out all 26 lines of his college-ruled three-hole-punched page that Mateo was flowing naturally in, and he wondered if it’s because he made no effort to diminish his feelings. Mateo at thirteen years of age understood what he would later feign ignorance of when mixed up in the wrong crowd of pick-up artists, cynical virgins, and other flavors of Machiavellian misogyny: that there is no need to abstract the passion you feel for the person who is the very source of that passion.

Warm Regards, Mateo

***

He did not know what Warm Regards meant, but he assumed it was similar to Love. Warmth was never a bad thing, and although he did not know what Regards were, Mateo was fairly certain that the newest derogatory term his gang of crass sixth graders slotted into their vocabulary was unrelated, especially since his first exposure to ‘Warm Regards’ was in an email to his parents commemorating his acceptance into the National Junior Honor Society. 

He folded his notebook paper letter several times, and adorned it with ‘Isa’ and a heart that appeared more anatomic than emoticon. He turned off the shower, brushed his teeth, and put together his clothes for the next day: cargo shorts, tennis shoes, and a Coldplay hoodie from the one concert he attended. He then lay in his bed, heart fluttering, racing, and skipping beats. Mateo called Isa’s face to mind, and imagined a day at the carnival with oily pizza and cloying lemonade. The warm blankets and warm feelings prepared to escort him into their first dream together, and his eyes relaxed. He was content.

Yet just before he succumbed to slumber, Mateo jolted awake—he had forgotten to practice kissing on the back of his hand.

‍

‍

Slabs of pavement were the cracked ingredients to the sidewalk along the boxed circumference of the elementary school playscape—and while most children dedicated their precious half hour of recess to the slides and monkey bars and swings—Andrea and Antonio spent that time nearly every afternoon in orbit on the sidewalk. The slabs of pavement were right triangles, like pieces of their cafeteria pita bread. This was important.

Crack.

See, Antonio was walking solemnly today, in a way that Andrea’s mother would have labeled ‘filmy’, and she would have practiced her teacher’s empathic commandments (sharing is caring, treat others how you want to be treated, check in on your sad friends, etc.) had they not been on the sidewalk. But his words sailed through her ear canals—he was walking too slow for her to focus. They were a few months away from the uprooting of their brief lifetimes—the harrowing migration to middle school—and they have been warned that walking as leisurely as Antonio was would set them up for tardiness, and tardiness was an intolerable sin in the eyes of middle school teachers. Andrea cited this and urged him to speed up—not because she was the forward-thinking luminary of her fifth-grade class, but because each sluggish step she took cut deep into her comfort, and she was mere minutes from lashing out at him or simply leaving.

Fault.

“Why are you sad anyway?”

“My mom said she’s leaving my dad.”
“Oh. That really sucks.” Andrea said it sucked, and it probably did, but the tone of her words did not convey the same concern that their definitions did.

Misstep.

See, Andrea had a meticulous arrangement for every recess that demanded a strictly tempoed march. Two right triangles composed one rectangle, leaving a diagonal fault line. If you were to walk through the center of each rectangle, which Andrea would do only if alone, you would be set up perfectly—if you had Andrea’s stride, that is—to step first on the cracks between rectangles, then the fault line in the center, and then the crack between rectangles again. You could continue, alternating crack and fault line and crack and fault line, until recess was over, at which point you would hop—if you were Andrea—from the slabs onto the surrounding grass, careful not to misstep onto an undivided portion of the pavement. There were twenty-seven rectangles on the long sides of the playground, and fourteen rectangles on the short sides. Andrea did not double-count the rectangles on the corners, adding them solely to the long sides to make them even longer. That way, they were winning the length competition, and therefore more deserving of respect and more authoritative. This was also important. 

Crack.

See, Andrea knew that she had to have self-forgiveness tantamount to the restrictiveness of her devoted practice. That is why she allotted a full three strikes on every long side (more respect, more difficult) and a mere single strike (less respect, less difficult) for every short side—a strike being used when she would miss the separations between the slabs—and when she would master fractions in the middle school she so restlessly anticipated, she would realize that her strikes per slab were mistakenly tougher on the short sides, and like her mother, would regret being so hard on a child.

Fault.

Now you must understand why Antonio’s ambling interfered with the routine she had crafted since her first few weeks in kindergarten. She had used seven strikes on her current long side already, embarrassed by both the stilted languid gait required to match Antonio and the new record of strikes on a long side. This clumsy balancing act was a wrench in her well-oiled-machine, and she wanted to let him know so badly that she is quite displeased by her life as well. “Aw, that sucks,” she wanted to say. “You get two Christmases! What a tragedy! What a horror! Double the gifts, twice the surprise!” He was very sensitive, though, and would have started crying. It took some patience rarely seen by those with her brain’s tendencies to decide against berating him. Instead, she recalled her classroom corkboard’s square breathing technique poster and listened to her own thoughts instead of his; she was, like most days, thinking about Delilah.

Crack.

See, coming up on this long side was the best view of the monkey bars, which have rested parallel to the long side and rusted plenty since their installation in first grade. It was under the bars where she engaged in her first theater performance, a nonverbal confession of third-grade love. Her father had shown her Charlie Chaplin, and so she shouted ‘watch this’ to Delilah who swiveled and saw Andrea feign a slip on a nonexistent banana, fall face first onto gravel, yelp like a startled dog; although Delilah laughed, she immediately swiveled back to her play group’s friendship bracelet activity and misinterpreted for silliness what was really Andrea’s unequivocally romantic desire to sacrifice herself for Delilah’s good humor. Well into middle school, just before sleep, the cinema of anxiety would continue to feature homoromantic misinterpretation, with a few cameos from this instance of slapstick-self-sacrifice.

Misstep.

See, Delilah had picked up a habit of misreading the nervous stutter, affinity for staring, and compliments (said as if they were somber eulogies and at risk of making someone cry). In fact, she was so pleased by Andrea’s friendship that she herself would initiate contact sometimes. The week prior, Andrea was, like usual, stubbornly maintaining a safe distance, at all times fifty feet from Delilah and her pretty pink bow and her cheetah-colored barrettes and her cheeto-covered hands. In a moment of weakness and magnetism, Andrea may have stared more wantonly than is apropos for a child of her age, and Delilah pranced over to let her know that she had ‘made a friendship bracelet for you because you’re always so nice’—south-seeking pole finally attracting—and while mumbling a thank you, Andrea snatched it with flustered hands like Delilah was holding out the holy grail, or even better, her heart. She went back to the slabs, warm in the February weather. Friendship, she thought, like it was marriage, like the bracelet was a fourteen carat diamond. Like her tenacious belief in Santa Claus, Andrea held steadfast to the idea of Delilah’s love, and like her forgone belief in the tooth fairy, Andrea kept the bracelet under her pillow in the hopes of something, but she did not know what.

Fault.

Now you must understand why Antonio’s ambling interfered with Andrea’s worship of Delilah. Andrea could not be seen prancing about like a slinky on the slabs, but she was also unwilling to end her staunch commitment to the cracks and fault lines, and despite all her patient encouragement, Antonio was unconcerned about her stressors, enamored by his family’s separation. He continued on and on verbally, to Andrea’s chagrin, but not physically, also to Andrea’s chagrin. His pace was so dreary that she considered an amendment for the first time: to abandon four years of precedent and allow herself two snaking steps on every diagonal fault line. Undulation on a straight path, however, would appear equally silly to Delilah, and Andrea was equally unwilling to end that commitment. Thankfully, she would soon be absolved of her suffering; after twenty minutes, Antonio had seemingly exhausted himself of melancholy and had at last sped up—clearly trying to mask some agitation like his father would when a honey bee nibbled on his Coke.

Crack.

See, in Antonio’s experience with the school counselors, candy was apparently a suitable ministration for processing trauma as a child. When he would be sent to the office as the victim of bullying, it was Snickers. When he went again, crying after having wet himself, it was Skittles. When he went the week prior to recount his parents’ argument, the itching feeling of displacement, the guilt that tightened up in his chest and held his tears hostage, they gave him a melted Werthers, and that made it worse. 

See, never had they given the same open-eared approach that Andrea offered. They inquired silly things like ‘do you feel safe at home?’, and they spoke with an aloof condescension, and Andrea did not. She kept quiet company and doused his flames with her ‘mmhmm’s and ‘yeah’s. She let him speak at length, and it was for this reason that he experienced his first of many self-actualizations through the emotional labor of women, an inkling of empathy prodding around in a psyche founded on first-person shooters and trampoline wrestling. This epiphany came in the form of sentimental affection, and the crush he harbored for the past few months had transcended infatuation. It was as if his sleeping beauty life had just received its princely peck, and out of that deep hibernation arose true love, begging for confession. There were only a few months left for the two of them to be like Vikram and Nikita, the only couple in fifth grade, boyfriend and girlfriend, in love, and he already had their ship name conceived, and so enraptured by her acts of service, he set sail in pursuit of Antea.

Fault.

“I love you,” he said.

Andrea furrowed her brows.

“Do you want to be my girlfriend and I can be your boyfriend?” He handed her a Snickers from his last time at the office.

She laughed.

He slowed his pace again.

“If we got married, I would leave, like your mom.” She joked. 

Misstep.

Antonio looked back at her blankly, obfuscating his pounding heart and pounding head, thinking about steel and Batman and other stoic items. 

She looked back at him and awaited his laughter.

He did not laugh.

She smiled coyly. Callbacks are funny.

He did not smile.

She returned the blank stare.

Misstep.

His lip quivered, and before he could reveal more, Antonio stepped off the slabs and walked toward the building, hands balled, smearing the tears before they fell onto his Velcro Skechers.

Andrea stopped, and faced him as he left, only understanding her faux pas afterward, when he sniffled as he left, still in earshot, and the guilt would whip her tight chest until it devoured her heart and her head felt fuzzy and she wanted to avoid the cracks to punish herself. She did not, however.

See, the cracks were the only solace left: she did not want to suffer in the last five minutes of recess; and she did not know how to apologize to Antonio; and she was itching for comfort and a reasonable walking pace; and, on this next short side, she could pass by Delilah, who was wearing her favorite pretty pink bow, and she could stare.

Crack.

They were supposed to fix: the crooked teeth, the wide-set eyes, the acne scars that were sold as freckles, the bowl cut that was really a teacup saucer cut, the plaque from dental habits he lied about, the asshole-like hyperpigmentation around his cracked lips, the ears that labeled him ‘baboon’ in the middle school cafeteria, the hooked nose his mother blessed him with, the weak chin his father’s sperm ignored, the eyebrows a ferret would envy, the tongue solitarily confined to his own lips, the bone structure of an invertebrate, and that was just his face.

They were supposed to fix: the 5’2” stature, the umbrella-handle spinal posture of lumbar lordosis, the torso of a tiered wedding cake, the gut that likely housed one, the rounded shoulders that cast shadows over the breasts he developed before his still-developing and thus envious female classmates, the Pollock drip technique eczema highlighted by a canvas that avoided the sun, the hands with frizzy hair on the dorsal side and knuckles and wrists, the fingernails a James Beard award winner would use to sharpen their knives, the waist that met his hips in square compromise, the knees that seemed to be bathed daily with dust soap and gravel lotion, the feet that would have a traveling circus recruit like the military, and that was all worth remembering.

They were supposed to fix it all. So, when Ricky finally received them that morning on Christmas, he sunk his nails into the plastic wrap, the translucent film choking, whitening, yearning to snap. He tore through this first barrier to salvation with relative ease. They were now in his hands. The texture felt like female attention and twenty-four carat respect. He pulled at the plastic tagging fastener off with his hands, groaning as it corrugated his finger into the appearance of a fourth knuckle. The pain did not matter. The tag tore, and they lay in his hands. He observed them for a moment, as a poacher would examine the ivory tusks on the carcass of his long-sought forbidden prey. Then he rushed to his mother’s bathroom and stood before the only full-length mirror in the Wilson household, ogling a body that only a Frankenstein could love. 

There he stood. 

Paused, he stood.

Neon green Nike Elite socks stretched to just an inch below his knees, Ricky’s teeth did not schedule a family reunion to end their estrangement, his eyes did not perform a coordinated assemblé, and nothing was fixed. He just looked like an idiot.

Ari was not stupid like every Mr. Tom, Dr. Dick, and Professor Harry had made him out to be. Ari understood things in a way that others did not. Ari understood that when you descend the stairs and hear shouting, you take advantage of the carpet being unevenly distributed and walk near the edges where fewer footfalls have reduced the padding and your presence is marginally less discernible. Ari understood that this is probably because the parents are fighting again and that is probably because of alcohol.

Ari understood that: when you’ve reached the bottom of the stairs and approach the kitchen to collect your mid-afternoon Saturday refreshments, you stand facing the fridge, all ten toes aligned perfectly, because even one out of line can signal an opportunity for conversation. Ari understood that you don’t want an opportunity for conversation.

Ari understood this because he overheard the mother remain adamant that she had in fact not had a glass of wine and certainly not four, and he had overheard the father’s skepticism in the way he said ‘okay’ and that’s when you must remember that your ten toes should stay aligned. If the father enters the kitchen, he may ask you as he did hours ago did you finish your generic assignment for nonspecific class and have you scheduled your meeting for indistinctive extracurricular, and you will say yes even if you know the answer is no, just as the mother did with the glass of wine but in reverse.

Ari understood that he was lucky today because it was the mother who followed him into the kitchen, and this poses no threat of conversation—when the mother enters the kitchen after you, there is a mutual understanding that the mother should not and cannot speak (and you should not and cannot speak) and that is because every word that exits a mouth in that kitchen is hypocritical. Even just to label it as hypocritical is hypocritical in itself. Ari understood that saying about glass houses and stones, even if a nondescript Professor Harry poked at him for not remembering the phrase itself.

Ari understood that his glass house was not inherited because no one grows up living in a glass house because that would be unsustainable and would result in the greenhouse effect. Ari understood that your glass house is something you learn, because he lives in a brick house with the parents who each live in their own glass house, and he, quite the prodigal young architect, only had the tomes of glass-house-building to study from.

This is why, as Ari understood, the benefit of having the mother enter the kitchen after you was because both you and the mother have so many stones designed for each other’s glass house that you would prefer the Cold War over the mutually assured destruction. Ari understood, nonetheless, that there was an arms race and that you must keep by your side your most potent nuclear warhead, in this case labeled ‘at least my addiction to my phone doesn’t take a toll on my liver.’ The mother understood the situation similarly, and was preparing her own warheads, just in case either decided to speak, but Ari knew his were more acrimonious.

Ari, ever the empathetic son, kept his ten toes aligned with the fridge, because should the mother decide to throw out even a warning shot, a mother will always feel her own pain and the pain of her child, while the child isn’t nearly old enough to feel the pain of its mother. To save her from the guilt and himself from the stress, Ari perused the fridge without any movement.

Ari thus understood all important things but one: that one day, the radiation from all these warheads you collect for your mother as you anticipate destruction will send cancer into your conscience, and you will grow little tumors in the warehouse where you used to keep the love for your mother. Ari, still being of the age where Professors can condescend to him, did not understand this, and for that reason, when his mother passed away from cancer, Ari did not understand why you feel as if you have cancer too.

‍

Zohra first accepted that the grass was less green when she turned 17. It was on her birthday, because her birthdays were always torturous. She uttered a thank you to God, even though he refused her prayers normally. It’s okay that it feels futile, her mom said, when she heard Zohra’s languid whines. It’s a privilege to have God on your side and pray, her mom said, when Zohra said that it was pointless and boring. Nonetheless, she accepted, and continued to pray. God probably would not appreciate the whining.

Zohra’s birthday was once again a shitty one, although less so than previous years. 

At sixteen, her mother made her announce sixteen wishes and none of them came true, and some of them were lowballs, which God would obviously know, so she felt that the onus of wish failure was on her mother—and she would continue to inculpate her so in her prayers for the next year amid refusals to announce a wish again, as if they have come true otherwise. 

At fifteen, she was to sing in front of her extended family, of which one of her cousins, Farhad, was her God-assigned childhood bully, the one that you carry into reluctant counseling appointments in your thirties and then get defensive when you are told in an unduly sympathetic voice that he set the foundation for your mistrust. She hated Farhad, because he had both a handsome and a gentle name, like sandalwood and rose, and hers was so masculine. Round-faced, and for that reason bullied himself, he was known for having the cheeks of a squirrel. Gulehri gulehri gulehri, the cousins teased, but Zohra was envious. Why should he have the dimples and I should have the jaw of a soldier from a French resistance arthouse film, she asked God, and why does mother continue to invite him and feel the social pressure (disguised as necessity) of having some extended family on my special day—especially those that we speak so poorly of when they leave—why are they more important than preventing the inevitable mistrust of my thirties?

At fourteen, not much remains in memory, but she remembers that it was bad, and that thirteen was also bad, and that twelve was alright, even though mother wasn’t present. The rest are nearly forgotten, or as counseling would tell her, blocked out.

This was the first birthday since her twelfth that she had offered any thanks to God. As was orthodox, he did not fulfill any prayers but just ambled about the sky as usual, this time prancing a little too heavily on the clouds so that the meticulously decorated park gazebo was sheltering friends and family and Farhad, whom Zohra considered to be neither.

It began with a drizzle, and Zohra’s mother said it was not necessary to bring the cake inside, and then the rain began to hammer little indents into the white fondant and ‘Happy 17th Birthday Zohra’ became a garbled slurry that looked like soured milk, and then her mother acquiesced, and Zohra asked God why it took so long. She didn’t even like fondant. The year prior, the fondant lacked structural integrity, a feat she assumed impossible for fondant, but her mother unrelentingly decided to rely on a new baker friend from her Pilates class. This year, her mother agreed to order a cake from the local nationally acclaimed bakery but did not budge on the fondant. This year, red velvet would be the flavor because it was a ‘compromise’ between chocolate (Zohra’s favorite since she was a baby) and carrot cake (her mother’s recent affliction). And yet this year, no amount of prayer in favor of fondant architecture saved the cake, because Zohra had forgotten to pray against the rain. Why are you having it rain in the winter, she asked God, when it is cold enough?

For this, she was kicking herself. Farhad and his mother were kicking her too, stepping on her toes and sending their heels into her shins, because there were 23 people under the gazebo. Dripping with the brief rain they had escaped, her feet were in heated arguments with those of the people around her, having territorial disputes that were no exception to the hierarchy of age. The family’s older children coerced the family’s young boys into teetering on the concrete edges of the gazebo, where some would fail the balancing act and sentence their nice shoes to the same fate as the rest of their shoes: muddy distress.

 The wind was encouraging droplets to fly east: whistling through the empty windows of the gazebo; then pushing the mass of bodies east; then depriving shivering mothers of their protective urges, driving them to grab their sons by the shoulders and rotate them onto the frontlines where they would be at the mercy of the bullets because baal kharaab ho jaayenge baarish se; then there were now 23 sardines covering a mere three-fourths of the gazebo because only that much was safe. The pack was warmer now, huddled for warmth but restless in disapproval, like a barrel of snakes in both mind and body. Whose responsibility was it to check the weather, they asked God, and was Zohra not aware that it would rain? Zohra wanted to inform everyone that she was not aware of the rain, nor was she aware that the first of the birthday gifts she would receive would be public odium—but people don’t like it when you assume they are upset, even when their faces make it painfully evident. Why do they have to say it first? This question she did not ask of God, but just wondered on her own, because she had asked him enough.

Farhad, always obstinate and ever-eager to make a statement, emancipated himself from the shelter in protest of such harsh conditions, and stepped over the threshold into the rain. Before his protest, there was unspoken unanimity in waiting for the rain to end. Farhad had rejected the precedent, and no one admired him for it. The family turned to his mother, as if she was his puppeteer, and under the pressure of 22 eyes, she called out to her marionette Farhad kya kar rahe tu vaapas aa jao and it appeared he had cut the strings, because he, raising his arms in defiance, became the vague silhouette of a cross in the rain. He seemed to be at peace, Zohra thought. Perhaps he could not hear her voice through the roaring downpour or smell her shame through the wet musk of celebrating earthworms, but even if he could, Zohra suspected he would not turn around.

When reflecting on the next moment in counseling, Zohra would identify it as the first memory of true agency, where she was bound by her will. Occasionally, desperate to contest her own conviction, her brain would tell her it was not, and that time in fifth grade when she shouted at her best friend for stealing her pencil and then was sent to the office actually precedes this memory, but she quells the feeling because this memory is the source of much of her adult confidence. 

Zohra then, tired of the suffocating family, stepped over the threshold as well. She continued to walk. Each squelch began a call and response, and although Zohra would recount this defiance to her counselors as lacking hesitation, she waited after each foot sank into the mud for her mother’s shrill voice to remind her of her place. Squelch; nothing. Squelch; nothing. Squelch; nothing again, but with more anxiety. Nothing found its way to her. She feared it was the barrage of rain around her that encapsulated all sound, signaling disrespect to her mother’s futile calls. That was not the case, however. In fact, her mother was suffering from the same syndrome as Farhad’s mother. All 21 expectant stares stifled her anger into embarrassed silence, with Zohra’s eyes this time centered on her cousin.

Farhad didn’t shift as Zohra approached, and she observed this commitment to his stoicism fetish as absurd, given she would hear about at every Thanksgiving and every Diwali and any other holiday that her mother could offhandedly insert extended family into. It initially began only three summers ago, with him insisting—pointed fingers, craned neck, irreverent tone—that her suffering was nothing but a choice. One day, after what he would consider disagreement and what she would consider chiding, she inquired if his mother had once told him he is undeserving of an attractive spouse. He said no. She said, “then you haven’t suffered yet.” He laughed, and said she was suffering by believing her own mother.

The journey of 50 steps felt like miles with so many eyes on her back. Nonetheless, she found Farhad. She planted both sets of Mary Janed toes in the mud next to him, and dropped both heels with a huff. Brown spittle peppered Farhad’s pant leg. He looked down, and she apologized curtly. He shrugged. There was no apparent disdain nor concern in his shrug, and Zohra was grateful for it. She would forever accurately admit one thing and that was her poor literacy in body language, and yet even she could observe that it really did not matter to him if there was mud on his nicest pants.

“Why did you follow me?” He asked.

“Why are you here?”

“It was claustrophobic.” 

That much was obvious to Zohra. “Aren’t you afraid of Komal Aunty being upset?”

“I’m used to it. Mom’s been upset before. I’m not hurting anyone.”

The rumble began to slow to a patter. She turned to face him so that her meek voice would not be heard by her mother. He didn’t reciprocate. 

“What about God?”

He smirked. “What about God?”

“Didn’t you ask Him?”

Farhad laughed. “You don’t have to beg permission to live.”

Zohra furrowed her brows, and turned back towards the few droplets still falling. Eyes still on Farhad, she matched both the silence of the peanut gallery behind her and their disapproving stares. You don’t? 

For the first time in a while—not the first time ever, as her counselors would have a hard time believing, partially because epiphanic moments are untrustworthy and partially because she was labeled a ‘pathological exaggerator’— in the bare rhythm of the drizzle, Zohra thought her thoughts in repose. She thought about the breakfast she had that morning and how it was quite unhealthy. She thought about that history exam she had failed, and she thought about the science exam she aced. She thought about the girls in class who tell each other that they love each other and don’t mean it, and she was grateful to be privy to reality television behavior in her own life. She thought about how she was Zohra, and she fiddled the hem of her dress because she was idle. Zohra, for the first time in a while, fiddled the hem with her middle finger and thumb on her right hand, shifting it back and forth, not because she was stressed.

Zohra realized her train of thought must have been conspicuous because Farhad inquired about the conductor, and she did not know what to say because her thoughts were flowing like the tapping of a mature and healthy maple. Usually, they resembled her use of school bathroom soap dispensers: forced; in spurts; lacking substance or purpose or efficacy; and rarely but occasionally responsive to derision. She confesses that she doesn’t really know, and it doesn’t really matter. Zohra did know, however, but she was right. It didn’t matter. She had renounced learned empathy for learned apathy.

He replied: “Fine by me.”

As the encore sprinkle fell and the cloud curtains closed, the tidbits of green among the mud looked rather drab. The blades of grass were soiled and mushy, like overcooked spinach. Zohra didn’t mind. She didn’t mind that they weren’t very beautiful, were stuck to her frilly socks, were flat and uninteresting, didn’t billow in the wind like good blades do. She just thanked God, and really, thanked herself. She then thanked Farhad aloud, who, unsure of why, shrugged this time not out of forgiveness but insouciance, not opposed to the acknowledgment.

Later, in self-doubt, she would reconsider that acceptance. Shouldn’t the grass have been glistening after such a moment of truth, she would ask her counselors, and shouldn’t I have felt some catharsis instead of peace? Most answered no. One answered ‘not necessarily’; he was the unduly sympathetic voice. She would, in those periods of bittersweet reflection, refer to Farhad as her new savior and praise his ability to give birthday gifts, because she now took her jaw at face value—reminding her mirrored self at least she was not fat after much encouragement in counseling to improve her self-talk—and she no longer asked why.

The last time I was at Mary’s Pub

on a whim

I may have found novelty

in alerting the plausibly vegan brunette

with the faux fur coat and faux leather boots

to the scar on my left cheek

so that she may have prompted me with ‘how does that happen?’ and

I may have replied ‘I used to hunt alligators in the bayou’ and 

she may have understood me as gallant and worldly and

intriguing;

had I told her that

actually,

it was from when I tried my hand at a backflip at a house party

in freshman year—

when I was different and 

an alcoholic and 

trying to impress women

with falsehoods like

‘I can do a backflip’ and

‘my ex and I are on good terms’—

then she would have found me as drab and stagnant

as any other man,

which I am not

because I have read How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Varun had his first therapy appointment at seven years old and that was when he squashed his first ant, aside from when he condemned himself to hell; he used one of the magnifying glasses from a science kit in elementary school and set ablaze an ant in the Texas summer, and the sweat, the remorse, and that charred exoskeleton carcass live with him today. His negative thoughts did leave him, nonetheless, and he credits himself and his therapist for his pragmatism (or cynicism, from moment to moment).

Varun found Wendy’s chicken nuggets scrumptious, long ago, as a child, before his unforgiving gut biome and genetic predisposition to autoimmune conditions gifted him a gluten intolerance. And a lactose intolerance. And a general intolerance for sugar, caffeine, alcohol, sleep deprivation, and yet does not abstain from any of them but the gluten, the one prompting the least sympathy.

Varun relished in the Pink Panther, and Charlie Chaplin and Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes, but only the episodes with Wile. E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, and perhaps that’s from a deep-seated desire for slapstick justice, but he hopes it’s just because physical harm is funny when no one actually gets hurt. He isn’t sure about his natural empathy, but he has intentionally nurtured his own stockade, and he thinks that means more, but he isn’t sure and doesn’t like to think about it, since he seeks partners with seemingly natural stockades of empathy and he considers them good people, and what does that make him?

Varun preferred neatly ordered silverware and family dinners without alcohol as a young child, but he also preferred to find himself to reading free wine-mom-romance ebooks, so maybe he was wrong all those years. He did, however, understand that alcohol came with calories before he was corrupted, and that is why he only drinks liquor, and hesitantly so, as well. Someday, he will not be scared of his caloric intake, but by now you understand that it’s a phobia from which he isn’t aching to be free.

Varun hated the Willow Smith song, and it was likely around that year he spent at a different school, making new friends, and establishing his first of many identities, that he came to realize musical individualism would suit his archetype, and it was the second of many affectations—the first being his proclivity for creative writing. Now he is chock-full of affectations and contradictions with a blind sailor at the helm, broken moral compass in hand.

Varun adored his 2007 Camry. 212,526 miles had waved hello through the odometer when the brakes failed on the highway, and he regretted not loving the car more. He dreads his first experience with the waves of real human loss, the car being just a seaside mist.

Varun underwent the classic Indian American experience of being neither, and he, like many other ‘neithers’ believes he is better for it. The fuller’s earth did not irk him, and the cafeteria table rejections were met with equanimity, but it hurt him to know that his mother and his sister and his friends and everyone else had done it too. For once, he was thankful to feel like he was impermanent and placeless, and not something definite, like his friends and family who are real people. That being said, he still refuses to tan. He turns red, and it doesn’t match his clothes. They are earth tones.

Varun had his mother come to him with this week’s conundrum, shirking the subject with strange yet delicate tact. She was curious whether his sister should receive birth control, being merely 16, and her a posteriori preface was ‘you are the whitest one of us’ and he felt the shame of having that porcelain wisdom. He said yes, anyway—better than sounding like Ravi, better than enjoying it. Be eloquent, the mirror said.

Varun watched P.S. I Love You, and kissed his hand, rolling the skin between his teeth occasionally as if to bite some very thin lips (he tucked his own, and his hand seemed to follow suit). He was proud, thought he had practiced with enough rigor, and yet he would find out after more than a few kisses that an ex-girlfriend had told her friends that, each time, it felt like an encounter with the beak of a chicken. He never requested reassurance from future partners, knowing it would reek of insecurity, but he could’ve used it, once or twice, especially now that he had muzzled himself.

Varun used to step on the cracks too, and sometimes he still does. He steps in holes, dances around puddles, meanders otherwise. Time spent walking this Earth with others has educated him—particularly when hand-in-hand with an interest or a friend unafraid of perception or his cousin Sakshi who taught him kindness for the purpose of others—so he only does it when alone as to not force them to dance as well.

Varun eventually grew to wear clothes that fit him, concluding the brief phase of neon socks and running shorts that were far too expensive to be reasonable. In the interim between clothes that fit in and clothes that fit, he was resentful of those that were living his prior experiences, and this was a habit he is still working to cut from the rotation, and this is now a plea for advice.

Varun understood so much in his adolescence about conflict. He was always squinting when focused, keenly observing a paragraph or person or Pink Panther until the internal and external and interpersonal conflicts were clear—and it is for that reason, perhaps, that he views his own volatility with distance. He is not level-headed, but I am, and I ensure that his ants are squashed and heart is held, and he does the same for everyone else—and for that, I am proud.

The contemporary Varun is expected to understand more, he feels, and he does not understand more. His gifts have eroded under the pressure of life, and his memories are now in first-person, and we are merging. I don’t like it, and neither does he, but maybe I will finally be Varun someday, when I am all the things he says and all the things he does.

Varun has been attentive to the steadily decreasing radiance of color since he was young, and he now resists the compulsions to scroll endlessly on his phone to read books instead in the mornings, because he read when scrolling endlessly on his phone that the brilliance of your imagination is directly correlated with the brilliance with which you view the world. He does not know if it’s working, only that he recently read the word ‘marcescent’ and is desperate to find a use for it.

Varun ceased to pretend he knew God when his father told him at a young age that all he performs all the ceremonial activities ‘Mama ke liye’, and at an intermediate age that religion was ‘a tool for minority subjugation, internally through the caste system and externally through the Brit’, and in the present day that ‘it’s all shit’.

Varun may stop lying some day, but that is why he is the writer he is, or so he believes. Accountability is a formidable opponent, and elusion is a Greyhound bus out of town that comes back only when you’re ready to come back. When Varun returns on that bus, the world will stop for a moment, and Rosenbaum’s Orange will rule the world, and he will be its only successor. The power might get to his head, but eventually, the plot won’t make any sense and neither will the sentences—and despite his pleas and apologies, he will have to be honest. 

In honesty, Varun loves love and loves family and loves watching and loves listening and loves writing and loves friends and loves you, and he has to love writing because that’s how he reminds himself who Varun is, and you have to keep reading so that he knows you see him and read him as well, and it’s not just me who reads the silly thoughts and the tough ones, the passions and the pass-throughs, the itsy dreams and the lofty forevers; the ‘marcescents’, and proud pits of emptiness, and the tearful surges of contentment, and me.

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