“I like how you remember the flavor,” she says.
They arrive at a long mirror in the hall and stand hushed before it. She is as beautiful in the mirror as she is in real life. He looks from himself to her, at the gap between their arms. Her phone starts to ring again, her mother, no doubt wondering where she has gone. She looks at him in a way that tells him it is time for her to go back. He suggests she take the elevator first. He will take his time before doing the same. And then they move on, broken or awoken from some spell. She waves and he holds up his hand as the elevator doors close. He watches her descent, a little red dot charting her movement away, floor eleven lighting up, then eventually three, two, one. He walks the empty halls. Slight pink smudge still on his thumb from wiping the rim of her glass but no other proof. But they were those two people in that mirror, they were the ones looking back at themselves, awed by their impossible reflections.
5.
PE CLASS IS LET OUT EARLY, AND INSTEAD OF RUSHING TO THE locker room with his classmates who are eager to line up at the snack bar, Amar drags his badminton racket on the blacktop. Mumma is still visiting her father in India, leaving no one to slip him spending money for a freshly baked cookie or a frozen lemonade cup. Nana’s health has been stable for two weeks now. But Mumma’s flight was canceled, and he is not sure when she will be able to come home. Hadia says there is no need to worry. Amar has yet to figure out how to launch a birdie into the air. Every time he tries, the birdie thuds to the ground just as his racket whooshes past, and he looks around to see if anyone but his partner noticed. His English teacher, Miss Kit, taught them a new word in class this week—melancholy—and he thinks of the word as he leans down to tug a protruding weed from the blacktop, tries to whack it with the racket, and wonders if maybe that is what he is feeling.
His shoulder is shoved and he stumbles into the brick wall. It is Grant walking away, looking back in such a way that Amar realizes he was shoved on purpose. He brushes dust from his shoulder. He does not like Grant, or the way Grant looks at him: as though there is something disgusting on Amar’s face. Amar straightens his posture and raises his shoulders a little. Just in case he was shoved because he appeared weak. He trails the racket against the wall until he reaches the locker room. He will push Grant back if he tries to bump him again.
Inside, the air is musty, the light gray. It smells of sweat. Light comes through the small, opaque windows at the very top of the walls, so high up that no one can see out of them. Everything echoes: footsteps of boys departing, locker doors slammed, locks snapped shut. His locker is in the farthest row, toward the end of the aisle. He likes it because not many people are around when he changes.
“Look,” someone says, “terrorist in a white shirt.”
Amar turns around. It is Grant speaking to Brandon. Brandon’s dirty PE clothes are flung over his shoulder. Both of them are in some of his classes but he knows neither well. Brandon has broad shoulders and is taller than the rest of the boys. Amar turns to look behind him but no one else is there.
Amar is the one in white. He slams his locker door louder than he intended. The metal trembles. He busies himself with the zipper of his backpack and Grant calls out to him, “Hey, we’re talking to you.”
Amar pictures the rest of the locker room—empty by now—and his stomach clenches.
“Why don’t you go back to your own country?” Brandon snarls.
He stands to face them.
“This is my country.”
He wanted to sound angrier, but he is surprised by the presence of something else in his voice—discomfort or defensiveness, he can’t tell. There is a slim space between Grant and the row of lockers and if he squeezes past he can make it to the door. He can ditch his last two classes and walk away from the whole stupid school until he reaches Hadia and Huda’s high school, where he can wait by the gate until they are let out. He has been in fights before, not with Grant or Brandon, but with other classmates in previous years. Fights he picked or allowed to happen, knowing he would win, or that there would be no real damage done: a bloody nose, a bruised arm. But this time there are two of them. And Brandon is bigger than he is. He presses his sneaker into an old, dark gum stain. Then Mark appears. Mark had moved to another school district after his parents’ divorce, but their schools had combined again in middle school. They did not really speak to each other anymore, Mark being a grade older. Still, if they passed each other in the hallway they would nod, and it was like a secret pact they kept with their younger selves. Mark nods to Grant, and Amar realizes they are friends now.
“Him?” Mark says when he sees Amar. He sounds surprised.
Amar wonders if they had planned to bother him today.
“Arabian Nights tells us he’s from here,” Grant explains to Mark. Brandon grins. Amar wants to tell Grant he is an idiot and that he is not even Arab. But his jaw is shut so tight his teeth hurt.
“He is,” Mark says.
Mark meets his eyes for a moment but then looks away.
“That’s right, you know him.”
“Knew him.”
There is the sound of a locker door echoing. Amar realizes he has taken a step back and hit the door with his body. Grant smiles with his head tilted back as though he has sniffed his fear.
“We should go,” Mark says, looking over his shoulder.
Amar is relieved: they may no longer be friends, but at least there is something between them they could both recognize and respect.
“Is your dad a terrorist?” Brandon asks.
Amar feels silent. And sick to his stomach, like his insides have twisted into a tiny fist, and when he looks up from the gray cement floor, the gray grout, the dark gum stain, it is to look at Mark, who is avoiding looking back at him. This is not anger. This is not fear. This is not an exchange he has been in before. He feels too ashamed to even have to say, no, he is not.
“Mark, you know his dad too?”
“Yeah, man.”
Once when they were ten, maybe eleven, Baba took all of them bowling. Mark’s finger had been between the bowling balls when another one rolled out, and it jammed his finger enough for him to not want to bowl. Mumma wrapped ice from the soda machines in a tissue, Baba gave them a ton of quarters to go into the arcade to play games that were manageable with one throbbing hand, while Hadia and Huda took over their turns. They brought home ten sticky aliens and one glow stick.
“Is he a terrorist?” Grant asks.
“Shut the fuck up, man,” Amar says.
Good. That was better. That sounded tougher.
Mark is the only one of these idiots who has been to his home, has eaten dinner with them, and if there is anyone who will tell them that his father is not a terrorist, but just someone who wears white shirts to work, packs brown paper lunch bags, it is Mark.
His father with his beard and his skin a little darker than Amar’s. His father did have a temper, one that was undetectable until it erupted, but his anger was hardly ever directed anywhere but at Amar, and even then Amar instigated it. When the sun began to set his father took walks at a slow pace, pausing at hedges with flowers, and some evenings Amar peered down from his bedroom window and thought his father looked like a peaceful man, his hands crossed and resting behind him. Amar wants to tell them: no, my father points out the stars in the sky to us if we haven’t looked up in a while, he teaches us how to look for the new moon to mark the new month, he reads books he underlines with a faint gray pencil. My father always says excuse me if he passes someone too close in the street. My father has never lost his temper at a stranger.