“I’m sorry, honey,” she says. “But you’ve always got some little crush fluttering around in that heart of yours. I’m just surprised you don’t have your eye on anyone, that’s all. What about that boy Zaq you mentioned. He is spending time with you and your friends now, right?”
I want to roll my eyes, but to be fair Zaq is cute. I remember having a brief, teeny, tiny crush on him when I ran into him and Agatha once during sophomore year, but I was swiftly distracted by a guy in my English class, Henri, who could quote most of Twelfth Night verbatim. Liking Zaq now would make me a hypocrite for judging the intragroup drama of the Lindsay-Wesley-Sammie love triangle. I pointedly don’t think about Talia.
“She could always fight Lindsay for Samuel,” Dad says before I can reply to Mom. I throw the pillow by his feet at him. “Aye, cálmate!” he laughs, tossing the pillow back to the end of the bed. “I like Samuel; he’s a good young man. What makes that roja better than my Rojas?”
I roll my eyes, although in this light I doubt he notices. “I agree with your father,” Mom starts. “Plus, you know how much we love the Nasars. It’d be nice to know we wouldn’t hate your in-laws.” They’re both smiling, looking like giddy chismoses rather than parents. I know I should play along with their teasing, laugh and promise to marry Sammie as soon as Lindsay is done with him, but I can’t help myself.
“What if I didn’t end up with someone like Sammie?” I ask, enunciating each word slowly as I force them from my mouth.
“No entiendo,” Dad says, sitting up straighter as he senses the seriousness in my voice better than Mom, as per usual. “What do you mean?”
I take a deep breath. “How would you feel if I didn’t end up with a person like Sammie?” I wait a beat before adding, “Or like Wesley?”
“You can date a short boy,” Mom jokes before noticing neither Dad nor I am laughing along. Her eyebrows crease in concern, her face pale in the frozen television light.
“I’m not sure we know what you’re asking us, mija,” Dad says.
“Never mind,” I say, equal parts relieved and disappointed. “I’m just tired. All the stress of prom planning has been getting to me,” I lie, waving off the implications of my questions.
Mom’s concern deflates as she wishes me a good night and unpauses her documentary. But I feel Dad’s dark eyes watch me as I leave the room, closing the door and conversation behind me.
I scrub away what’s left of my makeup in the steaming shower, feeling oddly drawn back to my parents’ room. I stay firm in the hot water though, letting the worry fade as I aimlessly run my finger through the condensation gathering on the lavender tiles.
My parents love me; I know this for sure. But I also know they love weddings and grandchildren and the expectations they have for me. They love the daughter they know, but what if I stop being that daughter?
My sweet, boy-crazy Ophelia.
I scrub and scrub until my skin feels raw and the red flush of heat and friction, alongside the water rushing down my face, hides the tears that fall of their own volition.
NINE
“Another cup?” Mrs. Nasar asks, poking her head into Sammie’s room for the third time this morning. Her tunic is a soft yellow, adorned with white beading along the cuffs, and billows around her thin frame as she’s hit with a gust of wind from Sammie’s fan.
“I’m good, thank you,” I reply, sipping the last of my chai. I’m really not a tea or coffee person, but Mrs. Nasar serves her chai with thick globs of honey and cinnamon from the local farmers market, making it my guilty pleasure. Though I’m still getting over the embarrassment of calling it chai tea until I was thirteen and one of Sammie’s younger sisters, Hana, called me out, telling me I was basically saying tea-tea. Mrs. Nasar never had the heart to say anything, and Sammie thought it was too funny to put an end to.
“You’re going to run up the electricity bill,” Mrs. Nasar says to Sammie, yanking on his ceiling fan until it switches to a lower setting. She looks at me, sitting at Sammie’s desk, where I’m highlighting passages from Northanger Abbey. “Look at Ophelia, taking notes and doing homework on a Saturday while you’re sitting on your phone.”
He tosses his phone onto his pillow. “Mujhe maaf kardo,” he says. It’s one of the few Urdu phrases I can recognize, but given the tight smile on his face, I can tell his request for forgiveness isn’t sincere.
She ignores him, smiling at me instead as she brushes long curls out of her face. Sammie’s height definitely came from his dad, but he’s the spitting image of his mom. All long lashes and sharp cheekbones. She rests her hand on my shoulder gently. “Another cup? I made plenty.” She grabs my cup before I can refuse, snatching Sammie’s up from his side table as she passes.
He clenches his hands, suppressing a snappy comment after she leaves, only shutting the door halfway behind her. He gets up to shut the door all the way before his sister Jani walks by.
“Doors stay partially open when girls are over, lover boy,” she coos, effortlessly cooler than I was at fourteen.
I turn a laugh into a cough unconvincingly.
“Keep laughing, nerd,” he says as he plops back onto his bed. “That isn’t even for homework, is it?”
“I’ll accept your insult if you can swear to me you weren’t using your phone to do history research. For fun.”
He holds my gaze for a long moment before breaking. “The Inca Empire isn’t nerdy, okay?” I cackle while he flips me off. “I’m compensating for my Eurocentric education. You’re reading an old white lady book.”
“Did you know Jane Austen called watering roses a ‘heroic enjoyment of infancy’? She really was ahead of her time.”
“I need new friends.”
“Listen to this: ‘I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature.’ I’m feeling so valid right now.”
Sammie groans, pulling his pillow out from behind his head and pressing it into his face. His words come out mumbled. “Is it too late to retract my commitment to North Coast?”
“Technically, no,” I reply, shutting my book and lowering my voice. “But then who is going to take care of you when you get all sad and wall-punchy in college?”
Sammie lifts the pillow off his face. “Is this you attempting to segue into an emotional bonding moment about last weekend, or are you just giving me shit for it?”
“?Por qué no los dos?” I ask. Sammie groans again, dropping the pillow. “Fine, fine. As much as I’d love to pick ‘just giving you shit’ … your Wesley jokes have been getting a little meaner lately.” I pause and nod at his now-dented trash can. “Is there a correlation to last weekend’s…”
“Lapse in judgment?”
“I was going to say minor breakdown, but that works too.”
“I’m fine.” He sits up, curling around his pillow in his lap. “It was one time. I just had a bad night and got caught up in my head.”
“It might make you feel better if you talk to Lindsay about all of this. Or maybe your parents, I don’t know. I’m not trying to lecture, but—”