My gut contracts with fear and guilt. I feel like I’ve been getting to know Aneesa under false pretenses. Getting to know all of them. Like Mr. Fahim would never have told me to call him Joe if he knew what I’d done. He came here and he opened their house to me and he was nice to me and I smiled and shook his hand and lied.
The chicken has changed not at all, but my appetite for it plummets. I look around for the trash can, wondering if I can surreptitiously dump the chicken and slip away before anyone realizes I’m even here.
As I sidle into the shadow cast by the house, I notice Mr. Fahim double-checking something with a tall blond woman near the sodas. This has got to be Aneesa’s mom, and there’s a part of me that’s surprised to see she’s not in hijab. And then I wonder why I’m surprised and I wonder why I wonder so many things. Which is probably a sign that I should get away from decent people and go home.
The trash can is under the deck, on the other side of the house. I make my way there and see Aneesa, coming down the stairs, wearing a flowing skirt with a loose white shirt and a head scarf in patterned red, white, and blue. It’s not quite an American flag, but it’s festive, and it makes her face seem to glow.
“Chicken no good?” she asks, noticing me about to dump it into the trash.
“No, no, it’s great.” I make a show of eating some. “It’s great.” Fortunately, I don’t have to lie because it really is great. It’s my gut that isn’t completely on the level right now.
She quirks her lips into a wry smile, but says nothing about my aborted chicken disposal. “Did you just get here?”
“Couple minutes ago.”
“Where’s your mom?” She peers around.
“Oh. I, uh, I didn’t know she was invited.”
“Of course she was invited!”
I deflect and shrug. “I don’t think I can stay very long.”
“I get it. Stay as long as you can.”
And the next thing I know, the sun is low along the horizon, its light stretched deep pink like pulled tufts of cotton candy. The coals on the grill glow like spots of lava on obsidian. Aneesa has located a couple of sets of clean skewers and scrounged a bag of marshmallows, which we’ve speared and now drape into the heat still wafting up from the grill.
I should have left. I couldn’t. Let’s add one more row in Sebastian’s ledger of guilt and shame.
Mr. and Mrs. Fahim (she wants me to call her Sara, and I manage to do so out loud, but not in my head) bundled the trash into large garbage bags, then gathered the paper tablecloth into its own sack and stuffed it into the big plastic toter. I should have helped. I’m useless.
“Neesa, we’re headed to the fireworks,” her dad says. “Sebastian, can we give you a lift?”
Before I can speak, Aneesa says, “We’re just gonna stick around here, Dad.”
Mr. Fahim nods slowly. “Don’t go inside until the grill’s out.”
“I won’t.”
Mrs. Fahim comes to her, favoring me with a small but sincere smile. She kisses her daughter on the forehead, whispers something just below my hearing, and then Aneesa’s parents are gone, leaving us alone with the marshmallows and the grill and the quiet and each other.
“Here’s a secret,” I tell her, before the quiet becomes too loud. “You don’t have to go to the school parking lot and fight traffic to see the fireworks. Most of the good ones will come up right over the tree line.” I point. “Mom and I usually sit on our back porch and watch them.”
“Speaking of your mom… I thought you weren’t able to stay very long.”
I hope the darkening night conceals my blush. “Well, if I left now, I’d miss the marshmallows.”
She groans with regret. “I. Am. So. Stuffed. I can’t believe I’m contemplating this.” She waggles her skewer.
“Everything was great.”
“My dad’s awesome on the grill. Both of my parents are good cooks.”
“I can cook.” I don’t know why I just told her that.
“Really?”
“Well, pretty much just pizza.”
She laughs. “Does your recipe involve a lot of—” She mimes tapping on a phone screen.
“No, no. I mean it. I make really good pizza.” Why am I arguing with her about this?
“You’ll have to prove it to me.”
“How?”
“Make a pizza for me sometime.”
One of the two marshmallows on my skewer is golden brown. I pluck it off and pop it in my mouth just long enough to suck off the outer carbonized shell, its burnt sweetness hot and strong on my tongue. The gooey center I respear with the skewer and put back over the heat.
She laughs. “How many times are you going to do that?”
“As many as it takes.”
“We have a whole bag of marshmallows. You don’t have to make them last.”
It hits me: The first time I saw that toasted marshmallow trick was from my father. I shut down the memory immediately, force myself back to the present.
Aneesa has snatched one of her own marshmallows and tucked it between her lips. Her mouth is comically distended around the whitish-brown plug of sugar and her throat works for a moment. Then, slowly, the marshmallow splits down the middle and melted goo plops onto the grass at her feet. Her tongue, coated in marshmallow, wags for a moment.
She inhales the remains and laughs in good-natured frustration. “I thought that was going to look cool!”
“It looked way cool,” I deadpan.
“I don’t know what I expected.”
“So, what did your mom whisper to you?”
Aneesa rolls her eyes. “She said, ‘Remember that we trust you.’ Which is totally some passive-aggressive parenting tactic they learned on the Internet. Please.”
Trust. Does that mean they think there’s a chance— Just then, the first firework splits the sky to the east, just above the tree line. It’s red and white, tracers falling out of the night sky like the despondent branches of a weeping willow.
Aneesa oohs, and an instant later, the bang comes, the explosion of the cannon that launched the firework. She startles.
“Light moves faster than sound,” I tell her. “We’re just barely far enough away that you can see the colors before you hear the noise.”
“It’s like watching a badly dubbed movie.” She chuckles.
“I’m sorry. I could get my mom to take us to—”
“I like badly dubbed movies, you idiot.” She pops her other marshmallow in her mouth and scampers up the wooden stairs to the deck. “Come on!”
There’s a lounger and an old beach chair on the deck. Aneesa drags them next to each other and, still chewing her marshmallow, slips onto the lounger. She fiddles with her phone and soon the 1812 Overture is playing.
I settle into the chair, and we stare up and out together.
“Did you know he hated this piece?” she asks.
“Who, Tchaikovsky?”
“Yeah. He thought it was just a lot of noise and no art.”
“That’s crazy.”
“We played it in band at my old school.” She grins. “Is it terminally geeky if I tell you I play a mean oboe?”
“Don’t they have a vaccine for that yet?”
“They should. All of those old, classical composers… Honestly, I can’t stand them.”
“Then why play this?”
“Because I have to admit—it just doesn’t seem like fireworks without it.”