She purses her lips, then bites her lower one, eyes unfocused in thought.
“Never mind,” I tell her. “I shouldn’t have asked. I know you’re not supposed to make people feel awkward and now I’ve done it. I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. Seriously. You do it all the time, for no reason. Just cut it out, okay?”
“Okay.” I think about saying I’m sorry, totally in an ironic way, but I don’t think she’d appreciate it right now.
“Look, here’s the thing about being a Muslim: It’s not really about us. We have one choice, one decision to make in the whole thing. We’re either going to follow our faith or not. And if we decide to follow it, then…” She shrugs. “We can’t help how other people react.”
“But it must suck. To have people, y’know, judging you. Because of…”
“Suck or not, it doesn’t make a difference. Something sucking doesn’t change what it is. What am I supposed to do? Let people’s opinions of me dictate how I live my life?”
“I never thought of it that way. I guess… you know, growing up here, you learn not to be different. Not to stand out.”
“That’s sad.”
“Being sad doesn’t change it,” I volley.
She finally relaxes and grins at me. “Truth. The Quran tells us that Allah made us all different so we could get to know one another.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, if we were all the same, what would be the point in meeting anyone at all?”
“Do you believe that?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. But wouldn’t the world be boring if we were all the same? And wouldn’t it be amazing if we were all different on purpose?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
I must still appear doleful because she grins and smacks my shoulder. “Turn your frown upside down, Sebastian—I like being me!”
“I guess I’m just worried for you.”
She smiles broadly and squeezes my arm for just a second. “You’re a good friend, Sebastian. And the good news is this: No matter how bad it’s gotten for us, it’s been worse for others.”
“That’s good news?”
“It’s better than the alternative, isn’t it?”
It turns out the shooter is white. This is confirmed when they find him with a broken leg roughly two miles from the scene of the shooting, still carrying his secondary weapon, a Colt pistol. He is shot once in the arm during the arrest.
I feel only relief for Aneesa, for the Fahims, at this news. No one will be assuming white people are dangerous after this.
But we are, of course. We are all dangerous, every person on this planet.
Even the children.
In bed, I relive the moments on the porch. It felt like walls came down. Like we connected. You’re a good friend, she said.
Friend. That’s a step, right? A step in the right direction?
I fall asleep on that notion.
By the third week in July, Aneesa and I are essentially inseparable. I have become, almost by accident, her guide to Brookdale, for whatever that’s worth. There’s nothing special or unique or even vaguely interesting about this place, but to Aneesa’s eyes, it’s new, and through her eyes, I discover it again. Sometimes we walk; sometimes we bike. I show her the best place for ice cream (Girelli’s, behind the library building, just off the alley where Leah Muldoon was almost kidnapped by a serial killer a while back), the hidden shortcuts through town, the only decent Italian food (Sam’s, on the other side of town from Hong Palace).
It’s great. It’s a great time. I don’t even think of the voice at night. Because I crash every night, exhausted and happy, despite Mom’s nagging about the summer slipping away.
Let it. If this is what it feels like to have the summer slip away, then let it.
Aneesa.
Ah-nee-sah.
(With apologies to Nabokov.)
It’s not just that she’s pretty and smart and pretty and funny and pretty, I realize. It’s something more.
It’s that she doesn’t know.
She’ll find out, of course. When school starts and she wanders the halls of South Brook High, she’ll find out. She’ll make friends, who will gossip in the bathroom, who will say, “Wait—not Sebastian Cody?” And she’ll say, “Well, yeah. What, does he molest goats or something?” because that’s her standby mock-horror, worst-case scenario.
And they won’t laugh. Instead, one of them will say, “No. God, Aneesa. He killed his baby sister. Like, years ago. Shot her in her own bedroom.”
And that will be the end of it.
So I enjoy it while I can. While it lasts.
I’m starting to run out of things to do with her, places to go. There’s really only one left. One I’ve been avoiding.
But on the Friday of the last week of July, she looks at me with those bright black eyes under those high, soft, angled eyebrows, and I say, “Get your bike. Let’s go.” And I take her to the last place.
To my place.
“It’s a rickety old trailer,” she says. “So what?”
We’re in my usual observation spot among the trees as the sun burnishes the rust stains on the trailer’s exterior, turning them almost bronze, almost beautiful.
I have no words to explain it to her, no words to explain what this trailer means, what it represents. What I have been planning to do within it.
When Evan left, it felt imminent and inevitable, like a storm on the horizon. Now, though, it feels no less inevitable, but somehow removed, like Christmas on the first day of fall. It’s coming. It’s out there. It’s happening no matter what, but there’s time. There’s time and there’s distance and there’s no need to obsess over it because no matter what, the calendar pages will be torn away and the sun will set and rise, and December 25 will arrive whether you fret about it or not.
“It’s just a place,” I tell her. “Just a place I come. To think. To be alone.”
“And you’re sharing it with me?”
“Looks like.”
She nods. “Thank you.”
“Why are you thanking me? It’s just a place.”
“But it means something to you. Obviously. So thank you for sharing it.”
How does she always know the right thing to say? Where does this superpower come from?
And how will I be able to say good-bye to her? I’ll have to, of course. Before I take myself out of the equation for good.
Because that time is still coming. It has to. That time lives in the future, but it marches relentlessly toward the present, even as the present hurtles toward it, the two on an inevitable collision course.
Unless… Is there any chance? Any chance at all that she could overlook my past? A chance I could stay? Somehow, that’s more frightening than the alternative. So much easier to imagine vanishing when that’s what you know you deserve.
“Earth to Sebastian,” she says, waving a hand before me. “Come in. Where did you go?”
“Nowhere. Sorry. Just thinking.”
“Well, think about food. I’m starving.”
“We could try—”
“No, we’ve been to all the good places, you said. C’mon—you owe me pizza. I’m calling you out.”
“Now?”
“Now.”