So, a day or two before Halloween, on a Sunday, I bike up to Aneesa’s for the first time in a long time. I haven’t seen her since I told her to get out of my room. I actually only said, “Get out,” never specifying. In that moment, I meant my room, my house, my heart, my life. She honored my request and vacated them all as best she could.
When I knock at the door, Mr. Fahim answers. I wonder what he knows, how much he knows. I wonder at the character of his knowledge; how did Aneesa tell the story? Was I the sick and injured prince or the outraged and out-of-control dragon?
“Ariadne,” he says with a slight quirk of his lips. “Aneesa isn’t home.”
“Oh.” I turn back to my bike.
“You’re welcome to wait for her, if you like.”
I don’t like, but I have no choice. If I leave now, I’ll never work up the courage to come back again. I need to do this now.
Reluctantly, I trudge inside. Everything has finally been unpacked. Artwork and photographs hang on the walls. The Fahims have completed the metamorphosis of the house no one wanted to buy into a home.
“We haven’t seen you around here lately,” Mr. Fahim says, gesturing for me to sit in one of the living room chairs. He takes the sofa.
“Well, school…” I let it drift and hang, smoke in the open air.
“Aneesa has been making new friends. I assume you’ve been busy with old ones.”
I let him think that.
“Do you believe in the afterlife?” he asks suddenly.
“I’m not sure.” I don’t want to offend him. And it’s a tough question for me. I’d love to see Lola again, but I also figure I probably don’t deserve that.
“Many don’t. Because it offends them to imagine all this”—he gestures around us, to the world beyond the room—“is a mere test. But it isn’t a test. It’s a trial. To determine if we are worthy. So it’s nothing we should shrug off, regardless of what follows. How we are now, to one another, dictates our eternity.”
I follow him, but I’m not sure how it’s relevant, until I realize what the whole point is: He knows. Either Aneesa told him or someone else did. He knows.
“What I mean to say,” he goes on, “is this: Life is short, but its brevity does not mean it’s meaningless. Work out your differences with Aneesa, whatever they are.”
“I’d like that.”
Mr. Fahim sighs. “I like you a great deal, Ariadne. And I understand better than most, I think. I’m very happy with Sara. I adore my wife and the life we have. So I don’t mean to insult you, when I say that… in an ideal world, I would see Aneesa with a Muslim boy. You understand?”
I shrug a noncommittal yes.
“But this is not an ideal world. You two are good together. And I would be happy if someday—in the future, you understand—if that turned into something more.”
“I don’t think that’s in the cards, sir.”
“It’s still Joe. And I’m sorry to hear that.” He takes a deep breath and glances around, as though for spies. “I am her father and I’m not supposed to say such things, but I will.” He gazes directly into my eyes. “Her loss.”
Aneesa and her mother arrive home to find Joe and me fragging aliens in Halo. I suck at it, my reflexes dulled from years of Intellivision and Atari 5200 games. Mr. Fahim doesn’t care. He claims I’m better than his wife, but not as good as Aneesa, which is “the sweet spot.”
Aneesa seems rattled to see me. A silent communication passes between her and her father, then her father and her mother, and then the adults leave us alone together in the living room.
“How are you doing?” she asks.
I’ve imagined this moment for a while now, speaking both sides of the conversation in my head, configuring and reconfiguring her responses and my responses to her responses, constructing a conversational flowchart designed to land me at the optimal conclusion.
And in an instant, I toss it out. Small talk and caution will get me nowhere.
“You told me the truth,” I tell her, “the last time we saw each other.”
“Not all of it,” she says, interrupting my flow.
“What do you mean?”
She fidgets for a moment. Then: “Look. I was afraid. Moving here. It’s not exactly—”
“Not exactly the most diverse place.”
“Yeah. And I was worried about fitting in, and I grabbed hold of the first friend I could find. And then we actually became good friends. Such good friends. And I felt bad that you wanted more.…”
“Don’t worry about… Look, just… It’s time for me to tell you the truth.”
From my pocket, I produce five sheets of paper, stapled together. I hand them to her.
Without a word, she scans the top sheet. Says “Oh” very quietly. And then she reads.
I guess I had hoped—or some part of me had, in any event—that it would make her cry. It doesn’t. It just makes her quiet for a long time, longer than it takes to read.
Finally, she speaks: “So, not to put pressure on you or anything, but I totally have an idea for a new pizza.” The bounce and the lilt of her voice are like a balm, like a good memory too long neglected.
“Since when do you come up with the recipes?” I challenge her.
“Hear me out: deconstructed pizza.”
I blink, then grin. I can already see it: thin wafers of crust with a tomato dipping sauce and cheese wheels on the side. “Derridare I?” I ask her.
Just like I knew she would, she catches my Derrida pun and fires back: “I de Man you do so!”
She returns my grin, and for an instant, none of it ever happened. Which is wrong because our lives are the sum of our mistakes as well as our triumphs, right?
But the grin is good and so is mine, and it feels right, and then she sighs and brandishes the rolled-up papers. “This, by the way?”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
We wallow in a moment of blissful silence.
And she looks up at me, impassive for a moment before the eyebrows arch in that Aneesa way, and she says, “You’re pretty much the best person I’ve ever known. I wish I were in love with you.”
“That’s okay.”
“Are you really going to turn this in for a grade?”
I nod. “Tomorrow.”
Tomorrow
Sebastian Cody
ACAS Assignment
October 28
Period 1
Assignment: Write a personal essay about a significant event in your life, and what you would or would not change about it.
BOY, 4, SHOOTS, KILLS INFANT SISTER
That’s what you want to hear about, isn’t it? That’s what you want to know. You want to know what happened and how it happened, the things that don’t make it into the news, the things that never leave my head, the things my mother said, the things my father did.
But you don’t get those things. They’re not yours.
And besides: That moment was not my most influential. That moment does not define me. I’ve never even read that article, only the headline.
When I was four years old, I killed my baby sister. It was an accident, but not the sort that you can apologize for and fix. You cannot repair this mistake; it lives on.