Three guys and two girls, older than me. I suddenly wish Tats were here. She would run up to them and start chatting.
I meander over, pretending to be really interested in the ground leading up to the group. I take a lot of pictures of the trail.
I would have bumped into the picnic table had J’s feet not shown up in my phone’s screen.
“Hi,” he says.
I do a wiggle-wave with my fingers, realizing two of his friends, the girls, are looking at me.
“Nice view,” I say, trying hard to look at the lake and not his face.
“Yeah,” he says, looking at me and not the lake.
He backs up and gets up on the picnic table, his feet resting on the bench, elbows propped on his knees. Facing me.
His friends are now clustering close to the water, and someone’s taking a bottle out of a backpack. I pretend not to see. I have nowhere to look but Jeremy’s face.
“So, do you come here a lot?” I say.
He laughs and I cringe. How did I blurt out the cheesiest pickup line in existence?
“Actually I do,” he says. “It’s almost in my front yard. See, that’s my house up there.”
He gestures up a hill on my right, and I immediately turn and look at it, without needing much of his directing. The house that I’d looked at through Google Earth countless times.
“A lakeside house,” I say. “Nice.”
“Yeah, you can come up after,” he says. “My dad’s barbecuing.”
“I’m kind of a vegetarian,” I say.
“You mean you eat halal?” he asks, laughing again. “Not to worry, we have halal hot dogs. I’ve got Muslim friends.”
“That’s cool,” I say.
“Want to see something that is actually cool?” He gets off the bench and walks toward a group of trees. I follow, glad to get away from his friends.
We stop at a tree with a small burlap sack hanging off a branch. He takes it down and opens it up. Birdseed.
“Watch,” he says.
He holds out a pile of seeds in the palm of his hand and makes a bird noise. A real-sounding one.
Pretty soon a few tiny birds begin assembling on the branches overhead. One hops down from branch to branch in a zigzag fashion, watching me carefully. I stand still, and it lands on Jeremy’s palm, pecking at the seed while giving me sidelong glances. I wonder if it’s female.
“Want to try?” he asks. “They’re chickadees. Very friendly.”
I hold out my palm, and he tips in the seeds remaining in his hand. I don’t know if he’s being careful not to touch me or if my hand stiffens involuntarily, but there’s no contact. I make the mistake of looking up at him at that moment. He looks back, and there’s so much that passes between us that I feel exposed.
He calls out his bird sound, and a chickadee finds its way into my palm, grazing my skin with its light claws. It’s so thrilling that I laugh and it flies away.
“They’ll even come over to the picnic table,” Jeremy says, walking back to our previous spot.
I drop the seeds on the table, flicking off the ones sticking to my clammy palm. Jeremy’s about to call out again when we hear a whistle. An older man in a white apron stands waving a spatula on the lawn of the house with the turquoise door.
“Hey, food’s ready,” Jeremy says to his friends.
As they begin walking to the house, Jeremy works on smoothing out the birdseed on the table.
“Here, you might want to take a picture of that,” he says, revealing his handiwork. “For the love of chickadees, you know.”
I position my phone and click, the skin on my face prickling with heat. The seeds have been shaped into a heart.
? ? ?
As we amble up the hill, he’s quiet and I am too, wondering what to say next.
“Good, Farooq is here,” Jeremy says, pointing at a Honda parked in front of his house. “You know him, right?”
“Yeah,” I say, freezing.
“He hangs out at my place a lot. His house is the next street over.”
“Which reminds me, I promised his cousin I’d be at her house right about now.”
“Really? Now?” he asks, pausing on the sidewalk. “At least have a bite first. Food’s hot.”
“No, I can’t,” I say. “Sorry.”
Down the side of the house, by the fence, Farooq is standing beside Jeremy’s dad at the barbecue. He hasn’t seen me yet, but in a matter of seconds he will.
I take off down the street, not even waving good-bye to the sweetest guy I’ve met so far in my life.
? ? ?
Of course I get to Fizz’s early, even with the slow Sunday bus service. Everyone is at the mosque, so I slip into the backyard and head to her dad’s hammock.
I need to sprawl on this thing to think about getting rid of Farooq’s presence in my life for good.
What can I do that’s legally permissible? Nothing. I’ll have to be a Silent Sufferer, like those women Mom watches documentaries about. She showed me one woman’s lined face as she toiled in the fields, two kids attached to her legs, while her husband hung out at the tea shop with his friends. Mom said, Look at that beauty—now that is a strong woman, keeping on while the going is rough. She admires stuff like that. Mom told me that her mother, my Teta, had lost four children in Egypt to various things, some even at young ages, and yet no one saw the toll it took on her.
Anyway, why are all the Silent Sufferers women? Silently suffering men are not looked up to in any way, as far as I can tell. I mean, even Gandhi, Mr. Ram’s favorite go-to for quotes, the man of peace, was not like that.
Come to think about it, Mom isn’t even like that. She didn’t suffer in silence with Dad. She jumped to action and dumped him. She acted like Sausun said she would if somebody kicked up dirt in her life.
I’m not Mom. I’m not Sausun. I’m this girl who wants to be left alone.
Thinking so hard makes me fall asleep in the hammock.
I wake up to a low, laughing voice. Fizz’s dad. “There you are! Your mother is in the house saying you were abducted by a boy at the lake.”
I’m groggy, and what he’s saying doesn’t register.
“Your mother came to volunteer at the mosque and asked for you. No one knew where you were so she’s very worried. Auntie Fatima and the girls are comforting her in the house right now.”
I walk to the back door. Is she freaked out in an angry or a devastated way? I hope the latter. She’d be happier to see me.
Her face instantly registers anger when she sees me. She clutches my sleeve and leads me out to the car, like I’m a juvenile delinquent she arrested. The twins are laughing behind their hands, and Fizz mouths, What boy at the lake?
Thank you, Mom, I seethe to myself. Do you want me to be a woman of action or, really, just your ideal Silent Sufferer? I conclude that she wants the latter from me as I bear her lecturing.
? ? ?
Fizz calls me after dinner, while Mom watches Downton Abbey by herself.
“I don’t know what to say,” she begins.
“Okay?” I say. Her tone sounds like Mom’s in the car.
“You kept everything from me? Like every single thing?” she says.
“Can I know what you’re talking about?” I say, throwing my Chicago clothes into the laundry hamper while scouting for new hiding places for my agendas and notebooks.