COMPENSATION
The days that follow bring no answers.
Mother is vague about the gathering; my questions only invite pinched lips and irritable head shakes from her. She’s suddenly busy all the time—not an easy thing to accomplish in our tiny, distractionless apartment. Bastien didn’t overhear anything useful either, so I am left alone with my confusion. At least one surprise comes from the meeting, though.
Food.
I arrive home from school to find the refrigerator and the cabinets full. Mother must have gone to a hair salon too, because the gray streaks that were beginning to snake their way through her hair have vanished. She laughs and waves away my questions. “Just enjoy it, Laila. I bought you something special—look in your bedroom.”
I walk into the room expecting to find a small trinket, or maybe a new blouse. Instead, I find a laptop computer sitting on my bed, brand-new and still in its box. It’s the same kind as Emmy’s, but a more recent version. Bastien’s bed has a box on it too—it looks like a video game console of some sort.
I rush back to the living room, positive there’s been a mistake. “But these things are so expensive! How did you get them?”
Mother laughs again, then twirls around in the middle of the room. She’s wearing a new dress. It looks like it cost as much as my computer, if not more. She’s always had expensive taste.
“Mother, where did you get the money for all this?” My heart is pounding in my chest, partly because I’m excited to have my own computer, but more because I’m afraid of what these gifts mean. Did she trade the last of her jewelry for one final splurge, or has she bartered something else? It pains me that I can’t just accept, can’t just enjoy. But I can’t. There’s something stopping me, even if it is only the perpetual sourness that seems to run, corrosive and sluggish, through my veins these days.
“I told you that money would come.” She is smug. Proud. Standing there, stunning and confident in her expensive new dress and young-again hair, she could be a snapshot from our past—a photo ripped in half, my father’s image torn away.
But I’m tired of the way she dances around questions. I have a right to know.
“Mother!” My voice is shrill as I repeat my question. “Where did you get the money for these things?”
Her head snaps up. She’s said nothing about my small act of rebellion the day before, but I know there is a tally in her mind. Confronting her, questioning her, is my second act of defiance in two days. She’s indignant, but after trying out her anger for just a moment, she softens and discards it. “It’s from Mr. Gansler. Darren. I’m doing a little work for him, and in exchange he’s going to pay our expenses for a while.”
“What kind of work?” My mother has never worked a day in her life, and I find it difficult to imagine what she could be doing that would be worth a laptop, a silk dress, and cupboards stuffed full.
“Just some networking,” she says. “I’m making some connections for him. In our community here.”
I wasn’t aware that we had a community. I certainly haven’t felt a part of one. And I know for a fact that my mother would never have allowed me to cross paths with someone like Amir back home, much less introduced us. But I feel relief. This explains why my mother, long accustomed to servants attending her every need, was herself serving tea and cookies to a group of men who looked like they’d never come within miles of someone from her station in life. Her old station, that is.
I fight back the sourness before I respond. Why am I the only one who seems to feel luck like a sunburn? Why should I be the one to question our sudden good fortune? I swallow my questions and resolve to be more like Bastien and my mother. To just accept.
“That’s good news,” I force myself to say.
Mother relaxes, smoothing the fabric of her skirt as she sits down. She’d been tensed for an argument, ready to do battle with me over this. “Yes, I think that it will be good for all of us. But I’ll need your help, Laila, if I’m going to make this work.”
I can’t imagine how I can possibly help, but she tells me before I ask.
“Amir. I need you to be nicer to him next time. I’m going to be working with his family, so they may be here quite often. There are a lot of them living in this area, and they’re well established here. They have connections I need.”
“What do you want me to do with Amir, exactly? Seduce him? Marry him?” I say it for shock value, my small way of lashing out, but Mother bats away the provocation.
“I just want you to distract him, Laila. He has a bad attitude, and it would help me if you could keep him entertained while I talk to the adults. He has a way of making unpleasant comments that keep us from moving forward.” Her voice turns bladelike. If I am sour, then my mother is sharp. “Kind of like another teenager I know.”
What can I say to this? If I am to become someone who attracts, rather than suffers good fortune, then I suppose that I should do its bidding. I swallow my questions yet again and nod.
OPENINGS
“Is it stuck?” Ian slides out of the crowd to lean against the locker next to mine. His shirt has a dime-sized hole on one sleeve, and the bottom of his backpack is stained with blue ink—small flaws I notice only because I’m avoiding eye contact.
“No. I—” I’m flustered, too embarrassed to find a clever lie. “I can’t remember the combination. I know it’s stupid. I’ve opened it dozens of times.” My brain is spongy lately. Porous. Useless memories seep in, unbidden and unwanted, while necessary facts leak out.
“Close your eyes.”
I don’t. “What? No.”
He smiles and shifts his bag to the other shoulder. “I’m serious, just try it. Close your eyes and try opening the lock. You won’t get it exactly right, unless you’ve got some sort of Jedi Master mind thing going on, but maybe it’ll trigger your memory.”
I don’t disguise my heave of a sigh, but I do close my eyes.
He’s right. Blind, the padlock feels more familiar to me. I turn it right, left, right, and then yank. The lock doesn’t yield, but something in my mind does and I remember that the first number is fifteen. I open my eyes and the next two numbers stumble back to me as well.
“Thank you.” I face my open locker, but he’s still in the corner of my vision.
“No worries. I forget my combination every time we have more than a three-day weekend. But the muscle memory is always there. Your hands remember things even when your brain doesn’t. At least, that’s my official, scientific explanation.” He grins and pushes away from the locker. “See you around?”
I turn toward him at last and nod. His eyes are an unusually pale shade of hazel and they give him an intense, almost leonine appearance. “Yes.”
I wait until he leaves before I look down at my hands. Muscle memory. I’ve never heard that term before, but it makes sense. I’ve been trying to will away the unwelcome thoughts of my last days at home, but my body can’t be denied the things that trigger. Familiar smells and sounds, a blast of hot air from a passing bus, even the sight of a bottle of water the same brand that someone—I don’t even know who—thrust into my hands as I sobbed and retched through the plane’s takeoff.…
I shut the locker and hug my books against my chest as I walk to class, trying not to brush against anyone or even breathe too deeply, lest some lingering odor attack my senses with false familiarity. If I can’t control my memories, then perhaps I can at least escape the triggers.
AIR
I’ve been underwater for nearly a month.
That’s what it feels like here—a life submerged. Wave-tossed and sand-scoured. Voices around me in school sound muted and distorted; faces are out of focus. I’m experiencing my new life through fathoms of water, making everything seem dreamlike and unreal, as if my brain can only accept so much change before it drowns.
Gradually, though, I’ve been surfacing. Certain things, certain people, have been pulling me out of my floating state, whether I like it or not.
Emmy, for example. After all this time—these weeks that have felt like years—she is still here, still hasn’t discarded me in favor of a new specimen for her rotating collection of friends. And she does not take no for an answer.
“I knew you’d say no. But it’s just a dance, and I already have the perfect dress for you to wear. It’s too small for me now, but it would definitely fit you. You’re so tiny!”
From her this is a high compliment. She and her friends are fiercely competitive in their suffering to be smaller, and even now Emmy is peeling the cheese and pepperoni off a slice of pizza—she’s gone vegan this week. Around the lunch table everyone seems to have given something up—dairy, meat, gluten, sugar, carbs. Only in a land of plenty could people voluntarily go without so much.
“Laila, you have to! You’ll have a great time, I swear!” Emmy lives her life in exclamation marks. Tori and Morgan, her sometimes-friends, nod in agreement.
I shake my head and try not to smile. They’ll take it as a weakness and keep pushing. We’ve formed an unlikely group lately, based, I suspect, on my novelty and Emmy’s cheerful efforts. There’s an undercurrent of tension between the others, the remnants of a nebulous summertime feud. Something involving name-calling, recanted party invitations, and other such suburban tragedies, according to Emmy’s version of events. Teenage betrayals, largely forgiven but certainly not forgotten. I seem to relieve the tension somehow; my newness and my foreignness give them an outlet, and together they fuss over me.
“Quit bugging her. She can decide whether she wants to come or not.” Morgan alone is skeptical of me, which I think makes her the smartest one of the bunch. Emmy’s unwavering determination to be my friend still makes me nervous, though I find myself letting my guard slip around her more and more.
“I can’t,” I tell them. “I would be so uncomfortable. Things like that don’t exist where I’m from. It would never be allowed.”
“But you’re here now. New place, new rules. Aren’t you even curious?” Emmy has already made up her mind that I will go to the homecoming dance. “Besides”—a sly look crosses her face—“Ian asked me if you’d be there.”
“Ooooo,” Morgan and Tori chorus, teasing me.
I have not needed their help to decipher Ian’s attention lately—some things are universal. To his credit, he has kept a respectful distance. But he hovers on the edge of my days, and I see him watching me. I sometimes watch him back.
“So?” Tori asks. She’s the one I know the least about—her pale blondness for some reason makes her forgettable to me. “Will you come with us?”
I could say that my mother won’t allow it. In another lifetime, she wouldn’t have. But here, she is newly permissive—liberated by the distance from the rules of our past, perhaps. Or, more likely, just distracted by the burdens of the present. Here, she will tell me to go.
Finally, I nod. I am curious.