Lovetorn (13 page)

I texted Toby that evening, although I must have written and rewritten the message on a scrap of paper a dozen times before I actually punched the letters into my phone.

“Hey,”
I wrote.
“It’s Shalini from Food4Life. Amina said to connect. See what u need 4 ur group.”
All the abbreviations went against my formal and somewhat perfectionist nature, but thanks to Renuka, it felt as if I’d learned a whole new language.

He texted back almost immediately.

“Gr8,”
he wrote.
“Let’s talk tmrw after school, outside. I’ll find u.”

Throughout preparing dinner, taking a tray up to my mother, folding a pile of laundry that had sat in a basket for four days, and wiping down the stove, I thought only of Toby. I began counting the hours until I would be able to talk to him after school. I figured it would just be a quick conversation. But those three words were imprinted on my brain:
I’ll find u.
Tomorrow afternoon, Toby—by far the cutest and sweetest boy in the entire school—was going to come find me. I sighed deeply, left my father in front of the TV and Sangita at the dining table finishing her homework, and went upstairs to pick up my mother’s tray.

I knocked on the door.

“Shalu?” she called out. I opened the door and went inside. The plates on the tray were almost empty.

“The
dal
was especially good today,” she said. “You and your sister are becoming very good cooks.”

“Thanks, Ma,” I replied. “I’m so happy you’re eating properly.”

“Come, sit,” she said, making a spot for me on the bed. Her eyes looked a little brighter. It might have been the fact that she had eaten well for once, or perhaps it was the new drugs she was on. I felt a little heartened. Maybe my mother was finally coming back.

“Kalpana could finally be with Mohit,” my mother said dreamily.

“Sorry, Ma?” I was confused. I didn’t know any Kalpana or any Mohit, and I was sure she didn’t either.

“There,” she said, pointing to the TV screen. I turned to look. The credits for a popular Hindi soap opera were rolling.

“They were so much in love, but too many things stood in their way. They couldn’t be together. But just now, finally, he found her and they married.” She had a look of pure contentment on her face.

My heart sank. She was talking about fictional characters on a TV show. She was still in her dark, unreachable place, emerging only to check in on the lives of people who didn’t even exist.

Holding back the tears, I kissed her good night, picked up the tray, and left the room.

The next morning Toby was the first thing that popped into my head. Only eight hours and he and I would be chatting on the stairs outside the school, maybe standing aside from everyone else engaged in a private, meaningful conversation.

I had decided, somewhere between last night and this morning, that it was okay for me to look forward to it. My mother had her escapist fantasy, wanting to live in some nonexistent TV world. And perhaps it would be okay for me to dream too. Maybe Renuka was right; I wasn’t committing any crime. I still loved Vikram; he was always going to be the boy I would marry. In eighteen months he and I would be together again. But in the meantime, just as my mother couldn’t control her depression, I couldn’t control the fact that I liked another boy. I just knew that I would never, ever do anything about it. And I knew that once the concert was over I would go back to my own life and would have nothing to do with him again. And then the feeling would just fade.

While Sangita was in the shower, I tried on a few different outfits, leaving in a pile on my bed my old clothes from India, my new ones from Target, and a few things that Renuka had let me have. I was looking for the hippest, most current one, which was a long shot in my still-limited wardrobe. I would have loved Sangita’s opinion—she seemed to have the whole fashion thing nailed, even if she was only eleven. But I didn’t want her to see me obsess over something as trivial as clothes. She knew that wasn’t me.

I finally settled on a pair of navy blue cords, a light blue long-sleeved T-shirt, and a denim jacket. I put the sparkly clip in my hair and threw on some flat ankle boots I had bought with Renuka one day. I looked at myself in the mirror from a dozen different angles and had to concede that I looked pretty good.

I stopped in to see my mother before going down for breakfast. My father was almost ready, weaving a belt through the loops on his pants. My mother was still asleep. My father said she had been up all night, finally falling asleep at dawn.

“Let her rest,” he whispered. “This evening is the first meeting at Dr. Gupta’s. Remember, I told you?”

In all the craziness of the past couple of weeks, I had completely forgotten my mother’s support group session.

“Of course I remember,” I lied.

He mumbled about not being able to find his comb and went back into the bathroom to look for it. I was about to turn around and go out when I caught sight of a gold lipstick case on the dressing table. I reached out for it, uncovered it, swiveled the tube so a shimmering pink color came up. My mother and I had bought this together in Bangalore right before we had left. The lipstick was almost untouched. I looked at her sleeping form. She wouldn’t mind me borrowing it. I slipped it into my pants pocket and left the room.

The door to the temple room was ajar. By the incense burning there I could tell that Sangita had already been in. I slipped off my boots and went inside. I lit another stick of incense and circled it around all the statues, saying prayers beneath my breath: “Bless and protect my family. Bless and protect Vikram and his family. Please make my mother better. Please.” My hand stopped in front of the Krishna statue and lingered there for a second. A tiny smile flickered across my face as I anticipated the day ahead.

As soon as the last class of the day ended, I rushed to the bathroom. I fished out a brush from my bag and ran it through my hair, unclipping and re-clipping my sparkling crescent moon barrette. I washed my hands and sprinkled a little water on my face, using my slightly damp fingers to push my eyelashes back so they would look curlier, a technique I had read about in some teen magazine at Renuka’s house. It didn’t work. I pinched my cheeks to bring in some color. That didn’t work either. Finally, I pulled out my mother’s lipstick tube from my pocket. I barely turned it, just enough so I could reach the surface of the lipstick with my finger. I dabbed a spot of the shiny pink wax onto my index finger and rubbed it on my lips. Then I pursed my lips together, checked my braces to make sure there was nothing stuck there, stood back for one last look, and ran outside.

Toby was standing against a wall, one leg bent up against it, his hair partially covering his face as he checked his phone. His flute case rested at his feet.

“Hi,” I said, coming up to him.

He looked up and smiled. My stomach did a little flip.

“Hey,” he said. “Wanna go sit over there?” He motioned to a stone bench.

We wove our way through the crowds of kids leaving.

We sat down. He stretched out his legs. I’d forgotten how tall he was. His teeth were very white and nearly perfect, and he smelled like spearmint. He shook his head slightly, moving the hair that fell into his eyes. “So, what’s up?”

I froze. Since yesterday I had thought of nothing else but seeing him again, talking to him alone. But right now I blanked on what I was supposed to say.

“Oh, right,” I said, collecting my thoughts. “Well, Amina, you know, thought that I should be your contact person. You know, if you or the other performers need anything from us. And that, you know, if I have to check something, I can come to you.” I couldn’t believe how many times I had said “you know.” I wanted to kick myself.

“Sounds like a plan,” he said. “I’ve locked in the date with the music department. Most of the other kids are on board, even if it adds a little more rehearsal time to their schedules. Everyone gets that it’s a good cause. We’re gonna repeat a concert we did in Seattle last year. A set of classical symphonies, concertos, duets, a couple of solos . . .”

He went on. I stared at how his lips moved when he talked, the way he stared right into my eyes.

“. . . it ran about ninety minutes, with an intermission. I can email over the details so you can start working on the programs. Other than that, we’re good to go.”

He spoke quickly, clearly, taking charge. In addition to him being supercute and a fantastic flutist (from what I could tell in my limited experience of flutists), he was obviously really smart as well. There was no way my crush was going away anytime soon.

He stood up.

“I gotta go get my little sister from soccer practice. So, we’ll talk, yeah?” He, like me, had a younger sister;
and
he was picking her up? What a kind brother he was! Could he be more perfect?

“I like your flute,” I blurted, feeling instantly stupid afterward. “You know, it’s silver.”

I needed to shut up now.

Toby grinned.

“Um, thanks,” he said. “But they’re pretty much always silver.” He smiled again, turned around, and left.

I sat on the bench for a few minutes. Part of me was exhilarated; he was just so
nice.
Another part of me was embarrassed at my stupid comments. “I like your flute?” I couldn’t have come up with anything smarter?

But it didn’t matter. The exhilaration outweighed the embarrassment. Sitting there on the hard stone bench, watching kids stream past me, I decided that for the first time since I got to this country I was going to let myself have a little fun.

There was crying and hollering coming from the master bedroom.

“Asha, you have to come with me; this is not negotiable,” my father said sternly. I could hear everything through the open door.

“I’m not interested in going and talking to a bunch of women I don’t know!” my mother shouted, crying. “Stop asking me to do it. I won’t!”

I stood at the doorway. My father’s face was red, his fists clenched at his side.

“Papa, can I help?” I asked.

My mother wiped her tears with the back of her hand. She was chewing her hair. She was unkempt. She looked like she was on the edge of going crazy. When did things get so bad?

My father stalked off. My mother flopped onto the bed, and I lay next to her. She was a sliver of her former self, slight and frail, joyless. She was breathing heavily.

“I know I’m sick,” she said to me, her voice almost a whisper.

I stared at her. This was the first time she had acknowledged what the rest of us knew.

“Of course I know. I am always sad, crying, mad. I hate everyone. Even your father. But not you, Shalu. Never you and Sangita. You are my only reason for living. If you weren’t here, I would have left this earth already. Believe me, I have thought of it.”

“Ma . . .” I was weeping. That she was in so much pain that she had considered suicide was more hurtful to me than I could bear.

“I know I am sick. I don’t know how to get better,” she said.

“Ma, do you want to get better?” I asked. Strands of damp black hair clung to her sallow skin.

“For you,” she said. “I want to be better for you.”

“Then please, let Papa take you to the meeting. It will be a start. Just one time; and if you don’t like it, nobody will ask you to go back.”

Her red eyes landed on mine.

“Please.” I sounded like a little girl at a carnival pleading for another pony ride. I was desperate.

Almost imperceptibly, she nodded.

My father said that what happened behind the closed doors of Dr. Gupta’s office was a mystery to him. When he realized he wouldn’t be granted access to the inner sanctum—a room populated by several women of various South Asian cultures and, from his estimation, ranging in age from twenty-five to sixty—he had told the receptionist he would be back to pick up my mother in an hour and strolled down to the nearest Coffee Bean for an overpriced iced
chai
drink.

Once home, my mother had gone straight upstairs to bed, although she had bent down to kiss my forehead, a gesture that reminded me of her healthier self.

“In the car, she said thank you to me,” said my father. “This must be a good sign, no?”

“How’d it go?” Amina asked me at school the next day. She had chased me down the hallway as I went from one class to the next. Looking at her, I spaced out for a second. I had been so preoccupied with my mother and getting her to the support group the previous evening that I had come down off my high after my little chat with Toby.

“The meeting with Toby?” Amina prompted me. She liked to describe everything as meetings, even if it was a couple of kids sitting on a park bench for all of three minutes.

“Toby was great,” I said, beaming. “Um, I mean, the meeting was great.” I recounted what he’d told me, that on the music end, everything was planned.

“So all we have to do is wait for the details—the titles of the songs they’ll be playing—and we can print the programs,” I said. “In the meantime we should get some flyers ready and start preselling tickets.”

Over lunch, we sat clustered around a corner table with our orange folders and scratch paper, eating and brainstorming. Patrick went to fetch more water; Catherine checked her emails on her phone. A few months ago I’d been eating alone. Now I was lunching with a group of people I felt a real kinship with. That in itself made me happy.

Patrick said he’d put up a Facebook page for the event. We talked about the viability of having a snack bar and seeing who could sponsor food that we could sell. We talked about ticket prices and maybe offering some sort of child care on the night of the concert so families with younger children could come too. We tried to cover everything. Catherine sketched out what the flyers would look like: “A Night of Classics” and then underneath: “Valley Crest Youth Orchestra and Food4Life present an evening of fine music. All proceeds to go to fund women’s literacy in Nepal.” Then Amina quibbled for a few minutes about our organization getting second billing.

“It was our idea,” she said, meaning it was actually
her
idea. “We went to
them
, not the other way around.”