When Michael Met Mina (18 page)

Mina

Coffee with Michael.

Outside of school.

On the weekend.

Not because of an assignment.

Voluntarily.

I'm just going to put it out there once and for all. This will be my first date.

Except is it a date?

And even before I waste brain cells contemplating that one, I have to think of the minor matter of my parents' dying from self-immolation if they discover me alone with a guy on something that maybe isn't a date but looks like a date. And even if, for argument's sake, I manage to see Michael behind their back – something I can manage easily enough based on Maha's expert advice given she's positively perfected the
I'm going to the library/study group/charity raffle
excuse – how can I ignore the fact that Michael's family resents
people like me
?

This is what's going through my brain as I go for a walk around the block on Sunday morning. As I'm walking, thinking myself into a frenzy, it hits me that I'm being a complete moron.

It's two people meeting for coffee.

He hasn't actually asked me out.

Do people actually get asked out officially or do you just go with the flow?

Can you actually die of a brain aneurysm through overanalysing whether your date is in fact a date?

*

Baba comes home from the restaurant in a good mood tonight.

‘Adnan and Mustafa are excellent,' he says, grinning at Mum and me as we sit down for dinner. ‘I put them on to Ehssan –'

‘Ehssan who runs the money-exchange shop?' Mum asks.

‘Yes. He knows a guy who's good friends with Saaleh – you know, he has the mixed goods shop on Alan Street – and he's the one to go to if you want to find share accommodation. So he's helping them until they can stand on their own two feet and find their own place.'

‘That's great,' Mum says. Then, her tone stoic and quiet, she says: ‘So the after-school care job hunting is officially over. I applied to all the local schools. A lot of them are after casual workers so it would suit me before the baby arrives. But nothing. Don't say I didn't try. So I am embracing being a stay-at-home mum before the baby is due, and I've joined that women's gym in the mall.'

‘That's great,' I say with affected cheeriness. Having seen her in action at the school she worked at in Auburn, I try to hide my disappointment for her.

I see a flicker of sadness in Baba's eyes. He seems to be weighing up how to respond but he's saved when Mum speaks up first.

‘I met two lovely women at the gym, too. We're going to have coffee this week.'

This makes Baba smile. ‘New friends? That's really good to hear.'

‘And I tried out the yoga class.'

Baba suddenly looks concerned but Mum interrupts him before he can say anything.

‘Don't fuss, Farshad,' she says. ‘It's the best thing for pregnant women. Wait until you see me. Nine months pregnant and doing a handstand.'

‘You're joking?'

Mum and I laugh.

Baba shakes his head. ‘God help me if we have a girl. I'm already outnumbered.'

‘Girl, boy, they'll always take my side anyway,' Mum teases.

‘So who'd you meet at the gym?' I say.

‘A woman called Emily. Would you believe she lives here too? In the block closer to the park. She used to work in IT but had twins so she's home now. Poor thing. She put on so much weight, so she's trying to lose it. I told her to eat nothing but chicken for three months. And I met a Muslim lady too. Rojin. She's Saudi, here on a working visa for two years. She's a gynaecologist working part-time at Westmead. Her husband's in ER there.'

‘If you become a yoga junkie and get a better body than me I'll die of embarrassment,' I say.

Michael

Saturday can't come soon enough. I won't receive the CD until Monday but there's no way I can wait. I'm ready to buy it online as soon as possible. I wake early to see if The XX has dropped their album. It hasn't happened yet, so I distract myself getting ready and head out a little early.

Terrence texts to join him and some other guys for a game of basketball in the park. I text him back and tell him I have to work. The album drops when I'm at the shops, checking iTunes as I walk up the escalator to the food court. I buy it, connect my earphones, find a table and do some people-watching as I wait for Mina.

I spot her from afar, walking slowly, looking around.

It's as though the shopping centre suddenly empties of everybody. It's not like the first time I saw her. Now is different.

Maybe you only get one chance at meeting somebody who really gets inside you, wakes corners of your mind and heart that you didn't know were asleep.

Eventually she spots me.

‘Did you listen to it?' she cries, her eyes beaming at me.

‘Incredible! Well the first two songs anyway. I haven't heard all of it yet though. I only just managed to get it. You?'

‘Three songs. I just got it, too. Oh my God I love them!'

I laugh.

‘Have you watched
The Great Gatsby
? The soundtrack is unbelievable.'

‘I missed it at the movies and I never got round to seeing it.'

We grab some lunch and frappes and sit down. It feels like we sit there for hours, talking about music and movies and school and whether Carlos has a crush on year eleven Zoe not year twelve Zoe, which would be weird given she freakishly looks like his sister, and whether Ms Chalmers, the Chemistry teacher, who can be heard having psychotic episodes in the lab at least twice a day, is sexually frustrated or just born angry, and what's on our bucket list and whether we believe in life after death.

When we eventually say goodbye it feels like we're actually at the start of something, not the end. There's so much promise in her goodbye that it makes my insides feel all funny.

Yeah, it's kind of the best day that I've had in a long time.

Mina

I can't stop thinking about Michael. He's like handprints in wet cement. One moment there's nothing; the next moment, a lasting imprint. He's stamped his way into my mind and, dare I even admit it to myself, my heart. I've seen girls fall for a guy before. The guy becomes their ‘complete me'; their
other half
. But I've never wanted a guy who would make me feel like a fraction. I just want a guy who can talk the small stuff and the big stuff. Who can make me laugh. Who can make my body tingle and my day feel like it's playing to a good soundtrack.

Somebody, it turns out, like Michael.

*

Mum's cooking dinner, talking a million miles an hour on the phone with Rojin and then, later, Emily. She invites them for lunch at our place.

When she hangs up she turns to face me. She's glowing but it's more than the baby.

‘Emily and I went for a walk today,' she tells me as we prepare for dinner.

‘That's great, Mum.'

‘We see each other at the gym most mornings.' Mum turns off the tap, cracks her neck to the side and arches her back. ‘It's a good thing I'm doing yoga. This baby is killing my back.'

I laugh. ‘I can't believe you're doing yoga. Next thing you'll be drinking kale protein shakes.'

‘Kale? What on earth is that?'

‘Hopefully something that never enters this apartment.'

She waves vaguely at me. ‘You're talking in riddles.' She rubs her lower back.

‘Does it feel different this time?'

‘Oh yes. I was a skinny teenager when I had you. At nine months I looked like I'd eaten a bit too much dinner, that's all. When I went for check-ups my sister would come with me and they would mistake her for the pregnant one.'

‘Were you skinny or was she fat?'

‘Both,' she says with a fond smile.

There's silence. Then she gives a forlorn sort of sigh. ‘God have mercy on her soul.'

My aunt wasn't able to get out. One more person in our family buried in Afghanistan's soil. My memories of her are scratchy. I remember sitting in her lap as she peeled the white off my orange. I remember how her breasts would suffocate me whenever she embraced me. I remember her holding me tight throughout the night Dad died because Mum had collapsed, her eyes blank holes that had stared at me without recognition. My throat tightens and I force myself to banish the memories from my mind.

‘Here, pass me the gloves,' I order her, my voice a slight tremble. ‘I'll finish up here. You rest.'

‘Really?' but she's already peeled off the gloves and hands them to me. She grins at me and falls onto the couch, stretching her legs out and looking up at the ceiling. She looks so beautiful it makes me ache.

‘Emily is in a bad way,' she says. ‘She's depressed about her weight, about looking after the twins alone all day. Her parents live in Queensland, her in-laws are in England and her husband works long hours. I offered to help her with the twins during the day.'

‘That's nice. It'll get harder once you get bigger though.'

‘She cried.'

‘Why?'

‘Looking after a baby alone is hard enough. Imagine doing it alone with twins! Her husband's not very supportive either. He comes home from work and wants to rest.'

I stack the plates and carry them over to the cupboard. ‘That's not fair.'

‘Do you know what's funny, Mina?
She
feels isolated.'

‘There you go,' I say, smiling. ‘You have your own project now.'

‘I wouldn't call it a project,' Mum says, as she sits up, inspecting her nails. A smile spreads slowly up to her eyes. ‘But, well, it's nice to feel needed.'

*

For the next two weeks at school Michael and I fall into a rhythm of hanging out during our free study period, when we're alone and can talk like the music geeks that we are without boring other people to death.

I wake up for school every day and feel a surge of energy and excitement at the thought of seeing him. When our eyes meet, or he grins at me across the classroom, I feel my skin tingle.

Paula, Jane, Leica and I are sitting in the café when Terrence and Fred walk in. Michael isn't with them because he's got an extra Art class today.

Leica's having a bit of a moment because she didn't get the mark she was expecting in a Maths quiz and we're trying to calm her down. We're failing miserably though because the three of us are also major stress heads about our work and have had moments like this ourselves. Hence our attempts to make her see reason don't exactly ring true when Leica's witnessed our own individual I-can't-do-this-any-more meltdowns.

‘It's not the end of the world,' Jane says meekly, rubbing Leica's back.

‘I told you that when you got your mark in that Studies of Religion assignment and it made you cry harder!' Leica says.

Jane doesn't bother defending herself.

‘And it
is
the end of the world,' Leica says dramatically. ‘If I can't do well on a mid-semester quiz, how am I going to do well in the HSC? I might as well give up on getting into medicine and focus on a hairdressing career.'

We all try to say something to make her feel better but Leica's determined to beat herself up.

‘What's wrong with you?' Terrence and Fred are standing over us at the end of the table. Terrence is looking at Leica like she's an interesting science experiment. ‘Have you been crying?' he asks tactfully.

‘No!' she says and sniffs.

‘You know it's better to blow the boogies out then sniff them back up,' he says authoritatively. ‘Here's a serviette.' He throws one across to her and then, because there are no free tables left in the café, the two of them sit down, just like that.

‘Who invited you?' Paula asks.

‘No free tables,' Fred explains.

‘Free country,' Terrence adds, and they start to eat.

They've ordered the same amount of food we'd eat in three days. There's a bit of grunting, and loud chewing and smacking of lips. And Fred drinks with food in his mouth, which makes me want to gag. They clearly have no interest in defying teenage male stereotypes. It's all-out Neanderthal behaviour. And it's exactly what Leica needs to put her quiz mark into perspective.

‘So who made you cry?' Fred asks, his mouth full.

‘Nobody made me
cry
,' Leica says defensively. ‘I just got a bad mark on the Maths quiz.'

‘I got thirty-eight out of forty,' Terrence says.

We all glower at him.

‘Mr Sensitive,' I say.

‘What?' he shakes his head. ‘Can't a guy outperform you girls in a subject without you going all feminist on us? If it makes you feel better, I failed that English essay.'

‘Yeah but you deserved it,' Fred says laughing.

‘I almost got away with it,' Terrence chuckles.

‘With what?' Jane asks.

‘I couldn't reach the word count so I wrote the word
and
one hundred times in white font so you can't see it on the screen but it comes up in the word count.'

We roll our eyes at him, although I'm secretly impressed by his ingenuity.

He grins. ‘Oh well, she gave me a fail and a warning, big deal. They're not going to raise the roof over it. With our fees? Our backs are covered.'

‘You poor thing,' Jane coos, batting her eyelashes at Terrence. It has little effect.

‘I like her,' Fred says. ‘She gave me a B.'

‘On an essay about gender representations in
Emma
?' Paula is just as incredulous as the rest of us.

He shrugs. ‘Yeah. I spun some stuff.'

Terrence grins at Fred, nudging him playfully in the side. ‘That's Fred's secret talent. Don't be fooled. He's a whiz in English. But he sucks at Maths even though he's Asian. Figure that one out.'

Paula and I groan loudly.