CHAPTER NINETEEN PRESENT DAY #2
“It’s less than two hours.” Rainie crosses her arms over her chest, scuffing her shoe against the linoleum.
At this rate, Aida’s gonna have to repaint the boots within the month.
“Are you gonna make me say please? Fine. Please, Mina. Come with us to buy stupid dresses for stupid prom.” Rainie picks at her lower lip, a nervous habit I haven’t seen her whip out since the sixth grade.
“Lucia would love it. Probably spend half the ride crying on your shoulder. She misses you.”
I know what Jesse would want. He’d tell me to square my shoulders and let her down gently. Remind me not to follow my heart when my head knows better.
“We all miss you,” Rainie confesses on an exhale, and my heart calls the game.
“What time are we heading out?”
At eight the next morning, I trudge out of the house to a street shrouded in fog and a stoic Jesse leaning in front of my car.
Half obscured beneath the fog, his boots crossed at the ankle and his hands jammed in his jacket pockets, he seems more suited for roaming the marshes.
A character conjured from the pages of a tragic gothic tale.
“Good morning,” I chirp.
“According to who?” Jesse pushes off the car and does a double take at my ankle-length lavender trench coat. His languid perusal slides over me like a caress, igniting heat low in my belly.
“I spoke too soon,” he says somberly.
Flushing, I poke his arm. “I’m wearing clothes underneath it. Everyone knows you wear easily removable clothes if you’re spending the day trying on dresses.”
“I can assure you everyone does not know that.” He runs his thumb over his chin, staring into the distance. “Huh. Maybe school dances aren’t a complete waste of district funding.”
“If you’re here to talk me out of going, it won’t work.
I’ve planned the whole day out.” I tick a finger for each point.
“Rainie’s picking me up last, so Aida and Lucia will already be in the car.
I won’t let any of them follow me into the dressing room or walk into an elevator or bathroom with me. ”
“You’re not even going to prom, Mansour. Why risk it at all?”
I tighten the belt on my coat. “Who says I’m not going?”
Jesse pushes his hair back, the locks spilling like ink between his fingers.
The fog outlines him in silver and white, elevating him from stunning to ethereal.
A stray urge to trace his lovely face and smooth the stress from his tightly wound muscles confounds me.
Jesse’s still the same untouchable enigma.
The walls of hostility between him and the nearest living creature haven’t changed.
When it comes right down to it, I still barely know him.
What happened in the train was a situational glitch. A survival exception.
When Jesse speaks, it’s quiet. Grim. “Are you so desperate to get back to your old life? To leotards and crowns and your two-bit boyfriend?”
I tilt my chin up, studying his stony features. “I thought you wanted me to get back with my two-bit boyfriend.”
“I never said that, and you know it,” Jesse says. “It’s not about what I want.”
“Then if it’s about what I want, let me go with Rainie, because I want to forget any of this ever happened.
I’m so tired of being tired, Jesse. I want to go to prom, worry about how I’m going to control my curls under my graduation cap, have summer picnics by the lake.
” When his expression only grows harder, I try again.
“I’m not as tough as you are. I faint at the sight of blood and cry at those car commercials where the whole family goes on a road trip together.
If I stop hoping that I can get my old life back, then …
” I shake my head, staring at the shrouded street behind him. “I won’t let it win.”
“I see,” Jesse says, frostier than the ice under our feet.
Headlights emerge from the mist, and a baby blue Jeep swings into my driveway. Rock music spills from inside the car as Rainie rolls down her window. From this angle, Jesse remains out of Rainie’s sight. “Mina!” she hollers.
“Be careful,” is Jesse’s flat parting statement. He jumps the fence between our houses, disappearing before I can say goodbye.
Shrieks assault my ears as soon as I open the car door. “Mina!” Lucia wraps her arms around my shoulders, and I cough as the scent of citrus envelops me. “I can’t believe you’re here!”
“Hey, Mina.” Aida pops her head between the seats, shooting me a small smile.
Rainie reverses from my driveway, and I scramble for my seat belt.
Aida kicks her feet onto the dashboard, balancing her sketchbook on her lap.
The baby blue Jeep belongs to Lucia, given to her as a birthday gift last year, but she hates driving it.
Rainie tames the four-wheeled beast with ease, although she regularly complains about the color.
I lean forward to poke Aida’s side. “You put beads in your braids.”
“Mr. Clay called my braids distracting, so I figured I’d show him exactly how distracting they could be.”
“Ugh, that bastard. We were talking about Hiroshima on Thursday, and he kept glancing at me,” Rainie growls. “I genuinely don’t think our history teacher knows the difference between Japan and Vietnam.”
Lucia grimaces in sympathy. She and Alex are the only white members of our group, and they’ve listened to our complaints against awful teachers over the years.
Mr. Clay gets the gold ribbon in his category, though.
Of everyone I’ve ever angrily journaled about, Mr. Clay has received the most entries.
I roll down the window and inhale deeply. The wind whips my curls in every direction, and I scrounge around my coat pocket for a hair tie.
“Do not even think of playing your music,” Aida warns Rainie. “I get to pick until we hit the border, and I choose Ludovico Einaudi.”
“I will drive this car off a bridge,” Rainie replies.
“We aren’t going over any bridges.”
“I’ll find one.”
Rainie enters the highway, flooring the car into the empty lane.
Streetlamps fight a losing battle against the fog, and Rainie flips her high beams every time we switch lanes.
Lucia reads out the directions, straining against her seat belt to peer through the windshield.
Aida taps her marker against her sketchbook, watching the trees fly past us in blurs of green and brown.
I relax into the seat, watching them repeat the same patterns we’ve had for years.
Before we cross the border out of Ward, Rainie swings into the gas station.
I follow them into the store, my heart beating at double speed when I realize we’re alone with the attendant.
Three others in the store should be more than enough, but the curse is getting strong.
Less bound by the rules I’ve grown accustomed to.
Each minute inside the gas station store passes like an eternity, and I hover by the donuts until Rainie and Lucia finish checking out.
Lucia pulls out the snacks as soon as we return to the car, handing out Corn Nuts and M I try.
I really do. But at the end of the day, it still feels like I’m trying to crowdsource my own identity.
Like I’ll never be able to reach one hundred percent, and my dad will be right. ”
“Yeah,” Aida says, her pencil paused over her sketchpad. I wonder if she’s thinking of her mom, who nearly cut contact with Aida’s older sister after she married a guy without “a lick of Ethiopian in him.” Aida’s nieces don’t speak Amharic. It grieves Aida’s mom endlessly. “We understand.”
“My mom literally could not care less,” Rainie says. “She doesn’t listen to me no matter what language I talk to her in.”
Lucia squeezes Rainie’s shoulder.
I wonder, if I look around, how many shadows would be filling this car. How many of them trap these moments of heartbreak, haunting us with fleeting reflections of who we might have been.
Lucia’s dad is right about one thing: It won’t be the same for our kids.
We might not be able to pass along all the stories, we might mix up the details of some traditions, but we will pass along a new kind of strength.
For better or worse, our children won’t grow up like this, frozen on the threshold between two worlds.
They won’t be made to feel like they’re on the outskirts of their own identities, afraid to venture too far into one side and lose sight of the other.
“Do you think we’re the kids our parents imagined we’d be when they were young?” Lucia murmurs.
They won’t ask questions that break your heart, because you know exactly what kind of guilt inspired it.
We aren’t spare parts of an identity or uneven pieces struggling to fit anywhere they’re placed. We will never be fully one or the other, but we can be something third. Something new and special and just as whole as those who came before us.
The song ends. Rainie thumbs a button on the steering wheel, and it starts playing again.
“We’re way better than they could have imagined.
You’re co-captain of the varsity soccer team and head of the spirit committee.
You bake for fun and don’t suck at it. You’re so freaking sweet, it’s like being friends with a walking root canal.
” Rainie takes a bridge too fast, and we collectively lean to the left as she rounds the bend.
“You’re a whole person, Lucia. You’re not a fragment or a dishrag.
” Her tone brooks no argument, and it brings a small smile to Lucia’s face.
“Now, finish serenading us with this depressing-ass song,” Rainie orders.
A green sign signals the end of Ward’s perimeter. THANK YOU FOR STOPPING BY, it declares. Spray painted an inch beneath it, in rebellious black, are the words “DON’T COME AGAIN.”