Karma for Beginners (12 page)

“So he's trying to speed you up?”

“Yeah, isn't it cool?” She grins at me. “He says if we willfully leave behind the householder stage and move quickly toward
sannyas
, we can accelerate our liberation!”

What I don't get is that the “householder stage” she's so excited to leave behind sounds a lot like “Mom.”

. . .

The universe is a secret.

“Come on,” Colin says, “let's get out of here,” and grabs my hand. Thank god.

“Where are we going?” It feels so good to just let him decide.

“I dunno.” He grins. “On a walk.”

We stay off the main paths so no one will see us, tracing trails to who knows where. We could technically get lost, but I'm not scared. When we pass the First Aid trailer I see lights behind the gauzy curtains. I don't think Jayita'd get me in trouble, but just in case I drop Colin's hand until we're past.

Finally we wind our way through the woods till you can't see buildings, backs of trailers or the open air of parking lots. Just gray branches, naked like nerves, crosshatching till they're thick enough to shade out the sky, and I know their edges and angles will keep us safe from the world past the woods. I stop walking and turn to Colin. He stops and turns to me. And then my back is against one of those trees, bark scratchy and hard through my sweater, and he's pressed up against the front of me, warm and human and alive.

Every day that week it's like that. Lost and found, cold and warm, risky and safe.

It's the happiest I've ever been in my entire life.

I'm at the Amrit, waiting to go meet Colin at the lot. The sound track is this Yaz tape he lent me, “Upstairs at Eric's,” which, in the first fifteen minutes, is giving Green Tea Experience a run for its money. This song
OnlyYou
is playing, so beautiful and perfect it's making my eyes start to water, and then Avinashi walks through the Amrit door. Ugh. The last thing I want is Avinashi to interrupt this song, and the
last
last thing I want is for her to see me tearing up. Her rust-colored turtleneck is pilly, braids brittle at the ends like paintbrushes where she's been sucking on them. I watch from the corners of my eyes as she moves through the line, picking things out and putting them back, finally settling on a yogurt. Then she sees me.

Crap.

“Hey.” She comes over, big empty tray holding one little tiny yogurt cup.

I don't look at her or talk, just try my best to stay inside the song.
All I needed was the love you gave, all I needed for another day
.

“
Hey
,” she says again, almost yelling. The cashier looks up. I press
PAUSE
and pull my headphones off.

It's funny. Two months ago Avinashi looked about my age. Now, suddenly, with me in my striped leotard and lipstick, her in spit-soaked braids, it's like I'm the teenager and she's the kid. It's crazy how fast you can cross that line, a million invisible changes adding up till you just tip over the edge into a whole different category. In school I used to see it with guys, their familiar soft high voices suddenly shifting down, turning them overnight into strange, large, clumsy creatures more like my mom's boyfriends than like me. Now it's weird: I can see it in myself.

She doesn't say anything, just stands there with her tray, ignoring my refusal to invite her to sit down. I remain silent. I may be doomed to abandon “Upstairs at Eric's,” but I am not going to ask this girl to be my friend.

Finally she breaks the impasse and sits down, avoiding my eyes. She peels the lid off her yogurt. She stirs slowly and much longer than is actually required to mix in the black cherry flavor, waiting to see if I'll talk to her.

“Hi,” I say, just so I don't have to feel her waiting anymore. She looks up at me expectantly.

I feel kind of bad just ignoring her, but I don't know what there is to say to this girl. She's made up of everything I don't want to be: the know-it-all Ninyassa talk; fake Hindi words my mom and everyone insist on using; Addams Family skin and the remnants of an unwiped runny nose. And underneath all that she reminds me too much of myself, a version of me that I'm trying to escape: the girl who does everything that grown-ups tell her to, who thinks and thinks and finally settles on something as boring as
yogurt
, the girl with big lonely eyes and no one to talk to in the cafeteria.

Avinashi swallows a bite of yogurt and leans forward like she's finally going to talk, but before her mouth can make words I pick up my Walkman, press
PLAY
, and walk away, leaving my crumpled muffin wrapper on the table.

Colin's waiting in the VW, drumming his fingers on the dashboard to some song I can't hear. As soon as I see him, my cheeks stretch into a grin and I feel like the me I want to be again, the me that I'm becoming, the me that I am around him. I climb into the bus, shaking my hair out from where my headphones were. “That tape is awesome.”

“I knew you'd like it. I think you have a taste for the New Wave, my dear.”

“Cool.” Colin knows enough about the world that he can tell me what my own tastes are. I love that it's possible for someone to know things about you that you haven't even found out yet.

He looks side to side, broad and funny, like a bank robber in a Charlie Chaplin movie; then leans in and pecks me on the cheek. I laugh. He revs the engine.

“I'm hungry. You hungry?”

I nod yes.

Colin doesn't seem scared about getting caught, but I duck down, heart pounding, till we're safely off the grounds. We drive over hills, through woods, across highways; finally we pull into McDonald's off the interstate. We inch up toward the red-and-yellow drive-thru menu and Colin says, “So what'll it be? Happy Meal? Quarter Pounder with cheese? My treat.”

I think about the last hamburger I had, the revenge burger on the way to the ashram. It definitely made my top ten list of best meals ever, but I have to admit I was green for at least four hours afterward. I don't want to risk throwing up in front of Colin, or much worse: gas.

“Um, I'll just have fries.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I'm good. A large one, though.”

The girl at the window is Colin's age. I can tell she thinks he's cute the way she smiles through her freckles, lingers just a little too long with the grease-stained paper bag. Then she eyeballs me: scans from my legs up to my face, then back at him. She can tell how old I am. I feel like saying, “I know. He picked
me
.” But I don't. I just say, “Thank you!” really loud and cheerful, brushing Colin's chest when I lean across to take the bag from her.

The parking lot stretches pretty far, and we sit in the bus at the very end of it. Colin lets the engine run so we can listen to the Allman Brothers while we eat. “Man, I love the Allmans,” he says, mouth full of Big Mac. He watches me eat my fries. “You a vegetarian or something?”

I blush, a little nervous that he'll think it's weird. But I don't want to ever lie to him. “Yeah.”

“That your decision?” he asks me like he already knows the answer.

I roll my eyes. “What do
you
think?”

He bursts out laughing. I didn't mean it as a joke but I crack up too, enough to barely escape snarfing a half-chewed french fry.

Finally I choke it down. “Ah,
not
exactly my decision. I was vegetarian in the womb.”

“Wow, your whole life, huh?”

“Yup.”
“So you've never had a steak?”
“I've never had a steak.”
“Man. We're gonna have to remedy that. I mean, if
you want to.”

Aside from my brief moments of rebellion-via-hamburger, which were mostly only satisfying because they made my mother mad, I've never had the chance to really think about it. I don't even know
what
I want. Given the choice to do whatever I wanted—totally outside of my mom—what would I do?

“Is it good?”

“Steak? Yeah. Steak is super good. You ever had a burger?” He holds out his half-eaten Big Mac, shedding special sauce and lettuce out the sides.

“Yeah, I've had hamburgers. Thanks.” I laugh. “I mean, I've eaten meat a little. But not much. My mom always gets pissed.”

“That is weird, man. Anyone ever tell you that your mom is weird?”

And you know what? I realize: nobody has ever told me that my mom is weird. They've only ever told me
I
am. All the stuff I've always gotten shit for—hijiki, kale, and six-grain bread, hand-me-downs and no TV, “emotional word pictures” and “processing” and Hindu chants—that's all her. None of it is me.

“Nope. No one's ever told me that she's weird.”

“Really?” he says, surprised. “Well, I'm here to let you know.”

He grins. I laugh. And finally exhale.

After we've been kissing for a while, necks craned across the space between our seats, I start to get a little sore. I guess he does too, because he reaches for my waist and pulls at me. I stumble, clumsy. He doesn't notice. Finally I tumble over onto him, smushed against the steering wheel, straddling his lap. I'm afraid my butt's going to accidentally honk the horn, but then he shifts his seat backward and I settle in, one leg by the gearshift, the other squeezed between the driver's seat and the door.

This whole last week it was always sweet, and soft. He'd rest a hand between my ribs, his kiss saying,
Shh, it's okay, you're safe
. Suddenly it's like safe stopped mattering. To him, at least. Even though we just finished eating, he seems hungry, grabbing my hips. He kisses me like he's looking for something inside my mouth. I press down against him, bite his lip. When my hips hit the steering wheel and honk the horn we both laugh, and then we grab at each other again.

We drive back full and happy, listening to XTC. Tomorrow is my birthday. This is the best fifteenth-birthday present I could get, better than anything you could wrap or hold.

“It's my birthday tomorrow,” I tell him. I'm not saying it so he'll do something special; I just feel like he should know. I don't remind him of how old I'm turning.

“Really?” he says, surprised. “Man, aw, crap!”
“What?”
“I've got a job tomorrow, working on some cars in
town.”
“That's okay.” It really is.

“You sure? You should've told me earlier, I would've done something. Man, I feel bad.”

“No, no, don't. It's cool. I'm sure my mom will want to hang out anyway.”

“Right.” He pauses, squints at me, remembering I'm a kid. I don't want him to remember that. I want to make him forget. I try to sound cooler.

“I totally have plans.”

He stops squinting. “Okay. You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I'll be back to pick you up day after,” he says. “Promise.”

I like the sound of that word.

It's practically night when we pull into the ashram. Headlights cut through dusty air and the dark makes Colin brave or careless, because he pulls all the way up to the main entrance and kisses me before the stereo's even off.

“Happy birthday, Tess.” He smirks into my eyes like it's still part of the kiss, and a shiver goes all the way down my spine into my toes.

Back in our room, I'm supposed to be sleeping, but Colin lent me his Dire Straits T-shirt and it rubs the thought of him against my skin, keeping me awake. My mom just sits on her bed, oblivious. The world inside my head is so alive and big; I can't believe the only thing keeping it from leaking out into this room is the closed seam of my mouth.

I'll get a lecture about silence if I listen to tapes, so I just lie there and wonder if my mom's going to say anything about my birthday. She usually starts talking about it the night before, counting down to midnight. But she just scribbles in her red silk journal in the glow of her bedside light, blankets pulled over her lap. Her mouth twitches at the corners as she writes, smiling at some secret tucked inside the envelope of her. The expression on her face feels familiar. For a second I don't know why, and then I realize: her face looks how I feel about Colin.

After a while I hear the scribbling stop, her notebook close. I slit my eyes and watch her through a screen of lashes. She looks over at me, furtive, studying my face to make sure that I'm asleep. I slow my breathing, make the rhythm even; I heard once that how fast you breathe is how someone can tell whether or not you're really sleeping. When she's finally satisfied I'm not going to wake up, she pulls the covers off, stands up, and slips her sandals on. She's not in her pajamas. She's wearing this fancy silk dress that clings to her, all white, embroidered at the hems. I've never seen that dress before. She switches off the light and leaves the room.

It's weird she didn't say anything about my birthday. And it's even weirder that she just snuck out. It makes me itchy, anxious like ants on my skin, and I suddenly remember all these things. Like waking up at four a.m. because of thunder and walking down our hall and she wasn't there. Like waiting on the sidewalk after school until the sun sank and it started getting cold. Like getting yelled at for complaining that she was leaving overnight to take a crystal healing workshop, and how I stayed up in our empty house that weekend, afraid to go to sleep alone. If I knew Colin's number I'd go straight to the pay phone by the dining hall and let it ring till he woke up. He'd answer bleary, and I'd say,
I need you; come and get me in the bus
. It'd be okay. She isn't here. She wouldn't notice I was gone.

. . . . .

Sleep finally floods in, thick dark liquid filling up the spaces. But daylight opens them again and I wake up with a hole in my ribs. Her bed is empty, but I hear the shower running. Anger rises in my throat.

I want to tell her. I want to tell her I saw her and ask her why she left without explaining. I want to say I know she's keeping secrets, breaking rules; that she can't just leave me here and go someplace she's not supposed to go. I sit up, blood flooding my veins, ready to turn the tables on her. .

But then I realize—she could say all those same things back to me, and they'd all be true. If I want to keep my own secrets, I can't get too close to hers. So I make a vow: I will pretend everything is normal, and I will take all the spaces that she makes in me and fill them up with Colin. I won't ask her anything. She'll come out of the shower and say happy birthday and ask me how it feels to turn fifteen, and that is all we'll talk about.