Nice and Mean (5 page)

Yes,
I thought,
exactly. Lunged at by a shiny silver Marina, and scuttling away.

A warm breeze blew as I passed a fruit stand, giving me a breath of mangoes, just like in India. I missed India terribly. Things were so much easier there. No tests, no cliques—just my Nani's Best Movies of the Twentieth Century DVDs, going to the marketplace with my aunties, and playing in the courtyard with our cousins. Even though I hadn't lived in India since I was five, Nani—Ma's mother—really seemed to understand me. She was the one who had gotten me started making videos, when she'd asked me to tape Priyanka's fifth-grade graduation. And while the aunties had scolded me for cracking my knuckles—a habit I had started in sixth grade and couldn't seem to stop—only Nani had actually tried to help, offering me her gold and onyx ring if I could stop cracking by the end of the summer. I'd succeeded, but now I hoped that
doing the video with Marina didn't zap away my powers of resistance. If I returned to Nani's home in Ahmedabad cracking my knuckles, I would spend the summer hanging my head in shame.

Pallavi's class burst out, a cluster of second graders dwarfed by their giant backpacks. I was skimming faces for my sister's when I heard voices chanting high above the crowd, “Pallavi is the princess! Pallavi is the princess!”

Pallavi, her own enormous backpack square against her shoulders, skipped in front of the singing girls. She turned to say good-bye and, to my amazement, they all curtsied! Pallavi gave a laugh that seemed to bubble up from deep inside her as her shiny black hair rippled down her back. She waved to her friends and ran over to me.

“Sa-cheese!” She gave me a jack-o'-lantern grin and her lunch box.

“Hi!” I said, bending down for a hug. “How was your day?”

She grabbed my belt loops and shook them. “I was the princess all day long!”

I laughed. “Wow!” I turned her around to leave the crowd. “How'd that happen?”

Pallavi took my free hand and gave a little skip. “I don't know! I just said, ‘Who wants me to be the princess?' and
everybody said, ‘I do!' and so I was!”

“Oh!” Why couldn't my life be like that? If I said to Marina, or even Flora, “Who wants me to be in charge?” I doubted that they would respond by calling out, “I do!”

“Pul-vee!” sang a voice, and I turned to see Pallavi's friend Molly waving good-bye. “Don't forget to dress pretty tomorrow for your
boyfriend
.”

Pallavi burst into giggles. “He's not my boyfriend!”

Molly's dimples appeared. “I'm just
kidding
.” Over her head, Molly's mother made a face like,
Oh, kids,
and with all the maturity I could muster, I smiled. But inside, I thought,
Oh my word: Princess. Boyfriend
.

Was my little sister one of the popular girls?

“Matthew's not my boyfriend,” Pallavi confided as we stepped out of the crowd. “He likes me, but I don't like him back.”

“Oh.” So she didn't have a boyfriend. She had something even better: a boy who liked her.

“Sachi?” Pallavi peered up at me as we waited for the light to change. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Pallavi!” I was shocked. “You're not supposed to ask questions like that.”

“Boo.” She kicked at the ground. “You never tell me anything.”

I was about to say,
You're too young
, but then I remembered all the times my parents had told me the same thing, and how it had made me burn.

“Actually,” I confided, “there is a boy I like.”

“Really?” she shrieked. “Sachi has a boyfriend! Sachi has a boyfriend!” The light changed, and she charged across Seventy-third Street.

“Pallavi!” I struggled to keep up. “We're in public!”

“Who is he?” she asked, her eyes wide. “What's his name?”

“Alex.” Alex Bradley. Just thinking his name gave me a thrill.

“Does he like you back?”

Why did she have to ask that? “We sit next to each other in English”—assigned seats, but still—“and sometimes, when he can't decide what to write about and I'm writing really fast, he says, ‘Ms. Avery! You need to move my seat. Sachi's distracting me!' ” My heart thumped as I thought about all the glorious times he had said that, the way his clear green eyes bulged out when he pretended to be serious, and how the whole class laughed and I'd felt like a part of something.

“He says you're distracting him?” Pallavi wrinkled her little nose. “I don't get it.”

The light changed. “Never mind.” I hurried us across Second Avenue, where a bus waited several blocks ahead. And certainly never mind that he was going out with Elizabeth Ellis. Pallavi would probably think it was silly to like someone who was taken. She'd wrinkle her nose so fully, her face might never get unstuck.

We reached the bus stop, and as I fumbled in my bag for my MetroCard, I thought, if I were Alex, I'd pick Elizabeth over me too. Sure, she and I were both in honors classes, and both of us were nice—we had both won Nicest Girl in the poll, in fact—but there was something about her that said “Boyfriendable.”

I'd thought about it in English, when Ms. Avery sometimes assigned me and Elizabeth to be partners. Yes, her jeans never sagged below her behind, the way mine did, and her hair fell into straight, even lines, while mine clumped. Yet I had this feeling that even if I managed to get my hands on a pair of the right jeans, or learned the secrets of the blow-dryer, I still wouldn't be Boyfriendable Sachi. The “right” kind of jeans would change, and clumpy hair would be the next cool thing.

How did people know these things? Elizabeth knew them, and looking at Pallavi, whose hair was in mysterious new barrettes I had never seen before, I knew she knew too.
It seemed to come naturally to them, the way solving an equation did for me, but there was no class in the world, not even an after-school activity, to help me catch up.

As the bus roared up to our stop, a thought popped into my mind:
Maybe I
could
learn about it in a class.
Maybe I could do it in Video. I ushered Pallavi into a seat and stood over her while the streets whizzed by. The video I'd liked so much from last year had had a funny beginning, but that part had been followed by interviews. Maybe Marina could do her
Victim/Victorious
scenes—whatever those were—and I could film interviews to stick in between.

I knew clothes didn't
make
you popular, and I wasn't interested in trying to start any trends. Still, I wouldn't mind knowing how Marina's friends all knew what to wear, or even how Flora and Lainey chose their strange styles. What made Lainey buy a bicycle-chain bracelet, and what made Flora choose that bracelet, out of the dozens in Lainey's collection, to copy? She liked it, of course, but it was probably more than that. She knew somehow that it was cool, and I wanted to know how she knew.

My video wouldn't have anything to do with people's nationalities, and that was a disappointment. But interviewing people about fashion would be better than standing around holding a camera while Marina directed them
down a red carpet.

Yes. That was it. That was how I could care about our video. And if the bus didn't hit any traffic jams, I might beat my mother home in time to research it that very afternoon.

When we got back to the apartment, my research plans flew out the window. My mother was already bustling around the kitchen, and since Priyanka had a test the next day, I felt like I should offer to help with dinner.

I joined my mother in the kitchen as she pulled a pan from the lower cabinet, poured oil into it, and turned the flame on low. Grabbing onions from the hanging basket, I snuck a look at her. Some days she came home exhausted from the office, where the lawyers sometimes acted bossy just because she was a paralegal. She didn't seem particularly tired today, though—just her usual efficient self. Efficient enough, maybe, that she would want to bathe Pallavi while I snuck a little time on the computer.

My mom slid me a cutting board with a strong push. “So,” she said, “you have some news?”

Her dark eyes were wide and ominous.

Oh no. Had Priyanka told on me? Why? I'd given her the computer the night before without a single argument. Did she think I had told on her, and—

“The math test?” my mother asked.

“Ohh.” I grabbed an onion from the basket above my head. “Ninety-five.” Gripping the knife tightly, I chopped the onion in half. Calm yourself, Sachi. Spies are not lurking around the corner. Priyanka can be trusted. Probably.

“Not bad,” said my mother, shaking some flour into a metal bowl. “But what happened? You said you knew the material perfectly.”

“I got one wrong,” I explained, piercing through the layers of onion, “and I didn't get the bonus problem right. Mr. Morrison said that you needed real algebra to figure it out.”

“Hmm. Maybe you can ask him for practice problems.”

“Maybe.” I sighed quietly. I liked math, and I preferred hundreds to ninety-fives too, but I wished my mother could be happy with a ninety-five.

“Sachi.” I heard a gentle
ting
as my mother set down the bowl and rested her hands on my shoulders. “I know we push you, but it is for your own good. I do not want colleges to say, ‘She is the third-best Indian applicant from New York City—it's a shame we only need two.' I want them to say, ‘She is the best!' ”

I could have said this last part along with her.

“I know, Ma,” I said. “I'll try to be more careful next time.”

She kissed me, her cheek soft and dry against mine.
“Good. When you finish the onions, would you like to roll out the chapatis while I run the bath?”

“Okay.” I
do
like rolling dough. Priyanka and I always fight over it.

My mom glanced down at my cutting board and smiled. “Look at your beautiful onions! So even and fine, and you never shed a tear. You are going to be a great cook someday, and someone will be lucky to eat your meals.”

I looked down at the slivers of onion. They had smelled sweet at first, but now they seemed rank. I knew my mom had meant to compliment me, but her vision of my future was depressing beyond belief. So I could chop onions without crying—would that help me work with Marina? Would it convince Alex to like me? Probably, while I was learning how to cut onions, Elizabeth Ellis's mother was helping her choose the most kissable lipstick.

My mother touched me lightly on the back as she squeezed out of the kitchen.

I threw the onions into the pan. They popped and sizzled. Now was my chance. I turned down the heat and snuck into the living room, where I seated myself in front of the computer.

First I typed in “popularity” and waited. Our Internet was so agonizingly slow! When the results finally appeared, I
frowned. I did not want, as one site offered, to “measure the popularity of websites.”

What about “clothing” and “popularity”? Strike two—it was all advertisements for clothing stores, each one claiming to have the hottest styles. I slumped back in the chair. Research for school was a lot easier. There was always a website on, say, Julius Caesar. I restrained myself from a knuckle crack and thought about how else to search.

“Sachi!”

I turned to see my mother standing in the living room doorway, her arms folded. “If I had known you were going to use the computer, I would have waited to cook the onions myself.”

“What?”

“You didn't smell them burning?” She stalked back into the kitchen, and I followed to see her scraping crispy brown onions into the trash. “I don't know what you were doing on the computer, but it must have been fascinating.”

“I'm sorry, Ma!” Here I'd meant to help, and I'd only messed things up. “It was research for school, and I didn't want to bother Priyanka—”

My mother snatched an onion from the basket overhead and began chopping it with quick, angry slices.

“I can do that,” I said. “Really.”

“Go do your homework, if that's what you need to do,”
she said. “I'll make dinner.”

I didn't want to risk going back to the computer, so I picked up my things and trudged down the hall, my backpack feeling heavier with every step. As I passed our shrine, I offered up a silent prayer:
Raam, give me the courage to make this video. Because right now all I know how to do is make errors on my math test, look after my sister, and burn vegetables.

* Worst Homeroom Interruption: Rachel Winter

Can I have one day without this girl? One day—that's all I ask.

* Best Homeroom Interruption: Sachi Parikh

Hey, what do you know? She's useful after all!

* Most Unbelievably Beautiful: Crystal Cabrera and Natasha Lambeau

If I have just one day where I look like them, I'll die happy.

* Biggest Victim: Come On . . . You Really Need to Ask?

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Wednesday morning, before the bell for first period, Eliza
beth and I were just sitting in homeroom, talking about TV, when Rachel burst in. Her ginormous hairmop was barely held in place by two bright red chopsticks, and Addie was tagging at her heels.

“Reener!” Rachel cried. “Bird!” She was so loud that Ms. Avery looked up from her desk.
“Guess what?”

I did not have a good feeling about this.

“What?” asked Elizabeth, leaning forward in her seat.

Rachel clip-clopped over and put a hand on her heart. “I just ran into Ms. Mancini, and she asked if I wanted to be the dance captain for
Grease
!” She clapped and squealed. “Isn't that the coolest? That means I'll get to run dance rehearsals when Ms. Mancini is working on other scenes!
And
”—she bent low to whisper—“that means more reasons I get to yell at Julian! Yay!”