Out of Nowhere (32 page)

Meanwhile, Cherisse sat silently. She looked at me across the table. Subtly, she raised her right hand, pointing her index finger straight up and her thumb at a perfect right angle. A big letter
L
aimed in my direction.

Loser.

She wore this tight white undershirt with lace at the top and
thin straps. She had a hoodie over it, but she’d only zipped the bottom half, so there was plenty of boob on display. Raccoon-like circles rimmed her eyes, and her hair was highlighted to a crispy yellow.

Did she and Samira really attend the same school? Inhabit the same planet?

Mr. Aden looked up from the laptop.

“Okay, she can delete now, if that’s what you want her to do,” he said. Mr. Cockrell glanced around the table, and everyone nodded. They at least agreed on this much.

Cherisse swiveled the laptop to face her. She logged out of my Facebook account, logged on to hers, then quickly deleted the post with the photo of me and Samira. The 108 comments evaporated.

There was no trace of what she’d set in motion.

“Are we done here?” she said, looking at Mr. Cockrell.

“Whoa. Wait,” I said. “That’s it? She hits Delete and walks away?”

“No, of course that’s not it,” Coach growled. “There are consequences.”

“Can we first please decide how we’re going to handle the phone messages?” Mrs. Swift chimed in.

Cherisse let out an exasperated sigh.

“Okay, listen … I’m not saying I sent that picture. But if it will make you all feel better, I can text all my contacts and tell them to just forget the whole thing. Sort of a global JK, you know?”

“What?” Mr. Haley asked.

“Just kidding,” Cherisse and I said at the same time.

“I believe something along those lines, perhaps with a bit more explanation than JK, is in order,” said Mr. Cockrell.

“Like?” Cherisse asked.

“Perhaps you and Mr. Cockrell can work that out together,” Mrs. Swift said. “I’m sorry, but I’m supposed to meet another student in my office right about now.…”

“Unbelievable,” I said.

Mr. Cockrell frowned at me.

“Excuse me, Tom?” he said.

I shook my head.

“She’s gonna walk away from this,” I said. “Punch the Delete key, send a text, end of story. You know what? I’m outta here.” I pushed back my chair. Coach rose, too.

“One moment, please.” Mr. Aden.

“Tom,” he said, “I understand that you want to see this girl”—he gestured to Cherisse—“punished. But how do you think that will help the girl in the picture?”

Everyone was quiet. Including me. It was a good question. Even if we took Cherisse out to the school parking lot for some tar and feathers, it wouldn’t erase the image she’d spread. The caption under the picture.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“And I don’t, either,” he said, smiling slightly. “I think the best thing for your friend in the picture is to leave her alone. Less attention, not more attention.”

He was right. The last thing Samira needed was for Cherisse to be turned into some sort of example. Turn her coven of nasty girlfriends into a bunch of avenging angels. The whole thing would just drag on and on.…

“I think we can all agree that handling this quietly would be best,” Mr. Aden said. Everyone nodded.

“So with that in mind,” Mr. Cockrell said, standing, “Tom,
thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. You can go to your first-period class now. Cherisse, you’ll stay with me a little longer. Everyone else: thank you, I think we’re set.”

I felt Coach’s hand on my elbow.

“Let’s go,” he said quietly, steering me toward the door.

Out in the empty hallway, we both exhaled at the same time.

“You okay?” he asked.

I looked at him.

“That
sucked
,” I said. “She’s getting off … with nothing! Absolutely nothing. And she has
ruined
Samira. Coach, this sort of shit is bad.”

To his credit, he didn’t correct me for swearing.

“Listen, Tom. I hear you. But Mr. Aden’s right. We need to not make this worse for your friend.”

I looked down the long, empty corridor. My throat was dry. I was even tempted to visit the water fountain, germs and discarded cigarette butts and all.

“I’ve got good news,” he continued. “We’re all set with Saeed. He can play.”

“Since when?” I asked. After the past forty-eight hours, I was having a hard time believing good news.

“I got an email this morning,” he said, grinning. “The committee reviewing the Maquoit complaint jumped right on it because I told them we’re in postseason play. They decided in our favor within ten minutes. That’s what a buddy of mine on the committee says, at any rate. So we’ve got our full team back, and a game tomorrow. Things are looking up.”

As he said this, Mr. Aden emerged from the conference room. He walked quickly toward us.

“Tom,” he said, “I wonder if I could speak with you?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

He looked hesitantly at Coach.

“Nothing you can ask me that Coach can’t hear,” I told him.

“Yes,” Mr. Aden said. “Well, I wonder, can you please tell me who is the girl in the picture?”

“Oh for crying out loud, Abdullahi. Why?” Coach burst out. I hadn’t realized they were on a first-name basis.

Mr. Aden stiffened.

“I promise you, I will not tell the young lady in there,” he said, tilting his head toward the conference room where Cockrell and Cherisse had yet to emerge. “My only concern is for this girl and her family.”

Coach shook his head slowly from side to side.

“Right,” he said quietly. “Always got to stick your finger in it, don’t you?”

Mr. Aden smiled.

“But I am paid to stick my finger in it! This is my job,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but are you a teacher?” I asked Mr. Aden.

He held out his hand.

“I am Abdullahi Aden, and I am the cultural liaison for schools. I work with the new immigrant students and their families.”

“So you’re a teacher?” I repeated.

“No, but I am an employee of the school system,” he said. He spoke precisely. Chose his words carefully.

“Why do you want to know who she is?”

“This is very disturbing, what that girl in there did,” he said. “This would be very upsetting to one of our Somali families. If I can be helpful to them in any way, I would like to do so.”

Coach was looking at me while Mr. Aden spoke. I might have been wrong, but … I thought I saw him shake his head.

“Tell you what,” I said to the guy. “Do you have a phone number? I’ll give it to the girl and her family, and they can call you.”

He didn’t like that answer. But what could he say? Abdullahi Aden gave me his card—sure enough, it said right there that he worked for the school department—then headed for the exit, nodding curtly to Coach as he left.

Coach smiled grimly at me.

“Well done,” he said, clapping me on the back but offering no other explanation. “See you at practice this afternoon.”

Later that day, after practice, Abdi and I floundered. We were close, really close, to finishing his little alphabet book, but we needed someone who could help us bridge the gap between his challenges and my cluelessness about the Somali language. And Samira was a no-show.

Not that we had a set date and time for working with Abdi. It’s just that she was pretty much always at The Center, so I’d counted on her. Myla hadn’t come, either. The events of the weekend had set her back, and she had a paper due.

The little dude swung a foot and looked at me like he really couldn’t believe how stupid I was. We were on the last three letters,
X, Y
, and
Z
, and while Abdi easily came up with a Somali word,
xaaqin
, which means “a little straw brush,” I struggled to think of a good English one. My mind kept jumping to
Xerox
and
xenophobe
, which, for obvious reasons, wouldn’t work and wouldn’t reproduce in Crayola.

“Man, don’t you know anything?” he said crossly. For some
reason he was in a rotten mood. So was I. Practice sucked, and not only because we were missing Saeed. Something was up with the other Somali guys.

No one seemed to know where Saeed was and whether he’d gotten the message that he was back on the team. He hadn’t come to school that day, and Ismail, Double M, and Ibrahim, who all had classes with him, had no explanation.

I got the feeling that they knew more than they were letting on. They didn’t seem surprised or upset. They responded clearly and politely to Coach’s questions about Saeed, but it was as if some curtain had dropped and they had disappeared behind it.

When I tried to talk to Ismail myself, he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

“Is everything okay?” I finally said to him. He nodded. I decided to just cut to the chase.

“I saw your comment on that stupid post Cherisse Ouellette had on Facebook. You do know that was total crap, right?”

He shrugged and looked across the field. “Yes,” he said. But his face was unreadable.

The rule at Chamberlain is that if you miss a practice, you miss a game. Coach was pretty frustrated that Saeed hadn’t gotten the message that he was back on, because we needed him for the next day’s game against Whittier. When practice ended, he pulled me aside and asked if I’d heard anything at all from Saeed. I promised to stop by his apartment on my way home from The Center.

“I know a lot of things,” I said to Abdi, “but not everything.” He didn’t seem satisfied with that answer. He needed me to know everything, in that way little boys needed big boys to be smart and powerful.

He was in for a disappointment.

Here’s what I did know, and what I finally figured out: the whole dictionary idea was pretty much a fail from the start. That’s because there is no direct correlation between the English and Somali alphabets. Sure, we could match the words
apple
with
aqal
and
boy
with
babaay
. But their letters don’t go in the same order as ours, and when you get a little deeper into it, nothing lines up. I mean, the letters
P, V
, and
Z
don’t even exist in Somali, and some of their sounds are written by doubling our letters. Even writing Somali using the Latin alphabet was only invented forty years ago. By some African guy. I looked it up on Wikipedia.

It’s like we’d tried to fold the two alphabets together, like the opposite sides of a single card, but because each half was a different shape and size the thing would never stand straight and the edges wouldn’t match up. We’d have a collection of same-sounding words and pictures in the end, but it wasn’t close to a dictionary.

I’m not sure Abdi cared.

“So, what is an X-word I can draw?” he insisted. I thought of something.

“Hey, in your music class do you guys have a xylophone?” He frowned. “It’s an instrument that makes sort of a ringing noise, and you play it with a little mallet?” He still didn’t get it, so I drew a line of rectangles that started out big, then diminished in size. His face lit up.

“Yes! Is xylo! I play it in school.” Using a different color for each bar, Abdi excitedly drew his version of a xylophone. It reminded me of the Playskool version my grandmother gave me when I was little. I could tap out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on it.

End in sight, Abdi rapidly drew a
yaanyo
(a big red tomato)
and a squiggly circle with a tail (ball of yarn, sort of). There is no
Z
in Somali, and no Samira to help us come up with a good phonetic Z-word, so I suggested
zebra
, and before you knew it, we were done.

He slapped the black crayon down on the table after he colored in the final stripe on a four-legged creature that looked like a cat with a horse tail. The crayon cracked in half.

“Yes! I go now. See you later, Tom.” Abdi grabbed his pack and dashed out The Center door without a backward look at the project we’d spent weeks finishing. The other completed pages were in a file cabinet drawer in the glassed-in cubicle, and I added these final three sheets to that pile, then slid the metal drawer closed. I figured Myla and Samira could take a look before Abdi brought it to school.

When I left, I walked around the block to the Bashirs’ building. The sidewalk was practically deserted. The sun had set, it was getting cool, and the air was filled with the scent of dinners cooking. Cumin. Frying meat. Just before I mounted the stairs I saw a man, his back to me, walking in the opposite direction. Not in any hurry, but walking purposefully to the corner. He was slim and wore nice trousers. He carried a briefcase.

I climbed four flights to the Bashirs’ and knocked. The building was alive with sounds, with children in hallways, with doors open so you could see into families’ private lives around the television or dining table. As I stood outside the Bashirs’ closed door, I swore I heard noise on the other side, but no one answered. I knocked again, but when the door refused to swing open, I told myself it was the neighbors I heard, and Saeed and Samira were not home.

And like that, they were gone. They slipped back into the nowhere they came from. As if they’d never existed and the past few months had never happened.

The neighbors would tell us nothing, and Myla and I had some long debates over whether they truly didn’t know or there was some conspiracy of silence. They just shrugged and wouldn’t reply when you asked them where the family went. And we asked. We knocked on doors, Myla and me, and even though at most of the apartments the kids, especially the little girls, were excited to see her and threw their arms around her waist, the adults told us nothing.

Same story with the guys on the team: Ismail, Ibrahim, and Double M knew nothing. Guidance had heard nothing; the Bashirs were simply missing in action. And even Coach, who I figured would go postal when he heard his star player had apparated, kind of just … moved on. Standing outside the bus, clipboard in hand, as we loaded in for our first playoff game against Whittier, he was his usual unsmiling pregame self. All business and calm.

“Saeed?” I said to him before I climbed the stairs.