Sister Mischief (32 page)

I push back out into the cold, debating whether it’s too late to make my next stop, noting the irony of the fact that I showed up at Rowie’s house no earlier than ten p.m. three times a week for two months, stayed until the blue light of morning, and now I’m feeling like I’m breaking curfew just because I was imagining myself knocking on the front door this time. I plug in my headphones for some pump-me-up jams to fight the fist of anxiety tightening in my stomach as I roll toward Rowie’s. I put on Tess’s favorite White Stripes album, and I enjoy it, knowing how Marcy would taunt me if she could hear. “My Doorbell” has a kicking backbeat, I think as I careen around the dogleg in the road.

There is Rowie’s driveway, looking prone and openhearted under the streetlights. I scan the windows for movement, hoping everyone isn’t asleep already. Sure enough, I see Priya in her study, reading under a green desk lamp. Collecting all my moxie, I toe up the stone steps and rap lightly on the door, seeing Priya’s head twitch at the noise. She ties her robe and comes to the door.

“Esme!” she exclaims, pushing open the glass door and motioning me inside. “What are you doing prowling the cold streets so late? Get in out of the winter!”

“Oh, just restless,” I say. “How are you, Dr. R.?”

“Oh, Esme, I’m fine,” she says, hugging me. “How are
you
?” The look she gives me suggests that she knows what she’s asking.

“I’m —” I don’t finish. “I’ve missed you.”

Rowie appears in a yellow nightie at the top of the stairs behind her.

“Well”— Dr. Priya Rudra watches us watching each other —“there’s chai on in the kitchen if you girls want some. I’ll be reading. Don’t stay up too late.” She begins to say something else, then stops. “It’s lovely to see your face, Esme. You’re always welcome here.” Her petite feet recede, padding down the hall.

Here are Rowie and me, confronted with each other, no escape to be had.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” I say.

“How are you?” she asks.

“I’d be better if I had some chai tea,” I reply, making a bloodless attempt at a smirk.

“I can do that.” She looks more at ease with a task to perform, and I follow her into the kitchen. For a moment we don’t talk as she lifts the wire tea strainer out of the pot and pours two mugs of tea. Except for us, the kitchen is asleep, off-duty for the night, streetlight glinting off the little spoons in the spice bowls. I sit in the breakfast nook with my steaming mug. When she sits, it’s half in the shadow.

“So,” I say.

“So,” she says.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here,” I begin carefully.

“A little,” she says, blowing on her tea.

“I’ll just put you out of your suspense now. I don’t totally know why I’m here.”

“You don’t have to,” she says. We look down in our cups for a second, silent.

“I feel — I feel like there are some conversations we never finished,” I decide.

“I do too,” she says, and it shoots straight through me.

“You do?”

“I mean, I didn’t really think I’d never talk to you again.” She pulls back a step.

“Yeah, but I gotta be honest — I don’t really know what to say right now.” My heart is pounding. An icon of Rama and Sita hangs above Rowie’s bare, winking shoulder. The fridge clicks on, rupturing the velvety silence. My eyes dart back to Rama and Sita, his blue face and her serene gaze, and I feel suddenly ashamed not to know anything about their story. I point.

“What’s the deal with Rama and Sita again?” I ask her. “All I know is that they’re, like, Hindu star-crossed lovers.”

She tips her head right, craning to search the portrait behind her. “It’s just like all the other precolonial love stories,” she says with a shrug. “Native empire and divine right and women being sold for land and power. There’s, like, this really long, complicated plot about Sita being the daughter of the king of Videha and Rama being blue and divine and winning a contest to marry her and ascend the throne, and then Rama’s evil stepmother wants her son to marry Sita instead, and Rama has to go through this long, complicated pursuit of her after she’s kidnapped, and there’s a lot of deer and birds and forests and fire and questions of purity.” She takes a breath. “It’s, like, no one ever asks the chick what she wants in these stories. No one asks them if they want to be auctioned off and chased through forests. I mean, maybe she doesn’t even really like him that much. Maybe she just wanted to kick it casual. Maybe she doesn’t want to deal with all that hassle. Or something.”

I don’t know how to respond, so I take a blind swing at the elephant in the room.

“So what’s up with you and Prakash?”

Her eyes flash at me: she meets mine in a gaze of shock, then shifts her sight out the window. “I don’t know. It just feels — uncomplicated.”

“
Un
complicated?”

“Please don’t start.”

“Because he’s Indian? Just because he’s an Indian dude?”

“Yes,” she snaps, lowering her voice, “Okay? Yes. It’s just easier. Fuck, Esme, I get dressed in the morning and I’m disappointing my parents. They were sad when I never wanted to go back to India with them. They were sad the first time I talked back to them like an American kid. They were sad when I never wanted to introduce them to my friends because I was afraid people would laugh at their accents. It’s — it’s just
complicated.
”

“And Prakash just magically understands you because he’s had some of those experiences? He understands you because he makes more visual sense as the other half of the picture? Are your parents even happy you’re dating? I thought they didn’t want you to.”

“They’re not unhappy,” she says.

“Yeah?” I shoot back. “Well, are
you
happy, Rowie? Guess what. This is some postcolonial shit right here. This is the part of the story where someone asks you what
you
want. All you do is talk about what your parents want. So what is it
you
want, anyway? I mean
really
want, like a fist-in-the-gut kind of wanting, what do you really, really want?”

“How in the hell can you expect me to know the answer to that question?” she hisses through gritted teeth, her voice clouding. “Don’t you get it? This thing with Prakash, whatever it is — it buys me time. It’s going to be different in a few years, like college and not living with my parents and — time, you know? Time and space. For whatever.”

I let her words set in for a minute. We don’t talk.

“Do you ever wonder — what it is we’re all making college out to be?” I ask slowly. “It’s like, this great escape, the way we’re all looking at it, this magic time when we can be whoever and do whatever we want. I’m just wondering, kind of, why we can’t be who we are and do what we’re gonna do now.”

“Because we’re sheltered.” She shrugs.

“I guess,” I say. “But that isn’t really good enough, is it? I mean, everything moves so
fast,
and yet not fast enough. Do we really have time to wait to be — ourselves?”

“Ez,” she says quietly, “I’m not you. I don’t think I’m as much like you as you think I am. I don’t think I’m your — the same as you, or something.”

“Do you really think that?” I ask. “Or do you just think you’re supposed to think that? I really don’t think we looked so bad together.”

“How do you know?” she whispers. “No one ever really saw.”

The wind kicks up outside; I hear my bike topple over. I don’t know how to respond to her: if a tree comes out to an empty forest, is the tree still gay? And where is this empty place, anyway, this place that no one sees, this place where things crash but don’t resound into all the other places? The crash happened; I
know
it happened; questioning whether it happened or not this late in the game makes me feel insane.

“It’s the same old impasse,” I observe, wanting to feel colder about it than I do.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “It is.”

“I don’t want to pursue you beyond the point that you want to be pursued.”

“Yeah.” She takes a slow breath. “There are other things that I want, you know.”

“Like what?”

“Like to make music. To write lyrics again. Maybe to be a part of you and Marcy’s little Holyhill revolution.”

“We don’t take maybe members,” I say haughtily. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.” I stop myself. “You’re really hard to get at sometimes, Rowie.”

“Sorry,” she says. “Look, I know. And I’m really sorry. For — everything. With us. I just wish things could be like they were before. Before everything got so messy.”

“Love is messy,” I say. “There’s no love without the mess of it.”

“Serious,” she says. “But we used to be able to — pound out the truth somehow. Writing and performing with you made me feel better about things.”

“I loved being onstage with you, you know,” I tell her. “It made me feel invincible. It made me feel like we were charting a course and the world just had to suck it up and follow us wherever we wanted to take them. But I think part of that was feeling like we had a secret, like we knew something they didn’t. Like we had a secret chemistry.”

“I think we’ll always have a secret chemistry,” she intones. “Or, like, we’ll always be MC Rohini and MC Ferocious together.”

“We rhyme,” I say, because it’s true. “There’s — there’s this song I’ve been working on. That’s sort of, about you, or whatever.”

“Yeah?” she says. “Can I hear it?”

“I guess so,” I agree, feeling nervous. “I mean, it’s not done, and it needs a chorus. It’s just a bunch of verses right now.”

“Yeah, ’cause you suck at writing choruses,” she says, grinning.

“Yeah.” I say. “Okay, here goes.” I begin to rhyme in a low voice.

I can tell that Rowie’s face looks a little melty by the time I finish, but neither of us can hold eye contact.

“That was super emo,” she says, trying for sarcasm but failing to conceal a sniffle.

“I know,” I say.

“It would — it would make me really happy if we could rhyme together again,” Rowie says. “Even if we can’t do — all the things we used to do. Sister Mischief was, like, the best thing I’ve ever done. And 4H.”