The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel (31 page)

CHAPTER 6

H
ad she known it was going to be an exercise in complete humiliation, Amina would not have come to the dance at all. As it was, she sat in a whirlpool of disco lights trying not to watch every single person in the entire school (including Akhil, including Dimple) make out with someone else. It wasn’t easy. God knows she had already scrutinized the streamers scaling the gymnasium walls, the monster-large speakers floating over sweet-smelling smoke, the disco ball spinning like the eye of a Cyclops. “Only the Lonely” blared through the speakers like some kind of cosmic taunt.

She hated it. She hated the lights and her shoes and her hair and the fact that the wistfulness of the singer’s voice made her wish for a nuclear war or an earthquake or really anything that might make someone else want to kiss her.

“What are you thinking about?” A face spinning with white stars leaned over hers, and Amina shot up straight, almost smashing into it. Jamie Anderson stood beside her, jean jacket collar turned up, some
sort of velour shirt underneath. Colored lights illuminated his enormous puff of curls, making him look like a candied dandelion.

“What?”

“You look like you’re thinking about something.”

“Bombs,” Amina said, wishing instantly she hadn’t.

Jamie nodded, like of course she was thinking of bombs. “The ones in the mountain?”

Amina looked at him warily.

“By Kirtland Air Force Base,” he said. “You know what I’m talking about.”

She had no idea what he was talking about, or why he was even talking to her at all, considering that he hadn’t said word one to anyone in English class after his initial outburst. He surprised her further by sitting down. A little breath of him escaped from the jacket. He smelled like denim and deodorant.

“One of the Manzano Mountains is hollowed out and filled with nuclear warheads. I thought everyone in the city knew that.”

“I guess no one told us retards.”

Jamie winced and smiled at the same time, looking over his shoulder, and Amina covertly wiped her hands against her jeans. Sweating. She was sweating.

“So what are you doing here?”

“It’s a school dance.”

It wasn’t a great answer, but Jamie nodded. “Cool.”

Amina tried to ignore the couple in front of them, noses nuzzling necks, hands locked onto asses.

“You know if a war starts, we’ll be the first to go?” Jamie said. “And the thing is, I bet the Russians wouldn’t even want to kill us if they could. You know? I bet they’re just like us over there, just at the mercy of their leaders—”

Amina stood up. “Do you have a cigarette?”

He smothered a look of surprise. “Yeah, sure.”

She turned and started down the steps. “You can just give it to me. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

He followed her. “What if I want to?”

“Can you stop talking about bombs?”

“Because it scares you?”

“Because you sound like my brother.”

He didn’t say another word as they thumped down the rest of the bleachers. They reached the bottom just as the song ended and the mass of conjoined faces in front of them split apart, looking alternatively dreamy or just wet.

“C’mon,” Jamie said, grabbing her hand. She looked down, mesmerized by the sight of his pale hand on hers, and let herself be led through the heated bodies, the sweat and Polo cologne and fruit-flavored lip gloss and hairspray. The wood floor turned to linoleum under her feet and the air cooled as Jamie pushed the gym door open. She followed him to a set of arches a few hundred feet from the gym and looked away as he fished into his jean jacket and then the back pocket of his pants.

“So what’s up with your brother?” he asked, putting two cigarettes in his mouth. “He’s a pretty cool guy, right?”

“You know him?”

Jamie blew on the end of one, handed it to her. “Not really. I just see him around. He went to that nuclear-waste protest at UNM last week.”

“You went to that?”

“My whole family went.”

Amina looked away, dumbfounded. Was that what other families did? A car skidded into the lot. The door opened and three girls uncrumpled themselves from the front seat, cooing their way across the parking lot.

“So you’re from Chicago, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. We just moved here last summer.”

“Huh.” Amina flicked her cigarette, the way she’d seen Akhil do it, thumb on the filter. “Do you miss it?”

“Yes. Not as much as my sister, but yes.”

This made sense. The few times Amina had seen Paige during lunch break, she was staring intently off campus, as if there were a whole world waiting on pause just outside the gates.

“Why did you get kicked out of St. Francis’s?”

“Who says I got kicked out?”

“You didn’t?”

Jamie blew at the end of his cigarette. “I got busted getting high at the Christmas Pageant.”

“Oh.” Amina tried for nonchalance, but she didn’t personally know any freshmen who had gotten high, or at any rate, high enough to get kicked out of school. Something about it excited her terribly. She wanted to lead Jamie back into the light and check his pupils and reflexes, maybe test his memory.

The gym door opened, and the high wail of an electric guitar slipped out before it shut.

“Anyway, I’m sure she’ll go back next year,” Jamie said. “She’s trying to get into Northwestern.”

“Why don’t you like Mr. Tipton?” Amina asked.

Jamie shrugged. “It just seems like everyone kisses his ass.”

“Well, if you are trying to get kicked out again, it won’t happen. The worst they’ll do here is have you sit in the corner and not get to participate in the discussion.”

He snorted. “Yeah, that would suck.”

What was it about him that was so hard to stop looking at? In a school of razor-jawed, short-haired boys, he was hardly handsome. His eyes were too deep set and his eyebrows too present. And yet these, together with his ruddy cheeks and too feminine lips, gave him an oddly androgynous face that Amina had to fight to ignore in class. Now the sneer on those lips sent a small flare up her spine.

“I’m not an ass kisser,” she said.

“What?”

“I’m not an ass kisser just because I talk in class.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, really. I
like
what you say in class,” he said. “I mean, it’s smart.”

“No it isn’t.”

Why had she said that? She didn’t even know what she was saying anymore, or what exactly was going to loosen the knot that was hardening in her throat. She looked across at the parking lot, where one of the trucks appeared to be bouncing slightly in a disconcerting way.
She felt Jamie’s gaze travel with hers, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up like it was being brushed the wrong way. She let herself look right at him. His hair radiated from his head in a beautiful nimbus, and she felt his face coming closer, the center of some oddly beautiful flower.

“What?” she said, and he jerked back in surprise.

He looked down at her hand. “Are you going to smoke that?”

Her cigarette had a thumb-tip-sized ash growing on it. She flicked it, stuck it between her lips like a straw, and sucked. A cat with its claws out skidded down her trachea. For one moment she held it in, looking at the curious expression on Jamie’s face, and then she choked and everything came out at once, smoke and tears and spit exploding out of her face. Jamie jumped back.

“Holy shit!”

She gasped, and began coughing again, this time jamming her face into the crook of her arm so he couldn’t see her. She wheezed, hacked. She felt his hand thumping her back like it would do any good, and she cursed silently through the rest of it, which ended with a few shaky breaths and a swallow.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded, not trusting her voice. She needed to burp and wasn’t sure if it would be smoke or air.

“You don’t smoke, do you?”

She shook her head, which made him laugh out loud. She dropped the remaining cigarette and stamped it out.

“Why did you ask for one?”

“I just wanted to get out of there.”

“Oh. No shit.” He looked back at the gym and took a step toward it, then turned around again. “So do you want to go for a walk?”

“No.”

“Around the soccer field or something,” he said, pointing past them like she didn’t know where it was. “And then we can go back inside.”

The sprinklers had gone off recently, and the wet grass tickled her ankles as they followed the lime boundary. Jamie walked a little ahead of her.

“So what did Paige do?” she asked.

“What?”

“To get kicked out?”

“Oh, she didn’t. She asked my parents if she could transfer because she thinks the Catholic curriculum is actively regressive.”

They approached a corner, and Amina’s shoulder brushed his as they rounded it. His hand swung close to hers, leaving a little comet trail of heat, and Amina thought of how if she were Dimple, she’d just grab it like it was some normal fucking thing to do.

“So you guys are Hindu, right?”

“What?” Amina startled. “No. We’re Christian.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed.

Amina walked a little faster. “Yeah. I mean, not that anyone in my family is anything, really. Our mother has taken us to church, like, twice. But we’re not Hindu. Although apparently the converts to our kind of Christianity were probably, like, Brahmins when Saint Thomas came down to India in 50
A.D.
, which is when our religion started, although everyone just, like, assumes it was some British colonization thing.”

Was she babbling? She was babbling. She fought down the inexplicable urge to tell him about how she and Akhil had once found a viper in their grandmother’s garden, or how Thomas used to see dead bodies burning on the banks of the river when he was little. They turned another corner, and Amina noticed with disappointment that the lights were on in the gym. Groups of kids were starting to come out the doors.

“We should go back,” Jamie said, walking across the field. She followed him.

“Fu-uck. Fu-uh-uh-uck.”

Akhil was knocking his head against the windshield repeatedly as they approached the station wagon, his hands gripping the roof.

“What is wrong with you?” Amina said, wanting more than anything for her brother to retain at least a whisper of the cool that Jamie had attributed to him earlier.

“Kee-ee-ee-eys,” Akhil said, not missing a beat. “Ssee-ee-ee-eat.”

Amina pushed him out of the way. Sure enough, there they were, glinting behind the sealed window and locked door.

“Oh my God.”

“You locked your keys in the car?” Jamie asked, and Akhil looked confusedly from him to Amina and back again.

“Apparently,” he said.

“Be right back,” Jamie said, and turned and walked toward the gym doors, where people were still coming out in sweaty clumps. “What are you doing with that guy?”

“Nothing. How are we going to get home?”

“Dunno.”

“What about Mindy?”

“I dropped her off at her house. We were done.”

Amina looked at the car, wrinkled her nose. She hated getting in with the overheated smell of Mindy (Giorgio of Beverly Hills, menthols, yeast) clinging to the upholstered seats. “Great.”

“You locked your keys in?”

Amina and Akhil turned to see Paige walking briskly toward them with Jamie behind her.

“Yeah.”

“And you don’t have a coat hanger on you?”

Dimples cupped either side of her smirk.

“No.” Akhil scowled.

“Joking,” she said. “I was joking. I think I’ve got one in my car.”

“Don’t worry about it if it’s a hassle.”

“It’s not,” Paige said. “I do it all the time.”

“She’s good,” Jamie said, as they watched her walking across the parking lot to a yellow van. “Faster than anyone.”

“I’m Akhil, by the way,” Akhil said, reaching forward to shake Jamie’s hand. Jamie returned the introduction, and then they dropped hands and stuffed them into pockets, awkward with the sudden formality.

“We have class together,” Amina volunteered. “English.”

“Oh yeah, with Tipton?” Akhil smirked. “What do you think of that guy?”

“I try not to.”

“Good answer.”

Paige reemerged from the van, waving a triumphant hand.

It was nothing short of riveting, really, watching Paige Anderson untwist the neck of the hanger while she studied the lock on the door, taking in the dimensions and calculating the geometry that guided her hand to the tip of the hanger. She bent it into a tiny
u
and then slid it first up, then down through the window crack. She bit her tongue between her front teeth and hooked the hanger around the lock. It slipped.

“Crap.” She shook out her hands. “Gimme a minute.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Akhil said, and she took a deep breath, wedging the hanger again, this time pulling it at an angle. The lock popped up.

“Nice.” Akhil smiled.

“Thanks,” Paige said, looking a little pleased. She opened the car door and handed him the keys.

“Amazing.” Akhil wasn’t even looking at the keys; he was looking at Paige, his face stretched into emotions Amina had never seen—wonderment, desire, and raw happiness riding over its surface.