Mai Mageed

Of course it’s come to this: paperwork. It is how our marriage started, this paperwork, except we’re not at city hall and no one is smiling, except my lawyer kind of is, but it’s some sort of condition, and he can’t help it. You really shouldn’t make such quick judgments about people. I never thought this would happen to us, that you would wake up and decide you didn’t love me anymore. I’m so upset right now. But wait, imagine I’m wearing a trenchcoat this whole time. It’s black with a golden dragon on the back. Anyway, I’m so upset right now. I never thought I’d live to see our home split in two, everything I’ve ever loved taken away from me. The kids, the dog. My beautiful collection of trenchcoats. Can I change it from a dragon to a rose? Imagine there’s a rose on it. I swear to God I’m so heartbroken.

“Stop it,” says Aaliyah. “Stop it right there. You’re laughing? You don’t even look a little divorced.”

When someone takes these games too seriously, the way Aaliyah does, all the magic melts away and seeps out through the bedroom door, and worst of all the flow of my imagination gets interrupted, so I start to suddenly see everything for what it really is. The biscuit color of the courtroom walls dissolves into boyband posters and spelling bee trophies, and my husband becomes a lamp again. Every time, it feels like cutting to commercial right when the show gets juicy.

The interruption encourages Sophie to chime in. “Yeah, stop changing the trenchcoats. I like the dragon idea better.”

I turn away from lamp husband. “Let’s start over.”

From the desk chair that we have designated as the judge’s bench, Aaliyah smooths the pleats on her black dress. Without notice, Aaliyah had stopped spending time with us a few months ago. She didn’t have the subtlety to blame it on summer travels either, nor the fact that we were getting ready to start fifth grade. Instead, she treated the whole thing very militantly, like a strategic withdrawal. For the entire last month of school, it was just me and Sophie and our yogurt cups. Even Sophie, now and then, would skip lunch to rub Bibles in the music room with the church choir kids. On those occasions, I would solve the riddles printed on the yogurt cup alone before licking all the puree and aluminum off the lid. I sat alone. Really, I sat across from a kid named Sebastian, who spent the semester trying to teach himself how to do a realistic puma growl. He rarely said a word to me, at least not in human-speak. Then, on the last day before summer break, he tipped an imaginary hat in my direction and said: “To be continued.”

Sophie, who now plays the bailiff, claps her hands together. “Please be seated.”

Beside her, Aaliyah slams an invisible gavel. You can really tell when someone watches too much TV. For example, Aaliyah only ever sits with her left side facing us, maybe because it’s the side without the big birthmark on her jaw. Or maybe it’s because when she faces someone head-on, she’s got a bit of a wandering eye like she can’t figure out which camera to look at. Either way, this girl watches too much TV for someone who initially thought bailiff was an herb.

Like a lipsticked gopher, a head pokes in from the doorway: Sophie’s mother checking in on us with a warm, wobbly smile.

“Hi, y’all,” she whispers. “There’s plenty of snacks downstairs, if you’re up for it. One of you girls can come down and fetch some.”

Before I can even suggest a round of rock paper scissors, I feel all three sets of eyes on me.

The technicolor and half-constructed Lego sets of the bedroom give way to beige wall decor the further you roam down the hall. Everyone under the age of 45 has been relegated to the second floor of the house—Sophie, Aaliyah, and I all sequestered in Isa’s room. Even the cat is technically senile. He’ll totter about the house in circles as if he’s looking for someone. Sometimes I give him a knowing look so he knows he’s safe with me, should he feel moved by some holy spirit to communicate with a human one day. Each time, he tilts his head as if to say but certainly not you.

Downstairs, the chatter fuses into one low hum. The key of adulthood is B-flat. My foot barely touches the bottom of the staircase when a woman I have never seen in my life reaches out and touches my hair. Her other hand cradles my cheek, but she leans in and decides to kiss it instead.

“Girl, have you eaten yet?” She cages me in her arms so that I am right in the line of fire of her breath, stray bullets of garlic and cigarettes. The air between us smolders.

I tell her I’m planning on it. Her mouth doesn’t shut all the way, so I can see that her two front teeth are whiter than the rest and seem to be made of the same stuff as a bathtub. On her cheek, there are chalky fingerprints of makeup. I squeeze my shoulders together to free myself and can still hear her as I scurry to the kitchen, crying out to me like a zombie from those midnight creature features: Eat!

The kettle has started to scream. It convulses on the stovetop and chokes out little gasps of smoke through its nose. There is no one to attend to it—the adults all congregating in small groups throughout the house, unintentionally divided by gender. Through the screen door, I can immediately recognize my

mother. She stands alone in the backyard, one hand holding a cigarette that’s dripping ash onto the grass, the other one smoothing a stray hair back into her ponytail. Sometimes I like to pretend I’ve been away, ran off to the desert for some twenty years, and have just seen my mother for the first time. I try to imagine what it would be like to long for her. Would I want to hug her, smell her? The first thing anyone would want in that situation, I decide, is some water.

I grab a pitcher to bring upstairs.

Sophie and Aaliyah are arguing by the time I return, and this time it is about insects. Specifically, whether or not insects have ears. Aaliyah is for: “If they don’t, then how the hell can they hear?” Sophie is against: “Who says bugs can hear?”

Aaliyah grabs a fistful of her own hair and wraps it under her nose, sniffs it. They don’t make any move to acknowledge my arrival when I join them on the floor. Weaved between the curly coils of the carpet is a hair so long that I immediately recognize it as Isa’s. Few things are more precious to a black girl our age than what’s growing out of our heads. Whenever my parents couldn’t afford a haircut, which was often, I would walk over to this very house and wait for Isa’s mother to join me in the bathroom, grab hold of my curls, and gently pull, leaving an inch or two dangling beneath her manicured fingers. I’d stand with my back to her, smiling shyly whenever our eyes met in the mirror. The pink tiles were cold on my feet. I would look down and watch my hair shed like brown leaves onto my toes. I knew we were done when she’d give my shoulder a light squeeze. It’s been so long since the last time we’ve done this that my pigtails have grown to my chest for the first time I can remember.

Now, through a cheekful of the snacks I’ve brought, Sophie suggests we role-play a hair salon. Her head sways as she crunches, the glass baubles dangling from her braids, making the same sound as the trot of a horse. Aaliyah scoffs but complies. She says, “You guys would role-play breathing if you could.”

The end result is half-hearted and our improvisational skills are lacking, so when Sophie makes believe she is giving me a trim, she starts to say scissors. Scalpel. I’m going to need three ccs, now! And Aaliyah’s idea of an average salon client rings more true to a feudal lord than a debutante. After she vows never to return to this establishment even if her family’s life depends on it, we decide to lay the game to rest. We make no moves in the direction of what some people might call a conversation. Instead, a few sounds rattling around the bedroom form a rhythm that could very well be in Morse code—a dripping pipe here, a cough there. I take a minute to count the lines on the inside of my palm.

“That water stain,” Sophie finally begins. We sit up at attention, rapt. “I, uh, I was gonna say it’s shaped like Florida.”

I won’t admit how much I enjoy these kinds of observations, knowing that for the other two it was probably like playing I Spy at knifepoint. Still, I join in and point behind Aaliyah. “Look. Your shadow kind of looks like George Washington.”

Sophie squeals, hand to her chest. “So presidential!”

Aaliyah laughs for a second then stops herself, her face reverting to the inscrutable expression she first came in with. This, I think, is what has changed about her the most since the summer began: she won’t let an emotion just happen to her, not without considering it first. Perhaps this is part of the package when it comes to maturity. You stop looking for faces in inanimate objects and you certainly don’t have a favorite color anymore. And when a transient thought arrives at the station of your mind, if it is a thought that holds no weight, one that neither improves nor diminishes your life by being spoken, you keep that thought to yourself.

I only venture downstairs once more. I am the only one brave enough to elbow through clammy mobs of kissy-faced adults long enough to secure

snacks. For the first time all day, I see Isa’s dad. He has that lonely, space-alien quality I’ve come to associate with men his age, always catching onto jokes several beats too late. He stands surrounded by other dads or dad-like men, orbiting like satellites around an antique record player. It is plain to see that he is much more handsome than the rest of them, eyebrows thick as rope, more like a dad on a billboard ad than a real one. We’ve hardly ever spoken. In lieu of words, he likes to offer the nearest piece of fruit, point a finger gun at me, and walk away. As I look at him, he doesn’t register my presence from across the room, too many dad-men in his line of sight, who almost seem to be multiplying.

I feel frozen in place as I watch Isa’s dad give his audience an abbreviated tour of his vinyl collection. A few jazzy names like Monk and Monkee and Mingus are thrown around. He carefully drops the needle and a song starts to play, one that I can tell is in French because it sounds like someone bawling while brushing their teeth. Isa’s dad takes several deep, shaky breaths and hides his eyes behind his hand. I realize he has started crying. The dad-men close in around him and offer rhythmic pats on his back. From where I stand, he has been completely veiled by their black suits. The air around my head feels like a vacuum. When I turn to run away, an assault of garlic and perfume and garlic passes under my nose, and I look up to see that it’s happened to me too—shesatellites have been pulled into my orbit—and it takes some real suppression of all the social graces I may have been raised with so that I can bulldoze through these grown women as roughly as my body will allow. I don’t look back or make sure I haven’t pushed anyone against a wall. I don’t stop running until I am back upstairs.

I can’t stand seeing adults cry. It is simply one of those things that feels forbidden but isn’t. Like when two blonde people start kissing. Once, when we were in the first grade, Isa’s mother took us to the mall around Christmastime. The first thing we did was hop on the merry-go-round. Its lights sparkled like something otherworldly. We rode side by side on twin horses. Looking back, I’m sure it moved at a crawling pace, but at the time, everything beyond the platform of the carousel seemed to swirl like dreams. The tinsel strewn atop the store signs.

The mannequins wearing cable-knit sweaters. Parents with cameras clicking and flashing. In my memory, we were floating all alone. But it’s more likely that we rode with an entire snotty, sticky-fingered cavalry. We leaped off our stallions after a few rotations with drunken grins on both our faces, cowboys at the end of a long night’s journey. Isa held my hand to stabilize herself, then she just kept holding it anyway. We rounded the corner behind the ATMs, searching for her mother. In the shadows between the men’s and women’s bathrooms, a man glowing white and red held his sniffling face in his hands. It was the mall’s Santa, the straps securing his beard visible behind the shell of his ears. His quiet cries blended with the twinkling machinery of the mall.

“Don’t look,” Isa said. She released my hand and I watched it bounce off the side of my thigh. “Let’s go.”

*

Sophie tends to the wound on my ankle. Meaning she pinches the area where a bruise will surely be developing in the coming days and glances at it from over the rim of her glasses. Technically I broke free from the hordes of concerned women downstairs and would have made it out safe had it not been for the final step on the staircase, which I had ignored in all my fleeing. In all the commotion—the vacuum clears from my eardrums when I realize this—I’ve forgotten to replenish our stash of finger foods, the reason I was dispatched down there in the first place. Aaliyah watches us silently from the twin bed. She has both hands folded on her lap, almost as if she’s afraid of catching whatever this room might transmit. Bad luck, maybe. I immediately feel cruel for entertaining the thought.

Yet I find myself poking at the wound. “You too cool to help? Is that it?”

She looks confused for a second and says, “Yeah, that’s right,” but I can tell she doesn’t believe herself.

“It’s obvious,” I say. “You think we’re embarrassing. Like, you can’t wait to get out of here.”

Even Sophie looks disturbed by the shift in my tone. Her hand is still on my ankle, though it now sits lifeless on top of it. Aaliyah rolls her eyes. “Whatever you say, girl. You sound like all of them downstairs. You want me to rip the hair out of my head or something? I don’t see you crying.”

Fatigued anger, like a photograph of an emotion, pulses behind my temples. “If you hate it so much, then just leave. Go home.”

“Sounds like you’re the one who wants to leave.”

The same way an engine will roar before it stalls, what I am best at is the goading, the beginning of the argument, the easy part. A few months ago, on the phone with Isa, it had been so quiet I thought I could hear her blink into the receiver. Her breathing was artificially steady, a clear effort to appear in good health. This was around the time Isa had been missing weeks of school at a time. I loudly shifted, every now and then, from my crouching position behind the living room couch and had to make an active effort to dry whichever hand was not clutching the landline. She listened closely as I tried to deliver a detailed report on what she had missed: Tyler C. and Colton got into a white boy fight. Mr. Morris was in trouble for calling a student dumb. Mrs. Ortiz was in trouble for yelling. Sebastian made an origami jumping frog and mumbled that he liked me; I didn’t do anything about it, just pretended not to hear and ran away. The cafeteria beef got recalled again, so no more Taco Tuesdays.

Isa coughed away from the receiver. “Slow down. Sebastian loves you?”

I said, “I guess so. Anyway, how are you feeling?”

“Why didn’t you say anything back?”

“’cause he’s weird as hell,” I said. “You know that.”

“And we’re not?”

I offered a lifeless ha-ha. “An-ny-way, like I said, it’s all just so boring.”

“I miss boring.”

I thought of the droning purr of the hospital, how she had her own room there painted yellow, more to cheer the visitors than the patients. How I’d accidentally whispered lucky when I saw that her room had a television. She’d promised I could sleep over any time, but had hardly called me since my first visit, for which I couldn’t help but resent her. This particular phone call, going back and forth about Sebastian’s romantic potential, was our first time speaking in over a week, our longest stretch after years of charging our parents’ phone bills for these secret late-night sessions.

“Are you going to tell me how you’re doing now?” I asked, impatient. After evading my physical presence for long enough, I worried she’d eventually push me away entirely, a fear that was beginning to seem very plausible.

Isa paused for a moment. Then she started to hum a peppy tune. “Whatever it is I think I see, becomes a Tootsie Roll to me!”

“Can’t you take anything seriously?”

She didn’t pause this time. “I don’t want to!”

In a fit of frustration, I slammed the phone into its cradle without a word. I lingered behind the couch for another hour, thinking about missing, the action and the emotion. If I had been in the desert for 20 years, I knew the first thing I would have missed was Isa.

*

The cat wanders into the room and lets out one long cry, puttering around in search of nothing. He leaps onto the bed and starts molding the blanket

between his paws. When he’s finished, he stares down like God at the small mountainscape he’s created, realizes something is missing, and like God, he walks back out again.

“Why would they hate you?” Sophie asks, pushing her glasses back up her nose. After a few seconds of ear-ringing silence, she cracks a small smile. “Is it because you chew with your mouth open? Or because you never share? Or you smell like pennies sometimes?”

Aaliyah cuts her off with a grave sigh. “No clue.”

It’s my turn to say something, try my own hand at humor or consolation, but it has been at least ten minutes since I’ve last spoken. Instead, I tear a tissue into so many microscopic pieces it would be more accurate to call it fine dust. I continue making these chemical alterations, stirring a mound of Jell-O until it turns into a crime scene of red sludge. Unprompted and with each word spilling over the other, Aaliyah has offered us a secret: that she hardly enjoys the company of her new posse. All they ever want to do is exchange sadistic bits of gossip. The easiest way to make friends, Aaliyah divulges to us novices in love and friendship, is by pretending you hate the same things. Tell someone you think the math teacher looks like a garden gnome, and you’ve got a bond that’s sure to last you through middle school, at the very least. Listening carefully, I don’t ask her what they might have said about me. It also goes without saying that when they were done hating the world, they’d soon start to hate each other.

I say, “They don’t even know you.”

Her voice thick as syrup, Aaliyah says, “Yeah. I think that’s why I like it.”

The curtains have cutouts shaped like little stars. So the brushstrokes of early evening sunlight form constellations on the walls and our legs. The entire room was space-themed in one way or another. Posters, miniature globes. Horribly, grotesquely, for no reason at all, I begin to slurp up the Jell-O. I can tell, without looking, that it will leave a red film on my teeth. How I vant your blood, I might have said if Isa were here.

Sophie lies flat on the floor so that she is covered completely in shadows and beaming stars. She calls on us, wordlessly, to join her in this game.

Before coming here today, there were lots of games we couldn’t play anymore. Not too long ago, Isa’s mother nearly had my head for convincing her daughter to play Take Off. The rules were you had to pin your arms to your sides and whirl around like a spinning top, and you do it until you can’t take it anymore. That’s when you collapse right onto the carpeted floor. If you keep your eyes open, staring at the ceiling—which in Isa’s room was pale green and freckled with stick-on stars—is a lot like peering out the window of a spaceship. And if you focus hard enough, you can hear the blood pounding in your ears, whooshing like a fiery jet engine. I loved the sound of Isa’s laugh during Take Off. It hummed across the carpet’s fibers, and I could feel it in my whole body. It felt as though she was an extension of the room, and naturally, I was an extension of her. I never regretted it, not even the last time, not even when Isa’s mother shoved me away, perhaps too roughly, and spent five whole minutes waiting for her daughter’s breathing to slow down.

Too quickly we realized there were moments you couldn’t rehearse for. I was afraid, truly afraid, that all the role-playing would somehow mess with my head. That one day I’d grow taller, funnier, more loved. Only to wake up and find myself kissing the mirror.

We each try to gather as many stars on our bodies as we can, until we look like the set of a shadow puppet production. Sophie, still splayed out on the floor, wins. Aaliyah and I squat side by side at an angle I can’t help but find endlessly hilarious. She taps her fingers against mine, and I look at her, the light hitting the bone of her eyebrow. We have a whole conversation with our eyebrows right then: mine say something like Don’t worry about them, they’re missing out. And hers either say, We should do this again sometime, or God, I wish the bathroom were closer. I can’t quite tell. But she does smile at me, only for a flash.

Bottomless coffee on an empty stomach has begun to take its toll on everyone downstairs, so the hum of their chatter only grows louder. It’s an unwelcome reminder, an invasion of the fortress we’ve built in this room. The three of us sit together on the carpet and Sophie, stubbornly clinging to their earlier conversation, once again insists that there’s no way a cockroach can have ears. I can’t seem to think over all the noise, can even pick up on a few words that bubble up against the current of conversation: so strong, can’t imagine, loss, dark roast. The pulsing fatigue has returned to my temples. As I listen to Sophie and Aaliyah squabble, a tidal wave of blood begins to froth behind my eardrums. I am overcome with the desire to completely trash Isa’s bedroom. I want to strip her bedsheets and throw them out the window, drag my arm across the desk and send every pencil and paintbrush flying. I want to take down every picture that has me in it and eat them. Role-playing someone with restraint, I deny myself this desire.

Outside, the sun starts to crouch and hide. Guests are beginning to clear out the front door in couples, holding hands like children. Across the street is a real child, much younger than us, dangling alone from a tire swing. A few brown leaves have shed like hair at the foot of the tree. I catch sight of my my shoulders, the sky is impossibly cloudless. It looks, I think, like a giant pond with a single goldfish floating to the surface, or a great big swimming pool with an orange flip-flop drifting along. These are the thoughts I might one day learn to keep to myself. For now, I tell my friends.