26
The High School Girl’s Room
OBSERVABLE CHARACTERISTICS: Awkward bed sitting, excessive sweating, attempts to hide excessive sweating.
APPROPRIATE COMMENTARY: “Wow, your room is really cool!”
INAPPROPRIATE COMMENTARY: “Wow, I’ve been trying to get up to your room for a long time!”
Norris’s vocal offer to help clear the dishes was expectedly dismissed. He and Aarti were each served a small cup of gold-tinted tea that was slightly bitter but not altogether unpleasant. Norris got the impression that this was a customary postmeal lull in this home and tried to pace his tea sips to match Aarti’s, who had an eye on her phone the whole time. Norris watched as Mrs. Puri silently opened the patio window and her husband brought two cigarettes to his mouth, lighting one and then the other. He handed one to his wife as the two began to do the dishes in tandem.
Secondhand smoke aside, it was an easy, domestic gesture that made Norris feel like an intruder. He was grateful for the out when Mrs. Puri eventually turned to Aarti and, presumably, excused them both in Hindi. Aarti nodded and signaled for Norris to follow her. As they made their way up the narrow, carpeted stairs, Norris heard the radio turn on in the kitchen. He wondered how many decades and across how many countries the pair had spent doing their dishes in this exact fashion.
“The tragedy of the Puri family, ladies and gentlemen,” Aarti said as she let herself drop onto her bed.
Norris stood at the doorway, looking in with some apprehension.
“I liked your parents,” he said, imprinting as much of the small and colorful room as he could at a cursory glance. Her messiness was different from Norris’s. Her messiness was meticulous. Each pile of clothes was color-coordinated and the packed shelves of magazines and trinkets all seemed to have an ongoing theme. Music and concert swag. School stuff. Photography. Maps. Lots and lots of clothes. Unlike Norris’s generic blue bedding, rented furniture, and rolled-up posters that he still hadn’t bothered to put up, this room could not be anyone’s but Aarti’s.
“They like you too,” she said, pulling a pile of stray blouses and T-shirts into a makeshift pillow under her chin. “Your mother is in academia. Your pants aren’t dragging around your ankles; you’re one of the tribe now! A model immigrant.”
It did not feel like a compliment, going by her tone.
“Isn’t that a little racist?” Norris asked half-jokingly.
“Hmm, race aware,” she reassessed after a beat. “You think my dad just interrogated you over dinner because ‘new black guy at school’ was reassuring enough?”
Fair. Norris wasn’t dumb enough to think there wasn’t some audition element to this dinner invitation.
“That’s my brother, Rohan,” Aarti preemptively answered, following Norris’s gaze to a framed selfie of Aarti and a slightly older Indian guy with bright eyes and slicked-back hair. “Junior at Dartmouth.”
“Impressive.” Norris whistled. “You look alike.”
Norris noticed the additional space she had cleared on the bed as an invitation for him to join her and awkwardly positioned himself down on one arm, lying at a literal arm’s length to avoid looking too comfortable should the Puris pop by their daughter’s bedroom. The pillowcase he found himself lying over didn’t smell bad, but Norris bet it hadn’t been changed in at least a week. Judith would change them. God, why was he thinking of his mom right now?!
“So what’s the big Puri family tragedy, exactly?” Norris asked to jolt his brain out of itself.
“What isn’t?” Aarti asked, inching closer. Norris couldn’t help but think that part of her was enjoying his discomfort in the moment. “Two amazing world travelers, top of their classes, and here they are decades later aspiring to nothing more than tenure, Hawaii vacations, and for their daughter to give them grandchildren by age twenty-five. It’s freaking medieval.”
None of these things sounded particularly bad to him. Well, maybe the creating-a-small-human-from-scratch part; that was just a horror movie.
“They’ve settled on America,” he suggested.
“They’ve just settled. Wasn’t the point of working so hard that their kids would have slightly more options on how to live their lives?” She let out a frustrated sigh. “Anyway . . . I’m just glad I finally told them. Thank you for, you know, helping me. Whatever happens next, at least it’s out there now.”
“You’re welcome.” Norris gazed at her, feeling, for once, perfectly at ease. God, she really was beautiful.
Aarti seemed to sense his change in mood. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Nothing, just . . . I think this is the first time I’ve, like, lounged on a girl’s bed.”
He probably shouldn’t have said that.
“I probably shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s okay. You’re sweet,” she chuckled, moving closer. “Guys around here like to pretend they’ve been porn stars since age nine. It’s exhausting.”
Norris was caught between a burning desire to ask her if he was the first boy to ever lie on her bed and the fact that her hair smelled really amazing. Something about her eyes—especially this close—always made Norris lose sight of the rest of the world.
I could be a really good boyfriend, Norris wanted to say. The best boyfriend. Some real Magic Carpet Ride boyfriending.
“You’re my favorite thing about this country, y’know” was what Norris’s mouth decided on instead.
Aarti smiled. “You know, instead of college, you should come with me when I get out of this town,” she said. “You would definitely need a driver’s license, though.”
“Well, sure,” Norris started. “But where would I go? From what I’ve heard, this country is not kind to black high school graduates.”
“We could solve crimes,” she offered. “For a small stipend each time, of course.”
She smirked at him. The moment went on a little too long. They both became aware of how close they were; how horizontally positioned; on a bed. A very comfortable bed.
“Dude, I’m not going to have sex with you right now!” she laughed, causing Norris’s head, ego, and the faintest hint of boner to all simultaneously pull back. “My parents are downstairs.”
“What? No!” Norris stuttered. “I wasn’t thinking that. Like, at all. How very dare you!”
In the process of moving back, Norris’s arm slipped off the edge of the bed and he slammed his head against the wooden bedpost. A) Ow. B) He would happily do it again too if it kept Aarti laughing this hard.
“So, you were at Maddie’s McElwees’s sister’s wedding?” Aarti asked, staring at him sideways with her head on the pillow. Their fingers interweaved and Norris smiled as she drummed her fingertips alongside his.
“Yeah,” Norris answered. “It wasn’t planned. We just had no idea what to do.”
“Didn’t you have an actual wedding invitation, though?”
“I mean, yes, she’d invited me, technically, but I’m pretty sure she wasn’t expecting us to come in through the back door with a drunken Patrick.”
She nodded a few times, as if trying to put a picture together in her mind.
“You’ve been hanging out with cheerleaders and football players too much. You’re turning into a jock-y little drummer boy,” she finally said. “They’ve got you on Patrick Lamarra watch.”
“He’s not that bad.” Norris shrugged. “You just have to load up on pee pads and chewsticks.”
Norris wanted to change the topic but didn’t exactly know why. He felt settled in a way he hadn’t since moving to Austin. He had Liam, and somewhere to play hockey on weekends. Work was great too. And Aarti? Aarti was right here. It was almost surreal.
“So, have you heard about prom?” Norris then asked. He had clocked a few posters around school, and that had been enough for the idea to burrow into his brain.
“Of course,” Aarti said dismissively. “Better get used to it. Every year, for every high school grade . . . it’s obscene. Other schools only have it for seniors but we’re not that lucky at Anderson. Why?”
“We should go,” Norris said as casually as he could.
“You can’t be serious.”
“No.” Norris pondered. “Well, maybe. I don’t know. Isn’t it supposed to be a big thing for you Americans? I wouldn’t mind seeing it.”
“It’s just a dance. God!” She laughed into her pillow, shaking her head at herself rather than Norris.
“What?”
“Nothing . . . just, now might be a good time to tell you that I’m not Madison McElwees, Norris.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Going to prom with the cheerleaders and football players,” she said, affecting a vocal fry that Norris would have previously found hilarious. “That’s not me! That’s the prom queen you work with.”
Pointing out that Maddie would probably forfeit the crown to Meredith or a nearby orphan did not seem like the right move right now.
“Maddie and I aren’t . . . we’re not anything. She’s still hung up on her ex, and I would never be into a cheerleader. That’s ridiculous. C’mon now.”
“Right.” Aarti rolled her eyes. “White girl, balancing at the top of the pyramid in yoga pants and goes to bed texting in a silk nightie. I bet you recoil in horror.”
Norris knew this tone—upset, and hiding it through sarcasm. He had perfected this tone. He could run out a karaoke machine singing exactly in this tone. He really didn’t want Aarti to have this nagging at the back of her head every time she looked at him. So Norris turned around and stretched his arm over her to reach his suit jacket, hanging from Aarti’s desk chair. He quickly fished out the now-frayed little notebook, compulsively filled over the past few months, and handed it to her.
“What’s that?”
Norris shrugged. “Proof that I’m not pining for Maddie McElwees.”
In his notebook, he knew, there was a rather vicious string of sentences about her, back when she was still only referred to as “The Skinny Madison” instead of just Maddie. His opinion of her had changed since then, of course, but he wanted Aarti not to worry.
“I take it back: I’m dating an artsy diary keeper. You’re an emo in sheep’s clothing.”
She flipped onto her stomach and began to read.
She did not seem overly offended, smirking and flipping through the notebook, looking utterly fascinated. She occasionally snorted or chuckled at a description of this or that person. Somewhere along the way, he’d filled almost every page. The flight to Whistler and back. The day he’d boringly chronicled every item of Longhorn attire that walked through the Bone Yard. Another time, he’d tried to keep track of Goade’s diet, and had only come to the fact that the man should by all account be dead of scurvy.
“‘School assemblies,’” Aaarti read aloud. “‘A fuck dungeon by any other name. What is this? Hell. Hell. I am in hell. Maybe if I keep acknowledging that I’m in hell it will be enough to qualify as a glitch in the hell matrix and the whole thing will crash. Hell. Hell. Hell . . .’ Wow, both sides of the sheet.”
Okay—Anderson High conducted a downright cartoonish number of assemblies. Every other morning since the semester began, Norris had found himself corralled into the obscenely large auditorium and forced to sit through a series of meaningless announcements. Parking pass updates for seniors, the rest of the football season, student council elections, the upcoming football season, College Day for juniors, next year’s football season. Norris suspected that these gatherings were a form of Valium for the student body on days it did not have any actual football to look forward to. Like when a recovering drug addict discovers a love for jogging four hours a day.
“Oh my God!” Aarti burst out laughing, pointing to another page. “What is this?”
She held up a page to him that featured a pretty solid facsimile sketch of Ian, arms and legs spread out like a boxered version of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Vitruvian Man, which they’d learned about in history class, with various arrows pointing at his body. Aarti gave him a knowing smile.
“The girl I liked was obsessed with this prick.”
“Understandable,” she conceded. “What’s this one?”
“Oh,” Norris started. “I tried to trace Patrick and his friends’ genome back to the missing human genome.” It was done in boredom, Norris meant to add. He mostly liked Patrick now.
“Oh my God!” she exclaimed. “You have two, three . . . four! Four pages for Meredith Santiago!”
That one, Norris mostly stood by. He would die on that hill.
Aarti laughed out loud, throwing her head back at a random page.
Norris forced a smile, slightly regretting the choice to hand over the notebook. He’d just wanted to make her feel better.
“Can I, um, can I get it back?” he asked, reaching for the notebook, suddenly nervous.
“Actually, I take it back: I’m dating a mean girl,” Aarti said as she handed it over.
“So, prom?”
She looked at him with a soft smile. “Pass.”
“Oh, come on!”
“There are so many other parties that are worth the effort; I’m not going to go to a glorified gymnasium dance.”
“You’ll crash Meredith Santiago’s basement to see your ex, but you won’t go to an actual dance with someone you’re actually dating? What kind of logic is that?”
She frowned at that.
“I mean, you should go, if you want. It would definitely give you some fodder for this.” She flicked the cover of his notebook and got up to turn on some music. “But it’s just not my scene, Norris. Sorry,” she said with a definite resolve that Norris knew better than to try to push past. Aarti Puri would be a photographer one day; Aarti Puri would not go to prom with him—with him or anyone else.