Love Edy (11 page)

“Wrong answer,” Lawrence said from his place
at the door.

Wyatt glanced at him, then back at the
twins. God, did his stomach burn. Acid simmered in his gut like a
cauldron, bubbling straight up to his throat. He needed a defense.
Yet, one wouldn’t come.

“Losing time,” the twin on the sink
warned.

“We’re friends,” Wyatt said. “Please.”

The bathroom door jarred. Lawrence barreled
into it, stilling whoever had been on the other side.

Wyatt stiffened. “We eat lunch together,” he
blurted. “And walk home. We talk on the phone sometimes. But that’s
all. I swear.
”

“Sounds like a man expecting something to
me,” said the sink twin.

“Just punch him,” said the other.

“No! Please. We’re not
doing
anything,” Wyatt cried. “We just hang. Come along and see if you
want.”

Sink twin rose; smile broad when he clapped
Wyatt on the shoulder.

“Now that’s more like it,” he said. “Start
inviting us. Or find something better to do.”

That afternoon Edy texted him in study hall,
asking what happened at lunch. It was then that Wyatt saw the black
guy who’d blocked his exit from class before the Dyson twin run in.
This time, he could recall the boy’s name. Kyle Lawson. One of
Hassan’s boys.

How had he forgotten?

Wyatt turned back to his phone, all the
while considering. He thought of Edy’s eyes, sweet, brown,
enchanting. He thought of her mouth, full, lush, and tempting. He
thought of her touch and wanted it, in his hand, on his skin. He
thought of Kyle, looked over, and thought again.

Wyatt deleted the text message, concentrated
on facing front, and avoided Edy’s questioning stare.

~~~

Days passed. Edy with
Wyatt, Edy with Wyatt, EdywithWyatt. Hassan knew because
people were so eager to tell him.

But why did it bother him
so?

Hassan ventured over to
his bedroom drawer and pulled out a weathered, well creased world
map. Blue markings delineated every place he and Edy had been by
land, sea, or air in every time zone on earth. Copenhagen. Cape
Town. Cairo. Kolkata. Bangkok. His parents’ hometowns of Delhi and
Chandigarh. Back when their fathers fled the city limits at the
slightest promise of research, Hassan and Edy hadn’t been far
behind, wide-eyed, pitiful, and determined to go. They’d get lost
in cities others saved pennies to go to. As a boy, Hassan swore
that he and Edy would turn his battered map blue, visiting every
place that man inhabited and maybe one or two places that man
didn’t.

He hadn’t counted on
growing up.

Hassan folded the map away
without looking at it and ventured to the window. Edy’s
window faced back, eclipsed in darkness, swallowed in the
still of the night.  

He wasn’t
jealous.

He absolutely wasn’t
jealous.

Hassan shut his eyes and
pressed the flat of his forehead hard against iced and unforgiving
glass.
Redirect.
Redirect to a big play, to the adoration of all
those girls, to tossing the pigskin with Nathan. Edy. Edy and
Wyatt.
Edy.

Damnit.

Hassan lifted his head.
He imagined Edy calling her new friend on a night she couldn’t
sleep, a night like this one. She wouldn’t know that Hassan stood
there, watching, willing to come if only she’d call.

He imagined Edy wanting
Wyatt for company after some fitful sleep, welcoming him as
if
he
were
Hassan. And Wyatt, Wyatt skulking across the yard and up their tree
before yanking open her bedroom window. And Hassan knew what he
would do, what he would do when the doors were shut and the windows
were shut, and only the two of them were alone.

The corners of his mouth
snatched down and hands clenched into merciless fists.

Wyatt would slip into her
bedroom and lace his fingers with hers. He’d draw her in
close, hand at the little dip above her backside. But would she
tilt for him and welcome him? Would she want him? Because that was
the question, wasn’t it?

Hassan turned from the
window with a groan.

Wyatt would kiss, touch
her, and would slip underneath Hassan’s window to do it.

Never.

Hassan pulled on jeans
over pajama pants, slipped into a hooded sweatshirt and crept
downstairs, careful to avoid the creaking third stair. Once out, he
ventured to the edge of the yard and became the silhouette facing
Edy’s house. 

What did he hope to
see? Or learn?

He squinted at her window.
Frost slicked the tree he’d need to climb to get in, though it was
a feat he’d accomplished before. Carefulness and a steady hand
would bring him to her.  

But then
what? 

Once, invitations had been
unnecessary, and he could have yanked her window open at any hour
of any day and she’d have been there for him, for whatever he
needed. 

Wyatt had changed
that.  

Except he hadn’t. And he
had. 

Hassan’s wanting to
protect Edy had begun like all things good: pure and
unsullied with the mark of selfishness.  

But
then it changed, warping from the inside out till the
nasty workings of its interior revealed their true
selves.

Rain began to fall. It
pelted in freezing needles, demanding his attention. What was
happening to him? What was happening to them?

The answers he sought were
right there, beneath his nose, if only he could focus.

He didn’t want Edy with
Wyatt Green. It ate at every good thing in him, till only the
nastiness remained.  

He wanted to call her
name, if only to know that she’d still answer, that she still felt
the connection that always drew them near. 

He wanted to tell her
about how little he trusted Wyatt and how it blistered to be
replaced. Those feelings had him standing beneath her window in the
rain at night. He imagined himself gaining courage, scaling the
tree and telling her the truth, whatever that meant.

No. 

Don’t even
think.

Sports kept him
disciplined and discipline was a gift.

He redirected and
considered the options.

He didn’t want Edy with
Wyatt. There were ways to address that. As for everything else . .
. he wondered how much things had truly changed.

They still saw each other
every day at school and for dinner most nights. They still
whispered across the dinner table and had covert conversations with
their eyes at school, around their parents, everywhere. And she
still visited him on the sidelines after every game, albeit with
the pale one in tow. Each time Hassan saw him, he had an
irrepressible urge to bury him under the earth, take Edy by the
hand, and . . .

He envied Wyatt. Not for
the time he spent with her, but for the unhindered way he looked at
her. As if loving her were the most natural thing in the
world.

Hassan’s head began to
throb.

Girls called him. All the
time. Girls who liked the idea of a guy who could strong-arm
on the field, who could take an everything or nothing moment and
come out victorious every single time. He thought of the
redhead
whose name he couldn’t recall. He thought of other
girls, too.

The week after her, some strange girl had
sauntered up to his locker and planted her mouth on his, right in
front of the guys. At a party the following weekend, an older girl
with beer-laced breath had pinned him to a wall and asked why he
hadn’t taken advantage of her yet. He’d stared, at a loss for
comebacks that usually came easy. At another party, one where he’d
rushed too many beers, the blonde cheerleader Sandra Jacobs had
offered to dance with him, only to grind so rough and rugged his
hard-on sprung like a jack-in-the-box. A whisper in his ear said
she wanted to go upstairs and liberate him. She had been easier to
get rid of. Another week and another party brought a girl named
Adelita, also keen on freeing the rod. The easies came faster than
he could count, faces a blur, with temptation lasting the length of
a lit match before revulsion settled deep.

He would make himself enjoy them. Girls who
wanted to kiss and touch and make him their first, all because of
what he did on the field.

He tried to imagine wanting to talk, to open
up, to share the strangeness of this new life with one of them. He
tried to imagine his moments of weakness before games: the
vomiting, the trembling, the uncertainty. He couldn’t do it.

Hassan pictured a girl among them that could
switch from English to Hindi and Hindi to Punjabi on a whim. They
would leap from the technicalities of football to the jumbled
thoughts that waded in his head: on politics, religion, philosophy,
or what it meant to be American and the child of immigrants. He
tried to imagine a girl not laughing when he pondered the
likelihood of reincarnation and figured out how to link even that
to football. Then he tried to imagine her not being Edy.

It wasn’t the first time
he’d had the thought, only the first time it weighed so heavy, and
shoved so insistent. Still, he rejected it, buried it, and managed
a laughed for being absurd.

Girls called him all the
time. Tall ones, short ones, smart ones, dumb ones—a lot of girls
who weren’t Edy. It was time he called them back.

It was time Hassan proved
to himself what his parents insisted all along: that there was
someone out there for him. Someone other than Edy
Phelps.

Eight

Winter ripped in harsh. Stark, snow
blinding, arctic glacial days bled to mind numbing nights, resolute
in unyielding bleakness. Even the thin, scattered clouds seemed
iced, a mirror of the permafrost blanketing the city. Keeping warm
became a perpetual task of diligence, with thickly layered clothes,
puffy coats, hats, scarves, mittens and lumberjack boots the only
things keeping Edy alive.

Thanksgiving loomed, and along with it, her
birthday. Early Monday morning, the Phelps’ phone shrieked. At a
wink past six, Edy stumbled from bathroom to hall, grasping for
bearings as no one but her seemed able to hear it. Slippered feet
dragging, fist rubbing her eye, she got to the call, mumbled a
hello, and received word that the secretary of state would be put
on the line.

She tore out for her father, yelling for him
as she went. Seconds later, she stood in the doorway of her
parents’ bedroom with her father’s back to her as he picked up the
phone in his room. Her mother, ill content to sit on the edge of
the bed, paced before Edy’s father, arms crossed, body rigid with
the tenseness of the moment.

They could turn on the television, Edy
supposed. No doubt, whatever had roused the secretary of state
herself would be cause for snippets of burning things, bold
flashing headlines, and grasping reporters speculating and
retracting in the same breath. Mother and daughter exchanged a look
of trepidation. They could go downstairs, or, they could wait for
the real news, right there, in their very own home. This was what
it meant to be a Phelps, right here in the flesh.

The conversation dragged on without leaving
much to piece together. Lots of nods and simple affirmations,
confirmation that he could leave immediately. The federal
government seeking her father’s counsel wasn’t new; he’d advised on
the pitfalls of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the
intersection of human resource deficiencies and human rights in the
Middle East, and most recently, as a special adviser at a U.N.
conference on least developed countries.

But none of those calls had come at six
a.m.

Edy’s mother must have had the same thought,
as she began pulling suits from the closet, shoes from the rack,
ties from the drawer, and barking at Edy to help lend a hand.
Though she had no idea what to do, Edy stepped forward; never brave
enough to question her mother’s direct instruction.

Husband and wife communicated through brief
glimpses and slight turns of the head, enough for her to know when
a shirt or pair of shoes was undesirable. She tossed things to Edy,
who folded them neatly, only to have her mother fuss and refold
them. Edy’s fingers fumbled with the truth of what her mother’s
shaking hands meant: that they were ushering her father toward
someplace even she wasn’t certain about.

Finally, the call ended.

“Egypt,” he said. “There’s complete and
utter chaos. Again. People have taken to the streets, rioting and
immolating themselves in a violent rebellion of government.”

“So?” Edy blurted.

She didn’t mean “so” as in “so what if
people are dying.” She meant “so, what can her father do?”

“Their democracy is decomposing. As a
scholar, I’m obligated to discover why and aid my government
whenever called.”

That. That endless need to be a Phelps. As
if anyone knew what
that
meant.

“I’ve seen those places on TV,” Edy said.
“When order breaks down, they fix it by shooting everyone.”

“Edith,” her father said. “That’s a tad
overwrought.”

Only a tad? Well, good.

He’d been to dangerous places before, but
after conditions settled and once troops were brought in—certainly
not before breaking news could make sense of what had happened.

“You can’t go,” Edy said, in a groping
childish grasp at control. “My birthday’s coming up. You can’t miss
that.”