Love Edy (7 page)

When they reached her gate, she was on to
something about football and her dad, who had pulled into the
drive. Wyatt watched him, dreading the conversation’s end. Edy said
her goodbye with a touch to his shoulder, promising to share lunch
the next day. She then bounded off for her father’s black BMW, body
light and tight with each step. With a wave of acknowledgment to
her father, Wyatt headed home, his own steps bouncing with the
truth—that a
girl
had talked to him—a
pretty
girl,
perhaps prettier than any he’d ever known.
She
wanted lunch
with him.
She
wanted to see him again.

A song came to him, and with it, a pressing
need to whistle. He couldn’t figure where it might have come from,
as he rarely listened to the radio and owned no music. Still, a
tune had seized him.

Wyatt bounded up a short set of stairs and
dug out the keys to his home. On opening the door, he found the
hallway dark. Glass crunched under his Converses. He could hear his
mother, Debbie, and his father, Roland, shrieking, same as always.
No doubt she was threatening to walk, this time for more than a day
or two. No doubt, dad was telling her to, that he didn’t give a dam
one way or another.

Normally, these confrontations made him want
to split his face on the stair rail if not but for a moment of
blissful unconsciousness. But not on that day. On
that
day
there was a song was in his heart, a lift in his step, and a smile
on his lips, placed there by a pretty petal named Edy Phelps. He
would say her name twice; it sounded so nice.

Edy Phelps. Edy Phelps.

Wyatt whistled a loud and sassy sound, good
as a New Orleans brass band come Mardi Gras. He bounded up the
stairs to his bedroom. Once there, he threw back the curtains and
smiled at his view of Edy’s house. It was a smile so broad and
bright it might as well have been a laugh. It should have been a
laugh. And then he did it. He laughed. With his mother downstairs
screaming that his dad had the prick of a caterpillar, Wyatt
laughed. With his father, words slurred, hollering that her horse
face kept him stepping out, Wyatt laughed. And as the few
possessions they owned shattered and the shouting continued, Wyatt
laughed, the song in his heart drowning everything out but him.

~~~

Locked away in a blinding homage to Hello
Kitty, Edy pulled up to her desk to do her homework. With her
window open and the curtains pulled back, she had a direct view
into Hassan’s room. As children, they’d scramble over the branches
that divided their rooms, slipping from one to the other,
undetected. They flashed lights as a means of late night
communication before either had been permitted cell phones. When
they fought, they made a point of drawing the curtains, glaring
through the window panes, making evil faces, or giving each other
the finger.

Edy read the assigned chapter on
Paleoamericans, made a few notes, and switched over to
To Kill a
Mockingbird
for English. Hassan’s bedroom light illuminated his
room at 6:20, his usual return time from practice. He dropped a
duffel bag on the floor and stretched, yanked off his shirt, and
let it fall next to the bag.

He’d feel her watching soon and look up.
Life tethered them in a way that one could sense the other, know
the other’s thoughts, and understand without speaking. So, she knew
he was ignoring her, even before he strode over and yanked the
curtains shut without so much as a nod of acknowledgment in return.
Harami. Bastard.

Edy yanked out her cell phone and texted
him, thumb jamming her screen as if it were his eyes. A single word
that she could only hope carried the strength of her annoyance with
him.

Really?

She hit send and waited, gnawing at her
bottom lip in the process.

One minute. Two minute.

Three.

Edy shoved aside her books, jammed on a pair
of Nikes and thundered downstairs. The damp autumn nightfall had
her wishing she’d grabbed a jacket, at least. Never mind that,
though. Fury would keep her warm.

She used her key to get in, wiped her shoes
on the mat, and tore for the stairs.

“Edy?” Hassan’s mother called after her.
“I’m glad you’re here. Come and help me—”

Hassan’s was the first room on the left in a
house that mirrored her own. Edy tried the knob, found it open, and
shoved her way in. Faintly, she registered his mother’s complaints
at the bottom of the stairs. She said that they were no longer
children, that it was improper for Edy to be in his room, that Edy
must be mindful of her behavior now that she was becoming a young
woman, something else and something else. Not for the first time,
his mother’s voice had morphed like the adults in a Peanuts
cartoon.
Wah wah wah.

Hassan stepped out the bathroom with a towel
around his neck. Saturated, ink black hair clung to him, sweeping
his eyes and dripping until he slapped it back. A simple gray tee
lay damp, hinting at a painfully well-muscled figure. Edy knew what
it took to make a body like that, had watched him transform day by
day as he sought it and sculpted through sweat. She swallowed at
the thought.

“Edy, come downstairs and help me—” Rani
called.

Hassan closed the space between them,
wrapped a hand on her arm, and pulled her into his room.

“We’ll be down in a sec, mom,” he said and
closed them in the room.

“So, you’re ignoring me?” Edy demanded the
second they were alone.

Hassan tossed his towel to the floor.
“Maybe, I’m following your lead.”

There it was again. The flash of burning
fury, the iced mask that had always been others and not hers.

“I did
not
ignore you. I sat
elsewhere for lunch.”

“I don’t care where you sit,” Hassan
said.

He fell back onto his bed and stretched out,
before folding his hands behind his head.

“Really?” Edy said. “So, it’s okay if I sit
with him tomorrow? And the next day?”

He closed his eyes, mouth thinning with his
thoughts. A thunderstorm raged within, a hurricane that he didn’t
always control. Edy saw that struggle in the lines of his frame, in
the inadvertent flex of muscle.

“I don’t like him,” Hassan said. His eyes
flew open with the acknowledgment: green glass spun to brilliance
in anger. “Stay away from him because I
don’t
like him.”

Edy’s mouth snapped open in rage, hung
there, and then shut on its hinge.

“
Mar sāle
,” she hissed in Hindi. Go
to hell. “And take your entourage with you.”

“Edy—”

In the time it took her to get to the door,
he appeared, closing it as she pulled.

“Move.”

“Would you at least hear me out?”

“I’ll hear you out when you stop locking
yourself up in bathrooms with bimbos.”

He shut the door and made her face him.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. And does that make
your lunches with the new kid go away?”

“What?” Edy cried. “No! Of course not.”

“Of course not.” His echoed words hung with
the weight of accusation. Mouth twisted, he glared at a point above
her head. But Edy cared nothing for the anger simmering on that
face, gorgeous or otherwise. She boiled with her own rage, and it
threatened to overflow, as he stood there, wanting her in his
world, all the while making absolutely no room.

Or was that even it? Was it that she
needed—no scorched—for a place at his side, and in his future, a
place that already stood at full capacity?

Yeah, she did.

The bedroom door flew open with Edy’s
realization, slamming into her back and launching her into Hassan’s
arms.

Rani gaped as if they’d been that way the
whole time. “Telephone,” she hissed and thrust a land line to her
son.

“I’m a little busy right now,” Hassan said.
“We have some things we need to get straight and—”

Rani’s orbs doubled in size. “Out of this
room,” she hissed and grabbed Edy by the forearm. “Go to your
house. You’ll be taking dinner tonight on your own. I’ll bring it
to you. And they’ll be no backtalk from either of you.”

Edy twisted, but found Rani’s grip dogmatic,
unrelenting. Ushered first into the hall, she made her way
downstairs and out the door. Only when the sound of the latch
closed firmly behind her did Edy and truth meet.

She’d been thrown out, thrown out of the
Pradhan home for the first time in her life. And while she had a
key, there seemed no point in using it. Not on that evening, at
least.

Six

Edy stood by her locker, hair longer than
ever and pulled into a wild cloud of a ponytail. She pulled an
algebra text out and another of chemistry before noticing Wyatt
just behind her.

“Hey,” he breathed.

She smiled. She always had the biggest smile
for him.

Two weeks of lunches together had earned
them whispers and outright scowls from the oxen she hung out with.
Well worth the price of admission, if you asked Wyatt Green.

“Hey, twinkle nose,” Edy said. “What’s
new?”

Twinkle nose. He touched his nose, drew
away, and found glitter on his fingertips.

“Art?” she guessed and slammed the
locker.

No malice in her voice, no mockery. Was she
any other girl at that school, she wouldn’t have passed on a prime
chance to mock him to stand a little taller by cutting him down.
No, Edy Phelps was a different. He’d spent yesterday alone
reminiscing about her fingers brushing his arm. Which brought him
to this next point.

Wyatt managed a dry swallow. “After
school—”

He lost his nerve. It walked off and left
him, disgusted by the audacity of the moment. He’d only just met
her. He’d never known gall. Better still, how could
he
ever
think—

Wyatt shook his head. All morning he’d
rehearsed.
Just blurt it
. He might have been a stranger to
gall, but he was a quiet friend of humiliation. He had no reason
not to welcome it now.

“After school?” Edy prompted.

Her hand rested on a small spiral binder
atop a stack of books labeled “Homework Assignments.”

“I heard about a place that makes great
milkshakes,” he said. “I don’t know if you want to go. You probably
don’t want to go. But if you do—”

She rummaged through the pages of her books,
engrossed in her searching.

“What’s it called?” she said.

“M—Max Brenner’s. Heard of it?”

“Of course.”

She looked up. Blinked. Wyatt shifted,
tongue wagging despite still-pressed lips. His mouth wouldn’t seal
the deal.

“Meet me here?” Edy offered. “After the last
bell? Unless you had another day in mind.”

Briefly, Wyatt thought about some of the
football players who convened in the hall after school and before
the start of practice. While they hadn’t come right out and
confronted him about the time he spent with Edy, the ones she hung
closest to had a habit of bumping him in the corridors, causing him
to drop things and, of course, glaring.

“How about out front instead?” he
suggested.

She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

~~~

Max Brenner’s turned out to be a gluttonous
dessert haven, with gooey, guilt-ridden delights like caramel
chocolate pizza, ice cream fondues, and banana crepes with dulce de
leche. Edy fussed over the endless assortment of items she could
possibly order. With each possibility, Wyatt recalculated the bill,
subtracting it from the slender fold of cash in his pocket. He’d
only lifted enough to pay for drinks. If she ordered something
ambitious, he supposed he could always do with water.

When she ordered a peanut butter and
chocolate milkshake, he exhaled, grateful to have enough to avoid
embarrassment. Wyatt settled on the cookie shake for himself and
willed the waiter away before Edy changed her mind.

“Tell me about Chaterdee,” she said when her
frosty drink arrived.

“It’s crap. A factory town where everything,
even the elections, are owned by some rich guy who vacations in
Tahiti. Everybody’s just waiting for them to outsource, anyway. To
give ‘em the boot and replace ’em with a bunch of Indians.”

Ugh. How many ways had he offended in
regurgitating his father’s crap?
She
vacationed in Tahiti
and only failed to be Indian through accident of birth.

“I’m sorry. I—”

“It’s okay,” she said and took a sip of her
drink so deep that he knew it wasn’t okay.

“I was thoughtless,” he tried again. “I
didn’t mean to sound so . . .”

She held up a hand. “Really. It’s a
predictable feeling, if you think about it. Daddy says that
capitalism is born of the internal struggle between classes, and
that the bourgeoisie, if left to their own devices, would always
leave the working class oppressed. Ali—that’s Hassan’s dad—thinks
that’s a little reminiscent of Marxism, you know, with the whole
‘dictating the bourgeoisie’ thing, but,” she shrugged. “Daddy’s not
Marxist or anything.”

Wyatt blinked, grasped at the only word in
that speech that hadn’t shot over his sense of understanding.

“Ali?”

“I just told you.
Hassan’s
father.”

The jock. He came up every day.

“Let’s talk about you,” he said.

She raised a brow. “What about me?”

“I don’t know,” Wyatt said. “Tell me
anything. Tell me what you love most.”

She stared back at him with those
button-wide eyes, huge, thoughtful, weighted in consideration.
Wrestling with things he hadn’t the courage to ask about.
Please
not the jock. Please.

“Dancing,” she said and leaned forward.
“Want to know a secret?”

“Of course.”

“My mother hates ballet.”

She giggled. If her laughs had texture, he
imagined them light and fluffy, like fresh spun cotton candy.