The Whole Story of Half a Girl (5 page)

“So it was a good day?” Mom asks her. I’m surprised Mom didn’t grill Natasha about the pinching thing. Normally that’s something she’d be all worried about. But Mom’s jumpy tonight. She’s gotten up four times to get more napkins or another pitcher of water or to refill the bowl of broccoli.

“Pretty good. Mrs. Price is funny.”

I can tell that in a week it will be like
she
never went to any other school. If Natasha likes a new thing, she just packs her bags and follows it without looking back. All I can think of is calling Sam after dinner.

“And Sonia, how’d it go for you?” Mom asks, turning her nervous face to me. Then she glances at Dad, who’s staring at his empty plate, rubbing his chin, a million miles away. He stops rubbing and smiles a sheepish smile.

“It was okay.”

“Just okay?” Mom says.

“Yeah. I kind of got lost in the morning.”

“How lost?” Dad asks.

“I couldn’t find my homeroom and then the gym teacher helped me.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad. How are your teachers?” he asks.

“Okay, I guess. My English teacher said she’s going to give us lots of vocabulary tests.” And her dress was ugly and she sort of looks like a pig, I want to say. And my day wasn’t okay; it made me feel like an alien from Mars.

I lost sight of Kate as we herded into the cafeteria like sheep. By the time I spotted her again, she was already surrounded by a bunch of girls in my class, all talking and laughing. She looked up and noticed me but didn’t say anything, not a wave, not a smile. I certainly wasn’t going to plop myself down in the middle of all her matching-shirt friends.

Then I saw a table to the left where a girl was sitting
alone, writing in a notebook. She was in my English class too. Something made me want to ask her what she was writing. Suddenly I didn’t care about Kate or anyone else, so I tugged up my jeans and went over to her.

“Can I sit here?” I asked.

She looked up from her notebook, gave me the once-over, and nodded.

“Hey, is that the Eiffel Tower?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, sitting down across from her.

“Did you go there?”

“Last spring with my parents.”

“Wow! Was it the most romantic place in the world?”

She put her elbows on the table, rested her chin on her hands, and closed her eyes for a few seconds. I wasn’t sure if Paris was romantic, but it had lots of parks and cool old buildings and a river that ran through the entire city. And once, at night after dinner, when we were walking by the river, the Eiffel Tower suddenly lit up and sparkled like a million stars. That was my favorite part of Paris. Come to think of it, though, Mom and Dad did a lot of hand-holding in Paris, which they never do at home, so maybe it was romantic.

“It was really pretty,” I said.

“When I get older, I’m going to live there and be a writer,” she said, and patted her notebook as she closed it. Her name was written in big black letters on the front:
Alisha Brooks
.

“I want to be a writer too—a journalist—and travel all over the world,” I told her. My body relaxed. Even my smashed sandwich started tasting better. I was about to ask her what she wrote about, but a group of kids descended on our table. In seconds everything became a swirling blur of orange lunch trays, laughter, and metal chairs scraping the floor.

Nobody seemed to mind that I was sitting at the table. Actually, nobody seemed to notice me. But I noticed me. I was used to being darker-skinned than everyone at Community except for Marshal, whose parents are from Trinidad, but everyone at this table made me stick out like a ghost. The kids who sat here were black, while all the other tables were filled with white kids. Alisha told some of the other kids that I had been to Paris. They seemed less impressed but asked me some questions, mostly about the Eiffel Tower. I answered, ate my sandwich, and tried not to think of Community. Or why the white kids and black kids didn’t sit together here. Or where you were supposed to sit if you were too dark to be white and too light to be black? And that was how my day went.

“Well, don’t worry,” Mom says. “These things take time. It’ll get easier.”

“Dad?” I ask. “Would you call yourself black or white?”

Dad puts down his fork and coughs a little. Mom freezes in mid-bite. Natasha even looks up from mashing her broccoli to bits.

“Why? Did something happen at school?” Dad says, and moves around in his chair a little.

“Nope. Just wondering.”

“Neither,” he says. “I’m Indian.”

“But if you had to pick one,” I say.

“White, I guess.”

“But you’re not white,” I say.

“I’m not black either. Indian is considered Caucasian, which is technically white. Or at least it was when I was growing up.”

Mom steps in. “Sonia, do you want to know what you should call yourself?”

“I guess white, right?”

“It’s up to you how you want to identify yourself. You could call yourself white, or half Indian. Or even half South Asian American.”

“Yeah, but there’s the Jewish part too.”

“But that’s your religion, not your ethnicity.”

“Sometimes people who are half white and half black call themselves black because they look black,” I say. “So I could call myself Indian and not white at all, since I look Indian. But according to Dad Indian is white. Only it’s not white. Dad’s skin looks a lot closer to black than white.”

Dad looks at his hands and turns them faceup and facedown as if it’s the first time he’s ever seen them.

“How do you see yourself?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I thought you guys were supposed to tell me.”

Mom and Dad look at each other.

“Are you sure nothing happened at school to bring this all up?” Mom asks.

“Yup. Just curious. No big deal.” If I tell them about the way the white kids and black kids don’t sit together at lunch, Mom would race to call the PTA and arrange some kind of multicultural day. She did that stuff at Community, but Community was already blended together.

Mom lets a breath out and seems relieved to be done with the conversation. Dad’s lost in his thoughts. I ask to be excused and run up to the den to dial the white push-button phone. Sam answers and her voice spreads over me like a mouthful of chocolate.

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Hi,” Sam says, sounding less excited than I had hoped. “How was it?”

“Well, I survived. The place is huge,” I say, and swallow hard. Before I called, I couldn’t wait to tell Sam about Kate and Alisha and the strange way everyone sat in the cafeteria. Now the words seem too heavy to hold on my tongue. “But I want to know more about your day. Tell me everything,” I say instead, knowing it will hurt. Sometimes that kind of pain feels good, like a scab you just have to pick at even though you know you shouldn’t. She tells me they made fortune
cookies and Jack had everyone do trust falls at recess. And he said there was going to be more math this year. And everybody has to think of a project for the science fair in October.
And
they’re already starting to write the play for November. I pretend I don’t hear that part.

“And,” she says, “Siri wears a bra now.”

“Whoa!” The word “bra” rings in my ears. I look down at my board of a chest. Siri wears a bra now. “Does she really need one?” I ask, laughing.

“I think so,” Sam says. “What’s so funny about it?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that last year we were …” I stop. I don’t know what I want to say anymore.

“I’d better go. My mom’s calling me,” Sam says.

“Okay.” After we hang up, I lie down on the rug and stay there for a while, alone in the den, holding the phone in my hand.

chapter eight

The next day at school I see Alisha get off her bus. It’s a different bus, blue and white instead of yellow. I recognize some of the kids from lunch who get off with her. Alisha looks up at me and I wave. She waves back and starts walking toward me. Her hair is scraped back in a tight bun like it was yesterday. She looks older than the rest of the kids here—taller, at least.

“Hi,” she says, and clutches her notebook to her chest.

“Hi,” I say back. And we walk through the front doors together. “Why isn’t your bus yellow?” I ask her.

“It’s a city bus from Bridgeport, where I live,” she says, searching my face, expecting something from me. What, I don’t know.

“Cool” is the only word I can think of. I thought everybody who went to this school had to live in my town. Bridgeport was pretty far away.

“Some kids in my neighborhood are bussed here because our school isn’t that good,” she explains, and looks at me hard and straight. She’s really good at eye contact. My mother always tells me to make eye contact with people, but I don’t like anyone’s eyes on me too long these days.

“Oh, right,” I say, like I know all about it. Why only some kids? Why do some people have to go to the bad school and what’s wrong with it anyway? I want to ask these things, but I don’t.

“Did you just move here?” she asks.

“No. I went to a different school,” I say. She asks where and has an excited edge to her voice. It feels so good to tell someone who I am and where I came from. I tell her about Jack and Sam. I tell her about the food Jack taught us how to make. I tell her about the stories and plays we wrote, and the sixth-grade play that I’ll miss, and all the camping trips I’ve gone on. I feel like I’m describing a foreign land and she drinks it in, doesn’t say a word until I’m done.

“That’s not real. It can’t be real,” she says, rushed and sputtering. “I wish I could go to that school. How come you don’t anymore?”

“Well, my dad lost his job and we can’t afford it.” After these words fall out of my mouth, my chest tightens. Maybe I’m not supposed to tell people this.

“Oh, it’s a
private
school,” she says as she stops walking. “Did you have to wear uniforms? My cousin goes to boarding
school and he wears one. He has tons of homework and the teachers are really strict and lots of the kids are really snobby and rich. All everybody talks about is getting into Harvard.”

“Community isn’t like that,” I say. Before I can say anything else, the bell rings and we rush to our separate homerooms.

Later that morning during English, another pink polka-dotted note comes flying onto my desk.

I wanted to sit with Alisha, but maybe Alisha doesn’t believe me and thinks I went to one of those fancy private schools like her cousin goes to. Maybe she thinks I’m rich and snobby. Maybe I am, I don’t even know anymore.

What’s funny is that at Maplewood, the school that people don’t need extra money to go to, everyone seems to have plenty of money. The kids show off their iPods and cell phones, something my parents would never buy me. We
don’t even have cable TV. I see other parents dropping off their kids in fancy cars like Mercedes and BMWs.

At Community nobody seemed to care so much about what they wore, and no one had iPods. But Alisha isn’t like most kids here. She’s wearing the same black T-shirt and jeans she had on yesterday. And she doesn’t seem to have an iPod or a cell phone either. But if she doesn’t like me just because I went to private school, that’s not really fair.

Mrs. Langley paces across the front of the room in a gray dress and rubbery gray shoes.
Swish, clomp, swish, clomp
. She writes more vocabulary words on the board, the chalk crumbling in her hand—
“efficient,” “formulate,” “genre,” “hazardous” …
I wonder if that’s all we’re going to learn?

I write my reply under a cupped hand and throw it onto Kate’s desk.

Kate’s eyebrows knit together as she reads it. I wonder if she can make out my handwriting. Most of the time I think much faster than I can write and it comes out like “chicken scratch,” as Mom calls it. Each letter in Kate’s handwriting looks like a fat little happy man. It’s chunky and neat, every letter the same height. She writes something back and looks around. My heart beats faster and I can feel sweat tingling
under my arms. Maybe I need deodorant. The note lands on my desk.

I look over at her and smile. Her head is bent over a lavender piece of paper as she writes another note. I wonder if she writes notes to people all day. A few minutes later she chucks it at another girl, one of the three Jessicas in our class. This Jessica is short and wears her long brown hair in a high ponytail. She also wears really tight clothes. She’s always chewing on her nails, giving people sideways looks, and whispering in Kate’s ear.

Just before lunch I walk slowly to my locker, wondering if Kate will be there. She isn’t. I open it and grab my lunch, another tuna sandwich, but this time with green apples chopped up the way I like. Mom even put in a piece of nut candy from my aunty, who brings a ton back every time she visits India. It’s made from cashew nuts and has the thinnest shaving of real silver on top. When I eat it, I feel like the Indian children’s book princess my parents named me after.