THE NEXT MORNING, Sejal followed Cat to the high school office. She’d taken half a Niravam with her orange juice and her surprisingly bacon-oriented American breakfast and was feeling okay.
“Hope we have some classes together,” Cat told Sejal. “Probably not, though. You’re way smarter than me.”
“That is not true.”
“It is. Plus you speak three languages and you’re Indian and you don’t use as many contractions as I do. That alone’ll get you into AP everything.”
“Hmm.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Cat. “I can always rely on my breathtaking hotness, right? See you at lunch.”
“By the tree, na?”
“By the tree.”
Sejal entered the office and stepped up to a wide counter. Beyond this were a pair of desks, one of which was occupied by a middle-aged woman as blond and toothy as an ear of corn. Sejal waited to be acknowledged. After a while this didn’t seem to be working, so she cleared her throat.
“Hello,” said Sejal. “This is my first day.”
The woman didn’t look up from her computer. “This is a lot of people’s first day, hon. Take a seat.”
Sejal blinked and looked around her at the otherwise empty office. She sat down in an unfriendly chair next to a fake plant.
There were no sounds, save the faint clicks of a mouse and the constant sigh of an unseen air conditioner. Each click sent a little tickle up her spine. She willed herself to be at peace. She tried to quiet her mind. In moments like these she once would have been texting or talking or checking her email. Now, more often than not, she found herself filling the void by twiddling her thumbs. Honest-to-gods thumb twiddling, but it helped.
Her heart and soul were off someplace, hopping from one computer to the next. They were riding the rails like hoboes.
On a wall behind the counter a framed poster said POSITIVITY, beneath a photo of a blizzard-battered penguin cradling an egg on its feet. Below the frame was a cartoon cat who hated Mondays. Sejal rather thought the two posters canceled each other out and searched for a third to break the tie.
The office door opened and a boy entered. He was gathering up a rain poncho as if he’d just been holding it over his head, though a glimpse of the sky outside confirmed that it was just as sunny and cloudless as it had been a few minutes ago. The boy stood at the counter and waited.
The blond woman rose and said to the boy, “Now then. It’s your first day?”
“What? No, I’m just late. I need a late pass.”
“It is my first day,” said Sejal, standing.
“Oh my dear!” the woman said to her. “You’re our foreign exchange student, aren’t you? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t think it made a difference,” Sejal explained, though clearly it had already caused this woman to double the volume of her voice.
“Say-jall…Gangooly?” the woman ventured, reading Sejal’s name from a file. “From India?”
“Yes. Kolkata.”
“It says here ‘Calcutta.’”
“It is the same thing.”
“And this is an Indian dress you’re wearing? It’s very exotic.”
The boy was frowning at it. “It’s from Dark Matter,” he said. “In the mall.”
The corn woman’s entire demeanor went stale as she turned to the boy.
“Name?”
“Um, Doug. Douglas Lee.”
“Reason for being tardy?”
“It…took me longer to get ready this morning than usual.”
The woman sniffed. “That’s no excuse. I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a Tardy.”
“Right. Hey,” said Doug, pointing at Sejal’s file, “that says she’s in the same Pre-Cal class as me first period. I can show her the way.”
Pre-Calculus was held in one of the temporary buildings ringing the parking lot, and Doug felt the sun crackling on his skin as he escorted Sejal. It could have felt worse, though—he had recently fed—and there was no way he was going to duck and cover around the one girl in school who hadn’t already decided he was a loser.
“I hate that word,” said Doug. “‘Tardy.’ Don’t you?”
“I had never heard it before a minute ago,” said Sejal.
“Oh. Well, school’s the only place you’ll ever hear it. It just means ‘late.’ And they invented it because they really needed a special word for kids that means ‘late’ but also sounds like ‘retard.’”
Sejal laughed. The sound of it rang Doug like a bell.
“So…” he said, “when did you get here? To America?”
“A week ago.”
“You like it?”
“I like it. Everyone has been…very nice.”
“Yeah, well…high school’s just starting. Give it a few days.”
A brittle silence passed.
“So,” said Sejal. “You are interested in fashion?”
“What?”
“You knew from where my dress had come. The boys back home would never—”
“Well…you know, I think guys can be interested in that kind of thing without being…you know,” Doug said in what he hoped would be taken for a confidently masculine voice. He only recognized the dress because he’d spent several summer afternoons at Dark Matter attempting to meet a nice girl with a vampire fetish.
They stopped outside the classroom door. The walk had been too short. And now Sejal was already frowning at him.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” said Sejal. “Your face…you look like you’ve had a lot of sun, no?”
“Oh. Yeah. I spent a lot of the summer at the beach. You know.”
“I didn’t notice it in the office.”
“Also…” said Doug, “also I caught some sort of sun allergy. My skin’s really sensitive.”
Sensitive, thought Doug. May as well ask her to braid my hair.
“Oh. I was going to ask you where you eat lunch,” said Sejal, “but you wouldn’t want to eat outside, then, by the tree.”
She was inside the classroom door before he could answer.