I’m lying in my bunk bed, listening to Leila snore above me. Her breathing is rhythmic and consistent, like a samba or a waltz. Every once in a while, she lets out a little sigh then switches her sleeping position from one side to the next. I can hear the rustling of her sheets and comforter from beneath her mattress. I can’t stop thinking about how her floor is my ceiling and how in some ways, everyone’s floor is someone else’s ceiling, isn’t it? Maybe even the deepest depths of our sky create a sidewalk for a passing giant who lives among the stars, and now I can’t fall asleep. I’m clutching a book in my arms, the way some would a stuffed animal. I look down at it.
Beauty Politics, the title reads. By C. Bates.
I immediately sit upright, startled.
Leila, I whisper to her body. She doesn’t wake up. I use the top of my foot to give the bottom of her bed a baby kick—just enough to stir her awake without bruising her body. But she remains knocked out and buzzing, like an alarm clock.
Lei, wake up, I call out again, slightly louder this time. The buzzing continues, a slow, wonky hum.
Annoyed, I climb out of bed, leaving my book nestled beneath the sheets. My childhood bedroom has a ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark stars. Leila always makes me wish on one before going to sleep. I pick the one closest to the door, near the right-hand corner, by the bathroom, because its light is beginning to dim. It’s the underdog of all the stars; not the North star, but my North star, if that makes sense.
What did you wish for? Leila always asks.
As if I’d ever tell you. Then it would never come true.
There’s a small desk facing our bunk beds, covered in loose papers and gel pens, with a Powerpuff Girls backpack slung across it. My baba built it for us when I was ten so I can come home and do my schoolwork, study for tests, and write papers in peace. Leila is allowed to use it too—we were meant to share it—but she hardly ever brings her work home with her. She prefers to sit on her top bunk and watch me scribble away below. She says she finds the sound of my pencil quickly scraping away against the page to be relaxing. Like ASMR, she says. I don’t get it, but to each their own.
The chair parked at the desk is covered in clothing, mostly Leila’s. Even though we’re only five years apart (I’m in the seventh grade, and she’s a senior in high school), the gap feels as massive as a moon crater. It creates a barrier that might as well be a galaxy’s distance away.
We barely have anything in common, my sister and I, other than our shared room and overwhelming amount of body hair. She’s kissed both boys and girls; my only friends exist inside the books that line my shelves. Lately, she’s been fighting nonstop with Maman. She says she doesn’t want to go to college, that she’d prefer to enter the real world and get a job, do something to actually contribute to society instead of wasting money on an education that will teach her nothing but how to shotgun a beer. She would prefer to work at a package-free shop or move to DC so she can get arrested while protesting on the National Mall. Like Jane Fonda, she says.
My parents will hear nothing of it. They say the only reason they risked everything by hauling ass all the way to the United States was to see us go to good schools. Leila says this is “projection,” a concept I don’t fully understand yet. But I pretend to.
We just want what’s best for you, Maman says.
You just want what’s best for you.
I just lie in my bed, the covers of a freshly opened hardcover pressed to my cheeks, reading a single sentence over and over until something registers.
There’s that buzzing again.
Leila must be twitching in her sleep. She once told me she sleepwalked all the way to the lobby of our building, that she came to just as she was about to enter a busy Brooklyn street, most likely about to get hit by a car. A physical manifestation of a nightmare.
I should really organize all the clothes on the chair, though. Most of the items sprawled all over still have yellow price tags on them, with $5 written in cursive Sharpie. They’re all left over from this Saturday. Leila took me thrift shopping and taught me how to run one finger over all the racks with my eyes closed, to feel for the fabrics. Polyester was an instant pass. Cotton, linen, silk are all fair game. She showed me how to stop when I felt the difference in caliber, to pick the pieces that would last me the longest, not make the flashiest statement.
It’s all about strategy. Don’t go for quantity. Go for quality.
I watched her, mesmerized, taking mental notes to review before bed.
The bunk bed ladder has always scared me, mostly because it’s a little bit loose and I’ve fallen off it so many times before. But as my body grew bigger, the floor rose so much closer to my feet, rendering the fall somewhat obsolete. It’s nuts the difference a few years can make.
I reach the top of the stairs and find Leila shaking uncontrollably beneath her comforter, as if she had jumped headfirst into a frozen lake in the middle of February. Concerned, I throw the covers back at once, prepared to take her in my arms and huddle for warmth.
“Good morning, Little Light,” Cal says.
“AAAaAAAaH!!!!” I scream, my entire body shaking. My hands and feet look like they’ve grown three sizes.
How old am I? What year is this?
I jump off the ladder, barely landing on my feet, and make a run for the door.
“You know this doesn’t mean anything, right?” he calls behind me.
The incessant buzzing continues in the background, swelling like a symphony. I reach the door, turn the knob, and throw it wide open.
I’m in my high school auditorium.
This is the catalyst. It’s also where we host weekly assemblies and the fall and spring plays, usually Shakespeare or something like it. The chairs are stitched in a dark-red velvet and fold up like movie theater seats when unattached to a buttock. There’s a small tech booth, a glass box resembling a model Apple store, that sits in the very back, atop all the velvet folding chairs, which cascade down toward the stage at an angle, like a county fair slide. I can see Mr. Dailey, the head of tech, messing around with the lighting from afar. Golden framed portraits of our past principals line the walls, all brazen-looking white women over the age of seventy wearing stern expressions. The frames are robust and hand-carved, but the canvases are nothing. Each painting alone is worthless without the right frame.
Every single seat in the auditorium is empty yet warm. I can hear voices, whispering and cackling. I squint, looking for a culprit, but I find none.
Tsk tsk tsk, one sneers.
You look like a Lucha Libre, another shouts.
But you’re really just a terrorist, a third chimes in.
The voices are cut off by a drumroll from the loudspeaker above the stage.
The curtains are drawn open. A single spotlight shines at the podium. I hear the clacking of heels approaching from the green room beneath the stairs. A figure moves in the shadows, crossing the stage floor. When they step into the spotlight, I let out a gasp.
It’s Leila, dressed in her old school uniform: khaki pants and a crisp, white button-down. There are a pair of black combat boots strapped to her feet; they look just like you-know-who’s. She taps on the microphone twice to test if it’s on. The tapping creates a glare, which reactivates the buzzing noise. This time, it’s so loud that I have no choice but to plug my ears with my pointer fingers.
“My name is Leila,” she begins, speaking into the empty auditorium as if every seat in the house is packed. I let out a small cheer, but she doesn’t hear me. Instead, she remains laser-focused on the piece of paper in her hand.
“I’m going to be reading an excerpt from my award-winning college essay about the monetization of hair removal. It’s titled, ‘Hairmerica.’ I hope you enjoy.”
The room breaks out into a sea of applause. I crane my neck and scan every inch of the theater space, looking for the source of the noise. But it still appears to be oddly empty.
Onstage, Leila clears her throat and starts her reading. The first few sentences are incredibly well-written, her lede dripping with nuance and satirical prose. Her beats even feel oddly familiar, as if I’ve heard them somewhere before.
Hey, wait a minute.
“I wrote this!” I call out to Leila on stage. But she still can’t hear me. I try waving at her from where I’m sitting in the front row, but she doesn’t look down.
“I wrote this!” I shout a little louder.
A ghost in the audience whistles up at Leila, and she smiles and nods into the abyss.
I feel a quick, sharp pain in my chest. They should be cheering for me! These are my whistles. She doesn’t deserve the praise. It’s just not fair. It’s not right!
Someone, a real human body made of blood and bones, sits down in the folding chair next to me.
“What’s wrong, joonam?” my maman asks.
I throw my arms around her, and she pulls me in close, kissing the top of my head. She smells of turmeric, sumac, and a house full of party guests. I’ve never been so happy to see her. I’ve missed her more than I realized.
“Maman, I wrote the essay that Leila’s reading! She stole it from me.”
My mother scratches my scalp and plays with my hair, just like she used to do when I was a kid.
“I thought you only wanted for people to hear your words, to read your work. So that your stories could help them, to touch their lives. And Leila reading them aloud is doing just that, isn’t it? Why should it matter who’s driving the car if you ultimately reach your destination?”
I roll my eyes.
“I guess you’re right,” I say, conceding to her point. “But I still want people to know it was me. Can’t I care about the reader and myself? Why do I have to pick just one when I could so easily have both?”
My maman picks my head up off her lap and places her hands under my chin so that our eyes are leveled. I can hear the buzzing in the background booming, now pouring down from the loudspeakers.
“Do not let your ego get the best of you,” she says. “You’re here on a mission to do good. This isn’t about you.”
I close my eyes, trying to internalize her words and block out the buzzing. This isn’t about me. It was never about me.
“Or is it, darling?”
My eyes fly open to find that my mother is gone. Loretta James now keeps her seat warm and holds my head in her hands. I jolt away from her, and she lets out a delicious cackle.
“It’s not! I’m not doing this for myself! I’m doing it for the reader! For the magazine!”
“Sure, doll,” she says. “Face it: You’re a two-faced, cold-blooded bitch. Just like me.”
Loretta grins and leans in, as if she’s going to kiss me. I slap her away, and she squawks like a seagull, but the buzzing drowns out her wailing. I look up at the stage. Leila hasn’t flinched or stuttered once. She continues to read my column out loud with an empty expression on her face.
I look for the exit, in need of a quick escape. But the auditorium has no doors or windows. Was the black box always like this? So literal? I bang on the walls, begging for someone to let me out.
Loretta slowly inches toward me. The closer she gets, the more deafening the buzzing. I see a hooded figure enter stage left and sneak up behind Leila, placing a black gloved hand over her mouth and holding it there until her eyes roll in the back of her head and she collapses into a puddle onstage.
“LEILA!” I cry out. The hooded figure takes a step forward into Leila’s spotlight, checks the microphone, pulls back its hood, then looks directly at me. It’s—
PING.
I sit upright, covered in sweat, my wet T-shirt clinging to my body and sending a cold shiver down my spine. I’m in Leila’s apartment, in my pull-out couch bed. The room is dark, meaning it’s most likely still the middle of the night. Not too much time could have passed between now and what went down at Vinyl.
It was a dream. I was dreaming.
I exhale, a sigh of relief, detecting a muffled sound in the dark. Using my phone flashlight, I identify the culprit: It’s Leila, fast asleep in the armchair next to me. She must have finally come home when she heard what happened to me. I bet Saffron called her.
I know the past twenty-four hours have been, well, definitively the worst. But still, I can’t help but smile. She looks so peaceful when she sleeps, like a newborn puppy or a little old man.
PING.
The phone in my hand vibrates. I squint down at the fluorescent bright light of my screen and attempt to focus my eyes.
I have thirty-two missed calls from Loretta. Thirty-fucking-two.
I literally passed out in a closet less than twenty-four hours ago, and she harasses me the second I leave. Are you kidding me? There are texts too. Dozens of them.
Loretta (11:17 PM): CALL ME!!! IT’S AN EMERGENCY.
Loretta (12:35 AM): WHERE ARE YOU? CALL ME. 911!
Loretta (1:12 AM): SWEET PEA, I NEED YOU. PLEASE GIVE ME A RING.
Loretta (2:24 AM): NOORA IF YOU DON’T CALL ME WITHIN THE NEXT MINUTE YOU ARE FIRED.
Loretta (3:43 AM): IGNORE THAT LAST MESSAGE. SORRY LOVE. GOT CARRIED AWAY.
Loretta (3:43 AM): BUT CALL ME WHEN YOU CAN.
I look down at my phone, stunned. Was it so silly to believe that something as serious as a health scare would convince Loretta I could spend twenty-four hours off duty? She probably needs to add another off-site meeting to the schedule and can’t figure out how to edit her calendar. How could she possibly give me my space when there’s so much important work to tend to?
My phone buzzes again. I don’t even look down to read the message.
Instead, I power off the battery and bury it in a crevice of the couch. Then I lean over and squeeze Leila’s hand three times before falling back asleep.