Underneath (4 page)

He keeps looking at me, expectantly.

I can't think of any conceivable way this barbecue will be fun for me right now, but I feel bad because I know Spike wants me to go. I squirm uncomfortably. I hate this; hate feeling guilty. I don't want to have to feel bad about not writing in a journal or not going to a party that I don't want to go to.

My neck is damp with sweat and I take deep breaths, trying to recapture a semblance of calm. After a moment, I can meet Spike's gaze again. I am fine. I am perfectly serene. I am—

Now Cassie is staring at me out of the corner of her eye. One second my mind is clear and uncluttered and Zen-like, the next second—

oh my god look at her eyebrows

she hasn't even gotten them shaped since—

she always wants all the attention and boy
has she been getting it

—sick of feeling sorry for her, what about me?

It's Cassie's voice. I don't want to hear it. I want to pretend that it's not her and it's only my paranoid imagination. But I can feel her layers of confused annoyance, her frustration and anger and even loneliness, coming off her like waves of heat from a summer parking lot. Her expression is placid, one perfectly arched and penciled eyebrow slightly raised, but to me it looks like a smirk.

And I hear the rest of them, like a buzz in the background.

—never wants to party with us

feeling sorry for herself—can't she just get past—

—major downer, I wish she'd just—

I want to put my hands over my ears, but I know it won't help. My eyes prickle like I'm going to cry. It must be showing on my face, but nobody else's expression changes.

I swallow hard. How long has Cassie felt like this? Maybe we never had the deepest friendship, but we always had fun. I thought I knew
her. But I guess I didn't.

I can't hold it inside. I stand up.

“Are you sure you even
want
me to go?” I say bitterly, directing my question at Cassie. “You don't seem that excited.”

“What are you even talking about?” She frowns, cuts her eyes at me, but I know she's lying. For all I know, she's just been going along with our friendship, going through the motions on the outside when inside she's backstabbing me. Or maybe it isn't only inside. A horrible, unfamiliar feeling of suspicion begins to take shape. Bile rises in the
back of my throat. Everyone at the table is looking at me. Spike looks confused, and Elisa looks worried, but the longer I stand there, the worse I feel. I grab my backpack.

“I, uh, have to check something in the library,” I say, my voice weaker than I'd like it to sound.

“Sure, whatever,” Cassie says, sounding perfectly casual, but I know what she wasn't saying and I saw her roll her eyes at Marc. And was it my imagination or was he grinning knowingly back at her?

I don't care. I start walking briskly away, backpack dangling heavily off one shoulder.

“Hey, wait,” Spike shouts. “You coming Saturday?”

I wave noncommittally, not looking at him, and keep walking. Spike's beach party: James, his brother, lots of beer, the swim team crew, and Cassie. My so-called friends.

There's no way I'm going to that barbecue.

five

The texture on my bedroom ceiling has a funny shape like an evil clown's head, right above my bed. I never noticed it until tonight. It's amazing what you notice when you spend ten hours lying around staring at the ceiling.

It's starting to get dark, so I turn on the bedside lamp so I can see the evil clown more clearly. Next to it is a bunny with three ears. The better to hear you with, my dear. With three ears, that rabbit could hear a wolf just
thinking
about chasing it.

And, just like that, I'm obsessing again. No matter how hard I try, I keep going back to what happened yesterday at school, and even more than that, the fact that I've started hearing thoughts.

Hearing thoughts
. Whenever I think about it, I get a nervous, gut-churning feeling inside. It's like a sci-fi movie. Except I'm no heroine, and I don't feel powerful. I'm just me, scared and alone. And angry.

I turn on my side and pull my knees up to my chest. I can't get the image of Cassie's smirking face out of my mind. Or the faces of all my so-called friends, plastered with fake smiles while their real feelings hammered my brain.

It's like the first day of kindergarten all over again. I'm wearing an embroidered dress—my favorite dress, bright purple and sparkly with tiny mirrors, a dress that Dadi had brought from Pakistan. I was still a little pudgy with baby fat. At recess, a group of mean kids surrounded me near the jump rope area, teasing me. “
What are you wearing?” “You look purple like a grape.” “Grape girl.”
Back then, Shiri was there to step in, running all the way over from the older kids' recess area when she saw me being cornered.

If she were here, I wonder if she'd understand, if she'd rub my back like she did when she was nine and I was five, and comfort me. “
Forget it. They don't know anything. You look cute, that's all. They're jealous.”

A tear slides down my nose. They
don't
know anything. Cassie doesn't know anything about how hard this is. And obviously I can't tell her.

I used to just laugh it off when she'd make bitchy little comments. I'd always known she didn't really mean it, that she was trying to be funny when she didn't know what to say. But yesterday … I heard what she was thinking, and somehow that made all the difference. Maybe she didn't
say it out loud this time, but she
felt
it. She meant it.

Part of me wonders if I should call her, try to confront her about it. But every time I pick up the phone, I hear her words echo in my head. She texted me a couple of times, but I deleted the messages without reading them. Maybe I'm being too harsh.

—sick of feeling sorry for her—

No. I'm doing the right thing.

The door hinges creak a little as Mom peeks into my room yet again. “Okay, Sunny honey?”

“Fine, Mom,” I mutter.

When she shuts the door, I sit up and fumble my feet into my fuzzy slippers. I took another day off school today, but it's time to make an appearance downstairs and pretend everything's normal, pretend I'm feeling better. I don't want to have to talk to my parents about this. How can I? How could I explain it?

Who tells their parents they might have ESP?

Whatever was happening to Shiri, she didn't tell her parents either.

Downstairs, I plop myself on the couch in front of the TV and try to lose myself in an hour-long hospital drama, hoping it'll keep me from thinking about how I'm either a freak or crazy, and how I probably don't have friends anymore. Instead, I have to bite my lip so I don't cry. I've had it with crying. It's not going to change anything.

After a little while, Dad comes in and sits next to me. He holds up the remote and gives me a questioning glance. I shrug. He changes the channel to an Angels game. It's utterly boring, and perfect. I lean back against the cushions and stare vacantly at the screen, my eyes half-closed, watching statistics scroll by and portly guys standing around in the outfield scratching their butts. Some guy with an ugly mustache hits a triple, and my dad says an “a-
ha!
” of approval. Mom is rattling pots and pans around in the kitchen, washing dishes and getting dinner together, but it's only background noise. Before I know it, an hour has passed.

Maybe this is why Dad watches so much baseball. You don't have to think.

After a late dinner I go upstairs to my room, then spend a minute debating with myself whether to turn on the clock radio or put in my earbuds. For now, I settle on the clock radio. I tune it to a rock station and turn it up loud. All part of the strategy so I won't “underhear” any more horrible nasty thoughts I never wanted to know.

I try to catch up on French homework, but my eyelids start to droop even though I slept a lot today. Then I realize it's Friday and I have the whole weekend to do it. So I put my notebook away and, on impulse, pull my laptop o
ver and open a search window.

“What to do if you hear thoughts,” I type, and click Go.

Big mistake. I give up after scouring five pages of results. Apparently my most likely scenarios are that God is speaking to me or I'm going crazy.

I can't accept either of those answers.

But I do find a website with tips to help people relax their minds and go to sleep, and I could really use that right now since I'm keyed up again. I skim the page, then open the top drawer of my nightstand and pull out a long teakwood incense burner and a package of lavender incense sticks that Mom gave me on my last birthday.

I turn off the radio and slip my earbuds in with the volume set to low. Then I lie back on my bed, trying to clear my mind and focus on the swirls of smoke, the feeling of my breath going in and out of my nose, the smoky floral smell of the incense, the sound of quiet, slow guitar music strumming in my ears. After a while the incense makes my throat scratchy and I have a coughing fit.

I reach for my water glass and wonder if I should try some of my dad's incense from Pakistan, the pungent-smelling
agarbatti
sticks; and just like that I'm thinking of Shiri again. Of how I used to escape from my parents' embarrassing Saturday yoga group in our living room and hop in the car with Shiri and Auntie Mina on a trek to India Sweets and Spices … hot samosas from the deli counter, the air in the tiny shop filled with competing scents of incense and cardamom and fried goodies and a million other things; the three of us pointing and giggling at all the melodramatic Bollywood movie posters on the walls. That's never going to happen again.

I wonder if Shiri ever thought about those times. If she did, she didn't write about them in her journal. But I can't stop thinking about them. Even if the memories make my heart twist every time I relive them.

I smile a little, bitterly. When we were kids, Shiri and I used to hide up in the big tree in her parents' backyard, our legs dangling off the biggest branch, and talk about what special powers we'd have if we were superheroes. The
one thing we both agreed would be great was to know what other people were thinking.

Now that I've heard what other people think, I'm realizing it's not so great. My own thoughts and memories—those are more than enough. But I can't help wondering, in some deep dark part of me, what if I'd been able to hear Shiri's thoughts? Would I have been able to do something to help her? Or at least maybe understand?

Monday morning is grayish and overcast, but not too cold. Typical early November. My motivation for getting dressed for school is severely limited, so I throw on an old green Yosemite sweatshirt, then pull my hair back into a loose braid and cover it with a faded baseball cap of my dad's with some Led Zeppelin symbols on it. My wardrobe is the least of my worries today. Today is the first day of the rest of my life, as they say—the first day of sitting alone at lunch and watching my former friends having a great time without me. Clearly they haven't been having a good time
with
me.

Maybe I'm not being fair. But midway through my drive to school, I have a moment of sad epiphany. Nobody called me before the beach barbecue Saturday to see if I was going. Except for a drunk text from Spike late that night, nobody seemed to care that I didn't show up. No call from Cassie saying “Are you okay, Sunny Bunny? We missed you.” No call from Elisa to fill me in on James and Eyes-Front's goofy exploits, or to tell me Evan still looked as hot as I remembered. Spike called yesterday to ask if I was feeling better—as if I'd come down with a virus and it would be gone next week.

As if. By the time I pull into the school parking lot, I'm fuming.

My first class is French. Eyes-Front is in that class, and at first I can't even look at him. Unfortunately, Mrs. Lam pairs us up for conversation exercises.

“Monsieur Marc avec Mademoiselle Soleil, s'il vous plait, merci,” she chirps, tapping on each of our desks with a burgundy-painted fingernail as she walks by.
Soleil
is “sun,” of course. Mrs. Lam tries to give everyone a French nickname. We normally hassle each other the whole time about “Soleil” and “Marrrc” when we're doing work in pairs, but today we hardly talk. Eyes-Front doesn't meet my eyes—or anything else, for that matter—for more than a second at a time, and there's no extraneous conversation. To me, this is confirmation that Cassie has been talking about me behind my back and that I shouldn't expect any of those dumb guys to jump to my defense. But it hurts.

I really thought they were my friends. Stupid me.

By the time lunch rolls around, I have a serious stomachache. Still, out of habit, I get in line at the pizza cart parked at the edge of the quad. When I glance behind me, the whole gang is sitting at our usual table, laughing and talking like nothing's out of the ordinary. I can easily guess what's going on: Elisa is wondering out loud which of her many club meetings to go to. Eyes-Front is staring at Elisa's chest. Spike is re-gelling his hair and teasing Elisa for being such a geek. James is not-so-surreptitiously trying to show off his latest pair of expensive brand-name sneakers, which his parents regularly buy for him. And Cassie … Cassie glances up and sees me looking at her. She quickly looks away again. She seems quiet; sorry. Maybe things will be okay. If I go over and sit with them and pretend nothing happened … a tingle of hope zings through me.

As I'm watching, Cassie says something. Suddenly, they all look up. At me. Cassie stares at me almost challengingly. Without breaking eye contact, she makes some other comment to the group. Then she starts giggling, a high-pitched, annoying sound that carries all the way to where I'm standing. The wanna-be gangster behind me in the pizza line turns his head, looking around. James and Elisa grin, and Marc even lets out his braying donkey laugh. My face goes hot, and I hope the people around me don't realize I'm the one being laughed at.

Spike is the only one not joining in. Feeling desperate, I try to catch his eye, but he looks away. He crumples up his empty brown bag, picks up his backpack, and heads off toward the volleyball court. My jaw clenches involuntarily. Why isn't anybody standing up for me? For an instant I have this intense wish, like an ache in my chest, to know what they said. Maybe it was something perfectly innocent, completely unrelated to me. Then I change my mind. I don't
want
to know what they said. Thinking about that moment with Cassie on Friday, I realize that knowing for sure is infinitely worse.

—what is her problem? we didn't do anything—

I flinch and turn away.

As I wait, it starts to drizzle, which is just perfect, but I don't even care if my hair goes flat. It's as hideous as it can get already. I'm surprised I didn't underhear Cassie saying something bitchy about
that
. Despite myself, I reach back to straighten my ponytail, then let my hands drop to my sides.

I've been part of that group for more than two years. The first day of ninth grade, Shiri and I met up with Tessa and Cassie near the back parking lot, and Cassie introduced me to her friends. I introduced her to Spike. That day at lunch, we were all so nervous that we tried to identify something weird, or goofy, or embarrassing about each person we saw so that we wouldn't feel so out of place ourselves. “
Look at that guy—can you believe he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt? Check out Tracie. She's had the same hairstyle since the fifth grade.”
When I think back on it now, I cringe.

But I thought they actually liked me for
me
, not because I was cool Shiri's cousin or because we just happened to be on the swim team together.

I guess I was wrong.

I'm a big girl now, though. I can do without them. When I get to the front of the line I pay for my pizza, grab the little box, and brave the drizzle with a surge of angry energy.

I don't need them. I'll just find a new place to eat lunch, preferably someplace with nobody around to laugh at me.

I jam my dad's cap down further on my head and do my best to shield the pizza box with my arm as I make a quick, damp circuit of the campus. Everywhere seems to be already occupied. Even the bleachers at the far end of the football field are taken over by the stoners, who are sitting underneath smoking cigarettes and talking about some band they all saw over the weekend. When I peer in at them, they look at me like I've lost my mind. If they only knew.