Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know - Samira Ahmed Page 0,7
me flowers in the first place. Another obvious sign I chose to ignore. When he finally headed back, he walked over with the new neighbor, so engrossed in conversation with her that he seemed startled when I appeared.
I want to say it was like the scene in a rom-com when the girl finally realizes that the guy she thought was the one is only just the one before:
Zaid
Oh . . . Khayyam! This
(points to lithe, gorgeous girl)
is the new neighbor.
New neighbor
(waves)
Hey!
(Awkward pause, feet shuffling.)
Zaid
And this is my . . . friend, Khayyam.
Khayyam
(gulps, pulls knife out of heart)
Is that for me?
(Points to orchid wrist corsage in
plastic box.)
Zaid
(chuckles nervously)
Yeah. Yes. Here you go!
(Hands Khayyam the box.)
Camera pans from box to Khayyam’s enraged face. She throws the box on the ground and walks away. Zaid calls her name, but she doesn’t turn back, and he falls out of focus. Camera zooms in on Khayyam as she walks off into the sunset, a smile spreading across her face.
END SCENE.
But that’s not how it played out.
I took the box, slipped the corsage over my wrist, and went to prom with Zaid, where we danced and laughed and I pretended I didn’t feel the point of that dagger in my heart. Julie gave him the stink-eye all night long; I’m surprised she didn’t sucker punch him on my behalf.
In hindsight, it all should’ve been obvious. Zaid and I never had a firm status agreement. We never called ourselves a couple out loud. At least, he didn’t. It always felt like there would be more—there were intimations of things to come, like whispered plans to backpack across Europe while we held hands at the Point or suggestions of me visiting him at college while we snuggled in the hollow of Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy. I wanted to believe it all because we fit perfectly in the chiseled space of that sculpture, arms and legs intertwined. Because when we first kissed under the ‘L’ tracks, it felt like we’d invented the idea of kissing. Because sometimes we’d sit on my back porch doing physics homework and Zaid would ask if I was Bohr’d and then smile at me, and I knew I could listen to his corny dad jokes forever.
A catastrophic inability to grasp obvious facts. Remember? I was reading between the lines when there was nothing to see but blank space.
Now Zaid’s off to Reed College in a few weeks, where he’s going to be majoring in environmental studies and smoking pot, and I’m . . . here. Afraid to text him. Scared to admit what Rekha’s Instagram screams at me, that the one person I thought was closer to me than anyone in the world seems to have forgotten I exist.
To add salt to the wound, Alexandre is apparently ghosting me, too.
When we exchanged numbers yesterday, he said he wanted to meet up again today. I swear we had a moment. Moments. Sparkly eyed glimpses of what could be. Still, I’m stuck in the moments with Zaid that have been. Maybe it’s my fatal flaw: I’m always in the Past or the Future and never in the Now.
“That’s three long sighs in a row,” my mom says, peeking around her newspaper from our little balcony, the afternoon light streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
I wasn’t even aware that I’d sighed out loud.
Mom is staring at me expectantly over her bright red cat-eye reading glasses, her graying brown hair unfurling from her loose bun. When I don’t say anything, she puts down the paper and rises from her seat, stepping through the patio doors into the room. Every August when we’re in Paris—annual time away from her job as Professor of Medieval Islamic Civilizations at the University of Chicago—she reads an actual newspaper. Not a digital edition but real ink and paper. She says human beings are becoming too detached from the simple pleasure of tangible things in our world. It’s why she adores