All around us people were shuffling in and out of seats. I stood up as if in a daze and followed my mother through the swinging doors. In spite of the air conditioning, the place felt hot. The hallway was loud and crowded and as I stepped aside to let someone through to the courtroom I found myself face to face with A.J. He looked the same as he had in high school, tall and blond, except that his face had filled out over the last ten years. In his crisp black suit and red tie, he could have passed for a businessman who had come here for a minor transgression, a traffic-ticket challenge or a hunting-permit violation, but the effect was contradicted by the presence of his mother, who carried the sleeping toddler in her arms, and the young woman who was rummaging through her purse. “A.J., honey,” she said, “I can’t find my keys.”
But A.J. didn’t hear her; he was staring at me. Then he detached himself from the group and crossed the hallway. “Nora,” he called.
Jeremy
“So what did you say?” I asked. I was leaning against the kitchen counter, watching her stir a stew in the pot. Three silver bracelets jingled on her wrist with each turn of the wooden spoon. She was still in the white blouse and gray pants she’d worn that morning to court and her hair was tied in a bun. Such a different look on her. So formal. Severe, even. I’d wanted to take her to dinner that night, but she said she wasn’t in a mood to go out, and suggested that we eat here, in the cabin.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just stood there like an idiot. I was petrified. You remember what A.J. was like.” She told me about the slur he’d written in blue marker on her locker. The principal had made him wash it off and apologize, but didn’t suspend him; the school’s wrestling team was competing that weekend.
The strange thing was that I could barely remember this particular incident; it had happened the year I’d lost my mother, when school was little more than a blur. The memories I had of Nora were from a later time. They were like little treasures I’d saved up in a box: how her skirt hiked up her legs when she sat down at the piano in music class; how she’d throw her head back and laugh when she and Sonya were at the ice-cream parlor together; that time she’d stood under my umbrella, her hair spilling over my arm while we waited for the school bus to take us to Big Bear Lake.
“And he wrote it without the second a,” she said. “He couldn’t even spell raghead.”
It was a word I’d heard nearly every day when I was in Iraq. Hell, I’d used it myself. Around the chow table that kind of talk was common. Hajji. Camel jockey. Dune coon. Ali Baba. One guy in my platoon even called Iraqis monkeys and savages. Back then I had thought of this behavior, if I’d thought of it at all, as part of the war: we had to dehumanize the enemy in order to fight it. But now, hearing her talk about the slur on her locker, I felt shame overtake me, followed by a private rebellion. This wasn’t the same thing, and I sure as hell wasn’t like A.J. “I’m sorry,” I said, touching her elbow, where the scrape from the other night had scabbed.
“I remember we had health class together once,” she said. “The teacher was talking about genital warts and A.J. said, ‘My mom gets them all the time.’ I was kind of stunned, so I turned to look at him. He pointed to the corner of his mouth. ‘She gets them right here,’ he said. I laughed—I couldn’t help it—I laughed. I said, ‘That’s not what genital means.’ After that, he hated me even more. And then a few days after 9/11, he defaced my locker.”
A memory surfaced. “He used to call me Jabba,” I said.
“Jabba?”
“Like Jabba the Hut. Because I was fat.” Even at a distance of many years, the insult still stung. I could still hear A.J.’s voice behind me in algebra