Eight

Meena, if you’re the least bit cool you’ll skip this part. I’m going to have to pretend you’ll mind me, because otherwise I’m never going to be able to write it. Okay?

Okay. In the spring, the girl who’d sat next to me in Lower Third form room dropped out because her father got a job in Namibia or somewhere, and Meena Chari moved down a row. We hadn’t spoken two words to each other that whole first term, even on the bus. Not because she was Indian or anything, but because she was so pretty. I don’t mean knock-down, drop-dead, movie-star gorgeous, like Stacy Altieri back home—Meena doesn’t look like that at all. But she’s got this incredibly smooth brown skin, which wouldn’t know a zit from a jelly bean, and big dark eyes like pansies, even behind her glasses. And even in that school uniform, Meena’s always really wearing some elegant sari—you can tell by the way she moves. You had just better not be reading this, Meena!

I don’t go around with girls who look like Meena, that’s one decision I made early on. A lot of girls do—at Gaynor, people like Tracy and Vanessa had their own little packs of groupies, all hoping it would rub off on them somehow, or that boys would try to get to the pretty ones through them. Which happened, I’m not saying it didn’t work, but I couldn’t. I just hung with Jake and Marta and was glad I had them.

But Meena. What are you going to do with someone like Meena, who doesn’t know the rules about things, who doesn’t act pretty? I know, right—when you look the way Meena looks, you can afford not to care, but she really doesn’t. Girls mostly think she’s conceited, and boys are mostly afraid of her, because she gets perfect marks and she’s going to be a doctor, like her grandfather. She’s as cool and neat as I’m hot-tempered and sloppy, and it was a long time before I could start to believe that she actually wanted to be friends with me. Nothing to do with modesty—I just understand the rules.

We’ve talked about it a couple of times. The first time, she took forever to get what I was asking. She kept saying, “Why shouldn’t we be friends, tell me that? We like the same books, the same kind of music, we laugh the same—we have so much in common, you might as well have been born in Madras, or I in New York.” Meena talks like that. Her mother and father have Indian accents, but with Meena it’s not the way her English sounds, but the way she uses it. Same thing as the uniform—you see one thing, or you hear one thing, but you feel something else. And Meena doesn’t even think about it.

When she finally caught onto what I meant, she didn’t answer right away. She put her hands together and rested her chin on her fingertips, and she looked at the ground for a long time. Then she looked up at me, and she said, “Because I’m a very good girl. I’m an only child, and I’m everything my mother and father ever dreamed about. Very good student, perfect English, perfect manners—presentable enough, yes—right on track for a double First at Cambridge, where we always go. Nice if I were fair-skinned— you get a better choice of husbands that way—but there, you can’t have it all, Jenny, do you see now?”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think I do.” What I thought was that I probably ought to be angry, and I was trying to work up to it. “You mean I’m your absolute opposite—I’m so different from you I’m like a novelty? Like that?”

Meena looked as though I’d hit her. “Not that! Not that, no!” She jumped up and grabbed both my hands. “You have such spirit, you make your own plans—you wouldn’t go along with what everyone else wanted, just so they’d go on thinking you were a good girl. You don’t care what anybody thinks—that’s what I admire so much about you. I wish I were like you, Jenny truly.”

Nobody else in my whole life had even come near saying something like that to me. Nobody. I told Meena so, but as smart as she is, there’s no way she could ever really know what it meant when she said that. Meena understands a lot, but if she understood something like this, she couldn’t be Meena. That’s just the way things get set up.

Anyway. We first got to be friends when we both hid out in the girls’ john, ducking Games, and then later when Meena started helping me with Spanish and I helped her with a music project she was doing, comparing the way Indian singers improvise with how Western jazz singers do it. Once I told her it didn’t count like helping, because of my parents being musicians, and she got really angry with me. She said friendship wasn’t a bloody cricket match, you didn’t keep score, there wasn’t a point system. I almost like watching Meena being mad, because she does it so well, considering it lasts maybe five minutes, no more. Meena can’t ever work up a good sulk.

She lives just outside Yeovil—her mother’s at the hospital there, and her father commutes to Dorchester to teach physics at the university. The first time I ever went to stay overnight at Meena’s house, I was edgy because I didn’t know if I should be different with Meena there than I was when it was just us, and she was edgy about how her parents would be with me. And they were edgy because Meena hadn’t brought anyone home from school before, and they didn’t know if I could eat Indian food, or how Jews were about graven images and shrines in the front hall. So between us we had the makings of a real disaster, but it worked out all right. Mr. and Mrs. Chari were as nice as they could be to their daughter’s weird American friend, and I didn’t knock anything over or say anything really stupid. And I know about Indian food—I’m from New York, for God’s sake.

So it was a lot easier when Meena came to spend a weekend at Stourhead Farm. Tony and Julian fell in love with her the moment she walked in the door—okay, I was a little jealous, especially watching Julian following her around, offering to carry things for her—and I couldn’t help thinking, I bet Sally wishes I looked like that and acted like that. But I was proud of her, too, —she’s my friend, what’s that make me? —and at the same time I felt guilty that I wasn’t ever like that with Jake and Marta. Some days there’s no damn way I can let myself alone.

Evan was out with a well-driller, and Sally was with the vet about some of the sheep, so Tony and Julian took Meena around the Manor, with me wandering along behind. Tony showed her the ground-floor room in the east wing that he’d been turning into a dance studio—he even had a bar on one wall, and he was putting up every piece of mirror glass he could find, fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. He was sanding the floor, too, on weekends, over and over, till it was practically transparent. So then, of course, Julian had to show Meena his rock collection, and his pressed-leaf collection, and his sugar-packet collection. And the stuffed gorilla in my room, but he never once mentioned that it was really his. Julian. I still can’t get him to take it back.

At dinner the boys were both talking to Meena at the same time, and Evan and Sally were asking her the same school questions Mr. and Mrs. Chari had been asking me. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her in peace until we went to bed in my room. And then it took me half an hour to talk Meena into taking my bed and letting me get into Evan’s old sleeping bag on the floor. Indians keep wanting to treat you like their guest, even when they’re yours. They can wear you out.

But then, finally, we got down to business. We lay there and talked about our families, and people at school, and I told Meena about Jake and Marta, and she told me about Lalitha, who was her best friend in Madras, and we compared books and movies and songs, and who had worse periods, and who hated Mr. Winship more—he taught Organic Chemistry—and why the monsoons are so important, and why I was going to take her to meet an old man they call Poet O in Central Park. Today it’s just a few years later, and already I can’t remember why, when you’re thirteen, all that stuff absolutely has to be talked about in the dark, when you’re supposed to be asleep. But it does.