Read Online Everything Was Good-Bye by Gurjinder Basran - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gurjinder Basran
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to the school. Needless to say, I was expelled the following week.”
I laughed even though I felt a pang of jealousy in my stomach. “So this Jennifer person, was she your girlfriend?” I sat down next to him, my thigh brushing his.
“No, I’ve never had a steady girlfriend. But there is this girl I like.” His palm grazed my leg. I stared at it, half expecting it to have left a mark.
My voice caught in my throat and rattled out, “Really?” I tried to seem disinterested and flung my legs over the side of the bed, my back to him as I picked up an encyclopedia and flipped through the pages for a few minutes. “You should tell her.”
“I’ve thought about it. But if I told her that I like her then everything may change. I may lose her—I don’t think I could survive that.”
I stopped flipping pages, tentative and almost frightened as I turned towards him. “Yeah, but if you never tell her, you won’t know if she feels the same way.”
He stared at me until the slightest smile formed on his lips. “She’ll know it by what I don’t say.”
I picked up an encyclopedia and lay down on my stomach next to him, both of us quietly flipping through pages, not reading a word.
As I walked home I wondered if the aunties on the street had seen me leave Liam’s house, and if they did, whether they would report back to my mother. My sisters and I referred to them as the Indian Intelligence Association. As members of the iia they were induced by their morals to spend their afternoons looking out windows, gathering gossip and deli-ciousdetails that they spread through a game of broken telephone. They were a blend of town crier and gossip columnist who spun stories like webs, occasionally devouring victims like my sister Harj.
Two years before, she’d been walking home from the bus stop when a group of dips in a yellow Trans Am followed her home. They’d been following her every day for a week and every day she’d come home in tears, too ashamed to repeat the things they had said. She knew not to turn around, not to pay them any attention, but the sound of their car rolling over the gravel made her skin prick with fear and like animals, they sensed it. It was the only encouragement they needed that day.
They pulled their car up beside her and one of the boys jumped out, grabbing the back of her arm, pulling her against his body, laughing as she begged for him to let her go. The aunties must have watched from behind their sheer living-room draperies, they must have heard her cries, they must have seen the trail of dirt and stones as the car careened away, because when she came home my mother had already been told that my sister had gotten in a car with a group of boys.
Harj tried to explain what had happened, that she had been grabbed, driven to an empty lot… Her words fell back, swallowed in open-mouthed sobs. My mother slapped her. “Stop it! Stop it! Not another word!” she’d yelled. Serena rushed to Harj’s side to save her from more injury. My mother dropped her hand, her eyes full of the questions she saved for God.
Harj, who had studied sociology in university, once told me that we were a natural target for judgments: a family already wounded was easy prey for a community that often turned on itself. She ran away a few months later. Despite my mother’s attempts at reconciliation, she would not return home. Tej and I visited her once, and though we were appalled by the squalor of her Eastside apartment—the mousetraps in the corner, the red-bricked views, the black mildew on thin-paned windows—we said nothing of it. Her roommate, who I later realized was her boyfriend, was sitting on a plastic patio chair by the window, chain-smoking cigarettes. Harj didn’t introduce us; she acted like he wasn’t even there and made us jasmine tea from small green packets she had taken from the Chinese restaurant she worked in. “So how is Mom… Serena… A.J.?” She asked aftereveryone, the way we were
I laughed even though I felt a pang of jealousy in my stomach. “So this Jennifer person, was she your girlfriend?” I sat down next to him, my thigh brushing his.
“No, I’ve never had a steady girlfriend. But there is this girl I like.” His palm grazed my leg. I stared at it, half expecting it to have left a mark.
My voice caught in my throat and rattled out, “Really?” I tried to seem disinterested and flung my legs over the side of the bed, my back to him as I picked up an encyclopedia and flipped through the pages for a few minutes. “You should tell her.”
“I’ve thought about it. But if I told her that I like her then everything may change. I may lose her—I don’t think I could survive that.”
I stopped flipping pages, tentative and almost frightened as I turned towards him. “Yeah, but if you never tell her, you won’t know if she feels the same way.”
He stared at me until the slightest smile formed on his lips. “She’ll know it by what I don’t say.”
I picked up an encyclopedia and lay down on my stomach next to him, both of us quietly flipping through pages, not reading a word.
As I walked home I wondered if the aunties on the street had seen me leave Liam’s house, and if they did, whether they would report back to my mother. My sisters and I referred to them as the Indian Intelligence Association. As members of the iia they were induced by their morals to spend their afternoons looking out windows, gathering gossip and deli-ciousdetails that they spread through a game of broken telephone. They were a blend of town crier and gossip columnist who spun stories like webs, occasionally devouring victims like my sister Harj.
Two years before, she’d been walking home from the bus stop when a group of dips in a yellow Trans Am followed her home. They’d been following her every day for a week and every day she’d come home in tears, too ashamed to repeat the things they had said. She knew not to turn around, not to pay them any attention, but the sound of their car rolling over the gravel made her skin prick with fear and like animals, they sensed it. It was the only encouragement they needed that day.
They pulled their car up beside her and one of the boys jumped out, grabbing the back of her arm, pulling her against his body, laughing as she begged for him to let her go. The aunties must have watched from behind their sheer living-room draperies, they must have heard her cries, they must have seen the trail of dirt and stones as the car careened away, because when she came home my mother had already been told that my sister had gotten in a car with a group of boys.
Harj tried to explain what had happened, that she had been grabbed, driven to an empty lot… Her words fell back, swallowed in open-mouthed sobs. My mother slapped her. “Stop it! Stop it! Not another word!” she’d yelled. Serena rushed to Harj’s side to save her from more injury. My mother dropped her hand, her eyes full of the questions she saved for God.
Harj, who had studied sociology in university, once told me that we were a natural target for judgments: a family already wounded was easy prey for a community that often turned on itself. She ran away a few months later. Despite my mother’s attempts at reconciliation, she would not return home. Tej and I visited her once, and though we were appalled by the squalor of her Eastside apartment—the mousetraps in the corner, the red-bricked views, the black mildew on thin-paned windows—we said nothing of it. Her roommate, who I later realized was her boyfriend, was sitting on a plastic patio chair by the window, chain-smoking cigarettes. Harj didn’t introduce us; she acted like he wasn’t even there and made us jasmine tea from small green packets she had taken from the Chinese restaurant she worked in. “So how is Mom… Serena… A.J.?” She asked aftereveryone, the way we were
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