eventually changed to hand-squeezes, pats on the shoulder. On the bus
rides to and from school, Mariya began sitting with the fifth graders,
casual and natural in her conversations.
“I love the Backstreet Boys,” I heard her croon, even though she
reviled pop music to our parents every evening. “They’re so cute.”
“I just want to meet people my own age,” she said when I complained to her after school, walking home from the bus stop. “I always see
you. We live together. We can play anytime!”
And though I found her logic seamless, for the first time I noticed the long pauses in my own conversations with new people; I grew
uncomfortable while playing alone at recess. I found a different girl to
sit next to on the bus, one who scooted closer to the window when I sat
down. It took weeks before she responded to my feeble attempts at conversation.
One day in October, I ran to Mariya at the beginning of recess
with my arms extended, having just undergone and failed some fourthgrade academic trauma. Mariya was already crouched in position on the
foursquare court; when I approached, she closed her fists around my open
arms to stop me.
“Not now, Aisha!” she snapped, her eyebrows raised, face scarlet.
“You’re embarrassing me!”
I felt the rejection in my gut, as if she had taken a baseball bat
to my stomach. My face warmed. I turned, scrambling across the playground towards the swings, where I put my face in my hands and cried
as silently as I could manage. I thought about how Mariya had grown so
cold to me, and I wondered why. With a bleary gaze, I watched her—petite Mariya ramming the rubber ball against the blacktop, laughing and
sneering at the kids she knocked out of the game. Perhaps she jeered at
me a little, too—I who had lived for almost my whole life in the company of these same children, but still did not feel so at home. What
prevented my classmates from swarming around me? When did I start
caring about the way they didn’t? This was Mariya’s witchcraft, I decided,
this was her curse against me. For the first time, I felt something sour. It
started as the soreness of my stomach, the bruise of the blow, and over the
days and weeks and months, began to grow.
“She is taking you for granted,” my mother explained one day
after school on the doorstep. We watched as Mariya played soccer with
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