* * *
— — —
That Harun is a coward is not up for debate.
When he saw the girl fall from the bridge onto the boy below, what was his first impulse? Was it to run to their aid? To call an ambulance? To get help?
No, it was to flee.
Again, to restate: his cowardice is not up for debate.
The reason Harun wanted to run, initially, was that he had this terrible feeling that the accident was his fault. Moments before, he had been essentially cursing both of those people for not being James. Even if he had not asked for it in so many words, he had asked for it in intention—which is, he knows, what God listens to. People lie all the time about what they want, but intentions are pure.
So at first, he had stood by and tried to think of the appropriate prayer to say when you accidentally ask God to do something bad to other people. As’alu Allah al ’azim rabbil ’arshil ’azim an yashifika was all he came up with, asking Allah to cure them. (He’s given up asking that for himself.)
But he would like the record to show, when he saw the heap of bodies, imagining them both dead, or at the very least gravely injured by his thoughts, he snapped himself out of his fugue state and walked closer, planning to Do the Right Thing—administer CPR, call 911, say the correct prayer.
But at that particular point, the bodies disentangled and the young female portion of the heap sat up. He was close, close enough to see her face: the sharp cheekbones, the prominent oval eyes, the regal neck. And then she’d asked him for his help. With that voice.
“One day, we’ll meet her,” James used to say as they huddled around his phone, watching one of her videos. “We’ll tell her how we’re her first, biggest fans. She’ll be famous, bigger than Beyoncé, but we’ll be best friends. She’ll sing at our wedding.”
Statements like that took Harun’s breath away. It seemed daring enough for him to imagine a future with James, let alone things like a wedding, let alone a wedding where James’s favorite singer, whom they’d never met, would sing.
Now, as he watches her throw away her shoes and rinse her feet with a bottle of Poland Spring, he has three thoughts.
The first is: It can’t be her. There is simply no way. Not this person, in this park, on this day. He is conjuring her as a way to bring back James.
His second thought: James, whose last words to me were Get the fuck out my life.
His third thought: If it is her, James will have to forgive me.
The young man he’s holding heaves against Harun, and Harun turns his glance away from her to him. Him, he now sees, is very good-looking, the kind of pretty white boy James called a “confection.”
“I’m all good,” the confection keeps saying, even as he sways like a green tree in a strong gale.
She (he can’t bring himself to even think her name) returns, barefoot, and takes hold of her half of the swaying tree of a confection. Harun can’t look at her face, so he stares at her feet. Which are still wet.
“Thanks for your help,” she says in that husky voice of hers.
“Uhh,” says Harun.
“It’s all good,” the swaying tree of a confection says.
It doesn’t look all good to Harun. Aside from the swaying, there’s the eyes. Two different colors. Can a fall do that?
“Is there someone we can call?” she asks.
James, thinks Harun. But no, this isn’t about him. He turns to the swaying tree, who is squinting as if someone just asked him the square root of 17,432.
“Dad?” Nathaniel says at last.
“Dad. So your father’s here?” she asks.
Nathaniel sways and nods.
“Do you have a way to contact him?”
Harun sees the phone on the path, alongside the other spilled contents of his backpack. He scrambles to pick it up. “Perhaps you can call?”
The swaying tree opens the phone, one of those ancient flip numbers, and presses a button. It rings loudly enough for them all to hear. The voicemail picks up. A man’s voice: “Tell me something good.”
The command irks Harun. What if there’s nothing good to tell? What then?
There’s a long beep, followed by a robotic voice that informs them the voicemail box is full, and Harun understands he must be in the minority, that lots of people have had so many good things to share that the voicemail box is full of glad tidings.
“I think we should probably get you to a hospital, Nathaniel,” she says, turning to Harun. “He seems pretty out of it.”
Well, a human being did fall on him. And even though that human is her (he’s almost certain), it must have hurt. Harun suspects the boy is concussed. Abdullah got hit with a cricket bat once and could not remember their address or his birth date.
“What do you think?” she asks.
It takes Harun a moment to realize she is asking him for his opinion. He responds, helpfully, with another “Uhhh . . .”
“Do you think you could see if there’s one nearby?”
“Yes, yes, hospital, hospital,” Harun says, his speech returning to him in double. He pulls out his phone, enormously relieved to have a focus for his attention that is not her. But his thumb has a mind of its own, because it’s hovering over the text app, so tempted to tell James whom he is with, to snap a surreptitious picture. Surely, if James knew, he would relent. He would take him back.
“Did you find one?” she asks, and Harun feels his ears go red because this poor boy is clearly unwell and he is still thinking about James. Will he ever not be? Amir has promised him yes, that one day he will look back and not believe this happened. It will be wiped from the record.
He prays so.
He prays not.
She clears her throat.
He scuttles to the map, finds an urgent care clinic. “Yes, yes. There’s one on Columbus Avenue. It says it’s about a quarter mile from here by foot.”
“Can you walk that far?” she asks Nathaniel. “If we help you?”
“We?” Harun blurts out in joy and relief and realizes, too late, that it sounds as if he is objecting to helping when it’s the we that has tripped him up. “Yes, yes. Of course, of course. We will. We will.”
“Really, you don’t have to,” Nathaniel says. “It’s all good.”
“I’m sure it is, but let’s get you checked out by a doctor,” she says. She bends down to pick up the rest of the contents of his backpack, as if she were a normal human being and not her.
Harun should help—he is merely an ordinary person—but seeing the boxers, the books, the T-shirts makes him flash on the suitcase that Ammi has lovingly packed for him, full of new clothes, a new kurta, gifts. And when he does, he is paralyzed by shame. And here he had thought he had plumbed the depths of his shame when, on the edge of this very park, James told him to get the fuck out of his life.
“Okay,” she says, hoisting the backpack onto her shoulder. “Let’s go.”
“Really, you don’t have to,” Nathaniel says. “I’m meeting my dad later. It’s all good.”
“Stop saying that!” Harun is surprised and also abashed by the harshness of his tone. He has no reason to be angry with this boy, who may not be James but who was just walking through the park, minding his own business, when he was fallen on top of. It’s not his fault if James asked Harun to believe that even if it wasn’t all good, it might be, when Harun knows, has always known, it wasn’t, it couldn’t be.
It’s the hoping that makes it hurt.
Harun knows that.
* * *
— — —
Nathaniel knows that.
* * *
— — —
Freya knows it too.
* * *
— — —
If she’s perfectly honest, Freya can admit that her intentions are not completely honorable either.
Now that the fog has cleared and she realizes what she’s done—fallen off the bridge while staring at images of her happy sister, who said yes, onto some guy below—her concern is less for his well-being than her own.
She sees the situation through her mother’s eyes—“He could sue us”—and Hayden’s eyes—“the wrong kind of publicity”—and though she generally finds her mother in particular to be not just preemptively paranoid about people wanting to sue Freya, but aspirationally so (dream it, be it), Freya is properly assessing the situation.
She fell off a bridge, onto an innocent bystander. Some other guy watched the whole thing. He has a phone in his hand. For all she knows, he has the entire thing on video and is just waiting to email the photos to some gossip website or post them on Twitter. How many hits would that get? The one thing people love more than witnessing a success is watching a downfall.
The guy she fell on doesn’t seem to recognize her (he doesn’t seem to recognize himself), but the Lurker does. Back when Freya was getting big enough to start getting negative comments, she sometimes engaged with the haters. Hey, I’m only human, she might say. Or: That hurt. And it was crazy because sometimes they backed down. It’s been a while since she’s done that. Hayden has told her not to respond to the fans so directly anymore. Not even to look at what they’re saying about her. “That’s my job now,” he’s said.
Still, the best way to defang someone is to kill them with kindness. Which is why she corralled the Lurker into helping get the guy, Nathaniel, to urgent care.
(It’s prudence, is all. It has nothing to do with the way her stomach flipped when Nathaniel touched her face.)
By the time they reach the urgent care clinic, Freya’s feet are black and her mood even darker. She realizes she has just roped herself into something stupid, yoked herself to these two people who could do her harm. She should’ve called the publicist, but she’s not sure she’ll take her calls anymore.
“What seems to be the issue?” the receptionist at the urgent care asks.
“We were in the park,” the Lurker explains, “and she fell off a bridge onto him and knocked him out.”
She can picture how this would all play out in the court of social media.
On her phone. Navel-gazing. Typical!
Used to like her, but she got 2 full of herself.
Truth.
Such a bitch.
U no she thru her sister under a .
The receptionist, with the bored expression of someone who has heard this particular story a dozen times today alone, hands them a clipboard with a sheaf of paperwork. “Fill this out, and I’ll need the insurance card.”
Freya turns to Nathaniel, who has not said more than two words aside from emptily reassuring them that it was all good, and she wonders if he’s brain damaged.
He was a brilliant mathematician, they would say. On the verge of curing cancer. Until she fell on him.
Another life ruined.
Hate that bitch.
“Insurance card,” the receptionist repeats. “Otherwise, I need payment up front for the appointment.”
“Do you have an insurance card?” Freya asks him. But the question does not seem to register at all. “Can I see your wallet?”
He hands it to her, and she rifles through. There’s the driver’s license, a bit of cash, the boarding pass, some business card, and, tucked into the torn lining, a creased photo strip. She peers at the picture of what is almost certainly a much younger Nathaniel and an older man who previews what Nathaniel might look like in another ten years—maybe his father? She feels a tug from deep inside, as if there were an invisible cord looped around the area where her heart should be.
She reaches into her wallet and pulls out her own credit card. She can hear her mother, Hayden, the publicists tell her that she has just provided a paper trail of her guilt. But I was just trying to do the right thing, she tells her invisible judges.
What do you know about the right thing?
Freya’s plan had been to get him here to an urgent care clinic and be on her dreary way, but now, hearing the invisible critics corner her (You paid for him because you were responsible), she cannot get away so easily. Sighing heavily, she leads Nathaniel to the seats and hands him the forms. The Lurker is still there. Maybe she can get him to leave his phone lying around so she can delete whatever pictures he took before they wind up a headline in the Post: Diva Ditches KO’d Pedestrian.
Who’s she kidding? She can’t sing, and if she can’t sing there won’t be fame, let alone celebrity or even buzz, and certainly no gossip items in the Post. The fans will disappear. And then . . .
She blinks hard, trying to dislodge the thought, and turns to Nathaniel, who’s staring at the clipboard as though it were written in hieroglyphics. At this rate, they’re going to be here all day. She snatches the clipboard away from him. “How about I fill that out for you?” she says, trying her best not to let her impatience seep through.
He nods.
The name she knows: Nathaniel Haley. “Address? Date of birth?”
“I don’t have one,” he says, and Freya thinks that he really is addled. He’s still holding his wallet, so she takes it back and removes his driver’s license, copying the pertinent info from there. Six foot two. Brown hair, green eyes. Nineteen years old. The address is just a state route in Washington, but when she writes it down, she pictures a house on the edge of a forest. She hears birds singing.
“Emergency contact?” she asks.
His face goes blank.
She fishes out the business card and reads the name: Hector Fuentes. Is that the man in the photo strip? “Hector Fuentes? Is that your father?” she asks, though Nathaniel doesn’t look like the kind of person who has a father named Hector Fuentes, but then again, Freya doesn’t look like the kind of person who has a mother named Nancy Greenberg.
Nathaniel hesitates for a moment, shakes his head.
“Can you tell me your father’s phone number?”
When he returns a blank look, she doesn’t blame him. Who remembers phone numbers anymore? She can get it off that ancient flip phone he used to call his father in the park, but she’s not sure how those phones work, so even though it implicates her further, she writes down her own number.
* * *
— — —
Harun listens to Freya quiz Nathaniel about allergies (shrimp). He feels left out. He wishes he had an allergy to offer. But he’s not allergic to anything, except perhaps himself. This is a thing. He looked it up once. It can be fatal.
“Have you had any of the following?” Freya—he’s sure it’s her now, he saw the credit card—lists a number of medical conditions. They include ailments like tuberculosis, arrhythmia, and emphysema, and Harun can’t help but notice that the most common maladies, the ones that will really hurt a person—corrosive shame, shattered heart, betrayed family—are not included.
She finishes the forms and turns them in. Harun knows that whatever use he might have had is expired, but she is his last chance at getting James back. What are the odds of them meeting, on this of all days? He must find a way to extend his usefulness.
The nurse calls Nathaniel’s name.
Freya says, “You’ll be okay?”
Nathaniel begins to answer, but Harun interrupts. “We should go with him. To talk to the doctor.”
Freya looks extremely unhappy about this, but, sighing, she stands and reluctantly follows.
* * *
— — —
They all three squeeze into the examination room, where, after the nurse takes Nathaniel’s vital signs, it becomes apparent that they are complete strangers with nothing in common and nothing to say to one another.
Awkward silence ensues as they each attempt to find some place in the small room to look that is not at one another.
Freya takes out her phone. The s
creen, she now sees, is cracked from the fall in the park, frozen on the image of her sister—she said yes!—with her stupid fiancé. The Lurker has his phone in his hand. Is he tweeting about her? Has he already posted pictures? She should check. She should tell someone. But she can’t bear it. She doesn’t want to know. She shuts off her screen but pretends to be busy on her phone so she can take a moment to surreptitiously size up her new companions.
The Lurker is jittery, big brown eyes popping out of brown skin a shade or two darker than hers. He exudes a sort of nervous energy that makes him look like a frightened animal and takes away from the fact that under all those jangling nerves is a cute guy, moderately well-dressed, trying desperately to play it cool.
The other one, Nathaniel, looks like the sort of person who’s never played it cool in his life. Looking like that, he wouldn’t need to. He’s the sort of attractive—tall and lanky and possessing bone structure people pay money for—that others need to play it cool around. Though not Freya. She has been inundated with beauty so much that she’s no longer impressed by it. She would be unimpressed by Nathaniel too were it not for the mismatched eyes, one green, one grayish. They mar his perfection. They make him breathtaking.
“You’re pretty enough,” Hayden told her once, “but it’s your voice that makes you distinctive.” It follows that without a voice she is indistinctive. She is nobody.
There’s a hard knock at the door as the doctor comes in. Freya scopes him out straightaway: young and toothily handsome but with a smug smile that wrecks everything.
“What seems to be the problem?” he asks.
It’s the same opening the doctor used earlier that day. Why do they ask that? Can’t they just read the forms? Only this time there is no Freya’s mother to step into the maw with the explanation, and Nathaniel remains mute.
“We were in the park,” Freya begins. “And I sort of fell off a bridge, onto Nathaniel.”
“You fell off a bridge? Did you faint?”
“No,” Freya says. She wonders if she should’ve said she did faint, because this would make her seem less culpable. Not her fault, they would tweet. She fell after fainting. Poor thing. Lost her voice, you know. “I just lost my balance.”