16
Homecomings
ESTIMATE REQUIRED TO FULLY UNPACK ONE WEEK OF CLOTHES: Three weeks.
ALLOTTED TIME TO CATCH UP WITH MOM: Forty minutes, tops.
CATCHING UP ON HOMEWORK: TBD.
CATCHING UP WITH PSEUDOGIRLFRIEND: As soon as possible.
Gah. God. No. Why?
The Austin sun was right where Norris had left it, which was to say, high and bright. It was as if it had been hitting the gym, unfiltered cigarette clenched between its teeth, waiting to give Norris the pummeling of his life. His sweating was back with a vengeance.
“You have to make sure to bundle up! Your body is adjusting from Vancouver weather to this,” Judith worried, one hand on the steering wheel and the other instinctively tugging Norris’s open shirt collar closed. “That’s the perfect recipe for catching a cold. Winter is over here.”
“When was winter?” Norris coughed.
“That one and a half weeks of rain, I think,” Judith said, as they sat in a particularly clogged artery of traffic on their way home from the airport. “That was the winter. Did you and Eric have a good time?”
“Yeah, it was really fun.” Norris nodded. “I missed him,” he added uncharacteristically. It just kind of slipped out.
“I know,” Judith said pointedly, raising a momentary eyebrow at the fruit of her loins. “Élaine called me to check on things for this Whistler getaway. We spent a few hours catching up. I miss her too.”
“You still talk to her?”
“I left friends in Canada too, Norris,” Judith reminded him. “She’s happy for Eric and Marc-André.”
“I didn’t think Eric had told her yet,” Norris noted. “About the boyfriend, I mean.”
Judith rolled her eyes.
“You kids always think you’re so good at hiding things. We made you, for Pete’s sake. . . . We know you! As for whether I still talk to her: not as much as I promised myself I would.” Judith ruminated. “It’s hard to make time. Work. Life. You.”
“Please,” Norris scoffed. “Name an easier kid. Like, a single one.”
Judith thought for a moment. And another. Norris assumed the topic had been dropped, but eventually she answered, “Steve Urkel.”
Dammit if he hadn’t missed her.
He had missed someone else too. Norris’s next thought was of the badly wrapped present currently nestled in his backpack and the person he couldn’t wait to give it to.
“Mom, can you give me a ride somewhere after we drop off my bag?”
Aarti wasn’t the easiest person to pinpoint, even now that he was back in a land of cell service and Wi-Fi. When she didn’t answer a text announcing his return, Norris waited a few hours before following up. It worked; moments later, he’d received a dropped pin to her location and the mask Norris now considered her standard signature.
The pin led them to a monastery-like building near Judith’s department, north of the University of Texas campus, known for views that captured most of Austin.
“Do you want me to come get you after?” Judith had asked as they pulled up to the gentle slope. Even driving, Norris had to admit that the view really was killer.
“No, I’ll be fine, Mom,” Norris said, mouth going dry the moment he spotted Aarti by her camera and tripod, apparently filming something. “I can bus it home.”
“So, that’s the girl, eh? She seems really pretty. From a distance,” Judith mused, invasively leaning into the passenger seat to ogle Aarti who, thank God, had her back turned to the road.
“Mom.”
“I’m sure the front of her is very pretty too,” Judith continued. “I would love to meet her.”
“Nah, it’s a real Harvey Dent situation up close, believe me,” Norris quipped as he got his backpack and quickly got out, slamming the car door shut. One step at a time. Judith could meet Aarti when she officially became his girlfriend. Maybe next weekend.
“Bye, Mom.”
She drove off behind him, and Norris took a moment to admire Aarti as she set up her shot.
“I know you’re there,” she called out, but he could hear the smile in her voice. She turned, pushing her red hair away from her face and for a second, Norris was speechless.
“How was Whistler?” Aarti asked, greeting Norris with a kiss on the cheek and a happy but somewhat distracted hug.
“Good,” Norris answered, regaining speech. “Snow, mountains, snow, mountains. It was fun, but I can’t believe I actually missed Austin.”
“Really?” she derided. “You were gone for less than a week.”
Norris shrugged.
“What did you end up doing around here?”
She wearily motioned to the camera. “This. All over. Please kill me.”
They sat down on the grass, and Aarti began to fill him in on her week. She had apparently been filming this vista every day for the past three days and planned on collapsing the footage into a supercut, focused on highlighting the traffic. It was a new project of hers, as she was “hitting a wall with photography.”
The whole camera thing would almost be a Manic Pixie cliché if it weren’t for how single-minded and focused she was about it. She knew the difference between lenses, where to order them, where to fix them around here, could time-stamp movies from the graininess of the film alone, always seemed to have an endless supply of SD cards in her bag, and maneuvered the handle of her high-tech tripod like a weary mechanic. To Norris, there was something ridiculously hot about her expertise. He wished he was as focused about, well, anything.
“You’re pretty awesome, y’know.”
“I’m aware. Always happy to hear it, though.”
She smiled brightly, covering her eyes from the sun’s glare and looking up at him with a smile. They both leaned in for a quick kiss on the lips. Norris smiled and joined their hands for a moment only to have her untangle them as she stood and returned to the camera, moving the focus wheel to the right and then back to the left for seemingly no reason.
“You’re very touchy today,” she teased, now tinkering with the lens. “Was there something in Canada’s water or something? Fluoride and neediness?”
Norris’s face must have fallen for a moment since she quickly followed up with “I’m kidding, I’m kidding. Sorry, I’m kind of distracted here. I spent all of spring break looking at portfolios, and mine is just garbage. Like, immature high school nonsense.”
She sighed heavily, a finger through her hair, shaking her head at the camera.
Norris didn’t know what to say. She seemed genuinely distraught, but he wasn’t sure whether his being here was even helping. He just wanted to find a way to make her smile.
“I almost forgot,” Norris said. “I got you this.” He fished the gift out of his backpack and watched with anticipation as she began carefully peeling back the paper.
“A snow globe,” she said as she finished unwrapping it. “Cool, thanks.”
“I figure that if I couldn’t bring back actual snow, it was the next best thing.” Norris added, “It’s not the same as bringing back a souvenir from one of your own world travels, but . . .”
“But you figured I was a generic-airport-souvenir kind of girl?” she asked.
“What? No, I just—that’s not at all—”
“Look, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be an asshole,” she added, drumming her fingers alongside the globe, trying to see into it. Finally, she looked up at him, seeming to decide something. “I’ve been thinking it’s time to tell my parents that I want to pursue photography in a real way. Like, go to art school instead of Harvard kind of way, or even skip college entirely kind of way. It’s going to shock the hell out of them, and then it’s going to make them really furiously mad.”
“Do they really not know?” he asked, hoping for an encouraging tone. “You take photos all day long. You love movies, lengthy, boring ones. They know you. They must know this is your thing.”
“You should get it.” She frowned, looking up from the globe. “Your parents are immigrants too.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
It was her turn to give him that look. The one he made such a specialty of unleashing on people who pretended to be dumber than they actually were.
“It doesn’t not matter and we both know it.” She echoed the exact words he had once said to her.
She sighed and moved away from her camera to a nearby bench, where Norris joined her.
“Imagine telling your mom you didn’t want to go to college, that you were considering dropping out of high school and getting a GED to free up time to work on your . . . hockey,” Aarti challenged. “How would that go?”
Norris quickly played the 15,043 arguments that could ensue from him walking into their kitchen with that statement. They all ended with the same outcome: him getting ready for school that next morning. A complete nonstarter.
“Poorly,” he simply said instead.
“Poorly.” Aarti nodded in agreement. “Well, that’s what’s waiting for me. And I need to do it sooner rather than later.”
“Why?”
“Because college is around the corner,” Aarti said. “And to them, this . . .” She waved over to the camera and Norris noticed her nails were now orange. Had she gone through all the colors of the rainbow in the time he had known her?
“This is just a fun high school extracurricular. It’s cheerleading or hockey or mathletes. Something to write an Ivy League application essay about.”
“I get it,” Norris said quietly. Because he did. When you were the child of immigrants, you weren’t just you; your success was also your parents’, your cousins’, your relatives’ still struggling for life in Haiti or India, wishing they were you. It was your job, your preordained celestial existence or whatever, to make the most of it.
She turned to him. “So, how do I tell them I want to do this? Really do it?”
Norris had no idea.
“I don’t know.” A beat passed. “Do you want to grab something to eat?” he offered. “Maybe talk some more?”
She shook her head. “I have to finish this.”
“Right. Okay.” Norris smiled.
“Thanks for the snow globe.”
The kiss Norris received on the cheek was chaste and polite, the receipt for an airport snow globe. What had happened to the undertone of maple syrup? Had he done something wrong?
As he walked away from her and prepared for the long wait at the bus stop, he couldn’t help but feel that Aarti didn’t just want to be alone . . . she wanted to be away from him.