“Hi, Mom,” she said, as they walked into the house.
“Hi, honey. Hello, Allison.” Maryam Singh was at the kitchen island, cutting vegetables with a wickedly sharp knife. “What are you guys doing home so early? I thought you’d be shopping all day.”
“We had a better idea. What’s for supper?”
“Rogan josh,” she replied, scraping chopped red chili peppers into a shallow bowl with the edge of her knife. “Will you be eating with us, Allison?”
“Rogan josh?” Allison bounced happily on her toes. She loved the lamb dish. “Sure! I’ll just call my mom and tell her I’ll be eating here, since my other mother loves me so much more than she does.”
Which was a far cry from her reaction the first time she had come over for dinner and a sleepover, Shanaya recalled. Completely unprepared for the hot spices which her mother used in cooking, the little girl had broken down into tears at the unfamiliar burning sensation in her mouth. Only an emergency application of chocolate ice cream as a treatment had rescued the night from complete disaster.
Maryam laughed, tilting her head back. “You’re terrible. You better treat your maan right, or when it’s time for your next turn on the wheel, you’ll be sent back as a stinkbug.”
Allison giggled, covering her mouth with her hand. “I’ll remember.”
“We’re going upstairs,” Shanaya said. “Call us when dinner’s ready, okay Mom?”
“Sure, honey.” She waved the knife at them with the same casual skill she used when pulling a tooth. “No problem.”
“Do you really believe that stuff about coming back as an animal or something?” Allison asked, as they climbed to the second story. “Having life after life until you reach…what do you call it again?”
“Moksa,” she replied absently. “I don’t know. Do you really believe that the Romans nailed a Jewish carpenter to a tree for telling everyone how we should all be nice to each other for a change, rose from the dead, and was carried off bodily into heaven, and that all we have to do to achieve eternal bliss is believe in him? That eternal reward or damnation has nothing to do with how we behave on earth?”
“Well, it’s something to do on Sunday morning,” Allison laughed as they emerged from the stairs into the upstairs hallway.
I can think of much more interesting things to do on Sunday morning, Shanaya thought. And every morning after, too. And never mind most of them involved having her head buried between her best friend’s thighs.
“Here,” she said as they entered her room. She knelt down, opening the bottom drawer of her dresser, pulling out a largish box made of a heavy, dark wood. She set it on the vanity, taking care not to mar the polished surface. She opened a small tray at the bottom. “What do you think of this?”
“Oh, Shannie.” Allison picked up the necklace, the sunlight bouncing off the golden discs. “It’s gorgeous.” She held it up, small movements of her hands making the entire piece ripple like a waterfall at sunset. “Are you sure it’s all right if I wear it?”
“Of course.” She forced a smile to her face. “Maybe I can find something for all the bridesmaids to wear, so it’ll be like we’re a secret club.”
“That would be awesome.” Her friend held it up to her chest. “God, it’s so heavy!”
She nodded. “Real gold, you know. I don’t know how long it’s been in the family, but Mom says she saw her grandmama wearing it when she was a girl.
“Here. Take off your shirt. I want to see how it looks against your skin.”
“You just want to see me with my shirt off, you lesbian pervert.”
“That, too,” she said easily, ignoring the pang her words caused. Coming out as a lesbian had been the hardest thing she had ever done. And it would have been a thousand times worse if she hadn’t had the support of her family and her best friend. Mayfield was deeply conservative, with a church on every street-corner, it seemed, and populated by people who thought a deep heart-to-heart about accepting Christ as your personal savior was something you did in the check-out line at the grocery store. And although the high school paid lip service to buzzwords like ‘inclusivity’ and ‘diversity’ she wasn’t foolish enough to think that her sexual preference wasn’t the cherry on top of the weirdness sundae, as far as many of the teachers and students there were concerned.
Which was why Allison had been the first person she had come out to, even before her own family. If her best friend couldn’t accept her, then she really didn’t have any idea what she was going to do.
But thank all the gods, Allison had. It had been their freshman year of high school. She had sat beside her, in this very room, as a matter of fact, as Shanaya had poured her heart out to her, explaining that she didn’t like men, at least sexually, and that she was attracted to women instead.
“Oh,” she had said, at the end of her impassioned speech. “I thought you might be.”
“You did? Then why didn’t you say anything?”
“Well, it wasn’t any of my business, was it?” Allison said reasonably. “But it wasn’t hard to notice. Every time there were a bunch of us around, talking about what guys at school were cute, or which movie star we thought was the best looking, you wouldn’t say a thing. But when a really hot woman was on television, like Valentina Belmonte or Brie Larson or Emma Watson, you perked right up.”
“Oh.” She fidgeted with her hair, something that drove her mother to distraction. “So…we’re still friends, right?”
Allison blinked at her. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“Well.” Blood flooded her face as she blushed. “Some people think…you know…gay guys and lesbians are, well, you know…gross.”
Allison tossed her head in her familiar gesture, the way she did whenever she thought someone else was being silly. “Well, I’m not about to go down and lick another girl’s coochie,” she said. “I like guys. And I can’t wait until I find I guy I like enough to let him do the nasty with me, no matter what those wrinkled old men at church say.” She ran her hands down her sides, where her body was already blossoming into a garden of rich curves. Shanaya looked away, knowing her hopeless desire would be as easy to read on her face as a come-to-Jesus highway billboard. “But I’m not going to tell you what you should do, or that you’re going to hell or anything dumb like that. You’re my best friend, Shannie. And you always will be. And no one is going to give you any crap, or they’ll hear about it from me.”
“Thank you,” she had whispered, as tears trickled down her face.
With the absentminded grace which she had been born with, Allison stripped off her plain white t-shirt. She put it aside, then paused, her hands behind her back. “The bra, too?”
“Let’s try to keep the temptations to a minimum,” she joked, though her mouth watered at the prospect of seeing her friend’s bare breasts. Two pathetic attempts to make Allison see her as a potential lover instead of a best friend were enough. The blond girl never seemed to make the connection that since Shanaya was a lesbian and obviously thought she was attractive, she might someday actually try to initiate a physical relationship.