Free Underneath by Sarah Jamila Stevenson Page A

adorned with a giant quartz crystal pendant and a silver dragon pin.
    â€œSorry I’m early,” she’s saying to my mom. “I really thought you said four o’clock. I—” Then she catches sight of me.
    â€œSunny!” she exclaims in a bright, chirpy voice. “Look at us! We’re twins.” Her shoulder-length, curly, carroty-orange hair has a white streak in the front where it’s starting to go gray, and it’s bouncy just like her personality. It makes me ill. And I’m angry, too, because if she hadn’t shown up so early, maybe Auntie Mina wouldn’t have felt like she had to jump up and leave.
    Dad walks back through the side door at that moment. He doesn’t look happy, either, and he quickly retreats to his study with his stack of grading.
    Antonia turns to my mother and plops a huge macramé bag onto the table.
    â€œOh, that’s really thoughtful of you, Antonia. I hope it wasn’t any trouble,” my mom says. Mom looks pleased, but for me, the rest of the evening is a nightmare. I try to bury myself in my pre-calculus homework when I’m not helping sort through photos. Every time I look at any of the pictures—the ones of Shiri as a kid at tennis camp, dressed up for eighth-grade graduation, or even the horrible one with the two of us as little kids, half-naked in an inflatable pool—I feel my teeth clench and my eyes sting. All those moments are worthless now.
    Mom is unashamedly weeping and smiling, sharing every stupid memory that pops into her head, and Antonia keeps doing her thing with heaps of glitter and paper doodads, turning the stacks of photos and digital printouts into a nightmarish scrapbook monstrosity. Mom wields scissors and a glue stick as the two of them chatter away about Shiri, about Mina, and then, after Mom cheers up a little, about other scrapbook ideas and goofy household decorating projects that my dad would surely veto if he were privy to this conversation.
    The evening seems endless, but finally Antonia leaves. I try to find my dad to ask him what he talked about with Auntie Mina, if he was able to find out why she left so abruptly, but he’s taking a long shower, so I give up and go to bed.
    At least I didn’t underhear anybody all day. I don’t know if I would have been able to handle hearing Auntie Mina. On one hand, maybe it would have helped me understand. Or maybe it would have made me break down completely.

    Monday is dismal. The sky is grayish with smoggy haze, and the trees on campus are starting to turn brown, except for the high, soaring palms out by the road. Eddies of fall wind whip a few dry leaves around and bend the palm trees into gentle parallel curves, and my nose itches with flying dust.
    My mood feels just as dismal; fragile as the dry leaves. My head aches.
    I get through my first couple of classes okay, paying the minimum of attention to get by. Then, in third-period Pre-Calculus, we get our tests back from last week. Scrawled in red on the top of my test is a C+. My stomach drops. The scrawled numbers go blurry as I stare at the page. I do my best to blink the tears back, but I can’t seem to control them, so I hurry to Ms. Castillo’s desk for a bathroom pass.
    When I reach the bathroom, I lock myself into a stall and lean against the graffiti-covered orange wall, my jaw clenched. It’s just a test . No, it’s more than the test. It’s everything. I stay like that for a few minutes, trying to regain control.
    The bathroom door opens and I freeze, holding my breath, tears still sliding down my cheeks and onto my neck. I peek through the crack between the door and the side of the stall. It’s Mikaela. She clomps in on huge platform-soled black boots and stops to rearrange her ripped, holey black tights.
    Then she goes into one of the stalls to pee. While she’s in there, I take a deep breath and go out to wash my face. Mikaela hasn’t exactly