“Hi . . . Excuse me. Do you go to Green Brook High?” the soccer coach called, jogging up to them.
The boy gave the barest nod and Coach Clarence stuck out his hand. “Do you play for a club?”
The boy shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and shook his head. “I’ll see you around,” he threw at Ashna, and started to walk away.
The coach ran after him. “Hold up a minute. I’m Coach Clarence. And you are?”
He looked over the coach’s shoulder and saw Ashna still watching him. How could anyone look away from him?
“Frederico.” He did not add a last name, and he looked straight at her when he said it.
Ashna’s insides did a skipping thing she had never experienced before. His name melted on his tongue and seemed to flow through her blood. A ripple of something too sensitive for comfort ran across her skin. She blushed, and his brows did that curious folding-together thing again.
“I want you to try out for the team tomorrow,” Coach Clarence said.
The tryouts had closed months ago. Coach had never taken on a player midseason. The man barely spared a glance for anyone, and Ashna had never heard him use that tone. Not even with his star players.
“Four P.M. tomorrow. My office, Mr. Frederico.” He held out his hand again and kept it there until the boy took it.
Coach Clarence shook his hand with both of his, the way fans shook the hands of celebrities, and went back to the pitch beaming.
“You’re not going to go to his office tomorrow, are you?” she said.
“Did you want me to go?” Another question.
Why would I care? That was the logical thing to say. I always want you to do what makes you happy. That was what she really wanted to say, but it made no sense to have that thought about a stranger.
In the end she said, “Why don’t you want to play?”
This speaking-in-questions affliction had to be contagious.
Ashna counted her breaths as he looked at her for what felt like the longest moment ever. How had she thought his eyes held nothing? She couldn’t even remember the person who’d had that thought. In the space of ten minutes she had forgotten who she was before he had found her. Before he said his name that way, all those consonants tilting up at the ends, as though the language she had spoken forever had suddenly become poetic, potent, beautiful.
For the first time in Ashna’s life she was aware of the air around her. There was a glow to it, all the particles shimmery glitter. She looked down at her feet to make sure they were still on the ground and wiggled her toes inside her shoes. It felt so much like floating that finding her feet not dangling in the air was bit of a shock.
It wasn’t until he answered her question that she knew her life would never again be the same.
“Maybe I don’t want to play for the same reason that you were hiding beneath those bleachers?”
Chapter Eight
Ashna had once hidden in the trunk of a car when the chauffeur drove her home from school through a crowd of rabid journalists, just before she left Sripore forever. And now she was on Good Morning America. How on earth had this happened?
Well, she wasn’t exactly on it, she was in her room folding and refolding her laundry as Good Morning America played on the TV, with the hosts discussing her. The jolly bunch couldn’t stop cracking up about her expression when Rico walked into her kitchen. As if that weren’t mortifying enough, they zoomed in on her face and froze the frame. Her pupils were dilated, her mouth agape.
To Ashna, that face said: What the hell is this jerk doing here?
To everyone else, that face seemed to say: I’ve never laid eyes on a being this hot!
No, seriously that’s what the very chirpy blond person was saying. Those exact words. Ashna threw a bra at the TV.
They zoomed in on Rico on his knees in front of her, looking up at her with those damn eyes as though his heart were in his mouth, his hand gripping the knife like someone showing off some ancient dagger-wielding martial art moves.
Rubbing her knee, she avoided looking down at her toes. The digits were all firmly attached to her foot. Thanks to him. Also thanks to him, that foot was in her mouth for all of America to see.
“I’d drop a knife on my foot too if I saw that walk into my kitchen, if you know what I mean!” the dark-haired one said, winks flying.
Well, Ashna would be glad to lend her the knife.
The Misono people had sent her a new set of their best. The nerve! Apparently their sales had seen a sharp uptick. What was wrong with the world they lived in? They had asked her to model for an ad for them. She’d rather chop off her toes than feed into the madness.
It had been a week since that stupid clip had gone viral. Why was it still everywhere? Wasn’t this the age of overnight sensations and flashes in the pan?
She looked at her underwear drawer. Everything was rolled up and arranged in a warm-to-cool rainbow of colored silk, just like her closet. She adjusted one of the rolls so it lined up perfectly with the one next to it. When she had left for Paris after Baba’s death, Mina Kaki had insisted on her seeing a therapist there. He had diagnosed her with PTSD resulting in acute clinical depression and anxiety, triggered by losing a parent so violently. He had encouraged her to use her need for order to help ground herself. Usually organizing things did help her calm herself when the fear of panic loomed. Right now? No such luck.
Although what she was feeling right now wasn’t exactly panic. It was rage. How dare he? How dare he show up at her restaurant?
Now, after all these years. Now, when she no longer thought about him. Ever.
For all the things he’d been, he’d always been proud. Yet he had never given her a hard time about keeping him secret from her family. They had both been comfortable with secrets. She’d believed that they had both wanted to—needed to—keep what was between them private, because the intensity of it had felt so overwhelming, so intimate.
How wrong she had been about him. In the end, the intensity of their connection had meant nothing. Having his pride hurt was all it had taken for him to betray her. One thing she knew for certain was that she would never depend on anyone that much again, or let anyone abandoning her cripple her that way.
She pulled her trembling hand away from her knee. She couldn’t let that time in her life emerge again. She turned off the TV and called China.
“Hello, superstar!”
“I can’t do it.” Ashna hugged her phone to her ear with both hands as though it were a puppy in pain.
When China didn’t respond, Ashna started to pace the length of her room. Outside her window the town was waking up; newborn sunlight caught the copper finial on the roof of Curried Dreams. Would she ever be able to look at her own restaurant again without seeing Rico slam down on his hurt knee?
“You have to find someone else. Please.”
“Ashna! What are you talking about?” China said finally.
“You have to understand. It’s . . . it’s . . .” How on earth had this happened? Gold and green eyes flooded her thoughts.
“You can’t back out. Not now,” China said, her tone unshakable.
It didn’t matter how unshakable China was, Ashna couldn’t do this.
“My . . . my mother needs me.” Dear God, she was going to be reborn as a frog in her next birth for this—the Hindu version of hell. “It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s Shobi! You know how things are with her.” As a matter of fact, China had no idea how things were with Shobi. Like everyone else in Ashna’s life, China simply avoided the subject of Ashna’s mostly missing mother as though it were an unfortunately located wart.