Gyroscopes

The cheering and clapping in the gymatorium is so loud that the wooden bleachers feel fragile, like the whole upper class is going to tumble to the floor in a heap. I’m in the middle of the row, so there is no way out for me without climbing over dozens of knees and ankles.

I stay put, quieting my heart.

It’s the fall pep rally, and it will be over in thirty minutes. Besides, the school play will be announced at the end and no way I’m missing that.

So yeah, I can survive thirty minutes.

Probably.

My friend, Lauren, cranes her neck and tells me Samantha is on the gym floor, leading a new cheer. That’s when everyone starts stomping their feet on the bleachers, joining in. I check my phone to distract myself and see an email from Dr. Bledsoe, my AP Physics and second-favorite teacher.

“Layla, I made a plan for the gyroscope,” he says. “Come by this week.”

“Will do,” I tap back, just as a roar echoes across the whole gymatorium.

The basketball team has trotted out onto the floor. They’re doing some fancy dribbling, and the varsity cheerleaders  follow with a routine that is so haram it almost makes me blush. Even Principal McKenzie looks nervous. Samantha is dancing in a pathetic way, her pom-poms on her thighs, an intense expression on her face. Her hips move wildly like the gyroscope Bledsoe wants me to help him build. I mean, there’s stability, but it looks like it’s going to spin off its axis at any minute.

“I guess she’s trying to twerk,” Lauren scoffs.

We both crack up laughing but get quiet when McKenz stands up. He makes a few announcements, thanks all the coaches, and then adjusts his glasses on his oily nose – I can seriously see the shine from here – before he introduces Mr. Davison.

Lauren and I clap and root for him. Three things to know about D – 1) he looks like Andre the Giant, but with a more expressive face; 2) he’s our Drama Club advisor; and 3) he’s my #1 favorite teacher.

D glides theatrically to the podium, right under the basketball hoop. He’s wearing a long blue cape pulled tightly around his body. It even covers his face. He’s so big he could probably just pick up McKenz and drop him right into the net.

I’m wondering what D is up to now when the sound system booms with a loud clash of cymbals. A familiar song starts up -- Dat-dat-dat WAH WAH. Dat-dat-dat WAH WAH -- and everyone recognizes it all at once.

“Oh no,” I mumble. Cheers erupt around me.

As if to confirm it, D does a dramatic twirl and flips open the cape, and everyone screams. His face is painted blue. But of course, because it’s D, there’s more. He reaches under the cape and pulls out a white and gold turban and sticks it on his head.

“You know it! You know it!” he shouts jovially into the microphone. “Hold on to your sandals! We’ll be putting on a magical production of Aladdin!” Samantha shakes her pom-poms wildly. McKenz and his shiny nose start swaying awkwardly from side to side. Later, I’ll realize that the man was actually trying to dance.

My heart thuds out of control.

***

After school, Lauren and I go to McDonald’s and each buy a $1 soda and a $1 hamburger. Mama would kill me to know I come here and buy crap food, when she cooks mountains of food at home, but all we really want is the table. Now, we can sit for an hour at least before the manager tells us to leave.

As we eat, Lauren says, “Disney has a new Aladdin movie now. It’s not racist.” She sounds annoyed.

I know what she’s talking about. In the live-action film, there’s even a cute Arab guy playing Aladdin. Will Smith is the genie, so who can be mad at that? And Disney took out the lyrics about Arabs being “barbaric” and all.

I don’t like this. Lauren and I don’t disagree about anything. So it’s hard to explain how Jasmine makes me cringe. She’s the only Arab girl I ever see in movies and she wears haram clothes and talks to a tiger. And when people hear I’m Arab, that’s who they think about, a princess whose father locks her up in a castle.

Meanwhile, my baba is a mechanic who took me to his garage when I was younger. Mama never liked having me home in the kitchen, because that was her space, and anyway, Baba realized I could figure things out easily. “Layla, come here and try to take this out,” he’d said one afternoon, in the summer. I was fourteen. He popped the hood on a Buick, and we both leaned over, studying the engine bay. He was pointing to the alternator. He didn’t tell me how, just watched me. When I finally did it, he said, “Now put it back.” So I did. Another time, he handed me pliers and told me to take the seats out of a Malibu. Some tasks took me longer than others, but I always figured them out. And he always knew I could.

I finish eating and fold my hamburger wrapper into tiny squares, smaller and smaller until it’s the size of my thumbnail.

“I’m not trying to step on everyone here,” I say. “I know everyone’s excited.”

“Have you even seen the new movie?” Lauren asks me, guzzling the last of her Coke. As if that proves something. When I shake my head, she shrugs. “Well, you shouldn’t complain then.”

***

D talks about the play at the first Drama Guild meeting after school the following week. He has pizza for us and cheeseballs and cans of Sprite. “We’re asking for four thousand from the PTA,” he explains, “but they think we will actually make a lot of money on ticket sales.” He’s up on stage, sitting cross-legged, on a long, oak table, which is what we use to assemble and sew costumes during the year. Spreading his hands out, he says, “It’s Aladdin. So yeah — everyone wants to see it.”

There are two things he wants to do, he says, to blow people’s minds: the genie has to appear and disappear somehow, using the fog machines, and the magic carpet has to be … magical.

“Can we build something?” He’s looking right at me. “You know, to make it actually fly somehow? They do that in the Broadway version.”

I’m sitting below him in the orchestra pit, with Lauren and Rajesh. Samantha is there too. Last year, she was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

“Maybe...” I say, then add, “...actually, I was wondering...you know.”

“I don’t. Tell me.”

“Well...how final is the decision to use Aladdin?” I ask. My heart starts racing. In a second, my voice will tremble.

“Pretty final.” His tone is curious, and he tilts his head as he looks down at me.

“It’s just that, it’s a movie that has a lot of stereotypes about Arab Americans and — ”

“Well, it was written in a time when there was no such thing as America,” he says laughing, and everyone else laughs too because now it’s awkward.

He listens patiently, while I stumble through the little speech I practiced this morning. I talk about the lyrics to the original opening song and how they painted Arabs in a bad way, and how it fed into the stereotypes that already exist about us.

Lauren is across from me, her eyes on the ceiling.

D is gazing down at me, his face attentive. But you know how you can tell when an adult is humoring you? Like, they’re going to let you say your thing, and then they’ll pretend to think about it? He’s definitely doing that to me.

When I’m done, he goes, “I appreciate you bringing this up.” Looks all serious. He even hushes Samantha, who seems alarmed that the play is under threat. “In fact, I’m very sensitive to those issues and I’ve already considered them. I made sure that our script has no mention of those troubling lines at all.”

“What were the lines?” Samantha asks.

“The song said Arabia is a land ‘where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face,’” I say quietly.

“But they were changed?” Samantha asks D, and he nods. “OK. So...that’s good, right?”

D throws out his hands, like he’s just done a magic trick. “Absolutely. And that’s how it should always work.”

“It’s not just the lines...” I start to say.

But he ignores me and starts going on about being inclusive and how we have to listen to everyone’s voice...except he’s just ignored mine.

***

Dr. Bledsoe is like a caricature of a crazy scientist — his brown hair is never combed, and he’s so skinny because he forgets to eat. I always think about how my mother would love to feed him.

I’m the only one in the whole AP Physics class that he asked to help him with the gyroscope. “Is it for a grade?” I reply. I’m taking four AP classes this year, including AP Calculus and AP Literature, but they have nothing on the Physics class. I’m nervous about taking on something that will hurt my grade.

“No grade, just for fun,” he says. “Are you in?”

“Heck yeah.”

Even when I was a freshman and didn’t qualify yet for his classes, I would wander in and he would let me hang out in his lab. I’d clean the equipment and wipe the tables after school several days a week when I wasn’t in Drama Guild, and so I became kind of an assistant lab tech.

“Why acting?” he would ask me sometimes, studying a paper or peering at his computer screen through his tiny, rectangular wireless glasses. They looked funny sometimes, like two blank microscope slides, butterflying his nose.

“I like acting.”

“Are you an actor?”

“No. I’m too nervous to be on stage. I stay behind the scenes. But I like being part of something big like that.” Sometimes, I think that is why I like science too. Science doesn’t mind when you make a mistake. Science looks forward to mistakes.

Before we start planning the gyroscope, Bledsoe shows me a video. “It’s almost like an optical illusion,” he says. I see a disk mounted on a frame, and it starts spinning wildly – but not really, I notice. There is stability provided by the frame, a force that always keeps it upright no matter how out-of-control it looks.

“It looks like it should be falling over, but it’s not,” I say.

“Like it’s defying gravity, right?” He nods excitedly. “The torque applied to the disk causes a precession — so what happens is the axis is caught between gravity and its own angular momentum vector, and it’s forced to find a happy middle ground to remain stable.”

We watch the video quietly, like awed worshippers at an altar.

“It’s beautiful.”

“I could buy one,” he says. “I have money in the science budget.”

“Nah,” I reply. “Let’s build it.”

***

One day at lunch, I hear Rajesh announce he’s auditioning for the part of Aladdin, and three guys, who are all in Drama Guild, roll their eyes. Because they know it’s over. Rajesh is a great actor – he played the Scarecrow to Samantha’s Dorothy, and he basically stole the whole show. He could have played the Wicked Witch and done it well. He just has a lot of charisma and a smile that could knock you off a chair.

“I might try out for the genie,” Lauren says.

“Perfect,” says Rajesh.

“That’s ok, right? D didn’t say it has to be a guy.”

“The genie can be gender inclusive,” he says with a smile. “This is a new era.” He looks at me pointedly.

“I’m allowed to have an opinion,” I say, starting to feel nervous.

“You are,” Rajesh says. “But, like, if the show is offensive, I’d be offended. I’m Indian.” He says it, like that explains it. And now the whole table starts talking like they’re historians, about how the stories originated in China and India and they’re not even Arab in origin. I start to feel nervous. I hate when people bring up rebuttals that I don’t know about, because I can’t tell if they’re legit or if they’re blowing smoke.

But they’re all intent on making sure I know I’m wrong.

And that is something.

Who am I, anyway? I’m just the nerd who builds scenery. And I’ve always been on the fringe of the group, anyway. It would suck to get pushed out even further.

I cave.

“I’ve been sketching ideas for a mechanism to make the carpet fly.” I say quietly. They all pay attention. I am a team player, I say with my eyes as I explain my idea. I tell them how I researched the way it was done on Broadway. “It won’t be anything like that...it probably won’t carry anyone. But I think I can make it hover above the stage.” I don’t mention how, last week, I sawed some 2x4s and hammered them together in a cross shape. I strung some heavy-duty wire to bind them and sat there, staring at it for a while.

I thought, This might work.

I could make this work.

I’m just not sure I want it to.

***

“I never took you to see the movie because I hated it when I was your age,” Mama tells me.  We’re walking to the Enoch Pratt Library, which takes up almost a whole block on Cathedral Street. The front door looks like a massive fortress gate, and inside, the hallways are lined with statues and paintings. The best room is the Poe Room – Edgar Allan Poe died in this city, so they claimed him by naming the football team after his poem, “The Raven.”

Mama is taking classes at the community college, to finish up a degree in psychology that she stopped when I was born. She comes to the Pratt to study and I come with her. Our apartment is too loud, because Anthony the electrician upstairs lifts weights and drops them all afternoon, and next door, Mrs. Sanjay has four kids who are running around and screeching all the time. We find a table by the teen section, and we put our papers and books down. “Mama, tell me...Why is Aladdin bad?” I ask her. “I’m trying to explain it to my Drama Guild at school but I get confused when they say stuff.”

“It portrays Arabs as barbaric people.”

“But Jasmine and Aladdin are characters everyone likes. They’re not bad. And they’re Arabs.”

“They’re also the ‘least’ Arab of all the characters… Jafar is very stereotypically Arab...” she continues.

“Yeah, but...what’s the reason?”

“Habibti,” she says with a sigh, and I suddenly feel sad. If she can’t even find the right words, what can I do?

“Look,” she says, “sometimes people just have to take your word for it. It’s like someone stepping on your toes and not moving off. Do you have to really explain how the pressure is causing you pain?”

“Right.”

“Sometimes, they have to imagine the pain to get it. You don’t have to prove it.” She glances at me over her glasses. “Or agonize over how to explain it.” She turns back to her laptop. “Let’s get to work.”

***

I talk to D during our Drama Club. Someone has told him about my plans for the lift, so he wants to see my sketch. “This is how we can make it hover, maybe at a point when Aladdin summons it,” I explain. While he reviews my sketch, I ask him, “Did you know there was a school that canceled Aladdin last year?”

“In Catonsville? Yeah, I know about that. It wasn’t Aladdin...it was Aladdin Jr.”

“Same thing, though, right?”

“Basically. But they didn’t even consult the parents. Very disrespectful to the drama parents who, as you know, do so much for the club.” He puts out his hands, looking like some wise Buddha.“ The thing is,” he adds solemnly, “everybody has a right to investigate other cultures and add their own artistic flair. Can you imagine if someone told me, because I’m white, that I’m not allowed to listen to or enjoy rap music?”

“Nobody is saying you can’t read the Arabian Nights. But the—”

D smiled, like he is being patient with me. “You know,” he says, “this cultural appropriation stuff wears me out.”

***

Samantha and two other girls are trying out for Jasmine. Nobody else but Rajesh dares to audition for Aladdin, so he acts in the scene with each of them.

I’m still working on the pulley mechanism. It’s always been hard to be the person D depends on for stage equipment and engineering, as well as to play minor roles. I watch Rajesh with Samantha, who’s wearing a black wig over her blond hair, and she’s dressed in a teal blouse and loose pants. She’s really working for this one, I think. When she turns around, I see the black eyeliner dramatically sweeping across her eyelids.

She’s not too bad. Ever since sophomore year, she’s always had the lead roles in the plays. I only ever had one role, as a Munchkin, but that’s because Allison got sick and I am the same size. They gave Allison’s lines to someone else, and I was only on stage for a total of twelve minutes.

Rajesh steps off stage for a bit and smiles at me. “You should try out for Jasmine,” he says. “Your voice is terrific.”

“Thanks. But I don’t think so.”

“So,” he says, pausing for a beat, “this sounds weird, but you look authentic. If that makes sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense, because she’s a cartoon,” I say and go back to work.

***

The gyroscope works.

Bledsoe is freaking like carbon dioxide gas bubbling out of a beaker. “I knew it,” he says, slamming his fist down on the table. Except he does it weird, like he gets a strong windup going, but right before impact, he slows down so that his fist just gently taps the surface. It’s hilarious.

“It’s amazing,” I say, watching it closely. Honestly, it looks like a bike wheel inside of a globe, but it spins magically, automatically righting itself whenever it leans too far forward or back. It just knows when to correct itself and pops back into alignment every time. I stop it and start it again with a flick of my wrist, over and over, taking a video for Baba. It never stumbles. It re-centers and finds the middle, no matter how close it gets to falling.

It looks like a goddess being born, growing taller and taking shape, right there on the workbench, the round orb like a halo around her brilliant head.

“You know,” he tells me, his eyes still fixed on the gyroscope. “I think you have a natural talent for science.”

“I have a father who’s a mechanic,” I say, “and I’m used to figuring things out.”

Baba never finished high school because of the war. It’s one reason why he pushes Mama to finish her degree at the college. “We had dreams too,” he said to her once, when she worried about the cost. “Let’s start here and see what happens.” I remember that moment, because they hugged for a long time.

I glance at the time on my phone and stand up. “I need to get to D’s room.”

“They’re still putting that play on?”

“Yeah.” I pause. “I’m trying to tell them that I have a problem with it, but...they want me to explain why, and they want a reason, and D doesn’t really want to talk about it. The whole thing just sucks.”

He shrugs. “It does suck.” He reaches out and sets the gyroscope into motion again. “The monkey was the most interesting character.”

When I get to the classroom, there is a huddle of people in front of D’s door, where a paper is taped. Samantha is there, being hugged by her friends, and there are tears in her eyes.

But she doesn’t look sad at all.

Not at all.

I get closer and see, “Aladdin/ Rajesh. Princess Jasmine – Samantha.”

Lauren is there too, and she slides her arm around me. “I guess she’s the star again.”

I knew she would be.

So why do I want to break something, as I watch Samantha fake-cry with her friends? Drama is not like science, where there’s a right and a wrong. The test shows positive or negative. The experiment works or it fails. Either the thing spins or it doesn’t. This is different and murky and I’m not feeling very good.

I go to my work room and lock the door.

My heart is thudding in my chest, but I ignore it this time. It’s not going to stop me.

The genie lift is on the bench. I can hear Dr. Bledsoe’s voice, saying, “It does suck,” and I continue to play his words in my mind as I use the brick hammer to smash the whole thing into tiny, jagged shards.