Her Story

1

We shoaled into the cafeteria together, the three of us. We knew who the sharks were and how to avoid them; we knew exactly where they basked in the afternoon sunshine, waiting to sink their teeth into some poor fish’s flesh. We grabbed plastic trays and packets of ketchup and bruised green apples. We watched the lunch lady fling clumps of brown gravy on scoops of mashed potatoes. With our plates filled, we flitted away to the table in the far corner.

We knew there was safety in numbers. We’d played together and laughed together since second grade. We’d stood together for hours to sell girl scout cookies and run against each other at cross country meets. Sure, we’d squabble every now and then — but we knew we belonged to the same species, although our families were so different: Katrice, whose doctor parents came from Eritrea; Laurel, whose dad is a pastor and whose family has lived here for who knows how long, and me, Sandhya, or Sandy, as I prefer to be called, because it blends in and it matches my sandy-beige skin, which I inherited half from my history-professor mom who came to the States with her parents when she was five and my father’s Irish ancestors who probably immigrated during the potato famine.

I saw the new girl at the end of the lunchline. It wasn’t just the clothes she was wearing that made her stick out so badly. It was also the scent of coconut-oil wafting from her gleaming, tightly-braided black hair. And, most of all, the bright red bindi on her forehead, exactly like the one my mother insists I paint between my eyebrows on the rare occasions when we visit the Temple.

Her name was Vaishali — an old fashioned Indian name that Mr. Goldberg had stumbled over and mispronounced when she’d walked into his class earlier that morning. That was the first time I’d seen her. We were already at our desks, and she gave me a half-wave as she slipped into the seat next to mine. I stared at my desk and pretended I hadn’t seen her hesitant hand. For years and years, I’d tried to blend in and be as American as I could be and here, suddenly, came this new girl, looking like my grandmother might have done when she was fresh off the boat. She was everything I was frightened to admit might be lurking inside me — personified, standing outside me.

The three of us saw her eyes dart to our table in the lunchroom. We fell silent, stiffening like criminals in the shadows, trying to escape her searchlight gaze. There was space for her at our table. We knew she could see that. But we met each other’s eyes, and avoided Vaishali’s until we sensed her gaze pass over us. Our relief tumbled into mindless chatter, mixing easily with the clickety-clack of the not-so-silverware, the clatter of trays, the screech of chairs being pushed and pulled across the floor, the shouts of laughter and echoing waves of noise.

At the dim edge of our horizon, Vaishali was visible, sitting alone at a table by the window, bathed in a rectangle of sunshine as calm as water in a lake.

2

By the end of her first week it was easy for us to pretend Vaishali didn’t exist. We might have forgotten about her altogether and not needed to pretend at all, if it hadn’t been for the way the sharks homed in on her.

We didn’t snigger when Marina called her Sasquatch, but we didn’t tell her to knock it off either. When Jacques, leader of the cool gang, walked past her table and threw a handful of bacon bits over her rice, we looked at each other and then looked away.

Self-preservation is an instinct, as hard to suppress as a shark’s thirst for blood.

It was as if we’d made a silent pact, the three of us. We let her eat alone. We let her sit alone. We let her walk alone.

We were close-knit friends, and we were happy in our friendship and we didn’t need anyone else after all.

Vaishali became as silent as a storm-tossed bark, and with each new insult, with each new battering day, she grew calmer and wiser in a way that should have won our respect. I suppose I did admire her strength — but the more she endured, the brighter my fear grew in my heart. Fear, shivering like sunlight on the scales of a fish.

3

Mr. Goldberg was a phenomenal history teacher. He had the gift of getting our attention without needing to work for it. We listened to him recount the horrors of the Holocaust, the genocide of our indigenous people, the evils of enslavement and the continuation of those evils through the Jim Crow era. We read about non-violence connections between Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Mahatma Gandhi — whom Vaishali always referred to as Gandhi-ji. We wrote long essays, we debated ideas, we learned to speak cogently in the classroom.

We thought we learned a great deal.

4

In June, when school was almost over, I noticed that Vaishali had missed a history lesson. We commented on her absence when, at lunchtime, we noticed she wasn’t at her usual table.

Maybe she’s ill?  Laurel said.

Or maybe she was away somewhere nice with her family or something, Katrice suggested, vaguely. I didn’t think her family had the means to go anywhere nice, but it felt rude to say so, or even think that.

Maybe, I agreed.

We were sure she’d be back in a day or two.

But three days went by and Vaishali was still nowhere to be seen.

So, maybe her family’s moved? Katrice suggested. Or she’s just moved schools?

Except why would anyone move so suddenly, so close to the end of the school year, and that too after joining our school in the middle of the school year?

I feel kind of bad, Katrice added.

Not like it was our fault, Laurel said.

For a moment a question hung, unspoken in the air. What if we’d tried to make a place for her at our table?

Then we shrugged the question away.

5

The school called an assembly and made this great big announcement that they would be starting a whole new anti-bullying training program at our school next year.

There were rumors that Jacques and his friends had waited for Vaishali after school one day. Things had escalated and turned violent. Who knows what they might have done?

Word traveled that Vaishali had the presence of mind to call 911 and Jacques and his buddies had been caught on a school security camera. We hadn’t seen any of them on campus since. He and his gang were facing suspension – maybe more.

Bullying is serious, the principal said at the assembly, as he closed his announcement. We have a zero-tolerance policy where violence is concerned.

6

We don’t talk about Vaishali. Why would we? The three of us hardly knew her.

I don’t think of her often. But every once in a while, I catch myself glancing at the sunlit spot where Vaishali would always sit at lunchtime, silent as a shadow.

Shadows are strange things. We nearly never notice them, although they’re always attached to our bodies. They creep along behind us, lurking in wait for those brief moments when, unexpectedly, the light shifts and they leap ahead of us, forcing us to acknowledge their existence.