Skunk Girl

Read an Excerpt

The Keera in My Brain

I’m a giant in the sky flying over crimson-roofed houses, dressed in a wool turtleneck and jeans. It’s hot and I’ve started to perspire, a fine drizzle of sweat that falls onto the village below. That’s when I see a group of elves walking single file. They’re carrying hot fudge sundaes, lots of whipped cream and no cherry, just the way I like them. As I’m about to swoop down and attempt to steal a sundae,

someone grabs my shoulder. It’s a ghost, and it knows my name.

“Nina.”

“Nina.” The ghost is still gripping my shoulder. My mother. Her hair is tied tightly back and nearly every inch of her face is covered in white cream bleach.

“Wake up, beta,” she says. Her fingers smell like onion and chili powder; she’s already made breakfast. She always likes me to start the school year off on a full stomach. “It’s your first day of school!”

She says this as though I should be excited. Though it is indeed the first day of my junior year of high school, none of the feelings swilling around in my head bear any relation to excitement. In fact,

they’re pretty much the opposite of excitement. After spending much of the summer reading the two SAT prep books my parents had bought me, it’s easy to come up with possible antonyms. Unenthused.

Disinterested. Reluctant.

My mother shakes her head. “Sonia was always so excited to start a new year of school, but you never want to get out of bed.”

I sit up. “I’m awake now, Ma. Happy?”

“I made you an omelet,” she says. “Hurry up before it gets cold.”

And so I rise, and so begins another year. Another year of social exile, another year of not fitting in, another year of not measuring up to the legacy left by my sister, Sonia, another year of wishing I were someone else, someplace else. Who on earth would be excited about that?

My father’s in the kitchen and extends his arms out wide as soon as he sees me. I brace myself. He’s a small man, but bearlike in his affections, often testing the capacity of my lungs to withstand intense pressure in the form of zealous embraces, though as I’ve become older, the duration of these embraces has lessened. “Nina!” he booms cheerily, squeezing me for a second before letting go. It’s a rare moment when my father isn’t in a merry mood. If we were white and Christian, he’d be one of those dads who dress up as Santa Claus every Christmas. “Ready to ace calculus?”

“I’m not taking calculus till next year, Dad,” I tell him. His forehead furrows. Sonia, of course, started calculus in her junior year,

which is probably why he looks so confused.

“Don’t worry, you will be soon!” he says, as if calculus were some major milestone every teenager aspires to achieve.

My father has no surgeries scheduled at the hospital this morning,

so after we eat my mother’s omelets he offers to drive me to school,

which is fine with me since I don’t have my license yet and it’s embar-

rassing to be seen stepping out of a yellow school bus when you’re a junior in high school.

As soon as we get in the car my father puts on his favorite kind of music, qawwali, Sufi mystical music. Sometimes, when he gets really into it, he sings along and does this gesture with his right hand, like he’s unscrewing a lightbulb. But today he stays still. It’s a little too early in the morning for musical theatrics, even for my father.

We drive past rows of houses with small yards and swing sets and the occasional inflatable pool, and stop at the light in front of the old roller rink, which was shut down a few years ago and has been abandoned ever since, weeds and shattered glass blanketing the steps to the entrance. Back in 1986, when I was in fourth grade, this roller rink was the epicenter of the social scene. I used to hate having wheels on my feet. When I did go roller-skating I’d hold on to the wall that bordered the rink as the other kids raced by me, skating hand in hand, or backward, or both. Mostly when I went I sat around with my friends Bridget and Helena, and sucked on red and green ice pops, the kind wrapped in plastic that you squeezed from the bottom up.

We take a left and then a right onto Main Street. The words “Welcome to Deer Hook” are painted across the brick wall of a store, also abandoned, which is next to another abandoned store, which is next to the offtrack betting parlor, where already there are a few old men in stained clothing loitering outside, the necks of liquor bottles sticking out from the paper bags in their hands. Deer Hook’s Main Street has a bad half and a better half, divided by the main intersection, the only intersection on Main Street that has a traffic light.We cross the light into the better half and I can tell you the order of what we pass without looking: the movie theater, the Italian restaurant La Traviata, the Ming Dynasty Chinese takeout place, the pizzeria, the taxidermist shop with the stuffed moose head in the window. I’ve spent my whole life in this town and nothing here has really changed, except for some businesses shutting down and never reopening, like the roller rink. In this town, things aren’t reborn or reinvented. Everything that doesn’t stay the same either dies or goes away.

For as long as I can remember I’ve pretty much hated Deer Hook,

population 11,250. When I was in middle school, I had a game that I liked to play. I would close my eyes and touch a globe ever so lightly with my finger. Then I’d spin it with my other hand. Wherever my finger landed when the globe stopped spinning was where I was going to end up living, and I would yell out the name of my future home. “Australia! Egypt!” If it landed on someplace like Kansas or an ocean, I cheated and spun it again. “Brazil!”

One day, my father walked in as I landed on New Zealand. “New Zealand!” I shouted.

“What are you doing?” he asked. I explained. My father raised his bushy eyebrows. “You have a keera in your brain,” he told me. Keera is the Urdu word for “insect.” What my father meant was that I had something in my brain that was giving me strange ideas, like wanting to live halfway across the globe. This was a bit hypocritical, considering he had moved halfway across the globe, but I didn’t mention this,

because he would have said, “That’s different.” Instead I imagined the keera in my brain. He was a friendly-looking insect, like a cricket,

with big, powerful green eyes that could see the world beyond Deer Hook, beyond Albany and New York City, all the way to New Zealand.

My father pulls into the circular driveway in front of Deer Hook High, a U-shaped one-story building with a statue of Henry Hudson in front of the entrance. There’s a ton of people milling around, talking and laughing, most of them familiar. Huddled together by the statue is a group of nervous freshmen. “Have fun!” my father says.

My fingers tighten around the door handle. Once I exit this car,

there’s no going back. It’s not that I hate high school, it’s just that I wish it would hurry up and end already. But I suppose to understand this, you have to understand the story of my life thus far. The dread I’m now feeling is a culmination of years of dealing with things that end in “shun,” at least phonetically: repression, suppression, exclusion.

My name is Nina Khan, and growing up, there were two things that especially plagued me. The first was my sister.

Excerpted from Skunk Girl by Sheba Karim

Copyright © 2009 by Sheba Karim.

Published in April 2009 by Farrar Straus Giroux

All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.