When she finally caught onto what I meant, she didn’t answer right away. She put her hands together and rested her chin on her fingertips, and she looked at the ground for a long time. Then she looked up at me, and she said, “Because I’m a very good girl. I’m an only child, and I’m everything my mother and father ever dreamed about. Very good student, perfect English, perfect manners—presentable enough, yes—right on track for a double First at Cambridge, where we always go. Nice if I were fair-skinned— you get a better choice of husbands that way—but there, you can’t have it all, Jenny, do you see now?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think I do.” What I thought was that I probably ought to be angry, and I was trying to work up to it. “You mean I’m your absolute opposite—I’m so different from you I’m like a novelty? Like that?”
Meena looked as though I’d hit her. “Not that! Not that, no!” She jumped up and grabbed both my hands. “You have such spirit, you make your own plans—you wouldn’t go along with what everyone else wanted, just so they’d go on thinking you were a good girl. You don’t care what anybody thinks—that’s what I admire so much about you. I wish I were like you, Jenny truly.”
Nobody else in my whole life had even come near saying something like that to me. Nobody. I told Meena so, but as smart as she is, there’s no way she could ever really know what it meant when she said that. Meena understands a lot, but if she understood something like this, she couldn’t be Meena. That’s just the way things get set up.
Anyway. We first got to be friends when we both hid out in the girls’ john, ducking Games, and then later when Meena started helping me with Spanish and I helped her with a music project she was doing, comparing the way Indian singers improvise with how Western jazz singers do it. Once I told her it didn’t count like helping, because of my parents being musicians, and she got really angry with me. She said friendship wasn’t a bloody cricket match, you didn’t keep score, there wasn’t a point system. I almost like watching Meena being mad, because she does it so well, considering it lasts maybe five minutes, no more. Meena can’t ever work up a good sulk.
She lives just outside Yeovil—her mother’s at the hospital there, and her father commutes to Dorchester to teach physics at the university. The first time I ever went to stay overnight at Meena’s house, I was edgy because I didn’t know if I should be different with Meena there than I was when it was just us, and she was edgy about how her parents would be with me. And they were edgy because Meena hadn’t brought anyone home from school before, and they didn’t know if I could eat Indian food, or how Jews were about graven images and shrines in the front hall. So between us we had the makings of a real disaster, but it worked out all right. Mr. and Mrs. Chari were as nice as they could be to their daughter’s weird American friend, and I didn’t knock anything over or say anything really stupid. And I know about Indian food—I’m from New York, for God’s sake.
So it was a lot easier when Meena came to spend a weekend at Stourhead Farm. Tony and Julian fell in love with her the moment she walked in the door—okay, I was a little jealous, especially watching Julian following her around, offering to carry things for her—and I couldn’t help thinking, I bet Sally wishes I looked like that and acted like that. But I was proud of her, too, —she’s my friend, what’s that make me? —and at the same time I felt guilty that I wasn’t ever like that with Jake and Marta. Some days there’s no damn way I can let myself alone.
Evan was out with a well-driller, and Sally was with the vet about some of the sheep, so Tony and Julian took Meena around the Manor, with me wandering along behind. Tony showed her the ground-floor room in the east wing that he’d been turning into a dance studio—he even had a bar on one wall, and he was putting up every piece of mirror glass he could find, fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. He was sanding the floor, too, on weekends, over and over, till it was practically transparent. So then, of course, Julian had to show Meena his rock collection, and his pressed-leaf collection, and his sugar-packet collection. And the stuffed gorilla in my room, but he never once mentioned that it was really his. Julian. I still can’t get him to take it back.
At dinner the boys were both talking to Meena at the same time, and Evan and Sally were asking her the same school questions Mr. and Mrs. Chari had been asking me. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her in peace until we went to bed in my room. And then it took me half an hour to talk Meena into taking my bed and letting me get into Evan’s old sleeping bag on the floor. Indians keep wanting to treat you like their guest, even when they’re yours. They can wear you out.
But then, finally, we got down to business. We lay there and talked about our families, and people at school, and I told Meena about Jake and Marta, and she told me about Lalitha, who was her best friend in Madras, and we compared books and movies and songs, and who had worse periods, and who hated Mr. Winship more—he taught Organic Chemistry—and why the monsoons are so important, and why I was going to take her to meet an old man they call Poet O in Central Park. Today it’s just a few years later, and already I can’t remember why, when you’re thirteen, all that stuff absolutely has to be talked about in the dark, when you’re supposed to be asleep. But it does.
Meena told me about Karthik, her white mouse, and I talked about Mister Cat—or I did until my throat started to tighten up again. So Meena changed the subject without seeming to change the subject, which is something she’s very good at. She said, “But what a palace he’ll be coming home to, your Mister Cat. So much space, so many shadowy corners to investigate, so many interesting new sounds… I’d love to be a cat in this house.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “Other people have cockroaches—we’ve got gnomes, or boggarts, or something.” I told her about the voices in my bathroom, which I hadn’t told anyone, and about the rooms Julian wouldn’t go into, and the things the carpenters and electricians had said. The longer I went on, the crazier it sounded, but Meena listened without laughing or interrupting once.
When I got through, she said, “Well, Julian was right—you definitely do have a haunted house. Dollars to doughnuts.” (Meena’s crazy about American slang, and sticks it in every chance she gets.) “In India we’ve got haunted houses all over the place—we’ve got haunted apartments, haunted gardens, even haunted garages. Our old house in Madras had a poltergeist, one of those spirits that breaks things, throws everything around. I saw her a few times as I was growing up.”
I’m glad it was dark, so maybe she didn’t see my mouth hanging open. “You saw it? Her? The poltergeist?”
“Oh, yes,” Meena said. “Not very often, though. A little girl, about Julian’s age, with a scar down one side of her poor face. Like a burn scar. Maybe that’s why she was a poltergeist, who knows? We felt so sorry for her.”
“What did you do? Do Indians have, like—I don’t know—like with a priest? An exorcism?”