The White Rush

The main issue they were dealing with was bravery thieves. 

Bravery thieves, Zelles always said, were the worst creatures that existed because they stole bravery, which was the most valuable treasure in the universe. 

Without bravery, you can't do anything, Zelles said.

Zixian and Zelles spent every weekday afternoon hiding bravery holders where the bravery thieves couldn't find them, like underground or in trees.

The hiding places were crafty, so usually Zixian and Zelles could find the bravery holders when they needed them, like for a battle or something like a math test. They made complicated maps with coded language and built-in misdirections and deceptions. But the bravery thieves did find them sometimes. The hiding place would be empty, or worse, the holder would be there but destroyed, smashed to tiny, shimmering splinters. Zixian had seen the broken holders with her own eyes, even once cut her finger on one as she pulled it from its hole in the ground.

There was only so much bravery. The bravery released from a smashed holder was lost to the universe forever.

Zelles was very, like seriously brave. It was because she knew how to use the bravery holders, how to hide them, how to keep them in little pouches around her neck, how to hold them in her hand and draw their power into her spirit. Even though Zelles was two years younger than Zixian, she wasn’t afraid of anything. She had no problem sneaking out of school during recess or talking back to the mean kids.

“They’re not real bravery thieves,” she told Zixian. “They only wish they were that powerful. They’re scare-fakers.”

Zixian was afraid of everything. Around the scare-fakers she tried to be invisible. She liked to do what she was supposed to. The first time she followed Zelles through the hole in the fence that marked the edge of school property, it was like they had fallen off the edge of the known and orderly universe.

“What?” Zelles had asked, looking back through the fence hole. “What’s wrong?”

Her eyes were giant and her skin was cocoa-colored and her hair was a fierce cloud around her tiny pointed face.

She looked like a warrior elf, which was exactly what she was. A warrior elf in the land of Zandrum, waging battle against the bravery thieves.

“We’re not allowed to go out there,” Zixian said.

“Nothing’s gonna happen to you.” Zelles held her skinny brown arms out to show she was still alive. “Look, I’m okay.”

Zixian ducked through the hole, but it felt like a bad idea. Her hands were shaking, and the broken metal of the fence scratched her leg.

Zelles was already halfway up a tree.

“I’m going back in,” Zixian said. It was scary out here, some kind of storage yard with sheds and gravelly rocks on the ground and a lot of buzzing metal lockers. She touched her finger to her knee, brought it to her face. A little blood. Heat was coming up from the ground and everything looked too bright.

There was a loud poof, and a bunch of tiny rocks hit her leg. Zelles had jumped down from the tree.

“Here.” She put a bravery holder into Zixian’s hand. It was smooth and round and purple-colored and looked like a glass rock. 

“I don’t know how to use it,” Zixian said.

“Hold it in your hand,” Zelles said. “Close your eyes and absorb its power.”

Zixian closed her eyes, felt the bravery holder grow warm in her hands. She could feel the bravery inside of it, but she couldn’t figure out how to get it out.

“It’s tricky,” Zelles said. “You need to be soft. Just for a moment, not too long. Just long enough for the bravery to get in.”

Zixian focused everything on softness. Softness. The edges of her body blurring into the pulsing hot air outside, so now she wasn’t separate from that air but part of it.

She felt her insides fill up with bravery. Not just through her hands from the bravery holder, which was what she had expected, but from everyplace her skin touched the air. It flooded into her like blue dye mixing into water, first in tiny streams that she could feel, then as a part of her insides.

“Up here,” Zelles said. She was higher than before, a tall, straight pine tree with easy regular branches. Zixian put the bravery holder in her pocket and followed her. She was wearing a skirt, and her scratched knee got scratched again on the rough tree trunk. She climbed up and up, following Zelles’ blue sneakers and corduroy pants, until the branches were too small.

They were high over the schoolyard. You could see everything from up here: the kickball game, the lunch aids, the scare-fakers hanging out by the swing sets. Everyone was small, like dolls in a dollhouse, like ants doing their ant activities, no clue that someone was watching over the tops of their tiny heads. Zixian smelled sap in her hair and on her t-shirt, felt the sting of air on her bloody knee.

She had never felt so powerful. 

Zixian loved Zelles’s house.

Zixian’s parents were fighting all the time and didn’t care if she was home for dinner, and Zelles’ parents didn’t care if she stayed.

Zixian loved the scented rice and curried stews, loved sitting around the big table with Zelles and her little brother Gayan. She loved how Zelles’ parents spoke, how they always talked about politics. The mother’s accent was beautifully lilting so that she sounded philosophical saying normal things like, Alisha, Leda, come to dinner now.  The father’s accent was trickier, especially when he got going about wars, the one in Iraq that Zelles knew all about, or the one in Sri Lanka with the tigers that she didn’t know about at all. But after a while it didn’t sound like they had accents at all. She loved how they never yelled, even when they argued, how they spoke to her politely like an adult they were doing business with.

“Leda,” Zelles’ father would say. His name was Arun, and that’s what Zelles called him. Her mother’s name was Padma and Zelles called her Mom. Zelles and Zixian were called by their human names. “Every group of people deserves their own country that they can govern as they see fit. Don’t you think so?” 

“Yes, yes they do,” Zixian would say between bites of dal, trying to match his seriousness. She thought of the elves, of their struggles to reclaim the kingdom of Zandrum where they had once lived so peacefully before the bravery thieves had come.

“For example your mother’s country, Taiwan,” Arun said. “It was colonized by China, then Japan, then China again, and now it’s a free country.”

Zixian would nod and pretend that she already knew this about Taiwan. Zelles would roll her eyes and say, “Arun. Lighten up.”

“Alisha doesn’t like when I say things that are true,” Arun said.

Zelles would roll her eyes again. Under her breath she would say to Zixian, “Zirfens at zogotos.” It meant, Have strength against the bravery thieves.

Alisha was in a tree the first time Leda met her.

It was a small tree in the corner of the school yard. Leda usually sat under it, reading books about fairies and wizards. She had hidden secret fairy maps up in the branches where no one would ever find them.

But during recess one day, there was a girl in the tree.

Her legs were clamped around a branch, and a map was between her hands.

Leda got ready for the girl to make fun of her for making a stupid fairy map. Everyone made fun of Leda, for reading in the bathroom during the spring movie party and drawing fairies on all her worksheets. They called her Scleroderma because of the Scleroderma Reading Challenge where all the students read books to raise money for scleroderma awareness. Scleroderma was a horrible disease where your skin froze and your face got stuck. Even Leda’s teacher Mrs. Feder called Leda Scleroderma, especially when Leda read a book during recess.

“Enough reading, Scleroderma,” Mrs. Feder would say. “Why don’t you get some exercise?”

That’s when Leda would go hide under the tree.

The girl looked young, maybe a third grader. So Leda didn’t have to worry too much about her telling the kids in her class. Anyway, everyone knew little kids lied all the time.

“Bravery thieves,” the girl said finally. “We can go after their treasure, but it might be a trap. They’ve taken control of Zandrum and driven the elves underground. We’ll need to stay alert and watch for danger.”

The girl looked at Leda. Her face was small and shrewd and pointed, her skin like cocoa. On her wrist, she had a bracelet with a small green key on it.

“I’m Zelles,” she said. “I’m a warrior elf.”

Leda looked into her big, dark eyes and knew it was true.

“Do you have an elf name?” Zelles asked. “It would start with Z.”

“Zixian,” Leda said. It came out so naturally, she knew it must have been her secret name all along.

The name Leda came from the W.B. Yeats poem “Leda and the Swan.” Her dad’s choice, the English professor. A poem about the dawn of history. He used to recite it while he fed her dinner or gave her a bath, his voice gravely and distant.

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

These words had been her lullaby from babyhood. The strange heart beating, so clear in her memory, the image of it. Always on its own without any body, just the heart in something white, the red heart beating strange and bloody surrounded by whiteness.

The whiteness was the swan, she knew, something to do with a swan. A swan that pulled Leda down into his giant wingspan and enveloped her, smothered her in some overpowering adult way that stretched Leda’s brain to somewhere dizzying. Then to sleepiness.

When she got a little older, ten or eleven, she noticed these lines, which were also important:

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

They meant that Leda had given birth to Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the history of the world. A woman whose face had launch’d a thousand ships, whose beauty had burned a city and killed a king. All of that from the original Leda, the cosmic mother, this namesake of herself, Leda Levine.

Leda was twelve when her parents got divorced.

“Your father’s been having intercourse with one of his students,” Leda’s mother said, making pancakes for breakfast like she did every Sunday. She raised her eyebrows, confrontational like she expected Leda to contradict her. Her face was puffy, her usually-perfect black hair sticking up at ugly angles. “At least one.”

It made Leda sick, that sweet pancake smell, her mother saying the word intercourse. The idea of her father doing whatever that vague thing intercourse was. The physical ugliness of her beautiful mother, the unexpectedness of this response to Leda’s simple question, Where’s Dad?

“So he won’t be living with us anymore,” her mother said. 

“Where is he going to live?” She was scared to ask, almost didn’t. She couldn’t imagine the house without him, making his normal corny jokes over pancakes, complaining about how the maple syrup wasn’t real. Reciting her Leda poem, absent-minded, when he wanted to show her he loved her.

“I don’t care. Fuck.” Leda’s mom picked up a burnt pancake with the spatula, flipped it into the garbage next to the oven. “He can go live in the dorm.”

Leda cut her overcooked pancake into little pieces, squished them around in the syrup until it looked like she had eaten at least some of them.

Leda’s new best friend at the middle school was Madeline Harris-Waltham. She had just moved from somewhere in Pennsylvania, and her parents were both linguistics professors. She spoke three languages and knew everything about everything: chemistry and world history and American politics and Greek philosophy.

Which was a little intimidating, but Leda loved the challenge of it. Sitting on their favorite ledge in the hallway, Maddy completely freaking out about the war in Gaza, Leda felt a million miles over the heads of the normal students walking past, talking about normal things.

“I know you’re Jewish,” Maddy would say. “But you have to admit Israel is pretty messed up as a country.”

Leda, who had never been to Israel or really given much thought at all to Israel, would agree vehemently. During class, she’d scroll on her phone, trying to find out more about the war, how it started, key stats and players.

“Fucking Ehud Olmert,” she would curse, the next time she saw Maddy. “A thousand Palestinians dead.”

It felt a little fake, imposterish, but she really did care. It was terrible for a thousand Palestinians to die. There were kids at Leda’s school whose parents were Palestinian, kids whose parents were Israeli, and Leda didn’t want any of them to die. She really did feel angry at Ehud Olmert, this Prime Minister whose name she had just learned, for overreacting so extremely to a few rockets. Rockets weren’t very dangerous, and anyway it made sense that you might shoot rockets at someone if they were holding you hostage in your own country.

“Do you know about the Tigers? In Sri Lanka?”

Maddy shook her head, and Leda thought maybe she hadn’t heard of them, but then she said, “I was sad they surrendered. They really deserved their own homeland.”

Which Leda didn’t know had happened. Alisha was still in elementary school and they hadn't kept in touch too well, so no more dinners with Arun and no more updates on the Tamil Tigers. 

The more things you learned about, the more you realized how awful everything was.

The fight with Maddy started over Leda’s name.

“Leda and the Swan,” Maddy had said, chewing her cucumber and cream-cheese sandwich, her eyes scanning upward like she was trying to remember something.

“My dad’s favorite poem,” Leda said, proud to finally be the expert on something. “It’s about the dawn of history.”

“That’s his favorite poem?” Maddy raised her eyebrows, haughty and incredulous. “That poem’s about rape.” 

“Um, no.” Leda said. She knew all the words, and the word rape wasn’t in there anywhere.

“Um, yeah,” Maddy said. “Leda gets raped by the swan. That’s in Greek mythology. The swan is Zeus, and he rapes Leda, and then she gives birth to Helen of Troy and Pollux and two other kids from her actual husband. Some versions say she was seduced, but it’s pretty obvious it was rape. It’s like, if someone is a god, he can just rape you and you can’t really say anything about it.” 

Leda nodded and gave up.

She had social studies with Maddy after lunch, but instead of sitting next to her, Leda took a seat across the room, kept her head down and didn’t make eye contact.

Later during PE, Leda ran through the words in her head, trying to find what Maddy was talking about. Poems were so mysterious: all those beautiful patterns of sounds, robbing words of their meanings. So many poems she’d grown up hearing, reciting, and, it occurred to her now: she barely knew what any of them were about.

She squinted her eyes against the sun, watched a kid swing at a baseball with a wooden bat. She was way in the outfield, wearing a right-handed baseball glove because there were no left-handed ones.

Yeats did say: Her nape caught in his bill, he holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

Was that rape?

Yes, it was. It definitely was. She had listened to that poem her entire life, thought it was a beautiful story about love creating the world. Really, it was just a story about a god doing whatever he wanted to a woman who didn’t have the power to defend herself.

“Heads up, Levine,” her P.E teacher yelled.

There was a baseball flying at her head. She took a step to the side. The ball landed next to her, hard into the dirt and grass, then bounced away behind her. The girl playing first base ran past to catch it and throw it to second base.

The batter was already there, safe.

“Levine,” the teacher yelled. “You’re useless.”

Leda’s father did end up living with one of his students. Not the original one but a different one, the one who, her father liked to brag, did all the data analysis for the university. The old one, her mother called her, though the woman looked really young to Leda, far too young to be doing something so important sounding as all the data-analysis for the university.

They had a two-bedroom apartment, the second bedroom furnished as an office with a fold-out couch for Leda. Leda felt weird and fake when she stayed there, which was every other weekend. Sandra, the girlfriend, was tiny with long black hair. Not Taiwanese, but from Beijing. Like some alternate-universe mother, like if time had gone backwards and started Leda’s life over.

The day after Maddy said the thing about the rape, Leda’s father started in with the poem.

“Did she put on his knowledge with her power,” he said, poking his head into the office. “Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” 

Whenever he talked to her now, his voice was nervous like tiptoeing.

She opened her eyes and pretended to be working on math problems in her notebook. She had been thinking about Zandrum. About how fun it was to fight bravery thieves, before you grew up and had to actually fight actual bravery thieves.

“Need help, Leda-pida?” he asked. “Sandra could help with math.” A nervous smile. “You know she does all the data analysis for the university.”

“Yeah, I know,” Leda said.

He smiled, faint and angry.

“I’ll just get back to making dinner, then,” he said.

Then he left the room.

She hated that, when her father got in that robot-way, like she was one of his students and his job was to put up with her.

Leda checked her last text message from Alisha. Over six months ago, something about bravery catchers and battle strategies. Leda wanted to message her back, but she didn’t know what to write. She didn’t have anything to say about elves and Zandrum. She could say something about her life. But the thought of explaining what had happened—how her family had fallen apart one normal Sunday over pancakes—gave her an acid taste in her throat.  

              

She wrote one sentence: Trapped with imposter parents.

Zirfens at zogotos, Alisha messaged back.

And then, before Leda could figure out what else to say, Alisha texted:

Come over for dinner?

Sandra dropped Leda off.  Leda hated riding in her car, the Mini Cooper. It felt like there was nothing between her and the air whooshing outside. Sandra always wanted to talk about China, how it was the rightful ruler of Taiwan. Leda now knew that China was not the rightful ruler of Taiwan at all, but she could tell Sandra wanted to argue about it, so she kept quiet.

Alisha’s parents were fighting in the kitchen. Not about politics but more normal parent stuff, something like, You said you would do it, so I assumed you would. Alisha led Leda straight through the living room and out the back door.

“We’re not really having dinner with them,” she said. “I just wanted to get you out of your house.”

She’d gotten taller in the year since Leda had seen her, as tall as Leda, but still scrawny like a kid. She was wearing her key bracelet.

“My parents are imposters, too,” Alisha said.

They walked out the gate of the house and down the street to the park.

“That lady who dropped me off,” Leda said. “She’s my dad’s girlfriend.”

She’d never used that phrase before, she realized: dad’s girlfriend. It sounded ridiculous: that Leda’s father, this most serious and grown up of grown-ups, would have something as juvenile as a girlfriend. Girlfriend was like something the kids at Leda’s school would say, like, I wonder if Trevor has a girlfriend?

“Girlfriends are the worst,” Alisha said, grim and matter-of-fact like she knew.

The tree they climbed was a lot more work than the ones outside the school yard. You had to stretch as high as you could to grab the lowest limb, then hoist your legs up and over it. Alisha did it fast and easily, like this was her tree.

It took Leda a few tries. When she finally got her legs over the branch—her thighs looked so thick and fleshy, she suddenly noticed, compared to Alisha’s skinny legs—Alisha was already five branches higher. 

“It’s okay, stay down there,” Alisha said. She was unwrapping a green cloth bag, wound several times around an even higher branch. A falling leaf hit Leda in the face. It was dark and its edges were prickly.

Alisha handed Leda the bag.

Inside was a brown wooden box. It had a flower pattern made of little stones set into it and a bronze lock. Leda ran her fingers over the patterns, smooth dark stones and cool white ones. She wondered if the white ones came from elephants.

“Here.” Alisha undid her bracelet and handed it to Leda.

Leda stared blankly at it for a second before it occurred to her that the tiny green key, dangling like a charm, might be an actual key. It slid into the lock with a satisfying click.

The first thing inside were three bravery holders, one clear, one marbled white and one gray-green that Leda liked the best.

Under those, a photograph. Alisha’s mother, younger, with baby Alisha on her lap. A man with his arm around her, but it wasn't Arun. Some other man, with thick, curly hair like Alisha’s and dark eyebrows. Leda had never seen him before, never seen a photograph of him in the gallery of family photos in the hallway.

Maybe an uncle or a family friend. But the way he wrapped his arm around Alisha's mother didn't seem like that.

“Who’s that guy?” Leda asked.

“That’s Vittesh Iyer.” Alisha said. “He’s my real father.”

Leda shook her head, confused.

“He was an alcoholic.” Alisha was grim again and matter-of-fact, like it was a sad story she’d read in the newspaper. “He moved back to India.”

“An alcoholic.” The word was adult and scary in Leda’s mouth. Of course she had heard of alcoholics, as something on TV or in a movie, not someone who sat with his arm around Alisha’s mother.

“Arun is Gayan’s father,” Alisha said. “He doesn’t drink.”

“Do you remember him?” Leda pointed at the photo.

“He was a musician.” She had one of the bravery holders in her palm, the gray-green one, was rubbing it with her thumb while she talked. “He’s the one who told me about the bravery thieves.”

“Arun is nice,” Leda said.

Alisha wrinkled her nose. “He is nice, I guess,” she said. “He’s not who I would have picked.”

There was one more thing in the box, a postcard. It had a picture of a building painted all different colors, statues of goddesses surrounding its sides.

“You can read it,” Alisha said. She had the bravery holder in her fist. Leda could only see one mossy-colored edge peeking from the clenched side of Alisha’s hand. 

My dear Alisha,

I hope you are doing well in school and also having time for some fun.

I am playing some music in Chennai.

Someday I will return to see you.

Have strength against the bravery thieves.

With much love, 

Your father

“It’s the only time he wrote to me,” Alisha said. “I think he’s got other kids now.”

Other kids.

Leda felt herself going white, felt her hair get instantly sweaty.  

“Don’t worry.” Alisha looked sorry for saying it. “It’s not necessarily gonna happen to you. Careful, hold on to the tree.”

Leda linked her legs tight around the limb below her, braced her hands on it. The bark was rough under her palms, covered in moss and lichen that she hadn’t noticed before, but now the pattern of it made her feel seasick.

“Here,” Alisha said, “try this.”

She passed the white bravery holder. It felt cool and good in Leda’s hand, glassy, the swirl of patterns comforting like a marble. Looking at it made her feel calmer, like maybe she could handle whatever unknown things were going to happen to her family. 

There was a quick motion in the edge of her vision, Alisha’s wrist drawing backwards. Then a smashing noise. Alisha had thrown her bravery holder, the pretty green one, against the long limb of the tree.

Leda covered her head with her arms, even though the pieces had already broken on the limb behind her and fallen to the ground.

“Sometimes I use a hammer on them, ” Alisha said. “When I feel really bad.”

She looked small in the tree, knobby-kneed, and Leda remembered she was only ten years old. Leda was turning into a teenager and leaving her behind. She didn’t want to, needed to stop it. There weren’t a lot of friends who knew about imposter fathers and where to find magic hidden in trees.

“You never feel bad,” Leda said. “You’re always brave.”

“Not always,” Alisha said. “Sometimes I have to break things to feel braver.”

Leda looked down at the peaceful glass stone in her hand one last time. Rubbed her thumb over its swirling pattern. Then she cocked her hand back, released it, and let the stone fly hard into the bark of the tree.

It was both terrifying and satisfying to hear it smash into pieces.

The Phenomenal Identity of Self-Immolation

 Leda Levine had a crush. One of those horrible crushes that literally, physically crushes your soul. Sometimes her heart hurt so bad that she’d have to stop whatever she was doing and just stand still, arms wrapped protective around her shoulders until the pain stopped. 

The crush was on her sociology professor.

Which was not her normal sort of thing, not at all. She was a smart-person, an ideas-person. Not a person who needed to find sexual titillation in what was a perfectly fascinating academic course. While her friends were out partying, hooking up, she was at the library every night finishing her reading—Marx, Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Edward Said—because what she wanted was to know everything. Desire, for her, was about information. She couldn’t ingest it fast enough, and meanwhile there was more and more of it being generated every day.

Normally. But these were not normal times. The new, horrible president had just been elected and things were all fucked up. Everything was crazy, and everyone was upset.

The students in her classes showed up drunk, sobbed in the hallways, wore black clothing and newly-purchased Black Lives Matter pins, marched through the library shouting No Justice, No Peace!  

Leda’s roommate Hadar stayed in bed for days, subsisting on Cheetos and hot toddies made from whiskey and bottled lemon juice and English breakfast tea.

Whenever Leda asked, “Are you okay?” Hadar would answer: “I just can’t believe everyone is so racist.”

“I know,” is what Leda said.

She remembered how Hadar used to freak out about Leda being Jewish. Every time it came up: when Leda lit her own menorah at Chanukah, mentioned her bat mitzvah, read a few words in Hebrew.

How can you be Jewish and Chinese?

Leda would remind her: Chinese is a nationality. Jewish is a religion.

I’ve never met any Jewish people who were Chinese, Hadar would say. Or, as if it were the same thing: No one at my synagogue was Chinese.

In California where Leda grew up, there were tons of people who were Jewish and Chinese.

Hadar was from upstate New York. Sometimes instead of saying Leda was Jewish, she would say, Your father is Jewish.

Which was true. Leda’s father, Professor Richard Levine, was Jewish.

But he was way less Jewish than Leda’s mother, Susannah Huang Rothstein, who was, it was true, Chinese—Taiwanese, to be specific, though she had lived in California since the age of five—but who had converted when she married Leda’s father. Leda’s Chinese mother was the one who had arranged the holidays in the Levine household, said the prayers over the menorah, prepared the Seder plate on Passover, pulled the Haggadot from the top shelf of the linen closet, who insisted on reading every tedious passage before anyone could eat.

Now she was married to a different Jewish guy. Leda’s stepfather, Chip Rothstein.

Leda’s father had a girlfriend, Sandra Chen, who was Chinese but not Jewish. 

At college, Leda’s friends were mostly white. Mostly everyone there was white. After the election, none of them could believe how racist everyone was. They would turn to Leda and say things like, White people really suck, don’t we?

She never knew what she was supposed to say back to them.

Leda didn’t feel like drinking or protesting or hashing it out in conversation. What she felt was a dark empty hole in her chest. If she inhaled too hard, her breath caught and she tasted blood.  Something primordial sickly wound, a knee scraped bloody, the smell of vomit in an elementary school hallway. Her father packing a suitcase, her mother screaming curses at him.

That feeling when you remembered that safety didn’t really exist.

Six days after the election, her sociology professor, Rajendra Mukherjee, turned to the class and said: People of color need to rise up in solidarity to defeat white supremacy.

The class was Sociology 132. Theories of Multiculturalism, a requirement for her political science major. She loved the reading—no textbook, just a huge packet of articles by people like Edward Said and Audre Lorde—and it was her only class with more non-white students than white ones. Which made her feel a little nervous, like she wasn’t sure whether she could be as smart as she wanted to be about theories of multiculturalism, to be of value to this multicultural room. There was an essay coming up, and Leda wanted to ace it.

Leda sat in front, in all her classes. So as Professor Mukherjee’s gaze circled the room, she didn’t know whether he was looking at the white students—daring them to challenge him—or the Black, Latin and Asian students—daring them to rise up.

She didn’t know, when he said people of color, whether that meant someone like her. Someone who’d never been followed through a store on suspicion of shoplifting, even when she had actually been shoplifting. Someone who’d grown up in a suburb known for its outstanding public schools. Someone who’d taken six years of private cello lessons as a child, who currently had a ten thousand dollar cello in the corner of her dorm room. Someone who’d been called Chinese all her life, even though she was born in California. Someone whose father was a white guy from Brooklyn.

She flinched when Professor Mukherjee’s eyes reached hers, scared to discover: was she invited to the uprising?

Yes, his eyes said. Welcome.

Then they locked in.

She felt it, a click, a falling into place.

They were the only two people in the room. His eyes holding hers, pinning her in place. Big, dark eyes in smooth brown skin, knowing wrinkles just along the edges. His face human in a way it hadn’t been before, intimate like a portrait. A smile of recognition. Of comradery. A slight, inquisitive squint.

In her mind, a flash: the two of them, Leda and Professor Mukherjee, at a well-designed urban-hipster playground, pushing two smiling, squealing children on the swing set.

Which was odd. Such an odd vision that it jolted her out of the spell.

She’d never had a fantasy about kids, not ever. She was ninety percent sure she didn’t want kids.

She blinked, startled. Professor Mukherjee was on with his lecture. She turned her head one way and the other, expecting to see people staring at her like something weird had just happened. But no, everyone around her was the same as normal, flipping through their notebooks, playing with their phones.

After that, it was like there was a spell on her, like she’d gotten stuck. No matter where her body was, her mind, or some large section of it, was still in the classroom under the assessing gaze of Professor Mukherjee. In the dining hall eating cereal in her pajamas, in the hall lounge as she reviewed for her poli sci test. Squirming on the ugly dorm armchair, the restlessness painful in her muscles. People of color, she could hear him saying, and rise up, and solidarity. She saw his eyes, the anger and intelligence in them, the way they softened when they fell on her.

That playground scene. Leda and Professor Mukherjee and their two beautiful toasty-brown babies.

She tried to read the week’s assigned articles from the packet, her normal Sunday morning study session in the library. The article on the table in front of her was about colonialism, the cultural imperialism exercised by the colonizer over the colonized. How the colonized—they were called the subaltern meaning they were below others in the society—were robbed of their own narratives. She got that much, but not much else. It was all semiotics and the failings of deconstructionism and then so, so many words she didn’t understand. Also there was a large section of the essay where women in India set themselves on fire.

Usually she loved this kind of thing. A long, barely comprehensible piece of critical theory, a small piece of a secret world, and she would be welcomed in, if only she could decode it.

The phenomenal identity of self-immolation, she read. A long shared table in a silent library, the serious students up early and laser focused on their work. She blinked, tried again. Self-immolation if performed in certain places rather than in a certain state of enlightenment.

All she could decode was that this text had come from Professor Mukherjee, and that this made it special. 

What was he doing this weekend, she wondered? Was he working right now, reading this same article as he prepared for tomorrow’s class? Was he, like her father the English professor, in his office writing six hours per day, every day, no exceptions for weekends or holidays or even family vacations?

Maybe he was out at a protest. Expressing his solidarity with other people of color. 

She remembered how he had said it, people of color, how he had looked right at her.

She imagined him here, watching her try to read the article. How he would be disappointed in her, her lack of focus. She looked back at the article, but it was a sea of words: caste provenance and sanctioned suicide and anteriority transformed into stasis.

She texted her best friend Maddie, even though it was three hours earlier in California and Maddie was definitely still asleep.

I think I’m in love with my sociology professor. 

Which made her feel better, to tell somebody, at the same time it made her feel like the most horrible, ridiculous person on earth.

By the time Maddie texted back, Leda was taking a lunch break at the vegan fast food restaurant near campus. Still trying to read the article, but not really, more staring out the window. Out on the sidewalk, students were marching by with signs, chanting about fascism and banging on drums. Leda wondered if she should just give up studying and join them.

That’s when her phone buzzed. Is he married?

She put her veggie burger down. Ew, I don’t know, she texted back. She had said she might be in love with him. She didn’t say she wanted to, like, date him or anything.

He was her professor.

Still, she looked him up on her phone. Yeah, he was married. To a very attractive Indian woman, put-together with good makeup. Only a couple pictures on his page, nothing about kids, so she clicked on the wife. A good handful of pictures there, public photos that Leda could stare at for minutes at a time, several times a day without anyone knowing. The wife at a restaurant with friends. Professor Mukherjee giving a talk. The two of them all dressed up in a Bandhgala and Sari, cheek to cheek at someone’s wedding. He was beaming, a huge joyous smile like nothing Leda had seen from him during class. The wife serene, her gaze fixed on something out of view. 

Leda was getting grease all over her phone screen, but she didn’t bother wiping it off. She scrolled through all the wife’s photos looking for evidence of reproduction.

If Professor Mukherjee didn’t have kids, then Leda wasn’t a bad person for fantasizing about his wife, say, leaving him for her massage therapist. Right?

Nope, there they were: the kids. Two of them, lovely plump toddlers, close in age. A series of family portraits, taken at a park, everyone dressed in shades of white and beige.

And something familiar. A swing set. The two children laughing as Professor Mukherjee pushed, sun low on the horizon behind them.

Something tugged hard in her chest when she saw it. It was just how she’d imagined him with his children. Exactly like that image that had popped into her head, in opposition to every ounce of logical reasoning she possessed, of she and Professor Mukherjee raising their babies together. 

Leda stared at that photo all week.

For minutes at a time, all day long, as though it were a puzzle she could solve. Peered at it under her desk during lectures, gazed at it in the dark just before she fell asleep each night. Professor Mukherjee’s children. Perfect, just as she had imagined them, the whole scene so perfect. Something she’d never wanted any part of, not the tiniest bit. Now, suddenly, every nerve in her body ached from the want.

How did this happen to me, she wrote in her journal. When did I become normal?

She stared at the picture until the wanting made her feel sick with self-disgust. Then she looked at pictures of the wife. She hated the wife, this strikingly poised woman that she would probably admire in normal life, hated her with a primal aggression even more disturbing than the lust for her husband.

In class, Leda couldn’t do anything but stare at him like she’d stared at the photo, mesmerized by his performance. He would pace back and forth, waving his arms in big, sweeping gestures to indicate the size of the ideas: structural inequality, de-facto segregation, transitional justice. She tried to take notes, but they were just a string of phrases that didn’t make sense together, meaningless snippets that sounded pretty coming from his mouth.

She studied every facial expression, every movement. What was it that made him so special? Why, when she was supposed to be listening to his words, could she only see the delicate angle of his jawline where it met his neck, the expressiveness of his hands, the way his bulky hamstrings challenged the fit of his suit pants?

She started to get nervous before class, couldn’t eat anything all morning. She’d show up shaky and wrecked, tired from whatever was in the news, the president’s sneering, contemptuous voice on the radio. Hadar was listening to NPR nonstop, like she was trying to catch up on all the caring about politics she hadn’t done for the previous nineteen years of her life.

Leda kept waiting for Professor Mukherjee to tell the class what to do. She was ready for her marching orders, ready to rise up in solidarity with her fellow people of color. But aside from the occasional snarky political comment, all did was lecture about post-colonialism like it was any other class, while she tried, as best as she could, to listen.

Her essay came back with a note: See me in office hours.

She knew why. It was a horrible essay. The worst essay she had ever written. She had tried to connect the idea of the subaltern to the presidential election. The people who voted for the president, Leda had argued, thought of themselves as subaltern because they were working class, or uneducated, or white in a society that was beginning to question the views of white people. In their minds, they were the oppressed minority, fighting for representation.

It had seemed like a good idea, but her paper didn’t make any sense. It wandered in confused loops, sometimes arguing that the poor, uneducated white people really were oppressed, or at least losing power as they believed themselves to be, and sometimes that they were not oppressed at all, that everything in their country was designed specifically around their needs, desires and comforts. She had stayed up all night trying to make some sense of this contradiction, but it was too deep in the roots of the paper. If she took out one piece, the whole thing would fall apart. The quotes she had chosen kept proving the opposite of what she wanted them to, so she found different ones, swapped out half the quotes without changing the analysis afterwards, switched back to the original quotes. She slapped on a title and a shaky conclusion at the end, printed it out five minutes before it was due in class.

The thought of explaining herself, her shoddy work, in Professor Mukherjee’s office made her want to throw up.

Her paper was already on the desk when she arrived, as though he knew she would be coming to this particular office hour, on this particular day, even though there were no appointments and she could have chosen any of his five weekly hours. Maybe he had seen her lurking in the hallway. She had been out there for at least five minutes, taking deep breaths through her nose, steadying her stomach with calm, relaxing mantras: this will not kill you.

He smiled, a little tense. She took a seat on the empty chair in front of his desk, tried to find a good spot on the floor for her backpack so it would lean on the chair legs and not fall over and spill all her crap everywhere. It was like being on trial, except the judge was also some kind of celebrity you had always dreamed of meeting in person. Or the judge was some kind of magician who had the power to destroy your heart. It was maybe the most simultaneously exciting and horrifying thing she had ever felt. 

He got up and closed the door behind her.

Her stomach sunk. This was going to be very, very bad. She decided to blame it on the election.

“Your essay,” he said, sitting back down. His desk was neat, just one tidy stack of papers off to the side. She scanned the room for pictures of his family, found them on the bookshelf behind him, two framed photographs. Both pictures she had seen, studied for hours: he and his wife at the wedding. He and his kids at the playground. 

“I know,” she said.

“I was intrigued by your argument.” Still smiling, a little tense. She could see the shadow of stubble on his chin. “I was hoping you could tell me more about it.”

“You were?” She wondered if this was a trap. Maybe he thought she had plagiarized it. But then, it was clearly too horrible to be plagiarized. “It was just, the election had me really stressed out.”

His smile relaxed a little, some of the tension falling away. “I’ve been stressed about it, too,” he said. An honest smile, like he was relieved about something. His eyes, as she tried to read them, so dark and intense, something sad, something confessional. His eyes holding her gaze, and then:

A playground, a swing set, Leda and Professor Mukherjee pushing two chubby babies in the fading light of a late afternoon.

She blinked. Blinked again, trying to break out of it. Rubbed her hand over her eyes, over her face, until it was mostly gone.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked.

He didn’t wait for her answer. A bottle came out of a desk drawer, two small glasses. He was pouring golden liquid.

“I’ve been extremely stressed,” he said. “About the election. Like as in, it’s taking a toll on my work. On my life.” 

She studied him, as he pushed a glass in her direction, pulled his chair a little closer. His face, the composed jawline she had studied so many times, wasn’t so composed now. Up close, his cheeks were fleshy, his neck becoming a little loose as he approached middle-age. It was that look of adult men, that meaty, filled-out look that was both attractive and scary.

“Does it make you feel alone?” Professor Mukherjee asked. “Being so stressed all the time?”

The babies were there again. In her mind so strong, it was like he was forcing them into her brain. No longer sweet and peaceful, but menacing. Babies in the harsh glare of the setting sun, babies set as a trap to lure her in.

She stood up, grabbed her backpack, and ran out the door.

When Leda told her counselor she needed to drop Sociology 132, he frowned.

“So late in the term,” he said. “There would need to be a serious reason.”

She hadn’t been back to Professor Mukherjee’s class for three weeks. For the first week, she hadn’t gone to any classes at all. Each day she had left the dorm room in the morning, intending a day of lectures and homework. Instead, she found herself wandering around town, aimless. Sitting in coffee shops, watching other students studying, scrolling through news sites on her phone but never clicking on the stories. Peeking into bookstores, scanning the shelves for something useful, something that would explain.

Nothing was going to explain. The grown-ups were dead; Leda was going to have to be her own grown-up now.

 “Some kind of extenuating circumstance?” Her counselor half-smiled at her, encouraging, wispy blond hairs floating amicably over his bald spot. She wondered if he was trying to get her to confess something or to make something up.

“It was the election,” she said. “I’ve just been a little too stressed out.”

He nodded, sighed, pursed his lips like they were fellow-mourners at a funeral.

“I completely understand. Yes.” Hand on the computer mouse, clicking buttons in her file. Voice lowered now, a co-conspirator in the resistance. “I think we all feel that way.”