Aisling’s expression changes from shock to anger. “And who is this girl you’re dating?”
I search around in my head for names. If it’s someone they don’t know, someone they can’t search up on Instagram, they’ll know I’m lying, and then I’ll be back to square one.
Before I can think too much about it, my mouth forms the words, “My girlfriend is Ishita Dey.”
“You’re home early for a Friday,” Amma says when I slip inside the house later that evening. “I thought you were going to a movie with your friends?”
“I was … I did. I wasn’t feeling great, so I came home,” I mumble, taking my shoes off and hanging my coat up.
I’m about to go up to my room when Amma reaches out a hand to stop me. She takes me in with a frown on her lips.
“Are you okay, Hani?”
Coming home to my mother’s voice saying Hani after a whole day of being called Maira always feels strange. Like stepping out of a skin that belongs to me but doesn’t quite fit. Hani is the name that Amma and Abba have been calling me for as long as I remember. It’s the name that feels like me. Humaira is just the name on my passport, my birth certificate. The name given to people who aren’t family, who aren’t Bengali. And Maira … that’s just what Aisling decided to call me on the first day we met in junior infants. And it stuck.
“I’m okay, Amma,” I say.
“Did you get into a fight with your friends?” I don’t know how she knows. It must be a Mom-sense thing. “I’ll make us some cha and we can talk about it?”
This is something that Amma and I do sometimes. When she’s feeling down or I’m feeling down, we make cha, sit in a bed under the covers and talk about what’s bothering us. Or sometimes about nothing much at all, really.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s have some cha.”
After changing into our PJs, Amma and I get into my bed with warm cha in our hands. Abba is already sound asleep since he has a meeting early in the morning and has to be up at the crack of dawn. He’s been working so hard to be elected councilor that I feel like I hardly see him.
“So … are we talking about it or are we not talking about it?” Amma asks, sipping her tea with one hand and wrapping her other arm around me. “Because we can just drink cha in silence, if you want.”
I heave a sigh. I trust Amma with my life. Even though I tell Aisling and Dee that they’re my best friends, it’s really Amma who’s my best friend. She gave up her job when she was pregnant with me—and she never went back to it. She says she has no regrets. Instead of working, she spends her time leading the PTA, which she says she does mostly because she wants to keep me close.
But if I tell Amma that I’ve lied to my friends about dating Ishita, she’ll probably say I should tell them the truth. Fix things with honesty and integrity. Rubbish that I definitely don’t want to hear—or do.
I take a slow sip of my tea before clearing my throat.
“I went to the movies with Aisling and Dee, but they were trying to set me up with some guy their boyfriends know.”
Amma takes a strand of my hair in her fingers and tucks it behind my ear gently. “And … that made you upset?”
“A little, I guess. I tried to explain to them that I don’t really want to date boys right now … and that brought up the whole bisexual thing and … they were weird about it.”
“Maybe they just need more time?” Amma offers. “It can take people time to process things.”
“You and Abba didn’t need time to process,” I say. “You hugged me and told me that you loved me and were proud of me and—”
“We did need time to process, Hani,” Amma says slowly. “We just processed on our own, not in front of you.”
“So … you were upset when I told you?” They were so accepting—like they had never expected me to be anything but bisexual. I never imagined that’s how things would go for us.
“We weren’t upset, but … we had to change our perceptions a little bit.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that … we had these ideas in our head about how things would look for you, and us, down the line, and we had to shift those ideas and make room for new ones.”
“Like … instead of a husband some time in the future, I might have a wife?” I ask.
“Yeah, things like that. And … about how we would deal with telling other family members. How they might react. But … we wanted to deal with that ourselves. Process it all with each other, so you didn’t have to worry about it.”