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“I’m fucked, Gurbaksh.” “It’s Gary,” he said. “They call me Gary here.” “Of course they do.” “It’s either that or listen to the toothless yokels mangle my name. Like how we call Deutschland ‘Germany.’ ” “I’ve never understood that.” I pitched another Scot-Lad to myself and missed it. It landed and spun at my feet. “Like shouldn’t we just call things by the names the people who live there call them? Is it really so hard?” “I’ve looked this up because I get renamed so many times. The word is exonym for the things other people call it and an endonym for what the people themselves call it.”
rode my bike to the library. I tried to track down something on Sikhism. They didn’t have a book just on Sikhism (they had to interlibrary loan that for me). They did have an Encyclopedia of World Religions I could look at but not check out. There were four paragraphs on Sikhism and an inset picture of the Golden Temple. It was incredible. Even better than the postcard my mom had sent. The sun flickered off the filigreed bits. It was gold folded onto gold onto gold. And it was all sitting on a pond. The sun caught the pond and parts of the pond were gold too. It was like the building was so
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“One of my goals in life is to be too much for small-town Ohio.”
“You’re going out with a black girl?” “I think she’s half black.” “That’s black. In America, that’s black.”
Race never really came up between Gary and me. But when it did, it was like we were sitting in a really bad fart and didn’t want to acknowledge it. The thing was that I envied Gary. I envied his turban. I envied his brownness. I figured it was his brownness, his turban, that allowed him to be so popular. He stood out. But not in the way that I stood out: my weakness on display for everyone. People just naturally avoided and despised me like a Band-Aid in the pool. I liked being friends with Gary, I liked being around his brownness, I liked that his brownness was now associated with me. But we
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The Jewish kids were different but they blended in and most of the school was too dumb to know what Jewish meant. But the school knew what “brown” meant and had an idea of what “turban” meant. But Gary disarmed all of that. People loved Gary. Teachers, lunch ladies, students, custodians, all fell under his spell. But was this the result of having lived as a “not” for so long? Was he constantly his own PR agency? The black kids, after about sixth grade, started to hang out exclusively with one another. Maybe fifth grade had become the year they’d started having to be their own PR agencies and
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We all sat there and listened to him cry, just as they had all stayed silent when I was bullied, just as we had stayed silent as the Coltons killed Gurbaksh. The Coltons were a minority in our town, evil was a minority in our town. But the majority lived in a tepid silence, avoiding the difficult confrontations, avoiding standing up for each other. I hated their silence the most. I hated them.
See, I was always going to be safe. I was not a survivor because of some inner quality of strength or courage, which at this point can surprise no one. I was a survivor because I learned how to hide, learned how to stand to one side when the evils of the world came down, hoping they’d attack anyone else but me. Lucky for me, hiding was possible. I blended in. Unlike Gurbaksh, I looked like my tormentors.
