He's marrying my sister in March

I've sat this thing twice. 505 the first time, which is the sixty-sixth percentile, which my mother heard as sixty-six out of a hundred and asked me where the other thirty-four went. Second time I got a 503.

CARS did it both times. 123, then 122. If you don't know what CARS is, it's nine hundred words about a dead architect and then four questions about what the author would think regarding something the author never brings up. Chem-phys I'm fine. Bio I got a 128, which my chacha says means I'm basically already a doctor, and my chacha also thinks you can patch a sidewall.

Third one's January eighteenth in Rancho Cordova, seven-thirty in the morning. Until then I'm on the register at his shop on Stockton, ninety a day, cash, four days a week, and I do a full-length every Saturday, which is seven and a half hours, which is longer than my shift.

I live in the back bedroom of my parents' house off Fruitridge. Not a back house, we don't have one of those, just the room at the end where my dad used to keep the treadmill. My sister's getting married in March and her fiancé moved into the front room in November, because his lease was up and my mother said only an idiot signs twelve months for four months of living.

His name's Bilal. Twenty-nine. He sleeps on the pull-out with his suitcase still half packed under the coffee table.

The hall's in Elk Grove, off Laguna. Fifty-two hundred for the room, then thirty-one a plate, and we're at two hundred and six people with my mother adding about four a week, so call it two-twenty by March. We drove out to look at it in December and there was fog on 99 the whole way, the real tule stuff where you're looking at forty feet of road. My mamu's flying in from Karachi with his wife. My khala's son got refused in September and he's appealing. The mehndi's at the house, in the driveway under a tent, and I've been informed that the tent is my department.

Bilal does intake at a warehouse in Natomas, ten at night till six in the morning. He's home by twenty to seven and the first thing he does is put the pan on. Not tea bags. An actual pan, boiled down, and he crushes the cardamom with the back of a spoon right on the counter.

I'm up at five-thirty on Saturdays because the real thing starts at seven-thirty and you're supposed to get your body used to it. The Saturday after Thanksgiving I came out of a full-length a little after one and he was still up, and he put a cup down and asked how it went, and I said CARS was bad, and he said okay, what happened in CARS. So I told him about the dead architect. He wanted to know what the guy had actually built. It doesn't come up in the passage.

My mother has a thing where she says nothing about the test and then puts a plate down in front of me and stands there until I start.

In December he brought his Corolla in with a nail in the right rear. Slow leak, and he'd been topping it up at the Chevron on Florin for two weeks like a crazy person. I pulled the wheel and patched it from the inside and didn't ring it up, and chacha watched me not ring it up and said nothing, which from chacha is basically a bonus.

After, we got tacos off the truck on Franklin, the one in the lot by the transmission place. He ate four. I ate one and a half and he looked at the half and didn't say anything about it.

In the lot he told me his mother had asked him on the phone if he was sure. He said of course he said yes.

I asked if he wanted the rest of my taco. He did.

Pakistan played New Zealand on a Tuesday and the match started at eleven at night our time. We watched it on my laptop on the floor of the front room with an earbud each, because the cord doesn't let you sit any further apart than that. Somewhere around the twenty-ninth over his head came down on my shoulder.

I didn't move him.

He got up about forty minutes later, said something in Urdu that I'm fairly sure was about his mother, and went to the pull-out. I stayed on the floor until the innings ended. Pakistan lost, obviously. My dad watches those matches with the sound off.

First week of January, Bilal's younger brother got refused. Second time. He was meant to stand with Bilal at the nikah and there's no version of March where that happens now, so Aleena came and sat on the end of my bed while I was in the middle of a psych section and asked if I'd do it.

I said sure. Took about a second.

Then she asked if Bilal had said anything to me about his mother. She said he'd been out in the driveway on the phone twice that week and come back in and not wanted dinner.

I said no. She said okay and went to bed. I got a 128 on that section. Best psych I've ever put up.

On the eighteenth I left the house at six, because I'd rather sit in a parking lot for an hour than be the guy pulling in at seven twenty-five. Bilal took the night off. He was in the kitchen at quarter to six with the pan going and I told him he didn't have to do that and he said he was up anyway.

He filled a thermos. It sat in the cupholder through the first two sections and I drank it lukewarm in the hallway at the break, standing by the lockers next to a guy who kept telling everybody he'd wrecked it. Score comes back in thirty days.

Last Saturday Aleena took me to get fitted, that plaza on Elk Grove Florin with the halal butcher in it. Bilal drove because her Civic has the check engine light on. The tailor put the tape around my chest and read the number out, then asked for my mother's phone number.

Bilal laughed so hard he had to go stand outside. When we came out he was leaning on the car with his phone, and he put his hand on the back of my neck for maybe a second, the way you'd do to anybody, and said the number again, and got in.