Third, people actually notice the front row, which means that I’ll be out there on full display. Frontline is the opposite of blending in. A part of me has secretly wanted this—that’s why I actually put some effort into poms this season—but another part of me is petrified.
Fourth, is the only reason I’m getting this promotion because of some diversity quota? Shudder. Diversity, quotas, token minorities, affirmative action—all that bullshit has haunted me my whole life.
“Keep Jess, she’s better,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant.
Naomi starts to respond but Jessica cuts her off. “Forget it, V. You do deserve it and I don’t really care. And BTW, there’s plenty of room for all three of us ‘token minorities’ to be on the frontline.” Jessica eyes Naomi up and down. “We just gotta get rid of this white bitch.”
“Really heartwarming, how you sistas stick together,” Naomi says mockingly before turning to face the rest of the group. “Meeting over. Get out!”
The girls don’t waste time gathering the duffle bags, backpacks, and purses that have been carelessly piled into a heap in the corner of the living room. A few of them congratulate me on my promotion before rushing out the door. Dancing frontline, even on a team as bad as ours, is kind of exciting.
“Violet,” Tessa calls out as I am about to leave. “You really do deserve this. It’s not because of that diversity stuff either. Naomi was just joking around with all of that.”
Naomi shakes her head vehemently.
“Stop, Naomi.” Tessa hugs me. She smells like vanilla with a faint hint of cigarette smoke. “V earned frontline because she’s good.”
“And because she’s brown,” Naomi adds wryly.
I flip Naomi off, which makes her smile. Then I exit the funeral home through the side door. A light summer breeze tickles the back of my neck as I walk into the parking lot. I check my cell. It’s almost half past seven in the evening and the sun is still hanging on, lying low on the horizon.
I pop the back of my SUV, a four-year-old black Honda CR-V, the preferred car of the middle-aged divorced soccer mom. It used to be my dad’s, who, as a self-absorbed, absent-minded, widowed fifty-four-year-old professor, is the farthest thing from a soccer mom there is. But he is generous and gifted me with the car on my sixteenth birthday.
I throw my poms gear and school bag into the back. As I slam the rear door shut, a chill runs down my spine. I turn around slowly. Up in the second-story window of the house, I see the creepy intern looking at me. For a brief moment, I meet his stare. Then I drop my keys and hastily stoop down to pick them up. The blood rushes to my head. Slightly woozy, I will myself to peek up again. This time, he is gone.
I practically leap into the driver’s seat. I can’t stop trembling as I press the automatic locks. I steady my hands just enough to ram the key into the ignition, then drive away as fast as I can.
Three
BY THE TIME I pull up to the Fawn Ridge sign at the beginning of my subdivision, I’ve nearly managed to make myself believe that I didn’t actually see the creepy intern. No—that isn’t quite right. I acknowledge seeing him, but I am trying to convince myself that he hadn’t been watching me. In the past three years, I’ve become very adept at denial. It is the most useful weapon in my arsenal. Without it, I will surely end up in a loony bin—or dead.
I drive along the tree-lined street leading up to my house. Meadowdale, with its charming town square, old-fashioned train depot, and locals who embody the mighty red, white, and blue that make this nation great, is straight out of Stranger Things. Fawn Ridge, with its community chili suppers, Sunday slow-pitch softball games, and relentlessly nosy neighbors is exactly the type of hood where ET would live.
My life, however, is a total horror flick. Or at least it was back when I was an Aiedeo. The Aiedeo are an ancient line—my line—of Assamese warrior queens. If being an Aiedeo meant I had a primarily ceremonial role that required me to wear a crown and throw a spear, I could maybe handle it. But it’s so much more wack than that.
The Aiedeo started with Ananya, my great-great-multiplied-by-like-a-hundred-more-greats-grandmother. She was a queen in an ancient kingdom that ruled what is now Assam, India. I don’t know much about Ananya, but from the stories that I’ve heard, Gram was straight-up gangsta. Ananya’s husband was the maharaja but he was just a tiny footnote in her story because it was Ananya who had the real power. Supernatural powers.
I never got the details on everything Ananya could do, but it sounds like she was all the Avengers rolled into one. Legend has it that she single-handedly took on a battalion of Persian soldiers with her mad combat skills, poisonous arrows, and super-strength.
When Ananya was still a relatively young queen, there was a shift in the Ultimate Reality, the eternal cycle of creation and destruction, that caused all hell to break loose. Literally. War broke out between the gods and the Asuras—or, more accurately, the creators and the destroyers. Ananya used her powers to help the creators win the war, which was a good thing, because had the destroyers succeeded, we’d all be living in some dystopian nightmare under the rule of demon kings.
The gods honored Ananya by creating an entirely new position for her: an Aiedeo. Her task was to protect the world by destroying the destroyers. As if that weren’t enough, the gods decided to ensure job security for Ananya’s future female lineage by making us all Aiedeo too.
They also promised one female in every generation would get her own set of powers like Ananya had. However, like most Indian parents, Ananya wasn’t going to give any of her progeny a trophy just for showing up, so she threw in the stipulation that an Aiedeo wouldn’t be born with her powers but had to earn them.
An Aiedeo does that by going through a rigorous training that starts when she’s ten and continues for the next seven years. An Aiedeo mother trains her daughter in a series of lessons designed to prepare her for various shamas, which are the ultimate tests of mind, body, and spirit. Every time a girl passes a shama, she’s rewarded with a power.
My training began exactly on my tenth birthday. I kind of knew what to expect because my nanny, Dede, had been telling me about my legacy for most of my life. The Aiedeo are a highly secretive group and they rarely reveal themselves to outsiders. But apparently, when my mother was still alive, she’d told Dede everything she knew about being an Aiedeo. I sometimes wonder if that’s because Laya was aware that she wouldn’t be around to tell me herself.
The night I turned ten, I woke up to see a woman with long black hair just like mine sitting on my bed, and I was so excited. Not because of all the stories that Dede had regaled me with about the Aiedeo; it was never just about the shamas or the powers for me. What I’d held on to was that every Aiedeo girl was trained by her mother. Which meant now I was going to get Laya back. But when I turned on the light, my heart plunged. The woman saw the clear devastation on my face and smiled softly. She told me that her name was Mohini, and then she taught me how to braid my hair. First with my hands and then without my hands, just using my mind. I wasn’t very good but Mohini was a patient teacher and I liked her singsong voice. She came back every night after that for an entire month until I could braid my hair with no hands all by myself.