Portrait

Come in from the snow and take off your boots otherwise you’ll get frostbite and your little toesies will fall off, you don’t want that, good girl…and now the other foot, there and now mumma will make you a castle by the heater.

The grey sofa cushions are very much taller than her and they make a cozy fort to keep the heat in nicely and she can feel her toes again and it is almost her favorite part of playing in the snow except for when her father pulls her around the block in her sleigh. The sleigh is red and it is new. Except sometimes Sean comes too and he is mean so she does not like him. But her mother has told her she must be nice to him because it is Manners and besides his parents bought the light blue and dark blue house next to hers. Her house is red and green and white and there are wild raspberries in the backyard and a big mulberry tree on the deck. When the berries fall on the deck they make a dark stain and her father can get very angry about that.

She is given her berries to eat in the kitchen which has a shiny white floor. It does not stain. She knows because she has spilled berries on it before. And when her grandmother cleaned it up her mother had said Don’t Spoil Jahnavi.

*insert cryptic Joyce-like diamonds*

It was warm under the blankets. So warm that she did not want to get up, but her mother was talking to her softly and she knew that it was time to get ready for school. Her mother had laid out a pair of jeans and a yellow shirt with a sunflower on it for her to wear after she showered. Her mother was very keen on showering in the morning. So was her grandmother. Something about energy but she never had much energy to begin with, at least according to Miss Sellers. Miss Sellers was always telling her to Look Alive in Gym class but she wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Honestly she wasn’t quite sure what to make of Miss Sellers either, who had very short hair and kind of looked like a boy. But her mother said Miss Sellers was definitely a girl. But it was still hard to believe sometimes because why would a girl teach Gym. Anyway, she was pretty sure she was alive even if Miss Sellers didn’t think so. And running around the field for Exercise was so very tiring, especially in the sun. Besides, if she ran an entire lap then she had to pass the big gray house behind the trees on the far side and all the older kids in the fifth grade said it was haunted. And she knew that the fifth graders were always right because they were so much taller than she was and kids didn’t lie to other kids the way grown-ups sometimes did, like when her father had told her he wasn’t divorcing her, only her mother, but then he still moved into another house and he only took her around the block on Thursdays and only if she rode her own bicycle, which was hard and sometimes she skinned her knees.

Picking the dandelions that grew along the edge of the field was a lot more fun than doing laps and that was how she had met Samantha, who didn’t like Gym either. Samantha’s mother was a hair cutter and sometimes she did free haircuts for Samantha’s friends. One day she said Do you want a haircut Jahnavi and Jahnavi said yes, and after that she always got free haircuts and she and Samantha were best friends.

After she had put on the shirt with the sunflower on it her mother gave her a glass of milk and a jam sandwich and drove her to school. School was very loud because of all the kids screaming and running around like little angry heathens and she really didn’t want to go, but her mother had to go to work so she squared her small shoulders under her big backpack and got out of the car. She allowed herself to be buffeted along towards the stairwell, which was where Ms. Fraser took attendance before everyone got to go into the building. She tried to stay by the wall and remain inconspicuous but somehow she found her path blocked by Ryan Emery, who said nastily Your head’s so small, I bet your brain is really small too. There’s no one with a smaller head than you. She looked up at him and tried not to have the afraid expression on her face. He was very much taller than she was but he was not a fifth grader: he was in her class and mostly the only time he ever talked to her was to tell her that her head was too small. In kindergarten there had been a girl named Corey whose head was even smaller than Jahnavi’s, but they both knew that it didn’t matter how big your head was as long as you got A’s on the weekly spelling tests. And anyway Corey had moved away when they got to the first grade and Jahnavi thought that it was so sad that they didn’t get to enjoy being big kids together.