Three Parties

Chapter One

Firas needed the flowers to make a statement. All of it needed to make a statement: the food, the music, the decorations, the favors, even the guests had to have some purpose, some thematic relevance that couldn’t be forged or fouled. Every element of his party would serve as a clue, a pinpoint on a map across his lips whence his secret often spilled in drips of jargon throughout hurried breakfasts and quiet suppers. Those inclined to do so would partake in the journey, and those less inclined would have the journey dropped on them like a brick house. His secret would come out, that was certain, but the precise manner in which it did would remain a mystery until reality blended with surreality, Time stopped spinning its merciless hand, and all the mind’s senses fizzled to a hum, for in that moment his unprotected heart would be the only thing in existence.

He wondered if the clues would be enough to lay the cobblestones to his destination, or if his parents would be too preoccupied, perhaps even too dim, to notice the path at all. They had much on their minds in recent years, as did his sister, as did his brother, each member of the family an island in an archipelago, viewing one another with familiarity and little else.

When he awoke that Sunday, his room displayed a strange new motif that he could only describe in his groggy morning state as askew. As though he’d woken up in the middle of the night and rearranged everything with a faintness that denied him any memory of it. A newfound intimacy had developed among his possessions: the Tustin solid wood armoire three
inches closer to his bed, the occupants of his floating shelves—books, landscape paintings, souvenirs—huddled in a secret meeting. The velvet ottoman on which lay his prayer rug, unfurled once a day to give the impression he ever used it, now tucked itself into the corner to allow for the emergence of its oldest friend, the streak of caramel staining the wall despite a decade of attempts to clean it. Even this everlasting emblem now struck him differently. But it could not be refuted that this disorientation was much less the fault of the picture than it was of the viewer, whose perfectly fixed head and perpendicular gaze were no match for the upturned mind behind them, viewing not only the whole room from a different angle, but the whole world from a different angle, looking for all the stains along its path and finding beauty in them. Today, after all, was to be a beautiful day.

He marched downstairs, expecting a half-hearted birthday wish from everyone, only to find Suhad alone in the kitchen cooking breakfast. The smell of frying bacon meant their parents were out of the house, and the awkward contortion of her body, obscuring the stove, meant they were scheduled to return any minute.

“Where are Mama and Baba?”

Her head jerked up like a rabbit startled by a breaking twig. “Oh, it’s you,” she sighed with relief. “Mazen had a session this morning. They should be back soon.”

“They booked his session for today?”

“Um, yes?” Her upward inflection portended the oversight, made more blatant as she slid the bacon onto a plate of eggs and toast and sat down to eat. Fork in one hand, smartphone in the other. No eye contact whatsoever, even as she sensed him gawking.

He went to the fridge to retrieve the ingredients he’d bought the day before to make himself the commemorative birthday breakfast of banana chocolate pancakes he’d long enjoyed, beginning back when Mrs. Tullinson lived next door. Myra Tullinson was a sixty-year-old widow with pink streaks in her hair and unabashed laugh lines who’d just been empty-nested when the Dareers moved in. Firas was nearing adolescence, but he still possessed his most childlike features, including the ruby cheeks and helpless eyes that made her instantly fall in love. She doted on him constantly, buying him clothes he didn’t need and toys he was too old to play with. She taught him how to cook and decorate, and the fine art of appreciating beauty, natural and man-made, and thus set him on his path to a career in architecture. On his fourteenth birthday, she asked his parents if she could steal him away for the morning to spoil him with a special breakfast. They agreed, so long as Mrs. Tullinson didn’t strain herself. By his nineteenth birthday, she had gotten sick and could no longer make the pancakes for him, but she insisted on inviting him over and teaching him the recipe. That was the last birthday they ever shared. Firas continued the tradition, making a more flaccid version of the treat in the years
since. When he opened the pantry, however, the chocolate chips were gone. An entire bag, disappeared. He felt that asking a question to which he already knew the answer was
tacky and tactless, so he simply made do with buttermilk pancakes because buttermilk pancakes were delicious in their own right and today was to be a beautiful day.

While the batter simmered over the griddle, Firas stepped outside to check the mailbox, almost expecting to find an anonymous birthday present. Instead, he found one hand-delivered
note, addressed to him personally, which he snatched just before rushing back to the kitchen to flip his pancake. Watching it closely now for fear of burning the other side, he checked the contents of the fridge to ensure that the food items required for that evening’s four-course meal had not suffered the same fate as the chocolate chips.

As he sat down to eat, he thought about his next task for the day. The flower shop opened at eleven o’clock on Sundays, and he would head over as soon as he finished his breakfast. That would give him enough time to prepare the dinner and the setting, after infusing his day with the vigor of a promising start. For what could be more promising to a beating heart than the ambrosial whiff of nature?

The syrupy pancakes slid down his throat and he thought of Mazen in his room with the chocolate chips. Nibbling on them like a royal servant testing the king’s meal for poison. On their own, the chips tasted odd, a hint of sugar and cocoa assaulted by a barrage of flavored fats. But Mazen wouldn’t have minded. Mazen never minded the little things, which made him the ideal guest and the first, among a periodically winnowing list, that Firas invited.

“OH MY FUCKING GOD!” Suhad slammed the table with an open palm, as though her exclamation lacked emphasis on its own.

He didn’t dare ask, nor did he need to. “DJ Shiv is making a cameo at the Grind tonight!” She didn’t look at him when she said this, because she wasn’t saying it to him. She wasn’t even saying it, but simply willing it into the universe as if the text she’d just read weren’t real enough.

A strip and a half of bacon still lay on her plate. Firas asked if he could have one. She didn’t hear him, so he speared the full strip with his syrup-speckled fork and crunched on it with three quick, successive bites. She noticed it barely, her eyes studying the same text over and over as though its meaning would change if she dared to look away. It was only when she shoved the last half strip into her mouth that a sensation, something in the realm of an alarm, diverted her attention to him, because when the scent of bacon began to waft out of the room, a new one took its place.

“Are you wearing cologne?”

He was. A musk-like concoction that Mrs. Tullinson had bought him when he turned sixteen and officially became, in her own doe-eyed decree, a man. He wore it only on his birthday, since nobody, least of all himself, cared much for the smell.

“I wear it every year.”

The light inside her head finally ignited, followed by an apologetic wince.

“Happy birthday . . .” The wince persisted, but, as her eyes shifting back to her phone made clear, only because of the cameo that now began to feel less real. The Dareers were not close, but they believed in formality, relied heavily on it, understanding, as the water around them stretched out, that none of them would be able to navigate their household without it.

She cleared both their plates from the table and began washing the dishes in the sink. “How should I dress tonight?”

Firas had initially planned to go grand, have the guests dress as ceremoniously as possible, as though they were attending the wedding of a couple so elite that half the guests knew them only by association. But as he readied the invitations— handcrafted on coated paper, gilded Baskerville against periwinkle blue, a bold summons (“You are called upon . . .”) capped by a soft, playful dare (“Will you miss out?”)—it occurred to him that turning his party into a grand ceremony would not enhance his big announcement but undermine it, suffocating it beneath a mountain of anticipation, an atmosphere of puffery in which the product sold is nothing like the product advertised.

“Casual,” he answered.

“Can I bring a friend?”

This was another issue he’d considered, one that kept him up every night since he decided to throw the party in the first place. At times, he even debated abandoning the idea, or canceling it once the idea materialized into the physical world and the RSVPs rolled swiftly into his mailbox. The guest list was the most curated element of the party, with each attendee playing a distinct role: the neighbor who replaced Mrs. Tullinson for help in the kitchen, the cousins from Sterling Heights for comic relief, his fellow interns at the architecture firm for moral support. An unexpected guest could lead to unexpected events. He imagined animosity between longtime rivals that exploded into fistfights, or the sabotaging of meals to undermine his culinary repute. More than animosity, he feared charisma, the life of the party who might steal his thunder, toppling his nerve and cackling so hard that Firas would be sent cowering into the corner for peace of mind that never comes.

“Sorry, but I just don’t have enough food for any more people.”

“Oh she wouldn’t eat! I wouldn’t either.”

“There’s also not much space in the house . . .”

Sensing his unease, she nodded, then finished washing the dishes and went upstairs to her room.

The invitation was for half past seven, which meant it was for half past eight, with several guests likely to arrive closer to nine. It was then that dinner would be served, some of it in the dining room and some of it on folding tables in the living room. His mother would forbid anyone eating on her sofa, a peach English roll-arm the likes of which she’d spotted in an interior design magazine whose origins were never known. He wondered if anyone would show up at all. Twenty-four of the twenty-six invitees had RSVP’d yes, with the other two texting excuses, feigning disappointment, and offering rain checks that were likely void.

He was always more grateful for people who declined right off the bat. With these invitees came the element of certainty. Rarely does a person RSVP no and show up anyway, but so
often do people RSVP yes and then don’t. Firas had at least two contingency plans for every part of his daily life, be it for unreliable bus lines to his regular destinations, for restaurants too crowded to make it back to class on time, or for his assignments, which he saved on flash drives and copied/pasted into emails each and every time he made an edit. If his workplace had a change in management, he secured job interviews before the new, potentially monstrous boss even started. Where a contingency plan could be formed, he formed as many as possible. Yet in the event that every single guest who was expected to arrive would, with only an hour’s warning, change their mind, he had no contingency plan whatsoever. His special effort to form a plan for disastrous circumstances, no matter how unlikely the disaster, was a tool he had acquired at the age of twelve, when he was to have his very first birthday party in America. The guests were all the boys in his class, as his parents were still unaccustomed to the notion of mixed-gender parties, a custom eventually quashed upon his brother’s first step on the ladder of adolescence. But between the day Firas’s invitations were handed out and the day his party was scheduled to take place, something happened. He overheard the sound of his name, caught in a whirl of snickers like a gazelle surrounded by a pack of hyenas, circling their victim for what feels like eternity to make the eventual pounce more rewarding. The boys planned not to show, despite assurances to the contrary, leaving him to discover the truth only when everything was already set up to receive them. The following day, he had his mother call the boys’ parents and inform them that the party was canceled. No explanation was given to them by Firas’s mother, nor was any explanation given to Firas’s mother by Firas. He managed to avoid disaster that time, but only with the help of fortunate circumstances—the honor of being
trusted by his sprightly teacher Mrs. Robbins to deliver a note to the principal’s office—that led him past the bathroom whence the snickering emerged. But good fortune rarely strikes its bolt upon the same person twice. What would he do in the case of disaster on the night of his twenty-third birthday? The announcement itself might end the party, but what of everything that preceded it, everything that could prevent the announcement from taking place and rob the party of its primary purpose?

He wondered why he hadn’t come up with a contingency plan this time around. Perhaps it was newfound audacity that enabled him to finally relinquish his control over his world, a budding faith in humanity to return the many kindnesses he’d been supplying now for years. He smiled at this thought, prided himself on the courage it took to submit oneself to the will of the universe.