‘Can I borrow your pen?’ Yasmin asked.
‘This one?’
‘Yes, it’s a pen, isn’t it?’
He gave it to her and the note accidentally slipped from his hand. ‘Oh, I guess I wrote that wrong…’ he mumbled when she read it.
‘I guess you did. It’s actually two,’ she said and drew a 2. ‘Which is also good.’
After that, Yasmin always greeted him with an ahlain or marhabtain, two hellos or double hi. If Sami grabbed a juice box in the canteen, Yasmin would appear behind him. Shouldn’t you be grabbing two? When they were sitting on a stone bench in the schoolyard and someone asked if there was room for them, she said, Sorry, this is a bench for two. They lay down on their backs with their heads close together and looked for shapes and signs in the clouds. When he quickly kissed her on the way home, under a tree with low-hanging oranges, she said: Two. Everything was better doubled.
Yasmin and he spent all their time together, just the two of them, for a while. Then a new boy started in their class. Haydar. He wore the same school uniform as the rest of them, but it looked more ironed, and he had a silver wristwatch as well. The school guard wasn’t supposed to accept jewellery but she only smiled and let him pass at the gate. Both the guard and their teachers were delighted at Haydar’s politeness and sarcastic jokes, little knowing that during break-time he swore more than all the other students put together. Worst of all was that the new boy was good-looking. Handsome, even. High cheekbones and dark eyes under thick, blond hair. Yasmin invited Haydar to join their games and let him sit with them at lunch. There’s only room for two, Sami wanted to say, but heard how silly it would have sounded.
He noticed how Yasmin changed when Haydar was around. Before, she loved asking him to crack his knuckles. Now she said it sounded gross. Before, they would compare comic books, but since Haydar didn’t bother with reading, now Yasmin didn’t either.
* * *
—
This particular day, during lunch break, the envelope was burning in his breast pocket as the students gathered around the kiosk to buy croissants and manakish, a sort of mini pizza with thyme and sesame seed. Sami looked out for Yasmin but just as he spotted her among a group of girls playing basketball, the bell rang.
Military class was next. Their usual teacher was ill and there were no substitutes, so their religious studies teacher filled in. She wore a silver cross around her neck and balanced her short and stout body on a pair of black heels. She was a mild woman who took the time to answer their questions, and sometimes her eyes would wander to the orange trees outside the classroom as she took off on philosophical flights of fancy. In the schoolyard, however, she underwent a personality transformation before their very eyes.
Clouds hid the sun, plunging the schoolyard into shadow, when she called out for everyone to line up. The first fifteen minutes was theory. She held up a Kalashnikov, described the various parts – the wooden butt, the magazine, the adjustable iron sight – and where to insert the cartridges.
‘This is the setting for fully automatic, and this is for semi-automatic, in other words, for firing one bullet at a time.’
A student raised his hand.
‘Miss, how fast can you shoot?’
‘Well, it depends on the model, but this could probably do six hundred rounds a minute.’
Then it was time for practical exercises, but not with the rifle. Their teacher ordered them to do gymnastics and formations. Dressed in their school uniforms, they obeyed her commands. When Yasmin fell and scraped her knee, she was told to do ten extra push-ups. When she was done, Haydar held his hand out to her and the silver watch shone in the shade.
‘Straight line!’
The teacher asked Sami to stay after class was over. Why had he looked so distracted? She leaned forward and sniffed the air. He was afraid she would comment on the perfume, even though she herself walked around in a cloud of artificial lavender, but she pointed to his oil-combed hair.
‘Ask your mother to take you to the hairdresser. Your hair is getting long.’
* * *
—
He had not managed to talk to Yasmin yet, but then he saw her waiting for him on the front steps. There she sat, with a beaming smile and sparkling braces. Haydar sat next to her.
‘Hello, hi,’ Sami said.
‘Hello,’ Yasmin replied.
Haydar rummaged around in his bag and said there they were, the theatre tickets.
‘Great, what are we seeing?’ Sami said.
He tried to sound normal, as though his heart was not in his mouth. The envelope he had brought from home, which had been sitting in his breast pocket all day, contained exactly that, theatre tickets. He would have preferred to take Yasmin to the cinema, but Homs had only old cinemas that showed black and white films and were rumoured to be places where criminals went to strike deals.
‘We only bought two,’ Yasmin said, shifting uncomfortably. ‘They’re for Romeo and Juliet, and you don’t like it.’
Granted, he didn’t, but he could have liked it if they had asked. The tickets he had bought were for a comedy that Yasmin would probably find childish, he realized now.
‘All right,’ Sami said. ‘I hope you have a good time, then.’
‘I’m sure we will.’
Sami rocked back and forth on his heels and grabbed the straps of his backpack. Yasmin moved closer to Haydar, who smiled and laid an arm around her shoulders.
‘I think I’m going to stay here for a while,’ Yasmin said. ‘But I’ll see you tomorrow, right?’
She said it breezily and naturally, as though there were a tomorrow.
An oily strand of hair fell into Sami’s face. When he walked across the schoolyard and out through the gates, he felt both more watched and more invisible than before. From that day on, three was apparently a crowd, the answer to all questions was two, and one felt lonelier than ever.
4
ONE TIME IN school, when they were hiding from the rain under the tin roof of the cafeteria, Haydar told them about a girl at the school he’d gone to before. The girl had snuck into the headmaster’s office one morning and taken over the PA system. Instead of the usual chorus, a phrase like ‘death to the enemy’ or the Baath Party slogan, she had sung a song she had composed herself about the will of the people. An informer must have reported it because the next day the secret police, the Mukhabarat, came to their school to talk to the girl’s teacher. The teacher was fired the same day.
‘That’s terrible,’ Sami said.
It reminded him of a time in first grade when his dad had realized that Sami had doodled on the portrait of al-Assad in his school book. The slap came without warning, a searing pain that left a red mark on his cheek. It was a moment that split reality in two: one half in which his dad never flew off the handle, and another in which his dad could get upset, frightened even, by doodles in a school book. It was the first and only time Nabil hit him. It was also the first time Sami truly sensed the power of the president. He secretly began hating the pictures of the serious-looking man in military uniform.