Five
The school was fairly well lit at night, well enough to see without being seen. I found my familiar spot, planted my wet bag on the wet concrete, and rooted around in my things with shaking hands.
I was ruthless with my hands.
I scraped my knuckles against stone, drew blood, cut my palms on cardboard, drew blood. I shoved those same hands in pockets and held my breath as they throbbed. I didn’t bandage cuts. I ignored burns. When I looked at my hands I was presented with the evidence of my station: bruises untended, scrapes unhealed.
I was unnoticed except in the worst ways.
As far as the larger world was concerned, I was about as remarkable as a thumb. My presence was notable only occasionally and only because my face seemed familiar to people—familiar the way fear was familiar, the way dread was familiar. Everywhere I went strangers squinted at me, minds buffering for all of half a second before they placed my entire person in a box, taped it shut.
Adults were always seeking me out—why? why?—to ask me direct and specific questions about international relations as if I were some kind of proxy for my parents, for their home country, for some larger answer to a desperate question. As if my seventeen-year-old body were old enough to understand the complexities of any of this, as if I were a seasoned politician whose tenuous connection to a Middle Eastern country I rarely visited would suddenly make me an expert in politics. I didn’t know how to tell people that I was just as stupid today as I was yesterday, and that I spent most of my time thinking about how my life was falling apart in ways that had nothing to do with the news cycle. But there was something about my hijab that made people disregard my age, made me seem like fair game.
We were, after all, at war with people who looked just like me.
I unearthed my damp newspaper along with my damp cigarettes, tucked a cylinder between my lips, dropped the paper in my lap, and zipped my backpack shut. I stretched out my injured leg, grimacing as I reached for the lighter in my pocket.
It took a few tries, but when the butane finally caught, I took a moment to stare at the flame. I’d spun the spark wheel enough times that it had abraded the pad of my thumb.
I took a deep drag, held it in, let it go, sat back, stared up.
I couldn’t see the stars.
On the one hand, smoking was not cool. Smoking would kill you. Smoking was a vile, disgusting habit I did not condone.
On the other hand—
Dear God, I thought, exhaling the poison. Would you please just kill my father already? I can’t take the suspense.
I picked up the paper, stared at the melting headline.
When I read the newspaper I saw myself, my family, and my faith reflected back at me as if in a fun-house mirror. I felt a hopelessness building in my chest every day, this desperation to tell someone, to shake strangers, to stand on a park bench and scream—
There’s no such thing as an Islamic terrorist.
It was morally impossible—philosophically impossible—to be Muslim and a terrorist at the same time. There was nothing in Islam that condoned the taking of innocent lives. And yet there it was, every day, every day, the conflation: Muslim terrorist. Islamic terrorist.
The Middle East, our president had said, was the axis of evil.
I saw the latent danger in the storytelling, the caricature we were becoming, two billion Muslims quickly solidifying into a faceless, terrifying mass. We were being stripped of gradation, of complexity. The news was turning us into monsters, which made us so much easier to murder.
I pinched the cigarette between my thumb and forefinger, held it up against the sky. I hated how much I enjoyed this disgusting pastime. Hated how it seemed to steady me, befriend me in my darkest hours. I could already feel the fist unclench in my chest and I relished it, closing my eyes as I took another drag, this time exhaling the smoke across the wilting article. The piece was about the recklessness of our airstrikes on Afghan villages, about how our military intelligence appeared questionable; hundreds of innocent Afghans were killed in the search for Al Qaeda members who never materialized. I’d read the last paragraph a thousand times.
“The Americans are all the time making these mistakes,” said Mr. Khan, whose two sons, Faizullah, 8, and Obeidullah, 10, were killed. “What kind of Al Qaeda are they? Look at their little shoes and hats. Are they terrorists?”
“Wow.”
The voice came from the fog, from outer space. It was a single word but it startled me with its heft and depth, with its fullness. It had been hours since I’d spoken to anyone but a police officer, and I seemed to have forgotten how sounds sounded.
Nerves spiked through me.
Hastily, I put out the cigarette, but I knew it was too late, knew there was no denying any of this. I would be eighteen in six weeks, but right now that didn’t matter. Right now I was seventeen years old, and what I was doing was illegal. Stupid.
But then the stranger laughed.
The stranger laughed and my fear froze, my heart unclenched. I experienced relief for all of two seconds before I caught a glimpse of his face. He’d stepped into the severe light of a streetlamp and my eyes focused, unfocused; my soul fled my body. I felt it then—knew, somehow, even then, that I would not survive this night unchanged.
He wouldn’t stop laughing.
“My dear sister in Islam,” he said, affecting horror. “Astaghfirullah. This is shameful.”
Mortification was a powerful chemical. It had dissolved my organs, evaporated my bones. I was loose flesh splayed on concrete.
He did not seem to notice.
He placed a hand on his chest, continued the show. “A young sister in hijab,” he said, tsking as he towered over me. “Alone, late at night. Smoking. What would your parents—” He hesitated. “Wait. Are you bleeding?”
He was staring at my knee, at the tear in my jeans. A dark stain had been spreading slowly across the denim.
I dropped my face in my hands.
An arm reached for my arm, waited for my cooperation. I did not cooperate. He retreated.
“Hey, are you okay?” he said, his voice appreciably gentler. “Did something happen?”
I lifted my head. “I fell.”
He frowned as he studied me; I averted my eyes. We were now positioned under the same shaft of light, his face so close to mine it scared me.
“Jesus,” he said softly. “My sister is such an asshole.”
I met his gaze.
He took a sharp breath. “All right, I’m taking you home.”
That rattled my brain into action. “No, thank you,” I said quickly.
“You’re going to die of pneumonia,” he said. “Or lung cancer. Or”—he shook his head, made a disapproving noise—“depression. Are you seriously reading the newspaper?”
“It helps me de-stress.”
He laughed.
My body tensed at the sound. Ancient history wrenched open the ground beneath me, unearthing old caskets, corpses of emotion. I hadn’t talked to him in over a year—hadn’t been this close to him in over a year—and I wasn’t sure my heart could handle being alone with him now.
“I already have a ride home,” I lied, staggering upright. I stumbled, gasped. My injured knee was screaming.
“You do?”
I closed my eyes. Tried to breathe normally. I felt the weight of my dead cell phone in my pocket. The weight of the entire day, balanced between my shoulder blades. I was freezing. Bleeding. Exhausted.