Six
I couldn’t believe it.
I gave the silver car a wide berth, wouldn’t move any closer. The wind was pushing against my legs, shoving cold up my sleeves, but I was frozen in place, looking from him to the Honda.
Finally, finally, Ali turned to face me.
“That was you?” I asked.
He had the decency to look ashamed. “My sister takes a chem class here a couple nights a week.”
I already knew that.
“My mom makes me drive her.”
This was now obvious.
“I saw you drowning in the rain,” he said, finally getting to the point. “I wanted to offer you a ride.”
“But you didn’t.”
He inhaled deep. “Zahra wouldn’t let me.”
I was staring at my shoes now, at the shattered remains of a leaf trapped in my laces.
I was stunned.
“You didn’t even have an umbrella,” Ali was saying. “But she just—I don’t know. I didn’t understand. I still don’t get what happened between you guys.”
This was so much. Too much to unpack.
Several months ago, when we officially declared war on Iraq, most of my friends started crying. I was devastated, too, but I kept my head down. I didn’t argue with people who didn’t seem to understand that Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan and Iraq were all very different countries. I said nothing when my history teacher’s army reserve unit got called up, said nothing when he stared at me while making the announcement.
I didn’t know why he stared at me.
It was like he wanted something from me, either an apology or a show of gratitude, I wasn’t sure. I wrote nothing but my name in the card we gave him at his going-away party.
Hate crimes were on the rise.
Muslim communities were in turmoil. Women were taking off their scarves, guys changing their names. People were freaked out. Our mosques were bugged, set on fire. Last month we found out that Brother Farid—Brother Farid, the guy always volunteering and helping out, the guy so beloved he was invited to a half dozen weddings last year—was an undercover FBI agent.
Heartbreak.
It was a time of change, turbulence, shifting sands. People were making names for themselves, even the most useless teenagers blooming into activists and advocates for change. Heretofore nobodies rallied for grassroots organizations, organized peace talks.
I was growing weary of everyone.
I hated the posturing at the mosque, the competitions to prove piousness in the face of persecution. I hated the gossip meant to shame the women who’d taken off their hijabs. People were particularly vicious to the older women, said they were all uglier sans scarves, decrepit. What’s the point of taking it off when you’re that old? people would ask, and laugh, as if a woman’s motivations to put on a hijab had anything to do with making herself more or less attractive. As if anyone had any right to judge another person’s fear.
Zahra had taken off her scarf.
Zahra, who’d been my best friend for years. Two months ago she stopped wearing hijab and stopped talking to me, too. Cut me out of her world—effectively shattered my heart—without further explanation. She wouldn’t even look at me at school anymore, didn’t want to be associated with me. From the outside, her reasons seemed obvious.
I knew better.
I knew Zahra hadn’t thrown away six years of friendship because of a single sea change. She’d hid the truth in another truth; we’d split for a Russian nesting doll of reasons. But this—tonight—to discover that she harbored this level of hatred toward me, this kind of anger—
I felt physically ill.
“I’m really sorry,” Ali was saying, when he hesitated. “Actually, I don’t know why I’m apologizing. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No,” I said. “No, you didn’t.”
Something wet landed on my cheek and I looked up, eyelashes fluttering against the unexpected drizzle. A sharp wind shook up a pile of dead leaves, wrapped around my ankles. It smelled like decay.
“We should get going,” Ali said, his eyes following mine upward. He had a hand on the roof of his car, a hand on the driver door. “Don’t worry about Zahra, okay? I usually wait in the library while she’s in class, catch up on homework. I’ll come back for her.”
“Okay.” Rain dribbled down my cheeks, dripped from my lips.
I didn’t move.
Ali laughed, then frowned. Looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
Perhaps I had. Tentacles of fear had suddenly reached up my throat, driven into my skull. I had turned to stone. I’d felt it suddenly, felt it like a bullet to the chest, cold and solid and real—
Something terrible had happened.
“You okay?” Ali opened the driver’s side door; rain blew sideways into the car. “Seriously, I’m sorry about my sister. I think she’s just going through a lot right now.”
I heard a phone ring, distantly, miles away.
“Is that yours?” I heard myself say.
“What?” He closed the car door. “My what?”
“Your phone. Ringing.”
Ali’s frown deepened, a furrow bordering on irritation. “My phone isn’t ringing. No one’s phone is ringing. Listen—”
I was staring at a single windshield wiper on Ali’s silver Honda Civic when my dead phone rang with a shrillness that broke the night, my paralysis.
I answered it.
At first I couldn’t hear my sister’s voice. At first I heard only my heart pound, heard only the wind. I heard my name the third time she screamed it, heard everything she said after that. My older sister was hysterical, screaming half-formed thoughts and incomplete information in my ear and I tried to listen, tried to ask the right follow-up questions, but the cell phone fell from my shaking hand, snapped when it hit the ground.
I’d gone blind. I heard my own breathing, loud in my head, heard my blood moving, fast in my veins.
Ali did not get to me before I fell. He dove to the pavement half a beat later, caught my head before it cracked. He was saying something, shouting something.
Please, God, I thought. Dear God, I thought. Please, God, I thought.
“Shadi? Shadi—”
I came back to my body with a sudden gasp. I sat on trembling legs, steadied myself with trembling arms. My eyes were wild; I could feel it, could feel them dilate, dart back and forth, focus on nothing.
“What’s going on?” he was saying. “What just happened?”
I was looking at the ground.
I remember it, remember the way the wet pavement glittered under the streetlamp. I remember the smell of dirt, the damp press of silk against my cheek. I remember the way the branches shook, the way my body did.
“I need you to drive me to the hospital,” I said.
Seven
Ali did not look at me while we drove. He did not speak.
I did not feel his eyes on me, did not feel him move more than was absolutely necessary to perform his task.
I looked at myself.
Somehow I’d multiplied, one iteration sitting in the passenger seat, the other running alongside the car, peering in the window.
The first thing I noticed was the cut on my chin. Freshly serrated skin, bright red blood smeared across my jaw. My silk scarf was once pale green, shiny; it was now a dull slate, pockmarked with fresh water stains. I’d chosen this scarf because I knew it complimented my eyes and because I was impractical. Silk scarves were an older woman’s game; few girls my age cared for the slippery material, opting instead for basic cottons, polyesters. Fabric that stayed in place with little fuss.