“Yeah, sure.”
It seemed as if the whole school had seen the graffiti message. Kids were whispering about it in the hallways.
A few kids pointed to Yusuf and Danial as they passed under the black banner that still hung over their heads. “Terrorists!” someone called out, hard and sharp.
A flash of plaid moved past, bumping into Danial. “Hey!” Danial shouted, but Yusuf saw Ethan Grant’s tall frame and put a hand on Danial’s arm.
“Just . . . don’t say anything.”
Miss Terrance was ready for a discussion in social studies class. She stood with hands on her hips, legs spread slightly apart so that they looked like two tall buildings teetering on the spindly foundations of her heels. “All right, everyone saw the words on the warehouse outside school this morning, so let’s talk about it and get it off our chests before we work on today’s lessons. Okay?”
Nobody said anything. Yusuf’s throat was dry. Uncle Rahman’s journal entry about the Twin Towers tumbling down in a pile of ash and stone echoed in his mind. Did anyone even know what “Never Forget” really meant? Had anyone ever really thought about it, the way he hadn’t been able to stop thinking all night long?
“We learned about it in fifth grade,” Madison finally said. “It was a bunch of terrorist attacks a long time ago, when my mom was a teenager.”
“Yes,” said Miss Terrance, writing 9/11 on the whiteboard with a bright red Expo marker. Then she wrote Never Forget under it.
A boy with wispy red hair raised his hand. “It was Arab terrorists. Like him.”
Yusuf felt the hair on his neck rise in protest. “Like me?” he squeaked. Why did people think all Muslims were Arab? His family was from South Asia, not that anyone in the class cared.
Miss Terrance scowled heavily. “How old do you think Yusuf Azeem is, fifty? How could he have anything to do with 9/11?”
There was an awkward laughter, but the red-haired boy persisted. “It was his folks. They said that on the news last night.”
Miss Terrance’s scowl got even darker. “Okay, seems like you kids need some education. I don’t want anyone pointing fingers at one of their classmates.” She turned away and wrote on the whiteboard: ASSIGNMENT!!!
“I want you to research 9/11 and present a report two weeks from now. And it better be good, because I might choose you to read it out loud. Got it?”
They all grumbled, but Yusuf relaxed. Two weeks. He had some time to convince his classmates he wasn’t a terrorist. Uncle Rahman’s journal would probably have some great tips. Perfect.
At lunch, Danial talked nonstop about his morning. “Everyone was so mean, you can’t even believe it. They were chanting ‘Never forget!’ like it was a fight song or something.”
“In class?” Yusuf looked skeptical.
“Our homeroom teacher was late.” Danial stared at his uneaten sandwich. “It was the worst five minutes of my life.”
“All because of a line of graffiti.”
Danial shook his head. “My dad says it’s always just below the surface, waiting to boil over.”
“The graffiti was just the catalyst,” Yusuf whispered.
“Trust you to bring science into bullying.”
“Science is in everything.”
Danial looked mildly annoyed. “No wonder they call you a nerd.” But he picked up his sandwich and took a bite.
They sat in silence for a while. Then a plaid wall planted itself in front of them. “Hey, terrorists.”
Yusuf looked up. Ethan and the redheaded boy from Miss Terrance’s class. No surprise that they were friends. “What do you want?” Yusuf wanted to shout, but it came out in a whisper. The lettuce in his mouth turned to dust and tried to choke him.
“Seems like you guys aren’t getting the message.”
Danial seemed frozen next to him. “What message?”
“Never forget. Duh.” Ethan and his friend laughed like it was a joke. Was it? Yusuf couldn’t tell why everyone was suddenly making such a big deal about 9/11. They hadn’t had this sort of reaction last year, or the year before. Just a few days of angry looks, and a big assembly in their elementary school with a lot of tearful adults. Then life moved on.
Maybe Danial was right. Middle school was bad. Sorrowfully bad.
Ethan leaned forward until his nose was almost touching Danial’s. “We hate you guys. You should leave Frey.” He said it as if it was something small. Normal. Ordinary. He had freckles on his nose and cheeks, little dots of brown dusted over his pink skin like wildflowers after the first spring showers.
Yusuf and Danial stopped breathing.
“Hey, dude, come on, leave them alone. Nobody cares about them.”
All four of them jumped. Yusuf saw Cameron walking toward them casually, hands in pockets. Ethan leaned back, away from Yusuf and Danial. He gave them a serious look, then said, “Catch you later,” and sauntered away to join Cameron. The red-haired boy scurried after him.
Yusuf started breathing again. Beside him, Danial let out a shaky whoosh of air, like a deflating balloon. “What. Was. That?” Danial finally said.
“I guess 9/11 is different this year.”
“Why?”
“Good question.” Yusuf watched Cameron and Ethan high-five each other. Then the two boys turned away, but Cameron looked back with a serious, almost sad look on his face. Yusuf met his eyes for a full five seconds, then he looked down again.
After school, in the robotics club, Mr. Parker handed out snack-sized bags of barbecue chips and cans of Sprite, then gave them blank sheets of paper to create flowcharts. Madison yawned so loudly her jaw cracked. “Flowcharts? Are you serious? After-school clubs are supposed to be fun.”
Mr. Parker ignored her. “Flowcharts help in the decision-making process a robot must follow. I want you to get comfortable with this, so that when we actually begin to do some programming you aren’t clueless.”
Danial said, “We’ve been programming since we were eight years old,” putting a hand on Yusuf’s shoulder to include him in the “we.”
Yusuf shifted in his seat. “Not real programming, just basic stuff.”
Mr. Parker looked at Yusuf. “Give me an example.”
Yusuf wasn’t sure he wanted to. “Sometimes I make games for my baby sister on Scratch.”
“He’s being too modest,” protested Danial. “He once created a robot that brought us juice boxes from my mom’s fridge while we watched TV.”
Yusuf didn’t know where to look. Everyone was staring at him as if he’d grown a horn in the middle of his forehead like Aleena’s unicorn. “It wasn’t a big deal,” he told them, touching his glasses. “It was just a moving arm with wheels, and it kept dropping the juice halfway.”
Tony Rivera clapped his hands together loudly. “That’s awesome, dude! Sounds a lot better than the thing I tried to make last summer. It was supposed to mow the lawn for me, but it ended up cutting down my mom’s hedges.”
The others laughed, and again it was a nice laugh. A kind one. Yusuf felt his face cool down, his chest relax. These were his kind of people.
Mr. Parker made them practice flowcharts for the next thirty minutes. Yusuf didn’t mind. A flowchart was basically a visual algorithm, and he could never get enough of those. He bent his head down and worked. At four twenty-five, Mr. Parker passed around a trash bag for the empty chip bags and cans, saying, “All right, pack up now. And remember to get those snack sign-ups back to me by the next class. I’m not going to keep on feeding you like this.”
“Will we actually get to work on machines in the next class?” Madison asked.
“Maybe,” Mr. Parker replied.
The door smashed open, startling them all. Cameron sauntered in, hands in pockets, a lopsided grin on his face. “Perfect timing!” he remarked. “I’m here to join the club.”
11
Friday was a half day because of school staff trainings. Amma was waiting for Yusuf in her old Chevy outside school on Friday afternoon.
“Early dismissal means we can pray Jummah!” she said cheerfully as he climbed into the passenger seat.
Yusuf would rather have gone home with Danial to play Mindstorms. He clipped his seat belt and leaned back to ruffle Aleena’s hair. She sat with a crumby mess of French fries on her lap and around her seat. “You have ketchup on your chin,” he told her.
She licked her lips. “We go pray now?”
Amma started the car. “Yes, we go pray now.” She looked sideways at Yusuf. “I was thinking, we can hand her over to your abba after Jummah, and then we can go do something on our own.”
Yusuf brightened. “Can we go to Conroe? I want to go to Best Buy to look at their electronics section.”
Amma smiled. “We’ll see.”
Friday prayers were offered in congregation in the trailer behind Abba’s dollar store, as always. It was sweltering hot, but Abba insisted they stay inside. “I don’t want anybody to complain about us to the mayor again,” he said.
A few men grumbled loudly. “I’ll be glad when the construction is finished and we can have a good space to pray,” someone said.
Danial’s father gave a short sermon about Prophet Abraham, the father of the three monotheistic religions. Yusuf sat in the back with a few kids from school, all shuffling their feet and fanning themselves with the palms of their hands. Danial was pretending to be asleep, his eyelids fluttering as if he was having a wild nightmare. The women were on one side behind a white curtain hung from the ceiling, and he could hear Aleena protesting over and over, “Hot, Amma, hot,” until Amma took her outside. Yusuf looked longingly at the closed trailer door and blinked back the sweat from his eyes.
Mr. Khan droned on. “And the Holy Quran calls Prophet Abraham an upright man. When the disbelievers thrust him into a fire to punish him for preaching, he was unshaken in his faith. He prayed to God Almighty, and lo! God cooled the fire before it could reach him.”
“That’s impossible,” Yusuf whispered to Danial. “Fire can’t just . . . cool down.”
Danial shrugged without opening his eyes. “Your problem is that you take everything literally. Maybe God sent down rain or something. Lots of things in the Quran are metaphorical.”
“Then why wouldn’t the text say God sent down rain?”
Danial poked an elbow into his side. “Maybe to make you think.”
Yusuf spent the rest of the sermon thinking about Abraham, tied up in the midst of a fire, praying for help. Maybe he should try that with Ethan. He was almost positive praying wouldn’t help with the problem of locker notes or unexpectedly tall bullies, but he was willing to try.
After Jummah, Amma dropped a sleeping Aleena at Abba’s store, and they drove off. Once they got on the highway, Yusuf leaned against the seat and heaved a sigh. The breeze from the open window was refreshing, even though the temperature was 98 degrees. “Where are we going?” he asked.
Amma adjusted the rearview mirror. “I need to pick up some supplies for your father, and then we’re free. We can do whatever we like.”
“Can we eat burgers from Whataburger?”
“Sure.”
“Can we stop at a 7-Eleven and get cherry Slurpees?”
“Only after five o’clock, when they’re buy one get one free.”
“Can I go to Saturday club?”
Amma looked at him sideways. “I thought we already discussed it?”
“I know, but I never thought we’d actually get six members on the robotics team, which means we can actually compete in the TRC, which has been my dream since third grade, and by the way, you need to sign up for snacks, otherwise everyone will be very mad, and Saturday school doesn’t even make any sense because it’s been Sunday school since forever.”
Yusuf stopped talking when he ran out of breath. Amma didn’t reply. She kept her eyes on the road, as if Yusuf hadn’t said a single word. Yusuf waited for a long minute, breathing deeply, then slumped back in his seat again. Danial had been right. His mother would never yield.
“Do you think we should stop the classes altogether?” Amma suddenly asked. “Do any of the students actually get any benefit from them? From all the hard work I do preparing and creating lesson plans?”
Yusuf sat up again. “Amma, your classes are so fun. I still remember that Jeopardy! game you created with all the articles of faith. And you tell amazing stories.”
“But?”
“But . . . can’t we do it any other day? Like on Sunday, when the kids are hanging out at the construction site playing in the mud and annoying each other?”
Amma chewed on her bottom lip. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. Once we get done with making lunch, many of the women and children are just sitting around. Sameena was complaining about it to me just last week. She wanted me to put all the kids to work at building, with the men!”
“Ugh, Sameena Aunty is so weird.”
“Don’t be disrespectful,” Amma warned.
“So you’ll think about it?” Yusuf asked, trying to squelch the hope that was rising in his chest.
“I’ll think about it.”
After getting Abba’s supplies from Sam’s Club, they stopped at the first Whataburger they found. It was just off the highway, with the famous orange W on the front entrance and a long line of cars in the drive-through lane.
They sat in the back of the restaurant near the windows, eating burgers and fries with milkshakes. “This is nice, just the two of us.” Amma smiled at him. “Remember we couldn’t do this for the longest time, because of Covid?”
Yusuf took a big bite of his cheeseburger and wiped the sauce off his chin. He hated talking about Covid. Nothing much had changed in Frey, but the virus had hurt a lot of people in Houston, where their family lived. He racked his brain for a different subject. “Amma, how old were you when 9/11 happened?” he asked.
She paused with a hand holding a fry halfway to her mouth. “Uh, seventeen, I think?” she said casually, as if she couldn’t even remember the exact year. “Why?”
He remembered Uncle Rahman telling him the journal was their secret. He’d never lied to Amma before, so he said, “My social studies teacher has given us an assignment, to write a report about 9/11.” He left out the part about the kids in school using the T word, or the hurtful notes in his locker. The one that morning had been, predictably, WE WON’T FORGET.
Amma ate some more fries, chewing on them thoughtfully. Her face was dark, her eyes downcast. “It was a difficult time for me. For all of us. I was in high school when it happened. I remember watching the news on the television in our teachers’ lounge. Some of my friends were crying. A boy in the cafeteria started howling and smashed a tray on the wall. It was tough.”
Yusuf tried to imagine his mother at seventeen, young and scared. “What did you do?”
“What could I do? Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Yusuf couldn’t imagine facing a national tragedy and doing nothing.
Amma put down her fries. “I cried a lot. All the time, as I remember. Your Sarah khala would come into my room at night and crawl into bed with me, and we’d look at the airplanes in the sky. Wondering if another one would crash into a building. Maybe close to us. Maybe it would be our house next time.”
“Wow.” Yusuf didn’t know what to say. “That’s seriously messed up.”
Amma waved a hand, like she was brushing away an insect from her face. “It was a long time ago. It was bad, but slowly it got better. We just went on the best we could. One day at a time.”
“One day at a time,” Yusuf echoed. Uncle Rahman had written the same thing in his journal. Maybe that could be the title of his report.
Amma wiped her hands with a napkin and smiled at him brightly. “Forget about 9/11. Are you looking forward to the football game tonight? I bet some of your friends will be playing!”
12
They got back to Frey at five thirty, the back seat of the car full of boxes for Abba. Mr. Khan was waiting for them at the dollar store with Danial. “Can�
�t believe we have to spectate such a violent sport,” Danial said to him dismally.
“Can’t believe we have to watch any sport,” Yusuf replied, thinking of his unfinished projects on Scratch.
“We have to support the school team,” Amma told them severely, taking Aleena into her arms. “No complaining.”
“First practice game of the season!” Abba said, clapping Mr. Khan on the back. “I can’t wait to see those boys in action!”
Mr. Khan grinned back. “The new team is supposed to be very quick on their feet. That Grant boy got picked, I hear.”
“Impressive for a sixth grader. He must have amazing skills.”
Yusuf shivered. Watching Ethan plow into other kids who were much smaller than him wasn’t his idea of fun. “Why do we have to go? I’m tired.”
“We’re going because we’re part of Frey,” Mr. Khan said, very seriously. “We need to participate in all the town activities.”
There was a little silence. Then Amma said quietly, “We’ve been proving ourselves for the last twenty years.”
Mr. Khan’s eyebrows shot up. Abba looked at Amma sharply. “What are you talking about? What’s brought this on?”
Yusuf knew it was their conversation at Whataburger. Amma had been unusually quiet on the ride home. “Nothing,” Amma said, and turned away with Aleena. “Let’s go.”
They walked to the big field behind the middle school, the adults in front, Danial and Yusuf behind. Aleena was on Abba’s shoulders now, singing the ABC song loudly. “You sing too, bhai,” she commanded Yusuf from her perch.
“No thanks.” Yusuf shook his head. He’d eaten too much at Whataburger, and his stomach was hurting.
There was already a medium-sized crowd at the football field. This was the first practice game of the season, the evening Coach Henderson was going to officially reveal his brand-new team. “Don’t any of these people have anything to do on a Friday evening?” Danial whispered, glaring at the crowd.
Yusuf Azeem Is Not a Hero Page 6