by Tahereh Mafi
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.
I was an idiot in many ways, it had turned out.
My scarf had been pushed back and forth enough times that it had bunched in places, shifted backward. My dark hair was pitch-black when wet, loose strands wild around my face, curling with damp. I was always pale, but today my pallor was deathly. I looked gaunt. My eyes were bigger, greener than usual. Glazed.
I did not think I was ugly. But I also did not think I would rate mention were it not for my eyes—for my irises—for the cold, sharp green of that which is not yet grown. I’d inherited my unripe eyes from my father, and some days I found it hard not to resent them both.
I became aware of my eyes in earnest last year, about the time my mother started locking herself in her closet. I became aware of my eyes because others had become aware of my eyes. My face. My body. So many women—always the women, only the women—talked about me, dissected me, my skin, my waist, the size of my feet, the slope of my nose, my eyes my eyes my eyes.
By the time I turned seventeen I’d definitively shed the wild awkwardness expected of most teenagers my age. This was right around the time my mother would not stop crying, around the time I’d lie awake in bed and pray to God to kill my father. I stopped laughing so loudly, stopped running around so recklessly, stopped smiling, generally.
I had aged.
People thought I was growing up, and perhaps I was, perhaps this was growing up—this, this, an uncertain spiral into a darkness lined with teeth.
My sadness had made me noteworthy. Beautiful. Had imbued in me a kind of dignity, a weight I could not uncarry. I knew this because I heard it all the time, heard it from old ladies at the mosque who praised me for my still lips, my folded hands, my reluctance to smile. They’d declared me demure, a good Muslim girl with fair skin, light eyes. My mother had since received five marriage proposals from other mothers, their grown sons standing behind t
hem, beaming.
My mother threatened to move away. Threatened to leave the mosque. Damned the other women to hell, stormed through the house slamming doors. She’s only seventeen, she’d scream.
A child.
I didn’t remember walking into the hospital. I didn’t remember parking or opening the car door. I didn’t notice, not right away, when Ali came with me, said nothing when he lied to the nurse, assuring her that yes, we were siblings, and yes, the patient was our mother.
Our mother.
Not my mother. Not my mother, not my mother, my mother, who was supposed to be at home staring listlessly at the wall or else singing terribly melodramatic Persian songs off-key in the kitchen. My mother was young, relatively healthy, the one who never got sick and never, ever took time off for herself. This was a clerical error, a mistake made by God or maybe this guy, the one wearing blue scrubs and a Dora the Explorer lanyard, the one squinting at his computer screen in search of my mother’s room number. It was my father who was meant for this place, this fate. My father who’d earned the right to be murdered by his own heart and for whom I waited, with baited breath, for a similar phone call, for a summons to such a place, for a justice still overdue.
Dear God, I thought, this is not funny.
I saw my sister at the exact moment the Dora the Explorer lanyard stopped bobbing up and down. I felt, but did not see, when the nurse looked up, said something—a floor, a room number—
“Where the hell have you been?” Shayda said, marching up to me, her long, dark blue scarf billowing around her. I had the strangest thought as I watched her move, as the long lines of her manteau rippled in the air. The thought was so strange I nearly laughed. You look like a jellyfish, I wanted to say to her. Tentacles and elegance. No heart.
“Where is she?” I said instead. “What happened?”
“She’s fine,” my sister said sharply. “We’re waiting on some paperwork, and then we can leave.”
I nearly sank to the floor. I looked around for a place to fall apart, for a seat or an unoccupied corner, and made it only as far as the wall, at which I stared. There was a terror in my throat so large I could not swallow.
I turned around.
I needed to move, I wanted to see my mother, I wanted answers and reasons to sleep tonight, but my nerves would not settle. I stared at my sister with wide eyes, wings beating in my chest.
“Hey, you okay?” Ali said gently, reminding me he was there.
I looked up at him, not seeing him.
Shayda made a sound in her throat, something like disbelief. I swung my head around, blinked. Her irritation dissolved, evolved as she took me in, analyzed the mess. “So this is why you didn’t answer your phone? Too busy doing whatever you two were doing”—she shot a disgusted look at Ali—“to care that your mother is in the hospital?”
“What?” Ali said, stepping forward. “That’s n—”
I was still staring at my sister when I held up a hand to stop him. It was meant to be a gesture only, a signal. But he walked straight into my open palm, broad chest pressed against my splayed fingers. I felt warm cotton, a shallow valley, hard and soft planes.
I pulled my hand away.
Our eyes did not meet.
“Don’t worry about her,” I said quietly.
My mom hated it when my sister and I fought, so I rarely rose to the bait these days, but cutting out the petty fights had left us with little else. When we weren’t fighting, we seldom had reason to speak. I always thought it would help matters to ignore her, and yet, for some reason, my silence only drove my sister crazier. Even now I could see her anger building, her body tensing.
“What are you even doing here?” Shayda said, turning on Ali. “You know people might see you standing next to us, right? They might think you know us. Or—gasp—they might think you’re Muslim.”
Ali frowned. “What are you—”
“Please. Don’t engage with her. Please just ignore her.”
Shayda practically exploded.
“What do you mean, just ignore her? When was the last time you saw him at the mosque, Shadi? When was the last time he said a single word to either of us? Or to Maman and Baba? Last month he saw Maman at the store and she’d only talked to him for a minute or two—nothing more—but apparently it was too much. He left the store after that. Walked out the door. He abandoned his grocery cart in the middle of the aisle so he wouldn’t have to bump into her again. Can you even believe that?”
I looked at Ali, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. He stared at the wall instead—stared at a blank, bright wall with a barely contained anger I’d never even known him to possess. I couldn’t process this right now. Not right now.
My mother was in the hospital.
I turned back around. “Shayda— Please—”
“Why are you even with him? He doesn’t associate with people like us anymore. His reputation can’t handle it.”
I felt Ali move before I saw the motion. He stalked toward my sister, looking suddenly murderous, eyes flashing. I could tell he was about to say something and I nearly shouted just to beat him to it.
“Stop,” I said. “Shayda, you’re yelling at the wrong person. Please. Please just tell me what happened. I couldn’t understand what you said on the phone. Is she hurt? How did she get here? Did you have to call an ambulance?”
Fear flitted in and out of Shayda’s face, giving her away. Her eyes shone, then dulled, the only evidence of the war within her, and in that moment she transformed. She was suddenly more than my stupid sister—she was the sister I loved, the sister for whom I would cut off an appendage, take a bullet. I pulled her into my arms even as she stiffened, held on tight when she softened. I heard the hitch in her breath.
“Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay,” I whispered, and she flinched. Jerked back. Became a stranger.
“Why do you smell like cigarettes?”
Panic rioted through me.
Lie, I screamed at myself. Lie, you idiot.
“That’s my fault,” Ali said, and I spun around, stunned. His anger was gone, but in its absence he looked wrung-out. Run-down. “My bad.”
“You smoke now?” Shayda again. “That’s disgusting. And haram.”
“Really?” he asked, eyebrows up. “I thought it was a gray area.”
Shayda’s eyes darkened. “Whatever. You can go now.”
Ali didn’t move. He looked away from Shayda, his eyes glancing off the wall, the ceiling, the floor. But he didn’t move.
He looked at me.
“Are you sure you want me to go? Do you guys even have a ride home?”
“Shayda has her car,” I explained.
“What about your dad? Do you want me to call him?”
I was still processing that, still trying to find a tidy way to explain that my father was likely sleeping in a room not unlike the one my mother currently occupied when he said—
“What about Mehdi? Did h—”
Ali froze, as suddenly as if he’d been struck by lightning. Slowly, he dragged both hands down his face.
“Fuck,” he breathed. Squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Shayda walked away.
She left, left without a word, the lines of her lean form rippling in the distance. Me, I’d fossilized in place. I stood staring at a single flickering bulb in the brightly lit corridor long after she disappeared from sight. My sister was wrong about many things, but she was at least partly right about one: Ali didn’t associate with us anymore.
It was surreal how it happened, surreal how different my life had become in his absence. Ali and I, Shayda and Zahra—we used to see each other every day. My first year of high school we’d all carpool, our moms taking turns driving us to and from campus. Once Ali and Shayda got their own cars they tore free, only too happy to break up the band, pursue their independence. Still, my life kept colliding into his. His life kept colliding into mine. Ali and I had been fixtures in each other’s lives for fi
ve years until one day, a week before my brother died, everything between us broke. We stopped talking at the beginning of my junior year, his senior year.
Overnight, we’d become strangers.
“Shadi.”
I looked up.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m—”
I shook my head too fast. “Oh, Ali. It’s okay.” I smiled and realized I was crying, my eyes bleeding slow tears that made no sound. My emotions had finally boiled over. I didn’t know why they chose that moment, didn’t know why they were directed at him; but I knew, even then, even as I could do nothing about it, that the picture I made must’ve been terrifying.
Ali looked struck; he stepped forward.
I walked away.
Eight
The teakettle was screaming.
I stared at it, the steam curling, silver body shuddering on the stovetop, demanding attention. We had an old electric stove, its white paint chipping in places, burned-on grease splattered across the steel drip-bowls within which sat lopsided heating elements. The lopsided heating elements made it so that nothing heated evenly, which made it impossible to cook anything properly on this stove, which was one of the quiet shames of my family. The only thing this stove ever did well was bring water to an acceptable boil.
I turned down the heat. Poured the hot water from the kettle into the waiting belly of a porcelain teapot, brewing the leaves within. I wrapped the whole thing in a hand towel, set it aside, let it steep. We didn’t have a proper samovar, so this would have to suffice.
I heard murmurs of conversation coming from the living room, where my mother and my sister were waiting. I did, did not want to join them, did, did not want to know what they were discussing. I lingered in the kitchen too long, arranging cookies on a plate, selecting glasses for our tea.
My mother had thought she was having a heart attack.