The Vow

by Jessica Martinez

I slap another mosquito on my arm, and it leaves a streak of fresh blood. I don’t know if it’s mine or Mo’s. “Yeah,” I say, but neither of us believes me. This conversation is so unnatural, so unbelievable, I wouldn’t believe anything I said right now. How could I be okay? “And you?”

  “No.”

  “I was lying when I said yeah,” I said.

  “I know. You’d better go. Your parents.”

  He walks away and I get back into the truck alone. Totally alone. That’s when the panic descends. I’m suffocating. There isn’t enough air inside the cab, even with the windows down. I begin backing out of the Husseins’ long, snaking driveway, watching the encroaching bushes race by in reverse.

  At the curb, I roll past the mailbox and see the dent I made in it years ago illuminated by the moon. I backed over it the day after I got my license. The memory of that night—of Mo frantically trying to jam the post back into the ground before Mr. Hussein got home, of neither of us being able to stop laughing long enough to figure out what we were doing—makes me nauseous again.

  I can’t lose Mo. If he leaves me, I’ll lose the only person who gets me. And then what’s keeping me from slipping backward into the old Annie? I don’t want to be that girl, the one everybody was afraid to touch.

  I’m crying, whimpering at first but then sobbing in that wounded-animal way that only comes out when I’m alone—long whines interrupted with hard gasps for air. And I’m driving too fast, but I have no choice. I’ve got to get home. My cell phone is resting on my lap, and any second now it’ll ring.

  I know they’re both pretending not to notice the oversized wall clock with its stoic hands and curled roman numerals, measuring the minutes until they’re allowed to worry again. But they’re counting down, individually of course. Mom has probably been doing something virtuous and disgusting, like scrubbing grout with a toothbrush, to keep her mind off everything, and Dad, no doubt, is watching baseball. He can watch game after game after game without thinking or feeling a thing.

  I don’t want them to know I’ve been crying, so for the second time this evening I force myself to stop. It’s harder this time because I’ve already let it get out of hand. I’m snotty and out of breath and my face hurts from squeezing.

  I take a deep breath, try out my voice with a few empty hellos, then call home.

  “Where are you?” Dad answers. The synthesized SportsCenter theme blares in the background.

  “I had to stay late to help close.” It isn’t until I hear myself that I realize I’m lying. I’m not sure why, since they’ll know Mo’s leaving soon enough. Maybe I’m just not ready for his reaction tonight. It’ll be too light, too encouraging. He doesn’t like Mo, doesn’t understand us—any guy who wants to be just friends with me must be gay or lying or both. He would not understand that without Mo I’m going to drown.

  “When will you be home?” he asks.

  “I just dropped Mo at his place.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell your mom you’ll be home in ten minutes.”

  I’m only a block away now, but I don’t correct him. I need at least ten minutes to get myself together.

  I pull into an empty playground parking lot and stare at moonlit slides and gleaming monkey bars. The swings rock and squeal in the breeze. I grew up in this park, but I never realized just how creepy it is at night. I was never allowed to wander after dark. It’s like a children’s ghost town.

  What if Mo’s wrong?

  It feels dangerous, but I want to believe it. He’s wrong. Mo’s just pulling a Mo—freaking out first, getting details later. Tomorrow he’ll find out about some visa extension or job for his dad in Louisville, and this night will be the crazy night we thought he was going back to Jordan, and nothing else.

  I hiccup, a reminder of losing control, but I feel differently already. Stronger. I twist my wrist to hear my bracelets jingle. This is all just one big emotional overreaction.

  Unless it’s not.

  My mind flits back to the day at the science center. The lost year, the pact with God, the tiny spot where the IV pierced my skin forever marking me, Lena’s smell and feel still burning in our house and in my brain. I don’t want to be that girl. I don’t want to be the one needing to be saved. That girl was alone. Starved. Godless.

  Chapter 8

  Mo

  Godless. I’m definitely not that. Sarina probably thinks so, but all-or-nothing is her mental disease, not mine. She’s the closest thing to devout our family has seen in generations. Who knows why. Mom’s parents were devout, but they’re dead. And Dad’s parents, the Teta and Jido whom we lived with, are lukewarm, which means we were too when we were living under their palatial roof.

  Sarina is a believer of things, though, so she has no idea about the big fat place between godless and God-fearing where I reside. I wonder if her piety is helping her now. Maybe she isn’t as scared because she knows she can fit in that way.

  We pass in the hallway outside the bathroom, and she smiles, but it’s a weird smile—no teeth, wide eyes—like I could pull it, let go, and it’d snap back into place. I nod at her, she says good night and closes her door, closes her door, like I don’t know she’s afraid of the dark and has slept with it cracked her entire life.

  I stand in the hall outside her room, waiting for something. Not sure what. I want to go in there and talk to her like I used to, hang in her hammock chair and ask her what the hell we’re going to do.

  I’m not even sure how human the response would be. She’d probably tell me Dad must know what’s best for the family and suggest I stop throwing the word hell around because it’s haram, as is the pulled pork sandwich she saw me eating at Curly’s last week, as is the amount of one-on-one time I spend with Annie, even though she knows things aren’t like that with Annie. Or she used to. Lately everything I do is wrong. If she had any clue of the things I’ve been imagining doing with Maya Lawless and her ridiculously perfect body, she’d tell me I’m going straight to hell. Maybe I am.

  I’m so screwed.

  I go back to my room, throw my jeans and T-shirt on the floor, and get into bed. The exhaustion is both profound and not profound enough. My legs are twitchy and my brain won’t stop turning, but I’m so tired, it hurts every time I jerk myself awake. I think I’d feel better if I could just get it over with and kick a hole in something.

  My bed feels like someone else’s. My skin isn’t mine either. It’s almost funny to think that yesterday I was stressing out about nothing, about who I should request as a roommate now that Bryce has abandoned me at basketball camp and what to say to Maya’s douchebag boyfriend if he threatens to kill me for trying to talk to her at Gas’n’Go the other day.

  But that was yesterday.

  Senior year. The truth lands like a boot on my chest. I’m losing everything. I’m pinned, winded by the force of it, watching everything I’ve worked for curl and dissipate like mist. I will not be a basketball god. I will not get my chance with Maya Lawless. I will not tool around with Bryce. I will not be with Annie.

  I put my thumbs at the base of my skull, my fingers spanning my head like it’s a basketball, and squeeze. It doesn’t help.

  It’s not like I’ll find refuge in academics, either. I can’t do science in Arabic. Or math. The thought patterns, I’m not sure they even exist in that portion of my brain. Dad is always waxing poetic about how math is intuitive to our minds—mine and his—because the study of mathematics began in the Arab world. He doesn’t understand that my brain has been soaked in the wrong marinade. The good math mojo can’t possibly apply to me. I think in English. My grades are going to tank. Good-bye, Harvard.

  Arabic is pretty, but it’s for listening to my grandfather tell me stories about his childhood. It’s for prayer and telling dirty jokes with my cousins. It’s not for real life. I don’t even dream in Arabic anymore.

  Sarina will do just fine. She didn’t get teased when we first moved here either, or at least not like I did. She was too young, or maybe girls
are more humane, or maybe I was just weirder or more foreign than her in some way. So while she wasn’t caring, I was forcing myself to tolerate Taco Bell and Abercrombie & Fitch.

  But now. What does it matter how American I’ve become? America is still washing its hands of me. My parents are still making me leave.

  The realization that the last seven years of my life have been a complete waste is a slow and painful one. AP classes, a waste. Extracurricular projects, a waste, including that robotics one that sucked up every spare second and dime for eight weeks. State science fair finalist two years in a row, a waste. Years of studying instead of playing Xbox, arguing my A-minuses up to As, picking beer cans off the side of the highway for community freaking service, all a waste. And I should’ve skipped that entire poetry unit last month. Haiku, my ass.

  When I first got into bed a muffled whimper was seeping through the ceiling vent from my parents’ room. Now it’s sobbing. I hear my dad too, the measured lilt of his voice. I can hear the language without hearing actual words.

  I usually feel bad for him when she falls apart like this, but not tonight. He did this.

  It’s the perfect reasonableness of his voice that kills. My whole life, I’ve only wanted to make him happy, but now I just want to slam my fist into his face. It’s scary and thrilling, like getting fouled and having all that adrenaline screaming at you to throw a punch. I’m mostly sure I’m not going to.

  When did I become so unimportant to him? Why push me so hard, for so many years, to yank it all away?

  There’s quiet from above; then his voice starts up again, still controlled, always controlled. But why is he wasting words on Mom? He should be down here. I want him at the foot of my bed, explaining what I did to let him down, because at some point he stopped believing my future was worth anything. He didn’t even try.

  There’s a knock on my door.

  “Can I come in?” Sarina calls.

  “Yeah.”

  The door swings open, then closed behind her. She’s wearing my basketball camp T-shirt from two summers ago, sweatpants, and glasses.

  “Nice look, four eyes,” I mutter. She got contacts for her fifteenth birthday, so I don’t get to make fun of the glasses nearly as much as I used to.

  She ignores me and settles into the chair at my desk. It swivels, and she’s immediately turning herself with one toe, the other leg tucked beneath her. She doesn’t speak, so I let her just spin.

  “Do you want something?” I say finally.

  “No. Do you want me to leave?”

  “No. Just don’t make yourself puke on that thing.”

  She spins for another minute or so, and I wonder if she really is going to make herself throw up. “It’s louder in here,” she says.

  “What, Mom?”

  “Yeah.”

  She’s back to whimpering now, possibly running out of steam.

  “She must’ve really hated it there,” Sarina says softly.

  I try to remember what Mom was like when I was little, when we were still in Jordan, but I can’t. She’s just there, in all my memories, but not smiling or crying or anything really. “I think she’s just being Mom.”

  “Maybe.”

  In the dark I can see the outline of Sarina’s head, profile and ponytail, turning and turning, an asymmetrical lump of clay on a pottery wheel. “She’ll be better tomorrow,” I say, knowing she won’t.

  “What if she’s losing it because life sucked there?”

  “It didn’t suck. I remember it, and it didn’t suck. Not that I want to go back, but it didn’t suck.” Maybe I didn’t need to say it three times.

  “I remember things too,” she says, “but eight isn’t old enough to know if a place sucks. I just remember the us. Not so much the there. The cousins, Teta, food smells, that big black dog from next door, the uncles yelling at us for knocking over the TV stand. That’s not real life; that’s a family reunion. That’s summer vacation. Why did we stop visiting, anyway?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I should be relieved. She’s worried, and that means she’s not a complete idiot. But I’m not. I feel like I’m on the Qwik Drop at Kentucky Kingdom right before they slide the floor out from under you, when you know it’s coming and you can’t avoid it or speed things up or know the exact moment you’ll be falling.

  “Everything will be different now,” she says.

  I have nothing to reassure her. She’s right. It’s silent for a moment; then a fresh whimper from above leaks down and over us both.

  “Do you think she’s crying because it sucks to be a woman in Jordan?”

  “Of course not.” My answer is quick and firm. Then I start to feel sick because I have no idea, haven’t even thought about it, but now I have to keep pretending. “It’s not Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan or anything. Women work and vote and do whatever, just like men. You know all that.”

  “I don’t know anything,” she says.

  “Of course it’ll be different,” I hear myself saying, “but Mom went to university there.”

  “Yeah.” Her voice is thin with doubt. She stops spinning, and I can see the whites of her eyes glowing at me. “But how different? I don’t remember enough, and besides, a lot could’ve changed. I don’t even know—can I go out by myself whenever I want in Jordan? And do I have to be totally covered? Plus, my Arabic isn’t as good as yours. And with my hair being light, people are going to think I am American, and I’ve heard American women get treated really badly—”

  “Stop it!” I say, sitting up quickly. “You’re freaking yourself out for no reason.” I take a deep breath, listen to my heartbeat thunder in my ears. “Dad wouldn’t take us back there if it was unsafe, or if life was going to miserable for you.”

  She’s silent. I’m pretty sure neither of us believes me.

  “I think I’ll have to wear a hijab,” she says. “Right?”

  “It’s not like it’s the law,” I say, knowing that’s not what she’s asking. Sarina understands the differences between laws and customs. Mom used to wear one before we moved, but only out in public.

  “It’s okay,” she says with a convincing resolve. “I can do it. I probably should’ve been doing it here anyway.”

  Usually her religious resolve pisses me off, but tonight it just depresses me.

  “Maybe Mom will be happier there,” she says softly. “Do you remember if she was happy before?”

  I shake my head. How is a ten-year-old boy supposed to know if his mom is happy?

  “Maybe becoming more devout will make her—”

  “I don’t think Mom’s problems have anything to do with Islam,” I interrupt. “And I don’t think they can be fixed by it either.”

  We sit in silence and wonder the unthinkable. Is it Dad? Is it us?

  “I want something different,” Sarina says finally. “I don’t want to be . . .”

  “You’re not like her,” I mumble. It’s the truth, too. I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Something heavy is pressing down on my chest, and above us, Mom is still crying. Their bedroom door slams. Dad’s footsteps travel over our heads and down the stairs.

  “I think I’m going to go punch him in the face,” I say.

  “Right. It’s not like he has a choice about any of this.” She starts spinning again.

  I snort, then roll over onto my side so I can see out the window into the Dubrowskis’ backyard. “Of course he’s got a choice. He’s just not looking for a job in the States.”

  “He said there’s nothing here,” she says.

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “After you left to get Annie, he said he’d been looking for a while. I think all that positivity about the interview in Jordan is just a show. For us, I mean. He must feel like he’s letting us down, but I bet he’d stay if he could.”

  Looking for a while. He saw it coming. How long has he been watching me work like a dog for the American dream, knowing full well it isn’t mine to earn? She’s wrong. He isn�
�t thinking of us at all.

  I try to focus on her face, but I can’t catch her features. She’s still spinning. “Seriously,” I say, “don’t make yourself puke.”

  “I won’t. I don’t get dizzy.”

  “Everybody gets dizzy.”

  “Not ballerinas,” she says.

  Those words hang between us like smoke.

  “Oh,” she says. That’s all, but that puff of air is enough to blow it all away. “There probably aren’t ballet studios and stuff like here. Right?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, but I do know.

  She doesn’t say a word. She knows too.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I’m pretty sure my basketball career is over.”

  Still nothing. I can’t think of anything else to say.

  “We’ll be the weird ones again, won’t we?” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “They probably hate Americans.”

  “I don’t know. Dad says they love Americans and hate America, but I’m not buying anything from him anymore.”

  Mom has stopped. Maybe she’s asleep.

  “I’m scared.” Sarina’s voice is thin, like a ribbon of smoke twisting up from the spinning chair. Like she’s on fire.

  I liked it better when I thought she was oblivious. “You know what I’m not going to miss? You know on the first day of school, when the teacher reads out everyone’s full name?”

  Silence.

  I close my eyes and replay that moment, seven times over for seven years. I hate that moment.

  Finally she says, “Yeah.”

  I don’t need to say anything else.

  That’s the moment when everyone remembers the thing that slipped their minds when I was playing basketball, or doing their homework for a small but reasonable fee. In that silence, I can hear their thoughts. Mohammed Ibrahim Hussein? Oh, yeah. That’s Mo’s real name.

  Chapter 9

  Annie

  What’s your real name?”

  I don’t look up from my stack of dollar bills. I’m counting.

  “Your name,” Flora demands.