by Beth Fred
He knew something, but I didn’t know how. It wasn’t like he was there, so I decided to go for it. “Afternoon classes were awesome.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“In trouble?”
“Mirr, are you doing something stupid?”
“No.” True, my brother’s definition of stupid differed from mine, but it was over now anyhow.
“If you’re doing something stupid, you need to tell me so I can help you.”
“Abrahem, I said no. Now get out of my room. I’m sick.”
He rolled his eyes. “Alright.”
Chapter 20
Caleb
Two days had passed since Mirriam flipped out on my floor, and I hadn’t heard from her since. She wouldn’t answer my calls or texts.
I didn’t know what happened. We’d had a good day. One minute we were talking, and the next she lost her mind. Something was wrong. I knew that. I was tempted to go across the street and break her door down, so she would have to talk to me. But I was not going to be breaking doors down for a while, and I wasn’t sure if I could get across the street. Not to mention, Mirriam didn’t want her family to know about us.
I sent one last text.
Please call.
And promised myself I wouldn’t send another.
Josh and Matt came over after school. It was good to see them. It had been forever, and it took my mind off Mirriam, who I didn’t mention. Maybe, I was more okay with this being a secret than I’d thought.
Matt pulled out a sixpack. “I hit my dad’s mini-fridge before we came.”
He handed one to Josh and offered one to me. “No thanks. I can’t.”
“Oh yeah, the drugs. Sorry, man,” Matt said.
Josh shrugged. “Well, you’re on better shit than this.”
He didn’t notice when I rolled my eyes. For a second, I wondered how we ever became friends. Half the time I couldn’t feel most of my body. When I could, it meant the painkillers had worn off, and it felt like someone was making a pulled pork sandwich out of me. “Yeah, Josh, I’m on way better shit.”
Matt’s phone buzzed. He pulled it from his pocket, looked at the screen, and chuckled.
“What’s up?” Josh asked.
He held the phone up for us to see. It displayed the picture of a cowboy, an Indian, and a Muslim sitting side by side. The Indian said, “My people are few.” The Muslim said, “My people are many,” and the cowboy said, “That’s because we haven’t played cowboys and ragheads yet.”
Mirriam flashed across my mind. She wasn’t Muslim, but I knew Arabic Christians had most likely died in the crossfire. A few weeks ago, I didn’t know Arabic Christians existed, and what if she were Muslim? I didn’t think it would matter. She’d still be the girl that pulled me out of the road. She’d still be the only girl in school that ever stood up to Kailee Hill. She would still be my M.
“That’s not funny.” My tone was harsher than I meant it to be.
“Oh really? Because a couple of weeks ago, you would have thought it was. It wasn’t six months ago you were talking about enlisting to turn the whole Middle East into a plate of glass.”
Josh sat up in his chair and turned to the side so he could face me full on. “How is your prom date going?”
“Why?”
“Curious.”
“Fine.”
“Let’s cancel the bet. Take Kailee to prom.”
“No way in hell am I taking Kailee Hill to prom. Why do you want to cancel the bet?”
“Because I think you’re spending too much time with the A-rab. It’s like you’re not the same person anymore. She pulled you out of the street, so you didn’t get hit a second time. I get it. You don’t have to change your whole life, or who you are because of it. Do you know what she said to Kailee?”
“Do you know what Kailee did to her? And Mirriam would never actually do that.”
“I don’t think so either, but it proves she’s not one of us. The sooner you realize that the better.”
“Get the hell out of my house, or we’re going to find out how bad my legs actually are.”
“Are you serious?”
I grabbed the arm of the chair and tried to stand.
“Caleb, calm down. I’m leaving.” Josh stood and headed for the door.
“I drove,” Matt said, following him out.
My stomach sunk, because they were right. A couple of weeks ago, I would have thought that was funny.
Chapter 21
Mirriam
Caleb’s calls and texts became less frequent, but he was still at it. Part of me thought I should talk to him. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to tell him the truth, but I couldn’t because that would be the last we talked. Also because not only would telling Caleb the truth not bring his dad back, it would crush his world. If my wannabe soldier boy knew another soldier shot his father, it would wreck everything he ever believed in. It would break his heart. Caleb had lost enough for a lifetime. I wouldn’t add to it.
I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t not tell him either, so we couldn’t talk. Not that it mattered, because when he learned I was responsible for his father’s death, he wouldn’t want to talk to me anyhow. I wore his ‘M’ under my clothes, because I wasn’t ready to give Caleb up. I just couldn’t complicate his life any worse than I already had.
I was sitting on my couch with a tub of ice cream and a spoon when Morgan called. She was probably mad at me. I’d been ignoring her calls, too.
“Hello?”
“OMG! Where are you? I seriously don’t believe you’re sick. You won’t graduate if you keep skipping? Are you nursing Caleb back to health?”
I laughed at the way she said ‘nursing’. “I haven’t seen Caleb in days, and I don’t feel well.”
“What happened? Something is wrong. I can hear it in your voice.”
I sighed. “I know something that I wish I didn’t about someone that I care about. I don’t know if I should tell them, but I don’t think so because they would hate me and I think the person is better off not knowing.”
“You know they’re talking shit about him for dating you. He wouldn’t be mad at you about it, but I wouldn’t tell him his friends are trashing him. The guy’s been through enough.”
“They are? How do they know we’re dating? It’s a secret.”
“Mirriam, in towns this size, there are no secrets. He kicked Josh and Matt out of his house for cracking raghead jokes.”
“Oh.”
“If that wasn’t what we were talking about, what is?”
“Nothing. I have to go.” I hung up before she had a chance to argue.” He blew his friends off for me. I complicated his life all the way around. It was time for me to stay out of it.
I would go back to school tomorrow. Not today. I took another bite of my vanilla bean ice cream and flipped through the channels one more time. I wasn’t a fan of daytime talk shows where the bottom of society screamed about their transgressions, so I settled on PBS, a documentary on friendly fire. I laughed when I heard the term. How could fire be friendly?
Then I realized we weren’t talking about a fire at all. Friendly fire was when one soldier shot another from his military. As the documentary went on, I realized that what happened to Caleb’s dad wasn’t exactly friendly fire. ‘Friendly Fire’ referred to an accident and was disclosed. What happened to Mr. Miller wasn’t an accident. It was a calculated risk. Shooting him was worth it to maybe shoot me. The military told Caleb and his mom it was enemy fire. It was not.
The narrator mentioned that five thousand U.S. soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan—that was way less than the number of civilians who had died—and a significant number of those were killed by friendly fire. The documentary didn’t seem to think it was a big number, but to me that meant a lot of guys were killed like Caleb’s father. Not terrorism at all.
Then I learned friendly fire victims might be entitled to pay-outs beyond their life insurance, especially if there was negligence
involved. Caleb’s words, “I don’t have another option,” echoed in my head.
Once he knew the truth, he would never talk to me again, true. But five thousand soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thirty thousand plus were injured. If the military owed him money, he had another option. I was willing to let Caleb hate me to keep him from becoming a statistic.
Both Ommy and Abrahem were asleep in their rooms, but if I waited until they were gone, I might not have the courage to do what I needed to do. I took the risk and walked across the street in broad daylight. I knocked on the door, sucked in air, and prayed it was enough to get me through what I had to do.
Caleb didn’t answer, but I knew he was there, so I pushed the door open. He stood in front of the couch. “I was coming to the door,” he said, crossing his arms in front of his chest. His tone surprised me—stern and harsh.
“You didn’t have to get up.” In fact, it’s probably better if you’re sitting down.
“What do you want?”
“To talk.”
“That’s a good idea. It might even have been a good idea four days ago when you fell off my couch and lay on the floor for ten minutes before ignoring me for days.”
“I—”
“Mirriam, you’ve scraped me off the ground more than once. If you can’t let me do the same for you, we don’t have much to talk about.”
That stung. Caleb had never talked to me like this before, and it seemed to be what I needed to pull myself out of this emotional chaos I was in and take control.
“Sit down, Caleb. We need to talk.”
“Are you going to acknowledge what I said?”
“After what I have to tell you, you won’t want to talk to me anymore. Okay?”
His brows knit in confusion. “What are you talking about? I love you. There isn’t much you could do to change that.”
An easy smile spread across my face and I sighed as my heart fluttered. I knew it. I knew it from the first time he kissed me, but hearing him say it made it real. The smile disappeared, and it took everything I had not to cry, because now I had a crystal clear image of what I was about to lose.
His eyes went soft, and he held his arms out for me. “What’s wrong?”
“Sit down. Really.” He obeyed, and I sat on the armchair beside the couch instead of the seat next to him.
He eyed the distance between us and then asked, “Are you breaking up with me?”
I laughed. If it were only that simple. I shook my head and blurted it out. “You shouldn’t join the army. You can still go to college. Someone owes you money, lots of it.” That was the reason I was here. Because telling him could help one thing: Caleb’s future.
“Who owes me money?”
Oh God! I forgot one really important detail. I forced myself to slow down. “Someone owes you money, but before I tell you who, you have to promise to find out another way. You can’t let anyone know I told you.”
“Told me what?”
“What I’m about to tell you. I’m serious, Caleb. It’s not just me I’m worried about. I can’t let anything happen to Ommy or Abrahem.”
“I have no idea what we’re talking about, but I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“I don’t care about me. It’s—”
“Mirriam, I won’t let anything happen to your family, because that would hurt you. What are we talking about? Who owes me money?”
“The army.”
“What? Do you mean the pay out? I hate it when people think the government gives money to fallen soldiers. It’s not true. That money was my dad’s insurance policy. He paid for it, and mom used it to pay off the mortgage.”
I shook my head. I knew what I needed to say when I knocked on the door, but now my thoughts whirled around my brain. The words escaped me, but I tried to tell him. “I saw it on TV. They called it something—I don’t remember. I saw it last night.” I moved my hand around in circles as I tried to remember the phrase. “Friendly fire.”
“Mirriam, my dad wasn’t killed by friendly fire. He was shot by terrorists.”
My eyes bulged as anger shot through me like venom. We were talking about his father, and I was the one irate. But it wasn’t true. “No, he was not.”
“I’m not going to argue with you about this. I’m sorry that you think there are no terrorists in Iraq or that it’s okay to be a terrorist, or whatever it is that you think, but you need to drop this. What did you need to talk about?”
“Miller.”
“What?”
“No, that’s what I wanted to talk about.”
Caleb groaned. “M, if this is some kind of game, it’s not funny.”
“I wish. Do you think it’s easy for me to be here talking about this?”
“I haven’t figured out what we’re talking about yet.”
Blurting it out was a horrible idea. I couldn’t figure out how to lead into the, ‘I snuck out of the house and now our dads are dead’ story.
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with air. I blew it out slowly and hugged my knees to my chest. I fixed my eyes straight ahead on the white wall—I didn’t dare meet Caleb’s eyes—and started from the beginning.
“The first day I saw you, you looked so familiar. I couldn’t figure out where I knew you from, but I’d seen your face before. I decided you were the typical All-American heartthrob, so you probably looked like a movie star.”
Caleb grinned. “Oh really?”
“Caleb, this is no time for your conceit. I thought it again that night you got hit by the car, because your expression looked so familiar. But you’ve lived here most of your life, and I was in Iraq and then Maryland. I didn’t think there was any way I could have seen you before. When I saw the picture of your father, I knew I had seen him before, and I knew where. You said he probably looked familiar, because you have the same features, but you were wrong. You looked familiar for that reason.”
“You met my dad in Iraq?”
“Only once.”
“I don’t understand. Why would that freak you out?”
I told him the whole story without leaving out any details.
In the four days we hadn’t talked, I’d alternated between crying, eating pistachio ice cream, and watching bad TV to cover up the fact that I couldn’t sleep and shouldn’t be eating pistachio ice cream. As I recanted this story, I wanted to cry again. I didn’t let myself. Instead, I sat, waiting for Caleb’s reaction.
Caleb looked through me, not at me. Finally, he said, “I need some time to process this.”
I nodded, because I knew this would happen. I knew before I came.
He sat a foot away from me, but we weren’t touching or talking—too much space between us, but that was what he’d asked for.
Caleb didn’t utter a single word as I walked to the door. Not even goodbye.
Chapter 22
Caleb
There it was—the missing piece. The chunk of the story I knew wasn’t being told two years ago, when dress greens showed up at the door. This was more than a missing piece, though. This was a whole new story.
A lump gathered in my throat when Mirriam was talking, and I couldn’t breathe past it. She was calm as she spoke. The color drained from her face. She went as white as my walls, but she never cried. When she finished, she looked at me gauging—waiting for a reaction—but I was numb.
My dad was shot by his friend with a government issued weapon. While he was dying, they were fighting with each other, not trying to help him. And Mirriam ran away.
I looked at this innocent girl—the only girl I’d ever loved. I fixated on her, hoping it would come to me. The answer. Something that said this didn’t change anything. She was still Mirriam. America was still the best place on Earth. My dad died for a reason. Uncle Sam was still the good guy, and defending your country was the right thing to do.
I came up blank. There was no answer.
All of this time, I thought he had been gunned down by a terrorist. The day they h
anded my mom the folded flag, I decided to enlist. I would find the terrorist clan responsible and kill them off one by one. An eye for an eye. Being killed by someone he knew—someone we knew, who probably still lived on the base—made it worse.
I pushed out enough breath to form words. “I need some time to process this.”
Moments turned to minutes and slipped through the silence.
I stared at Mirriam until I couldn’t see her anymore.
Finally, she stood. “I should go.” And she did.
The door swung open and closed. Mirriam was gone.
I was left in an empty house with the new knowledge my dad was killed by one of his own. Anger consumed me. I needed to kick someone’s ass. Now. Not later. But who? I didn’t know who had fired the shot. Although, I assumed Collins had barked the order. He had been the commanding officer, and no one would have followed that order coming from anyone else.
I wanted to break Collins’ neck.
I swatted my hand in front of me, pushing the crystal vase and glass candle set from the coffee table to the floor. It crashed into a million bits of broken glass. I knew Mom would kill me when she came home, but I didn’t care.
I always wondered how Mirriam could hate it here the way she did, since the Middle East was supposed to be so much worse, especially for women. And Mirriam wasn’t the kind of girl to keep quiet. Now I knew. For the first time in my life, I hated America, too.
Dad hadn’t died protecting his country, or his family, or his friends. He was killed protecting an innocent girl they called a terrorist.
“Oooww!” I screamed out in pain as I forced myself to my feet. I took a thick book from Mom’s shelf and threw it in the fireplace. I waddled to the kitchen, turned on a burner on the stovetop, and stuck the cardboard center of a roll of paper towels in it. I returned to the living room and threw it against the book. We only kept firewood around Thanksgiving and Christmas. It had been 99 degrees for three weeks. No chance of finding firewood here.
I was moving too fast. Each step hurt. Every time I pushed my legs forward, it didn’t matter which one, I wanted to scream. I fought through the pain and made it outside. Unable to pivot my body in an angle so I could remove the flagpole from its holder, I broke the pole off. Red and white striped cloth swept the concrete porch as I crossed through the door again.