by Lucy Ferriss
Khalid, Shahid told his uncle that evening, would not have found the quip funny. Omar listened quietly while Shahid complained about his stepbrother. In the end Shahid told his uncle of the photograph, of Khalid’s veiled threat, no nanawate for tora.
“And is the photograph,” Omar asked quietly, “objectionable?”
Shahid sighed. “I don’t know, Uncle. It’s not so easy to say, over there.”
“Not so easy to control your sister, either.”
“I try, Uncle.”
“You should not have this problem on your mind. You have a career to focus on.” Omar had lifted his glass to his lips. He drank two fingers of Scotch every night, unwitnessed by anyone except Shahid. “Let Afia be engaged,” he’d said. “Married as soon as possible. You are a generous brother, Shahid, but you saddle yourself with a liability, here. I will speak with your family,” he added, before Shahid could object.
On the plane returning to America, Afia had been silent, sullen. “You might thank me,” he’d said at last.
“For what?”
“For the fact that you’re on this flight. Khalid had a print from the website. What if I’d let him show it to Baba? What do you think would’ve happened to you?”
She had shrugged. “Maybe I’d be dead. Maybe that would be better.”
He had felt his anger then, cold and wriggling, threatening the relief he felt at their both returning to New England, safe. “Drama queen,” he had accused her, and they had not spoken for the remainder of the flight.
Well, she was getting in line. She knew what she had—a great opportunity for education, for independence. She knew what Shahid had done for her. He was pissed at Khalid, but that was nothing new—all his life he’d wanted and needed Khalid to be his mentor, his guide, and Khalid had done nothing but wish him dead. Too bad for you, Khalid lala, he’d thought when Zardad’s offer finally came. And now, when Khalid’s words came back to haunt him—no nanawate for tora—he just hit the squash ball harder and drowned them out. He focused on the GMAT, coming up in a couple of months. All was settled. All would be well.
The first Sunday in February, Coach Hayes pulled him into her office after a home match where they steamrolled St. Lawrence. She stood in the doorway for a minute, talking to two girls from the women’s team, before she shut the door and sat in her swivel chair, opposite him. Her phone’s red light announced messages, but she ignored it. Shahid took the stiff-backed chair. From the yellow bin she kept by the door he picked one of the old-fashioned blue hardballs she made them use, sometimes, just to keep them on their toes. From the other bin, the red one, he picked one of the soft balls and began juggling them, blue and black spinning off his hands. Coach Hayes had the largest office in the athletic building. In four years, Shahid still hadn’t gotten over how weird this was. Coach took a swig from her water bottle—the woman drank like ten gallons a day—and opened a folder. “I need your honest opinion, Shahid,” she said.
“Always, Coach.” He kept his eyes on the balls. Blue, black, blue, black.
“What are our chances with the Ivies?”
Now here was a subject Shahid could warm to. He caught the blue ball in his right hand; the black one skittered off. “We took Brown last year,” he said, “and we came close with Columbia. Princeton’s out of reach—they’ve got those two guys from Egypt, I played them in the juniors, and now they’ve got one of the Khans, from Lahore. But Yale graduated three of its top contenders, so they’re beatable. And Harvard . . . well, Harvard is a toss-up, Coach.”
“What do we need to do?”
“To beat them?” Shahid sat back. With the relief of Afia’s engagement, he had been playing well, but he hadn’t really thought about team strategy. He was flattered, Coach asking him like this. Not like she wasn’t sure of herself. That was one of the many things his family could never have comprehended—how well this woman seemed to know her mind, like a man. He’d Googled her athletic history. At her peak, her serve had been her signature. She struck it overhead, like a tennis serve. Her ball traveled fast enough to disorient her opponent, and she somehow recovered quickly enough from the follow-through to pick off the return. It was a high-risk strategy. “To beat them,” he repeated, “we’d need to look at the bottom half of the lineup.”
“That’s my thinking. You, Afran, Chander, Jamil—I can’t see changing anything there. Tom’s out till March, probably, with that ankle.”
“I’ve been working with Carlos.” Shahid stood. He had to pace, to see how to rearrange the squad. “You’ve got him at seven, but he’s beating Yanik. And you’re alternating Gus and Johan at nine, but you know, Gus took that guy today in less than an hour. I could see putting him at eight, and trying someone new at nine.”
“Gus at eight,” Coach Hayes repeated. She was making notes, sipping her water.
“Yeah. His serve has got that soft little spin, you know, it’s tricky. And he’s got more confidence this year. You might give him a try at eight when we play Trinity, just to see.” Shahid nodded at his vision. “And maybe stack the boys on the top. Switch Chander and Jamil, you’re sure to get that fourth match.”
“I don’t approve of stacking, Shahid, you know that.”
“With positions three and four, it’s not really stacking.” When she raised her eyebrows, he gave in. “All right, but let me work with Jamil on the side. Then we have a chance, Coach. Not a big one, but a chance.”
“Well, that’s your assignment. A win over Harvard.” She drew a rectangle around the list she’d made in her notebook. She stood. She looked almost pleased. Then a shadow crossed her face. “How’s your sister, Shahid?”
He stiffened. “She is well, Coach.”
“She’s . . . adjusting okay? To this idea of being engaged?”
He gave her his widest smile. “It is all settled, Coach. Everyone is very happy.”
“Good.” She cleared her throat. “Because—not to be selfish—we’re going to need your focus, these next few weeks.”
“Count on me, Coach.”
If all she wanted was focus, he thought, tossing the blue ball back into the bin, he could oblige her as long as things stayed settled with Afia. Outside her office he checked his phone. No calls. He felt tender toward Afia, as he did every time the subject of her engagement surfaced. He sent her a text: We play Trinity next Saturday. Take the bus down to Hartford? Dinner on me.
Then he loped into a mostly empty locker room. Gus waved while he talked on his mobile. Chander was still in the shower. Afran stood by the sink blow-drying his hair. For a short, bullet-faced Kurd, Afran was touchingly vain. He bought crisp white T-shirts by the dozen and tended his mop of soft curls like a girl. “Coach on your hide about grades?” he asked when he’d shut off the dryer. He eyed Shahid in the long mirror as Shahid stripped off his practice uniform.
“No, dude. Dreaming about Harvard.”
Afran snorted. “That’s like her wet dream.”
“You were raging out there, man,” said Gus. Shutting his phone, he clapped a hand on Shahid’s shoulder. He was a bear of a guy, more like a cricket player than squash, but they didn’t have cricket in America.
“Yeah, and I’m starving. You want to drive over to Bertucci’s tonight?”
“Can’t, man. History paper.”
“Afran?”
“You just want to exercise those wheels.”
Shahid shrugged. With Afran’s Turkish accent, wheels came out like whiles. Yes, he wouldn’t mind giving his whiles a spin. Shahid didn’t have the same feeling about owning a car as the American guys did. The Civic was a pain in the ass and would always be a pain in the ass. He had it only so he could drive to Northampton and check in on Afia. “Gimme five?” he said to Afran.
He showered, the hot water sluicing through veins of fatigue. Even with everything settled, he wasn’t sleeping well. In a week or two his family w
ould expect a report—and Khalid, he felt sure, would be plinking computer keys, looking for evidence that Shahid’s report was bogus and their sister was still whoring around.
“Your hair’s wet, man,” Afran said as they headed into the frosty night.
“Sexy new look,” Shahid countered. The Civic started up fine but shifted rough, and squealed on the sharp turn to the state highway.
“You get a mechanic on this thing?” Afran asked.
“You volunteering?”
“Fuck, no. My dad runs an auto shop. Makes me sick just to slide under an axle.”
“Your father fixes cars? How the hell’d you start in squash?”
“Same as you, man. The little clubs, the little competitions, the kind uncle. Not like our pig-rich American buddies.”
At Bertucci’s they slid into a red vinyl booth and ordered Cokes. At least Afran didn’t drink, though that might have had to do more with squash than with Islam. Afran was nuts about squash. He didn’t have Shahid’s talent, so he worked a lot harder. He’d built up an arsenal of spins and ricocheting boasts. He subscribed to Squash Magazine, even though Coach would lend out her copy, and he was forever asking Shahid what he thought about Amr Shabana or the legendary Jahangir Khan, or whether the new Head racquet had a bigger sweet spot.
“When I’m number one, next year,” he said after they’d chosen a hamburger pizza, “I want to start captains’ practices at six. Seven’s too late. Half the squad’s got eight A.M. classes.”
“You’ll never get the Americans up,” said Shahid.
“So the starters become all Pakis and Turks. What do we care?”
“When Coach’s budget gets slashed, you’ll care.”
“She’s the A.D. She’s not going to slash her own squash budget!”
Shahid waved him off. Afran might be more Americanized than he was, but he didn’t have a clue about politics and athletics. When Enright held another fund-raiser in New York, Afran would not be on that stage.
“Let me show you some starters I think she should recruit,” Afran said. He pulled out his iPhone and began scrolling through his sites, his fingers opening and compressing like a magician’s.
“I don’t want to see ’em, Af,” Shahid said. “I’ll be gone, remember? I might be working for the competition.”
“What’s your sister going to do then?” Afran asked, keeping his eyes on the screen. “Schlep to Boston for matches?”
Normally Shahid would have grinned at Afran’s used of schlep. The Turkish sponge, he’d called his friend, soaking up slang along with American customs. But at the mention of Afia he felt a tightening in his jaw. “Afia may not stay—” he began.
But Afran interrupted with “Whoa. Someone’s been recruited.”
“I don’t care about squash right now—”
“Not for the team. To help your captivating sister.”
Afran passed the iPhone over just as the waitress arrived with their pizza. Shahid watched as she exchanged winks and smiles with Afran. The guy’s hair definitely did the trick. Light from the votive candle caressed Afran’s dark curls and his high, flat cheekbones. Shahid turned to the phone’s tiny screen. He tipped the thing into the light, then away from it. He was looking at a Facebook page. In the highlighted photo, Afia was sitting on a guy’s shoulders, reaching up into an apple tree heavy with fruit. She was wearing the hijab, but her turtleneck revealed the curve of her breasts. He squinted.
“You can expand the photo,” Afran said. He made the opening motion with his fingertips. Shahid tried it, then pushed the photo upward. Still all he saw was the top of the guy’s head, with Afia’s hand pressing down on rust-colored curls. The head looked familiar, but he couldn’t say from where. In the blurry background of the photo was another apple-picking girl, tagged as “Taylor!”
“Who’s the guy?”
“Ask your sister, man.”
He scrolled back to Afia’s face, the delight in her eyes and mouth. The lizard of anger went ice cold. Last week, the picture of Afia had disappeared from the Smith College website. But now Shahid’s fingers were moving over a Facebook timeline. Above it shone a snapshot of a toothy girl, her arms around a disheveled guy in a Dartmouth sweatshirt. Taylor Saintsbury, the name read. In a relationship with Chase B. Chase—of course, the squash leftie. He tapped back to the photo. “When did this show up?”
Afran took the iPhone back and scrolled. “Last week,” he said, “but the pic’s from fall, you can see the leaves turning. You don’t know the dude holding her up?”
“No.”
Afran scrutinized the picture. “I’m surprised your sister let this go online,” he said. “She’s not real show-offy.”
“She didn’t let it go online.”
Afran’s eyes widened. He set down the phone and took a slice of pizza. As if he couldn’t talk with his mouth empty, he bit off the point before he said, “You posted it, man? She might get pissed. I didn’t even think you knew Taylor—”
“Of course not me!” Shahid exploded. Afran jerked back in his seat. His dark eyebrows knit together. The iPhone lay on the table. Shahid picked it up to look again at the photo. It had been taken in the fall, before the trip home. This Taylor, this stupid friend of Afia’s, let someone put it on her page. He wanted to tell Afran his sister was engaged, but that would only compound the shame.
“Eat some pizza, dude,” Afran was saying. “It’s getting cold.”
Robotically Shahid lifted a triangle and tasted the greasy beef, the stringy cheese. His first year in the States, he had tried to keep halal. It wasn’t impossible—the dining hall was prepared to cook special meals—but it drew an attention that Shahid had come to resent. Slowly he gave in on one thing, then another: vanilla cake, Chinese food prepared with MSG, desserts with pig-marrow gelatin. “You get girls off social media?” he asked when he’d swallowed enough to calm himself. No reason for Afran to know what threats came out of Nasirabad. Shahid could take care of his own family troubles. “Because this Taylor looks taken.”
Afran shrugged. “You can’t have sex on Facebook. But they mess with my head, I’ll tell you that.” He looked around the restaurant, as if the waitresses in their crisp blouses and jeans were part of his problem. “I slack off in classes, you know? Coach is making me see someone. They’re calling it ADD, but it’s not really.”
“What do you mean, see someone? Like a doctor?”
Afran looked embarrassed. “I decided to see this guy Springer. He’s a sort of shrink. Smarter than the tools at the counseling center, though.”
“What does he do to you?”
“He doesn’t do anything. We talk. It’s stupid.”
Talk. Shahid didn’t want to talk to anyone, not about his sister. “Springer,” he said. “Isn’t that—?”
“Coach’s husband.” Afran wrinkled his nose. “But he doesn’t, like, talk to her about me. It’s not allowed.” Afran drained his Coke. He leaned across the table. “Look. If I could get someone to cut out whatever central lobe is all about the Prophet’s commands, and what you can do and what you can’t and how big a deal a girl’s hymen is . . . I’d do it. Bingo. Like that.” He made a movement atop his head that was similar to what he’d done with his iPhone, opening his fingers then locking them together, as if pinching off part of his brain. “Do I care about purity or marriage? No. I want to get laid.”
Even knowing how Afran liked to say things like get laid, Shahid reddened. “But would you want someone to treat your sister the way you treat, you know . . .” He gestured at the iPhone as if it were Afran’s Rolodex.
“Hey, you had a hookup last year. What was her name? Vanessa?”
“Valerie.” Shahid lifted the final slice of pizza and let it flop onto his plate. “She wasn’t a hookup, she was a girlfriend.”
“And?”
“And then I found her in the clo
set at some party, making out with a lacrosse player.”
“That’s American women, man.”
“Well, I don’t understand them.”
Afran signaled for a refill on the Coke. “You asked about my sister,” he said when it came. “I don’t have a sister, okay? But I did have a cousin. She was retarded.”
“Afran—”
“No, I mean really retarded, like in something was wrong with her brain, okay? But she was this beautiful girl. And she got pregnant.”
“How old?”
“Fourteen.” Afran’s eyes were fixed on a spot over Shahid’s shoulder. “She wouldn’t say who the guy was. I’m not sure she knew. But I’m telling you, man. I’d rather somebody treated her the way I treat American girls, than do what they did.”
“Which was?” Shahid’s mouth went dry.
“She died in a kitchen fire. The door was locked.”
“That’s awful, man,” Shahid said. “But an accident like that—”
“It wasn’t an accident. You know it. I know it. The cops knew it.” He took a long swig. Then he fixed his eyes on Shahid. “So what would you rather?” he said. “A girl suffers because some guy toyed with her feelings? Or because her dad locked a door and lit a match?”
“Will that be all?” the waitress asked. Her wide-set eyes darted from one of them to the other. She was pretty in the way of local girls—a layer of baby fat on fine bones, slender nose, breasts that seemed ready to give milk. Julie, her name tag read.
As if he had just been bantering with his friend, Afran turned to her. “That depends,” he said.
“On what?” Julie asked.
“On what you’re doing after work.”
Julie’s blush mottled her pale skin. “I work late,” she said.
“So do I,” said Afran.
“Just the check,” Shahid said to her.