by Audrey Bell
My father's eyebrows took off towards his hairline.
My parents, Solomon, and Justin’s parents left us after dinner so we could be wild for one last night. We found Andrew and Nigel and Juliet and we drank underneath a big white tent, laughing with each other, telling each other we couldn’t believe it was over, wondering what we’d missed, wondering when we would see each other again.
I laughed a lot. We were far enough away from the music that I could talk to Andrew who was moving to D.C. to work for the weather bureau and to Juliet, who had been named the next Editor-in-Chief, without yelling. Juliet and Justin commiserated about how much they would miss us next year. We all promised to come back and see them.
I saw Jack from afar, or at least I thought I did. I saw plaid and dark hair and that familiar walk.
I sipped my beer and bit my lip. I wanted to talk to him. I pulled my hair into a ponytail, finished my drink for courage, and followed him.
I found him with Xander and thankfully without a girl. Xander saw me first and nudged Jack with his shoulder.
Jack turned. He hadn’t shaved in a few days. He looked scruffy. It was a good look on him.
“Hey, there,” he said.
Xander got to his feet, nodded at me—“Hey, Hadley”—and turned towards a crowd of boys in their fraternity so that Jack and I were alone.
Jack stood up to his full height and looked at me. He smiled. “So, Hadley Arrington.”
“So, Jack Diamond.” I wavered, thinking about what my dad had said about selfishness. I’d been selfish. And Jack had been selfish. We chose ourselves instead of the other person.
“You’re something else, you know that?”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” I said.
He nodded. He sipped his beer. “You leave tomorrow?”
“After the ceremony, yep.”
He smiled.
“What about you? Where you headed?”
“New York,” he nodded. “My mom’s house in the suburbs, though. Not the city. I need to figure some things out.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, that’s good.”
He nodded. “It’ll be nice. A lot of people will be nearby.”
I snuck a look across the tent. The metal poles were wrapped in Christmas lights, the van Morrison song playing sounded a little sadder than it usually did, and Jack looked damn good.
“Thank you,” Jack said, with a smile.
I flushed. “What?”
“You said I looked damn good. Thank you.”
I closed my eyes. “Jesus. I’m sorry.” I could feel my face flaming.
He laughed. “It’s fine. You always look damn good.” He licked his lips and stared at me nakedly.
“So, maybe we’ll see each other,” I ventured. I tried to think of him in New York—the both of us growing up a little bit—and then maybe in a few years….
“God, I really hope not, Hadley,” he said.
Right. I swallowed. “Yeah. Sorry. Sorry, I just…the music and ceremony and all that…it’s making me sentimental. Congratulations, though. On graduating.”
He smiled sadly and I smiled sadly back. “You too.”
“I’ll…well, maybe I’ll see you at the ceremony,” I said, with a shaky smile.
He laughed bitterly.
“I’ll go though. Sorry.”
I turned. He reached for my wrist and pulled me close to him. He ran his thumb over the veins on my wrist near the base of my palm. His hands were warm and gentle, calloused. They felt so good. I exhaled heavily. It felt like so long since I’d been touched.
“Hadley Arrington,” he murmured.
I swallowed. He looked me in the eyes, pulled me close, and kissed me gently—his lips like a flutter of butterfly wings against mine. “Goddamn, I miss you.” He said.
“I—I wish…” I didn’t know what to say. “Me too.”
He raked his fingers through my hair, loosening the ponytail, cupping my chin in his hands. “Hey, be safe, okay?”
“Yeah. I will.”
He nodded at me, our eyes were locked, and I thought briefly that maybe we could salvage it. Maybe we could fix it. Maybe we could be whole.
“Goodbye, Hadley.”
Chapter Forty-Two
I cried over Jack Diamond when I got home. Instead of crying at graduation, I cried over Jack.
He was right to say goodbye then.
I searched for his face, briefly, when we threw our caps into the air, when we turned out to meet our families, when people were crying from joy and sadness and possibly from colossal hangovers. I couldn’t find him.
I clung to David, who couldn’t stop laughing.
“We’re done, done, done, done,” he chanted.
But later David clung to Justin, and they reaffirmed that they’d be able to make a long-distance relationship work, and my mother and Solomon went to the airport and my father came back over to help me with the last of my belongings.
David’s flight to San Francisco was the following day.
My dad waited in the hallway while I hugged David tightly and he started crying again.
“No, no, no,” I said. “We’ve got to be happy. We’ll see each other. We will.”
“It won’t be the same.”
I kissed him on the cheek. “You’ll always be my best friend.”
I gave him the cappuccino machine and tried not to burst into tears when he said: “Four years and it’s finally all mine!”
We drove to the airport. We had separate flights—my dad’s to Beijing and mine to New York and he hugged me at the gate. In a few days, I’d be in Syria and he’d move onto Tokyo before looping back to London.
“I’m proud of you, kid,” he said gruffly, pushing a wrapped box into my hand, and disappearing towards the international terminal.
I opened it waiting for my flight, thinking it would be a delicate piece of jewelry selected by his assistant.
But it was a satellite phone. The perfect present.
I took a breath and exhaled. I told myself I’d be okay.
Chapter Forty-Three
“They’re sending us fucking babies now,” Kevin Dell said at baggage claim at the airport in Damascus.
Judging from the airport, you wouldn’t know the country was at war. It was clean, and while there were armed soldiers, it didn’t seem much different from JFK.
I knew it was Kevin Dell because I’d spent the last week memorizing the résumés of the three journalists I’d be working with. Kevin Dell was the most senior. 42, grizzled, Pulitzer Prize-winner, a leg full of shrapnel, a bad divorce in 2003, and more accolades than you could count.
“Fucking babies,” Dell repeated.
He was speaking to Chip Clark, the handsome Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer with a million dollar smile. “You Hadley?” Chip asked.
“Yeah.”
Kevin Dell extended a hand. I shook it.
“I’m Dell. This is Chip Clark,” Dell said, knocking Chip in the stomach. Chip was thirty, somewhat of a prodigy. I’d seen his photographs before. They tended to be heart-stopping.
We were just missing Erin, an experienced broadcast journalist who had grown up in Australia and broken several major stories about international corruption.
“Let me grab your bag,” Chip offered.
“No, carry your own bag,” Dell said. He looked at Chip. “It’s not the fucking Ritz Carlton. Let’s not give her any ideas.”
Chip smiled at that, and we walked through a series of metal detectors out into the bright, shining morning.
I saw her sitting in the passenger’s side of the Jeep; Erin Phipps, in olive green pants, with a headscarf falling back from her blond hair onto her fine shoulders. She had a cigarette clenched between her teeth. She looked sort of like a movie star.
I tossed my bag into the back of the jeep as Dell jumped into the front.
“Christ, how old are you?” Erin asked in a raspy voice. She sounded kind of like a movie star too.
&nbs
p; “I told you. She’s a baby,” Dell said.
“I’m twenty-two.”
Erin nodded and exhaled a thin stream of smoke through her teeth. “Welcome to hell, kid.”
Chip climbed into the back with me. “It’s not that bad.”
“Don’t sugarcoat things,” Dell said. “We’re staying in Damascus, which is safe. We go out into the rebel-controlled cities every few days. Things have gotten a bit hairy the last few weeks. You don’t want to be caught outside of Damascus after dark.”
I nodded. “Right.”
Chip looked out at the highway. We could’ve been anywhere. There were billboards, cars, no signs of unrest. I shifted uneasily.
“Weird, huh?” Chip said, looking at me.
“Sorry?”
“It’s weird—how calm it seems,” he explained. “And like twenty miles away everything’s gone to hell.”
I nodded. “Yeah. It is.”
They didn’t give me much time to settle in before we went out to talk to a rebel commander. I left my stuff at the hotel, grabbed a tape recorder, a bottle of water, and a notebook and followed them back out for the day’s assignment.
We drove out to Daraa. A military stronghold that was vulnerable to rebel takeover.
It was an hour’s drive to Daraa. The world changed in an hour.
You could hear firefights once you started heading south towards the strongholds.
Erin and Dell were joking about the bombastic general we were going to interview and Chip occasionally snapped photos.
“Take one of Hadley,” Dell suggested, watching in the rearview mirror. “Before and after she’s seen this fucking mess.”
He grinned and snapped a photo. I was sure I looked uneasy.
“We’re coming up to a checkpoint,” Dell told me. “Time to shine.”
I was grateful to have something to do.
“Put on a headscarf,” Chip said seriously.
I pulled one on awkwardly. Chip snorted and adjusted it quickly. His touch was utilitarian, like I was a camera, something that he was handling for work.
Erin yawned. “Misogynist bullshit, Arrington. Get used to it.”
Dell rolled down his window.
“Salaam,” he said.
The Syrian guard barked quickly for ID and I handed him our passports and press credentials, speaking as deferentially as I could.
The guard gave me a hard look but waved us through. I settled back against the seat, feeling relieved.
We drove to the rebel commander’s offices. We were ushered in wordlessly. Dell had interviewed him before. I was the only one who was new.
The commander spoke in English. “She’s new.” He nodded at me. “What happened to the boy?”
“Law school,” Dell said, glaring at me so I knew not to talk.
He studied at me suspiciously, but said nothing else. I turned on my tape recorder and waited for him to lapse into Arabic. He didn’t.
Chip fiddled with his phone. Having been told not to take pictures, he had nothing to do with his hands.
“What’s up?” Dell asked, turning to him.
“Bathroom?” Chip said. He waved his phone at Dell and Dell nodded.
He was escorted from the room, and a few seconds, having asked nothing more than softball questions, Erin thanked the commander for taking the time to meet with us and we started to go.
I didn’t understand what was going on until Chip was in the car. “What’s going down?” Dell demanded.
“Two suicide bombers attacked a rebel stronghold.”
“What?”
“Unconfirmed.”
“Where?” Dell asked.
“Northwest corner of the city.”
“Anyone taking responsibility?” Erin demanded, tapping out a text or email on her Blackberry.
“No, no, not that I can see. People are saying ISIS or the military.”
“It can’t be the military.”
“Unconfirmed, unconfirmed,” Chip shouted as we sped off.
We reached a smoking pile of rubble a short while later. I shivered while I heard the gunfire. I’d never heard it so close. A screaming child ran past a crumbling wall in the direction we had driven from.
“Focus,” Chip said quietly to me. “Seriously, heads up now.”
I nodded, trying to worry where someone that small would have to go for help in a place like this.
Dell gestured to a distraught man who was motioning wildly at the destruction.
I closed my mind and just began to translate for them.
Chapter Forty-Four
After the first day, I didn’t think anything could shock me. It all blended together. We worked in groups of two or four, depending on what needed to be done. Increasingly, Chip and I were on our own.
Chip had no Arabic, but Erin and Dell had enough to get by together. It made sense, even if it left us without a more senior reporter.
I filed my first story on the second day. It would be buried in the international section when it was printed, a brief write-up on medical shortages in rebel-controlled regions.
On my third day, I just started sending briefs to the New York office, un-copyedited, unspectacular. Just information. They were folded into larger stories by practiced reporters based in New York and London.
I couldn’t remember when my first week ended and the second one began. I certainly did not know what day of the week it was most of the time.
So, I don’t know when we saw the girl die.
Chip was swearing as darkness fell. Our Jeep was nowhere to be found. We had both begun to fear it had been stolen. We were in the outskirts of a dangerous part of the city, the sky was fading to gray, and the gunfire sounded close, maybe just a few blocks away.
We’d gone to chase down another story of carnage, and we’d found carnage, but too much gunfire for Chip to safely photograph it, so we turned back for the Jeep.
And it had fucking vanished.
“Didn’t we park it here?” I demanded.
“I don’t know!” he screamed. He breathed. “Sorry.” He ran a hand through his hair. “We’ve got to move, though. We can’t just stand here.”
“Where?”
“Just walk. I’ll call Dell.”
He dialed and we walked north, past broken windows and crumbled houses, the loud roar of the world in our ears.
“Dell, it’s Chip. Our car was stolen and we’re walking north along the city border…yeah, I fucking know.” He sighed. “We’re not far. Alright, we’ll try to get there.”
“We’ve got to move,” he said, breaking into a jog.
“What did he say?”
“To move,” Chip snapped. I heard the urgency in his voice and I started to run with him. “We’re meeting him at the edge of the ruins by the mosque, alright?” He shook his head. “The whole city has gone to fucking hell.” He pulled me left down a familiar street. “Listen, if we get split up or if I get hurt, just run to the ruins and get Dell.”
“Did he say to do that?” I asked, thinking it couldn’t possibly come to that.
“Yeah,” he said.
We started to hear shelling. It was close, really close. It was so loud that it obscured the gunfire.
My ears rang.
“Shit, shit,” Chip yelled. “Let’s cut through here.” He nodded at an alleyway.
“No, no, no,” I shouted, grabbing at his wrist. It was a narrow alley that went between two buildings and we could so easily be shot by a sniper from the rooftop windows.
“It’s faster.”
“No, let’s go the way we know.”
A man pushed two young children in front of him, hustling them down the same alleyway. I heard him urging them to run home as he unholstered a weapon.
I saw the blood blooming from the girl’s forehead at the same time as I heard the gunshot. She fell to the ground. She was dead. I knew immediately.
The father cried out and scooped up her tiny, broken body, howling even as he urged his son h
ome, carrying her with him.
“Oh my god,” I said, in a strangled whisper.
We heard another shot and Chip ducked. “Run!”
We sprinted along the path that we knew. I ignored the gunfire, shaking, seeing the that little girl die again and again as I ran.
How old had she been? Five? Maybe six.
How much more fair would it have been if I were shot instead of her?
When we reached the rubble at the square, we saw Dell’s Jeep. Chip doubled over and threw up.
“Christ,” he said.
Dell didn’t say anything when we got into the car. Chip climbed into the back and swore incoherently as we sped down the bumpy road.
When we reached the main highway, he spoke. “You guys okay?”
Chip didn’t say anything.
“Clark, I need to hear your fucking voice.”
“Fine,” he said hollowly.
“Hadley?”
“I’m good. I’m fine.”
Dell swore again and punched the steering wheel and sped all the way back to Damascus.
I ate with Chip. If you could call it eating. Neither of us touched our food. We sat on the floor of his room, which was messier than mine and covered in his jaw-dropping photographs.
“You two are off-duty tomorrow,” Dell advised us. “I don’t care what they report.”
He left us to go to Erin and work on their write-ups.
“How old do you think she was?” I asked Chip.
He shook his head.
“Like six, right?” I asked.
“Shut up,” Chip said. “It’s not going to do any good talking about it.”
“I mean, like, nobody—there’s not anything—that should be an atrocious thing, and it’s not. Like, there’s so much bad shit going on, nobody will even care about—”
“Shut up or get out,” Chip said. “I’m serious. I can’t think about this shit.”
I got out. I didn’t like being yelled at for trying to have a conversation I badly needed to have.
Knowing I could sleep in the next day made everything worse. I chose to stay up, reading through pages and pages of information on Twitter. The Arabic script blurred into one continuous stream.
140 characters and all anyone had was bad news.