The Terrorist

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Laura shook her head. There were times when you had the energy to explain American stuff and times when you didn’t.

  One day, Con had brought Laura a bag of American snacks that you could not buy in London but that Con, because her father worked at the embassy, could get from the commissary: Twinkies, Mallomars, and Peppermint Patties. Laura locked herself in the bathroom to keep Billy from stealing her precious snacks. Billy wrote messages on Kleenex and poked them under the bathroom door with a pencil tip. HAVE PITY ON ME, I AM STARVING.

  Laura wrote back with lipstick on toilet paper. CANNOT FIT TWINKIES UNDER DOOR. Billy stuck his tongue under the door, imploring her to put Twinkie crumbs on it. “Mop my tongue with Twinkie filling,” he moaned. Laura tried, but the filling scraped off when Billy pulled his tongue back.

  Mohammed was so much taller than Laura that her eyes were level with his chest and she could not see past him. Mohammed was so solid. His seemed a body that nothing could destroy. But she would have said that of Billy, too: there was too much personality in Billy for a mere bomb to take him. “Oh, Mohammed,” said Laura, “we can’t have him back. I still can’t believe it’s true.”

  “Here is another thing that is true,” said Mohammed. “Your parents need you, Laura. You must be careful for yourself. You must not rob them of their other child.”

  Laura hated being told how to behave. “I have things to do,” said Laura, her hand going to the push-bar.

  “Laura, stop it. Don’t be such an American. This is not a game.”

  “Oh, you Arabs,” said Laura, “you just want to push people around.”

  “Oh, we Arabs,” said Mohammed, “would like our friends to behave rationally and not endanger themselves.”

  One of the differences between American kids and foreign kids was age. Kids like Mohammed always seemed older, as if they had suffered more, or understood it better. Americans expected more good things from life: more comfort, more fun. Other people expected less.

  Billy had expected everything, always.

  “I want to go into the tube station,” said Laura, “and see where it happened.”

  In a voice as even and smooth as his olive complexion, Mohammed said, “I don’t think that is a good idea.”

  His accent was American. Most kids at L.I.A. could talk American. Imitating American was in. You had to have American sneakers and American jeans, listen to American rock groups and eat American french fries. Above all, you had to use American slang exactly right.

  But he was not American.

  “What country are you from, Mohammed?” she asked.

  “Palestine.”

  She was exasperated. “That’s not a country.”

  Mohammed did not react like an American. He didn’t make a face or swear or tell her where to go. He said gravely, “It is to me.”

  “It’s Israel. It’s been Israel since before my father was born.”

  Mohammed did not argue. He went back to the original question. “They’ve fixed the escalator at the tube stop, Laura. You can’t tell that anything happened. If you want to go into the station, I will go with you. But you should not.”

  Israel, she thought, is like Northern Ireland. Just when you think the Israelis and the Palestinians are going to have peace, somebody throws a bomb. Is Mohammed a Palestinian who would throw a bomb?

  She shook off such an awful idea. Mohammed was in her Shakespeare class. They had memorized lines together. It was impossible to imagine Mohammed planning the deaths of children. He was a wonderful person. She was ashamed, but the thought would not go away. “Is your passport Israeli, Mohammed?”

  Back in Massachusetts, nobody even knew what a passport was. Vaguely you knew if you went to France or something, you needed one. But most people weren’t even going to Boston, never mind France. A passport wasn’t like a driver’s license, that you cared about.

  Here in London, however, the word “passport” had a certain strength. You could not leave a country without showing your passport at the airport or the harbor, nor could you enter the next country. You could not stay at a hotel without your passport. You could not cash a traveler’s check.

  Some passports were better than others. U.S. passports were best.

  Mohammed seemed so remote that when he finally answered, it felt to Laura as if he really were in another country. “I don’t have a passport,” he said softly.

  Laura didn’t get it. You had to have a passport.

  Mohammed shook his head. “Quite a few kids at L.IA. don’t have papers. We’re not here legally.”

  Laura was stunned. She had not known there was such a thing as wealthy illegals. Illegals were poor peasants who crept over borders in the dark and went to live in slums. Mohammed was very wealthy. You could be rich and still be illegal? “Does the school know?” she whispered.

  “They look the other way.”

  “What would happen if you got caught?”

  “Rich illegals don’t get caught.”

  What a motto, thought Laura.

  “It’s the reason I’m not going on the class trip to France in January with the rest of you,” said Mohammed. “I can’t get into France, and if I did, I couldn’t get back into England.”

  Some kids didn’t go to Europe because they couldn’t? They had all the money in the world—and were prisoners? Laura could hardly process this information. “But Mohammed, how did you get here to start with? Do you have a fake passport?”

  “Laura, stop asking questions. I like you. I understand Americans. I know they can’t shut up. But you will cause trouble, asking the wrong questions of the wrong people.” He touched her, unusual for a Muslim boy, resting a hand on her shoulder. It was not affection; it was guidance. “Laura, this is a school with secrets. You must let people keep their secrets.” His eyes moved away and fastened onto some distant place of sorrow.

  Laura’s place of sorrow was not yet distant. Billy, as Tiffany had put it, was hardly in his grave. Laura began to weep again. “I’m sorry, Mohammed.”

  He could not know that she was apologizing for thinking he was a terrorist. He thought it was because she had started to cry again. “A brother deserves tears, Laura. He deserves more than tears. But taking the stairs he died on … I still don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Then what is a good idea?” she said. “Mohammed, I have to find him!”

  Mohammed thought “him” meant Billy. “Laura, if I may ask you, doesn’t Christianity tell you where Billy is?”

  Laura did not think of herself as a Christian, but as a Congregationalist, although she knew one was part of the other. She had been yelling at God for allowing this, but she had not asked Him who the terrorist was.

  She didn’t want to either. She wanted her God in a realm where only the keeping and cherishing of Billy counted.

  The headmaster came pounding down the hall. Laura remembered now that Mr. Frankel could watch every corner of the school on his television monitors. He must have seen her cowering between doors near the music rooms.

  “I want you both in class right now!” Mr. Frankel all but spat the syllables. His voice was way too angry.

  Laura knew the feeling.

  The problem was that the police, Scotland Yard, and the antiterrorist squad had discovered nothing. They did not know one more thing about Billy’s death than they had known the first hour. Nobody claimed responsibility. Nobody who’d seen anything came forward. None of Billy’s activities or collections led investigators anywhere. Explosives experts were examining fragments of Billy’s bomb, but results were inconclusive.

  Nothing is more frightening than nothing.

  Even the slimmest clue would have comforted the headmaster, her parents, and Laura. But there was nothing.

  She imagined the truth as nothing.

  Billy as nothing.

  God as nothing.

  It was too terrible. There had to be something.

  The terrorists of the world swirled in Laura’s mind. Men full of
rage. Men with weapons. Men with a Cause. Men who did not care about children.

  I will suspect everybody. I will find my terrorist. Even if he is in my class. Especially if he is in my class.

  CHAPTER 8

  “I,” SAID JEHRAN, THE week after Thanksgiving, “am having a slumber party. Everybody must come.”

  The American girls were amazed. Slumber parties were so American—and so babyish. You were ten when you had slumber parties. But they were also thrilled. Jehran’s life was a mystery. Jehran never invited Americans over, just Samira or one of the other Middle Eastern girls. Jehran was supposed to be one of the wealthiest students at L.I.A. Everybody said her gold and diamonds were gold and diamonds.

  “I shall need instruction,” said Jehran, “to grasp the rules of slumber parties.” Jehran’s speech was very British: the lovely, classy, television theater accent that Americans adored. Real-life Londoners rarely sounded that way. The Americans listened happily to Jehran’s pretty sounds.

  Con laughed. “Rule one—you don’t sleep. Rule two—you giggle all night long. Rule three—after midnight, you tell scary stories.”

  “No, no,” said Kyrene, “the important thing is food. You cannot have a slumber party on a diet.”

  “That’s for sure,” said Tiffany. “I can eat Middle Eastern food if I have to, Jehran, but not all night long. Tell you what, I’ll bring the real food.”

  Jehran lowered her lashes and looked through them, a reprimand everybody except Tiff found painful. When you were abroad, and an American was rude, you were responsible. Con said quickly, “We’ll love whatever you serve, Jehran.”

  “Or pretend to,” agreed Jehran, smiling.

  It was a Euro-smile. Not broad and easy like American smiles, but thin with superiority. Euro-smiles made Laura crazy. She always wanted to say: Listen, if you were really so good, you’d be number one in the world. And you’re not. So there.

  She missed America.

  The Williamses had had Thanksgiving dinner at the home of American friends, but there was nothing for which to be thankful. The day was fake, with the bag of Pepperidge Farm stuffing and the can for pumpkin pie flown in.

  And who, Laura asked herself, who at L.I.A. is also fake?

  Laura yearned to spot some tall, dark, evil stranger on whom to blame Billy’s death. But she did not run into anybody she didn’t already know. Nobody seemed to be eyeing her from cars or following her on sidewalks.

  “Laura, you must come to my party,” said Jehran, resting her hand on Laura’s. “You need to laugh and smile.”

  Laura shook her head. “My parents need me.”

  This was a statement with which no Muslim would ever argue; parents were first. So when Jehran argued, the girls were amazed all over again. “Now, Laura,” said Jehran. “At least ask your parents if you might come. We will be chaperoned. They need have no fear for your safety.”

  Samira sniffed. “American parents don’t know what supervision is,” she said. “They won’t even think of asking whether there will chaperones, Jehran.”

  Jehran gave Samira a dirty look, remarkably like Billy when he didn’t get his way, and turned her back on Samira. “You have sunk so low in your heart, Laura. We are your friends, and will spend our hours not in the telling of scary stories, but in the lifting of your heart.”

  Laura was touched by this little speech. Jehran was not particularly friendly, and yet she was the first to reach out and say, Come. Laura wanted to be polite, but she could not imagine going to a slumber party to giggle the night away. She shook her head.

  “Can I help you, Mrs. Williams?” said Jimmy Hopkins. The woman stood on the outside of the high, chainlink fence that enclosed the school playground. She had wrapped her fingers around the metal like a little kid who doesn’t get to play, and was staring through the openings as if she thought Billy might be ready to come home.

  He felt tender toward her, and very sad. “I’m Jimmy Hopkins,” he reminded her. He didn’t want to circle the fence to reach her; it would take him a few minutes, and she was too lost. He must stay by her side with the fence between them.

  The television monitors that continually scanned the grounds had a use. The headmaster came swiftly out of the building and walked down the outside of the fence. “Hello, Mrs. Williams,” said Mr. Frankel. “Laura is fine. Shall we go into my office and I’ll call Laura down from class?”

  It was not Laura Mrs. Williams was looking for. But she let Mr. Frankel lead her away. Her fingers bumped hopelessly along the chain links.

  Jimmy forgave Laura everything.

  “Can you believe it?” said Kyrene. “My parents might be transferred back to America. Washington, D.C. Isn’t that pathetic? There’s nothing to do in America but watch television.”

  Laura could not stand this kind of American. London was crammed with them: American kids who had never lived in America. They’d grown up in foreign countries and knew America from TV shows or by visiting relatives in the summer. They looked American. They talked American. But in some creepy way, they were not American.

  “Expatriate” was the term. Sort of like ex-husband or ex-wife. They were ex-country. They had no use for America, (although they would never have surrendered their very useful American passports), and Laura despised them.

  But she did not rouse herself to tell Kyrene off. Laura’s speech was dwindling away. Nobody wanted to hear her talk about the only important thing: Billy’s killer.

  Jimmy, proving he was a Ten whether he looked like one or not, said to Kyrene, “Have I mentioned that if one more person says there’s nothing to do in America but watch television, I’m going to shoot her?”

  Several people laughed, but it wasn’t funny. Loyalty wasn’t funny, and no loyalty was less funny.

  Who knew where the loyalties of expatriates lay? Laura thought. Expatriates would say terrible things about America, and the president, and the political party in control, and the way crime was so high, and people were amoral, and California was disgusting.

  If they trashed their own country for nothing, what would such people do for pay?

  For enough money, would they kill?

  What if my first guess was wrong? thought Laura. What if it’s not a foreigner who killed Billy? What if it was an American?

  Thomas Williams pulled off the road.

  He kept losing track of his destination, and having to sit for a moment and get his bearings. Oh yeah, he would think, staring at his map. Oh, yeah, I’m headed to Birmingham.

  Then he would try to remember why anybody would want to go to Birmingham. He’d have to open his briefcase and leaf through his papers to jog his mind.

  He was okay once he got wherever he was going. It was the journey that threw him. He could think only of his son’s journey. Billy’s last journey on earth, up a set of moving stairs … and then the final journey, where Thomas could not follow and could not help.

  He could not stand it that no group claimed responsibility for Billy’s death. He wanted somebody to blame this on. I could bury my son better, he thought, if there was a reason. A stupid reason, an evil reason—but at least a reason!

  It cannot be chance. You don’t hand out bombs by chance.

  If he stayed close to where it had happened, Thomas thought, there was a possibility of figuring out the reason. But if the Williams family left, who would care anymore about Billy or the reason?

  So Thomas was doomed to keep driving these English roads and ending these English jobs and living this English nightmare, even when everybody, including the company, wanted him home.

  He still wanted to go to Russia for Christmas.

  Laura, Tiff, and Andrew were the only students in French class who were not multilingual.

  Laura could not imagine another language living inside her head and coming off her tongue. She wondered if speaking other languages made it easier to switch countries? Should she look for a person who could change tongues, and therefore loyalty and patriotism?


  The teacher liked to work separately with each student because the class was on such different levels. The Americans, in foreign language, were at the bottom. Samira was summoned to the teacher’s desk.

  Jehran tried to entertain Laura by writing down the French conversions in Arabic. Arabic was a flowing vertical script, like the tide coming in, with flecks of spray dotted above. It was impossible to believe it had meaning.

  Jehran was startlingly glamorous in comparison to the torn jeans and drab sweatshirts of American girls. She was very petite, almost childlike, yet wearing a brocade dress that Laura’s mother would have found too mature. Jehran’s thick hair hung down her back, black as a tuxedo.

  “Jehran, s’il vous plaît,” said the French teacher.

  Jehran went up while Samira sat back down. Laura remembered she hadn’t asked about Samira’s passport yet, so she did. “Laura, mind your manners,” said Samira.

  “I’m just asking if you’re really American.”

  “I have never once claimed to be American,” said Samira sharply, discarding her somewhat American accent and using the upper-class British accent Jehran had.

  “It’s the best passport,” said Laura, figuring Samira would be forced to defend her real country now.

  Sure enough, Samira snapped like a flag in the wind. “That’s so American of you to think U.S. passports are better. Not everybody wants to live in New York or Los Angeles, you know. Some of us think you Americans are completely uncivilized. We want to stay here in Europe.”

  “But you’re not European,” said Laura, aiming for mild puzzlement. “What country are you from, Samira?”

  Samira said with pride, almost with ferocity, “My grandfather was an advisor to the shah.”

  “The shah?” said Laura. The word meant nothing to her.

  Laura was often the class dunce, so this surprised nobody. Andrew stepped in as tutor. “The shah was a king who once ruled Iran,” he told Laura. “America supported the shah. He was overthrown way back in 1979, when the Shiite Muslims came to power. Shiites are very, very strict. The ruler they have now is called an ayatollah, a sort of Muslim priest. Iran hates America.”