by Alan Gratz
“Listen, Mom, I can explain,” I said, trying to head things off before she blew up at me.
Mom frowned at my bruised face. “Kamran, have you been fighting?”
“It’s not his fault, Mrs. Smith,” Adam said. “This idiot was saying really stupid stuff about him and Darius.”
Mom looked up sharply at the mention of Darius’s name.
“You didn’t know I’d been in a fight? The school didn’t call you?” I asked.
Something was wrong here. Something big. Suddenly I realized Mom wouldn’t usually be in her work clothes this late at night. She would have changed to come with Dad and watch me in the football game. And now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen them at the game at all. I’d been so focused on the scout, I hadn’t looked for my parents in the stands. Had they even been there? They never missed a game. But if they weren’t at the game, what were they doing?
Jeremy’s sneering voice came back to me. Maybe if you’d been home watching the news before the dance, not being a big sportsball hero, you would have heard: your brother’s a traitor to his country. My head spun. I felt like my whole body was sinking right through the seat of my chair, the floor swallowing me up.
“Mom,” I said. “Mom, what’s going on?”
Mom looked like she was about to cry, and then I realized—she had been crying.
“Kamran, you have to come home right away,” she said. “It’s your brother.”
MOM GRIPPED THE STEERING WHEEL OF HER Suburban so hard I thought it was going to snap off in her hands. We’d left my car at the school so I could ride home with her. She’d already spoken to Mrs. DeRosa, though I had no idea about what. I didn’t know anything.
“Mom, what is it? What’s going on?” I demanded. “Is Darius okay?” My greatest fear was that Darius was hurt—or worse.
A light turned red ahead of us, and Mom stopped the car so suddenly I was thrown against my seat belt.
“There’s this report. On the news,” Mom said at last. “An attack on the US embassy in Turkey. And there’s someone in the video—someone who looks like your brother.”
“What, defending the embassy?” None of this made any sense. Darius wasn’t assigned to any embassy. He was deployed in Afghanistan.
“No,” Mom said. “Attacking it.”
“What?” I felt a jolt of shock. “But—no! It’s not Darius. It can’t be! This is crazy! Why would he attack a US embassy? How could he be in Turkey?”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. The light turned green and she gunned the car, throwing me back against the seat. “Someone from the paper called us while we were getting ready to come to the game. We had no idea what they were talking about. The Estellas across the street called and told us to turn on the news. That’s when we saw the video.”
“Is it him?” I asked. “It can’t be him.”
“I don’t know,” Mom said again, still squeezing the steering wheel. “It’s hard to tell.”
“What does the army say? They have to know if he’s in Turkey, right?”
“We haven’t heard from them. Your father’s been trying to call them.”
“This is nuts!” I said. I wished for the millionth time that my parents had bought me a smartphone, but all I had was a flip phone that could barely text. Same with Mom. I turned on the radio instead, surfing for something, anything about Darius. It was all just pop stations until I flipped over to the AM dial and found a political shock jock ranting about it.
“So this soldier—no, that’s not fair to real American soldiers,” the guy was saying, “this man, this Muslim, he goes to West Point and learns everything America has to teach him about tactics and military history and advanced warfare, then gets himself sent to Afghanistan so he can go AWOL and share everything he knows with al-Qaeda! So I guess that’s what the US Army does now: train Islamic extremists how to fight and then pay their way overseas so they can become terrorists. Our first problem here is allowing Muslims to join the army—”
“Turn it off,” Mom said.
“But—”
“Turn it off.”
I punched the radio off and sat back in my seat with a huff. The guy was full of it, but I wanted to hear any news I could about Darius. The idea that Darius went to West Point so he could learn all kinds of stuff for al-Qaeda was ridiculous. As I stared out the window, I remembered that day, almost seven years ago now, when we’d gotten up at the crack of dawn to drive Darius to his first day at the United States Military Academy.
The four of us—me, Darius, Mom, and Dad—had stayed overnight at a motel just outside West Point, New York, after flying in the day before. I was still jet-lagged and could hardly drag myself out of bed, but Darius looked like he’d been up all night. He was so excited and so nervous he couldn’t eat a thing at breakfast, and he hardly said two words to us on the drive over.
We filed into Eisenhower Hall, where an older cadet told us about how hard the next seven weeks of cadet basic training were going to be. “Beast Barracks,” he called it. I looked up at Darius. He sat hunched over in his seat, his arms folded across his stomach like the time when he was trying not to be sick on a roller coaster at Castles-n-Coasters.
“Are you gonna puke?” I whispered.
“No. Shut up,” he told me, but he sure looked like he was going to puke. I scooted a little closer to Mom.
The cadet checked his watch. “You now have ninety seconds to say good-bye to your loved ones,” he announced.
There were gasps and cries of alarm, and mine was one of them. I knew why we were there, of course: Darius was going off to college. A very special kind of college, where we wouldn’t see him again until he got leave at Christmas. But the reality hadn’t set in until that moment, when they told us we only had a minute and a half to say good-bye. Darius had been my constant companion—my sometimes playmate, sometimes confidant, sometimes adversary, and full-time best friend—and now he was going away forever. Or close enough to forever.
Little kid that I was, I burst into tears.
Mom was in tears as well, hugging Darius, and I shamelessly threw my arms around him, too. I sobbed and wouldn’t let him go, even when older cadets started calling for the newbies to come away with them.
“Hey, you’re going to be okay,” Darius told me, hugging me back.
“Don’t go,” I told him. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I’ll see you again soon,” he promised. “And when I do, I’ll be a real soldier.”
“I don’t want you to be a real soldier. I want you to stay at home with me.”
The older cadets called out again.
“I have to go, Kamran,” Darius said, pulling away. “You have to be the strongest of the strong, the bravest of the brave. You can do that, can’t you?”
I shook my head, still sobbing.
“Yes, you can,” Darius said. “I know you can.”
Darius gave Mom and Dad one last hug and hurried off, wiping at his eyes. I watched him until he disappeared down a hallway with the thousand or so other new cadets.
The rest of the day was dreadfully boring for a fifth grader. Speeches from officers, a tour of the academy, lunch in the cafeteria. I walked around feeling like a hollow shell of myself, as if the best, most important part of me had been scooped out with a spoon.
We saw Darius again that day only once, at the oath ceremony. We sat in bleachers while the new cadets marched across the quad to the trumpets and drums of a military band, every family straining to find their son or daughter in the ranks. We didn’t have to stretch to see Darius, though—he was right there in the first row. At least, I was pretty sure it was Darius. While we’d been wandering around the academy grounds, Darius had gone through a transformation. His shoulder-length curly black hair was replaced by a severe crew cut that made him look almost bald, and gone, too, were his jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers, replaced with a white button-down short-sleeved shirt, black shoes, and gray pants with a thick black line down the sides.
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br /> Darius and the other new cadets stopped with parade-ground precision, then repeated the military academy’s oath back to a senior officer: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States, and bear true allegiance to the National Government; that I will maintain and defend the sovereignty of the United States, paramount to any and all allegiance, sovereignty, or fealty I may owe to any State or Country whatsoever.”
Seeing Darius there reciting the oath, head shaved, face serious, so proud that he was practically about to pop a button on his new army-issue shirt, everything changed for me. All day I had wished he would come back home with us, but right there, in that moment, I understood why he would leave sunny Arizona and fly across the country to this cold gray place. Why he would abandon his friends. His family. Me. Darius was going to be a part of something much greater than himself, something with tradition, with meaning. An extension of everything Mom had taught us about being Persian. Darius was joining a new family. He was going to be a United States soldier.
That was the day I decided I was going to go to West Point and be a soldier, too.
“He swore an oath,” I said, my forehead against the car window.
“What?” Mom asked.
“Darius swore an oath to defend the United States,” I said. “He wouldn’t go back on that.”
Mom turned onto our street and pulled up short. An army of local TV trucks and camera crews was parked outside our house, waiting for us.
“HAVE YOU HEARD FROM DARIUS?”
“What has the army told you?”
“Is Darius a traitor?”
Reporters with microphones and cameras swarmed our car, yelling questions through the window.
“Are you Muslims? Is Darius a Muslim?”
“Have you seen the footage yet? Is it Darius?”
Mom honked and gunned the engine, and the reporters jumped out of the way as she sped into the driveway.
“Go straight inside,” Mom told me. “Don’t say anything to them. Don’t even look at them.”
Butterflies filled my chest and my pulse quickened. Mom pulled the keys out of the ignition, and I leaped out of the car and ran for the front door.
“Kamran, wait!” someone yelled. “Tell us about your brother!”
I kept my head down and kept running.
“Stay off our property,” Mom yelled at the reporters. She hurried inside after me, slamming the door.
Dad had the TV on CNN, watching the news coverage. He stood when we came in, going immediately to Mom to give her a hug. I went right to the TV. Headlines scrolled across the bottom of the screen, but they were on a commercial break. I never watched CNN. I didn’t even know what channel it was on. The only news I ever watched was sports news on ESPN.
“What are they saying?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing new,” Dad said. “It might be Darius, it might just be someone wearing his uniform.”
Dad and I shared a glance. The only way someone else could be wearing Darius’s uniform was if they had taken it off him, which meant Darius was captured.
Or dead.
So either Darius was now a terrorist, or he was captured or dead. I didn’t know which was worse.
“Welcome back,” said CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. He stood in front of a bank of huge televisions, all showing different videos of gunfire and explosions around a sandstone-white building flying the US flag. “We return now to the attack on the United States embassy in Turkey, where fifty-three people are known to be dead, including twenty-two civilians. And most disturbing of all, leading the attack appears to be US Army Ranger Captain Darius Smith. Or perhaps not. With me now is the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Trip Conrad. Mr. Conrad—”
CNN put a picture of Darius up on the screen, a posed photograph of him in his uniform, looking as handsome and serious as ever. Then they split the screen and showed a still from a video taken in the embassy; in the background, a guy stood waving his finger in the air. He was the same height as Darius, but I couldn’t make out his face.
It was surreal, listening to Wolf Blitzer talk about my brother. Saying where he grew up, what his grades were like at West Point, going over his acceptance into the Army Rangers, his assignments in the Middle East. It was as weird as if Emily Reed, my favorite correspondent on ESPN (and not just because she happened to be so pretty), had been talking about my performance in the homecoming game on SportsCenter.
The house phone rang. I reached for it, but Dad waved me away and answered it himself. “Hello? No. No, we have no comment at this time. Please don’t call again.” He clicked off the phone and tossed it on the couch. “They won’t stop calling. But I have to keep answering in case it’s the army.”
“Mr. Conrad, I’m going to have to stop you there,” Wolf Blitzer said on TV. “I’m told we have a startling new video just released by al-Qaeda that definitively includes US Army Captain Darius Smith. Let’s bring you that video now.”
Mom and Dad and I huddled around the television set as Darius appeared, seated behind a desk in front of a black curtain. A wave of shock hit me. It was Darius. My brother. But just like that first day at West Point when he’d appeared transformed, now he was transformed all over again.
Darius was still wearing his army fatigues, but he’d grown a scraggly little beard and wore a white head scarf around his curly hair. Mom let out a gasp, and Dad put his arm around her. I felt the room start to spin all over again.
“My name is Darius Smith,” Darius told the camera, “and I take full responsibility for today’s al-Qaeda attack on the US embassy in Turkey.”
My mother sobbed once, and my father closed his eyes. I shook my head, silently pleading with Darius not to say this. Not to do this. But he kept going.
“I was once asked to commit atrocities against the Muslim people by the United States government,” Darius said, reading from a piece of paper. “I now choose to lead those same innocent victims in the fight against American tyranny. Today’s strike on the US embassy is merely the first in a series of planned attacks against the United States to punish the infidels for their crimes against Islam.”
Once, when we were little, Darius and I were watching a movie about aliens, and I was scared. I covered my eyes and told Darius to tell me when the things were off the screen. I waited, terrified that if I peeked through my fingers, I’d see one and have nightmares for weeks. Finally, Darius told me it was all right to look.
The aliens were still there.
I’d screamed, and Darius had laughed and laughed. He’d done it on purpose, just to mess with me. I was so mad I grabbed one of the sofa cushions to beat him over the head, but then I got so scared I hid behind it instead.
I felt like that now. I couldn’t decide whether I was more frightened or mad. I started trembling. “No. No!” I yelled at the Darius on TV. The tie I’d worn to the dance felt like it was suffocating me, and I tore it off and threw it to the floor. Darius kept talking about infidels, jihad, martyrs, al-Qaeda—but I wasn’t listening anymore. All I could hear was the sound of my own blood thumping in my ears, my breath coming short and fast, my mother crying quietly beside me.
Whatever else Darius had to say didn’t matter anyway. All that mattered now was that our lives were never, ever going to be the same.
FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE KINDERGARTEN, I WAS officially afraid to go to school.
I stood at the bottom of the steps that led to the front doors of my high school, letting the other students flow around me. A few of them didn’t know who I was. Freshmen, mostly. Kids who didn’t care about football or homecoming or any of that stuff. Kids whose parents didn’t watch the news.
The rest of them knew exactly who I was, and all about what Darius had done. Or said he had done.
I hadn’t slept at all Friday night, going over the video of Darius in my mind. The more I’d thought about it, the more I’d realized that Darius’s speech was textbook terrorist screed—whi
ch is why I was sure it was written for him by somebody else. Somebody who made him read it. Or brainwashed him into reading it. There was no way Darius had willingly abandoned the army to join al-Qaeda. I was sure of it. Even if he cared much about Islam—and our family had never been religious at all—Persians were Shi’a Muslims. Al-Qaeda were Sunni Muslims. There’s no way he would want to join al-Qaeda, and there’s no way al-Qaeda would let him.
I tried to tell my parents my theory, but they’d been too numbed by shock and sadness to listen. And that first video of Darius had been followed by another on Saturday. And another on Sunday. Darius training al-Qaeda troops. Darius calling on American Muslims to take up arms against their country. With each new video, the case against him mounted.
And from the looks the other students were giving me on Monday morning, he’d already been found guilty. And I was guilty by association.
My hands clenched into fists. My heart raced. My face got hot. A flood of emotion overcame me, a mishmash of feelings I thought I’d already dealt with during the roller coaster of a weekend. I wanted to run away and hide. I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to punch something. I wanted to punch somebody.
What I didn’t want to do was climb those steps to school. But I did. I was not going to let those looks stop me from living my life.
Inside, it was worse. The crowd in the hall parted from me like they were a stream of water and I was a drop of oil. Conversations stopped. Eyes followed me. Silence stalked me. I’d been stared at like this before, but never so blatantly. It happened sometimes when I was out in public, someplace where nobody knew who I was. I’d be with Darius at Metrocenter Mall and people—adults, mostly—would give us these side glances. They’d look us up and down, suspicion in their eyes. They didn’t think we noticed, but we did. I did, at least. More than seeing it, I could feel it. Feel the way people watched me as I browsed the game store and stood in line at Orange Julius. As soon as I got comfortable, as soon as I forgot that I happened to have the same nose and skin and hair as some monster who’d once hijacked a plane, a suspicious glance would remind me all over again. These people had no idea I’d grown up in a suburb of Phoenix like any other American kid, playing Xbox and eating Cheetos. Or they didn’t care. They feared me—hated me—just because my skin was brown.
