by Alan Gratz
But it had never been that way at my school. This was my turf. My kingdom.
Just the short walk to my locker twisted my guts into a tangle of spaghetti. I didn’t know how I was going to survive a whole day of this. I looked for Adam. He’d texted me a little over the weekend, stuff like HEY. U OK?, but mostly he had given me space while my family and I dealt with each new horror that appeared on CNN. The one person I hadn’t been able to talk to was Julia, and when I spotted her down the hall, surrounded by her girlfriends, I practically ran over to her. If I needed anybody’s support now, it was hers.
“Hey! Julia!” I called.
Julia’s friends gave her a quick glance and then peeled off. I leaned down to kiss her and she turned away, making me kiss her cheek instead of her lips. I frowned.
“I tried calling you and texting you all weekend,” I said, fighting down a pang of worry.
“I was busy with the play,” she said, still not looking at me.
Something was definitely up. Could it be about Darius? But Julia knew me. She knew Darius! I pushed on, trying to make things right by ignoring the tension between us. “How’d rehearsals go?”
“Fine,” Julia said.
“Did you get that one scene right? The one you’d been working on?”
“Yes,” she said. And then: “I have to get to homeroom.”
“Julia, wait,” I said, catching up with her before she could run off. “What’s going on?”
She looked up at me at last, her lips thin, her blue eyes filled with hurt and sorrow. But there was something else in her expression.
Fear.
I staggered back, as startled as if she’d slapped me.
“Julia—”
“Please don’t call me anymore for a little while,” she said, her voice small, the opposite of her usual confident tone.
“Are you—are you breaking up with me?” I asked. I blinked, feeling light-headed. “You can’t break up with me,” I said. “I love you.”
Julia swallowed a sob and turned away, a hand to her mouth.
“Julia!” I called, my voice cracking, but she was gone. I realized suddenly that we’d had an audience—a bunch of kids who’d been pretending not to watch the homecoming queen dump the king. My face was hot with embarrassment as tears welled up in my eyes. I couldn’t let them see me cry, too. I pushed through the gawkers into the boys’ bathroom and huddled over the sink.
I wiped away a tear with the back of my hand. My chest burned like my heart had been ripped out. I didn’t know how to handle this. I’d never been dumped before. I’d never told a girl I loved her before. Now both had happened on the same day.
Out in the hall, the bell rang. I was going to be late to homeroom, but I didn’t care. I ran the water and splashed some on my face, trying to hide the tearstains. I wanted to crawl into a corner and fold in on myself until I disappeared. Julia had broken up with me. But what really haunted me was that look in her eyes.
Julia was afraid of me.
I looked in the mirror, trying to see what she had seen there. Trying to see the monster everybody else saw, the terrorist. But all I saw was me.
“TWENTY-TWO! TWENTY-TWO! BLUE SEVENTEEN!” Francisco called.
I stood behind him, watching the defense shift. We were an hour and a half into another grueling practice. The air was dry and dusty, and the Arizona sun was blazing, even though it was November. Sweat poured down my face inside my helmet. This was hard, but it was nothing compared to what I’d been through at school that day. The glances. The whispers. The fear.
Julia’s face came back to me again. That look. That look that squeezed my heart and wrenched my gut.
It was a look I’d seen all day in the faces of my classmates. All except Adam, who’d been the only one to talk to me, to sit with me at lunch. Everyone else seemed to believe that I was some radical Islamic terrorist.
I didn’t have anything against Islam. My mom’s younger brother, my uncle Rahim, he was more religious than my mom was. He took me and Darius to a mosque when we were little, and I remember the men on their prayer mats, bowing and muttering their prayers. But my family wasn’t religious. We celebrated Christmas, not Ramadan, but mostly because we liked giving each other presents. We didn’t go to any church, Christian or Muslim.
But nobody cared about facts. They’d already decided I was Muslim, and that I was going to turn on America, just like my brother had.
I steamed underneath my football helmet. I had seven more months left until graduation, and then I would be off to West Point, and they would never have to see my “Arab” face ever again. I shook my head. Persians weren’t even Arabs. They were two different things. But like I said, nobody cared about facts.
“Set! Hut!” Francisco called.
The ball snapped. Francisco dropped back to pass. I blinked. Tried to remember where I was, what I was supposed to be doing. I stepped up a second too late to block.
WHAM. Omar, the linebacker, absolutely plastered me, knocking me off my feet. It took me a few seconds to get my wind back and sit up, and by that time Francisco had already thrown the ball downfield and the play was over.
I shook my head, trying to see straight again. That knock from Omar had been a cold reboot to my system. We weren’t supposed to hit that hard in practice, but I knew it was more my fault than Omar’s. My mind was everywhere else but here: Wolf Blitzer’s face on TV; Julia’s face in the school hallway; Darius’s face, reading a terrorist screed halfway around the world.
Coach Reynolds blew his whistle, and I pulled myself to my feet. Nobody offered to help me up.
“Smith!” Coach shouted at me. “No doubts. No second guesses. No distractions. Right?”
Easy for him to say. I nodded to let him know I’d gotten the message and came back to the huddle. Fine, I thought, half listening as Francisco called the next play. School was going to be tough, practice was going to be tough, life was going to be tough from here on out, but I could be tough, too. I’d been tough all my life. I’d had to be, to keep up with Darius. He was eight years older than me, and eight years is a long time in kid years. He was a giant to me. We’d played together a lot, the way brothers do, but there were other kids Darius’s age in the neighborhood, and he liked playing with them, too. Especially football. I was way smaller than Darius and all his friends, and they never wanted me in their games.
“Go home, Kamran,” Darius told me one day when they were picking teams.
“I want to play, too!” I whined.
“You can watch from the tree,” he said.
“I don’t want to watch! I want to play!”
“You’re too little.”
“I am not!” I started to cry and pitch a fit. “If you don’t let me play, I’ll tell Mom and Dad!”
The other kids rolled their eyes and begged Darius to come on and start playing, but I turned the crying up to eleven. Darius huffed and dragged me away by the arm.
“Stop being a baby,” he told me when we were away from the other boys.
“I’m not a baby,” I protested.
“Then stop acting like one.”
I sniffled and dragged the back of my hand across my nose. “I want to play.”
“You’re too little, Kamran.”
“I don’t care.”
Darius huffed again. “Okay. Fine. You want to play? You can play. But if you get knocked down, you can’t cry. You don’t get the ball, you can’t whine. You get scraped up, you walk it off. You understand? If you’re going to play with the big kids, you can’t be a baby. You have to be tough.”
“The strongest of the strong,” I told him, still sniffling. “The bravest of the brave.”
He frowned like he didn’t think I could do it, which only made me want to show him all the more. To prove I could be tough enough.
That day, everything happened that Darius said would happen: I got knocked down, scraped up, and I never once got the ball. But I did what I promised: I bit back tears, I kept my
mouth shut, I wiped off the blood and kept playing. And the next day, I came back. And the next day, and the next. And pretty soon they were giving me the ball, really including me in plays. Then one day I wasn’t the last picked for a team. Those games with the big kids were how I got to be so good at football. Those games had made me better, tougher, and I was going to need that toughness now. Every last bit of it.
The center hiked the ball. Francisco dropped back. Omar came right at me. This time I was ready. I met him with my shoulder, knocking him away. He bounced back at me, pushing, shoving. I could barely get an arm in to block him. He bumped me, rammed me, elbowed me. It was like he wasn’t even trying to get past me. He was just roughing me up, like the big kids had done to me that first game back in the neighborhood.
I felt all the frustration of the whole day wash over me, and I lost it. The whistle blew, and I got right in Omar’s face, ready to fight.
“WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM?” I YELLED.
Omar shrugged like he hadn’t done anything wrong. I shoved him, and he shoved me back. I swung a fist at him, trying to score a hit around his pads, and soon we were punching and kicking at each other.
Coach Reynolds ran over, blowing his whistle and pulled us apart.
“Enough—enough!” he told us. “What’s going on here?”
“He went crazy!” Omar said. “He started shoving me, and then he took a swing at me.”
“Because you attacked me,” I said. I threw myself at Omar again, but Adam grabbed me and held me back.
“You!” Coach Reynolds told me. “Go cool off. The rest of you line up again.”
I kept trying to get at Omar, but Adam spun me away.
“Hey—hey!” he said. “Kamran, hey. Listen to me. Omar was just rushing the passer.”
I blinked. I was still breathing hard, my rage making fists of my hands. I twisted to look over Adam’s shoulder, to see if Omar and his buddies were talking about me. Adam tugged my helmet back around.
“Kamran, he was just doing the same thing he always does. I saw him. Let it go,” Adam said. “Don’t be so sensitive.”
I turned on Adam. He was tall and gangly, his Adam’s apple sticking out beneath the chin strap of his helmet. “Don’t be so sensitive?” I said, my voice rising. “Maybe you didn’t notice the way everybody treated me today, like I had a bomb strapped to my chest.”
Adam was quiet. All day, we’d studiously avoided the subject of Darius, talking about stuff like the Super Bowl and math homework instead. But I couldn’t pretend to ignore the truth anymore. People hated me. Feared me.
“Look, Kamran,” Adam finally said, “you can’t blame people for reacting like that.”
“I can’t? Not even my teammates? Not even my girlfriend? They think Darius is a terrorist. They think I’m a terrorist.”
“That part’s stupid,” Adam admitted. “But, Kamran, you have to understand how everybody else sees your brother. He basically went on TV and said ‘I’m a terrorist.’ ”
“But he’s not! He can’t be. You know that. We’ve been friends since third grade. You know Darius.”
“I thought I did,” Adam said quietly.
His words hurt worse than anything Omar had done. I shoved Adam in the shoulder pads, making him stumble. “Take it back,” I told him. He shoved me, hard, and we faced off, a clock’s tick from throwing punches like Omar and I had.
“Darius. Isn’t. A terrorist,” I told Adam, my voice low.
“Who are you trying to convince? Me or you?” Adam shot back.
That one hit too close to home. All the doubts I’d been fighting crowded into my head, and my face burned with guilt and shame under my helmet.
I pushed Adam away. “You know what? Keep the Super Bowl ticket. You can take Omar. Or better yet, take Julia. I hear she’s free.”
“Kamran—” Adam called, but I was already on my way to the locker room. I was done.
Coach Reynolds would be mad at me, probably bench me for the start of the next game, but I would deal with that later. Right then I just wanted to get out of there. Go home and disappear into my room and never come out again.
I slammed my helmet on its shelf and yanked off my pads. In all my life, no matter where I’d been or what else was happening, the football field had been sacred ground. When I put that helmet on, I wasn’t a terrorist, or whatever else people secretly thought of me. I was Smith, number 13, running back. I was part of a team, judged only on my efforts and accomplishments. People cheered for me on the football field. Held up signs encouraging me on. Now I felt like even this last place of refuge was gone.
I showered, changed, and got out of there before anyone came back to the locker room. I didn’t want to see anybody. Especially not Adam. He and I had been best friends since elementary school, and he’d known Darius that entire time. Darius used to throw the football for us in the backyard. Used to play video games with me and Adam after school. If Adam didn’t believe in Darius, we couldn’t be friends anymore.
First Julia. Now Adam. I was totally on my own.
When I drove up to my house, I wasn’t surprised to see the row of TV vans up and down my street. But there was something else there, too. Something new. A black armored car with HOMELAND SECURITY written on the side was parked in my front yard. It looked like something from Darius’s pictures from Afghanistan. A tank on wheels. And all around it were white delivery vans marked DHS, and big black SUVs with flashing red and blue lights.
The Department of Homeland Security had come to visit.
PEOPLE IN BUSINESS SUITS AND WHITE ZIP-UP hazmat gear moved in and out of my house. I couldn’t get anywhere close to my own driveway, so I parked down the street and walked up. A policeman stopped me at a barricade.
“I live here,” I told him. He told me to wait while he radioed it in. I felt a bead of sweat roll down the center of my back. My pulse quickened and my breath came short. If you’d hooked me up to a lie detector right then, I couldn’t even have said my name was Kamran Smith without the needle jiggling all over the place. I felt like a criminal and I hadn’t even done anything. Across the street, the Estella kids stared at me from their driveway.
Two government agents in suits came out. They asked me to unzip my gym bag and my book bag so they could look inside with flashlights.
“What’s going on?” I demanded, but they didn’t answer. Why wouldn’t anybody tell me anything? Why did I have to be searched before I could even go inside my own house?
When they were sure my American history textbook wasn’t a bomb, the two agents walked me inside. Mom and Dad stood in the living room talking to two more agents in suits while the astronaut-looking hazmat people took apart the kitchen.
“What’s going on?” I asked again.
“They’re searching the house,” Dad told me.
“For what?” I looked down the hall. There were hazmat guys in my room, going through my stuff! “Wait. You can’t do that,” I said, heading down the hall.
An armed policeman stopped me and corralled me back with my parents.
“I assure you, we can,” said one of the agents. She was a large white woman in a gray skirt and jacket. Her partner, an African American guy in an almost matching gray suit, showed me his DHS badge.
“We’re from the Department of Homeland Security,” the woman said.
“Yeah. I saw your tank parked on the lawn.”
“Kamran,” Mom said.
“What? It’s like Operation New Dawn out there,” I said.
“What do you know about Operation New Dawn?” the male agent asked me.
“I know my brother, Darius, was taking part in it as a US Army Ranger until he was captured and brainwashed by al-Qaeda!”
“Kamran, don’t,” Dad said.
“Dad, they’re taking our house apart like we’re terrorists! We’re American citizens!”
“We’ve been authorized to conduct a search of these premises,” the woman said. “A similar search has already been conducted
at your brother’s apartment near Fort Benning. We’ll be wanting to talk each of you, individually at first, and then together.”
“Darius isn’t a terrorist!” I yelled. All the hazmat people stopped and turned to look at me, but nobody said a word. It was creepy. I took a step back. “I’m telling you, he’s not.”
“Kamran, don’t make this worse than it already is,” Dad said.
“Worse? Worse!? How could it be worse?”
“Kamran, just do what your father says and have a seat on the couch,” said the woman.
“I don’t want to sit on the couch,” I said.
“It wasn’t a suggestion,” the woman told me.
I clenched my teeth, my face hot. Who was this stranger to tell me what to do?
Mom put a hand on my arm. “Kamran, sit with me.”
Mom had always been able to calm me down when I got like this. When I wanted to argue and fight. I let her pull me to the couch, and the woman from the DHS went away. The guards in black SWAT uniforms stayed.
I watched as a DHS agent went through our DVDs in the living room, like there might be something hidden inside the Iron Man case. Down the hall, I heard somebody taking the lid off the toilet in the bathroom I’d once shared with Darius.
My stomach clenched, and I fought the urge to yell again. This wasn’t fair. None of it. Mom and Dad and I hadn’t done anything wrong. And we were just supposed to sit here and take it, like I was supposed to just take the stares of my fellow students, the betrayals of my friends. I shook with rage. I hated the DHS, I hated the press. I hated the people at the mall, the kids at school. I hated my mom and dad for sitting by, I hated Adam and Julia for turning on me, I hated Darius for doing this to me.
Darius.
All the tension went out of my arms and legs, like when you get off a roller coaster and can’t walk right for the next few minutes. It was true: I hated Darius. It was Darius’s fault all this was happening. It was Darius’s fault my life was ruined.
