The Girl Who Fell to Earth

by Sophia Al-Maria

  This was too much. I plowed through the siege of little girls and half tumbled down to where Flu and Falak and the rest were shooing me to go back up. Ducking their pushy encouragement, I fished my abaya out of a pile in the corner, bundled up in black, and trudged off in the direction of the house we were staying in, hoping someone there might know where my father was.

  A car flicked its brights at me. I ignored it. It honked, and a man yelled, “Sophie!” It was Baba. “So you danced?” he poked as I came to his window. There was a laugh suspended in his question. How did he know already?

  “Can we go now?”

  “Sure,” he said, and turned the car around to drive me back to Abu Dhabi.

  I changed into my American clothes under my abaya, and a few hours later we’d made it to the airport. Baba checked me in and handed me the mini photo album Flu and I had posed for. “You look very pretty here, like a real Al-Dafira girl.”

  The compliment faded when I saw the photo he was referring to. I sat in a heart-shaped cutout and my face had been masked by a romantic Gaussian blur to disguise the acne.

  “I’m glad you like it,” I answered, and handed it back to him.

  “I’ll keep this one with me,” he said, and folded it in half and slipped it into his wallet beside a photo I’d never seen of Ma alone in the Space Needle, backlit by the huge cockpit window of the revolving restaurant. “Tell your mama and sister I love them too much,” he said before he left me at immigration.

  “I will,” I promised.

  16

  ETA BOÖTIS • THE SOLITARY ONE •

  On entering seventh grade, I found that everyone in my class had gone from gravel wars on the playground to groping behind the vending machines. My perception of boy-girl mixing had been blown way out of proportion by the deep sexual segregation of my time in Doha. But this new state of affairs was more mysterious to me than the euphemized “sexual intercourse” or the “special changes” happening to my body. I overheard talk of tonsil hockey, blow jobs, and finger-banging—all slang that was both nonspecific and evocative enough for me to be certain it was exciting. Every other hall break there were rats yelling “PDA!” at people holding hands, playing footsie, or even sharing cans of soda.

  But looming larger than the sudden flurry of saliva swap meets was another big change. As is the custom in American schools, the class had begun to coagulate into groups typified not only by the John Hughes hierarchy of jocks, geeks, and freaks, but very clearly by race. The Mexican kids, the Samoans, and the new Russians banded together into their respective groups, and then there were the Native American kids, who hung around in the area but were divided into their own private school near the casino. I’d jumped the trap of needing to belong to my tribe in Qatar, but now there was a new kind of tribalism to figure out: middle-school cliques.

  Between a gutter punk named Joey and the Mexican kids in Dickies and wifebeaters, the school had already decided who the usual suspects would be. Joey, like a few of the other poorer kids, had to do cafeteria duty to pay for his lunches.

  Of course, this will lead anyone to become a target, and it all rose to a crescendo one afternoon while Joey was wiping down tables. Kane, one of the junior varsity football players, crossed him somehow. It was unclear how the fight started. Some claimed Kane had called Joey a nigger, but it really didn’t matter what he’d done, because Joey’s reaction was fierce. He whipped Kane across the face with his disinfectant-soaked rag and brought the huge cafeteria table crashing down on Kane’s back. In some tellings Joey had flipped Kane off; in others, Kane had spit in Joey’s face. Whatever the truth was, it became an inflamed brawl of more than twenty boys swinging at each other with no apparent goal beyond having a rumble. It spilled out of the cafeteria into the courtyard, and then from the courtyard onto the street. Girls tried to pull their boyfriends out of the struggling tangle of testosterone, terrified of having no one to make out with if they got suspended. The science teacher, Mr. Heddon, got elbowed in the face and ended up in the nurse’s office before anyone else did. The only thing everyone seemed to agree on was that obviously the fight had happened because Joey was black, or at least half black, and anyway, aside from Nevaeh Ripley, he was the only black person in the school and so a very easy target.

  When Kane returned to school from suspension and Joey didn’t, a rumor spread that he had skipped town and gone to ride the rails up and down the West Coast. One of the dropout girls from the park spread a rumor in reverent tones about how Joey had gone to Los Angeles to meet his hardcore heroes. I thought about him every time I sat in the cafeteria, muddy footprints on the floor, backpacks slung on the backs of chairs, expanding areolae of grease saturating my paper plate full of seventy-five-cent tater tots. It was all too depressing. I began to obsess about Joey and placed him at the center of my own private tall tale, in which he rode on top of a Burlington Northern freight car all the way to L.A. I added him to my pantheon of heroes—partly for being a mongrel like me and partly just for managing to get out of this little town.

  It was during this time, while school and home seemed to be falling apart around me, that I became particularly interested in dystopias. I preferred the classics, which says more about me being a pretentious fifteen-year-old than that I had any discerning taste: Brave New World, The Gates to Women’s Country, 1984, A Handmaid’s Tale, and my predictable favorite, A Clockwork Orange. I rarely ever lingered in the sci-fi/fantasy wing of the library anymore, although I still snuck listens to Ziggy, now on CD. I got my sci-fi kicks by searching for X-Files fanfic on the Internet during the coming years’ still lonesome and miserable lunch hours and filling floppy discs full of Fox Mulder JPEGs, Battle Angel GIFs, and tinny, MIDI-fied versions of “Diamond Dogs.”

  I lobbied to get the Internet at home, but the Internet cost money, and although Ma had a temp job at the time, things were tight. So the day after I turned sixteen I went to the cineplex across the river (the same place Ma and Baba used to put me to sleep during Close Encounters) and asked for a job. Just like Gramma’s farm, the cineplex had been in the wake of a bad slump ever since people started selling off valley property and migrating to cheap housing developments in the surrounding hills. At the time I was born, it had been in a prime location on the valley’s main drag; now it was all used-car dealerships and dollar stores. The cinema’s main clientele consisted of napping winos and twelve-year-old boys who knew the theater was so desperate for customers they could get in to see R-rated movies without ID.

  My job was to sit in the box office and listen to the wind on the busted nozzle of the mic as it swept over the empty parking lot. Even on days I didn’t have to go in to work, I pretended I did. I’d settle in for my ninth viewing of The Fifth Element, letting the pre-movie intro (at Regal Cinemas it was a “cosmic roller coaster”) take me away over icy cups of Pepsi and giant corn kernel explosions. Every night when the last show got out, I’d shut off all the lights but the soft gold glow of the popcorn machines and go through my final tasks of scouring the soda fountain, emptying the butter vats, and running the old roto-sweeper over the huge lobby carpet. I dreaded having to leave that theater and went into a sort of rock-garden Zen, scooting from one end of the galaxy-patterned rug to the other. At 11:30 sharp Ma would pull up to the lobby, signal with her brights through the bank of glass doors, and then wait in the darkness for me to come out. It was less than a mile away, and yet she always refused to let me walk because I had to cross the river. When we got home, more often than not, we’d find Gramma all dressed up with no place to go or conversing with people who weren’t alive anymore.

  As Gramma began to prefer the company of ghosts to the living, Ma decided the time had come to move her into a home. This change came in the spring of my sophomore year. Dementia had been setting in for a long time and had already siphoned off most of her memory, including the ones of Dima and me. It was subtle at first, a puncture somewhere in the membrane between the past and the present; a name would slip, or someti
mes whole conversations would leak out from other times and other places. The disease was infiltrating all of our lives and had begun to partition her days. I became accustomed to her thinking I was her long-dead sister, “Sis,” and that I worked at the race course, which she regularly begged us to take her to “for a little gamble.”

  After winter break Ma sold the farm to pay for Gramma’s care, adding our patch of open earth (one of the last swatches of dirt in the area) to the belt of concrete that had filled the valley. A surveyor came with a compass, prism, tripod, and ranging rod. He outlined the property in his book. The man who owned the trailer park made an offer to take all our acreage and the house, all the way up to the shaggy riverbank. He gave us two weeks to clear out the house and leave. After the deal, Ma calculated how much there was, “enough for about six years in a nice place.” Each acre would pay for approximately a year of medicine, a room in a nursing home, daily portions of boxed mashed potatoes, and prune juice.

  It was a difficult decision to make, because the money raised from selling the farm would not guarantee that Gramma’s memory would ever return. Every day after school and before work I went to visit Gramma. The home was called Logan Grove—an almost maniacally benign-sounding name for such a deeply strange place. The place had been built as an Escher-esque warren designed specifically to allow residents with cognitive problems to wander smoothly through the day without being reminded they were trapped. There were hallways that doubled back, doors that led to nowhere, and one-way mirrors all over the place. Being a teenager in the halls of Logan Grove was like being on a badly hemmed version of The Truman Show. Kitchens bled into nursing stations, candy stripers were instructed to play along with residents’ delusions, and there were even a few tabby cats that provided cuddles to the wheelchair-bound. The lobby was the creepiest part of all. It was trussed up to resemble a small town square. It had a working beauty salon and a trompe l’oeil bank, and at the center of this no-horse town stood a large chess table—an apt choice for the centerpiece to this sad, still life.

  Ever since Gramma had been put in the home, she had predictably become obsessed with returning to the home she’d been taken from. One afternoon around May she asked me for an unusually lucid favor, considering she usually hassled me for a trip to the races.

  “The lilac bushes’ll be blooming now, Sophia. You wanna go out in the back and bring some in for me?” It caught me by surprise, and she had used my real name. I had to do it for her.

  Heading down the balding path to the bridge, I was determined to get her a cutting from the lilac bush for her gloomy little room in Logan Grove. The old way to her house on foot had grown a comb-over of blackberry brambles, and the vines sent thorny trip wires across the path. I’d have to take the railway trestle. As I climbed up onto the thick wood timbers, the wet smell of river silt and pinecone wafted up in the air. The banks looked sore from surveyors tramping up and down, and for the first time I felt apprehensive of what I might find down there. The river swirled greenish brown several meters under me as I kept inching my way along. A way down on the trail I saw a figure all in black and thought for a moment about turning back. After all, the river was the last place I was supposed to be. The body was hunched with a hood, smoking a cigarette under a crab apple tree. It took me a moment before I recognized the configuration of hoodie, glasses, and posture: it was Joey.

  “How’d you get up there?” he yelled at me from his spot on the ground.

  I pointed toward the nursing home as I made it the last stretch of the bridge and jumped down onto the bank.

  He threw out the stub he was smoking and took his hood down. “Want a smoke?”

  We found a dryish plywood plank and laid it across the roots of the tree. It cracked in half under our combined weight. Joey was wearing black Converse duct-taped shut at the toe. His pants were sewn up with dental floss and covered with hardcore patches. His hoodie was covered in stitched-in anarchy signs, his hair was in a grown-out Frohawk, and he was really, really dirty. The only snippet of incongruity in Joey’s look was the fact that he was wearing thick-as-Coke-bottle glasses.

  He rummaged through his worn-out leather-bottomed Jansport; it was covered in white-out scribbles. One said “Tara” and had a pair of boobs next to it; under that there was an ass with “Nicky” written in glitter pen. I knew who the girls were. They hung around the park. Tara was skinny with a shaved head like Tank Girl, and Nicky had all kinds of face piercings. He pulled a pack of Pall Malls out and lit one off a floppy clip of matches. It was the last light. I was nervous. I couldn’t get my cigarette going because of the rain, so he lit mine off the end of his. I’d never seen anyone do that before.

  “So what happened after that big fight?” I asked dumbly and hacked on my first puff.

  “Which fight?” He inhaled deep.

  It hadn’t occurred to me until now that maybe Joey fought all the time; maybe the fight I’d witnessed was only one in a real-world life of fighting Joey led. I felt stupid and fell silent. He dug his heels into the ashy leaves. They hadn’t finished rotting from the fall before. Rain was really starting to pour now and the river a few yards from us was unusually green. He rubbed raindrops off his glasses with the back of his sleeve.

  “Well, where did you go?” I asked. “I mean, after you got suspended from school?”

  Joey was peeling up the edge of the “hum” part of his Subhumans patch. “I went all over the place.”

  The rain slowed down, breaking into a rhythmless patter. Joey got up and wandered toward the railroad trestle, where several shopping carts lay under the bridge. He squatted by the riverbank, a massive Crass circled-cross-with-a-line-through-it logo stretching across his back. A few timber trucks rumbled by over the bridge toward the freeway. I watched him rock back and forth on his haunches. Head down. Then I noticed the silver glint of a pot shoved under the blackberry brambles. A little clearing a way back had a sleeping bag, and alongside the spot where I sat was the burnt-out circle of a fire pit. I began to piece together the gloomy truth that Joey had probably never left Puyallup at all that year. He hadn’t gone to California; he had been living rough out here. I shuddered and remembered my lilac promise to Gramma.

  “I better get going,” I said, and stamped out my half-smoked cigarette under a pile of mulch.

  After that I wiped my palms off on my jeans and carried on up the riverbank toward the farm on a cloud of smoke and a hazy inkling that I should run away from this town, and soon. I walked the rest of the way up past the cottonwoods to the edge of our old property. What I saw when I reached the top of the path almost brought me to my knees. The fields were all plowed up. Orange plastic flags marked off different areas for laying concrete. The once neat berry tines were now piles of wooden post and wire. The lilac bush Ma and Baba had been married by, the cherry tree, and hundred-year-old firs were all toppled and mashed into the dirt by bulldozer treads. But the worst sight of all was the house, or, more specifically, the place where it had once been, now an open patch in the fields like a gashed-in crop circle of rubble. None of us had anticipated that the new owner would knock our home down.

  I picked my way up to the open basement foundation, a big hole where the house should be. The uneven ground on the bottom was covered with mangled black plastic and held down with rocks. All the remains of the house had already been taken away, so it felt as if the house had just been beamed up, leaving a cement-block outline like chalk around a corpse. I kicked some broken glass into the hole. The place we called home had been erased right out from under us.

  After that, the idea of leaving Puyallup grew beyond a hint of a thought into a full-on escape plan. Things seemed more vivid as I prepared to make my announcement. It was as if the forces behind every object and action were suddenly drumming up their energies double-time, shining brighter, like when clouds break and suddenly whatever it is you’re looking at becomes more brilliant. That is how seeing that ripped-up land galvanized my resolve to go. I never saw Joey a
gain, and I never heard Gramma call me by my real name after that. But the experience made me realize that the only way to become the person I wanted to be was to remove myself from the people who thought they knew me.

  17

  LAMBDA URSAE MAJORIS • THE SECOND LEAP •

  Baba was eager to have me return to Doha, live with the family, and learn about Islam. Ma, on the other hand, wigged out when I told her I was leaving. We spent the remainder of our time together in mortal mother-daughter emotional combat.

  “You had no trouble tossing me into the pool when I was a baby!” I screamed at her. “Why can’t you let me go now?”

  In response to this she would bring Dima into it, accusing me of abandonment. I felt bad enough about leaving Dima behind in that crappy little duplex without Ma rubbing it in. Still, the urge to leave had become more powerful than even my worst guilt. I officially withdrew from school in Puyallup and packed my suitcase several pounds overweight with a full stock of Dover Thrift Editions and my CD binder to keep me company. At the airport, Dima came inside to see me off, while Ma, out of protest, stayed in the car. My little sister and I hugged, knowing we would be apart a long time, then exchanged quick “okay, whatever, bye”s, and I was on my way. To what, exactly, I couldn’t have guessed.

  When I made it to Doha, I took my papers to the American school, hoping my credits would transfer, and enrolled myself. Getting a place in the school was so competitive it was almost impossible for Qataris whose parents didn’t work in the oil industry. After a very long afternoon in the principal’s office explaining my story, it was decided, with some trepidation, that I should be granted a place in the junior class and that the usual payment of tuition up front would be waived for us to sort out later.