Bastien and I were stuck riding in the car with the air-conditioning that barely worked. We were sweaty and cranky, and Bastien was whining about not being able to roll down the windows. “They don’t open,” I explained yet again. “Because of the bulletproofing. It’s to keep us safe.” I craved fresh air too, though, and I would have happily sacrificed a bit of personal safety for a gust of wind to cool the car’s sweltering interior. I had just reached up to push a sweaty piece of hair out of my eyes when the car lurched violently and then sped up even more, tires squealing as the vehicle fishtailed and rocked.
“What’s going on? What are you doing?” As my father’s daughter, I could speak to the driver with a certain amount of imperiousness.
But the driver was hunched over the wheel, too focused to answer. I whirled around just in time to glimpse what had caused him to swerve.
Out the thick, tinted window, I saw it. Bastien did too.
There was a body in the street.
A man, probably, but it was hard to tell. It was a man-sized heap, anyway, lifeless and crumpled in the middle of the road. I suppose it could have been a person only injured or unconscious, but something about the wretched stillness of the body made me certain that death had long since paid its visit.
But as horrible a sight as it was—a discarded corpse almost close enough to touch—what happened next was worse.
The car behind us—whether my father’s car or the decoy even I didn’t know—did not swerve. It did not veer even an inch to avoid the object in its path.
That car, heavy with its armored plating, drove over the ragged corpse as if it were nothing more than a piece of trash in the road. I heard a thump as it happened, although it was probably only my imagination—my brain giving the gruesome image its own gruesome soundtrack.
I may have imagined the sound of the impact, but I definitely did not imagine the sound of the chief of security shouting, firing the driver on the spot as soon as we pulled into the razor-wire safety of our vacation compound. Our chauffeur, the man who had been white-knuckled with the effort of steering us safe of the terrible obstacle just a few minutes earlier, did not say a word to defend himself. He accepted his punishment with the slumped shoulders of someone who knows he has made an unforgivable mistake.
Only later could I bring myself to ask Father what the driver had done wrong. He frowned when I asked, and looked as if he didn’t want to answer. He did answer, though. That was something about my father. He always told me the truth if I asked the right question.
“Laila, dearest, it was a matter of safety.” His frown deepened as he chose his words. “There are people who put things in the road to force us to change our course. And then they booby-trap the path that looks safest. Do you understand? A driver who swerves is the driver most likely to trigger a roadside bomb. The protocol is to never deviate from the planned course, no matter what, and your driver violated that protocol. He put you in danger, so he had to be fired.”
“But it was a body. A person!” A tear escaped and my voice cracked, causing my father to turn away. He didn’t like displays of weakness. I didn’t care. Not at that moment, anyway, though normally even the faintest hint of irritation was enough to make me scramble to amend whatever it was I had done to displease him. I didn’t want to accept his explanation. I didn’t want to live in his world. A world in which windows were sealed shut and bodies were mere bumps in the road. I ran from the room, and we never discussed it again.
But now my six-year-old brother marvels at a bus that stops for squirrels.
Bastien darts away from me, shoving his leather satchel into my hands so that he can run over to the shabby playground across from our apartment. As he scampers toward the rusty swing set, I wonder if he tried the window on the bus. When he found that it would open, how did he react? Was he grateful for the breeze, or was he frightened by the possibility of what dangers could enter along with the wind?
I hope the former, but truly I do not know. We have been shaped differently by our past, Bastien and I.
WORDS
Emmy brings me into her circle of friends, introducing me and showing me off like a shiny new toy. This is Laila, Emmy begins each introduction. Depending on the audience, she then sprinkles in little morsels of information about me. Laila speaks fluent French, she says in a prideful tone, as if she deserves some credit. Or, This is Laila’s first time in the United States. Or, sometimes, She speaks English better than I do! I am an exotic pet.
Most people are kind. They’re friendly in the overwhelming way I’m starting to realize is normal here, and when they smile in that way that makes me think of a tiger’s grin, I remind myself that this is what is expected here. I show my teeth back.
The girls at the lunch table are unimpressed, hungry for more interesting morsels than Emmy provides. And Emmy, in turn, is hungry for their approval. She turns defensive when one of the girls, Morgan, questions her.
“What is she, an exchange student or something?” Morgan sniffs, looking more interested in her yogurt than she is in me.
I resist the urge to speak for myself. This is Emmy’s show.
“No.” Emmy’s words sound clipped, sharp. “She lives here now. Permanently. With her family.”
One of the other girls—Hailey? Or perhaps Kailee?—stage-whispers something to Morgan. “Ef oh bee.”
I don’t know what it means, but Emmy reacts. “That is so rude! She is not an F.O.B.” She turns to me to translate. “Fresh off the boat. Such a racist thing to say.”
Hailey-Kailee-Bailee turns red, chastised.
I am amused. I am fresh off the boat—or, more accurately, the chartered plane. I don’t see the insult in the statement, though it’s clear one is intended. Emmy, however, is offended enough for both of us, and she defends me rapid-fire. “She’s not an exchange student, and she’s not an F.O.B. Her family is famous—you’d know if you ever bothered watching the news. Her dad was, like, a dictator. He ran the whole country.”
The conversation goes on around me, but I freeze at that word.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I say as soon as Emmy and I walk away from the lip-gloss tribunal at the lunch table. We’d been judged and found worthy, an invitation to join the girls extended and politely refused in order to continue my public debut. “It isn’t true.”
“Hmmm?” Emmy is distracted, pleased by her social coup. I have no speaking part in her scripted introductions.
“What you said. About my father. It isn’t true.” I’m trying to keep my anger in check, but my old voice, the one that used to be obeyed, returns to me unbidden. “Don’t say it again.”
Emmy reacts to my tone. She looks stricken. The girls at the table were bad enough, and now I’m attacking her too. Her exotic pet has claws and teeth. It is too much for her to handle. “B-but,” she stammers, “that’s what the news said. I looked you up. I read the articles. Your father was in charge, right? I mean, I saw pictures and everything. Your mom is beautiful, by the way.”
“He. Was. Not. A. Dictator.” It is my turn to say the words slowly and too clearly to be misunderstood.
Emmy is still confused. “But you should be proud, Laila. Your family is famous! You’re like royalty or something!”
The distinction is lost on her. “Just don’t call him a dictator,” I ask softly.
She doesn’t want to let it go. Just as I found no harm in F.O.B., she finds no harm in her word. “I’ll show you where it says he is. Come over to my house after school. You can see for yourself.”
I should say no. I should be confident enough about my father’s legacy to refuse—it is an insult to my family to even entertain the idea.
I accept.
INVITATIONS
I can’t help but hunch my shoulders against the feeling of being watched. Emmy’s bedroom is unsettling.
A hundred sets of eyes stare at me from the walls. It’s an amateur portrait gallery—a snapshot collage of faces. Some of the photos—boys only�
��have X’s penned across them. I don’t ask why. I already knew that Emmy was a collector of people. I am her latest specimen, after all.
Her mother knocks on the door of her room and asks if I will be staying for dinner. She looks nervous.
“Yes!” Emmy shouts out in answer, then turns to me. “Right, Laila? You can stay, can’t you? Please?” I notice that she has angled her body so it’s blocking the computer screen.
“Um … okay, good. I mean, fine.” Her mom’s brow is furrowed. “We’re having lasagna. Is that okay with you?” She emphasizes her words strangely, as if expecting me to object. “I mean, do you have any—” She searches for the right words, “Any dietary restrictions? From your country, or your religion?” Just like her daughter, she plays with a golden pendant hanging from her neck. Hers is a small cross.
I suddenly understand her nervousness. “Lasagna sounds wonderful, Mrs. Davis. Thank you very much for the invitation. I would love to stay for dinner.”
Emmy’s mother’s face unfurrows and she smiles broadly, looking so much like her daughter for a moment that it’s like seeing double. She is pleased that I have not rejected her food. Would she be so pleased if she could read the pages that her daughter is hiding?
Emmy fidgets and glowers until her mother leaves the room, and then rolls her eyes. “It’s probably better my mom not see this stuff. She’s so controlling.” I hide my expression behind my hair. The googling girl with her own computer in her bedroom thinks her mother is controlling.
Emmy’s fingers fly over the keyboard as I watch and pretend to be indifferent. Back home we had no internet. Or at least not the internet I see before me now. We had only a heavily censored, filtered version, with threatening messages decrying all but the blandest of government-approved sites as forbidden.
“See?” Emmy asks as she finds what she was looking for. “I didn’t make it up. I really am sorry, Laila. I didn’t know it would offend you.”
I force the corners of my mouth to turn up and form a forgiving expression as I gaze past her to read the headline emblazoned across the screen. The picture that accompanies the article is old, taken several years ago, and my father looks heavier, healthier than I remember from more recent days. My mother is walking behind him in the photo. It is not a flattering image of her, but she is still beautiful, even with her eyes shifted toward something out of camera range. She looks skittish, like a storm-spooked horse, with the whites of her eyes showing too much.
The article on Emmy’s computer screen is not kind.
“It’s not true.” I want to keep reading, but the need to defend is more urgent. I’ve seen enough to know that whoever wrote the article was wrong, had only part of the story. There are several unattributed quotes that sound suspiciously like things my uncle would say. My uncle, who does not share the blame in this article, but who certainly shares the blame in real life.
Emmy shrugs and begins to braid her hair, checking her progress in the mirror above her dresser. She truly does not care. The accusations on her computer describe events so far away from her they might as well belong in a fairy tale. Once upon a time, there was an evil man who led his country into war and misery.
The truth is more Shakespearean tragedy than fairy tale, though. Upon his death, an emperor’s sons vie for power, only to destroy everything around them and pass their bloody quarrel on to the next generation. Whether fairy tale or Elizabethan tragedy, such stories don’t come true in Emmy’s world. My life is no more real to her than an assigned reading for English class.
“There’s a lot more,” Emmy says once her braid is finished. “Do you want to see it?”
Yes.
“No,” I say.
“Okay, then let’s go eat. My mom’s lasagna is awesome, but stay away from her garlic bread. She burns it every time.” Emmy is out the door, the article already forgotten.
I glance back at her computer before I follow. I want to read more, but I don’t want to read more—conflicting urges grapple in my gut. Either way, I know for certain that I don’t want my carefree new American friend looking over my shoulder as I read. Surely the same thought would occur to her as the one that now pulsates and throbs in my head like a malignant tumor, and I couldn’t bear the doubled weight of our combined question: What kind of person doesn’t know whether her father was a king or a monster?
DIRECTIONS
I hurry home after my dinner at Emmy’s. The walk is long, but I’m not ready to try the city’s bus system. Just looking at the schedule, with its seemingly infinite routes and destinations, makes my head spin.
But even on foot, I’m disoriented within minutes. Not lost, exactly. Not yet. But I’m angry with myself for not paying more attention when I walked here with Emmy. Alone, everything looks different. The cocoon in which I used to live has been ripped away, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to spread my wings. Simply to walk, unaccompanied, from one place to the next is new enough—one part liberation, one part intimidation. The fact that all the buildings look the same to me does not help. How many fast-food restaurants can possibly coexist in one small area?
I turn left at the Golden Arches, only to realize my error a half block later. It should have been a right at the arches and then a left at the sign advertising fried chicken by the bucket—a landmark that never fails to amaze me. Even with my privileged background, I can hardly fathom the food quantities here, measured in buckets, tubs, platters, and combo packs. I backtrack, cursing. No one shoots at me here, and the bumper-sticker-adorned cars are neither armored nor driven by bodyguards, but my heartbeat quickens anyway. There is comfort, if not safety, in familiarity, and nothing here feels familiar.
Finally my apartment building shows itself—a five-story stucco beacon in the dusk. Unbelievably, my home.
Inside, Bastien is eating cereal again—his enthusiasm for it has only grown since we arrived. Mother is painting her fingernails with no evidence of a meal before her. The lasagna sits guiltily in my stomach. It was delicious.
“Have you eaten?” I ask.
She beckons me with her fingers extended and spread, her gesture intended both to dry the red paint and to call me over for a kiss on each cheek. “I can’t bring myself to eat that sugar-coated Styrofoam your brother is so obsessed with. It tastes like chocolate-dipped mothballs. I’d rather go hungry.”
I open the cupboards to confirm what I already know. Nothing but the last two boxes of cereal left from our grand first shopping trip, both nearly empty. I have to bite my tongue to keep from shouting out in frustration. Does it not occur to her to buy anything else? She may not mind going hungry, but couldn’t she remember that she has children who will need to eat tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day after that?
Unless there is another reason.
I approach the topic carefully, and only after making a cup of tea, using the last tea bag from a tin I found in the back of an otherwise empty drawer. “I thought you might like some tea,” I say as I bring her the offering. I try to think of something bland and nonconfrontational to discuss. In our culture it is considered rude to skip straight to business without first sharing a meal and a conversation. My question keeps bubbling up in my throat, though, growing in urgency until I feel like I might choke. Finally, I can’t contain it.
“Are we out of money?” It comes out rushed and petulant, not as I intended. I sound like a child asking an adult question.
“Don’t worry, Laila. Money will come.” She’s too busy inspecting her cuticles to look up at me.
“From where?” I can’t let this drop. We can’t eat from cereal boxes forever. “Maybe you should get a job.”
Mother looks amused. “Doing what, darling? Working behind the counter at the corner gas station, perhaps? Can’t you just see it?” She laughs and begins to apply a second coat of polish to her nails.
“Then I’ll get a job. I could work at the gas station. Or I could work as a tutor, maybe.” I have no idea how to go about getting a job in this cou
ntry, or even if anyone would hire a fifteen-year-old immigrant—an F.O.B., no less—but someone has to be practical here.
“Laila, stop.” She is no longer amused. I have pushed too far. “I still have some jewelry I can sell, and there are many people who owed your father favors. They will provide, if I ask.” She shoos me away like a housefly.
I may be a child in her eyes, but at least I know that the favors owed my father died when he did. There will be no one coming to our rescue. “Fine,” I say, knowing when to quit. “But you should sell the jewelry soon.”
She ignores me, so I join Bastien on the couch. “You shouldn’t eat so much of that,” I tell him. “You’ll get sick again.”
He sticks his tongue out at me. “I like it.”
I smile at him and mess his hair. He alone seems to be flourishing here. Perhaps I should follow his lead.
TRUTHS
I feel shy when I see Emmy next. She knows something about me that I don’t know myself. I’d considered slipping away from the dinner table last night to finish the article in secret, but there hadn’t been a chance. I spent the meal stuck between Mr. Davis’s beetle-browed silence and statements up-talked into chirpy questions by Mrs. Davis. So I hear you’re fitting in well at SCHOOL? It must be so hard to move so FAR AWAY? Emmy has told us so much ABOUT YOU?
It was a pleasant enough evening, but it has left me feeling stripped bare.
Now I feel a childish need to keep a secret from Emmy, for no other reason than to prove that I can. The opportunity presents itself quickly.
“Want to go to Starbucks with some of us after school?” Emmy asks.
The Tyrant's Daughter Page 2
