All We Have Left

by Wendy Mills

  Lately, he has been getting reckless, and it’s scaring me how he’s taking more and more chances. But I know he’s frustrated that no one seems to be noticing our tags. At this point, we have painted “Nothing” on literally hundreds of buildings, and except for one small mention in the paper, and a few more police patrols, no one seems to care.

  “Jesse, it’ll be fine. Trust me.”

  I nod without speaking, hating that at this moment I feel with Nick the same way I feel with my dad, like there is something I should say but don’t.

  I hand Nick the cans of paint, and keep watch as he starts the tag. He’s halfway through when I see a car.

  “Nick!”

  He pulls me back into the shadows next to the doorway, and even though we are plainly visible if anyone looked, the car drives right past us.

  “See?” Nick says. “We’re invisible. No one sees us.”

  He’s almost done when I see the cop car. It’s cruising slow, like a shark, as it comes down the steep hill toward us.

  “Cop!” I say, and Nick glances over his shoulder, and then back to his tag.

  I stand for what feels like an eternity and then at least another week as the cop gets closer and Nick finishes the tag.

  “Got it.” Nick grabs his backpack and we run. A quick burst of a siren follows us, and I feel the burn of headlights on my back as the cop accelerates.

  “He’s going to catch us!” I yell, and Nick darts down a side street and across someone’s lawn. I can hear the siren in earnest now. Nick ducks behind an old shed, pulling me down into the bushes with him.

  I sit on the wet, squashy ground, and Nick draws me close, his arm around my shoulders.

  “They’ll have to notice us now,” he says, and presses a quick kiss to my temple.

  But they don’t. By the next morning, a fresh coat of light yellow paint has obliterated Nick’s tag. The cops must have woken up Mrs. Danver to tell her what we had done, and she painted over the “Nothing” by the glow of the streetlights.

  Nick is so pissed that he’s barely speaking to me, or anyone, and when Adam flashes a dimpled smile at me in the halls, I look away. I feel his puzzled stare long after I’ve walked off.

  That afternoon when I get home, the shop is super busy and has been all day, according to Grill.

  “I need help, Jesse,” he says. “Your dad went upstairs for a liquid lunch, and I haven’t seen him since. This is getting old.”

  “Let me get changed, and I’ll come right back,” I promise.

  I walk up the stairs, making my feet as light as possible, but my heart sinks when I hear Dad screaming at the TV.

  “Damn terrorists! We ought to nuke those towel heads back to the Stone Age!” he yells as I come into the kitchen. “See what they’re doing? That’s what they want to do to every one of us.” Dad doesn’t bother to look at me, his eyes trained on the TV.

  It’s another beheading. I see the man in an orange jumpsuit on his knees, a man in black standing behind him with a sword.

  My stomach clenches, and I avert my eyes and try to make myself small as I head for my room.

  “They won’t stop until we’re all dead!”

  Dad doesn’t like anyone he considers a foreigner, but he carries a bottomless well of hate for Muslims, which he often vents in a rage-filled rant at the TV. I’ve learned to stay as far away as possible from him when he’s like this.

  The buzzer for the door downstairs sounds, and I jump.

  “Tell Grill he can damn well handle it on his own,” Dad says, his eyes fixed on the TV. “Tell him that’s what I pay him for.”

  I don’t tell him that Grill has told me emphatically that Dad doesn’t pay him anywhere near enough to put up with his crap, and when the buzzer sounds again, I abandon my plan to get changed. The sound of my father’s continuing tirade rings in my ears as I escape down the stairs.

  At the bottom landing, I yank open the door and find Teeny, Emi, and Myra standing there.

  “What …?” I’m surprised because I haven’t seen a whole lot of them lately, and anyway they almost never come to my house. They’ve met my dad.

  “We need to talk,” Teeny says grimly.

  “What’s up?” I say, trying for normal, though I can tell already that this is anything but normal. I shut the door behind me and lean against it, hoping they can’t hear my dad’s screaming. There’s a line at the counter almost ten people deep, and Grill frowns as he catches my eye.

  “Guys, this isn’t the best time in the world,” I say, knowing I need to help Grill or he might walk out.

  “There’s never a good time with you anymore,” says Teeny, who evidently has been elected spokeswoman of the group. Myra is on her phone, probably searching, “How to talk to your best friend when she won’t talk back,” and Emi just stands there looking uncomfortable and fidgety. She hates emotional scenes.

  Teeny, however, thrives on them.

  “You talk to us now,” she announces. “Or else.”

  Or else? Really? But whatever is going on is clearly important to them, so I sigh and lead them through the door to the shop office. We stand awkwardly next to my father’s overly neat desk.

  “This is an intervention,” Teeny says. “We don’t understand what’s going on with you and Nick, but we’re here to tell you that we are your friends, that we’ll be here long after Nick bites the dust, and you need to remember that.”

  “Can’t you hang out with us and Nick too?” Myra asks plaintively.

  I don’t know what to say. I share so many secrets with Nick, Dave, and, yes, even Hailey Brinson that it has just been easier to avoid my friends than to lie to their faces. I’m still hyped up about our close call last night, and the whole thing has gotten a lot more serious than I bargained for. I’m scared a lot of time that the police are going to show up at my door. So how am I supposed to study Statistics with Emi or ooh and ahh over Teeny’s newest batch of clothes from her aunt?

  “Nick isn’t good for you,” Emi says, but she won’t meet my eyes. “I miss studying with you.” For her, it’s basically a declaration of love, and my eyes sting.

  “I’m sorry.” There’s nothing else I can say. I can’t tell them what’s going on, because if I do, I’ll lose Nick, and he’s the only one who seems to understand the anger that feels like it is burning me up from the inside out. I’m not sure if all that mad is going to just leave me a dry, burned-out husk, or explode outward at the people around me.

  But these are my best friends, and I don’t want to lose them either.

  “We’re worried about you, Jesse,” Teeny says, and while her words are sweet, her tone is not. She is glaring at me.

  I nod, because I’m worried about me too.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Myra asks. “How can you just stand there?”

  Somehow that has become the story of my life, and I’m still standing there silent as they turn to leave.

  “Don’t call when it all comes crashing down,” Teeny says over her shoulder, and her tone is spiteful, but I see the dark pain in her eyes.

  Emi pauses at the door, and she stares at me for a long moment.

  “Is he worth it?” she asks quietly.

  She turns to go without waiting for me to answer.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Alia

  I notice him in the crowd waiting for a local elevator in the seventy-eighth-floor sky lobby. He’s tall and lean, and his straight blond hair is too long, and he’s got a hip-hop thing going on with his baggy pants and oversized Giants shirt.

  I’m not sure why I start watching him, maybe because in the mass of people in suits and dresses, he’s the only one close to my age. But that’s not the only reason. He looks like one of those guys who could pop off at any time. You watch people like that because you never know what they’re going to do.

  As if to prove my point, the guy reaches out a hand toward the back pocket of a maintenance guy holding a bucket and squeegee.

 
; In my head, Lia yells, “Stop right there, buster!” and slaps his hand away from the maintenance man’s pocket.

  “Hey!” I say, and the guy and several other people glance over at me curiously.

  I’m staring right at Hip-Hop Boy, and he knows why.

  He looks at me for a long moment, and I notice that he’s actually cute in a bad-boy, I-just-got-busted-trying-to-lift-some-guy’s-wallet kind of way. His wheat-colored hair is silky and appears as if it was chopped with a blunt instrument, and his eyes are a light greenish hazel shadowed by strong eyebrows. And then he smiles, and his whole face is transformed from kind of cute to wow. He stands there grinning at me, like he knows I saw and thinks if he’s going to be busted by anyone in the world, he’s glad it was me.

  I glare at him, and he shrugs, like “What can I say?”

  I remember then that I’m wearing the hijab, and that I shouldn’t be flirting with some punk. Not that I was flirting, I was preventing a crime, and if I happened to notice the would-be thief was cute, well … Just because I definitely don’t want to date anyone, I’m not dead.

  Still, I avert my eyes from him. I’m blushing, and for some reason I think he’s still looking at me. I back up and run into a sign on a metal easel, knocking it over with a clatter. I scramble to pick it up, feeling stupid.

  The local elevator opens, and I’m pushed forward with the crowd. The boy doesn’t get on, but I find myself thinking about him as we go up. I wonder if he was just waiting for me to leave so he could continue his wallet-snatching without a witness. Lia would go back down, this minute, and confront the boy. I pull out my notepad, accidentally elbowing a few people in the crowded elevator. I sketch the scene quickly: Lia dragging him out of the building by his collar, her dialogue bubble reading, “Why don’t you steal from someone your own age, Hip-Hop Boy!” and all the while, tiny hearts are coming from his head because he can’t keep his eyes off Lia.

  I hurriedly tuck the pad back into my bag as the elevator opens on my dad’s floor. I head for his office, practicing the words I want to say to him so they don’t get all jumbled up, like they did with my mother.

  Ayah, I need you to understand how serious I am about this NYU program. My drawing means so much to me. This isn’t one of my crazy impulses, and I really think it’s what I want to do. I hope that you will change your mind and give me your blessing.

  It sounds good. Hopefully he won’t notice that I should be in school. Somehow I thought wearing the scarf would make me feel grown up, strong, like Lia, but so far all I feel is young and silly.

  Inside my dad’s office, I thank the receptionist for telling the security guy downstairs to let me up, and she smiles and gestures for me to go on back. It’s not yet nine, and there are a lot of empty cubicles, but my father always gets there before everyone else to run reports from the day before.

  But when I get to his desk, he’s not there. His computer is on, the tiny fan clipped to the side of it running, and there are stacks of paperwork and a few diskettes lined up neatly with my father’s slanted handwriting on the labels. But no Ayah. I wait for a couple of minutes, nodding at people as they pass me, staring through an office door out the windows at a thin slice of blue sky. I asked Ayah once why the windows were so narrow, and he told me that he’d heard the towers were designed by an architect who was scared of heights, which made me laugh.

  I tap my foot. Where the heck is Ayah?

  I know sometimes he will go upstairs to pray with some of the restaurant staff from Windows on the World when he doesn’t have time to go to the other tower to the prayer room. He told me that they spread tablecloths and use flattened cardboard boxes as prayer mats on the stairwell landing. But he’s already prayed the morning prayer, and it’s not time for the noon prayer, so that can’t be it.

  “Alia?” Mr. Morowitz says. “Is that you?” He’s holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a bagel smeared with cream cheese in the other.

  Mr. Morowitz is big and puffy, and always reminds me of a balloon in his tight suit, but he’s really nice. He’s often part of the group my parents invite to the apartment to eat dinner. They always end up talking about religion, and the world, and how we all fit into it. My parents don’t believe in sheltering me from other religions, and I’ve been to synagogue with Mr. Morowitz’s family, and church services with our Christian friends.

  I wonder for a moment why he isn’t sure it’s me, and then I remember the scarf. Do I look that different with it on?

  “Hi, Mr. Morowitz,” I say. “Do you know where my father is?”

  “You just missed him, honey,” he says with his mouth full, a smudge of cream cheese on his chin. “He was in earlier, but he left to go vote, and then he’s got a training seminar across town. Bagel?” He offers me an American Café bag. “They’re kosher, halal, for you.”

  I shake my head. “No, thank you.”

  What am I going to do now? I’d felt so sure that this was the right thing to do. Now, the next time I see my father will be when we all meet in Ms. Julio’s office, and I can’t imagine that he will be in the mood to sign my permission slip after that meeting.

  “Alia?” Mr. Morowitz is saying. “Are you okay?”

  I focus on his kind, concerned face. “Uh, sure. I’m fine,” I say, and smile reassuringly.

  He blinks, and then smiles back. “If I see him, do you want me to give him a message?”

  “No,” I say. “I’ll talk to him later.”

  I check the clock on my father’s desk and see that I’m going to be late as heck for school, and I don’t have a thing to show for it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jesse

  The pep rally is in full swing, pumped-up teenagers screaming and yelling at the cheerleaders who are doing a dance that honestly looks like they should have some sort of pole to go with their shake.

  “She was putting them up earlier,” Dave is saying. “You wouldn’t believe this crap …”

  I can’t really hear what Dave and Nick are talking about, though I’m sitting on the bleacher row just below them, leaning back between Nick’s legs. His hand is twined in my hair, his fingers rubbing the base of my neck. Every once in a while, he pulls my head back and leans down to give me a kiss, as if saying, See, she’s mine. It’s been a couple of weeks since we almost got caught by the cops, and if anything Nick has gotten even more reckless. More and more lately, I’ve wanted to call Emi, or Teeny, or Myra, and say: Help. I’m in too deep. But it’s too late. I made my choice and now I’m on my own.

  Even with Nick’s fingers warm on the back of my neck, I find my thoughts wandering a well-worn path to Adam. I’ve seen him a couple of times in the halls—a nod, a flicker of dimple—but we haven’t talked again. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way I felt when I was on the mountain with him.

  “See, she’s putting up another one,” Dave is saying as the pep rally roars around us. Hailey is all over him, her hands under his army jacket. They’d started going out soon after Nick and I hooked up. I think she did it to make Nick jealous, not that he seemed to notice.

  I finally look around to see what Dave is talking about. Jade Grimsky and Hal Jones are busy putting up fliers. Jade and Hal are big into good works, and I assume it’s another bake sale to raise money for some cause or another. Why does Dave care so much about two-dollar brownies?

  The pep rally finishes, and we get up, everyone jostling and yelling as we stream toward the doors. Nick has his arm wrapped around my shoulders, and even then, with my boyfriend’s arm encircling me, I find myself looking for Adam. Dave is in front of us, and slows as we near the blue flier that Jade and Hal were putting up. It says: Islam Peace Center, and there is a date for a grand opening this Saturday, and an address in town.

  My stomach turns, and before I can help myself, I think: It was Muslims who hijacked those planes and drove them into the towers of the World Trade Center and killed all those people. It was Muslims who killed my brother.

  “See?” Dave
says. “Can you believe this crap? My brother got his leg blown off over there, and they want to open up a freaking peace center?”

  Nick reaches out and rips the flier off the wall. Dave follows suit and rips down another sign nearby. As we head down the hall, they tear down every blue sign they see.

  The four of us walk a long, circuitous route home. We usually take Nick’s car, but it’s in the shop, so we’re walking today. I’m not paying much attention where we are going, because my thoughts are spinning like car tires caught in the snow. My dad has gotten worse, and, as promised, Grill has quit, leaving me and a few newbies to run the store. Mom has never had much to do with the shop—as far as I know, she’s only climbed once in her life, right after my parents moved here, and she swore she’d never do it again—so she keeps zipping along like a deranged bumblebee pretending everything is peachy, while I try to keep things together.

  We’ve stopped on the sidewalk, and Nick, Dave, and Hailey are staring up at a building. We’re at the bottom of a stretch of antique shops just off Main Street, and the last building in the row, which used to be a chocolate shop, has a new sign reading: Islam Peace Center.

  “You’d have to tag it up high,” Nick is saying, and I finally tune into the conversation. “If you didn’t get up there”—he gestures to the top of the wall of the brick building, up on the second floor—“no one would see it.”

  It takes me a minute to figure out what they are talking about: tagging the Peace Center. But there’s a fence running along the side of the building on the corner, and unless you got up high, the tag wouldn’t really be noticeable.

  “A ladder?” Hailey suggests.

  “Nah,” Nick says. “You’d have to move it every letter and it would make too much noise. We need a climber.”

  They all turn to look at me.

  “Uh … What? Me?” I squeak. Nick is the one who does the tagging. Though I’ve practiced our tag on paper, I’ve never painted it on the side of a building.