by Wendy Mills
The counter is gone, and all that is recognizable from the candy shop days is the small kitchen against the back wall. The rest of the room is open, full of light and posters, and tables with kids my age who sit silently staring at me.
What are they all doing here?
“I’m Yalda,” the woman says to me. “I think you should know that this is a no-judgment place. When we are here, we will try not to judge you, and I hope that you can extend us the same courtesy.”
I nod, staring at the floor, which has been painted with feet in a rainbow of colors and sizes, all walking in different directions.
“We are doing teen outreach today,” she continues. “We do it every Thursday.”
She takes my arm and draws me away from the door. I try not to catch anyone’s eye; I’ve gotten used to the disgusted looks, because it is what I’ve been seeing from friends and strangers alike for months.
“This is Jesse,” Yalda says, raising her voice so the unsmiling kids can hear her. “There’s no point pretending that you don’t know who she is, and why she’s here. But the purpose of this Peace Center is to bring people of diverse faiths and backgrounds together. So no snark, okay?”
I sense the lessening of tension as her words fill the chocolate-scented room.
“Jesse, why don’t you sit down?” Yalda nods at a table with three or four kids, but I head for an empty table near the back instead.
I’m not sure what I was expecting—cleaning toilets with a toothbrush?—but it wasn’t this. Yalda seems to have every intention of treating me like the other teens who are here legitimately, not ordered on pain of juvenile detention to be here twice a week for the next six months.
I sneak glances at the other kids who are now focused on Yalda. A few of the girls wear head scarves, but the majority of the kids look like the ones I go to school with every day. They are kids I go to school with. I see Jade Grimsky and Hal Jones, and a girl, Nina, from my Health block, and a few other people I recognize, and some I don’t, who I assume must be in college.
“We’re talking about what it’s like to be a Muslim in America,” Yalda says to me.
She turns to a tall, regal-looking girl with gold bangles on her wrists and a colorfully patterned scarf over her hair. “Nadifa, you were saying …?”
Nadifa nods. “I was just saying that I wear the hijab because I’m proud of my Muslim identity. One of my teachers in high school asked me to stay behind class one day, and when we were alone she said in this real quiet voice, ‘Sweetie, you’re in America now, you don’t have to wear that scarf if you don’t want to.’”
Laughter sweeps through the room, and I see the scarved girls nodding.
“I mean, she was sweet and all, but look, it’s because I’m an American that I have the freedom to wear it. Hello, I’m a feminist! I’m majoring in political science; I know what my rights are.”
A dark-eyed girl wearing an “I love Malala” shirt says, “I’d be a millionaire if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me whether my parents make me cover my hair, or if my dad’s going to force me to marry some old, fat guy. No, it’s my choice to wear the scarf, and my dad wants me to be happy. But it does piss me off that they make women wear the veil in other countries. That they beat women who don’t wear it, or even kill them. That’s just so awful.”
Yalda says, “It is awful, Maira. I think it’s important to remember that in the seventh century the Quran gave women more freedom and rights and equality than most other civilized nations at that time.”
“So how come people use the message of the Quran to stifle women’s freedom now?” another girl with sleek, dark hair shouts out.
“It’s cultural, not religious,” Nadifa says. “There are still some villages where people are following customs that go back a thousand years. It’s all they know.”
“And it’s not just girls who have issues,” says a boy wearing jeans and a SUNY New Paltz T-shirt. “I was born here, and I think what those ISIS guys are doing is lousy, but it feels like people think we’re all like that. I was trying to find a bathroom last year at the DMV, and a security guy got all suspicious on me, like I was casing the joint or something. Like I was looking for a place to plant a bomb.” He shakes his head.
“Flying while Muslim. That’s my dad’s only crime, and he gets stopped every time he gets on a plane,” another guy says.
“Everybody is mad at us for what happened on 9/11, and all the crap that’s been going on since, but why don’t they understand that we think it’s horrible too?” Maira says. “God never told us to kill like that.”
“They’re just guys with an emptiness where their hearts should be, believing madmen who tell them to do terrible things,” Jade says, her voice high and clear. “It’s not the first or last time it’ll happen.”
“But when you see what’s going on with our brothers in Afghanistan, and Iraq and Palestine, it’s like America hate Muslims. I thought we had religious freedom in this country, so why do they hate us so much?” the guy in the SUNY shirt says.
“My cousin in Afghanistan got killed in a drone attack,” a girl says, and she swallows hard. “How did she deserve to die? She was only fifteen!”
Jade puts her arm around the girl, and whispers to her while she cries.
Yalda clears her throat and glances at her phone. “We’re almost out of time, and I want to tie up some details about an upcoming presentation. Anne Jonna, a survivor of the attacks on the World Trade Center, is coming to speak to us at the end of the month. We’ve started putting notices in the paper, we’ve got the food lined up, but we need to make posters and get them out to the community. Anybody have a hidden artistic talent they’d like to volunteer for the cause?”
“What about the new girl?” one of the college girls says, and her voice isn’t friendly. “I hear she has some pretty bad-ass artistic skills.”
Suddenly, everyone is looking at me, and my face burns and I stare fixedly at the table as I try to think of what to say.
The front door opens, and a gust of rain and the smell of flowers blows in.
“Sorry we’re late!” a girl calls, and her voice is full of laughter.
With a feeling of inevitability, I see that it is Sabeen in a pale yellow scarf, her dark eyes flashing.
“You could have called,” Yalda says.
“Mom, we tried, but you must have your ringer turned off. Anyway, we would have been here on time but, for all his bragging, baby brother here drives like a little old lady in the rain.”
Sabeen shoves her brother’s arm playfully, and I recognize him, of course I do, and my bones dissolve, my heart collapses in on itself, because I didn’t know.
I didn’t know.
His laughing gaze falls on me, and his face freezes, the dimple disappearing, and his sky-blue eyes turn cold.
Chapter Nineteen
Alia
Travis and I sit in tense silence.
“How long will it take for them to get us out?” I ask.
“You’re right, in my free time, I’m a working psychic,” Travis says, and then sighs. “I have no idea. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there’s just a problem with our elevator, in which case it shouldn’t be long.”
This cheers me up. All his talk about a bomb seems pretty farfetched now that I’ve calmed down. It’s way more likely that our elevator car malfunctioned in some way, and they are working hard right now to get us out.
I start fidgeting.
“Why are you here?” I ask him, because I’m not good with silence. At all.
“What?”
“I was here today to see my father.” If only I’d gone to school like I was supposed to, none of this would be happening to me.
“Yeah?”
“So why are you here today? You look too young to work here,” I persist.
“I’m almost nineteen,” he says. “Plenty old enough to work here if I wanted.”
“Okay, okay,” I say, holding up my hands. “I didn’t real
ize you were ancient, or I never would have asked. I’m just trying to make conversation. Let’s talk about something.” I can’t bear the thought of being alone with my frantic thoughts.
“What do you want to talk about?”
I shrug. “It doesn’t matter. World peace? Which is your favorite, Rachel or Monica? The name of your dog?”
“I don’t have a dog.”
I sigh in exasperation. “Can you work with me here?”
“Monica,” he says after a moment. “I like neurotic dark-haired girls.” He smiles at me, and my heart skips a beat, because is he flirting? “Where are you from?”
“I live here now, or in Brooklyn anyway. I was born in LA. Where are you from?” I say it challengingly. Why does everyone think that just because someone is Muslim that they aren’t natural-born Americans?
He seems surprised at my tone, and I realize that maybe I read him wrong.
“A small town a couple hours from here.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I hate it. I can’t wait to leave.”
“Why?”
“People think they know you. In a small town, they think they know everything about you, but they don’t. I’m so tired of it.”
I have the weird desire to touch the side of his face and make the scowl go away.
“I’ve never lived in a small town,” I say. “But honestly, I think it’s like that everywhere. I grew up in a neighborhood with a bunch of aunties and uncles who have all known me since I was born. It was exactly the same.”
We hear a faraway clanging noise, and we both tense, but even though we listen hard, we don’t hear it again. I’m still so hot, and the pin in my scarf is digging into my head. When I reach up to adjust it, I realize that the scarf is askew and I try to fix it, but it’s hard without a mirror.
He looks at me curiously. “Why are you wearing the scarf?”
“It’s a hijab. It’s to show my submission to God. That’s what Islam means, you know, submission, surrendering to God.”
“You’re Islam?”’
“No, I’m Muslim. My religion is Islam.” I stare at him. “Really? The scarf didn’t give it away?”
He looks embarrassed. “I thought … maybe you were a nun or something?”
“A nun?” For some reason I find that hilarious, and I burst out laughing. He watches me, a bemused expression on his face.
I wipe my eyes with my sleeves, knowing I’m laughing so I won’t cry. “The scarf basically means the same thing as it would on a nun. It represents purity and faith.” For some reason, the word “purity” makes my face flame, as if I am announcing I’m a virgin.
“Oh.” He tucks his shaggy blond hair back behind his ear like he’s trying to think of something to say.
“So, what were you going to say to me? Before?” I ask.
He looks at me quizzically, his one eye just a tiny bit greener than the other. I suddenly want to sketch him again; I can see him on paper, with his strong jaw and messy hair, saying something like: Lia, we need to get out of here so we can save the rest of the people who could be trapped just like us. Can you help me?
“What?” he says.
“Before the elevator fell,” I say. “I asked if you normally stared at people like that, and you said, ‘You’re the one—’ but you never finished what you were going to say.” I tilt my head at him.
“Oh,” he says, embarrassed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Come on,” I say. “Once we get out of here, God willing, it’s not like we’ll ever see each other again. What’s the big deal?”
“Okay, fine.” He heaves a big sigh that makes him sound about six, not eighteen. “I was kind of upset, okay? I saw you staring at me, and I thought you were going to say something about me …”
“Crying?” I supply helpfully.
“Yes,” he says. “That. I wasn’t really, you know—”
“Crying?”
“Man, stop it. Yes, okay, maybe I was. I just thought you were going to make fun of me or something, and then when you accused me of looking at you, I was, like, really?”
“I wasn’t though,” I say.
“You weren’t what?”
“Going to make fun of you,” I say. “My father says that ‘tears are prayers too. They travel to Allah when we can’t speak.’”
He opens his mouth to say something else, but we hear a clicking sound, and then static, before a real, live human voice says over the intercom, “There’s been an explosion.”
Chapter Twenty
Jesse
When I get home that evening from the Peace Center, still feeling raw and unsettled, my mother is waiting.
The apartment is dim, and I can hear the fall of rain on the leaves outside the cracked kitchen window and the gush of the gutters.
And my mother sits at the counter, not moving, not texting, not doing anything but waiting.
Usually she’s such a whirlwind of energy, always talking, but only about what’s happening tomorrow, what happened today, what’s happening right-freaking-now. There’s not a lot of conversation about anything important. It’s like she lives her life only half-tuned to a radio station so that she doesn’t have to listen to the lyrics.
“What’s up, Mom?” I say, a little unnerved.
She looks at me, not speaking.
After I was arrested and taken to the hospital to get my ankle X-rayed (no break, just a bad sprain), they took me to jail, where I was fingerprinted and put into a holding cell. I couldn’t seem to stop crying when my mom arrived with a lawyer to bail me out. The look on her face was indescribable. All she kept asking on the way home was “Why? Jesse, why?”
I couldn’t answer. I had no answer. I didn’t know why.
My father had refused to come with my mom to get me out of jail.
“Unbelievable,” is all he said to me the next night when the local news flashed a video of the side of the Peace Center. A group of people were on ladders, busily scrubbing at my fading words with brushes and buckets of soapy water. Even then, I wondered what Nick would think. I hadn’t spoken to him since I arrived home except for the one text he sent me:
Did you talk
I didn’t reply.
He found out soon enough when the police arrived to pick him up.
“What, Mom?” I ask, because she still hasn’t said anything.
Her face wrenches, like she’s trying not to cry, and she stares at me so searchingly that I fight the irrational urge to close my eyes so she can’t vacuum out my brain.
“It’s our fault,” she says. “What you did. We should have realized it would affect you.” She sighs. “Travis was my baby boy, but when your father first stopped talking about him, right after it happened, I let him. I thought: This is how he copes. This is how he gets through it. And when his sadness turned to rage, I thought: Give him time. He’ll come back to me. Because he wasn’t always like this, Jesse. I remember him the way he used to be—funny, brave, smart—and it makes me so sad that the man I fell in love with is gone. All I can say in his defense is that losing a child is the worst pain a parent can experience, and losing Travis the way we did … it changed your father. It changed both of us.”
She presses her lips together.
“Jesse, I know I haven’t been here for you the way I should have been, and all I can say is I’m sorry. Sometimes it hurts so much to look at you.”
I swallow hard, because this feels like a sharp, burning knife slicing into my heart. I’ve always known deep inside that somehow I caused my parents pain, that somehow it was easier for my mother to run, and my father to drink, than to have to deal with me.
“Sometimes it seems pointless to have anniversaries to remember something I remember every single day.” She gazes over my shoulder at the rain streaming down outside the window.
She shakes her head and turns back to me. “The city is planning a memorial service for the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11. They’ve always done something small to remember the date, but the new town c
ouncil has decided to do something bigger this year. They want to do something special for Travis, and they want us to come and speak about him.”
“I’m sure Dad thought that was a spectacularly wonderful idea,” I say, my voice bitter.
She smiles slightly, because we both understand Dad, whether we want to or not.
“Actually, we got into a pretty spectacular fight about it. I can’t do it anymore, Jesse. I see what your father has done to you—I mean, look what you did! I still … can’t believe it.” Her voice drops. “I used to tell myself that he wasn’t affecting you, the things he said, especially when you had friends like Emi and Teeny. It was like you were standing up to him in your own quiet way, befriending people you knew he wouldn’t like. But now I see you were being affected. I’ve let him do this to you all these years, and I can’t stand by any longer. I’m leaving. We’re leaving. I’ve prayed about it, and we’re going to stay at Mary’s apartment until something changes. Until everything changes. Until he’s back to the way he used to be. I refuse to live with him like this. And I don’t want you to either.”
“You’re leaving Dad?” I ask, and my voice sounds young and small because I can’t believe this is happening.
“Yes.” She stands, and adjusts her skirt, a quick, determined movement. “We agreed that I would tell you. I moved my things out today. I think you should stay tonight and say good-bye to him, but it’s up to you. If you want to come with me now, I’ll help you pack.”
“I …” My thoughts swirl, chaotic and hot, a fire burning out of control. “But I don’t want to leave.” Even as I say the words I’m surprised to hear them.
But it’s true. My home is the only place I feel safe. I’m caught in a tornado filled with the jagged pieces of my life, and I need a place to hunker down. I can’t lose that right now.
She stares at me in surprise. “You want—” She clears her throat. “You want to stay with your father?”
