I said, “I think Dad’s too busy to come say good night to me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Rowen gave me one of his signature smiles, looking triumphant.
We retreated into our respective tents, but shortly I was out again, following Lori and Minh to the communal bathrooms. The queue wasn’t too bad this time, and as I waited for my turn I listened around, hoping to catch the latest gossip about today’s events. But it was just usual dig-camp stuff. It was a bit odd though that no one was talking about the French tourist who was now recovering in a Dubai hospital.
Even after washing my face twice, I still kept finding random grains of sand behind my ears and around my nose. The showers were occupied, and I was restless. Before coming to the bathroom, I’d attempted to brush the sand out of my hair, but, as a result, my locks started resembling rats’ tails. This was the first time I’d had long hair on a dig. I realized now why most girls out here wore their hair in low and tight buns twisted at the nape of their neck, their heads covered with baseball caps. With a sigh, I stuck my head under the faucet and worked soap through my roots before rinsing it all out. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get the camp’s water-pump system clogged with sand, but it was too late now. At least I was clean.
With my wet hair slapping around my cheeks and water running in rivulets down my back, I rushed to return to my tent. The desert air was different now. It smelled of ozone. I shivered in the wind that had intensified while I was busy cleaning myself. I was relieved to return to the tent, where I changed into my sleeping gear of stretched-out yoga pants and a singlet and attempted to towel-dry my hair.
Lori and Minh were already back there, sitting on a blanket spread on the floor and taking turns painting each other’s toenails. Both girls were already wearing their pajamas. Lori, ever the beauty queen, had her hair up and secured with a sparkly band matching her glittery black Victoria’s Secret shorts and fuchsia tank top. Her skin gleamed, smelling of citrus-scented lotion. Minh, the only child of a laid-back hipster dad and a New Age mom, was clad in her cotton workout pants and a tee I saw her wear outside sometimes. Apparently it doubled as a pajama piece.
I came to join them on the floor. “Aren’t you two superhot in those?” Lori asked, casting a judgmental look at our pants-covered legs. She reached out to pat Minh’s knee.
“I’m fine and perfect. Thanks for your concern and for feeling me up.” Minh pulled her legs into a relaxed lotus pose. She finished with Lori’s toenails and started putting away her manicure kit.
“So, Alif,” Lori said, her eyes focusing on me, “did you have some kind of breakthrough with Tommy? I couldn’t help but notice he was eyeing you during meals today.”
“If having a conversation with him that lasted longer than ten seconds can count as a breakthrough, then yes?” I offered, my shoulder blades tensing. “But what’s more interesting is what’s going on with you and Rowen.”
Next to me, Minh shivered.
Lori blushed. Blushed. “Can I tell you two a secret?”
Minh and I waited. Not looking at either of us, Lori whispered, “I like him. I like him a lot.”
“And does he like you a lot too?” Minh raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips. I doubted Lori noticed the note of desperation in Minh’s question. I should’ve never asked Lori about Rowen, but it was too late now. When Lori spoke again, she sounded cautious but also bursting with suppressed feeling. This was different, I thought, not at all how she’d behaved when she’d reported to us every little detail about guys she’d dated before. “I think so. I hope so. This is still recent. And unexpected … I think he might be the one. I know, I know how ridiculous this sounds, but this is how I’m feeling right now.”
“When’s the wedding?” Minh deadpanned.
“Shut up, okay?” Lori’s cheeks were turning a vicious red.
Luke’s and Rowen’s voices preceded their entrance into our tent. Rowen already reeked of alcohol, while Luke brought with him a subtle aftershave-and-soap scent that reminded me of our kiss. A knowing smile playing on his lips, Rowen approached Lori and helped her off the floor. The two of them went to sprawl on Lori’s bed, their backs against the tent’s wall. That left me with Minh and Luke. The three of us managed to fit on my bed, me ending up wedged in between the two of them. It felt cozy and safe. Luke’s knees were brushing against mine, setting me off to search for a spark of electricity in our touch, but all I felt was Luke’s minty breath and the infernal heat seeping in from outside. Whatever chemicals my body had generated yesterday when I was making out with Luke must’ve been just an accident.
Talking and laughing, we passed around the bottle of cheap whiskey Rowen had squirreled away from the kitchen. As it turned out, the booze came from a secret cache of some unwitting volunteer who’d gotten distracted while on breakfast cleanup duty. The alcohol’s burn assaulted my throat, making my heart run faster and my words come out slurred. I found myself watching Luke’s mouth with fascination. My fixation must’ve been obvious to Luke because his lips quirked into an obnoxious grin. I was giggling like the tipsy fool I was. Alcohol loosening our tongues, we talked about our worries, dreams, and fears. Everything was kind of perfect until, much to my dread, Lori brought up my stupid crush on Tommy again. That wiped the goofy smile from Luke’s face and brought tension back into our tent.
AND THE WIND HOWLED
After we emptied the bottle (Lori and the boys pulling more than their fair shares), Rowen decided to treat us to the supply of camel-shaped chocolates he’d stocked up on in the Dubai airport. Somehow the chocolate wasn’t a melted mess.
Minh’s mouth was open in shock as Rowen kept producing more and more candy from his apparently bottomless pockets. “How much of that stuff did you actually get?”
He shrugged. “Enough for a few days?”
Alcohol lowered our inhibitions to the point where we decided to play spin the bottle. For a second there, I was a giddy summer camper, about to be kissed for the first time. We went for a few rounds. Every time Lori or Rowen got to spin, they managed to get the bottle pointing at each other. When I sent the bottle spinning, it ended up pointing at Luke, so I leaned over to give him a peck on a cheek. But he shifted his head at the last moment and my lips slid against his. I pulled back immediately, but Luke leaned in, prolonging the kiss amid the cheering and clapping of our friends. When I finally extricated myself from him, he was grinning like the Cheshire cat. I just hoped this wasn’t going to become a problem, this Luke thing. He was starting to get on my nerves.
When my turn came again and the bottle stopped spinning, its tip was set on … Tommy, who had walked into the tent unnoticed. We were busy howling with laughter like a pack of hyenas and didn’t hear him sneak up on us.
“You have to kiss Tommy!” Lori roared, mouth full of candy, words slurring amid fits of hiccupping laughs as she fell to her side.
Tommy watched us, his lips slightly twisting at the sides, like he couldn’t make up his mind—should he judge us or join us? If I weren’t so tipsy, I’d be running out of the tent, crying in mortification. But floating up high on whiskey fumes, I was even bolder than Lori.
“Wanna join us, Thomas?” I asked.
“Where did you get that bottle?” Tommy cringed.
That almost-happy twitch I saw dancing on his lips disappeared. Fine, be a grown-up.
Under Tommy’s molten gaze, the five of us exchanged nervous glances, trying to single out the sacrificial lamb to blame for the smuggling of alcohol. A weird sound, like raindrops hitting the tent, ate away at my already weakened concentration.
“It doesn’t rain here much, does it?” Minh asked, following her question with a loud hiccup that made everyone except Tommy giggle. My eyes followed him as he opened the tent’s door a smidge and took a peek outside. He was suddenly packed with tension—I saw it in the way his muscles stretched under the fabric of his shirt.
A sand-filled whirling cloud danced outside the tent.
&
nbsp; “Shit … Desert storm!” Tommy rolled down his sleeves and, before stepping outside, gave me a sharp look. “Don’t leave the tent!” He grabbed the baseball cap off his head and covered his nose and mouth with it. Then he dashed out of the tent, leaving us drunk and worried.
* * *
It hit the camp without any more warning than that.
One second the night was dead quiet and lying in wait, and the next, a vicious storm hollered like a feral animal trapped in a barbwire cage. I counted my breaths after Tommy left the tent. On the count of forty, a man screamed outside. A deranged, no-nonsense kind of scream that, I imagined, came from limbs being torn apart and clothes set ablaze. Whoever was screaming, he couldn’t have been that far from our tent. But it was not the agony in the scream that cut me raw. No, it was the strange fact that as the wind began throwing sand against the tent, I could still hear it with dead clarity: Someone was calling my name.
Another scream followed while I was deliberating what to do. The voice of the screamer … It sounded a lot like my father. This revelation exiled all rational thought from my head, and, moving on autopilot, I got up from the floor and started pacing back and forth, stopping only when my eyes fell on my towel, still wet from when I’d used it to dry my hair. This will work. I placed the towel against my mouth like Tommy did with his cap and headed for the exit.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Minh launched herself out of her spot on the floor. “Tommy said not to go outside, right? It wasn’t just my boozed-out imagination. He was definitely asking us to stay put…”
“I know … but didn’t you hear it just now?” I stopped by the tent’s door and listened. It came again, that scream. Closer than before. “It’s my dad. He’s calling for me!”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Alif.” Lori sounded less drunk now. “It’s just the wind.”
“I disagree.” Rowen untangled himself from Lori and came to stand by my side. He shared my pensive stance and listened. That scream (or was it really just the howl of the wind?) played out again. Aaaliiif!
“That’s it. I’m going out!” I informed my friends as I grabbed the tent’s door, preparing to tear it back.
“Okay, but we’re coming with you!” Minh said, gathering her long hair into a low bun. She picked up a trendy cotton scarf from the top of her open luggage and nodded at me in affirmation.
“But Tommy said to stay here.” Lori’s whine was suddenly the voice of reason in our group. But Lori didn’t engage in battles she couldn’t win—so she moved to join us. We had to wait as she searched for a piece of fabric to protect her airways. She settled on a red gauzy scarf. Luke and Rowen didn’t have much of a choice but to use what was available in our tent, so they ended up with some random pieces of clothing pressed against their mouths and noses. All together we looked like a motley crew of oddballs who had no business going out into the sandstorm.
“If we stay close to the tent and just look around, we should be fine,” Luke spoke for the first time since Tommy left. He didn’t come off certain at all.
“You don’t have to come, Luke.” I didn’t wait for his reply and just stepped out of the tent, unable and unwilling to wait any longer. I felt all the might of the desert’s anger when the sand-filled wind punched me square in the face, almost knocking me off my feet. In response, I squinted and pressed the towel firmer against my mouth and nose. The wind was rushing into my ears and slapping at my exposed hands, making my skin prickle. I wished I had one of those surfer onesies that came with a tight hood, designed to cover one’s head and ears. The sand was everywhere, and it hurt like hell, even through my clothes. Despite the damp towel I held against my face, sharp dust particles were invading my mouth, slowly coating my tongue and throat.
The only illumination came from the clattering lamps sitting atop electricity poles and on the sides of some tents. But many lamps were already broken, light fading.
In the sand-fueled haze, people were shapeless shadows dashing in all directions. Caught up in their chaotic movement, I ran too, stopping only when a broken piece of debris blocked my way. Minh smacked right into my back, the impact bringing me to my knees. I howled in pain as skin scraped right off my legs. Someone picked me up off the ground. I glimpsed Luke’s face hovering above mine. When he let go, I turned to look back the way we came and could barely see the outline of our tent in the night. Another powerful gust of wind slammed into me, and it took all my strength and stubbornness to stay upright. I didn’t hear or see her fall, but Lori was on the ground next to my feet. Rowen and Minh were helping her up. Going outside had been a bad idea, I thought, but then I saw something—a gigantic mass of gleaming metal coming our way, flying, swirling in the dust storm. This huge object turned out to be one of those four-wheel drives the camp had at its disposal. How could this be possible? Not giving me enough time to consider the question, the car crashed right on top of our tent, smashing it flat against the ground, only feet away from where we huddled together.
“Oh my fucking…” Lori’s eyes cemented on the scene of total destruction, and she dropped the hand pressing the scarf against her mouth. This momentary lapse of control was enough to get a clump of dirt in her face. Lori bent over and coughed and coughed and coughed before jerking her hand back up and pushing the scarf against her face again, this time all the way up to her eyes.
The specks of sand were glittering in the eerie darkness, yellow dust already claiming the four-wheel drive and the smashed tent underneath it. I sensed the warmth of someone’s hand on my elbow just as their fingers closed around my arm. I was being dragged away. A glance over my shoulder revealed a face partly hidden behind a familiar baseball cap.
“Follow me!” Tommy yelled out. And we ran.
I trained my eyes on the ground, searching for any obstructions. My friends were keeping up—when I turned to look back I’d get an occasional view of Luke’s pale arms or Minh’s long black hair flying, freed from her bun by the wind. There were occasional screams, panicked faces appearing out of the swirls of sand and then vanishing, all while the walls of sand around me thickened. The longer I stared into the sandstorm, the more it seemed to be moving in an odd pattern—lifting things off the ground and throwing them, like a toddler having a tantrum. Like the sand had a mind of its own.
In all this mess, I saw a body.
Or more like a torso, a bloodied white tee pulled up halfway. Someone was stuck under a pole that lay flat on the ground. The electrical lamp on the pole’s end was still on but fizzling out. In its dancing light, I could see that the body belonged to a young woman. I gasped into my towel. I’d never seen a dead body before. Just as the first wave of nausea roiled inside my chest, the dead girl squirmed.
She twisted her head and met my eyes. Hers lips were moving. I strained to hear what the girl was saying, but the relentless wind was swallowing all sound. I rushed closer to her while everyone else ran in the opposite direction, away from the camp—and from me.
I tied my towel around my neck before scooping my hands under the pole in an attempt to lift it. But the pole must’ve weighed a ton. Powerless tears rushed down my face. The towel fell away from my mouth, and with my face no longer protected, the sand was stinging my wet cheeks, getting into my nostrils, blinding me, making it hard to breathe. I knew that what I was trying to do was useless, but whatever possessed me earlier made me push at the pole again and again until my left shoulder gave out.
I didn’t know real physical pain until then. I screamed as fire seared through my arm but had to shut my mouth tight, fast. I spat on the ground, but my tongue and the insides of my mouth were caked with sand. The girl who was splayed on the ground at my feet lowered her head flat against the earth and closed her eyes. She was giving up.
“Try this…”
I swung my head to find Tommy. He was leaning over me. I raised my eyes to his outstretched hand, clutching some mechanical contraption. After a second of staring at it, I realized it was a manual car lift. I didn�
�t know where Tommy got that from, didn’t have time to ask, didn’t care. I was just grateful that the shoulder that got busted and was now locked in a state of permanent agony was my left—and I am right-handed. With my left arm hanging limp, I used my right to grab the car jack from Tommy. But when I attempted to wedge the tool between the trembling ground and the pole, another jolt of pain hit me from my injured arm. Catching a glimpse of my grimacing face, Tommy gently pushed me aside and took over.
Ungraceful and weak against the monstrous storm, I sat down on the ground while Tommy fitted the car lift against the pole and gave it a push. Once. Twice. Again. Again. When Tommy had managed to lift the pole an inch or two, it was up to the girl to save herself. Her eyes fluttered open. She started to move, slowly escaping her prison.
“How badly are you hurt?” I yelled into her ear. But only a choked scream left her mouth. Her eyes, widening in panic or confusion, were locked in on something behind me.
A powerful gust of wind slammed into my back. It hurt so badly it was like I was in the center of a black hole, compacted and torn apart at once. Tommy turned to see what was happening, and I couldn’t stop watching his face as it darkened with understanding. His eyes were beautifully tragic, reflecting the strange blackness creeping up over us. This was the last thing my mind captured as a memory from that night. A suffocating shadow crawled over me. Then chaos reigned.
OUT OF COMFORT ZONE
The thing about sandstorms is that they are fast, furious, and unpredictable. I’d heard sandstorm terror stories from my mother and father both, but I hadn’t actually experienced one myself. Now I could mark that off my list of experiences to have before turning eighteen. It was not a pleasant experience. I could’ve done without it.
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