Just yesterday, Amar came home from school and announced that his best friend, Mark, had gotten new shoes. Mark was in Amar’s third-grade class, and his first real friend. Amar often talked about Mark. How Mark was allowed to play video games every day. How Mark had the latest console. Mark got to eat in front of the TV. Baba told him that meant Mark was spoiled, not special. There was a rule in their house that Baba only let them bend on rare occasions: they were not allowed to go over to their friends’ houses, they could only see them at school. Baba told them, “There is no such thing as friends, only family, and only family will never desert you.”
Hadia disliked it when Baba said this, it was untrue and unfair, especially because Baba had friends from work and friends from mosque, who he was closer to than Mumma was to her few friends. And besides, Hadia thought, she had Danielle, who had been her friend since the first grade, and even now that they were in seventh grade and only saw each other during lunch or in PE, Danielle slowed her pace while running the mile to jog alongside Hadia, and if their classmates pointed to Hadia’s head and asked her, “But aren’t you dying under that thing?” it was Danielle who stood up to defend her, Danielle who shouted back at them, “Does anyone ever ask you if you’re dying in your clothes?”
Hadia was the only girl in their grade who had never spent a night at a friend’s house, had never spent a Saturday with one either, swinging in the park or wandering malls and trying on lip gloss and doing whatever else it was that girls did together. Instead, Hadia and Danielle shared a slam book that they decorated and filled with quizzes and journal entries written like letters to each other, and on weekends, Danielle called the house phone and Hadia would take the phone into her closet and pray to God that no one would pick up and listen in, and if Amar did, they had code names for everyone and their own version of pig latin.
Still, sometimes Hadia wondered if it was true, or possible, that someone who was not in her family could ever really love her. Baba’s words made her think of her home like a fortress they could only leave to go to school or mosque or to the home of a family friend who spoke their language, and in this fortress she and her siblings were lucky, at least, to have each other.
Last night, before dinner, while Hadia was studying for her math test, Amar had knocked on her bedroom door and asked, “Do you think I should ask Baba to get the shoes for me?”
Amar always trusted her to know how their parents would react to things that he had done or wanted to do, as though he were not also their child who could predict them. She felt guilty about how little patience she had for her brother now. She used to appreciate his lingering in her doorway, how he would pause between his stories, thinking of what to say next, as if just speaking to her was the important thing. She did not miss their old games but did miss wanting to play them, wanting to run in their backyard together until she was out of breath. Amar felt it too. Sometimes the three of them would play again but Hadia would find an excuse to cut the game short, or would injure her character and die a tragic death, despite her siblings begging her to find a cure.
“How much are they?” she asked.
“A hundred and fifty dollars,” he mumbled, so fast he blurred the numbers together. He watched her with a worried look on his face, as though her response would determine if he should have hope.
It was never going to happen. Mumma bought them shoes from the cheap shoe stores; they were allowed one pair a year, usually in the fall before school began, and they wore them until they became too tight or until the next school year.
“Definitely,” she said, just so he would let her study in peace, but when he jumped off her desk and almost ran out the room, she did not know why she had said it.
That night at dinner Amar looked up at Baba from time to time. Mumma refilled bowls and brought the dishes out to the table, still steaming, rice and dhaal and talawa gosh, the dishes she cooked so often. She poured more for Amar before taking a seat. Amar did not even thank her. Hadia reached across the table to help herself to more rice. And then Amar asked for the shoes, and because her home was given to arguments, in the way she imagined other homes might be given to laughter, Amar continued to ask even after Baba refused him, his pleas growing more desperate as Baba’s request to not be tested turned into a firm command.
“Are these the hundred and fifty dollar shoes?” Huda asked him.
Amar glared at Huda, then looked to Baba to see if he had reacted. Mumma had stopped eating but she did not look up from her plate. They knew Baba. Knew which of Baba’s faces to not push further, knew that his reaction depended on how stressful his day had been. But Amar never knew when to stop. Hadia wiped her hand on her napkin so she could reach beneath the table to pat him, to warn him before it was too late.
“Baba, just this once can you—”
It was too late.
“Enough,” Baba barked and banged his hand on the table and their dishes rattled. The light above them flickered. For a split second there was nothing but dark and the water in their glasses sloshed up before settling again.
“Do not ask me again,” Baba yelled at him, his voice the rough and loud one, the one that made Hadia jump no matter how many times she had heard it, even when she expected it, even when it was not directed at her. In these moments she hated her father. How the fury he was capable of contorted his features and made his skin flush red. The little gems that dangled from the chandelier trembled.
“There is no sense in shoes that are over a hundred dollars. No sense,” Baba said furiously.
Amar turned to Huda and spat out, “I hate you.”
“What did you say?” Baba yelled.
“He said he hated me.” Huda sat up in her chair.
“I heard what he said,” Baba snapped at her.
Huda opened her mouth to argue but saw how Baba glared at her. Even Mumma looked at Huda angrily. And Hadia decided in that moment that she too hated them all—her brother, who made everything difficult for himself. Her mother, who turned against her own children just to stand by her husband. Huda with the smug look on her face, and how provoking Amar’s anger was like a game to her. They were all cruel to each other. They could not even get through one dinner. She stared at the food on her plate and made a silent pact with herself: she would work hard, she would study, and she would find herself a new family. A new house that never got angry, a home where weeks would pass without a voice raised.
“What did you say, Amar?” Baba asked Amar again.
Amar stared at his plate. His face was blank. He pushed his plate forward. He lost his appetite so quickly. Hadia could see the way his eyes filled with tears but he bit the inside of his cheek so he would not cry.
“Amar, I asked you a question,” Baba shouted. “Look at me.”
He did not look up. No one in their family was as stubborn as Amar. He was even more stubborn than their father. His lip quivered and what had hardened in Hadia a moment ago suddenly softened: she did not hate him, she took back the thought, reached under the table and placed her hand on his knee, pressed on it just a little.
“You never tell your sisters you hate them, do you understand?” Baba said, pointing his finger at Amar.
Amar still did not flinch. “Did you hear me?” Baba kept shouting. Underneath the table, out of sight, Amar placed his hand, so much smaller than hers, on top of Hadia’s and squeezed it.
* * *
SO WHEN SHE wakes the next morning to see pamphlets with facts and testimonials slipped under their doors, and posters taped all over the home, she is surprised. While the rest of them slept, Amar had taken a stack of Baba’s good printer paper and begun his campaign. By midday, a petition circulates, five blank spaces under the line: WE, THE PEOPLE OF OUR HOUSE, BELIEVE AMAR DESERVES THE SHOES, everyone signing their name except Baba. Mumma asks Amar to come to lunch and Amar shouts from upstairs that he is protesting peacefully, and that means he will not eat, and Hadia is sent with a plate that she sets by his door. An hour later, it is found empty in the sink. And even though Baba had been so adamantly against Amar asking for the shoes last night, he remains silent during Amar’s campaign, and Hadia wonders if he is curious to see how far Amar will go.