“There is no chance of my daughter going to a party where there will be dancing and boys present,” he is yelling, and she can see Huda and Amar exchange frightened glances. She is focusing on the line of the staircase, blinking fast. She cannot even argue or lie about the boys that will be there, because Baba is the type to check in on the party, call Dani’s mother twice, or pick her up before sunset and before anyone arrived anyway. The light overhead blurs and unblurs.
Baba points to Huda and Amar and jabs the air. “Look at the example you are setting for your brother and sister. The way you are behaving tonight. How many times have I told you, Hadia? If you are good, they will be good. If you are bad, they will follow you—more than they will ever follow my example, or Mumma’s example.”
“You’re not being fair.”
She should not have spoken: the girlish sound of her own voice makes her cry. She has made herself weak in front of him. She has lost. She turns from him and runs past Mumma, who she knows will never take her side, will only harp on the fact that she has been batamiz on a holy night. That she has caused him stress and pain. She runs past Huda and Amar and into her own room, where she slams the door and dissolves into a fit of quiet sobs on her bed, allows the thoughts that anger her and sadden her and frighten her to enter: that she hates Baba, hates her limited life. She only wanted to go to the party to be there for Dani, but now she will meet all the boys in the world just to spite Baba, she will shave half her head and dye the rest electric blue—but even that will not be enough because she will never escape this place unless she runs from it.
She opens her window wide and lets the cool air in. She will cry until she is tired. Until her face swells and her eyes become as red as her nose. Maybe she will not join them for the nazr. Why can’t she continue to throw a fit like Amar, scream back at Baba until her voice is hoarse, bang the walls and furniture until something breaks. Why instead does she wait, swallow her pride and anger, and return to Baba not hopeful that he will give her what she originally asked for, but that he will not hold having asked against her.
She takes out the strand of her hair tucked behind the rest that really has been dyed an electric blue, and curls it around her finger. She dyed it with Dani last week, when Dani decided she would no longer go by Danielle and chopped off her hair so it was short like a boy’s, bleached it and then dyed her bangs blue with Hadia’s help in the bathroom after school. Baba had been away on a business trip, and it had been easy to convince Mumma that she had to work on a group project. She could not even enjoy her time in the bathroom with Dani. Her mind had wandered, wondering what the group project could be, what she would say they had accomplished by the end of their time together.
“Your turn?” Dani asked, when they were seated on the edge of the bathtub. Dani’s hair was wrapped in foil because they had seen that done in salons and thought it might help.
“Just a little bit,” Hadia said. Not that anyone would see, tucked beneath her scarf as it would be. At home she wore her hair down. But there, behind her left ear, visible only if pulled out or if her hair was lifted up, was her secret strand of electric blue. She showed only Huda. She could not trust telling Amar, who was in trouble so often he might blurt out the incriminating evidence to barter his punishment. Hadia loved to look at it before she fell asleep, loved twisting it around her finger and letting the dim light make it appear a beautiful, magnetic blue.
Dani’s sweet sixteen is an event they have spent lunchtimes brainstorming plans for. It will be terrible if she cannot go. Their friendship had been through various transformations since elementary school, but each time they emerged even closer. Now Danielle is changing again: throwing out her old clothes and wearing dark eyeliner, confessing to getting drunk with some of the other girls from school, but Hadia doesn’t care—Dani can change into any version of herself and go by a new name and she will still be the one Hadia looks for in the lunchroom.
Hadia waits until her thoughts slow into sounds: Mumma in the kitchen preparing for the nazr with Huda, Amar bouncing his tennis ball against the wall, a car passing too fast. She waits until Baba is in his study to tiptoe downstairs. The night air is cold and Hadia is careful when releasing the handle of the front door behind her, so slowly it makes no click as it closes. Wind rustling the leaves. And all the stems of the flowers bent, their buds closed to brace themselves. She is wearing a thin cotton shirt and jeans. She should have worn a sweater, so she could camp out longer, but when she looks down at the goose bumps on her arms, she thinks: good, now they will know how I would rather shiver than come back inside.
It is pathetic that leaving her home without telling anyone is a thrill. She is fifteen. Standing in her own front yard should not give her that fleeting sense of freedom her friends have begun to enjoy—from attending parties she is not allowed to go to, skipping classes she does not miss. She inhales the cold air. She steps out until going any farther means crossing the indent that marks the end of the driveway and the beginning of the sidewalk. Here she stops. The indent is filled with dirt and fragments of twigs and shriveled-up weeds. Barefoot, she presses her toes against the line. She looks back at her house: her bedroom light left on, Amar’s too. Bright, big moon. Sky dark with patches of lighter blue. And gray clouds, thin streaks of them. Innumerable tiny stars. How can she be upset when the world looks like this?
She sits on their driveway and then lies down, her head against the hard, rough pavement. She has lived here as long as she can remember. This is her patch of land on this big Earth. There is comfort in the feel of her entire body stretched out against the cool concrete. How furious Baba would be if he looked out a window and saw her. What would the neighborhood think of him, for having a daughter who did something like that? She smiles a little. But he won’t come for her. Not after they have fought. He won’t try to appease her. He will wait for the apology that is his right, simply because he is older, because he is her father, and a father is deserving of respect regardless of how she feels about his rules and the logic he uses to arrive at them.
But tomorrow, after she has apologized, she knows Baba will come straight to her room after work and he will close the door behind him. He will present to her a blended ice drink he knows she loves that costs almost five dollars each, or a book she has not yet read, or a porcelain figurine of some kind that has less to do with her and more to do with what a girl might expect to want—a girl holding her puppy, two children sitting back-to-back reading with their knees up on a bed of grass. The figurines are not inexpensive, but they are also not necessary. What good does it do to give me a gift now, she will think, when all I wanted was just for things to be another way yesterday. Still, there was always a reluctant delight in rising from her desk to claim her frozen drink or little figurine. In part, her delight came from knowing that Huda was not getting one and Amar was not getting one, nor would he. Baba loved him in ways Amar was blind to.
Baba always looked relieved when she complimented the figurine or took a sip of the drink. He would ask, “Is it the flavor you like?”
Even if it wasn’t she would nod and thank him. She wanted to be firmer, or stay angry like Amar, without letting it so easily dissolve into guilt. But when she pictured her father stopping off at the store on his way home from work, wandering the aisles searching for something that he thought she might like, feeling bad for what had passed between them, though he would never be able to tell her so—she could not do anything but accept the gift, despite knowing her place in the transaction, knowing what fight she was giving up on completely.
“Drink it secretly,” he’d remind her. “Don’t tell Mumma I am ruining your appetite, or giving you caffeine at night.”