Mark shrugs, then says, “He sure looks like a fucking terrorist.”
Amar punches him in the face. And again. So fast and so hard that Mark’s head hits the locker behind him and he crumples to the floor, eyes wide and wild, one hand covering his mouth. Grant and Brandon look from Amar to Mark, as if unsure what to do. Even Amar does not know what to do. If he should run. His hand hurts so much so he holds it. Mark moves his hand and there is blood on his teeth, blood on his lip. Soon it is on his chin, on the collar of his shirt, and he holds his fingers over his mouth as if to stop it. Then there are arms around Amar and he is lifted off the floor, Brandon has picked him up and Amar begins to kick, but he can’t move his hands. Grant is looking at him as if he is pleased for this opportunity, so pleased, and he steps toward Amar, and then it is Amar who is receiving punch after punch after punch.
* * *
IT HURTS TO touch his face in the nurse’s room so he sits with his hands in his lap, careful to not rest the back of his head against the wall either, a tenderness there he is sure will become a bump. He waits with the lights turned off. He focuses in and out at the charts of what to eat, the poster of the muscles in the body and the bones, the glass containers with the cotton balls and wooden sticks. He blurs his sight and then focuses on the line of the sink, blurs and then the tick, that shift that announces another minute has passed. The nurse is being very kind to him. Her name is Mrs. Rose. She checks on him even after she has applied the bandage on his eyebrow and chin, given him a tissue to hold up to his split lip.
“What did he say?” Amar asks her after she calls his father.
“He just listened.” Mrs. Rose smiles sadly at him.
When she was dabbing at his eyebrow she kept saying, “Oh, boy, oh dear. What have you boys done to each other?”
Everywhere she dabbed stung. He wanted to cry but could not. He wanted to bite his lip but that hurt too. Then, when she was done, she dropped her voice into a whisper and pointed at him and she said, “You’re a strong young man. Don’t listen to any hateful voice. That’s what I always tell my son.”
He nodded at her. And only then did he almost cry. Maybe the principal had told her his side of the story. Mark, Grant, and Brandon just said that he had lunged at Mark, and Grant and Brandon had retaliated to protect him.
“Deplorable behavior,” his principal had said, after announcing all four of them were suspended equally, “absolutely unacceptable.”
Grant and Brandon, who had not a single scratch on them, were sent home, and Mrs. Rose separated Mark and Amar. All four of them could not return for a whole week.
“If anything like this happens again,” the principal warned, “you will all be expelled.”
He wishes Mumma were home and that she could pick him up instead. Mumma would know what to say and would not get mad at him. But she is so far away and already so worried about them he can’t even tell her what happened. What face will he greet her with when she returns? His eyebrow is split open. His forehead has a bruise so large it pains him to even touch it. His mouth tastes like blood. Mrs. Rose had said, you might be needing stitches, honey. He liked her voice; it was warm and she sweetened her sentences by calling him honey or sugar.
It has been three days since September eleventh. That morning Amar was almost ready for school, half-asleep and still eating his cereal, trying to remember if he had packed all his soccer gear for practice after school. He dabbed at the surface of his milk with his spoon, watched the little rings of cereal sink and rise up again. It was Mumma who called from India and told Baba to turn on the news immediately.
The four of them watched as the same image looped, and the newscasters repeated the same lines: Something devastating has happened. Baba took a seat on the floor. The towers and the dark plumes of smoke. Not a normal flight pattern of planes, another newscaster said. Are we going to go to school? Huda asked. They were going to be late. Baba did not reply. They watched for hours. Every time the plane appeared, a streak of dark on the screen, it felt impossible that it would happen, and then it did, and then it kept happening. The president announced it was an apparent act of terrorism. Oh God, Hadia said next to him. She pressed her fingers into her wrist the way he hated, dug her nails like she wanted to hurt herself. Please don’t let them be Muslims, Hadia said. Why would you even say that? Amar wanted to say to her, but when he saw Baba’s nod he knew not to. Soon they saw that all the hijackers were Saudi, that their names were the same names that belonged to people in their community, and Huda just repeated, this is horrible, how could this have happened?
That night Baba told them that they had to go to school the next day, but that Hadia and Huda could not wear their hijabs. “We don’t know how people will react,” he said. “We don’t know where they will direct their anger if they are afraid.”
Huda started to cry. Huda never cried. Hadia put her hand on Huda’s shoulder.
“I refuse,” Hadia said. “What have we done?”
“Please,” Baba asked her. “Please. Listen to me.”
He had never said please before. His voice, the expression on his face—he was unrecognizable. None of them spoke. Hadia and Huda went into a bedroom, closed the door. I hate them, Amar thought, picturing the terrorists they showed on TV, I hate them more than I’ve ever hated anyone. The next morning Baba drove them to school. They were all quiet. Huda wore one of Baba’s old, faded baseball caps from a work retreat. Hadia wore her hair in a bun, clipped back so none of it fell into her face. Their eyes had the red and swollen look of having cried the night before. They looked out the window, Huda biting her bottom lip the whole drive.
But Baba did nothing to change his own appearance. His beard was always kept trimmed and neat, so he would look professional for work but still not break the religious rule of having one. But his beard could make him look like the men on TV who had ruined everything. Amar would ask him to shave it off. It would be no different than his sisters taking off their scarves.
* * *
AT HOME, HE allows Hadia to enter only after her hundredth knock. He had been lying under the covers with the blinds closed, a pillow over his face. Maybe for hours. His father drove him home and Amar said almost nothing the whole ride. He felt like a shell that had snapped shut. His father knocked immediately after he had locked himself in his room, barricaded the door with a chair in front of it, but Amar ignored him. He did not want to see his father.
But when Hadia says, “It’s me, Amar. Let me in?” he goes to his door, moves the chair, unlocks it, and rushes back to his bed and puts the pillow and blanket over his face again before he replies, “Fine.”
Soon he feels Hadia’s weight on the bed as she takes a seat on the edge. She does not say anything. He does not want to explain, though Baba has probably already told her. There is another knock and before he can reply he hears the door open and Huda whispering, “Is he okay?”
Beneath the covers he smiles. The corner of his lip feels ripped, it stings to move his mouth. He keeps touching it with the tip of his tongue, tasting that bitter, coppery taste.
Hadia’s voice is saying, “Amar? Do you want anything?”
Her voice is soft. His head is pounding. He wants more painkillers. He took four even though the directions said to take two every four hours. It was so painful he did not care. He lifts the pillow from his face and sits up.
“Oh God.” Hadia flinches. She looks like she is going to cry.
“That bad?” he asks.