ESCAPE
I have to leave the apartment after the conversation with my mother—we both need space. But I only make it as far as the bottom of the stairs before it occurs to me that I have nowhere to go.
I’ve been hiding out at the school library when I want to avoid going home during the week, but today is Sunday, so it’s not open. How unlucky for me that in this land of 24-7, my one refuge seems to be the only place that ever closes. That I’ve managed to survive over two months’ worth of weekends trapped in the apartment now strikes me as a monumental accomplishment—one that can’t be repeated. I’ll surely go mad if I don’t escape, even for just a few hours.
It’s warm out, but I pull the hood of my sweatshirt over my head anyway. It’s the closest I’ve come to wearing a veil since I got here, and it feels unexpectedly comforting. Where to go? I pace in the parking lot in front of our building, doing indecisive laps until I notice a white-haired woman standing by her car, glaring at me. She clutches her purse to her chest, letting go only long enough to press the Lock button on her keychain. Three times. Beep. Beep. Beep. She seems to be doing it for my benefit, so I raise a hand in greeting. My gesture sends her scurrying across the lot, shooting glances back at me every few feet until she’s inside.
She thought I was waiting around to steal something! The thought makes me laugh out loud even as it stings. How far I’ve fallen. From princess to thief.
The dizzying descent that is my life threatens to overwhelm me, and even with nowhere to go, I start to run.
It’s a means of escape, but it only serves to make me feel more foreign and more vulnerable. Where I’m from, girls are not encouraged to be athletic. Our cloaks and veils keep us sedate, and there is no track practice for us—there are no jogs through the park. I feel the consequence of this passive life now, and even the brief sprint leaves me gasping. My flight is short-lived.
My only memory of running is as a child, racing down long corridors and clambering up back staircases to avoid my uncle when he visited. Even then I hated him, hated his constant lectures and his mean slaps and pinches.
“You shouldn’t let her run wild like this,” he used to say to my father, talking above me, about me, as if I weren’t even in the room. “She needs to learn her place. It’s just going to be more difficult the older she gets.” I could never be as invisible as he wanted.
Sometimes my father defended me. “Laila is fine. She’s just a spirited child.” But more often, especially as I grew older, he just frowned and waved me out of the room. It was better for all of us when I ran away at the first hint of my uncle’s arrival in our home—his visits becoming louder and more frequent toward the end. That way I wasn’t forced to hear either his tirades or my father’s silence.
I bend over, hands on my knees, and try to catch my breath. I’ve made it only a pathetic few blocks—not nearly far enough to escape anything. Where to go? I regret not bringing my laptop with me when I stormed out—I could at least find somewhere with free wifi to pass the time. I’m too proud to go back for it, though; my exit was too haughty to repeat.
I finally settle on the county library. I have only a vague idea of where it is, and it takes me nearly an hour and three wrong turns to get there. I might have tried taking a bus, but I have no money and I still find the cryptic schedules daunting. As I walk, I watch from the sidewalk as deserted buses zoom past me. They’re empty this early on a Sunday, but they still have no room for the likes of me.
Today, I don’t mind feeling lost. Today, for the first time in my lifetime of minders, maids, and protectors, I feel a sense of relief in being alone and adrift.
But even so, I’m sweaty and irritable when I finally make it to the library. The arctic blast of the air-conditioning feels almost painful as I walk into the building. Why must everything be kept at such temperature extremes here? Americans never seem to be at peace with their surroundings—they’re always heating or cooling or just constantly changing everything to meet their whims. Watching their industriousness exhausts me, and sometimes I want to shout out, to tell them to just be. But I know I have no right to criticize. Everyone needs to feel some degree of control over their universe, and supercooling a room is a relatively benign way of achieving that, I suppose.
This library is cavernous, four times the size of the school’s, and the computer area is far more crowded. I feel like an intruder, and I skulk and eavesdrop pathetically until I understand how the system works. I wait until someone abandons a computer without logging off and then slide into the still-warm seat. Perhaps the woman in the parking lot was right to think me a thief.
My fingers hover over the keyboard—what dangers lurk in foolish searches? But today my quest is simple. I just want news from home. Facts and data, the less personal the better.
The news will have to be impersonal, since there’s no one for me to contact. My barren email in-box is a cruel reminder of how few connections I have in the world. Everyone I ever knew seems to have either died, vanished, or betrayed—in many cases I’m not even certain which. Not that anyone would ever feel safe sending an email anyway—not from my country, where the internet is a small and closely watched place.
Without anyone to contact, I have to rely on filtered, stingy news reports. Recent updates are few; the media is content to let my country’s past describe its present. It seems that not many people in the world care about a far-flung country with too many guns. Not as long as its citizens are only shooting each other, that is.
I scan and skip through pages I’ve seen before. Was it only weeks ago that I first read them in the school library? It feels like ancient history now. I take small comfort in the fact that the few new articles I can find struggle with what to call my uncle. His title tap-dances from “prime minister” to “commander in chief,” and from “newly installed” to “disputed.” The last one gives me hope.
One title is noticeably lacking. There is no “king.”
There never was. It’s not a surprise, of course. I’ve known this now for weeks. But here in this overchilled library a world away, it seems cruelly obvious. My stupidity laid out in black and white. My family’s royalty was a myth I believed for far too long—a fabrication woven for a child’s ears.
A small part of me understands. How does a parent tell a child a truth like my father’s? And some of the lies were at least close to truths. Like royalty’s, my family’s status was passed down from father to son. Like a king’s, my father’s rule was absolute. The only real differences, I suppose, were that my father had no adoring empire and that his was an authority based more on bloodshed than birthright.
Did it start out as a joke? Did my parents concoct a silly bedtime story that went too far? When were they going to tell me the truth?
I push away from the computer. I’m too distracted to focus. My eyes feel jerky and untethered, and the skimpy information online isn’t enough to hold my attention.
As I stand up, I see a familiar face. Ian.
He’s leaning against a bookshelf, looking at me. He lifts his hand hesitantly, as if he hasn’t made up his mind whether he wants to talk. “Laila, hi.”
I smile at him. I’m glad he’s here—a reaction that surprises me. We’ve barely spoken, but there’s something about him that makes me curious. He seems somehow more perceptive than the other American boys I’ve met here. Of course, it might just be those hazel lion’s eyes—I wonder how many personality traits people incorrectly assume from this simple biological quirk.
“Hi. What are you doing here on a Sunday?” It comes out sounding like an accusation—not what I intended. Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Hiding out.” He grins and ducks his head a little. “My parents think I’m at a church youth group meeting. I’ve been coming here every Sunday for months now.”
The fact that he’s also hiding out makes me want to confess my own fugitive status. “I’m hiding too. This is my first time. My first time here, I mean. But why are you avoiding your church? I thought you were religious.”
He shrugs. “My parents are. I don’t know what I am. But I do know that I’ve spent enough hours in churches all over the world to justify a free pass when I feel like skipping out.”
He says this with a lightness I envy. Here is someone who feels no guilt for his escape.
“What about you? Are you religious?” We simultaneously step out of the busy computer area as he asks this.
I shake my head. “No. My parents aren’t, so I suppose that I’m not either by extension.” I cringe as I catch myself using the present tense. I don’t have enough practice yet speaking of my father in the past tense. “Religion has always been a sensitive subject in my family. One of my uncles is very religious, very conservative, and he blamed a lot of problems on my father’s lack of faith.” I don’t know why I’m telling this to Ian—I’m sure he doesn’t care.
But he surprises me again. “Your uncle, he’s the one they call the General?”
“How did you know that?” My muscles tense at the mention of a name I thought I’d escaped.
His cheeks flush. “I read up a bit on your country after Emmy introduced us,” he admits. “I have plenty of time every Sunday to do research. It beats crossword puzzles.” We share a smile as he gestures toward a table occupied by four old men with a stack of newspapers and pencils in hand.
“I wanted to say—” Newly serious, he pauses. “I wanted to say that I’m sorry about your father. I can only imagine how hard it’s been for you.…” He’s watching for my reaction, treading lightly.
I react by turning into a puddle. My eyes swim with mortifying tears, and the spines of the books around us go wavy. I’m embarrassed by my reaction but powerless to stop it. It’s the first time anyone has spoken to me like a girl who has lost her father. Until now, everyone has treated his death like a headline. Unemotional. Institutional, even, as if a building or a bridge had been destroyed, instead of a man. Aside from a single anguished moment when she thought no one was looking, even my mother has remained stoic and silent on the topic.
Poor Ian looks so stricken by my reaction that I force my grief away. I’ve lost control over everything else in my life; I can’t lose control over myself.
“Do you want to get out of here? Maybe grab a cup of coffee or something?” His lion eyes hold mine.
I nod and follow.
SIMPLICITY
Ian leads me to my second Starbucks. It’s the identical twin of the one I’ve gone to with Emmy, down to the upholstery on the chairs and the placement of the sugar packets. It’s creepy in its familiarity, like it followed me here. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the aggressive sameness of chain stores.
At the counter I stare up at the menu, trying to remember what I ordered before. My eyes are still raw from tears, and the choices are blurry and overwhelming.
Ian rescues me. “The green tea lemonade is good.” It’s a gentle prompt. I nod, and he orders two.
There’s only one empty table, and we twist and contort our way through baby strollers and scattered shopping bags to get there. Ian starts to pull my chair out for me but then stops abruptly. He steps back too quickly and bumps into someone behind him. He’s sweetly uncertain as he sits down in his own chair. It’s nice. Here, now, he’s just a boy, and I’m just a girl. We’re just a girl and a boy sitting at a table drinking lemonade, and nothing could be simpler.
But then he makes it complicated again.
“So, I’m curious. Who was that guy you were with at the dance last night?”
I recognize the forced indifference in his tone, and I focus on my straw wrapper, my drink, my napkin, before I answer. I assume he means Amir, but he could also mean my nameless dance partner. I don’t want to discuss either, but for very different reasons.
“I know it’s none of my business, but I was kind of worried about you. It looked like you were in the middle of a fight or something, and he was practically dragging you out of the gym.”
Amir, then. Part of me is relieved, or at least less embarrassed. “He’s just a family friend. He’s a bit … traditional, and he was concerned about me. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Traditional, huh? He seemed pretty upset when he saw you out there dancing. I thought maybe he was jealous.”
So, Ian spotted that, too. My face grows warm, and I shake my head and look away. I shouldn’t care that he saw me dancing, but for some reason I do. I start to explain, to defend myself, but then stop. I see no judgment in his expression, and I hear no shame on his tongue. Their absence unsettles me, and I change the subject. “Does your family have plans for any more grand journeys overseas?”
He frowns. “My parents talk about it. A lot. But I think they realize that they like the adventure more than they like the religious part. They’re having a hard time justifying another mission to themselves, but they’re trying.”
“And you?” I ask him. “Do you want to go again?”
“No,” he says with the finality of someone whose mind will not be changed. “But I don’t exactly get a vote. I’m trying to stay out of it for now. No sense using up all my fight if they never even decide to go. Only a couple more years until I’m in college, anyway. Then they’ll have to go without me.” He starts to tie his straw into a knot. “How about you?”
I’m distracted by his straw origami—he’s making a stick figure, or maybe an airplane. “What about me?”
“Are you going to stay in the U.S.? Do you want to stay here?”
It’s a heavy sack of a question that he drops into my lap, and I wish he hadn’t asked it. I have no answer to give him, but I speak so as not to be rude. “I honestly don’t know. I don’t know what I want. It doesn’t matter anyway—going back isn’t an option right now. It may never be.” I blink fast—I don’t want Ian to see me cry twice in an hour.
He notices. Of course he notices. Those pale eyes of his are like flashlights. “Emmy was right,” he says. “We do have something in common.”
“Do we?”
“Neither one of us has control over our future. Neither of us has a vote in where we may end up.” He cringes at his own words. “Sorry about that. This conversation isn’t going quite the way I’d hoped.… I mean, it’s not that I’m not enjoying talking to you. I am. It’s just—”
“It’s okay. I know what you mean. But perhaps next time we should go see a movie together. That way we can’t talk.” I smile to let him know I’m teasing.
He laughs. We stay another twenty minutes, but now we’re mindfully unmindful—our conversation all banter, controversy-free. Beneath the lightness, though, lies something newly solid. A connection. And then it’s time to leave. We stand up together, again as if our steps were choreographed. He puts his hand on the small of my back as we wind our way through the crowded maze of tables and chairs. It’s the lightest of touches—he probably doesn’t even realize that he’s doing it—but I feel it like an electrical current. I’m too aware of him, too distracted by his physical presence.
When he takes his hand away, I’m even more bothered by its absence.
“Can I walk you home?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No. Thank you, but no.” I don’t want to refuse, but old lessons remain strong in my mind.
“Then maybe I’ll see you at our hideout next Sunday.” His voice drops to a near whisper as he leans in, his lips grazing my ear. “I like being your accomplice.” And then he walks off, his words still hanging in the air and his touch still buzzing on my skin.