WORDS
Emmy brings me into her circle of friends, introducing me and showing me off like a shiny new toy. This is Laila, Emmy begins each introduction. Depending on the audience, she then sprinkles in little morsels of information about me. Laila speaks fluent French, she says in a prideful tone, as if she deserves some credit. Or, This is Laila’s first time in the United States. Or, sometimes, She speaks English better than I do! I am an exotic pet.
Most people are kind. They’re friendly in the overwhelming way I’m starting to realize is normal here, and when they smile in that way that makes me think of a tiger’s grin, I remind myself that this is what is expected here. I show my teeth back.
The girls at the lunch table are unimpressed, hungry for more interesting morsels than Emmy provides. And Emmy, in turn, is hungry for their approval. She turns defensive when one of the girls, Morgan, questions her.
“What is she, an exchange student or something?” Morgan sniffs, looking more interested in her yogurt than she is in me.
I resist the urge to speak for myself. This is Emmy’s show.
“No.” Emmy’s words sound clipped, sharp. “She lives here now. Permanently. With her family.”
One of the other girls—Hailey? Or perhaps Kailee?—stage-whispers something to Morgan. “Ef oh bee.”
I don’t know what it means, but Emmy reacts. “That is so rude! She is not an F.O.B.” She turns to me to translate. “Fresh off the boat. Such a racist thing to say.”
Hailey-Kailee-Bailee turns red, chastised.
I am amused. I am fresh off the boat—or, more accurately, the chartered plane. I don’t see the insult in the statement, though it’s clear one is intended. Emmy, however, is offended enough for both of us, and she defends me rapid-fire. “She’s not an exchange student, and she’s not an F.O.B. Her family is famous—you’d know if you ever bothered watching the news. Her dad was, like, a dictator. He ran the whole country.”
The conversation goes on around me, but I freeze at that word.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I say as soon as Emmy and I walk away from the lip-gloss tribunal at the lunch table. We’d been judged and found worthy, an invitation to join the girls extended and politely refused in order to continue my public debut. “It isn’t true.”
“Hmmm?” Emmy is distracted, pleased by her social coup. I have no speaking part in her scripted introductions.
“What you said. About my father. It isn’t true.” I’m trying to keep my anger in check, but my old voice, the one that used to be obeyed, returns to me unbidden. “Don’t say it again.”
Emmy reacts to my tone. She looks stricken. The girls at the table were bad enough, and now I’m attacking her too. Her exotic pet has claws and teeth. It is too much for her to handle. “B-but,” she stammers, “that’s what the news said. I looked you up. I read the articles. Your father was in charge, right? I mean, I saw pictures and everything. Your mom is beautiful, by the way.”
“He. Was. Not. A. Dictator.” It is my turn to say the words slowly and too clearly to be misunderstood.
Emmy is still confused. “But you should be proud, Laila. Your family is famous! You’re like royalty or something!”
The distinction is lost on her. “Just don’t call him a dictator,” I ask softly.
She doesn’t want to let it go. Just as I found no harm in F.O.B., she finds no harm in her word. “I’ll show you where it says he is. Come over to my house after school. You can see for yourself.”
I should say no. I should be confident enough about my father’s legacy to refuse—it is an insult to my family to even entertain the idea.
I accept.
INVITATIONS
I can’t help but hunch my shoulders against the feeling of being watched. Emmy’s bedroom is unsettling.
A hundred sets of eyes stare at me from the walls. It’s an amateur portrait gallery—a snapshot collage of faces. Some of the photos—boys only—have X’s penned across them. I don’t ask why. I already knew that Emmy was a collector of people. I am her latest specimen, after all.
Her mother knocks on the door of her room and asks if I will be staying for dinner. She looks nervous.
“Yes!” Emmy shouts out in answer, then turns to me. “Right, Laila? You can stay, can’t you? Please?” I notice that she has angled her body so it’s blocking the computer screen.
“Um … okay, good. I mean, fine.” Her mom’s brow is furrowed. “We’re having lasagna. Is that okay with you?” She emphasizes her words strangely, as if expecting me to object. “I mean, do you have any—” She searches for the right words, “Any dietary restrictions? From your country, or your religion?” Just like her daughter, she plays with a golden pendant hanging from her neck. Hers is a small cross.
I suddenly understand her nervousness. “Lasagna sounds wonderful, Mrs. Davis. Thank you very much for the invitation. I would love to stay for dinner.”
Emmy’s mother’s face unfurrows and she smiles broadly, looking so much like her daughter for a moment that it’s like seeing double. She is pleased that I have not rejected her food. Would she be so pleased if she could read the pages that her daughter is hiding?
Emmy fidgets and glowers until her mother leaves the room, and then rolls her eyes. “It’s probably better my mom not see this stuff. She’s so controlling.” I hide my expression behind my hair. The googling girl with her own computer in her bedroom thinks her mother is controlling.
Emmy’s fingers fly over the keyboard as I watch and pretend to be indifferent. Back home we had no internet. Or at least not the internet I see before me now. We had only a heavily censored, filtered version, with threatening messages decrying all but the blandest of government-approved sites as forbidden.
“See?” Emmy asks as she finds what she was looking for. “I didn’t make it up. I really am sorry, Laila. I didn’t know it would offend you.”
I force the corners of my mouth to turn up and form a forgiving expression as I gaze past her to read the headline emblazoned across the screen. The picture that accompanies the article is old, taken several years ago, and my father looks heavier, healthier than I remember from more recent days. My mother is walking behind him in the photo. It is not a flattering image of her, but she is still beautiful, even with her eyes shifted toward something out of camera range. She looks skittish, like a storm-spooked horse, with the whites of her eyes showing too much.
The article on Emmy’s computer screen is not kind.
“It’s not true.” I want to keep reading, but the need to defend is more urgent. I’ve seen enough to know that whoever wrote the article was wrong, had only part of the story. There are several unattributed quotes that sound suspiciously like things my uncle would say. My uncle, who does not share the blame in this article, but who certainly shares the blame in real life.
Emmy shrugs and begins to braid her hair, checking her progress in the mirror above her dresser. She truly does not care. The accusations on her computer describe events so far away from her they might as well belong in a fairy tale. Once upon a time, there was an evil man who led his country into war and misery.
The truth is more Shakespearean tragedy than fairy tale, though. Upon his death, an emperor’s sons vie for power, only to destroy everything around them and pass their bloody quarrel on to the next generation. Whether fairy tale or Elizabethan tragedy, such stories don’t come true in Emmy’s world. My life is no more real to her than an assigned reading for English class.
“There’s a lot more,” Emmy says once her braid is finished. “Do you want to see it?”
Yes.
“No,” I say.
“Okay, then let’s go eat. My mom’s lasagna is awesome, but stay away from her garlic bread. She burns it every time.” Emmy is out the door, the article already forgotten.
I glance back at her computer before I follow. I want to read more, but I don’t want to read more—conflicting urges grapple in my gut. Either way, I know for certain that I don’t want my carefree new American friend looking over my shoulder as I read. Surely the same thought would occur to her as the one that now pulsates and throbs in my head like a malignant tumor, and I couldn’t bear the doubled weight of our combined question: What kind of person doesn’t know whether her father was a king or a monster?