FRIENDSHIP
I’m rattled by the encounter. So rattled that I don’t notice Amir sitting on my doorstep until I almost trip over him. I curse my luck—today seems to be the day for surprise encounters with unwelcome men.
“Do you want to come inside?” I don’t know why he’s alone out here, but my mother would be furious if I didn’t at least invite him in.
“I’m not exactly welcome in there.” He’s angry, sulking.
A small surge of hope rises in my chest. Had I been relieved of my duty? “Did my mother say that?”
He makes a snorting sound. “Your mother has a way of making herself perfectly clear without saying anything at all.”
I can’t help but smile at that.
“She told me she was worried that you were so late and asked me to go out and find you.”
“So you just sat down out here?” It shouldn’t matter, but I feel offended. That he hasn’t even bothered to stand up to speak with me doubles the insult.
His jaw muscles clench. “No. Actually I did exactly as I was told. I went out to find you, but I didn’t get far before I saw that you were busy talking to someone else.” He tilts his head to the side and his tone turns challenging. “Is he a friend of yours?”
I break eye contact with him. I don’t want to answer this question. I don’t know what the answer should be. Darren Gansler is certainly no friend, but for some reason I don’t want Amir to know that. I know how poorly-chosen alliances can end. Finally, I shrug. Let him decipher this nonanswer however he wants.
“You know who he is, right?” Amir won’t drop it.
“Does it matter?” Another nonanswer. I want to keep him talking.
“He’s CIA. If he’s talking to you, it’s only because he thinks you’re a weak link. That you’ll give him something the rest of us refuse to.”
Another insult. I rein in my anger. I still need answers. “How do you know?”
He makes that humorless laugh sound again, too joyless and dry for someone his age. My age. “We’ve had a few go-rounds with him. They didn’t end well. Now he gets other people to do his dirty work.” He jerks his head toward my door. Toward my family.
My mouth is opening, I’m ready to lash out, when it suddenly occurs to me that we’re speaking my language. The sound of home. I’d slipped into it without even noticing, drawn in by the comfort of its familiarity. Although Amir’s coarse accent is a strong reminder that he comes from the mountainous border region, it’s the first time in weeks that I’ve heard my language from anyone other than Bastien or my mother. And even Bastien is always speaking in English now—his accent sounding more American every day.
I switch back to English. It makes me feel less vulnerable. “I never see you at school,” I say, changing the subject. “Do you really even go there?”
He tenses at the new sound. Boys from his region don’t study English with private tutors. Boys from his region often don’t go to school at all. From his reaction I can tell that my English is better than his, even though he’s surely lived here for longer than I have. Good, I think. Let him be the vulnerable one.
“I’ve seen you.” His answer, in English, is even more heavily accented than I thought it would be. “You certainly make friends quickly.” Even through the language barrier, his words sound like an accusation, although it’s one I don’t understand.
“You mean Emmy?” It bothers me that he’s seen me at school while I haven’t seen him. It makes me feel watched. Exposed. “Yes, I suppose I do make friends quickly. With the right people, at least. Unlike you, she’s been nothing but kind.” I find that I mean the words as I say them. As hard as I’ve tried to find faults in her attention, Emmy has been nothing but kind.
His face twists into a smirk, and I know he’s about to say something cruel.
He doesn’t have a chance, though. The door bursts open and the men—Amir’s relatives, I assume—stomp out in a flood of indignant words. “Let’s go,” one of them says roughly to Amir, who jumps to his feet immediately. “She’s wasting our time in there.”
Amir follows the muttering wave of angry men to the stairwell, then pauses to turn back. “Just be careful around people who try too hard to be your friend here. They may have harmful intentions.”
There is no concern in his voice. His words sound more like a threat than a well-meant warning.
I dismiss him like a servant with a flick of my wrist—a gesture that causes the hate in his eyes to flare again before he spins around and follows the men.
He’s long gone before it occurs to me that he may not have been talking about Emmy. Did he instead mean Mr. Gansler, with his overstuffed gift baskets and conditional paychecks? I feel foolish for missing the reference, and I suddenly hope that Amir returns soon.
He may hate me, but he also knows something. I’m willing to suffer his scorn in exchange for answers.
TRANSFORMATION
I feel ridiculous.
Emmy, Morgan, and Tori have dressed me up as one of them. I am an American package. Or perhaps I should say a packaged American—an imitation of something wholesome, like processed cheese, another food Bastien has come to adore here.
They don’t notice that I’m distracted as they fluff and paint and wrap me. But I am. I can’t focus on their debates about my hair—up or down?—or my shoe choice, or even their gentle teasing about Ian, who they’ve chosen for me as firmly as they’ve decided upon my dress. My very, very short dress.
It occurs to me to object to the dress, but I don’t. I have a hard time caring about the exposure of a few inches of my thighs when my mind is focused on whether or not Mr. Gansler will soon be putting my family on an airplane for the second time.
The rapid, angry departure of the men from our apartment had not disturbed my mother at all. No matter how I pleaded with her to call them, visit them, to make whatever was wrong right again, she just shushed me or patted my head like a child. “Everything is fine, Laila,” she’d said in her infuriatingly vague way. “Everyone appreciates what they struggle for more than what they are given. Trust me.”
Trust is something I’m finding in short supply, though.
“Trust me, you look amazing!” Emmy, too, wants my faith.
“You really do, Laila,” Tori echoes. “You look good in red.”
Morgan scavenges through Emmy’s jewelry box, still unsatisfied with the details of my transformation. “Don’t you have any other earrings, Emmy?” She pulls out a pair she finds suitable and holds them up, triumphant, before Emmy can answer. “Perfect!” They’re costume pieces, garish and cheap; the painted metal is already peeling.
Still, I don’t argue, and when she hands them to me, I put them on dutifully. I might as well—the disguise my friends have chosen for me is a small price to pay for this excursion into American life. Without meaning to, I have grown excited about the evening. The shiny, lipsticked chaos in Emmy’s dress-strewn bedroom breaks through my worries in short, welcome bursts. I accept Tori’s offer of a spritz of perfume and will myself into the moment.
Morgan fastens the earrings and nods, finally satisfied. “There. You’re like our Cinderella for the evening.”
Tori giggles. “What does that make us? The mice who sew her dress?”
“No, dummy.” Morgan pulls playfully at one of Tori’s errant curls. “We’re her fairy godmothers.” Her expression turns serious—concerned, even. “Do you know the story? ‘Cinderella’?”
Emmy steps in to defend me once again. “She’s not an idiot, Morgan. Of course she does.”
I am amused by their banter. That their passions run so high about everything from salad dressing to fairy tales is endearing. “I think that everyone in the world knows at least the Disney version.” I hesitate, not sure if I should continue. But why not share my culture with them, the way they share theirs with me? “My country also has a children’s story about a lost slipper, but it has a very different ending.”
“Oh, tell us!” Emmy, of course, is thrilled to collect another piece of international trivia. Even Tori and Morgan seem interested, so I go on.
I start slowly, using an exaggerated storyteller’s cadence—it’s been years since I last heard the tale, and I want to do it justice. I’m embarrassed to find that I feel vaguely competitive, as if my story needs to somehow beat their Cinderella story. “Well, according to our version, there was once a rich and powerful sultan who had a daughter whose beauty was unsurpassed. He favored her above all his other children, and worried constantly that one of his rivals would someday hear of her great beauty and steal her away. To prevent that from happening, the sultan locked her up in a tower filled with many luxuries and servants so that no one from the outside would ever see her face.
“But one day the daughter was standing next to an open window when she heard the sound of music being played nearby. It was more haunting and beautiful than anything she had ever heard or even dreamed of. Enchanted by the melody, she vowed to do whatever it took to meet the person capable of creating such incredible music.
“She quickly tied together several lengths of the silken curtains draping her windows, climbed to the ground below, and ran as fast as she could in the direction of the sounds. She was so focused on the music in the distance that she didn’t even notice when one of her gold-embroidered slippers fell off as she climbed down from her tower. She soon caught up to the musician, a poor but talented traveler, and he fell in love with her upon first sight. They ran away together and were married in secret that very night.
“The sultan was outraged when he heard what had happened, not only because of the loss of his precious daughter, but even more so because of the loss of his honor. He ordered his men to scour the land for his missing daughter. She had anticipated this, however, and so she had already traded her silken robes for the coarse clothing of a peasant and disguised her face behind a veil.
“When the sultan’s men failed to find her, he gave them new orders: to go from village to village with the single gold-threaded slipper and try it on the foot of every woman. Whoever’s foot fit the slipper was to be killed on the spot.”
I barely pause to take a breath. I’ve found my rhythm in the tale. “Now, unlike in your Cinderella story, a shoe size is not such a terribly unique thing, and many innocent women were killed. When the sultan’s daughter heard of this, she could not bear to let the deaths continue, and she turned herself in to her father’s men at once. The sultan refused to see her. From his private chambers he ordered that she be publicly stoned to death that evening at sunset.
“The musician was despondent. He vowed to play his beautiful bride one last song before her death, even if it meant that he, too, would be sentenced to die. As she was led out to the courtyard where stonings took place, he began to play more sweetly and sadly than he ever had before.
“The sultan, who had been watching from a window, heard the music and softened. No one who could create such enchanting sounds could possibly be dishonorable, he realized. He ordered that his daughter’s execution be stopped immediately. His entire kingdom was shocked when he not only forgave the couple but also allowed them to live as man and wife within his palace. In exchange he required only that all of his daughter’s toes be cut off so that she could never again run away, and also so that he would never again be offended by the sight of a slipper the size of the one that represented his daughter’s shameful act.”
I stop abruptly at the end. I’d been so focused on translating the story into English—I was trying hard to capture the subtle nuances that come through in my language—that I hadn’t noticed my friends’ reactions.
Morgan’s upper lip is drawn up in an unmistakable look of disgust. “God, Laila. That’s completely … barbaric. They really tell that story to children?”
Tori is also horrified. “I would’ve had nightmares for months if I heard that when I was a kid.” She shakes her head slowly.
Not even Emmy jumps to my defense this time. Her eyes are wide, and she stays silent.
Barbaric. The word is a slap to my face, the sting worse for the surprise of it. I’m shocked by their shock. I’d never thought of the story as anything but a harmless fable. My own nanny used to embellish the details, describing at length the impossible riches inside the tower, the seductive power of the music, and the details of the father’s fury. Sometimes the daughter’s entire feet were cut off—my nanny’s version didn’t always stop at the toes. To me, it was simply a story with a message: family honor, redemption, and true love. Even the sultan was no villain, since in my world a father’s love can be measured by the lengths he will go to to protect his daughter, no matter the consequence.
Now, sitting here with my shoulders bared by my borrowed dress and my ears bejeweled with gaudy tin, I hear the other messages in the story for the first time. That I’d actually considered the ending a happy one suddenly strikes me as … barbaric.
“Oh my god, you guys, look what time it is. We need to hurry up.” This is the most Emmy can do for me, and I flash her a weak smile to let her know I appreciate it.
I am too stunned by the weight of my dark new understanding to hurry. I’m the last out the door, and I leave without so much as a glance in the mirror. I don’t need to see my transformation. I can feel it.