I looked up.
Up, up a cloven chin and thin lips, nose and sparse lashes, flashes of bright blue eyes. The officer wore a hat. I could not see his hair.
“Got a call,” he said, still peering at me. “You go to school here?” A crow swooped low and cawed, minding my business.
“Yeah,” I said. My heart had begun to race. “Yes.”
He tilted his head at me. “What were you doing on the ground?”
“What?”
“Were you praying or something?”
My racing heart began to slow. Sink. I was not devoid of a brain, two eyes, the ability to read the news, a room, this man stripping my face for parts. I knew anger, but fear and I were better acquainted.
“No,” I said quietly. “I was just lying in the sun.”
The officer didn’t seem to buy this. His eyes traveled over my face again, at the scarf I wore around my head. “Aren’t you hot in that thing?”
“Right now, yes.”
He almost smiled. Instead he turned away, scanned the empty parking lot. “Where are your parents?”
“I don’t know.”
A single eyebrow went up.
“They forget about me,” I said.
Both eyebrows. “They forget about you?”
“I always hope someone will show up,” I explained. “If not, I walk home.”
The officer looked at me for a long time. Finally, he sighed.
“All right.” He backhanded the sky. “All right, get going. But don’t do this again,” he said sharply. “This is public property. Do your prayers at home.”
I was shaking my head. “I wasn’t—” I tried to say. I wasn’t, I wanted to scream. I wasn’t.
But he was already walking away.
TWO
It took a full three minutes for the fire in my bones to die out.
In the increasing quiet, I looked up. The once-white clouds had grown fat and gray; the gentle breeze was now a chilling gust. The drunk December day had sobered with a suddenness that bordered on extreme and I frowned at the scene, at its burnt edges, at the crow still circling above my head, its caw caw a constant refrain. Thunder roared, suddenly, in the distance.
The officer was mostly memory now.
What was left of him was marching off into the fading light, his boots heavy, his gait uneven; I watched him smile as he murmured into his radio. Lightning tore the sky in two and I shivered, jerkily, as if electrocuted.
I did not have an umbrella.
I reached under my shirt and tugged free the folded newspaper from where I’d stashed it in my waistband, flush against my torso, and tucked it under my arm. The air was heavy with the promise of a storm, the wind shuddering through the trees. I didn’t really think a newspaper would hold up against the rain, but it was all I had.
These days, it was what I always had.
There was a newspaper vending machine around the corner from my house, and a few months ago, on a whim, I’d purchased a copy of the New York Times. I’d been curious about Adults Reading the Newspaper, curious about the articles therein that sparked the conversations that seemed to be shaping my life, my identity, the bombing of my friends’ families in the Middle East. After two years of panic and mourning post-9/11, our country had decided on aggressive political action: we had declared war on Iraq.
The coverage was relentless.
The television offered a glaring, violent dissemination of information on the subject, the kind I could seldom stomach. But the slow, quiet business of reading a newspaper suited me. Even better, it filled the holes in my free time.
I’d started shoving quarters in my pocket every day, purchasing copies of the newspaper on my way to school. I perused the articles as I walked the single mile, the exercise of mind and body elevating my blood pressure to dangerous heights. By the time I reached first period I’d lost both my appetite and my focus. I was growing sick on the news, sick of it, heedlessly gorging myself on the pain, searching in vain for an antidote in the poison. Even now my thumb moved slowly over the worn ink of old stories, back and forth, caressing my addiction.
I stared up at the sky.
The lone crow overhead would not cease its staring, the weight of its presence seeming to depress the air from my lungs. I forced myself to move, to shutter the windows in my mind as I went. Silence was too welcoming of unwanted thoughts; I listened instead to the sounds of passing cars, to the wind sharpening against their metal bodies. There were two people in particular I did not want to think about. Neither did I want to think about looming college applications, the police officer, or the newspaper still clenched in my fist, and yet— I stopped, unfurled the paper, smoothed its corners.
Afghan Villagers Torn by Grief After US Raid Kills 9 Children My phone rang.
I retrieved it from my pocket, going still as I scanned the flashing number on the screen. A blade of feeling impaled me—and then, just as suddenly, withdrew. Different number. Heady relief nearly prompted me to laugh, the sensation held at bay only by the dull ache in my chest. It felt as if actual steel had been buried between my lungs.
I flipped open the phone.
“Hello?”
Silence.
A voice finally broke through, a mere half word emerging from a mess of static. I glanced at the screen, at my dying battery, my single bar of reception. When I flipped the phone shut, a prickle of fear moved down my spine.
I thought of my mother.
My mother, my optimistic mother who thought that if she locked herself in her closet I wouldn’t hear her sobs.
A single, fat drop of water landed on my head.
I looked up.
I thought of my father, six feet of dying man swaddled in a hospital bed, staring into the middle distance. I thought of my sister.
A second drop of rain fell in my eye.
The sky ruptured with a sudden crack and in the intervening second—in the heartbeat before the deluge—I contemplated stillness. I considered lying down in the middle of the road, lying there forever.
But then, rain.
It arrived in a hurry, battering my face, blackening my clothes, pooling in the folds of my backpack. The newspaper I lifted over my head endured all of four seconds before succumbing to the wet, and I hastily tucked it away, this time in my bag. I squinted into the downpour, readjusted the demon on my back, and pulled my thin jacket more tightly around my body.
Walked.
LAST YEAR
PART I
Two sharp knocks at my door and I groaned, pulled the blanket over my head. I’d been up late last night memorizing equations for my physics class, and I’d gotten maybe four hours of sleep as a result. The very idea of getting out of bed made me want to weep.
Another hard knock.
“It’s too early,” I said, my voice muffled by the blanket. “Go away.”
“Pasho,” I heard my mother say. Get up.
“Nemikham,” I called back. I don’t want to.
“Pasho.”
“Actually, I don’t think I can go to school today. I think I have tuberculosis.”
I heard the soft shh of the door pushing open against carpet, and I curled away instinctively, a nautilus in its shell. I made a pitiful sound as I waited for what seemed inevitable— for my mother to drag me, bodily, out of bed, or, at the very least, to rip off the covers.
Instead, she sat on me.
I nearly screamed at the unexpected weight. It was excruciating to be sat upon while curled in the fetal position; somehow my stacked bones made me more vulnerable to damage. I thrashed around, shouted at her to get off me, and she just laughed, pinched my leg.
I cried out.
“Goftam pasho.” I said get up.
“How am I supposed to get up now?” I asked, batting away the sheets from my face. “You’ve broken all my bones.”
“Eh?” She raised her eyebrows. “You say that to me? Your mother”—she said all this in Farsi—“is so heavy she could break all your bones? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
She gasped, her eyes wide. “Ay, bacheyeh bad.” Oh, you bad child. And with a slight bounce, she sat more heavily on my thighs.
I let out a strangled cry. “Okay okay I’ll get up I’ll get up oh my God—”