“Where are we going next?” I ask Zayed as the SUV bumps its way through the desert.
“Wadi Al-Hitan is called the Valley of Whales,” he says. “An ocean once existed here millions of years ago, and excavations have revealed thousands of prehistoric whales and sharks, as well as petrified coral and mangroves.”
We can get only so close to the Valley of Whales before we have to get out of the SUVs and trek the rest of the way. It feels as if we are exploring a science fiction landscape—the surface of an alien planet—and Zayed explains that the rock formations jutting randomly from the ground have been scoured for millennia by the sand-laced winds, carving them into strange shapes.
“That one looks like my dick,” Will whispers, making Ethan snicker.
The dig site is also home to an outdoor museum, where the exhibits are excavated skeletons of Basilosaurus and Dorudon whales, both prehistoric and both millions of years old.
Zayed says the Basilosaurus was equipped with small legs and feet that were not big enough to support the weight of a fifty-foot whale. “Scientists believe it is an ancestor to modern whales, that their legs evolved away as whales stopped coming out of the water.”
Vivian links her arm through mine. “As a science nerd, I’m not even going to pretend I don’t think this is completely cool.”
“Right?” I say.
“I want to discover something like this.”
“What? Whales?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe the cure for an incurable disease or a species of fish no one has been deep enough in the ocean to find yet.” Just then Ethan and Will smash into each other—chest bumping chest—pretending to be prehistoric fighting whales. Vivian laughs. “Or I could pinpoint when exactly boys become such idiots.”
“Pretty sure they’re born like that.”
? ? ?
From the Valley of Whales we travel to Wadi El Rayan, a protected sanctuary composed of a pair of lakes joined by a short natural spillway and a series of small waterfalls. There we are invited to a Bedouin camp for a lunch of pit-barbecued lamb, rice, and vegetables. We team up for volleyball and a pickup game of soccer. We leap from the top of a waterfall into the spillway below. And at sunset we roast marshmallows over the campfire as the sun sinks behind the dunes.
The ride back to Cairo is quiet. All of us are exhausted, dirty, and sunburned, and Vivian falls asleep with her sand-dusted hair on my shoulder. On the other side of me, Ethan plays a game on his phone.
“If you want,” he says, not looking up, “my driver can take you home. Save your driver from having to come out so late. Vivian too.”
Ethan’s turned out to be nicer than I expected, so I take him up on his offer. I text Mr. Elhadad to let him know I won’t be needing a ride. Then, because I can’t help myself (and clearly have not learned my lesson about these things), I text Adam. I miss you. As the SUV returns to pavement, I watch the screen, hoping to see the little bubble that means Adam is responding, but it never comes.
It’s past ten when we unload ourselves and our backpacks from the Land Cruiser. The embassy driver is waiting, standing beside a shiny black BMW. My smelly body is unworthy of this kind of luxury, but the air-conditioning is glacial and there are bottles of water in the backseat cup holders.
“That was a good time,” Ethan says as we pull out of the parking lot. He turns to Vivian. “We should have invited you to hang with us sooner.”
She fluffs her hair, raining sand all over the seat. “Probably.”
He laughs. “Want to come to Hurghada with us next weekend?”
“Who’s us?” Vivian asks.
“Basically me and Will. Maybe Mohammed Aal, if he can talk his parents into letting him go.”
“So you need girls?”
Ethan nods. “We need girls.”
Vivian explains that Hurghada is a beachfront city on the Red Sea. “It’s basically like the Egyptian equivalent of Florida,” she says. “Beaches. Bars. Snorkeling.”
“The flight’s only about a hundred bucks,” Ethan adds.
“I’ll ask,” I tell them, but I’m skeptical my parents will give me permission to fly to another part of Egypt with a bunch of teenagers. Even if I leave out the part about the bars, my dad is not that gullible.
Dad is watching a movie on his laptop when I get home. We haven’t bought a television because the local programming is in Arabic, so everything we watch is online. Mom’s asleep with her head on his thigh, and Dad hits pause as I come into the living room.
“Leave any sand in the desert?” he asks, eyeing my dirt-streaked clothes.
Just scratching my scalp sends a tiny avalanche of grit down the back of my neck. “Only what I couldn’t carry home in my underwear.”
Dad laughs through his nose. “Good time?”
“Yeah. It was,” I say. “Got a ride home in an embassy car. You should think about becoming an ambassador.”
His shoulders shake as he tries not to wake up my mom. “Sure. I’ll get right on that.”
CHAPTER 28
Aya and I discover that the Garden City Daffodils are a tightly knit bunch of women ranging in age and varying by nationality. They have a handful of vacancies left by beloved members who returned to their home countries and I worry that getting on the team will be hard. Except tryouts go something like this: We kick the ball around to warm up, we play a short scrimmage, and then we are welcomed onto the team by Karin, the Australian cofounder, and Jessica, the American.
Karin is in her early thirties with streaky blond hair, tanned skin, strong thighs, and a voice that carries. She serves as both the coach and the number one goalkeeper, and getting the ball past her proves really tough. I manage to score on her only once.
“We’ve never had a winning season and I wish we were more competitive,” she admits. “But never to the exclusion of fun or to the point where we’d turn up our noses at new blood. If you’re willing to be here, we’re happy to have you.”
She introduces us to the whole team. Too many to remember all at once, but Maude is a fifty-eight-year-old Brit who proudly proclaims herself the oldest player on the team. And Diya is a bank teller/midfielder who wears a hijab during practices and games. Aya loses her mind with excitement over this. Mathilde is French-Algerian. Sophie is from Ghana.
“I have never met so many people from so many different countries,” Aya gushes. “I am probably not the best player, but I am very glad to be here.”
It is really cool that all of these women have come to Cairo and found a way to make it feel like home, to create their own little clan. I am happy to meet them and even more happy to be back on a soccer field.
“I’m hoping to make the team at the American school in September,” I explain to the group. “But if that happens, I wouldn’t mind playing for two teams.”
“You seem comfortable at forward,” Jessica says, tightening her light brown ponytail as we take the field for drills. “Is that where you like to play?”