Linah waits. Finally, she sits up, frowning at Zain in her desk chair, where he’s playing a game on the computer. She scoots to the edge of the bed and peers over his shoulder. The label of his T-shirt is sticking out and he needs a haircut, his curls falling past his ears.
“So,” she says, irritated. “You’re backing out.”
“I’m not,” he says evenly. On the computer screen, he shoots a trio of zombies.
“You said you’d do it.”
“I said okay to the cigarettes.” His voice drops at the last word and they look toward the shut bedroom door, though Linah knows they shouldn’t worry about anyone walking in. The adults are always in the living room since the airport was bombed last week—huddled around the television, cursing when the electricity cuts out, taking turns running to Hawa’s for platters of greasy baked chicken, which they’ve eaten for lunch and dinner for days. “Not going to Abu Rafi’s.”
“If we take them from your mom, she’ll know it was us.”
The zombies fall to the ground, green blood oozing. Zain turns to her.
“I don’t know.”
“We haven’t left the apartments in a week. They won’t even let us walk to the dikaneh. It’s like we’re prisoners.” If her father were here, he would tell her to stop being a drama queen. But Zain just nods. “It’ll be fun. We’ll leave when everyone’s watching the news.”
Zain looks unconvinced. “I guess.”
“You promised,” she accuses him. She’d come up with the idea weeks ago, before the war started, when she saw a group of older girls leaning against the railing on the Corniche. Their long brown legs dangled as they smoked. They looked glamorous and mysterious, the smoke drifting from their lips.
“Okay, okay,” he says.
Linah recognizes Zain’s tone—he’s convinced. She leans back in bed, satisfied, the insect still scrambling up the curtain.
The last two weeks have been mind-numbing. The electricity cuts out every few hours, like it does every summer, but she and Zain can no longer wander outside, go to the video store down the street, where the AC is always on, delightfully freezing. Nor can they go to Malik’s to get ice cream, or down to the beach. The adults have even forbidden them to go onto the balcony. They still sneak out sometimes, for the breeze. When the adults are in one apartment, they migrate to the other.
Watch television, the adults keep telling them, but whenever they put in a movie—drawing all the curtains and sitting on the tiled floor, where it is coolest—they rarely get to finish it. They’ll be halfway through when the adults rampage in, ordering them to move and open the curtains, yelling at them for the crumbs on the floor. The cable has been shaky the last few days; sometimes one apartment will abruptly stop receiving a signal.
Go to the other apartment, they’ll tell them. Everyone is distracted and upset, the trashcan full of cigarette butts.
Summers aren’t supposed to be like this, Linah thinks. Summers are supposed to be about swimming at the beach, spending nights bowling and going out to dinner, staying up playing video games. And this summer, this summer was supposed to be the best, because she was finally eleven, and the adults were allowing her and Zain to go to the beach alone, without Manar there to babysit.
But now it’s ruined. The summer is just heat and mosquitoes and the bombings that sometimes make the windows shake. All the adults do is talk about evacuation and warships and explosions. They watch men yell on the television and shake their heads.
It’s been nine days. Nine days since Linah woke to Zain saying her name, his face afraid.
“Something’s wrong.”
Her first thought was the adults had found the ants that she and Zain were catching with sugar cubes inside plastic bottles.
“The ants?” she asked, sitting up.
He shook his head. “Something happened to the airport. Your mom says to get up. Everyone’s freaking out.”
The next few hours were chaos. Noises of traffic and honking below them, voices carrying from the street. The adults watched television and yelled at Linah and Zain whenever they went near a window.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” her mother said, her voice taut.
The day was spent in the living room of the green apartment, the adults insisting the children remain nearby. The news reports showed the same images over and over: Streaks of smoke from the airport. An old man talking about prisoners. Airplanes dropping bombs like eggs from their abdomens. Khalto Riham made plates of bread and labneh, and they ate on the couches, eyes fixed on the television. The conversation was cryptic and urgent.
“You don’t think they’ll fight back? It’ll be suicide.”
“Thank God Latif and Abdullah aren’t here.”
“And Mama and Baba! Can you imagine Mama here?”
“They should return the men.”
“I can’t believe you’d say that!”
“Without the airport, how could—”
“Hush, not in front of the children. People are driving through Syria.”
“The UN won’t let this continue.”
“When has the UN ever done anything?”
One of the men on the news wore a white robe. He had twinkling eyes and a long beard. Linah recognized him from posters near the mall. The billboards showed him speaking, his hand outstretched as though about to swat a fly, and behind him a landscape of mountains. Once, when she was at her friend Susan’s house in Boston and they were playing in the living room while her father watched the news, the bearded man came on.
Barbarians, Susan’s father had said, spitting the word from his mouth like an olive pit.
Her understanding of it all is half formed, hazy. She knows there are good guys and bad guys, like in Spider-Man movies and the Sherlock Holmes books that she and Susan swap. She has heard her parents talk about Israel and Palestine, wars and land and people dying. Linah knows that someone is wrong and this is why everything is happening—the airport burning and the men on the television, the shouts on the streets below them, the rumbles that resound every few hours when night falls, just yesterday shaking a bathroom window so hard they woke to its shattering. She is afraid that she might die but more afraid that everyone else—especially her father and Zain—will die, and then she’ll be alone, like that girl in the movie she watched a while ago who was by herself after a plane crash in the tropics.
The adults won’t elaborate. Only Khalto Riham pays any attention to them, asking if they’d like to sit with her and recite Qur’an. It is something they do with her in the summers—Linah’s earliest memory is of curling up with Zain in Riham’s bed in Amman for an afternoon nap, the air smelling of almonds and mothballs, Khalto Riham reciting the Fatiha. Even then Khalto Riham seemed separate from the other adults, as though the rest—Linah’s mother, Souad—were children. It is the reason they call her Khalto instead of her first name—it seems sacrilegious with Riham.