Ali recoiled, stepping back as if he’d been struck. He waited for what seemed an eternity for me to speak, to take it back, but my lips had gone numb, my mind too stupid to navigate this labyrinth of emotion. I did not know what I’d just done.

Finally—without a word—Ali walked away. Disappeared into the dying sunset.

I realized, as I cried myself to sleep that night, that I might’ve hurt him less had I simply driven a stake through his heart.

December

2003

Seventeen

I kicked off the covers, dragged myself out of bed.

I couldn’t sleep, likely wouldn’t sleep with this pounding, tangled mess of a head, heart. I wrapped myself in my blanket, quietly opened my bedroom door, and padded downstairs. All the bedrooms were on the same floor, which left the living room fair game at night.

Once downstairs, I switched on a light.

The scene flickered to life, the unbroken hum of electricity filling me with a vague sadness. Dining room, kitchen, living room. It all felt cold without my mother in it. I collapsed onto the couch and burrowed into my blanket, hoping to numb my mind with a reliable opiate.

I turned on the television, was not rewarded.

Flashing banners across the bottom of the screen read BREAKING NEWS, a scrolling marquee neatly summarizing the storms I would weather at school for the next six weeks. Right now the news anchors were discussing the possibility of other undercover Al Qaeda members living here, in America, new data suggesting that they’d slipped into the country around the same time as the 9/11 hijackers. We were currently searching for them.

I turned off the television.

The FBI had been cold-calling members of our congregation recently, interrogating them over the phone and terrifying them witless. So many people had been assigned an agent that, for some people, it had become kind of a running joke.

I didn’t find it funny.

The random interrogations were creating division, causing people to question and distrust each other. The Muslim community had never been perfect—we’d always had our weirdos and our disagreements and a spiny generation of racist, sexist elders far too attached to culture and tradition to see things clearly—

But we had so much more than that, too.

We fed the poor, volunteered endlessly, organized peace dialogues, took in refugees. Nearly all the kids at the mosque had been born to parents who’d fled war in another country, or else came here to find better and safer opportunities for their families. We’d built a sanctuary together, a safe house for the otherwise marginalized. I loved our mosque. Loved gathering there for prayers and holidays and holy months.

But things were changing.

The FBI wasn’t just interrogating people—they were also looking for recruits within the congregation. They were offering large sums of money to anyone willing to spy on their friends and family. We knew this because people shared their horror stories after prayers, stood near the exit wearing only one shoe, gesticulating wildly with the other. What we didn’t know, of course, was who had turned. We didn’t know who among us had accepted the paycheck, and as a result, we were poised to devour ourselves alive.

The thought made me hungry.

I made myself a bowl of cereal, sat under dim light at the kitchen table. There was once a time when my parents kept the kitchen fully stocked, when meals were a gathering time, when food was the great smoother of troubles, delicious and plentiful. These days when I opened the fridge I found milk and wrinkled cucumbers and a carton of eggs. In the pantry we had little but canned tomato paste, a box of cereal, dried herbs, and Top Ramen—a perfect recipe for our electric stove that was only any good at boiling water.

I listened to the lights hum.

I took another bite of cold cereal, shivering as I tried again to remember where I’d left my phone. It had been easier than I’d expected to go so long without it; I’d little use for it without Zahra in my life. Other than her, my brother was the only one who ever contacted me. My heart leaped at that thought, tried to wrench loose my emotional control, but I forced down another spoonful of Cheerios and compelled myself to think, instead, about not choking. And perhaps about homework. I had endless amounts of homework.

I had been unwilling to look too closely at my recent failures.

Failure number one: I missed my multivariable calculus class last night, which meant that even perfect scores across the board would get me no more than a B. This seemed an unbelievable, riotous injustice, and though it occurred to me that I could probably explain to the teacher that my mother had been in the hospital, the slim chance that he might not believe me—or worse, ask for proof of my mother’s mental breakdown—was motivation enough for me to remain silent.

Failure number two: I’d failed my AP Art History exam today. I didn’t need to wait for the results to know this truth. I’d turned in a blank exam; I was going to fail it. Still, there was a chance it might not weigh as heavily, in the end. My teacher was the kind who liked to make the final exam worth half our grade, and as we’d just entered the second week of December, my last chance was right around the corner. In fact, in a couple of weeks I’d have to survive a deluge of examinations, and I had no idea how I’d catch up. There was still so much more looming—college applications, for example.

College applications.

I inhaled so suddenly I coughed, milk and half a Cheerio having gone down the wrong pipe. What was I thinking? I wasn’t going away for college. My eyes teared and I wiped at them with my sleeve, covering my mouth as I continued to cough.

Was I going away for college?

Could I abandon my mother here? All this time I’d been waiting for my father to die, I’d also been considering my future. Shayda was well on her way to transferring elsewhere, to getting married. With three of the five of us gone, I didn’t think I’d have the heart to leave my mother behind.

But now—

A shoot of hope pushed up through my rotting ribs. The one fringe benefit of my father not dying: I might be able to go away.

Start over somewhere else.

When the phone rang I startled so badly I spilled cereal all over myself. I stood up, felt scattered, reached for a towel. I mopped myself up as best I could, sighed over the state of my blanket, glanced at the clock. It was nearly midnight, far too late for friendly calls.

Fear shot through me as I lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” I said.

A beat.

“Hello?” I tried again.

“Babajoon, toh ee?”

My already erratic heart rate spiked. Babajoon was a term of endearment—it literally meant Father’s dear—and hearing it without warning, hearing it in my father’s unexpectedly tender voice—

I lost my composure.

I took a deep breath, forced a smile on my face.

“Salam, Baba,” I said. “Khoobeen shoma?” So formal. I always used formal pronouns and conjugations with my father, even to say Are you well?

“Alhamdullilah. Alhamdullilah.”

He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say he was fine. He said, Thank God, thank God, which could mean any number of things.

“What are you doing awake so late?” he said in Farsi. “Don’t you have school tomorrow? I can’t remember what day it is.”