The Vow

She stares at me, eyes suddenly wide with panic.

I have to look away. “He’s already started looking for jobs back in Jordan.”

“What? Why not here?”

Exactly.

I wanted to grab my dad’s head and shake him when he told me he was actually excited about the interview he has lined up in Jordan. Excited to go home. His home. He actually said maybe the timing was lucky, that this opportunity was perfect.

I won’t criticize him in front of Annie, though. I can’t tell her he’s choosing to go home, or at least accepting it. She won’t forgive that.

“Why isn’t he looking for a job here?” she repeats, her voice bordering on shrill.

“It doesn’t work like that. ReichartTek got him the visa. That visa isn’t good anymore, so we have to leave. He’s got two weeks.”

“Are you kidding me? Then what?” The brain vein is bulging now, and she’s turning splotchy like she does every time she has to give an oral presentation.

“We have to leave.”

“But what if you don’t? I mean, nobody’s going to force you onto an airplane, right?”

“I don’t know how it works,” I mutter. “I’ve never been deported before.”

She puts her hand to her head and wipes the loose strands of hair from her eyes. It looks like straw, like she’s spent the whole day swiping it away in exasperation. “You’ve lived your whole life here, though. That has to mean something. I’m sure if people knew, like if you got somebody to write an article in the paper or something, or maybe start a petition . . .” She trails off.

She’s not stupid, but that might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard her say. “Annie, people aren’t going to sign a petition, and if they did, it wouldn’t matter. Nobody cares.”

“I care.” Her voice breaks, and I hear something split inside her. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry. I just . . . this is crap! I don’t even believe this. How are you just sitting there? How are you feeling?”

My least favorite question. She knows it, but can’t stop herself from asking it anyway. I’ve yet to discover how telling people how I feel makes anything better, and she’s yet to care that I hate it.

How. Are. You. Feeling.

Scared.

“Mad,” I say.

She stares at me for a moment, then turns so she’s facing forward again. We’re still here in the parking lot, and I’m not sure why until I remember I’m the one behind the wheel. I turn the key, wrestle the gear shift into reverse, and back out.

Inside Mr. Twister I can see a man’s silhouette and what looks like a mop handle coming out of his back. The outline makes him look like he’s been impaled by a broom or something.

Annie starts to cry. I haven’t seen her cry in years. She doesn’t make a sound, but her shoulders jerk and bounce, and I have the same gut-twisting feeling that I did the last time I saw her cry. I want to puke. It’s worse than getting kicked in the balls. I just I want her to stop. I’ll do anything to get her to stop.

Chapter 7

Annie

It takes everything to stop. At first I don’t think I can, but then I realize Mo is in agony beside me and I need to just make it happen. I clench my teeth, take deep breaths through my nose, and push it down. He hears enough of it at home.

Besides, crying in front of people is always a mistake. It’s been a long time, but I know exactly what I’ll feel like afterward. Pitied. Pitiful.

What I need is to have already sobbed it out, to have that raw, scraped-clean feeling you get after the breakdown. Instead I’m sucking in tears and pretending the pressure isn’t building and building in my chest.

This can’t be real. I can’t lose Mo.

I’m sweating, and the air rushing through the cab makes me shiver. There’s got to be a solution, somebody who can fix this. Mo makes a left turn, way too fast, but I’m afraid if I yell at him I’ll start crying again. I take a breath so deep my lungs feel like they might explode.

I can’t lose Mo.

“I don’t have a choice,” he says, like he’s read my mind. “I know that. But I don’t know if I can survive it all over again.”

I look at him. I might throw up. The cab of the truck smells like mildew, like it always does after rain, and my stomach lurches with every twist of the road. I picture him lost and lonely in some scary foreign country, being shouted at in Arabic, being jostled in a crowd like the ones you see on TV.

My head is pounding now. I’m trying so hard to think, but nothing comes. I can’t look at him. Even with my eyes squeezed shut, I know he still has that expression on his face—sadness twisted with naked fear. Mo is so full of crap most of the time that when I see that look of bare misery, it nearly kills me. I still remember the first time I saw it, that day he peed his pants at the science center. That was maybe the best day of my life. It was the last day I was nothing but a dead girl’s sister.

Mo drives to his house. We both get out and meet around front of the truck’s bug-smeared grille. He hesitates, then hugs me.

“You suck at hugging,” I say into his chest. He really does. It’s a cage of bony arms and clavicle-to-my- forehead every time.

“I know.”

He drops one arm and stands with the other around my shoulder for a minute or two, and it’s odd because as close as we are, and as much as he feels like the other half of me, we don’t touch all that often. Tonight it feels right, though, if slightly like trying to snuggle with a tree.

“I don’t want to go in there,” he mumbles. “Everybody . . .”

I close my eyes. I’m such a jerk. I didn’t even ask about his family. “How did Sarina take it?”

“I don’t know. She’s so naive, I don’t think she really gets it. I was mostly just watching my mom teeter on the brink and then I had to leave to come get you.”

“Hmm.” Mo’s mom can lock herself in her room and cry for days over a sick cat or a fight between Sarina and her best friend. We don’t spend much time hanging out at Mo’s, but I’ve been there enough to know that there are two Mrs. Husseins. The one is gracious and lovely, and the other is holed up in bed wailing.

He doesn’t answer, but lets go of me to swat a mosquito off the back of my arm.

“I need to go,” I say. “They’re going to start freaking out soon.”

He nods. He knows. “Are you okay?”

I slap another mosquito on my arm, and it leaves a streak of fresh blood. I don’t know if it’s mine or Mo’s. “Yeah,” I say, but neither of us believes me. This conversation is so unnatural, so unbelievable, I wouldn’t believe anything I said right now. How could I be okay? “And you?”

“No.”

“I was lying when I said yeah,” I said.

“I know. You’d better go. Your parents.”

He walks away and I get back into the truck alone. Totally alone. That’s when the panic descends. I’m suffocating. There isn’t enough air inside the cab, even with the windows down. I begin backing out of the Husseins’ long, snaking driveway, watching the encroaching bushes race by in reverse.

At the curb, I roll past the mailbox and see the dent I made in it years ago illuminated by the moon. I backed over it the day after I got my license. The memory of that night—of Mo frantically trying to jam the post back into the ground before Mr. Hussein got home, of neither of us being able to stop laughing long enough to figure out what we were doing—makes me nauseous again.

I can’t lose Mo. If he leaves me, I’ll lose the only person who gets me. And then what’s keeping me from