The Vow

slipping backward into the old Annie? I don’t want to be that girl, the one everybody was afraid to touch.

I’m crying, whimpering at first but then sobbing in that wounded-animal way that only comes out when I’m alone—long whines interrupted with hard gasps for air. And I’m driving too fast, but I have no choice. I’ve got to get home. My cell phone is resting on my lap, and any second now it’ll ring.

I know they’re both pretending not to notice the oversized wall clock with its stoic hands and curled roman numerals, measuring the minutes until they’re allowed to worry again. But they’re counting down, individually of course. Mom has probably been doing something virtuous and disgusting, like scrubbing grout with a toothbrush, to keep her mind off everything, and Dad, no doubt, is watching baseball. He can watch game after game after game without thinking or feeling a thing.

I don’t want them to know I’ve been crying, so for the second time this evening I force myself to stop. It’s harder this time because I’ve already let it get out of hand. I’m snotty and out of breath and my face hurts from squeezing.

I take a deep breath, try out my voice with a few empty hellos, then call home.

“Where are you?” Dad answers. The synthesized SportsCenter theme blares in the background.

“I had to stay late to help close.” It isn’t until I hear myself that I realize I’m lying. I’m not sure why, since they’ll know Mo’s leaving soon enough. Maybe I’m just not ready for his reaction tonight. It’ll be too light, too encouraging. He doesn’t like Mo, doesn’t understand us—any guy who wants to be just friends with me must be gay or lying or both. He would not understand that without Mo I’m going to drown.

“When will you be home?” he asks.

“I just dropped Mo at his place.”

“Okay. I’ll tell your mom you’ll be home in ten minutes.”

I’m only a block away now, but I don’t correct him. I need at least ten minutes to get myself together.

I pull into an empty playground parking lot and stare at moonlit slides and gleaming monkey bars. The swings rock and squeal in the breeze. I grew up in this park, but I never realized just how creepy it is at night. I was never allowed to wander after dark. It’s like a children’s ghost town.

What if Mo’s wrong?

It feels dangerous, but I want to believe it. He’s wrong. Mo’s just pulling a Mo—freaking out first, getting details later. Tomorrow he’ll find out about some visa extension or job for his dad in Louisville, and this night will be the crazy night we thought he was going back to Jordan, and nothing else.

I hiccup, a reminder of losing control, but I feel differently already. Stronger. I twist my wrist to hear my bracelets jingle. This is all just one big emotional overreaction.

Unless it’s not.

My mind flits back to the day at the science center. The lost year, the pact with God, the tiny spot where the IV pierced my skin forever marking me, Lena’s smell and feel still burning in our house and in my brain. I don’t want to be that girl. I don’t want to be the one needing to be saved. That girl was alone. Starved. Godless.

Chapter 8

Mo

Godless. I’m definitely not that. Sarina probably thinks so, but all-or-nothing is her mental disease, not mine. She’s the closest thing to devout our family has seen in generations. Who knows why. Mom’s parents were devout, but they’re dead. And Dad’s parents, the Teta and Jido whom we lived with, are lukewarm, which means we were too when we were living under their palatial roof.

Sarina is a believer of things, though, so she has no idea about the big fat place between godless and God- fearing where I reside. I wonder if her piety is helping her now. Maybe she isn’t as scared because she knows she can fit in that way.

We pass in the hallway outside the bathroom, and she smiles, but it’s a weird smile—no teeth, wide eyes— like I could pull it, let go, and it’d snap back into place. I nod at her, she says good night and closes her door, closes her door, like I don’t know she’s afraid of the dark and has slept with it cracked her entire life.

I stand in the hall outside her room, waiting for something. Not sure what. I want to go in there and talk to her like I used to, hang in her hammock chair and ask her what the hell we’re going to do.

I’m not even sure how human the response would be. She’d probably tell me Dad must know what’s best for the family and suggest I stop throwing the word hell around because it’s haram, as is the pulled pork sandwich she saw me eating at Curly’s last week, as is the amount of one-on-one time I spend with Annie, even though she knows things aren’t like that with Annie. Or she used to. Lately everything I do is wrong. If she had any clue of the things I’ve been imagining doing with Maya Lawless and her ridiculously perfect body, she’d tell me I’m going straight to hell. Maybe I am.

I’m so screwed.

I go back to my room, throw my jeans and T-shirt on the floor, and get into bed. The exhaustion is both profound and not profound enough. My legs are twitchy and my brain won’t stop turning, but I’m so tired, it hurts every time I jerk myself awake. I think I’d feel better if I could just get it over with and kick a hole in something.

My bed feels like someone else’s. My skin isn’t mine either. It’s almost funny to think that yesterday I was stressing out about nothing, about who I should request as a roommate now that Bryce has abandoned me at basketball camp and what to say to Maya’s douchebag boyfriend if he threatens to kill me for trying to talk to her at Gas’n’Go the other day.

But that was yesterday.

Senior year. The truth lands like a boot on my chest. I’m losing everything. I’m pinned, winded by the force of it, watching everything I’ve worked for curl and dissipate like mist. I will not be a basketball god. I will not get my chance with Maya Lawless. I will not tool around with Bryce. I will not be with Annie.

I put my thumbs at the base of my skull, my fingers spanning my head like it’s a basketball, and squeeze. It doesn’t help.

It’s not like I’ll find refuge in academics, either. I can’t do science in Arabic. Or math. The thought patterns, I’m not sure they even exist in that portion of my brain. Dad is always waxing poetic about how math is intuitive to our minds—mine and his—because the study of mathematics began in the Arab world. He doesn’t understand that my brain has been soaked in the wrong marinade. The good math mojo can’t possibly apply to me. I think in English. My grades are going to tank. Good-bye, Harvard.

Arabic is pretty, but it’s for listening to my grandfather tell me stories about his childhood. It’s for prayer and telling dirty jokes with my cousins. It’s not for real life. I don’t even dream in Arabic anymore.

Sarina will do just fine. She didn’t get teased when we first moved here either, or at least not like I did. She was too young, or maybe girls are more humane, or maybe I was just weirder or more foreign than her in some way. So while she wasn’t caring, I was forcing myself to tolerate Taco Bell and Abercrombie & Fitch.

But now. What does it matter how American I’ve become? America is still washing its hands of me. My parents are still making me leave.

The realization that the last seven years of my life have been a complete waste is a slow and painful one. AP classes, a waste. Extracurricular projects, a waste, including that robotics one that sucked up every spare second and dime for eight weeks. State science fair finalist two years in a row, a waste. Years of studying instead of playing Xbox, arguing my A-minuses up to As, picking beer cans off the side of the highway for community freaking service, all a waste. And I should’ve skipped that entire poetry unit last month. Haiku, my ass.

When I first got into bed a muffled whimper was seeping through the ceiling vent from my parents’ room. Now it’s sobbing. I hear my dad too, the measured lilt of his voice. I can hear the language without hearing actual words.

I usually feel bad for him when she falls apart like this, but not tonight. He did this.