Couldn’t.
The sun was streaking across the sky, painting his face in ethereal ribbons of color, blurring the edges of everything. I felt like we were disappearing.
I couldn’t help it when I whispered, “You look like a Renoir painting right now.”
He blinked. “What?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I—”
“Shadi—”
“Please,” I said, cutting him off. My voice was breaking. “Please don’t make me do this.”
“I’m not making you do anything.”
“You are. You’re making me choose between you and Zahra, and I can’t. You know I can’t. It’s not a fair fight.”
Ali shook his head. “Why would you have to choose? This has nothing to do with my sister.”
“It has everything to do with your sister,” I said desperately. “She’s my best friend. This—us—it would ruin my relationship with her. It would ruin your relationship with her.”
“What? How? What would we be doing wrong?”
“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s complicated—she—”
“God,” he cried, turning away. “I fucking hate my sister.”
I felt the fight leave me then. Felt the emotion drain from my body. “Ali. This is the problem. This is the whole problem.”
He spun back around. “For the love of God, Shadi, just tell me what you want. Do you want me? Do you want to be with me? Because if you do, that’s all that matters. We can figure out everything else.”
“We can’t,” I said. “It’s not that simple.”
He was shaking his head. “It is that simple. I need it to be that simple. Because I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t see you every day and just pretend this isn’t killing me.”
“You have to.”
He went suddenly still. I watched it happen, watched him stiffen, then straighten, in real time. And then, two words, so raw they might’ve been ripped out of his chest:
“I can’t.”
I thought I might actually lose my head then, thought I might start crying, or worse, kiss him, and instead I racked my mind for an answer, for a solution to this madness, and seized upon the first stupid thought that entered my head. I spoke recklessly, hastily, before I’d even had a chance to think it through.
“Then maybe—maybe it would be better if we didn’t see each other. Maybe we just shouldn’t be in each other’s lives anymore.”
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
