Jessica Martinez - The Vow

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.

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.

It’s the perfect reasonableness of his voice that kills. My whole life, I’ve only wanted to make him happy, but now I just want to slam my fist into his face. It’s scary and thrilling, like getting fouled and having all that adrenaline screaming at you to throw a punch. I’m mostly sure I’m not going to.

When did I become so unimportant to him? Why push me so hard, for so many years, to yank it all away?

There’s quiet from above; then his voice starts up again, still controlled, always controlled. But why is he wasting words on Mom? He should be down here. I want him at the foot of my bed, explaining what I did to let him down, because at some point he stopped believing my future was worth anything. He didn’t even try.

There’s a knock on my door.

“Can I come in?” Sarina calls.

“Yeah.”

The door swings open, then closed behind her. She’s wearing my basketball camp T-shirt from two summers ago, sweatpants, and glasses.

“Nice look, four eyes,” I mutter. She got contacts for her fifteenth birthday, so I don’t get to make fun of the glasses nearly as much as I used to.

She ignores me and settles into the chair at my desk. It swivels, and she’s immediately turning herself with one toe, the other leg tucked beneath her. She doesn’t speak, so I let her just spin.

“Do you want something?” I say finally.

“No. Do you want me to leave?”

“No. Just don’t make yourself puke on that thing.”

She spins for another minute or so, and I wonder if she really is going to make herself throw up. “It’s louder in here,” she says.

“What, Mom?”

“Yeah.”

She’s back to whimpering now, possibly running out of steam.

“She must’ve really hated it there,” Sarina says softly.