STANDARDS
The king and I start school.
It’s not our choice. Mother didn’t like it—none of us were ready for it—but something came in the mail that shook her up enough to change her mind. I only managed to read a few phrases before she snatched the letter away. “Condition of legal immigrant status.” “Violation of terms.” “Deportation.”
Mother seethes enough for all of us. She doesn’t like being told what to do. Who do they think they are, sending this threatening, impersonal letter in the mail? Treating us like common immigrants!
It’s easier to just obey. Besides, after three weeks of staring at each other in our tiny apartment, we all need a break. Our mourning has kept us docile. Lethargic. But our grief-induced stupor is starting to lift, and we’re growing restless and more and more irritable with one another every day. Maybe school is a good thing. Even Bastien is unusually compliant with the idea.
I have one condition.
I want an interpreter. Not for language. For life. Someone who can help me understand cereal aisles and lunch lines and other small, baffling things like the posters in the hallway telling students to wear their pajamas to school for spirit day. MTV and the Cartoon Network, blaring on our television whenever Bastien can seize control of the remote, are only marginally more useful than my mother at explaining these things.
The school is quick to assist. They assign me Emmy, a student mentor. President of the international students club, though she’s never been anywhere except Canada and on a weeklong beach vacation at a resort in Mexico. I know because she shows me photos the first time we meet.
I’m embarrassed to say that my first thought when I meet Emmy is a single, ugly word.
Whore.
But it isn’t my fault. It isn’t my voice. It’s the voice of my uncles. All but one are dead now, but they still sometimes speak, cruel and accusing as ever, in my thoughts.
In my country, women wear layers. Our clothing flows and drapes. It hints and implies.
I shouldn’t have reacted. I’ve seen enough television to know how people here dress. That the clothing here shouts. That it confesses secrets that remain better kept elsewhere. I’d seen it for myself in Paris when my mother took me on one of her shopping trips as a birthday treat. She’d boarded the airplane dressed as usual. But each hour, each trip to the first-class restroom, revealed slightly more of her. A scarf removed here. A shawl removed there. By the time we landed, my mother was transformed. Unwrapped.
At the time, I was in awe of the way she’d changed, like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. And then, on the way back home, I was relieved to see the layers reappear, piece by piece, returning the glamorous stranger in the seat next to mine back into my mother.
But even my Paris mother had limits cheerfully ignored by Emmy, whose bare shoulders display peeling traces of an old sunburn and whose freckled and scratched legs climb alarmingly high until they meet a short skirt at the very last possible moment. That she can feel so at ease in her flawed skin is astonishing to me.
Emmy must feel me looking at her. Judging her. Because her smile stiffens slightly and she takes a small step back, a wounded expression on her face.
I still have power.
But I know that she isn’t a whore, or any of the other, even worse things that women are sometimes called in my country. I know that, here, she is perfectly normal. My new normal.
I am the one who has to change. To transform, like my mother on that airplane ride. I offer Emmy a smile and some small talk to make up for my insult.
She accepts, perking up before my eyes. “Wow, you speak English really well,” she says, slowly and too loudly.
“I would hope so. I’ve been tutored in French and English since I was old enough to walk.” It is a princess’s voice. I see Emmy’s face catch that, too. I have to change faster. “But thank you,” I say in a stranger’s humble voice. Another apologetic offering.
Forgive me. I’m still learning.
Emmy. So cheerfully American, so wholesome and na?ve even in her near nakedness, forgives yet again. I will have to study her carefully. Surely this openness has limits.
OBSTACLES
I wait for Bastien at his bus stop after school, thinking that if his first day was anything like mine, he’ll want me there. I’m grateful for the chance to just sit on a bench in silence for a few minutes, since my mind is numb from sensory overload. Hallways full of people wearing impossibly bright, bright colors have left my eyes feeling scorched. Today was a blurred parade of socks that matched shirts that matched sweaters—indulgent color coordination that you only see on pampered children in my country. Toothy white smiles punctuated the faces of the candy-colored strangers in the hallways, leaving me feeling like a small, dark storm cloud skittering grimly from corner to corner.
Bastien is somehow unaffected.
He leaps off the bus looking remarkably like all of the other six-year-olds who tumble out behind him. He’s a king disguised as a commoner, right down to the grass stains on his knees and the cowlick in his hair. The only hint of his foreignness is the leather satchel he carries—the same one he carried on our rushed flight away from home.
He needs a backpack like the other kids, I see. Something made of cheap nylon, with a superhero emblazoned on it. And bright. It has to be a bright color. I make a mental note to help him buy one. There’s no reason that any of this should be harder on him than it needs to be.
“Bastien!” I call out as the other kids push past us. He looks happy to see me. That he looks happy for any reason reassures me. “How was the bus?”
He looks up at me with wide eyes. “The driver stopped for a squirrel!” His voice is full of awe.
I cringe. I know exactly why this should matter to him—why he should find such a thing incredible.
“Everything’s different here.” It’s the only thing I can think to say as I put my arm around his shoulders and hustle him toward home. Luckily my response seems to satisfy him, and he doesn’t mention it again. Instead, he chatters happily about recess and fire drills. The memory is roused in my mind, though, and it oozes uncomfortably in my thoughts like a lanced blister.
Bastien is thinking, I know, of a scorching hot day not long ago—another memory from our Before. Our driver was racing through the streets faster than usual. Going anywhere as a family required a cumbersome and cheerless parade of at least five cars. A security detail always rode in the first and the last cars—grim-faced men who carried guns and never spoke to me. The cars in the middle varied in their order. They were identical by design—armored cars shipped in from South Africa that reminded me of heavy, metal armadillos. On this day my parents rode in one car, Bastien and I in another, and the third car was a decoy driven by a nervous chauffeur who took no comfort in being the least valuable member of our bulletproof procession. The position of Father’s car changed every time so that no one ever knew which car to attack. We were shuffled around like a deck of cards—the moving target that was my parents’ car sometimes ahead of us and sometimes behind. The elaborate vehicular waltz was just one more attempt to fool those who wished us harm.
Bastien and I were stuck riding in the car with the air-conditioning that barely worked. We were sweaty and cranky, and Bastien was whining about not being able to roll down the windows. “They don’t open,” I explained yet again. “Because of the bulletproofing. It’s to keep us safe.” I craved fresh air too, though, and I would have happily sacrificed a bit of personal safety for a gust of wind to cool the car’s sweltering interior. I had just reached up to push a sweaty piece of hair out of my eyes when the car lurched violently and then sped up even more, tires squealing as the vehicle fishtailed and rocked.
“What’s going on? What are you doing?” As my father’s daughter, I could speak to the driver with a certain amount of imperiousness.
But the driver was hunched over the wheel, too focused to answer. I whirled around just in time to glimpse what had caused him to swerve.
Out the thick, tinted window, I saw it. Bastien did too.
There was a body in the street.
A man, probably, but it was hard to tell. It was a man-sized heap, anyway, lifeless and crumpled in the middle of the road. I suppose it could have been a person only injured or unconscious, but something about the wretched stillness of the body made me certain that death had long since paid its visit.
But as horrible a sight as it was—a discarded corpse almost close enough to touch—what happened next was worse.
The car behind us—whether my father’s car or the decoy even I didn’t know—did not swerve. It did not veer even an inch to avoid the object in its path.
That car, heavy with its armored plating, drove over the ragged corpse as if it were nothing more than a piece of trash in the road. I heard a thump as it happened, although it was probably only my imagination—my brain giving the gruesome image its own gruesome soundtrack.
I may have imagined the sound of the impact, but I definitely did not imagine the sound of the chief of security shouting, firing the driver on the spot as soon as we pulled into the razor-wire safety of our vacation compound. Our chauffeur, the man who had been white-knuckled with the effort of steering us safe of the terrible obstacle just a few minutes earlier, did not say a word to defend himself. He accepted his punishment with the slumped shoulders of someone who knows he has made an unforgivable mistake.
Only later could I bring myself to ask Father what the driver had done wrong. He frowned when I asked, and looked as if he didn’t want to answer. He did answer, though. That was something about my father. He always told me the truth if I asked the right question.
“Laila, dearest, it was a matter of safety.” His frown deepened as he chose his words. “There are people who put things in the road to force us to change our course. And then they booby-trap the path that looks safest. Do you understand? A driver who swerves is the driver most likely to trigger a roadside bomb. The protocol is to never deviate from the planned course, no matter what, and your driver violated that protocol. He put you in danger, so he had to be fired.”
“But it was a body. A person!” A tear escaped and my voice cracked, causing my father to turn away. He didn’t like displays of weakness. I didn’t care. Not at that moment, anyway, though normally even the faintest hint of irritation was enough to make me scramble to amend whatever it was I had done to displease him. I didn’t want to accept his explanation. I didn’t want to live in his world. A world in which windows were sealed shut and bodies were mere bumps in the road. I ran from the room, and we never discussed it again.
But now my six-year-old brother marvels at a bus that stops for squirrels.
Bastien darts away from me, shoving his leather satchel into my hands so that he can run over to the shabby playground across from our apartment. As he scampers toward the rusty swing set, I wonder if he tried the window on the bus. When he found that it would open, how did he react? Was he grateful for the breeze, or was he frightened by the possibility of what dangers could enter along with the wind?
I hope the former, but truly I do not know. We have been shaped differently by our past, Bastien and I.