TRUST
The news has coughed up Darren Gansler like a man-sized hair ball.
“I know it’s early,” he says when he sees my unkempt mother. “But it’s important.” He’s tieless and rumpled himself.
“I know. Come in.” She turns to me before the door is even shut. “Laila, can you please run to the store and pick up some pastries? Something to offer our guest?”
I wait for Mr. Gansler to wave off the gesture, to tell me it’s not necessary, but he doesn’t. He just looks at me, waiting. They both want me out of the house, out of earshot.
No. I’m not leaving. Not this time.
“I can’t. I don’t feel well. It’s—” I see their eyes hardening against me, so I hug my midsection and drop my chin, add a bashful breathiness to my voice. “It’s that time of the month. I just want to go back to bed.” I bite the inside of my cheek to keep the smirk off my face. I dare you to argue with that.
Mr. Gansler grimaces and looks away, embarrassed by my feminine admission, while Mother narrows her eyes. She seems to be debating my lie, trying to decide how to react. It’s not in her nature to speak openly about such matters. She glances at Mr. Gansler and then at my bedroom door, measuring the distance between the two. “Fine,” she says at last. “But close your door.”
I nod and shuffle to my room, trying to keep up the fa?ade of pain. If I didn’t know better, I could swear I heard a barely there note of pride in her voice. I wish I’d known sooner that all I had to do to earn her approval was to act devious. Yes, Mother, I’m your daughter after all.
Bastien is stirring under his blankets, so I close the door gently behind me and sit on the floor with my ear pressed against the flimsy wood. I can hear every word of their conversation through it. If anything, the voices on the other side sound amplified. Today, there will be no secrets.
“It’s time. We can’t wait anymore or things are going to get out of control again.” Mr. Gansler doesn’t bother with small talk. I feel a flush of perverse pride that something from my home could rouse this important man, this CIA officer, out of bed so early and put that twang of anxiety in his voice.
“I know.” Mother is smooth again, comfortable in her scripted role.
Bastien sits up and blinks at me. I hold a finger to my lips, and he nods and crawls silently over. He pulls his knees up to his chest and leans against me, his little body warm and trusting. He doesn’t look surprised to find me eavesdropping—I can’t decide whether this says more about him or me.
“We’re not interested in simply delaying the inevitable, Yasmin. If he can’t hang on to power, then there’s no sense in backing him. And frankly, I’m not convinced he’s even going to play ball. We sit on different sides of a pretty high ideological fence.” Mr. Gansler sounds peevish, like a man who needs a strong cup of coffee before dealing with this mess. I wonder whether he has a wife, and what he tells her when he rushes off. Don’t hold dinner, dear, I might be late. We’re launching a civil war today—you know how it is.
“You control the money, so you control the outcome, Darren. His grip on power may be shaky right now, but it’s not too late to reverse things. Besides, if you decide to back someone else you’re going to have to start from scratch. There is no one else with a chance of uniting the factions. The General may not be the best choice, but right now he is the only choice.” Her voice is low, convincing. Almost hypnotic.
For the first time I wonder how much of a role she played in my father’s decisions. She is, after all, calmly negotiating support for the man who killed her husband. Did she ever use that same lulling tone to suggest a bombing campaign? Did she speak with such smooth confidence while listing the virtues of using chemical weapons against unsuspecting villagers? Against children?
Stop! I have to purge these thoughts from my head. They’re distracting me. Bastien fidgets, trying to get more comfortable against me, and I force myself to focus.
“He’ll listen to me, Darren. I’ll make the arrangements. Just promise me that you’ll deliver the money personally. I can’t vouch for anyone else, but I know that I can vouch for you. I trust you—you know what’s at stake better than anyone else in Washington. You’ve been there. You know what it’s like.”
Nice touch, Mother. I feel dirty listening to her shamelessly manipulate him. I’m certain he’ll see through it.
But apparently he doesn’t.
“We need to move fast. It’s a lot of money, Yasmin. A lot of money. Make sure he understands the obligations that come with it.”
“He’ll understand.”
I hear them moving, the front door opening, an exchange of goodbyes, and then nothing. I crack my bedroom door open silently, slowly, nudging Bastien aside so I can peer out.
My mother, master manipulator and careful plotter, is standing with her back against the front door. Her face is pale, and her lips are pressed together like they’re barely containing a scream. She is a hurting, haunted shell.
Good. Let her hurt. The anger that jumps unbidden into my mind scares me. It feels like a point of no return. But if I’m hurting, she should be too.
She opens her eyes and looks right at me. For several long seconds we’re frozen, staring at each other, and somehow I become the guilty party. I drop my eyes, ashamed, but I feel her continue to stare. I don’t look up until I hear the ice cubes tinkling into the glass and the sounds of my mother, still in her nightclothes, pouring herself a drink.
ATTENTION
The news holds us prisoner while the sun rises outside. Slashes of morning light enter our apartment through the gaps of our still-closed blinds, but none of us get up to open the shades.
We sit, glassy-eyed, waiting for the revolving-door news channel to get back to the story. Four minutes of commercials to three minutes of news; snippets of home in hyperactive forty-five-second bursts only every so often. Mother swirls the ice in her otherwise empty glass, and the cubes rattle like boozy castanets until they melt. Bastien is on the couch next to her with his hands hovering slyly near his mouth. When he thinks no one is watching, he sucks his thumb the way he used to when he was younger. He turns it into nail biting the moment anyone looks, which he seems to think is a more acceptable vice for a seven-year-old.
I’m too impatient for the teases and the snippets, so I turn on my computer. I have to wade through several layers of reports—the rehab starlet has already checked herself out!—before I find what I’m looking for. The news is not good. Retaliation has begun, and the death toll is climbing. The General has gone on the offensive, and the provinces are suffering his wrath.
My first thought as I read this is of Amir. Is that strange? I search, and I’m relieved to find no mention of his village.
“Laila, are we going to school today?” Bastien has abandoned his news vigil, and now he’s restless.
I glance at the clock. We’re already late. “Yes, let’s go. We might as well—there’s no new information anyway. Get dressed, quick.”
Bastien skitters off without protest.
Mother barely acknowledges our scurried attempts to get ready for school, but she stops me as we’re rushing out the door. “Laila, wait. I need you to do something for me.” She steps into her bedroom, then emerges with a thick envelope. “Give this to your friend, please. What’s his name, Amir? It’s the money we borrowed.”
My friend? And his name so easily forgotten? “Where did you get this? I thought we were broke. And why don’t you give it to his cousins the next time you see them?”
She frowns at my questions and pushes the envelope at me. “Laila, please. Just do as I ask. We have plenty of money now; we won’t need to borrow from them again. And I don’t think I’ll be seeing anyone from that family anytime soon.”
This has something to do with the news. With Mr. Gansler’s visit. With my uncle. “Why?” I ask, not expecting a response.
She surprises me with a half answer, which is half more than I expected. “Darren’s interests have shifted, and he’s the one who pays the bills.” She shoos us off and shuts the door before I can ask anything else.
I walk Bastien to his school. It’s out of my way, but late as I am already, another twenty minutes doesn’t matter.
He straddles the curb as he walks, one foot on the sidewalk and one on the street. It gives him a lurching gait that makes me think of Amir’s sister. “Bastien, why did your teacher ask to meet with Mother?”
He scowls and kicks at a rock. “She says I’m lying. She says I make things up.”
I know immediately what he has been lying about, and my heart aches for him. “Did you tell people you’re a king?” I ask softly.
He looks at his feet and bobs his head in the tiniest of nods.
I start to tell him he shouldn’t say such things, that it isn’t true, but I stop myself. Who am I to say what’s true? Mother has dragged us both into a game I don’t understand. For all I know, Bastien will be king once she’s done maneuvering. And if not, our future is a bleak question mark. Bastien’s stories may be the only things that survive intact.
I shudder and walk faster. “Hurry up,” I snap at Bastien, and he looks relieved the conversation is over.
ALARMS
I arrive at school to find that my Here and my There have collided.
Cars and trucks with flashing lights crowd the street, and somewhere inside a tinny alarm sounds, on and on and on. Icy fingers of panic caress and then start to claw at my chest. My first thought is that the war has followed me, encircled my life completely.
Then I notice the other students.
They’re milling around the front entrance in a boisterous crowd, their expressions falling within a narrow range from neutral to cheerful. At worst, some look bored. There is no crying; there are no screams. But I still can’t push away the piercing dread that something terrible has happened.
I find Emmy standing near one of the fire trucks. She bounces up and down on her toes and waves with both hands when she sees me. “Laila! Where have you been? Have you heard the good news? Someone called in a bomb threat!”
I’m certain I heard wrong—I’m so distracted by the red-white-red-white lights dancing across her face that I can’t grasp the meaning of her words. “What?”
“Bomb threat! Woo-hoo!” Someone in the crowd yells it, and then someone else tries to start a chant. “Make the call! Make the call!” It doesn’t catch on, but I can’t stop myself from taking a step back, away from the shouting. I stumble over the curb, falling in a clumsy heap.
“Oh, Laila.” Emmy’s eyes go wide and she covers her mouth with a hand. “I didn’t even think.” She rushes over and pulls me up. “Don’t worry. It’s not a real bomb—it never is. This happens at least once a year, but usually not until the weather’s nicer, or on Senior Skip Day. We’re just waiting until the principal makes the call—he has to officially make the decision to evacuate the school for the day. Which always happens.”
I understand her this time, but it doesn’t keep me from wishing we could move just a little farther away from the building, farther away from the flashing lights. Just in case. “But what if—?” The alarm clanging in the background cuts off abruptly, and the students cheer.
Emmy’s bouncing on her toes again, but she keeps a tight grip on me. “Okay, that probably means he’s about to make the announcement. Shhh. Listen.”
The sound of a man clearing his throat comes out of the loudspeakers, and then a decidedly unpanicked voice announces that the school is being evacuated for the remainder of the day. He says something about alternate locations being set up for use as study halls, and the crowd jeers.
“This is sick,” I say, but no one hears me. Emmy is laughing along with everyone else. “You people are sick.”
“Let’s go find Tori and Morgan,” Emmy says, pulling me along with her. “Everyone’s heading to the park now—we should hurry so we can get a good spot on the hill.”
I’m too disoriented to do anything but follow.