FOCUS
I feel different when I wake the next day. Inside out. Raw.
I rise from bed and fumble through my morning routine. We have a routine now. How did I not notice this before? Mother heats the water. I set out the spoons. Bastien’s job is less defined, but he is reliably watchful. More so than most boys his age, I think.
“Can I turn on cartoons?” He doesn’t usually ask permission. Mother starts to shake her head but then glances over at me. I shrug in response.
We were up late watching the news again. Coverage of the fighting, already skimpy, had become nonexistent by the time we went to bed. The chance of an update is small, so Mother sighs her consent at Bastien and the room fills with the sounds of superheroes.
We eat breakfast without speaking, our lives guiltily unchanged by the war back home.
I still feel different when I get to school. No one else seems to, though. “Laila, look at these pictures!” Emmy seems to have forgotten about our falling-out the day before; she joins me at my locker and hands me her phone so I can scroll through the digital photos someone sent her.
Who had a camera? I didn’t notice anyone taking pictures in the park.
“You look beautiful.” Emmy beams when I say this.
The photos are remarkable for their fiction. They tell a story of an entirely different day than the one I experienced.
“This one’s my favorite.” She scrolls to the last one. In it the sun appears to shine—the product of either a clever camera or a very brief break in the clouds, since I remember no bright moments like the one here. Emmy looks like pure joy in the image—her face, tilted back and laughing, shows no trace of disappointment or anger. Tori and Morgan are aware that a photo is being taken—they’re making funny kissy faces at the camera. They’re a photogenic team, vamping, giggling, and radiating an energy that spreads everywhere in the picture except to me. I am a faded blur, alone in the center of these happy, beautiful girls. My eyes are downcast, and my expression dour.
“You look so mysterious. Laila, our International Woman of Mystery!” As always, Emmy finds something kind to say. But behind her words I sense a new reserve—perhaps our argument hasn’t been forgotten, after all. “The bell’s about to ring—see you later.” That she rushes off without concrete plans for lunch proves to me that all is not as it once was with Emmy.
“Bye,” I say to her back.
I run my fingers along the wall as I walk to class, tracing a path. Holding on.
TRIGGER
It’s dissection day in biology. Fetal pigs. Mr. Farleigh barks instructions over the jittery giggles in the room. “Three students to a pig, everyone. Do you hear me? Team up and have one person from each group grab your tools.” Scalpels are strewn across a table at the front of the room. Forceps. Probes. A tray holds one spread-eagled specimen, already dissected. “This is what you will end up with if you follow my instructions.” He’s shouting now, his words nearly drowned out by the noise of twenty-four students vying for lab partners. I remain still. I’m the odd man out—silent number twenty-five.
Bacon jokes fly around the classroom, as do the predictable snorts and squeals. Besides me, only the actual pigs are quiet—they’re pale and shriveled and peaceful.
Mr. Farleigh continues to yell over the noise, drill-sergeant droll. “Every year the district gets at least one complaint about this lab. If you are so inclined, listen carefully before you go running to Mommy and Daddy. I don’t care if you’re vegetarian. Or vegan. Or fruitarian—that’s a real thing, I’m told. The school board has determined that this lab is a nonnegotiable requirement, no matter what crazy fad diet you may be following. You will complete this assignment, or you will fail this class.”
But then his tone turns formal. Looking at me, only me, he speaks more quietly. “The only exception is for religious beliefs. If you object to handling the specimen on religious grounds, please come see me right away.”
At first I’m confused. Up until that moment, I had been thinking the same thoughts as probably every other student in the class: Ew. Gross. Cool. Religion had never entered my mind. Are Muslims not allowed to dissect pigs? I had no idea. What about Jewish students? It’s an interesting question—one I can take my time to ponder, since no one has chosen me for their lab group.
Something about it—about the question, about the day, about my life here—makes me laugh out loud. It’s not a healthy sound. At first it’s a hitching snort, but it quickly grows into a donkey’s bray tinged with a hint of shriek, and I can’t seem to stop. Soon the entire class is staring wordlessly at me.
I can’t catch my breath.
Mr. Farleigh looks disgusted. He clearly thinks I’m just some stupid, squeamish girl hysterical at the thought of touching a pickled pig. But that’s not it.
It’s not the assignment—it’s the moment. It’s the quiet, pale faces clustered around me. It’s the body on the tray, trussed and flayed. It’s not having a lab partner. It’s looking around, wondering who woke up yesterday morning in their peaceful suburban bedroom, picked up a phone, and called to report a bomb just for fun. It’s me. Here. I stand up and race out the door.
Because I cannot even flee a room without complications, I bump into someone in the process. “I’m sorry. Excuse me. Sorry.” I should help him pick up the books I knocked out of his arms, but I don’t. I don’t know his name, this human obstacle standing between me and escape, and there’s no point in learning it. There’s nothing for me here, and I don’t feel like pretending otherwise. My energy is gone, my strength nonexistent, and it’s all I can do to just get out.
“Pardon me, young lady. You are not excused from class!” I ignore the teacher as he leans out his door to shout at me. There’s no point answering him, no point turning back. I do not belong here. There is nothing for me here. This becomes my mantra as I escape.
The hallways feel foreign to me, stranger even than on my first day here. I’m running now, passing so many rooms I’ll never enter filled with so many people I’ll never speak to. I pass dusty trophy cases and endless rows of dented lockers. I’m almost at the big double doors, almost free, when I bump into the second person in as many minutes.
“Laila, stop. Are you okay?”
It’s Ian of all people—a slap of a coincidence. Or perhaps no coincidence at all, since he always seems to be everywhere I am. “I’m leaving.” I’m dizzy, gasping for air, but I manage to wheeze out what’s already obvious: “I can’t breathe.”
He steers me to a stairwell and then helps me sit down. “Do you have asthma?” And then when I shake my head, “Are you maybe having a panic attack? I’m only asking because my mom gets them sometimes, and you look exactly like she does when she’s having one. Your eyes, especially.” He brushes a tear from the corner of my eye with a barely there touch as he says this.
I laugh the braying donkey’s laugh again; the harsh sound echoes in the stairwell, making me clamp my mouth shut. A panic attack? What a luxurious problem to have. To be attacked by one’s own panic rather than shot at, bombed, or gassed.
And yet, I am panicked. I am panicking.
Ian is talking to me in a low voice, telling me about some printing problem with this week’s school paper. It’s a boring, pointless story, but its value is in the telling, in the murmuring. I should be annoyed; he’s trying to calm me the way you would a wild animal—a growling dog or a rearing horse. But I’m not annoyed, since it seems to be working. My galloping heart slows to a trot, and my fists unclench, my fingernails leaving purple-red grooves on my palms.
I hold up one hand. “Stop. It’s okay, Ian. Stop. I’m okay now.”
“Are you sure? Do you want me to get someone for you? The nurse? Wait, scratch that. I don’t think we even have a school nurse. Do we?”
The tension snaps and fades, and I give him a tepid smile. “No, I’m really okay. Embarrassed maybe, but I’m fine.” I feel watery-limbed and light-headed, but he doesn’t need to know that.
“Has that ever happened to you before?”
“No,” I lie. But it has happened. At the football game. At the school dance. Any time my past has collided with my present. Sounds and smells and memories from home might as well be bullets.
“Because I could talk to my mom about it, if you want. Find out how she deals with it. She does yoga and meditates sometimes, stuff like that, and she might have some other ideas.”
“No. Please, just drop it.” I know he’s trying to help, but I’m so far beyond yoga, or scented candles, or whatever feel-good methods people use to calm their suburban anxieties. What tidy little pill could remove the fear of my entire family being killed? What amount of meditation could erase the memory of being hunted, a screaming mob outside the gates? How many long bubble baths would I have to take to forget the image of my mother staggering out of my father’s study, covered in his blood?
No, my panic is real. It won’t be erased or cured for all the yoga poses in the world. I must simply learn to absorb it better so that it doesn’t leak out the way it has today.
“I need to go, Ian. But thank you. Really.” I push myself up from the steps.
“Laila, you have people who care about you here. We want to help you, if you’ll let us.”
Those eyes. The way he looks at me, the way he is, I almost wish I could … I don’t know what. I wish I could be the kind of person who could be with the kind of person he is. But I’m not. I shake my head once and then walk away from him one last time. He belongs to a different world now.