The Vow

Chapter 4

Mo

Annie knows all my secrets. Every single one of them. I can’t trust Bryce with my locker combination, and whatever I tell Sarina in confidence has at least a 20 percent chance of being accidentally blabbed to Dad, but Annie’s different. Since the fifth grade I’ve been telling her things she could’ve easily fed to the bloodthirsty masses in a weak moment, but she’s never leaked. Not once. She’s tighter than a submarine.

I’d say the first secret was a mistake, but that’s too mild. It was a calamity, a natural disaster so horrific I’m still amazed it didn’t kill me.

We’d only just moved to the States, and I was certain life could not possibly suck more. Chemically speaking, if my life was a solvent, and misery the solute, saturation point had been reached. I missed Jordan so bad my whole body ached, and unlike Sarina, who kept asking when we were going home to Teta and Jido’s (Grandma and Grandpa’s), I was old enough to really get it. We weren’t going back.

There were the obvious things to miss: the pack of boy cousins I roamed our neighborhood with and our cutthroat war games; fat Teta with her paper-soft skin and her sugared dates that left my fingers and tongue sticky; the boys next door, Ali and Barzy, and Barzy’s deaf dog, Hoda, that was so old his hair was falling out. I don’t even know why I missed that ugly dog, but I did.

And the food. The food. I was dying for the crispy hot falafel and chewy manakish Teta’s cook would let me eat fresh from the oven, and baklava so sweet it hurt a little. I hadn’t really known it until the move, but Mom’s cooking skills were crap. I guess she wasn’t really up to cooking at that point anyway. That first year was mostly crying for her.

But I think I missed the intangibles even more. I missed being cool. I missed being around people who didn’t tell me I smelled like skunk spice, whatever that even meant. It felt like I’d been kidnapped from the predictable calm of my Jordanian private school and delivered into a foreign war zone: Lincoln Middle. Here nothing was certain, except the fact that I had no allies. Predators were ruthless. Anything could happen.

And outside the chain-link fence of Lincoln, I missed being smiled at. Ten-almost-eleven is old enough to feel the uneasy stares of grown-ups you don’t even know. It’s old enough to understand that you make people uncomfortable.

I thought I’d learned English at my school in Jordan, but I guess that was British English, and the garbled Kentucky drawl around me sounded nothing like it. Just breaking up the flow of foreign sounds into words required brain-aching levels of concentration. And I, apparently, sounded like Harry Potter on crack—again, whatever that meant.

So I practiced. Southern-speak made my cheeks and tongue ache, but I did it. Every night I’d lie in bed and say things properly, drill the words that I’d been teased most recently for first. Ha not hello. Deyesk not desk. Bayethrum not loo. Never loo, unless I wanted to be stuffed into one during recess again.

Accent turned out to be nothing, though, because that at least I could change. My new names, however, may as well have been tattooed on me. Iraqi boy. Sand nigger. Saddam. Terrorist.

My parents should’ve warned me. Or somebody should’ve warned them. Now I see how it had to happen, but at ten, how was I supposed to guess that my classmates were going to hate me no matter what? Their dads and uncles and brothers had been in Iraq killing and being killed by people that looked like me. And not just looked like me, but talked like me and prayed like me. Hating me was practically their patriotic duty.

At first I tried to correct false assumptions one at a time, but I learned pretty quickly that talking back only ended in getting shoved against my locker or leveled by a kick to the back of the knee. It didn’t matter how firmly I insisted my name wasn’t Saddam and that we weren’t even Iraqi, because my real name, Mohammed Ibrahim Hussein, was bad enough. And after a few attempts at trying to explain we were less-than-devout mainstream Muslims, barely likely to go to mosque, let alone to suicide-bomb the local Kroger, I gave up. My brown skin, my accent, my stinky lunches, my too-dressy khakis shorts and lame button-up polos—I was worthy of a shunning.

It hurt. But it made sense too. Ostracizing the weird one is what ten-year-olds do best. I’d seen it done back in Amman to the kid with the small head and the lisp. Maybe I’d even joined in. Maybe I deserved this.

After that first month of school in Kentucky, when I realized how bad it was going to be, I just wanted it to be summer so I could float around in our swimming pool in peace without having to field angry questions about why my soggy falafel looked like dog crap and why my God wanted me to hijack airplanes and kill people.

I just wanted to be left alone.

And then I went and did the unthinkable: I pissed myself.

You can’t piss yourself. Not in Amman, not in Elizabethtown, not anywhere. It’s the unpardonable sin, trumped only by crapping yourself, which I thankfully did not do.

We were on a field trip to the Louisville Science Center, and I’d been too nervous to ask an adult where the bathroom was. I figured I could hold it. All day. At ten I was clearly not aware of my physical limitations. By the time I realized that holding it all day was absolutely not going to happen, I had a wet spot blooming over the front of my khakis and hot piss running down my legs and into my socks.

It was the albino boa constrictor that saved me. All the kids were standing around a science center employee, mesmerized by the grotesque yellowish snake draped around his shoulders, and by some act of God, or maybe just an act of exclusion, I was behind them.

At first the physical relief was too sweet to feel anything else. But then pleasure was swallowed whole by panic. I couldn’t move. I should’ve been running to find the bathroom, or hiding somewhere, or at the very least, looking for one of the parent volunteers, but my urine-soaked legs were frozen.

Standing helplessly, waiting for people to notice what I’d done, I realized that my isolation was about to turn into something much, much uglier. I had been a pariah. Now I’d be prey. I’d have a better chance of survival with that snake than with my classmates after this.

That’s when I saw Annie. Birdlike. Pale. Silent. Her sunken eyeballs were like marbles, staring unblinking from the far side of the cluster of students. I didn’t notice then that she was just as separate from them as I was. I only saw that she was inches taller than the crowd and practically incandescent. Later, I learned how phobic she was of snakes, how she’d been close to throwing up, trying not to stare at its glistening body or hear the shlip, shlip of its flicking tongue. But in that moment, her paleness made her look like a ghost, or maybe an angel.

An angel who was staring at my crotch.

I shuddered, feeling the paralysis breaking and a rush of tears flooding my eyes. But before I could even start crying, she was in front of me, pushing me hard, driving me backward, whispering, Go-go-go-go-go!

I turned, stumbled along with no choice—she was skinny but surprisingly strong—and even if I did have a choice, I didn’t have any ideas of my own. Bewildered, I let her shove me all the way to the women’s bathroom and into a stall.

“Stay here!” she hissed, her pink lips quivering, sky-blue eyes wide and fierce. Then she was gone.

I slid the metal lock shut with a quivering index finger and waited. Forever. I stood shivering in the overly air-conditioned ladies’ room, afraid to sit on the toilet, afraid to move, afraid that Annie had left me there to die, afraid she was about to throw open the door and bring my classmates through one by one to laugh at the pants-pissing freak show.

Someone came in and I tensed every muscle, bracing for whatever was about to be done to me. Orthopedic shoes and enormous ankles appeared in the stall next to mine. Not her. I listened to the stranger pee and sigh, flush, use the sink, and leave.

Maybe Annie wasn’t coming back. Maybe she’d found her friends and forgotten about me. She had lots of them. Everyone liked Annie Bernier, or at least they were nice to her, which from what I could tell, was the same thing. She never smiled, but she wasn’t like the pouting popular girls. Not viciously pretty or loud-talking or hair-twirling—and yet everyone treated her like royalty.

I didn’t know then about Lena. I didn’t know that they weren’t her friends any more than they were my friends, that we were both being ostracized, just in different ways.

The door swung opened again, and Annie’s pale-pink Chucks appeared on the mottled tile just beyond my stall.

I held my breath.

“Put these on,” she whispered, even though we were alone.

A pair of black sweatpants appeared on the floor, and she slid them under with her foot. I snatched them greedily. I didn’t even ask or care where she’d found them. They were too big, but not so big they’d fall down unless someone gave them a yank.

I opened the door. Annie stood in front of me, spindly arms crossed, examining the fit.

No place to look. I stared at the wall, cheeks burning as the mortification returned, mixed with the overpowering relief of being rescued.

She held out her hand and waited. What did she want, a high five? Money?

“Your pants,” she whispered finally.

I stared at the piss-soaked khakis on the ground. I didn’t ask what she was going to do with them when I handed them over, and I didn’t argue when she stuffed them into the garbage can. I just followed her out of the restroom.

We rejoined the group together, as if nothing else needed to be said. And when she inexplicably saved the seat beside her on the bus back, I was too shocked to ask why.

She didn’t tell a soul. I didn’t know why then, and I only sort of know why now.

Lying in bed that night, I felt the change. Something had happened to me. I’d pivoted, and while one foot was still firmly planted in misery, the other was somewhere else. And the view from my new stance was not entirely desolate.

I’d been saved.

Only then did I realize I’d forgotten to say thank you.