Love from A to Z(59)

Then he lifted his head, ran his fingers through his hair, and gazed up again. All the way up at the ceiling.

He doesn’t look sad.

“What are you going to do?” I couldn’t imagine it. Dropping out of school. Handling so many unknowns.

“I’m going to make things.” He smiled. “The thing is, I’ve got a bit of money that my mom left for . . . ‘fun,’ she called it. She wanted me to have a gap year before university, but I never took it. So I guess I will now. I may even go spend some time with my grandparents in Canada. Dad’s side in Vancouver, Mom’s in Ottawa.”

My heart lit up. That’s kind of close to Indiana. Close to Springdale.

Well, closer than Doha and London, at least.

“Are you guys coming? I want to see the other exhibits too, not just stand here.” Hanna materialized right in front of us, ever-present iPad clutched to her chest.

A bit of annoyance crept into me. At her antics.

I was glad I didn’t have a little sister or brother.

Adam must have seen something on my face, because he laughed and said, “She’s been a great big sister to me all these years. On top of being a little sister.”

He paused, watched her opening the door for us with an exaggerated flourish, and then added, “I guess she’s had to be all sorts of things.”

Oh. Yeah.

I hadn’t thought about how growing up without a mother must have affected her.

And made Adam and her tight in a way I couldn’t understand.

Like Daadi’s death in October had dimmed some of the lights inside me and made me clingy, to even a blanket my grandmother had knit for me.

We followed Hanna into another exhibit hall, both Adam and me quiet. We drifted from artifact to artifact, sometimes the three of us together, sometimes separately.

And then I glanced to my left and saw it.

The Marvels of Creation and Oddities of Existence.

That was the caption under a framed double-page spread with Arabic writing and pictures of trees and plants.

THE INSPIRATION FOR MY JOURNAL WAS STARING AT ME.





AN INTERLUDE


HERE, ONE MUST TAKE THE reins of the story from both Adam and Zayneb. Their observations of the events that unfolded next differ so vastly that it’s hard to understand what actually happened if we rely solely on them.

To find the truth and present it clearly, one has to wade through two vats full of emotions and perceptions—i.e., their journals—to collect and clutch at those stray facts, proven to be facts as they showed up in both journals.

These mutual bits were then combined with the feelings for each other they’d admitted to themselves up until this point, and thus I present the following to you.

? ? ?

Reading the caption below the glass-enclosed thirteenth-century manuscript, Zayneb let out a small “oh.”

Adam came to stand beside her.

They stared at The Marvels of Creation and Oddities of Existence folios.

Adam wondered if he should bring up that he knew she had a Marvels and Oddities journal just like him. Wondered whether that would sound slightly stalkerish, or whether it was cute. Or perhaps even romantic?

The truth remained that he had previously wanted it to come up naturally, and here it was now right in front of them.

Zayneb wondered if this—being presented with the real Marvels and Oddities—was a cosmic moment of significance in her life. The universe, or, in fact, the creator of it, sending her a message. That her life was on the right course.

And then her phone buzzed.

An e-mail from Fencer.

The subject line read Analysis assignment = D-for extensive use of false equivalencies.

Zayneb stared at the notification and then swore.

It was a muttered swear, quiet in its volume but strong in its impact. On Adam.

He tilted his head at her (in her journal, she recorded this tilt as being “judgy”) and asked, “Whoa. Everything okay?”

She said, “No. My beeping”—as Adam recorded in his journal—“social studies teacher just gave me my first D ever.”

“That stinks.” He tried to think of something to say to make her feel better. “Can you do the assignment over?”

She shook her head. “I can’t. He’s like a crazy Islamophobe who hates on us Muslims.”

Adam was taken aback. At this fact and the intensity of the way she pronounced it. He thought he glimpsed a . . . Was that a snarl on her face?

“Can you go to your principal? Speak up? If this teacher is treating you unfairly?”

Zayneb surprised herself by grimacing at Adam. At him using the word “if.” She was surprised both that he had said “if this teacher is treating you unfairly”—as if she wouldn’t know whether someone was treating her unfairly—and that she had made a face at him so openly.

But he was in the wrong to use “if” so effortlessly, so she held the grimace and exploded with “It’s because of the principal I’m here in Doha for two weeks!”

Adam put his right hand in his pant pocket and pinched the seams inside, something he did when he was getting worried.

Zayneb’s expressions were getting him worried.

He’d never seen anger completely taking over someone’s face as it was now, plainly and frankly, in front of him.