A Girl Like That(52)

Then light burst through: a thousand brilliant bits of glass. Air washed over my face: warm and smoky, with specks of sand.

Shadows struggled above. When they dispersed, there was blood on the face of the golden-eyed boy. I wondered if he was a vampire, and the silly thought made me want to laugh. Laugh, laugh, and laugh until I could scream, scream, and scream.

Cloth slid over my skin once more, followed by the sound of metal buttons clicking, up to my throat. A voice whispered in my ear, as soft as flowers: “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

I don’t know, I wanted to say.

But my tongue was tied and I could not whisper back.





Porus

I knew something was wrong the moment I felt the phone vibrate in my pocket. Call it gut instinct. Or maybe it was the knot I’d been carrying around in my stomach ever since the day Zarin had kissed me and then started dating Farhan Rizvi. Instead of ignoring the instrument the way I normally would have while working, I put down the cardboard box I was holding and picked up.

“Hello? Porus?” A familiar voice, brusque and anxious. Zarin’s aunt. “Is Zarin there with you?”

“No, Khorshed Aunty. I’m at work. I haven’t seen her this afternoon.” I flattened my back to the wall next to the loading dock outside the deli and pressed the phone to my ear, ignoring Ali, who was glaring at me for leaving my box in the truck. I raised a finger: one minute. Ali rolled his eyes and nudged me hard with an elbow on his way back inside.

“She hasn’t come home. She said she had debate practice, but that should have been over an hour ago. She isn’t even picking up her phone.”

I bit my lip. “Debate practice” had been Zarin’s excuse for sneaking out on dates with Abdullah in the past. I guessed she was using the same MO with Rizvi.

“She wouldn’t notice if I was gone,” Zarin had said of her masi. “There have been times when I’ve come home and found her so drugged up from her pills that she barely knew I was there. She’d wake up and start asking me what I thought of the lunch she’d cooked up. Like I could even think of eating after seeing her like that.”

“It must be the buses. Sometimes they can b-be late,” I stammered now, hoping Khorshed Aunty wouldn’t question my lie. The buses were, to my knowledge, never late. And boy or no boy, Zarin had never taken this long to get home before.

At the other end of the line, there was a barely suppressed sob. “Could you … could you go and check on her. I’m so sorry to bother you like this, dear, but Rusi is not picking up his phone at the office … I … I didn’t know who else to call.”

As badly as this woman had treated Zarin, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her now. I was also worried. In India, as terrible as the red tape could be at times, we could have tried calling the police, tried filing a missing person’s report. In Saudi Arabia, things were different. Neither of us knew enough Arabic to communicate with the authorities. And if the religious police got involved, there was no saying what would happen.

Zarin liked to talk about them dismissively, telling me that nothing would go wrong, that Jeddah wasn’t as heavily regulated as the capital city, Riyadh, where the Hai’a was headquartered. But I’d heard stories at the deli about surprise raids at homes over here, based on a tip about alcohol or drugs. I’d also read articles online about young Saudi and expat couples getting arrested at coffee shops for “acting suspiciously” and being taken for interrogation to the Hai’a office in Jeddah. In extreme cases, involving adultery, the couple was imprisoned or sentenced to multiple lashings. Zarin knew a little Arabic, but not enough to explain herself in a scenario like this. What if they misunderstood her? Or what if they didn’t ask for any explanation and simply assumed the worst? As much as I despised Rizvi, there was no way I wanted to see Zarin get into trouble with the authorities for going out with him.

“Leave everything to me, Aunty.” The words settled heavily in my gut. “I’ll find her. I promise.”

I hung up and instantly dialed Zarin’s number. A couple of rings later, it went to voice mail.

I swore out loud, unable to think of how else I could reach her. I closed my eyes and tried to remember everything she’d ever told me about Farhan Rizvi, everything I’d heard from the boys at the deli. My mind switched over to the first time I’d ever seen the guy. Sunglasses. Crying girl. Black car. Warehouse.

I shot a glance at Ali, who was unloading the final box of Swiss cheese from the delivery truck. “I have to go,” I told him.

“What?” Ali’s face was red with effort. “You can’t ditch work like that! The boss will have your hide.”

“It’s an emergency. My mother.” The lie fell easily from my lips, eliminating the need to tell him anything else. “I really need to go. I’ll take your next shift, I promise.”

Ali frowned and opened his mouth as if to say something.

I didn’t wait to find out what it was.

*

On a normal day, it would have taken me twelve minutes to get to the warehouse. Today, it took nine. If I hadn’t been contemplating the various horrific scenarios I could possibly find Zarin in, I would have cheered over the fact that my car hadn’t given me an ounce of trouble the entire ride.

Outside the car, the sun burned. If I closed my eyes, I knew it would turn red against my eyelids. I squinted in the light glinting against a shard of glass near the rusted warehouse gates and spotted a black car in the distance, amid the dusty buildings.