Nine, Ten Page 4

  Naheed looked around the room to see if anyone else was listening.

  She didn’t want to talk about her hijab.

  Anyone else would have figured that out. And stopped asking.

  But not Eliza.

  Next to them, Tommy and Sebastian were still balling up paper, although now they were using it like a stress ball and seeing which hand could squeeze it tighter.

  “Do you have to wear it?” Eliza went on.

  If Naheed didn’t say something, the whole class was going to start looking this way, and just because they had seen Naheed’s head covering for three years didn’t mean they understood. Or didn’t notice.

  But it was too late. Tommy and Sebastian seemed more interested in anything else than in their science experiment.

  “Yeah, Naheed. Why do you have to wear that? Isn’t it hot under there?” Tommy asked.

  It wasn’t.

  Sebastian laughed. “I remember in third grade when you first wore it. I thought you had lost all your hair, like you were sick or something. Isn’t that crazy?”

  Yes. In fact, Naheed had long and very thick black hair. It was one of the things she loved about herself. It was just like her mother’s.

  “So why do you, Naheed?” Eliza asked one more time.

  Wearing pajamas to school might have been better than this. The last thing she wanted to do was explain why. It was as if all of a sudden Naheed was a giant in the room with an endless skein of cotton on her head and everyone was staring at her, and it.

  “I don’t know, Eliza,” Naheed said. “Why do you have to be so annoying?” Which seemed to do the trick—the questions stopped—but it also sent Tommy and Sebastian into full-out hysterics.

  And then Eliza looked like she was about to cry.

  “Annoying Eliza.” Tommy laughed. “That’s a good one, Naheed.”

  Eliza’s mouth was twitching more than ever and tears were filling up her eyes. Naheed had never seen anyone start to fall apart so quickly.

  Sebastian echoed the sentiment. “Yeah, that’s a good one.”

  The boys said it in unison and repeated it a few times for good measure, like a Greek chorus. “Annoying Eliza. Annoying Eliza.”

  The attention had shifted and Naheed could feel herself returning to her normal size, but she also felt really bad. Eliza hadn’t done anything wrong. She was just trying to make friends and she didn’t know how.

  The boys were still laughing.

  Five minutes left.

  Life science couldn’t be over fast enough.

  September 10, 2001

  11:16 a.m. EDT

  Shanksville, Pennsylvania

  “Are you going to eat those?” Ben righted his chair back onto its four legs and leaned in toward Will’s french fries.

  When Will didn’t answer, Ben helped himself, nabbing a handful of fries from Will’s tray. The very familiarity of his bad manners was a relief, because for a long time after the accident had happened, even Will’s best friends had acted differently around him. They wouldn’t grab food off his plate. They didn’t tease him, punch him in the arm, or give him dead legs in the dugout. Like he was too fragile. As if he would break. Like he was different somehow. And he supposed that was true.

  After so many weeks and months, most people had stopped telling him how sorry they were to hear about his dad, stopped looking at him like he had a toad on his head or something equally as unfortunate. And that was a relief too, because it was as if he had been hearing, through their apologies and condolences and cards and flowers and food and tears, something else they weren’t saying.

  He should have just kept driving past.

  Or just called it in on his CB. Don’t all truckers have CBs?

  It didn’t have to happen, did it?

  Only, as the world outside his home began to forget, it brought a new sense of loneliness. It created a gap between “them” and “us,” before and after, the haves (a dad) and the have-nots (a dad).

  “Where’s the ketchup?” Ben asked.

  Alex tossed an unopened packet of Heinz across the table. “What are you looking at, Will?” he asked.

  When he heard his name, Will whipped back around. “Nothing.”

  It wasn’t until he saw Ben and Alex staring at him oddly that Will realized he had been searching the cafeteria for Claire.

  She hadn’t been on the bus this morning.

  Was she absent? Maybe she was sick?

  Or, Will guessed, she could have gotten a ride to school.

  Maybe Claire wasn’t on the bus because she had ridden her bike to school. It had been drizzling, but it was warm and not too wet. Perfect for bike riding. Will could have ridden to school. He should have. He had been thinking of doing that himself, lately.

  It had nothing to do with Claire, of course.

  He just thought he might want to ride his bike one of these days, before it got cold, before winter swooped in and hung around till March or April.

  “Will, pay attention,” Alex demanded. “I’m talking here.”

  “What?” Will refocused his attention back to the table.

  “I was saying I have the new Madden,” Alex went on. “You guys want to come over after school?”

  “Cool,” Ben said. “I’ll bring a controller.”

  They both waited for Will’s approval.

  “Nah, I don’t feel like it,” Will said.

  Since when had he stopped wanting to play video games?

  “You guys can, though,” Will added.

  Since when? Since he didn’t feel like doing much of anything anymore.

  “Well, no, we can do something else if you want,” Alex said quickly.

  A year ago they would have just played Madden with or without him. Ben had been waiting months for this game to come out. Alex had preordered it.

  No, his friends hadn’t forgotten. Not completely. Not at all. Someone must have talked to them about the right way to behave when somebody’s father died. Was killed.

  Whatever.

  “Yeah, we can play Madden anytime,” Alex added.

  But nobody got it right. Because there was no right.

  “What do you feel like doing, Will?” Ben asked.

  Will looked up and across the room.

  What did he feel like doing?

  He felt like sitting next to his dad in his old truck on the way to the dump on Sunday morning. He felt like getting up early and watching his dad try to make breakfast, crack the eggs and drip them all over the counter. He felt like throwing a ball in the backyard, back and forth, back and forth, until the rhythm of the ball hitting the leather and swooshing as it returned was all he could hear, and all he could feel. Until he and his dad were like one single unit.

  But that’s not the way things were.

  “I don’t know.” Will shrugged.

  Across the way a loud shriek of girly voices flew up into the room. So Claire was in school. She was there, sitting with her friends. Their faces lit up with laughter at something one of them had just said. The girls kept their seats close together, their heads almost touching as they giggled and talked.

  There were only twenty-seven kids in the whole seventh grade, and Will had been in class with Claire in second, third, and fifth. They had ridden the same bus to school together every single year for eight years. But this year she looked different. She looked like a whole other person than the one he remembered. She looked, well, like a girl.

  When she had heard he was going to Florida with his family, Claire had plopped down on the bus seat next to him. She said she had gone to Disney World before, and she let him in on which were the best rides at what time, and which ones to avoid altogether. She told him to bring sunscreen and lots of water, so he didn’t have to buy it when he got to the Magic Kingdom.

  “Because everything is so crazy expensive once you get into the park.”

  And Will didn’t hear a word she said, but he noticed her hair and her smile and the faint smell of maple syrup whe
n she was this close.

  For a short time in fourth grade Will and Claire had actually been boyfriend and girlfriend. The whole thing was arranged by their friends, by delivering a note and returning to their side with the answer. Will agreed to be Claire’s boyfriend, but by the end of the day she broke up with him, via another note, which read, “I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore. I’m sorry because you are a nice boy.”

  That would have been from the before. He was in the after. This was the now.

  Will shifted his reverie away from the table of girls. “I feel like riding my bike,” he blurted out.

  Alex and Ben were silent for a beat. Then Ben said, “Okay, fine. Great. Good by me.”

  “Yeah, we haven’t done that in a long time.” If Alex was disappointed, which he probably was, he was good at hiding it. “It’ll be fun,” he said.

  “What’ll be fun?”

  None of them had noticed that Claire was walking by with her tray, but they all looked up at the sound of her voice. She stood by their table and waited for their answer. Somewhere between fourth grade and this year Claire had gotten really pretty.

  Ben and Alex answered at the same time, Ben saying “Nothing” and Alex saying “Biking,” and it came out sounding like “Nubiking.” Then Alex punched his knuckles into Ben’s upper arm.

  “Ow, what was that for?”

  “So what is it?” Claire asked again, as if she kindly hadn’t noticed any of their fumbling and nervousness. “What’s so fun that you haven’t done in a long time?”

  Ben punched Alex back.

  “Bike riding,” Will spoke up. “We’re just going to bike over to the old strip cuts after school.” And then Will surprised everyone, himself most of all, when he added, “So you wanna come with us?”

  September 10, 2001

  11:18 a.m. PDT

  Los Angeles, California

  Of course it was so silly and just a big misunderstanding. Aimee knew her parents weren’t getting divorced. They had been bickering a lot lately, but wasn’t that just stress over moving, selling the house, and trying to find something in Los Angeles they could afford?

  Sure, sometimes they argued over how much time Aimee’s mother was working, who didn’t do the dishes, who left the milk out all night.

  But that would settle down.

  Lunch period was long past; it was almost eleven thirty and now Aimee was hungry, but she had to find her next class. The inside of the school looked like a maze of stucco walls, each hall exactly like the one she had just come down, or turned around in and walked back the other way. The bell rang, and the doors were all closed by the time she found the room number that was marked on her slip of paper.

  Her mother had been wrong about one thing: Missing school orientation was not a minor thing.

  “Oh, sweetie. We can’t fly to L.A. for the start of school and back for your cousin’s bat mitzvah and back again a week later. It’s not a big deal to start late. They don’t do anything the first few days of school anyway. Right, Steve?”

  She looked at Aimee’s dad for confirmation, but he didn’t give it.

  “It’s hard enough starting a new school,” her father said. “Missing the first few days won’t help.”

  “Well, you’re not helping,” her mother said, and maybe her voice was getting a little loud. “What do you want us to do? Fly back and forth? And who’s going to pay for it? The flights alone would cost . . .”

  Aimee shook the memory out of her head and tried to concentrate on algebra. She was supposed to be taking a test for her math placement, a test everyone else had taken last week.

  What did she care what two girls she didn’t even know thought about her?

  Or her family?

  What could they know?

  Aimee looked down at her test and then up at the rest of the kids sitting at their desks. There were some things that were the same as at her old school—the desks, for instance. The desks were the same plasticky wood with the metal frame and the chair attached. And the whiteboard in the front of the room. And the teacher. The teacher kind of looked like Mrs. Franklin from fourth grade.

  That was the year Aimee’s mom first started working.

  “I’m terrified,” she’d confided in her daughter. Aimee’s mom had been trying on outfits for her interview, and so far seven dresses, ten shirts, and three pairs of pants had landed on the floor. Various shoes, stockings, and socks were scattered in between.

  “You’ll be great, Mom.” Aimee lay on her mother’s big bed while her mom stood in front of the full-length mirror, this time in black slacks and a gray top. She held a pair of gold earrings up to the sides of her head. “What do you think?”

  Aimee shook her head. “Not those,” she said.

  “No?” Her mother put the earrings down on the dresser and picked up another pair.

  “Let me.” Aimee bounced off the bed. Usually things went the other way around, with Aimee trying something on and asking for her mother’s approval. This was exciting. If this new job meant they would spend more time together like this, like two best friends, like two girlfriends, Aimee was all for it.

  Her mom stripped off the top and tried on something else. “I think I need to match the shoes to the jewelry, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Aimee answered.

  In truth, Aimee had no idea. Her mom was beautiful no matter what she was wearing. And all these dresses and earrings looked pretty much the same. Her mom seemed to favor blacks and grays, sometimes browns or olives. She called them earth tones. She looked good in everything she put on.

  Aimee picked a scarf from the ones hanging on the inside of her mother’s closet door. “How about this?” She held it out. “Instead of that necklace.”

  Her mother took off the necklace and tied the loose scarf around her neck. It did look good. The material of the scarf had a bit of all the colors her mom was wearing and a little burst of purple that pulled it all together.

  “Oh my goodness, Aimee. It’s perfect. You’re a lifesaver.”

  Her mom scooped her into her arms, scarf and all, and hugged her, way too tightly, but Aimee remembered it as one of the happiest afternoons. They spent another half an hour cleaning up all the mess, hanging up shirts and dresses, and refolding pants, and then they went down to make dinner together. Meatless tacos, Aimee’s favorite.

  And they might even have baked cookies that night. Yes, Aimee was pretty sure they had. Oatmeal chocolate chip with raisins.

  “How are you doing with that exam?” the Mrs. Franklin look-alike was asking.

  “Oh.” Aimee looked up. “Fine, I guess.”

  The teacher smiled and gave her that kind, it’s-okay-if-you’re-not-the-smartest-kid-in-the-class look.

  Maybe if Aimee hadn’t been such a fashion guru, her mom would never have gotten that job and they would never have had to leave Chicago. And her mom wouldn’t have to be away so much. She’d be home right now, so that when Aimee got off the bus, she’d be there to hear about every last second of her very first day of seventh grade.

  Or better yet, they’d still be in their old house. No new school, new teacher, new town, new kids.

  No impending divorce.

  No, just kidding.

  Either way, her mother would have remembered to pack Aimee a snack before sending her off to school, as she was now most likely going to starve to death.

  “How about you finish it tomorrow?” the teacher said, reaching for the test paper.

  Aimee was about to answer. She was about to say that, no, she could do it. It was easy math; she’d learned it last year. But her stomach spoke instead, with a loud grumbling roar, and there was still a whole afternoon left of school.

  September 10, 2001

  12:10 p.m. EDT

  Brooklyn, New York

  “What are you talking about? I swiped my card,” Sergio said. He twisted his body and tried to yank himself out of the officer’s grip, which loosened but didn’t let go. There was
rage lingering on the surface that rippled like a wave awakened into motion.

  “I watched you jump the turnstile, son.”

  Son? I’m sure not your son.

  “Let go of me.”

  The man let go, as if daring Sergio to run.

  But Sergio knew better than to run. You didn’t run.

  You had to give a cop your name. You had to cooperate. You had to give in. Give up. Answer to those who served and protected a world that had never served nor protected him.

  They were allowed to stop you for no reason. They could throw you up against the wall and pat you down, say whatever they wanted. And if you resisted, if you said one single thing, moved the wrong way, answered back, they could haul you in and that would be the end of that.

  That was the law.

  Stop anyone. Like every black kid walking (or running? Forget it!) down the street, in his own neighborhood, down in the subway. The police were allowed to do whatever they wanted—tease, taunt, humiliate, shove, prod, provoke. Sergio’s cousin Ralph had spouted tears that time when the cops grabbed him and ran their hands all over his legs, around his chest, up and down his arms, holding his head down so he couldn’t look up, so he couldn’t turn and see anything but the dark smothering of his own hoodie. Heavy, angry hands all over his body; loud, angry voices robbing him of his being, of being a human being.

  “Are you going to wet your pants, little boy?” one of the cops said. “Want me to call your grammy for you?”

  Ralph was huge, dark skinned, with short dreads. He looked sixteen but he was only eleven, and he cried like a baby.

  No, Sergio was not going to cry. He was not going to bend. Not going to break.

  “Where are you going so badly you need to steal a ride?”

  “What’s it to you?” Sergio answered.

  I dare you. I just dare you.

  “Look, I’m not a police officer. I’m not going to give you a ticket.”

  Sergio lifted his eyes from the concrete platform. “What the—”

  “Engine 209. Ladder Company 10. Sorry, kid. I was just . . .”