“I’m saying it won’t happen. Not with me.”
I frown. He sounds so sure, socertain.I’ve been dealing with this for weeks, and he thinks he’s cracked it in twenty-four hours? “It happens with everyone. Despite the best efforts of your superiority complex, you still count as everyone.”
“Ouch,” Jesse says cheerfully. “How about we test it? I won’t move from the stairwell when you open the door. If it possesses me, just slam the door shut again.”
“No.”
I took a risk with Miss Diaz yesterday, and it ended with a pair of scissors in my arm.
“Mansour—Mina. I can help you.” A short rap against the door startles me, and I pull back an inch. “Let me help you.”
In the corner of my room, a single brown leaf drops from my calathea onto the carpet. The leaf has been dead for weeks, but I’d hoped it would recover the way my monstera usually did. It didn’t make any sense to me how the rest of the calathea was thriving while an entire leaf had browned inches away; as if they weren’t connected by the same roots, housed in the same blue ceramic pot. It might not have even felt the dead leaf finally fall.
I gaze at the corpse on the carpet and make a decision.
“Pull your jacket halfway down your arms,” I order. If it possesses him and throws his giant body against the door, I need to give myself the advantage. “And tie your shoelaces together.”
To his credit, Jesse doesn’t argue, although I’m sure there’s a sarcastic retort knocking on the back of his teeth. “Done.”
Please don’t let this be another mistake.
Bracing myself, I close my hand around the curved handle and pull the door open.
Iheld out my American passport to the man at the border control desk and answered his questions in perfect Arabic. Short sentences were the key to hiding my accent. They made it easier to obscure my hesitation over the correct plural of a word or a particular present tense form. I’d spent both flights practicing.
He glanced at my ID picture and then at me. “Welcome to Masr.” The stamp pressed into the first page in my passport and released. His attention switched to the next person in line as he handed it back to me.
“Thank you so much” was one of those phrases without a direct translation into Arabic, so I offered the next best equivalent of a thousand thanks and skipped to baggage claim. I tried to resist opening my passport to marvel at the stamp. My first ever stamp. Plus, he hadn’t charged me for a visa. All the websites said I’d be charged for one if I had an American passport.
I grabbed my bag off the belt and hurried out of the arrivals terminal. As soon as I set foot past the sliding doors, the air enveloped me, heavy and thick.
Whoa. I’d been warned about the smog, but it still took a second to adjust.
Bright fluorescent light washed over the street, where cabs and busesmaneuvered around a crush of pedestrians headed to the sprawling parking lot below. My stomach roiled with nerves. What if my aunt had forgotten my arrival date? I didn’t even know what she looked like. She could be any of the people milling behind the barricades across the closed-off street in front of the terminal.
I squeezed past jubilant families reuniting and tried to squash my uncertainty. Surely Khalto Safa hadn’t forgotten to pick me up. She’d bought the tickets herself.
A hand fastened to my shoulder as a woman materialized from the crowd.
I jerked away instinctively. After a second, my jaw dropped, and I nearly blurted,Mama?
The same clever green eyes. Same tight curls pinned away from her round cheeks and angular jaw.
But this woman was flesh and bone. Living.
“Yasmina,” Khalto Safa said. She studied my face, and I wondered if she saw pieces of my mother, too. “You’re real. Huh.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I settled for beaming. “I’m so glad to meet you.”
She raised a thick black brow, switching to Arabic. “Are you certain you’re Nadine’s daughter?”
I blinked, trying to brush away my hurt. Everyone said I looked more like Baba than Mama, but I hadn’t realized the difference was so noticeable. “Of course.”
Khalto Safa started walking, presumably leading me toward the car. I dodged errant pieces of luggage, struggling to keep up with her. “Where are we going?”
Pyramids, pyramids, pyra—
“To eat,” my aunt said. “How do you feel about duck?”
