I glanced at her to check she if she was serious. “Ward doesn’t have a mall, let alone aluxurymall. I have to drive fifty miles up to Oregon to find one, and even then, they’re usually just outlet stores. Maybe there are cooler malls in San Francisco or L.A., but the entire state isn’t just those two cities any more than Masr is just Alexandria or Cairo.” The words came out more heated than I planned. She’d been making these snide remarks since I landed, and I couldn’t figure out why. She seemed determined to think my excitement was false, or worse—some kind of pity.
“Tell me about Ward,” Khalto Safa said. It caught me off guard until she continued, “I want to understand why your parents chose that town in particular, if it’s so unremarkable.”
“I wouldn’t say unremarkable, exactly,” I hedged. I loved Ward; I felt protective of it and guilty for wanting to defend it.
My aunt sighed. She stopped at a kiosk and picked up a gilded lion-head lighter, flipping the heavy lid to test the flame. Satisfied withthe fire dancing from the lion’s jaw, she dropped a hundred and fifty bucks onto the seller’s laptop and left, ignoring the confused glance he shot our way. “You can tell me about Ward while we get you some new clothes. It’s embarrassing walking next to you in that outfit.”
I instantly perked. She could insult me all she wanted if, in exchange, I’d get to walk out of here with shopping bags.
“What they say about earthquakes in California isn’t completely true. We only get a handful of quakes every year. Barely even a quake, really. More of a shimmy,” I start, subtly steering my aunt back to the shop where I’d seen the black purse. “Now, if we’re talking fires and flooding …”
On the car ride to El Agamy, the signs of life disappeared with every mile under our tires. The ocean chased us, becoming bluer and brighter in the absence of families milling at its shores. A building with black scorch marks running up its left side leaned toward another building, this one with dangerously lopsided balconies.
“You and Mama grew up here?” I asked, momentarily distracted by the sight of a dog lying in the middle of the road. A dozen puppies clambered under her belly, nosing for milk. They were directly in our path.
I clutched the glovebox when Khalto Safa showed no signs of slowing. Before I could shriek a warning, she swerved, avoiding the pile of puppies by a bare inch.
“Yes,” she said shortly. She lifted her lighter to her cigarette and tossed the empty box into the street. I watched it fall next to one of the puppies.
I pressed my cheek to the window, determined not to prove Khalto Safa right. Sure, El Agamy might not be as glamorous and fun as the rest of Alexandria, but this was where Mama grew up. This was her home.
Khalto Safa slowed at a speed bump the size of a small mountain. Thecar tilted backward, wheels spinning in the air as we climbed. The bottom of the car scraped the bump with a metallic shriek.
When the car crested the speed bump, I screamed.
Hundreds of children filled the road ahead of us. They wore uniforms that must have gone out of rotation decades ago.
The nearest child stood right at the car’s front bumper, staring at me with big, mournful eyes. She was holding a long sandwich wrapped in plastic, and her crooked one-piece hijab slid partially down her face.
The back of the car rocked. Khalto Safa swore as the speedbump scraped the undercarriage a second time.
“Khalto Safa, what’s—what’s going on?” I choked out, unable to tear my gaze from the girl.
“What’s going on is that someone decided to build speed bumps the size of a damn house in the middle of a fast-moving road ‘for our safety’ when all it does is screw up our cars and make themless safe!”
Ice water sluiced down my spine. She couldn’t see them.
“I know it’s not much now, but El Agamy is an up-and-coming area,” Khalto Safa said.
A viscous black sludge poured from the little girl’s mouth.
One by one, the children choked on the black liquid as it coated their chins, drenched their clothes. They were drowning, right here in the middle of the road.
“Your teta always talked about how busy El Agamy was before everyone made off to Marsa Matrouh and Marina. Everyone had a summer home here. We were a fun little trend for the rich and bored until they hopped to the next section of the coast. Ridiculous. If you think they did a number on El Agamy, you should see Abu Talat.”
Khalto Safa’s car sped forward, and just as her bumper reached the first girl, the children disappeared.
I screwed my fists into my eyes and shook my head. It was the weatherchange. Lucia mentioned her trips to Italy made her ears pop from the plane’s cabin pressure even weeks after landing. Maybe my eyes were popping.
I took a deep breath, refocusing on the conversation. I dutifully did not point out that Khalto Safa could be the poster girl for the rich and bored. “That happened in California too, after the Gold Rush. People flooded the area and built towns to support them while they mined for gold, and when there was nothing left anymore, they abandoned it. We learned about them in eighth grade—they called them ghost towns.”
Khalto Safa released a sharp laugh. “Ghost towns. I like that.”
The car rolled into a narrow, uneven street. I held on to the console as we rocked from side to side, and my aunt spat another slew of expletives as the front wheel dipped into a muddy pond. “Runoff from the sewers,” she growled. “New tenants in the house at the end of the road. Idiots built cheap pipes and turned our street into a toilet for the dogs. Not to mention the thieves have been stripping the copper from their wires, but don’t worry—they would never try anything like that with our villa.”
The crumbling junkyards gradually shifted to fading ivory walls. They climbed higher the deeper we went, eventually merging into a pair of soaring iron gates.
Once I finished picking up my jaw from the ground, I identified the vines snaking around the rusted metal as ivy and grape leaves. Mama had tried—and miserably failed—to grow grape leaves for mahshi in our old yard. Oddly enough, Baba managed to plant them with no problem the following year. Mama had joked her touch was just too toxic.
