Instead of feeling smug, the thought of everyone else stuck inside only depresses me further.
Spooning cereal into my mouth, I grab my journal from my backpack. I’ve documented every attack, every bizarre incident since I left Masr. The first ten pages of the journal remain blank. Waiting for me to fill them with the details of what happened on the trip.
But I can’t. The fear refuses to let me condense it, to make it small enough to fit into words.
After I add a couple of hesitant lines about the encounter with Miss Diaz, I toss the journal, picking up the much rattier leather one I lifted from Baba’s study. It contains only two entries: my mother’s maiden name on the first page, written in her trademark slanted script, and a photo of her and Baba in their early twenties.
Baba and Mama smile up at me from a two-by-two photo of them posing in front of the Stanley Bridge in Alexandria. Baba has his arm around Mama, his square glasses slipping down the long line of his nose. A nest of curly hair sits on top of his head, and he’s wearing a truly horrific pair of bellbottom jeans.
He’s also smiling wider than I’ve ever seen him smile in Ward.
Mama barely takes up space at his side. Much more reserved than Baba, her hands rest in front of her skirt, lips turned up at the corners. Coils of black hair cascade in spirals around her frame. I wind one of my own curls around my finger.
Nadine Haikal and Hatem Mansour met at the University of Cairo twoyears into Baba’s position as a faculty lecturer. Nadine had taken a series of long buses from El Agamy, a rural area on the outskirts of Alexandria, to visit a friend on campus. She ended up wandering around, lost, until Baba happened upon her.
I love hearing the story, drawing it around me like a warm and well-worn blanket, but Baba turns puce anytime I try to talk about Mama. I resent it, sometimes, how Baba hoards those memories of her. I was only nine when she went to her hometown for her first and last visit.
It’s almost as if he thinks by withholding stories about Mama or Masr, I’ll be a blank slate for America to fill in. A girl with an Etch A Sketch identity.
Outside, the rain howls, unleashing its wrath on Ward.
My hands tighten around the journal. I went to Masr to learn about who I am, where I come from. But also for answers, because here is my darkest, quietest secret: I don’t believe them about how my mother died.
The school bus was late, which meant today was the day the hairstylist’s daughter would die.
Eleven-year-old Nadine peeled the plastic around her feeno sandwich, the oven-warm bread sliced down the middle and filled with scrambled eggs and feta cheese. She sat on a dusty curb, the empty lot behind her piled high with garbage and fetid animal carcasses. A fly swooped around her sandwich. Soon, the pack of stray dogs that patrolled this road would amble by. If she didn’t want new scratches, she needed to scarf down the sandwichquick.
Still, Nadine waited. She had a schedule to follow.
On cue, the hairstylist’s door opened across the barren dirt road. A haggard man wearing layers of dirt-caked coats slept outside the salon’s door, and Nadine watched curiously as the hairstylist offered him a cup of tea. According to Janna, the hairstylist’s blabbermouth daughter, their family barely had anything to spare as it was. Janna always eagerly ate the half of feeno Nadine offered her every morning, and Nadine had noticed the bruises under mother and daughter’s eyes growing with hunger as the drought lengthened. Stupid to offer tea to a random vagrant, who’d likely come back to the dim-wittedly charitable hairstylist’s door.
No matter. Soon, the hairstylist would only have one mouth left to feed.
Janna didn’t bother glancing both ways before she shot across the wide dirt road. A car hadn’t passed through in the thirty minutes Nadine had been waiting. Tucked in a desolate corner of Alexandria, El Agamy was a decrepit, forgotten cluster of half-constructed buildings and empty roads. When Nadine was younger, she had loved having the run of the entire town. Her mother wouldn’t bat an eye at Nadine disappearing for hours to play with the housekeeper’s daughters until well past dinner. She had only interceded once, when Nadine’s speech became accented with what her mother called “balady.”
“Anyone who hears you speak like that will never truly hear a word you say,” Mama said. “As soon as they hear a falaha, they won’t need to hear anything more.”
Nadine didn’t know what was so wrong with a falaha—most of Masr was falaheen. They were the farmers who fed them, who climbed the towering date trees in the Haikals’ garden with nothing but a piece of rope, a basket, and their bare feet. What did it matter if they spoke a little differently?
It wasn’t an answer Mama liked. She forbade Nadine from seeing the girls for weeks and doubled Nadine’s tutoring sessions until the accent disappeared.
The emptiness of El Agamy offered Nadine far less entertainment nowadays. Sometimes, if she walked down the right road or the sun slanted a certain way, she could almost see what her mother and grandmother meant when they said El Agamy had been beautiful. She could imagine that this had once been a place where Abdel Halim Hafiz had come to summer, where rich families had built grand, stately properties from here to Hannoville and sunbathed by the glittering beach.
Maybe she would still feel a sense of wonder about their neighborhood if she hadn’t seen what else was out there. Admiring the rest of Alexandria didn’t require as much effort from Nadine’s imagination. She had gone to Manshiya and Sidi Bishr with her grandmother, and Nadine had beenbreathless as they drove around the glamorous city to Teta’s favorite shopping center. Towering, colorful buildings had lined asphalt streets. Fruit vendors meandered along the paved roads, peddling their wares without fear of the honking yellow cabs winding around them. Men in shiny suits sipped coffee at outdoor cafés, a deck of cards split between them. Women linked their arms and laughed as they ducked into bustling shops.
Next to it all, the glittering Mediterranean coast stretched in a curve from the Citadel of Qaitbay to the Montaza, like the entire city was sitting on the ocean’s smile.
“Teta, can we move here? Please?” Nadine had said from her seat by a store window, unable to peel her gaze away from the sheer volume oflifehappening around her. This was what a city should look like. Not the dry, lifeless corner where the Haikal family had lived for generations.
Her grandmother had pinched her ear and dragged her from the store. She threw a crying Nadine into the car and pointed a knobby finger in her face. “Don’t you ever say anything so foolish to me again.”
And Nadine hadn’t. Not ever again.
“Salam Nadine!” Janna chirped. Like many people in Egypt, Janna was Muslim. Today happened to be Quran recital day at her public school, so she wore a bright blue one-piece hijab for the occasion. The loose buttons on her uniform had been lovingly sewn back on.
Nadine herself went to a secular private school, where they were only faithful to the number of zeros in her mother’s check.
“Salam Janna.” Across the street, the hairstylist watched the pair for another minute, chewing her lip worriedly. The rash of missing children had put the parents in El Agamy on edge, which is why Nadine had played the long game with Janna Elshenaway.
