Something wet landed on my cheek and I looked up, eyelashes fluttering against the unexpected drizzle. A sharp wind shook up a pile of dead leaves, wrapped around my ankles. It smelled like decay.
“We should get going,” Ali said, his eyes following mine upward. He had a hand on the roof of his car, a hand on the driver door. “Don’t worry about Zahra, okay? I usually wait in the library while she’s in class, catch up on homework. I’ll come back for her.”
“Okay.” Rain dribbled down my cheeks, dripped from my lips.
I didn’t move.
Ali laughed, then frowned. Looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
Perhaps I had. Tentacles of fear had suddenly reached up my throat, driven into my skull. I had turned to stone. I’d felt it suddenly, felt it like a bullet to the chest, cold and solid and real—
Something terrible had happened.
“You okay?” Ali opened the driver’s side door; rain blewsideways into the car. “Seriously, I’m sorry about my sister. I think she’s just going through a lot right now.”
I heard a phone ring, distantly, miles away.
“Is that yours?” I heard myself say.
“What?” He closed the car door. “My what?”
“Your phone. Ringing.”
Ali’s frown deepened, a furrow bordering on irritation. “My phone isn’t ringing. No one’s phone is ringing. Listen—”
I was staring at a single windshield wiper on Ali’s silver Honda Civic when my dead phone rang with a shrillness that broke the night, my paralysis.
I answered it.
At first I couldn’t hear my sister’s voice. At first I heard only my heart pound, heard only the wind. I heard my name the third time she screamed it, heard everything she said after that. My older sister was hysterical, screaming half-formed thoughts and incomplete information in my ear and I tried to listen, tried to ask the right follow-up questions, but the cell phone fell from my shaking hand, snapped when it hit the ground.
I’d gone blind. I heard my own breathing, loud in my head, heard my blood moving, fast in my veins.
Ali did not get to me before I fell. He dove to the pavement half a beat later, caught my head before it cracked. He was saying something, shouting something.
Please, God,I thought.Dear God, I thought.Please, God, I thought.
“Shadi?Shadi—”
I came back to my body with a sudden gasp. I sat on trembling legs, steadied myself with trembling arms. My eyes were wild; I could feel it, could feel them dilate, dart back and forth, focus on nothing.
“What’s going on?” he was saying. “What just happened?”
I was looking at the ground.
I remember it, remember the way the wet pavement glittered under the streetlamp. I remember the smell of dirt, the damp press of silk against my cheek. I remember the way the branches shook, the way my body did.
“I need you to drive me to the hospital,” I said.
Seven
Ali did not look at me while we drove. He did not speak.
I did not feel his eyes on me, did not feel him move more than was absolutely necessary to perform his task.
I looked at myself.
Somehow I’d multiplied, one iteration sitting in the passenger seat, the other running alongside the car, peering in the window.
