“Was scared too. I’m sure he saw the Qatari number, didn’t know what it was, and panicked.”
I laugh, and my phone vibrates with a message from Jamie. “Hey, I’ll call you back, okay?”
“Hmm. I deserve a whole slice of a mousse cake after today. No, wait, Not just a slice. Gonna make Marwan get me a whole cake.”
“You do.”
“So do you. I’ll send you a little something to treat yourself, okay?”
“Thank you.”
Five seconds after we hang up, I get a notification that she sent me a hundred dollars.
I pull up my messages with Jamie. He doesn’t know what I did, and after this long day, I don’t have it in me to repeat it.
He tells me he slept in and ran for an hour around Washington Square Park.
Me:do you have some room in the suspended Braxton students club?
He calls me immediately.
“No,” he says in horror.
“Alexis.”
“Well,” he says, stunned. “I should have expected this plot twist. How are you feeling?”
“The knife wounds on my back and chest are healing nicely.”
“They won’t even scar,” he says confidently.
I hear the key turning in the front door of the apartment and stand. It’s nearly eight p.m., the sun nearly gone, and now Baba’s home.
His heavy footsteps shuffle by the welcome mat, and I hear him grunting when he picks up his shoes to place them on the rack.
“Hey, Jamie. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Sure, Jihad.”
Baba’s keys clang on the mantelpiece beside the front door, and I give him enough time to wash up and settle down before looking for him.
He’s in his room, on the prayer mat in the last position of the Maghrib prayer.
I’ve rarely seen Baba in this room, avoiding it as much as I can when he’s home. And now, looking at my father, I feel as if I haven’t seen him in a hundred years. Are those new gray hairs on his head? A new wrinkle by his eyes?
“Baba,” he says when he’s done, surprised to see me standing there. His voice falls awkwardly in this room. It’s too loud and too quiet, not finding the spaces to settle in. “Everything okay?”
His eyes focus on me for a bit before wandering off. It’s an improvement from before, when he couldn’t even look at me. When all he did was try to chase Mama’s ghost with his eyes, but she danced away at the last second.
“InshAllah,” I say, and he fixes his stare on me again. “Baba, I have something to tell you.”
He straightens up. “Yes?”
I take a deep breath. “I’m not going to NYU. I didn’t even apply. I want to go to Opus. It’s an art academy in San Francisco, and I’d be great in it. I’m applying for their scholarships and housing, and I think I might get it. But I don’t want to stay in New York. I can’t be here anymore. And I don’t think you can either.”
He blinks at me. Our relationship has been slowly healing since December, after I confronted him about Mama’s death, but now he looks lost.
“What?” he finally says. “But your mother is here. Isn’t…Amal left and now you?”
