I close my eyes. “Mama is here, and it’s killing me to leave her. But I am also dying here, Baba. You’re barely alive yourself. You have a grandchild about to be born, but you don’t look like you care. Mama wouldn’t want this.”
He stares at me, and I see the lines around his eyes. My father looks so old, so human, so fragile.
“I think you should move to Qatar.” I get courage from Amal, who talked about this a long time ago. “I think you should be with Amal and Marwan and the new baby. I think you need to find a purpose. Because this isn’t a life, Baba. We can’t just be sad the entire time. I can’t do that. I can’t do that to Mama. You were both sad, and you tried to be happy for us. She was sad because she missed Syria.”
“Don’t tell me what your mother was,” he says, anger seeping into his voice.
“Then I’ll tell you what you are to me.” My nose burns, and the backs of my eyes ache with tears. “You’re barely a father. I have to put in the effort to get you to see me. I talk about Mama’s murder. I cook her recipes. I’m trying to see the colors that were taken from me, and I can see them now. But you see me as an afterthought. You don’t know how school is going. You just don’t know. This apartmentis… this apartment is too painful for us. You need to move.Ineed to move.”
His expression crumbles in hurt, his chin wobbling, and he looks away.
“I’m…” he begins before clearing his voice. “This isn’t what I wanted when I came here. It’s not what I dreamed of.”
I know he’s talking about moving from Tartus to New York.
He runs his hands over his face. “It’s not what your mother deserved. Living here in this apartment. She was a bird, and I put her in this cage. I thought…” He breathes, but it rattles somewhere in his chest.
“What?” I ask, transfixed.
“I thought it would get better,” he says quietly. “I thought we’d move from here. Bigger apartment. Maybe your mom goes back to school. Maybe life gets better. It just… didn’t.”
I think back to all the times with Mama and when Amal was here. Life wasn’t what my parents expected it to be. It wasn’t Alexis’s mansion and fancy schools. There was gray in between the colors of the rainbow, but those colors still existed. Mama, Amal, and I laughed and had our own inside stories and jokes. We made memories in this apartment. Even with the cancer, Mama laughed so we wouldn’t be scared.
“Life was life, Baba,” I finally say, the tears escaping. “Mama made the best out of it. She gave us all she could. It wasn’t better, and it wasn’t worse. It was just life.”
He turns away from me, but not before I see his own tears.
Sunflower Yellow
When Audrey publishesthe article on Friday, she sends me a message.
I hope I did your story justice
She did.
It feels like I’m reading about someone who isn’t me but has all my features and characteristics. Audrey acts as a mouthpiece for me, beginning the story with Mama, nothing specific—she could be anyone walking down the streets of New York, but distinct enough that you know this person is special. She weaves poetry about the murals, linking them to moments in Mama’s life. She makes a fictional character out of Mama where she represents every Muslim hijabi woman out there whose dreams and lives were violently taken. Where she couldn’t live in her home country and sought a life elsewhere for herself and children. Audrey writes about how the murals are an artistic resistance against a silent, slow, and deliberate genocide happening. She writes about how this Muslim woman, as proud as she is of her identity, should be seen as a human being and not be boxed into neatlittle packages with her identity being the only way she’s recognized. She intertwines that with rumors about the school whose students enjoy the privileges of their skin color, old money, and status to treat the world as their plaything. How bullying there progressed from verbal to physical, with the help of apathetic eyes that only watched, and ultimately resulted in the indefinite suspension of two marginalized students. She worries for the future of this nation if “rotten, spoiled bullies who never outgrew childish tantrums now become adults who bully the entire country.” She writes about dignity and the reason why the Statue of Liberty exists and her early origins as a Muslim woman who rallied the people in the cause of freedom for all. She talks about me—the Artist, she calls me, although she’s been toying with different monikers. She compares me to revolutionary artists like Banksy and Frida Kahlo in the weight of their art that makes people stand for hours on end just to see every brushstroke. She ends it by saying that despite all the evil in this world, it’s people like me who rise above it and change it for the better.
By the end of it, I’m in tears and send Audrey a whole paragraph thanking her. Her reply is just one sentence: it was all you.
By Saturday, it’s gone viral online, linked on several other websites, all reporting on the murals and Braxton. I know Audrey is getting emails and phone calls, asking her about the article.
Jamie calls me in a daze.
“Hello, whistleblower,” he says, impressed.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say with a smile. The anxiety at having this article published is still there, but Audrey assured me it was all right. Her aunt reviewed it. Nothing said in the article would lead to any legal action against me or Audrey.
“She’s been doing this a long time,” Audrey told me. “She’s written about so many CEOs, man.”
“Is that why you didn’t sound upset that you got suspended?” Jamie asks.
I swivel in my chair in my room. “Well, Braxton will need to bring us back immediately if they don’t want the world to figure out that those two students are us.”
“You’re terrifying,” Jamie says after an amazed silence.
“Thank you. Besides, we just need to sit for the exams and get our diplomas. It’s not like we have any classes left.”
“Thank God for that.”
