Chapter 33 Navy Blue #2
“It’s up to the board,” he says through gritted teeth.
I pick up my bag, slinging it over my shoulders, and leave without saying goodbye.
As soon as I’m outside, I realize my hands are shaking as I press stop on the recording on my phone. I take a deep breath and call Audrey.
“Hey,” I say as soon she picks up. “Do you have time now?”
Audrey meets me outside the school.
“Did you have class?” I ask, and she shakes her head.
“Yeah, but we’re just reviewing chapters. And you said you’d let me know on Friday.”
“Yeah, sorry. I got caught up with everything. Do you want to go somewhere? I feel like this is going to be a long talk.”
She grins and pats the bag across her shoulder. “I’m so ready.”
We sit at a near empty café not far from the school, which will give us privacy for our conversation. It also faces one of my biggest murals. Mama turns her head to me, winking, butterflies fluttering from the ends of her eyes.
Audrey takes out her notebook, flipping it to an empty page. “I won’t record this. I’ll just take notes.”
“Thank you.”
“All right. Let’s begin.”
I smile, nodding at the mural. “I did that.”
She stares at me.
I pull out the sketchbook I’ve been gripping tightly under the table. “The murals are all mine. I don’t want to talk about how they came to be all over New York. Banksy doesn’t, so why should I?”
Audrey is still frozen. I wave my hand in front of her, and she comes to life. “Are you kidding me?”
“You said you didn’t care if I was the one behind the murals,” I say, astounded.
“That’s because I didn’t think it was you,” she retorts, pressing her hands to her face. “I thought if you did a mural, it was going to be the one at the school.” She slams the table with her palms. “Oh my God, that was you too. Holy crap! Holy cow! How are you not on the cover of Vogue right now?”
I laugh. “I don’t want that. Audrey, I won’t tell you how I do it. And I don’t want this article to have my name on it. When you describe me, make it vague. You talk about the school and the things they let happen. But don’t name Mason and Adrian. Don’t incriminate yourself.”
She nods frantically. “You could go to The New Yorker with this. Or The New York Times. Pulitzer too? No, they don’t have a newspaper. Oh God, I’m freaking out. Why did you choose me?”
“Because you told me why you want to be a journalist. You were honest and real, and I think you’ll do it justice.”
Her cheeks become a rose pink. “I’ll give it my absolute best.”
“You sure? This might cause trouble.”
She shakes her head. “My aunt is a journalist, and she can tell me exactly how to write a piece without any legal action being taken against us. I’ll run it by her. Plus, the school only told me not to write smut or gore. This is neither.”
I laugh and turn to the latest page in my sketchbook, where I drew and roughly painted the latest drawing this morning on my way to school. Mama holding two pomegranates, cradling them in her arms, her tears falling onto their surface with a Mona Lisa smile.
Audrey doesn’t take the sketchbook but traces the edges in wonder.
“This will be up tomorrow. That’s how you know it’s me. I don’t want my name to be out there. I know there will be people who might make the connection, but I want the anonymity. For now.”
Audrey closes her eyes, takes in several deep breaths. She shakes her head, cracks her knuckles, and whispers to herself, “You trained your whole life for this.”
Then she taps her pen on her notebook. “There’s been a pattern to these murals. Kind of like a story. But the one at Braxton felt like a deviation. Is that right? Or are they all part of the same concept?”
I take in a deep breath and tell her everything.
She lets me finish before asking questions that open up to more answers I never thought of.
She writes it all down, doesn’t record anything, which puts me at ease.
She listens to the recording I did in Dr. Mérieux’s office and breathes forcefully through her nostrils at what he says.
By the end of it, she glances down at her notebook and says, “We can’t really use the recording. But this… this is a story.”
“I’m not the exception,” I tell her, needing her to understand.
“There are Jihads everywhere with their own similar stories, made to feel exactly like me. Or worse. This story is not about being a victim. This is not a story people should read and feel pity. I told you because people need to bear witness. Because I need to fight back.”
She gives me a strange look. “Pity? There is just awe.” She taps her notebook, filled with everything she wrote. “I’m going to need some time to gather my thoughts. But it should be up on the website on Friday.”
I nod, inklings of anxiety flaring up.
“This is going to be amazing,” Audrey reassures me.
“This is… a once-in-a-lifetime event. Your art is beautiful, Jihad. People love it. You’ll find so much support from everyone.
There’s nothing to be scared about. I’m so happy for you and for all the doors this will open for you.
” She lets out a small laugh. “Man, and I thought you’d get in trouble for me writing this article.
There’s so much evil in this world that goes by unaccounted for, and when we have something like this”—she nods at my mural—“that’s where we draw the line?
Nah, I don’t think so. Besides, I don’t know how you did it.
No one does.” She winks. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s not. Who’s to say?”
Amal checks on me later in the afternoon and is relieved when I tell her it went well.
“He hung up on me,” Amal says, telling me how she spammed Dr. Mérieux’s lines until he answered. “I called him many colorful words, and he didn’t like that.”
“He did act like a colorful word.”
“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?”
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 apartment is… this apartment is too painful for us. You need to move. I need 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.