Chapter 2 Zainab #2
They filed into the foyer one by one, their faces carefully blank.
Behind them came the other children—our half-siblings, ranging in age from five to fourteen.
Mehar was there, only twelve years old but already wearing that pinched expression that came from growing up in this house.
She looked at me and Zahara with something like pity in her eyes.
“Look at them.” Baba gestured toward us like we were exhibits in a museum. “Look at what they’ve become. Sneaking out. Meeting boys. Dressing like whores.”
I flinched at the word. Zahara grabbed my hand.
“I need to know.” Baba’s voice dropped, and somehow that was worse than the yelling. “I need to know if they’ve been defiled.”
My stomach turned to ice.
“Check them.”
Kim, Fatima, and Khadija exchanged glances.
I saw hesitation flicker across Kim’s face—she’d always been the kindest of the three, the one who snuck us magazines when Baba wasn’t looking, the one who braided our hair and told us stories about our mother.
But then Baba’s gaze landed on her, heavy with expectation, and whatever resistance she’d been building crumbled.
“Come on,” she said quietly, reaching for my arm. “Let’s go to the bathroom.”
“No.” I jerked away from her. “No, you can’t—Baba, please—”
“You will submit to this examination.” Baba’s voice left no room for argument. “Or the consequences will be far worse than anything you can imagine.”
I looked at Zahara. She was trembling, tears streaming down her face, but she gave me a small nod. Just get through it, her eyes said. We’ll survive this. We always do.
We didn’t have a choice.
They took us to the master bathroom—the big one attached to Baba’s bedroom, with the clawfoot tub and the cold tile floors.
And Baba came with them.
He stood in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, watching as Kim led me to one corner while Fatima and Khadija took Zahara to the other. His presence filled the room like a weight, pressing down on us, making the already small space feel suffocating.
“Baba, please.” My voice cracked. “Please don’t watch. Please just let them—”
“You lost the right to privacy when you chose to behave like animals.” His voice was flat. Emotionless. Like he was discussing the weather and not about to watch his daughters be violated. “If you have nothing to hide, this should not bother you.”
Kim’s hands were shaking as she closed the door. She wouldn’t look at me. Couldn’t look at me.
“Remove your clothes,” Baba instructed. “From the waist down.”
I looked at Zahara across the room. She was already crying, her whole body trembling as Fatima tugged at the waistband of her jeans.
Our eyes met, and I saw the same horror reflected back at me.
The same disbelief that this was actually happening.
That our own father was about to watch us be examined like cattle.
“I said remove them.” Baba’s voice sharpened. “Do not make me repeat myself again.”
My fingers felt numb as I unbuttoned my jeans. Slid them down my legs. Stepped out of them. Then my underwear—plain cotton, nothing special, but removing them in front of my father felt like peeling off my own skin.
I stood there half-naked, arms wrapped around myself, trying to cover what couldn’t be covered. Trying to disappear into the cold tile floor.
“Lie down,” Kim whispered, and I heard the apology in her voice even though she didn’t say the words. “On your back. Knees up.”
I lowered myself to the floor. The tile was freezing against my bare skin. I bent my knees, and Kim gently pushed them apart, and I wanted to die. Actually wanted to cease existing rather than endure another second of this.
Baba stepped closer.
He was watching. Standing right there, looking down at me, as Kim positioned the flashlight and examined me like I was a piece of meat at the butcher shop.
I stared at the ceiling. Counted the tiles. One. Two. Three. Four. Tried to leave my body, to float up and away from this moment, from the cold air on my exposed skin, from my father’s eyes taking in every detail of my humiliation.
Across the room, I heard Zahara sobbing. Heard Fatima tell her to hold still. Heard Khadija murmur something I couldn’t make out.
“Well?” Baba’s voice cut through the silence.
Kim cleared her throat. “She is… she is intact. Her hymen is intact.” It was so bizarre, didn’t he know that a hymen could be broken without sex? I had learned that in one of the Cosmo magazines that Kim snuck to us.
I felt Baba’s gaze on me for a long moment. Assessing. Judging. Then he turned away, his attention shifting to the other side of the bathroom where Zahara lay exposed and trembling.
“And the other one?”
The silence that followed was the longest of my life.
I turned my head, still lying on the floor, and watched Fatima exchange a look with Khadija. Watched them both look at Zahara, who had her arm thrown over her face, her chest heaving with sobs she was trying to muffle.
“She is not intact,” Khadija finally said. “She has been… used.”
Baba made a sound. Low and guttural, somewhere between a growl and a groan.
Like the news physically pained him. Like Zahara’s lost virginity was a wound inflicted on him rather than a private matter that was none of his goddamn business.
But with her virginity lost, he couldn’t sell her off.
And with me being seen with a street nigga, I couldn’t be sold either.
Our father had promised us to men at his mosque. That was now ruined.
He crossed the bathroom in three strides and stood over Zahara, looking down at her naked lower half with an expression of pure revulsion.
“Cover yourself,” he spat. “I cannot stand to look at you.”
Zahara scrambled for her clothes, her hands shaking so badly she could barely pull her underwear back on. I was moving too, yanking my jeans up, desperate to be covered, to be hidden, to have some small barrier between my body and my father’s judgment.
“Whore.” The word left his mouth like a curse. “I raised a whore under my own roof. Fed her. Clothed her. Gave her everything. And this is how she repays me.”
“Baba, I’m sorry—” Zahara started.
“SORRY?” He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her to her feet. She cried out in pain, but he didn’t seem to notice. Or care. “You spread your legs for some street hoodlum and you think SORRY is sufficient?”
He dragged her toward the door, and I scrambled after them, my jeans still unbuttoned, my heart pounding so hard I thought it might explode.
“Baba, please, it was my fault too—” I tried to grab his arm, tried to make him let her go. “I knew about it. I helped her sneak out. Punish me, not just her—”
He released Zahara just long enough to backhand me across the face. I hit the bathroom wall hard, my head cracking against the tile, stars exploding across my vision.
“You will both be punished,” he said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “Believe me. You will both be punished.”
He shoved us out of the bathroom and into the hallway, where the rest of the family still waited. All those eyes on us—our stepmothers, our half-siblings, everyone who lived under this roof and followed this man’s rules without question.
They all saw us stumble out. Saw the tears and the terror and the red marks already forming on our skin.
None of them moved to help.
The beating that followed was the worst of our lives.
Baba used his belt. Then his fists. Then a wooden spoon from the kitchen when he needed something with more reach.
He beat Zahara until she stopped screaming, until she could only curl into a ball on the floor and whimper.
And when I tried to intervene—throwing myself over her body, begging him to stop—he beat me too.
For defending her. For being her accomplice.
For being born with the same face as a daughter who had brought shame upon his household.
The other wives watched in silence. The other children watched in silence. Mehar was crying, I remember. Little twelve-year-old Mehar with tears streaming down her face, her hand over her mouth to muffle her sobs.
Nobody helped us.
Nobody stopped him.
When it was finally over—when Baba’s arm got tired, when his rage burned down to embers—he stood over us, breathing hard, and delivered his final verdict.
“Get out.”
I looked up at him through swollen eyes. “What?”
“Get out of my house.” He stepped back, disgust curling his lip. “Both of you. I have no daughters who behave like whores. No daughters who sneak around with kafir men. No daughters who bring shame upon their family.”
“Baba, please—” Zahara’s voice was barely a whisper. She was bleeding from a cut above her eyebrow, and I was pretty sure at least one of her ribs was cracked. “Please, we have nowhere to go—”
“That is not my concern.” He turned his back on us. On his own flesh and blood. “You have five minutes to leave. Take nothing but the clothes on your backs. If you’re not gone by the time I return, I’ll drag you out.”
He walked away from us into his office.
The door closed with a click that echoed through the silent house.
Kim helped us to our feet. Pressed two hundred dollars into my hand—probably all the cash she had—and whispered, “Go to the shelter on North Avenue. They’ll take you in.”
I wanted to thank her. Wanted to rage at her for not doing more. But there wasn’t time for either.
Five minutes.
We had five minutes to say goodbye to the only home we’d ever known.
Zahara leaned on me as we stumbled toward the front door. I could feel her trembling. Could feel the blood from her wounds seeping through her shirt and onto my hands.
“It’s okay,” I told her, even though nothing was okay and might never be okay again. “I’ve got you. We’re gonna be okay.”
The front door opened. The cold Baltimore night rushed in, biting at our skin, our wounds, our broken hearts.
We stepped outside.
The door slammed shut behind us.
And just like that, we were alone in the world.
Two sixteen-year-old girls with no money, no family, no future. Standing on the front porch of a house that was no longer ours, wearing clothes stained with our own blood, with nothing but each other to hold onto.
Zahara looked at me, her face swollen and tear-streaked and still somehow beautiful. “What do we do now?”
I didn’t have an answer.
But I wrapped my arm around her waist and started walking anyway.
“We survive,” I said. “That’s what we do. We survive.”