CHAPTER TWO PRESENT DAY
I wasn’t always like this.
I used to be studious, attentive. The list of my extracurriculars would make any college admissions committee weep. I split my time between my friends, dance, and Alex.
Alex. I couldn’t remember a time I had kept a secret from him. Why would I need to? In a town like Ward, where people cherish a good love story, Alex and I had the best.
Fate had already laid it out for us, just waiting for someone to turn the first page. Me, the popular captain of the dance team. Him, the handsome and beloved basketball star. An alignment of the stars over a poorly lit auditorium on a Wednesday afternoon our freshman year.
My dance team was performing a complicated routine, some nightmare of choreography that was going well until they tossed me in the air. One of the lifters at the bottom broke formation, and my falling body hit the girls at the wrong angle. We scattered like bowling pins.
The lights shone around Alex as he bent over me, a fluorescent halo ringing his golden head.
He’d carried me and my broken ankle all the way to the nurse’s office, despite his coach shouting at him to get his ass back to the court.
He held my hand until Baba arrived. For the next three months, he bought my lunch and carried it to the table so I wouldn’t have to maneuver on my crutches.
By the end of month one, I’d fallen in love with him. I told him at the end of month two. By month three, we were us. Mina and Alex. He came to my performances, and I learned how to style a jersey under a cardigan for his games.
When I ended it, Alex received two measly texts.
I can’t be with you anymore.
I’m sorry.
I wish I’d handled it better. Come up with a good lie, maybe faked feelings for some college guy from out of town. Any explanation would’ve been kinder than none.
But I tried to tell him the truth—I really did. The first week back from the trip, I asked him to meet me at the Grease & Grind. I chose a time right in the middle of the dinner rush. On the way there, I drove at a snail’s pace, rehearsing my speech.
In November, I found out my mother had a sister.
My aunt. She reached out and asked me to come visit my mother’s childhood home in El Agamy.
Baba would have never let me meet her on my own, so I lied about where I was during spring break.
When I came back from that house, something came back with me.
If I’m alone with someone, it’ll find me. It always does.
The crowded twenty-four-hour diner seemed like the perfect place to confess. I’d had it all planned out.
Or so I thought.
Alex was already waiting for me in the parking lot when I pulled in. A quick scan of the lot turned my heart to lead. The only people near us were a mom wrangling her kids into a minivan and a jogger.
“Let’s go,” I said, grabbing his arm. “I made a reservation for us.”
“Hey.” Alex captured my wrist, clearly worried. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Please, come on. We’ll lose the table.”
“Mina, the Grease & Grind doesn’t take reservations.”
The mom started her car and reversed out of the parking lot. “We have to go inside,” I hissed. “Now!”
“Mina, hold on. It’s too crowded in there. I’ll drive us to Espresso Yourself. They have a discount on the raspberry white mochas you like.”
The jogger rounded the corner, leaving the parking lot empty.
And I smelled it. The pungent odor of sewage and rot.
It was coming. Any second now, Alex’s eyes would turn a cold and hateful orange, and he would try to kill me.
Panic stole away my senses. I yanked out of Alex’s hold, nearly punching him in the process, and sprinted into the diner. Alex stood outside for ten minutes, waiting for me to come out and apologize, before shaking his head and storming away.
I haven’t tried a second time.
I sink lower in the seat, attention switching between the world’s slowest clock and my dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre.
English is my hardest hour of the day. Miss Diaz wears a feathered cap to talk about Hamlet, hangs posters of Isabel Allende’s stories around the cramped classroom, reads Mahmoud Darwish poems every time it rains.
Students who aren’t in her class seek her out for advice.
The ones who are try twice as hard to put in the effort, even though it’s the last semester of senior year and they’ve spiritually exited the building.
If Canyon High has a heart, its name is Miss Diaz.
“Alright folks, one more weekend of Jane Eyre before we move on to our next unit! Look alive, look alive.” Miss Diaz rubs her hands together.
Brown curls overpower the book-shaped clip in her hair and bounce around her round face.
“We’ve talked a lot about tragedy in Jane Eyre.
I want to go over joy today. Joy is why we endure when all the obstacles are stacked against us. Where does our heroine find her joy?”
Definitely not anywhere in this book.
I run my thumb over the crinkled page of my school-issued copy. Dozens of seniors have held this copy of Jane Eyre in their hands. Their names litter the front page, joined by mine in tiny letters at the bottom.
I trace a drawing of a sunset etched in the corner of the page. Books are like clay, Baba always says. Every owner leaves an imprint behind. A little sadness, a little hope, soaked into the pages of an old story. Keeping it alive for the next person.
What imprint am I leaving behind?
“Mina!” Miss Diaz startles me, and I find her standing at the edge of my desk. There’s a mixture of frustration and concern in her gaze. “Hon, are you alright? I’ve been calling your name.”
“Sorry.” The word comes out hoarse. It’s the first time I’ve talked out loud to anyone other than the ants all day. I clear my throat. “Sorry. I was going over my notes on the reading.”
“Alright,” Miss Diaz says. I can tell she doesn’t believe me. “Come up with anything good?”
I flip the page. Pretend my notes aren’t doodles of prom dresses.
“I don’t really see what could be joyful about her life.
Her parents are dead, her aunt abuses her, her best friend dies, and then her love interest turns out to be married.
” Frankly, it’s a miracle Jane didn’t flee into the woods earlier.
“Spoiler much?” someone calls.
“You should have read that last week, Tyler.” Miss Diaz tsks and pivots on her booted heel.
“Mina’s right. There is a lot of hopelessness in Jane’s tale.
But if that’s the case, why does she go back?
Once she becomes a rich woman and finds a suitable match in St. John, what drives Jane to return to Thornfield? ”
Miss Diaz is still looking at me. I blasted through the end of the book during fourth period. The only parts I retained are Mr. Rochester losing his vision and the other dude dying. “Because she hears his voice calling for her in the wind?”
“Not quite.” She flashes an encouraging smile.
“But you’re on the right track. This weekend, I want you all to consider Jane Eyre’s journey in its entirety.
From her aunt’s house to St. John’s, ask yourselves this: What parts of herself does Jane leave behind, and what ties them all together?
” She raps her knuckles on the podium. “Answers in two double-spaced paragraphs, please.”
Backpack zippers cut through the groans. Conversation breaks out for the last minute of class. Miss Diaz crouches by my desk. “Can you hang back after the bell?” she asks quietly.
My chest tightens. Miss Diaz hasn’t quit trying to catch me for a one-on-one in weeks.
“I can’t today. My dad is picking me up.
” A bald-faced lie. Baba teaches a seminar on Friday evenings, and he heads to the university library early to get work done.
He is there so often that if he didn’t have the social skills of a six-hundred-year-old turtle, I would wonder if he was dating the librarian.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind waiting a few extra minutes. Please, Mina.”
I barely hear the bell over my burgeoning terror. The students start to filter out. The certainty of danger creeps over me, as persistent and pervasive as the weeds coiled around the quad. If they all leave, it’ll happen again. I know it will.
It’ll find me.
I clutch my binder to my chest. My heart thumps frantically against the front cover. Not Miss Diaz. Please, please, not Miss Diaz. “Can I come in early Monday morning instead?” Only ten stragglers left, chatting or texting by their desks.
Please let some of them wait to ask Miss Diaz a question. Please don’t leave me alone with her.
“You said that last time,” Miss Diaz says. She hops onto the desk next to me and crosses her ankle boots, the metal buckles clicking with the movement. “Have I done something to offend you, Mina? You can tell me. I promise I won’t be upset.”
The forlorn note in her voice makes me want to weep.
This is the woman I’ve pestered for four years about everything from the merits of a peplum top to whether a classmate asking if my parents had ridden to school on a camel qualified as a microaggression.
Things I couldn’t ask Baba, because he would just tell me to mind my business and focus on my studies.
People like that are weeds, habibti, he’d say. They want to tangle you up, make you as small as them. Otherwise, they know you will grow higher than they ever could.
Good advice. Ninety-nine percent of the time, I followed it.
For the other one percent, I went to Miss Diaz.
“You haven’t done anything wrong.” My first bit of honesty today. I trace the outer edge of the binder with my pinkie. “I’ve just been busy.”
The room empties. I shoot out of my chair. Dread drips in my belly, forming a pool of fear somewhere deep and dark. Miss Diaz watches me retreat with a puzzled frown. “What’s keeping you so busy? Is it anything I can help with?”
We’re alone, and she hasn’t changed. It hasn’t taken her.