Chapter 2 Nadine Haikal El Agamy, Alexandria 1977
The school bus was late, which meant today was the day the hairstylist’s daughter would die.
Eleven-year-old Nadine peeled the plastic around her feeno sandwich, the oven-warm bread sliced down the middle and filled with scrambled eggs and feta cheese.
She sat on a dusty curb, the empty lot behind her piled high with garbage and fetid animal carcasses.
A fly swooped around her sandwich. Soon, the pack of stray dogs that patrolled this road would amble by.
If she didn’t want new scratches, she needed to scarf down the sandwich quick.
Still, Nadine waited. She had a schedule to follow.
On cue, the hairstylist’s door opened across the barren dirt road.
A haggard man wearing layers of dirt-caked coats slept outside the salon’s door, and Nadine watched curiously as the hairstylist offered him a cup of tea.
According to Janna, the hairstylist’s blabbermouth daughter, their family barely had anything to spare as it was.
Janna always eagerly ate the half of feeno Nadine offered her every morning, and Nadine had noticed the bruises under mother and daughter’s eyes growing with hunger as the drought lengthened.
Stupid to offer tea to a random vagrant, who’d likely come back to the dim-wittedly charitable hairstylist’s door.
No matter. Soon, the hairstylist would only have one mouth left to feed.
Janna didn’t bother glancing both ways before she shot across the wide dirt road.
A car hadn’t passed through in the thirty minutes Nadine had been waiting.
Tucked in a desolate corner of Alexandria, El Agamy was a decrepit, forgotten cluster of half-constructed buildings and empty roads.
When Nadine was younger, she had loved having the run of the entire town.
Her mother wouldn’t bat an eye at Nadine disappearing for hours to play with the housekeeper’s daughters until well past dinner.
She had only interceded once, when Nadine’s speech became accented with what her mother called “balady.”
“Anyone who hears you speak like that will never truly hear a word you say,” Mama said. “As soon as they hear a falaha, they won’t need to hear anything more.”
Nadine didn’t know what was so wrong with a falaha—most of Masr was falaheen. They were the farmers who fed them, who climbed the towering date trees in the Haikals’ garden with nothing but a piece of rope, a basket, and their bare feet. What did it matter if they spoke a little differently?
It wasn’t an answer Mama liked. She forbade Nadine from seeing the girls for weeks and doubled Nadine’s tutoring sessions until the accent disappeared.
The emptiness of El Agamy offered Nadine far less entertainment nowadays.
Sometimes, if she walked down the right road or the sun slanted a certain way, she could almost see what her mother and grandmother meant when they said El Agamy had been beautiful.
She could imagine that this had once been a place where Abdel Halim Hafiz had come to summer, where rich families had built grand, stately properties from here to Hannoville and sunbathed by the glittering beach.
Maybe she would still feel a sense of wonder about their neighborhood if she hadn’t seen what else was out there.
Admiring the rest of Alexandria didn’t require as much effort from Nadine’s imagination.
She had gone to Manshiya and Sidi Bishr with her grandmother, and Nadine had been breathless as they drove around the glamorous city to Teta’s favorite shopping center.
Towering, colorful buildings had lined asphalt streets.
Fruit vendors meandered along the paved roads, peddling their wares without fear of the honking yellow cabs winding around them.
Men in shiny suits sipped coffee at outdoor cafés, a deck of cards split between them.
Women linked their arms and laughed as they ducked into bustling shops.
Next to it all, the glittering Mediterranean coast stretched in a curve from the Citadel of Qaitbay to the Montaza, like the entire city was sitting on the ocean’s smile.
“Teta, can we move here? Please?” Nadine had said from her seat by a store window, unable to peel her gaze away from the sheer volume of life happening around her. This was what a city should look like. Not the dry, lifeless corner where the Haikal family had lived for generations.
Her grandmother had pinched her ear and dragged her from the store. She threw a crying Nadine into the car and pointed a knobby finger in her face. “Don’t you ever say anything so foolish to me again.”
And Nadine hadn’t. Not ever again.
“Salam Nadine!” Janna chirped. Like many people in Egypt, Janna was Muslim. Today happened to be Quran recital day at her public school, so she wore a bright blue one-piece hijab for the occasion. The loose buttons on her uniform had been lovingly sewn back on.
Nadine herself went to a secular private school, where they were only faithful to the number of zeros in her mother’s check.
“Salam Janna.” Across the street, the hairstylist watched the pair for another minute, chewing her lip worriedly. The rash of missing children had put the parents in El Agamy on edge, which is why Nadine had played the long game with Janna Elshenaway.
All it took was one moment of a lowered guard. As Nadine watched, the hairstylist shook her head slightly and retreated into her salon. The door swung shut behind her.
Nadine stood. Time to go.
“Do you want my sandwich?”
Janna’s brown eyes went wide. “The whole sandwich? Are you sure?”
In answer, Nadine put the feeno in the girl’s calloused little hands. Nadine’s own hands were smooth. In a few years, when Nadine would start to keep a journal of her private horrors, she would joke that blood made a good moisturizer. Her hands never wrinkled, never cracked.
“Do you want to come back to my house? I don’t think the bus is coming today. My mom can drive us.”
Janna stopped chewing. “Oh. I should tell Mama first, though. Right?”
The last word told Nadine all she needed. She had Janna in the palm of her supple hand, and she would do whatever Nadine said.
These girls, these soft girls, they weren’t a challenge.
Their parents loved too hard. Protected them more than they should.
Any instincts Janna might’ve had, instincts about girls like Nadine, never had a chance to develop.
“My mom will let her know after she drops us off. Come on, we’re going to be late. ”
Janna held Nadine’s hand all the way to the ivy-wrapped iron gates around Nadine’s two-story villa. The young girl shrank a little as they entered the estate, her curious gaze roving over grandiose pillars supporting delicately carved buttresses and balconies the size of some apartments.
At school, Nadine learned about a creature called an anglerfish.
A hideous, ordinary fish except for one detail: the glowing fin dangling right in front of its mouth.
In the darkness, the fin shone terribly bright, entrancing the anglerfish’s prey.
They wouldn’t see the sharp, hungry teeth lying in wait.
Wouldn’t hear the snap of its jaws until they were already between them.
These painted walls were the Haikal family’s glowing fin. And Nadine had grown up between its teeth.
Janna didn’t let go of Nadine’s hand past the living room, up the stairs to the second floor. It wasn’t until they reached the waiting steps to the third-floor door that Janna’s hand twitched in hers.
“I didn’t know you had a third floor,” Janna murmured. “Is your mom in there?”
An orange light spilled under the door, the rays crawling toward their dusty shoes. A soundless hum wove through the air. No matter how many times Nadine heard the sound, it never stopped raising the hair on the back of her neck.
The first fissure of fear broke open in Janna.
She tugged free of Nadine, but it was too late.
The shadows slithered from the walls, blots of black dancing toward them.
They snuck beneath Janna’s feet, slunk around her crooked hijab.
Sound erupted from the shadows. Voices rang around them, and Nadine guided her gaze away from the snatches of color flitting across the dark surface.
Pockets of forever, Mama called these shadows. Moments, memories, that time saw fit to save.
But time only moved forward for a reason. Whatever imprints those shadows stored, Nadine wanted no part of it.
The door swung open. Nadine threw herself to the ground, covering her face in the nick of time. Janna’s bloodcurdling scream pierced her ears, ringing in her head, and the orange glow momentarily brightened behind Nadine’s closed eyelids.
Janna’s screams abruptly cut off. Nadine waited for the click of the door to raise her head.
The orange light receded. All that remained from where Janna Elshenaway had once stood was a half-eaten feeno sandwich.