* * *
After Mom’s fallen asleep—and I’m certain by the way her breath becomes even—I flip to her and stare at her face.
I love her.
And I want her all to myself. Is that too much to ask?
I put my hand out and lay it softly on her shoulder.
She doesn’t know how much I love her, I guess.
She opens her eyes right then somehow—like we’re cosmically connected or something—and I draw my hand away. But before I turn around, I say, “I love you.” Really quietly.
I think she heard, because she places a hand on my back, and I can feel that it’s filled with love.
* * *
I wake up for Fajr before Tats’s alarm goes off, pray, and then text her. DON’T WAKE ME UP TO SWIM.
Mom’s reading Qur’an from her phone in the armchair, the light shining on her head, which is covered in her long prayer dress that’s one big circular cloth starting from her head—with a hole for her face—and reaching the floor.
I get into bed and pull the covers up over my hair but allow the folds to fall and make a small, open space through which I can watch Mom.
When she wears her prayer dress, she looks like those stacked wooden Russian dolls that you take apart, each doll becoming smaller. Every single morning, her doll self reads Qur’an and does her duas after Fajr.
It’s so dependable. I don’t want that to change.
I don’t want her to change.
And, at the same time, I also don’t want her to cry. To be lonely. To not have someone who loves her like that.
But how can she love people I don’t know? That I don’t know if I even like?
How can she fall so fast for a stranger? Strangers, plural?
And I don’t even know how to talk to her about it.
* * *
As I’m about to close up the hole in my blanket, what Mom said about prejudiced people comes to me: When you see the world as divided… it’s not about expanding hearts—it’s about shrinking our capacity to love.
I’m not being prejudiced. It’s not about skin color or culture for me, this feeling I have about Mom and Uncle Bilal.
It’s about preserving what I already have.
Which is what Mom said, a voice whispers after I close myself into the blanket. That people who are exclusionary want to preserve what they have. That they think others will take it all away from them.
I take off the blanket and whisper, “Mom?”
She pauses in her reading and looks up at me, with questioning eyes.
“Are you coming back to bed?”
She nods and finishes her reading while I wait.
Then she climbs into bed behind me and wraps an arm around me and laughs. “Aha. So you missed my morning breath, huh?”
Turned away from her, I make a face and then smile.
Maybe I can talk about it with her in the morning.
About her and Uncle Bilal.
Part Three
SATURDAY, JULY 17
WEDDING DAY
To do:
Avoid love at all costs
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When I wake up again, it’s to Tats sitting up on her bed in a black-and-turquoise burkini, the swim-cap-scarf part off, her long hair rippling around her face, watching TV.
“Finally. Can you get ready fast?” she asks.
“Didn’t you get my text?” I throw off the blanket and look at the time. Just after seven a.m. “I can’t go swimming.”
“Jan, come on. I’ve been waiting.”
“Is it because you want to wear your new burkini?” I roll my eyes. I’ve been best friends with Tats for years, but sometimes I feel on the cusp of wondering if I fully get her. Like I’m thinking right now that wearing a burkini is an “adventure” for her. “Where’d you get it from anyway?”
“Online. It’s the same one Lindsay Lohan wore but in blue instead of red like hers.” She flips channels. “I wanted to go swimming, but I didn’t want to stand out in my swimsuit because you’d be wearing a burkini. That’s why I got it.”
I walk to the bathroom. “I can’t come. My period’s gonna come any minute, and so I refuse to go into a pool.”
Tats groans. “Oh come on. You don’t even have it yet.”
I close the door. When I come out, she’s still in her burkini, so I decide to bargain. “Ditch the swimming idea and I won’t ask about the Jeremy situation. This weekend. I’ll eventually ask, but I’ll spare you this weekend.”
Tats turns off the TV and leans back into the headboard behind her. “What do you mean?”
“I won’t ask about how you kept the entire thing from me. Like it was no big deal that you’d started going out with him—without telling me a single thing—when I thought we tell each other everything.”
“How could it be a big deal?” She tilts her head against the headboard, frowns, and, after straightening her head again, opens her mouth. “I was keeping it a surprise because I thought you’d be happy. He’s friends with you. And I’d just blocked him EVERYWHERE. Because he was actual buds with that creep who hurt you. But then you were right: He’s completely different. I found out how different when I got lonely with you gone for so long. And when he commented on that pic of yours of your dad’s lake, I unblocked him for some reason. And saw all the stuff he was into. Next thing I know, I’m talking to him online. And then he picked me up so I could watch him play baseball and we ate tacos after and I kept telling him how much I missed you and so he kept picking me up and… Yeah, and.”
That was a long spiel. Sort of like there’s a teeny bit of guilt underlying it all.
Whatever. I like Jeremy. He’s kind. He’s good. He’s going to treat Tats really nicely.
Who cares that forever ago I fell for him for three seasons of a school year.
“Okay, it’s okay. I’m not mad. It was just weird you didn’t tell me.” I sit on the edge of my bed and then let myself drop down so I’m lying on my back with my feet on the floor. “Can you play ‘Ocean Eyes’? Please.”
“No. Not a good song for you now.”
“Please.”
“Janna.”
“It’s not like that.”
She comes over and lies down beside me. “Are you really happy about me and Jeremy?”
“Yeah. How long have you guys been together?”
“From like three days after you left.”
“Whoa, that was fast.”
“We make sense. ’Cause he’s chill and quiet. And I’m not.”
“But isn’t he leaving for college now? After this year off?”
“No, he decided to work with his dad again for another year. So we’ll still see each other.” She smiles big.
Tats’s going in state for junior college—literally just an hour from Eastspring—so she’ll continue living at home.
I’m so happy she’s headed toward having a good summer.
The blue skies will be in her heart.
“I’m excited for you, okay?” I sit up and twist myself to prop my face on a hand, my elbow poking into the bed. “Really. I want you to have the best, blue-skies summer.”