The Tyrant's Daughter (6 page)

“Close your eyes.”

I don’t. “What? No.”

He smiles and shifts his bag to the other shoulder. “I’m serious, just try it. Close your eyes and try opening the lock. You won’t get it exactly right, unless you’ve got some sort of Jedi Master mind thing going on, but maybe it’ll trigger your memory.”

I don’t disguise my heave of a sigh, but I do close my eyes.

He’s right. Blind, the padlock feels more familiar to me. I turn it right, left, right, and then yank. The lock doesn’t yield, but something in my mind does and I remember that the first number is fifteen. I open my eyes and the next two numbers stumble back to me as well.

“Thank you.” I face my open locker, but he’s still in the corner of my vision.

“No worries. I forget my combination every time we have more than a three-day weekend. But the muscle memory is always there. Your hands remember things even when your brain doesn’t. At least, that’s my official, scientific explanation.” He grins and pushes away from the locker. “See you around?”

I turn toward him at last and nod. His eyes are an unusually pale shade of hazel and they give him an intense, almost leonine appearance. “Yes.”

I wait until he leaves before I look down at my hands.
Muscle memory
. I’ve never heard that term before, but it makes sense. I’ve been trying to will away the unwelcome thoughts of my last days at home, but my body can’t be denied the things that trigger. Familiar smells and sounds, a blast of hot air from a passing bus, even the sight of a bottle of water the same brand that someone—I don’t even know who—thrust into my hands as I sobbed and retched through the plane’s takeoff.…

I shut the locker and hug my books against my chest as I walk to class, trying not to brush against anyone or even breathe too deeply, lest some lingering odor attack my senses with false familiarity. If I can’t control my memories, then perhaps I can at least escape the triggers.

I’ve been underwater for nearly a month.

That’s what it feels like here—a life submerged. Wave-tossed and sand-scoured. Voices around me in school sound muted and distorted; faces are out of focus. I’m experiencing my new life through fathoms of water, making everything seem dreamlike and unreal, as if my brain can only accept so much change before it drowns.

Gradually, though, I’ve been surfacing. Certain things, certain people, have been pulling me out of my floating state, whether I like it or not.

Emmy, for example. After all this time—these weeks that have felt like years—she is still here, still hasn’t discarded me in favor of a new specimen for her rotating collection of friends. And she does not take no for an answer.

“I knew you’d say no. But it’s just a dance, and I already
have the perfect dress for you to wear. It’s too small for me now, but it would definitely fit you. You’re so tiny!”

From her this is a high compliment. She and her friends are fiercely competitive in their suffering to be smaller, and even now Emmy is peeling the cheese and pepperoni off a slice of pizza—she’s gone vegan this week. Around the lunch table everyone seems to have given something up—dairy, meat, gluten, sugar, carbs. Only in a land of plenty could people voluntarily go without so much.

“Laila, you
have
to! You’ll have a great time, I swear!” Emmy lives her life in exclamation marks. Tori and Morgan, her sometimes-friends, nod in agreement.

I shake my head and try not to smile. They’ll take it as a weakness and keep pushing. We’ve formed an unlikely group lately, based, I suspect, on my novelty and Emmy’s cheerful efforts. There’s an undercurrent of tension between the others, the remnants of a nebulous summertime feud. Something involving name-calling, recanted party invitations, and other such suburban tragedies, according to Emmy’s version of events. Teenage betrayals, largely forgiven but certainly not forgotten. I seem to relieve the tension somehow; my newness and my foreignness give them an outlet, and together they fuss over me.

“Quit bugging her. She can decide whether she wants to come or not.” Morgan alone is skeptical of me, which I think makes her the smartest one of the bunch. Emmy’s unwavering determination to be my friend still makes me nervous, though I find myself letting my guard slip around her more and more.

“I can’t,” I tell them. “I would be so uncomfortable.
Things like that don’t exist where I’m from. It would never be allowed.”

“But you’re here now. New place, new rules. Aren’t you even curious?” Emmy has already made up her mind that I will go to the homecoming dance. “Besides”—a sly look crosses her face—“Ian asked me if you’d be there.”

“Ooooo,” Morgan and Tori chorus, teasing me.

I have not needed their help to decipher Ian’s attention lately—some things are universal. To his credit, he has kept a respectful distance. But he hovers on the edge of my days, and I see him watching me. I sometimes watch him back.

“So?” Tori asks. She’s the one I know the least about—her pale blondness for some reason makes her forgettable to me. “Will you come with us?”

I could say that my mother won’t allow it. In another lifetime, she wouldn’t have. But here, she is newly permissive—liberated by the distance from the rules of our past, perhaps. Or, more likely, just distracted by the burdens of the present. Here, she will tell me to go.

Finally, I nod. I
am
curious.

I don’t know why I agreed to go. All day the decision haunts me, and I sit through my afternoon classes in even more of a fog than usual. The teachers don’t notice. I’m one more foreign student in a district teeming with the children of immigrants, lesser embassy staff, and expat employees of budget-strapped NGOs who can’t afford the rent closer in to the city. We are transient students with heavy accents who show up one term and vanish the next. We are invisible in class.

“Can anyone comment on the particular importance of the first ten amendments to the Constitution?” The teacher’s eyes skim over those of us in the classroom who can speak most personally about the absence of such rights. I do not raise my hand, nor do the two other students in the room who come from elsewhere. I know very little about them—rather than bonding over our shared experiences, we repel one another, as though afraid our foreignness might metastasize if we get too close.

Only one student volunteers; she traces the words with her index finger as she reads from her textbook. “The Bill of Rights establishes fundamental personal freedoms and limits the role of central government.”

I’m angry with myself for being nervous about the prospect of an American dance. Such a silly, petty concern. But I don’t know how to act. I don’t know how to dance, at least not in the way television shows me it’s done here.

I
do
have a fluttery thrill at the thought of doing something that would horrify my uncle, though. He once slapped my mother hard enough to make her mouth bleed for allowing me to swim in a bathing suit while there were male visitors at the house. He tried to hit me, too, but she stepped between us and absorbed the second blow—the one meant for me. She spit a bloody spray at his feet and dragged me away, telling me to ignore him even as he hissed ugly threats at her. I waited for her to tell my father that evening, but she never did. “Your father has bigger problems to address with his brother than a little quarrel about clothing,” she’d explained.

Almost as if she had predicted what would happen.

The memory strengthens my resolve. I will go. I will dance.

“Come on, class. No one has any thoughts on this? Really?” The irritation in Mrs. Moore’s voice draws my attention back to the moment. She looks at the clock on the wall and sighs. “We’re all stuck with this topic for the next fifteen minutes, so someone might as well answer. Let’s try the question another way: Why do we even have amendments?” She looks hopefully at the front row, but no one responds.

“Is it because the Founding Fathers made so many mistakes? Is the Constitution just so screwed up that we have to keep going in to fix it?” She switches tactics: mild sarcasm now—American civics–style.

“Yeah. They did screw up.” Someone in the third row finally speaks. “Especially the part where they tried to ban alcohol.
That
was stupid.” He grins and twirls his pen around his fingers until someone from the other side of the room shouts back.

“That wasn’t the Founding Fathers, dumbass. That
was
one of the amendments.”

Both comments draw laughs, and the teacher looks ready to give up.

“It’s just … change.”

Mrs. Moore’s eyebrows go up when I speak, and then she nods. “Okay, let’s talk about that a little more. What kind of change? Are people so different now than they were back in 1787 that we need completely different laws?” She gestures for me to answer.

I don’t want to, but now everyone is staring. “No, n-not exactly,” I stammer. “It’s more an issue of—” My vocabulary fails me under the weight of the attention. “Context.”

But the teacher won’t let me stop there. “Continue,” she says.

I fray the edges of my blank notebook while I speak. “I don’t think it’s that
people
have changed so much. I mean, they have, obviously. But sometimes it’s more that things around us change so much that something that might have seemed unimaginable all of a sudden feels … inevitable.”

“In-ev-i-ta-ble.”
I hear someone imitate my voice, high-pitched and haughty, and I wish I hadn’t said anything at all.

“Well put,” Mrs. Moore says, which makes it even worse. I feel my face flush and I clutch unconsciously at the veil I no longer wear, then sink deep into my seat until the bell rings.

But even as I hurry out, regretting the loss of my classroom invisibility, my mouth forms the liberating word again:
context
. This new world of mine is neither my
then
nor my
there
. If I am to be forced to live in exile from my past, I might as well take advantage of the freedoms my new context offers.

I might as well dance.

Before homecoming comes another, less celebratory type of dance.

I take the long way home most days, shuffling more than walking. I’ve been learning new streets—every block that becomes familiar expands my world by a fraction. Already I feel more comfortable walking alone here; the space and the freedom are no longer intimidating. My circuitous routes also give me a reason to come home later and later.

Today I should be hurrying, but I’m not. Today Amir and his cousins will be at our apartment. I’m expected to chip through his hatred and make him my friend—a task that feels impossible.

I’ve already decided that I will make only the smallest effort, just enough to appease my mother without actually succeeding, when I see Mr. Gansler once again leaning against our building.

“Laila.” He calls me over. He’s not bothering with the cigarette this time.

I consider ignoring him, but it seems pointless. I have a feeling that “Darren Gansler,” true name unknown, will follow me with his bad luck wherever I go.

“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see you here today.”

He raises an eyebrow and studies me for a moment before speaking. “You strike me as an intelligent young woman, Laila. So I probably don’t have to tell you just how important these meetings are for your family.”

There’s a question hiding behind his statement. He wants to find out how much I know. The answer, of course, is not much at all, but I don’t want him to realize that.

His mouth pinches up on one side—not quite a smile—and he crosses his arms over his chest. He’s guessed.

“It looks like I
do
have to tell you.” He says it in a way that sounds like he wishes he didn’t, and his smirk wilts into a frown. “Laila, I didn’t bring your family here out of the goodness of my heart. You’re here, or at least your mother is here, for a reason. Your mother made a deal the day you all got on the plane. We—the United States government, that is—went to considerable risk to get your family out of your country safely. I offered your mother a way out and guaranteed political refugee status here if she agreed to cooperate.”

I know exactly what he is going to say next before it even comes out of his mouth.

“Her cooperation hasn’t been exactly … perfect.”

I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing out loud. That my mother would not do his bidding should
surprise no one.
You are more conniving than the devil himself, dearest Yasmin
, my father used to tell her.
You are truly my secret weapon
. His words were always delivered with a kiss—he admired her cunning.

Mr. Gansler does not.

“As I said, Laila, you seem like an intelligent girl.” He speaks quietly, as if he doesn’t want anyone to overhear. “So I’m sure you understand just how important it is that your family remain here in the U.S. Obviously I can’t guarantee your safety if you go back home. No one can. I’d hate to see that happen.”

I manage to keep my expression neutral, but I can’t breathe. The threat is clear. Do what he wants, or he’ll send us back. We all know that can’t happen. It just can’t.

Slowly, my breath returns, but I can still hear my heart thudding in my ears like a war drum. I study him before responding—this bland, ill-pressed-trouser-wearing man. His expression is mild and open, almost friendly. As if he’d just asked me about the weather, or how I liked school.

I hate him, if only for his proximity to our suffering.

I pull my shoulders back and stand as tall as I can, wishing that for once I could tower over someone. I make no effort to conceal my disgust. “Whatever agreement my mother made, she made it on the day she watched my father die. You were there. You heard the mob chanting outside the gates. What
wouldn’t
she have agreed to? What choice did she have?”

Mr. Gansler doesn’t answer. He has said enough, and he sees that I understand him. He offers only a small apologetic nod and then walks away.

I’m motionless as I watch him leave, afraid to test my wobbly, weak knees. I don’t know exactly what my mother agreed to, but for now it doesn’t matter. I saw in his eyes that he means to carry out the threat. Mr. Gansler has transferred the burden of her agreement to me, and I have no choice but to comply.