Spilled ink, p.1
Spilled Ink, page 1
Dedication
To Fawod, Yolaine, Nyla, and Kylie
Always a knock away
Epigraph
What we speak becomes the house we live in.
—Hafiz, fourteenth-century Sufi poet
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
A Note from the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Ad
Books by Nadia Hashimi
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
Even with my comforter pulled over my head, I hear the tap, the pause, the two quick taps, and one final tap. I peek at my alarm clock and groan to realize ten minutes have already gone by since it buzzed.
I roll over and rap my knuckles against the wall in reply.
Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.
I’m awake, I tell him. Barely.
It’s been hard to fall asleep lately. I remember seeing midnight come and go. What time did I drift off? I feel around on my bed and my finger snags on the fraying threads of my comforter, nothing more. I roll over onto my stomach and hang my arm off the side of the bed, patting the carpet until I find the spiral binding. I pull the sketchbook onto my lap, the reading light still clipped onto the back cover. I click it a couple of times but it stays dark. I’ve drained yet another battery.
I sit up and blink the grogginess away. Pens hidden in the folds of my comforter roll onto the floor. At least I remembered to cap them. Archival ink pens aren’t cheap, and I just bought this ultra-fine-tipped set of twelve. Is it possible that in my insomnia, in some half-conscious state, I channeled my inner muse and came up with an inspired drawing?
I look at the page, creased where my hand must have been when I fell asleep. I’ve been working on this drawing for a month now, and something just doesn’t feel right about it. Yusuf calls my drawings edgy. I just like an image with a twist. I flip to the previous page. Two weeks ago, I drew a winged woman walking away from a tree with a stiletto heel impaled into its trunk. I stopped showing my drawings to my parents after they wanted me to explain what I meant by a cow wearing a crown in a frying pan. I thought “a picture is worth a thousand words” meant that you don’t have to say the thousand words.
I throw off the covers and slide the sketchbook into the bottom of my nightstand drawer, where I keep an old inhaler and a snow globe from SeaWorld. I wonder if someday I’ll outgrow drawing, the same way I’ve outgrown asthma or a tolerance for animals in captivity.
I hear footsteps next door, much to my surprise. The wall between us is thin and the floorboards in the house all creak so I know Yusuf was up at least as late as I was last night.
A door opens in the hallway.
“Not today,” I say, and burst out of my room, my hair wild around my face. Yusuf and I collide as we reach for the bathroom doorknob. Yusuf’s hand lands on it first.
“Third day in a row, Yalda,” he says with a grin. He has a towel over his shoulder, and his T-shirt is rumpled from sleep.
“Oh, come on,” I groan. Every morning is a race to the bathroom we share. It wasn’t such a big deal when we were five years old and two of us could brush our teeth together without elbows jamming into each other. But we’re seventeen now. I don’t need him teasing me while I wash my face with apricot scrub, especially when I know he uses it sometimes. I know he doesn’t want me in there while he’s painstakingly shaving the twelve and a half hairs he’s grown on his face since puberty. The hair on his head is another wormhole into which he disappears and loses all sense of time as he arranges his dark waves in a way that’s supposed to look like he doesn’t care about his hair at all.
My hair, on the other hand, could actually use an hour’s worth of attention, and yet all I do is twirl it around my finger and tie it up into a messy bun—the hairstyle that has saved my sanity.
“Oh, come on!” I whine. I don’t do well on little sleep. “Would it kill you to give me a turn to go first?”
“You know what, fine, you go ahead,” Yusuf says. He shrugs and takes a step away from the door, which makes me pause. I’m wide awake now and on full alert.
“Nah, you go,” I say, because after years of these games, I know when I’m about to walk into a setup.
A smile erupts on Yusuf’s face as he reaches for the door. It was a setup, just not the kind I was thinking. My reflexes kick in and I step toward the bathroom door, blocking my brother with my right leg. He starts to nudge me away with his shoulder but stops when my mom calls out from the kitchen.
“Please, if you love me, give me a break for just one day,” she pleads.
I look up at Yusuf and watch his face go flat with resignation. Mom’s guilt-tripping works wonders on him. I’m susceptible too, but for Yusuf it’s pure kryptonite.
“Just be quick,” he says, snapping upright. “Keith’s going to be waiting.”
I close the door behind me and glance at the clock on the wall, even though it’s been stuck at five o’clock for the past few months. Mom has decided that this is our bathroom and we should change the battery ourselves. Yusuf and I have decided clocks are outdated. We’re all stuck in this moment, trying to teach each other lessons, I suppose. While I brush my teeth, I look at the perfectly arranged toiletries on my brother’s side of the sink. Because we’re twins, people expect us to be similar in all ways, but we’re not. Yusuf is organized but not pathologically so. His shirts aren’t in rainbow order and he doesn’t have perfectly aligned wicker baskets in his closet. He’s just naturally neat. My mother says he and I have been different this way since we were babies. Yusuf would line up his toy cars like a parking garage’s employee of the month. My chaos was legendary and frustrating, especially to my mother, who likes to recall the time she found my stuffed panda in the oven and my rock collection tucked into her makeup drawer. I keep the clutter under control now partly because I realized I would stare at the piles of stuff instead of falling asleep and mostly because I was tired of being compared to my brother.
I check my phone. We need to be out of the house in twenty minutes. Keith will be waiting for Yusuf.
Or maybe Keith will be waiting for both of us?
I take another serious look at my face. People tell me I’m so lucky to have such thick hair, but I look at the girls in my school with barely a hint of fuzz on their arms or legs with hair so fair, it wouldn’t do anything but sparkle if they didn’t shave it off. That is not my reality.
I have only started tweezing my eyebrows into submission this year, which was late by society’s standards. Some of my cousins have been plucking and waxing their faces and limbs since they were ten. One cousin has already had four laser hair removal sessions, and another told me her mom takes her to a salon where a woman with less hair than a reptile takes her into a small room in the back and spreads hot wax over her arms, then rips it and all her arm hair off with strips of fabric. Afterward, the reptilian lady rubs aloe vera and coconut oil onto my cousin’s irritated skin as some sort of moisturizing apology. As much as I hate looking at the fuzz on my arms, what my cousin describes sounds like a satanic ritual and I am no friend of the devil.
“C’mon, Yal. You got that natural beauty going for ya,” Yusuf calls from behind the door, as if he can hear my thoughts. “I’m the one who needs more time in there.”
My brother is rarely in neutral. He’s either plotting my downfall or pulling me out of a dark well. Maybe I misjudged his gear today. I smile and put my hand on the doorknob. I try to turn it but it slips right out of my hand. My fingers come away greasy. I didn’t misjudge.
“What’s taking you so long?” Yusuf teases, and I can hear the grin on his face. I wipe off the Vaseline with a wad of tissue. I look around and spot his clear-complexion face wash, then unscrew the cap and squeeze some hair conditioner into it.
“You think you’re so funny,” I say. But I must admit, this is reasonable revenge. Last week, I got into his phone and changed the names of half his contacts to “MARKETING” and the other half to “SPAM CALLER.” He ignored a bunch of texts and let a few calls from my parents go to voice mail before he realized what I’d done.
“Pretty slick,” I say when he opens the door for me from the outside.
“Thanks,” he says, beaming.
“I was talking about the doorknob,” I clarify, stepping aside so he can get into the bathroom. “Not you. That was amateur level.”
Our pranks have been escalating for the past couple of years, and sometimes innocent bystanders are affected. One night, Mom stayed up late watching Turkish soap operas. On her way back to her bedroom, she stepped on a fake mouse Yusuf had left outside my bed
My mother does not appreciate pranks. She doesn’t even like regular surprises, which makes me wonder how she took the news that she was pregnant with twins. Neither of my parents can think of any other sets of twins in their families or even among the other families they knew “back home” in Afghanistan. Dad has always told us that Yusuf and I were a special gift from God, but I also suspect that the way we surprised Mom is why we don’t have younger siblings.
I change my clothes and sneak into my parents’ bathroom to dab a little of my mom’s foundation on the tender pink spot on my chin. Their bathroom shares a wall with ours, so I can hear Yusuf groan.
“My face soap? That’s not okay, Yalda!”
Vindicated, I turn my attention back to my face. The circle of makeup hasn’t concealed anything and actually draws even more attention to my chin. I wash it off and start over, using less this time.
“Yalda!” my mother calls. “You’re late!”
Once I’m dressed, I throw my books into my backpack and dash into the kitchen. We live in a bi-level with three bedrooms on one end of the house, and down the hall are the kitchen and living room. Downstairs has another living room with furniture Mom would love to replace. Yusuf and I both dreaded going downstairs alone as kids, and honestly, even now, I probably move extra quickly through there on my way to the garage. Our front door is on a landing between the lower floor and the upper floor. Mom hates the dated layout and went to a dozen open houses last year but stopped looking altogether when she saw how high prices had gotten in our area.
In the safety of our upstairs kitchen, Yusuf’s tilting his cereal bowl into his mouth to drain the sugared milk. He can’t spell cinnamon without autocorrect, but somehow he doesn’t spill a drop, nor does any trickle down the corners of his mouth. I wouldn’t attempt something like this unless I were home alone. I grab a banana off the counter and give my mother a quick kiss on the cheek.
“Yalda, did you post the coupon last night?”
She takes a deep breath and I know her sigh will carry a plea to God for patience.
I take my phone out of my pocket and open the neighborhood app. I find the flyer I made promising a free appetizer with the purchase of two entrées—Mom’s idea since business has slowed down lately—and post it in the newsfeed.
“It’s up,” I say, showing her my screen to prove it’s done. She squints and then plants a kiss on my temple.
“Thank you, janem!” she says. Mom may not approve of sugar in our food, but she goes heavy with the sweetness once we’ve done exactly what she wants us to do.
“Where’s Dad?” Yusuf asks.
“At the restaurant,” Mom says. “He has somebody there to fix the fridge.”
“Didn’t they just fix the fridge?” Yusuf asks.
“Just before Thanksgiving,” I confirm. “That was barely two weeks ago. It’s broken again?”
Mom closes the door she’s just opened without pulling anything out of the cabinet. She sighs again. There’s always something in need of repair. “He’s coming home early this evening, so please be on time. I want us to all be together for the holiday. This is important. Family time.”
Since we lost my cousin Rahim, family time has become a synthetic, scheduled event.
It’s not that we weren’t spending time together before last year. We had lazy Sunday mornings, trips to the mall on rainy days, or walks down a wooded trail. But nothing is casual anymore. Everything is calculated, like Mom’s trying to make sure we reach some unknown quota to save us from what happened to Rahim.
My mother, dressed in her gym clothes, picks up the box of cereal from the counter and reads the label. She clucks her tongue in disapproval. Talking nutrition to us seems to exhaust her more than her most grueling workout.
“I wish you guys would let me make you my shakes for breakfast. This is all processed sugar,” she says. She drums her fingers on the counter and jots another item on her grocery list. Because she doesn’t have to be at the restaurant until eleven, she dedicates the mornings to getting us out the door, her workout routine, and researching foods that will render us immortal.
“Yalda Jamali, I’m leaving without you,” Yusuf announces, using my full name and deepening his voice. It’s an empty threat. We both know he wouldn’t go farther than the front porch, but I still rush to get my jacket and backpack.
“Let’s go,” I say. Yusuf either has no idea that lately the walk to school has been giving me butterflies in my stomach or he pretends not to know. Either way, I’m glad my feelings are not a topic of discussion. We head down the sidewalk, Yusuf taking long, slow strides. Mine are shorter but quicker, which keeps us in step if not in sync.
Up ahead, a screen door creaks open and clatters shut. We don’t pause or even slow down.
Yusuf nods at Keith, who plods at a diagonal across the frostbitten grass of his yard to join us on the sidewalk.
“Hey,” he says, glancing at both of us. Keith’s family moved into town a year ago so we didn’t grow up together. I would probably stop speaking to my parents or at least threaten to stop speaking to them if they decided to move in the middle of my junior year. Keith has plenty of friends, but because most people here have known each other since middle school, he seems to float around the friend groups instead of being absorbed by one in particular.
“Hi,” I reply casually. In the brisk air, our words form small, transient clouds before dissipating.
“How’s it going?” Yusuf says.
The guys fall into a conversation about last night’s basketball game. I watched the game with Yusuf and saw the same unbelievable three-point shot they’re talking about. I debate jumping into the conversation but hold back because I have a bad habit of saying too much or the wrong thing and then I spend a lot of energy regretting it for the rest of the day . . . or month.
The end of the next block is a four-way stop, always busy at this hour of the morning. We wait for a driver to remember that pedestrians have the right of way at a crosswalk.
Two cars enter the intersection at the same time. A man leans into his horn and the other driver, a woman with sunglasses almost as big as her face, gesticulates at him to indicate the anger is mutual. We steal across to the other side while they mouth off at each other from behind their windshields.
“People need to relax,” I say.
“Yeah, quick question—have you met people? That’s not what people do,” Keith replies with a laugh. He nods at the house on our left, with four yard signs out front, two in support of names I don’t recognize for county council positions. The other two have been popping up since twenty-six Afghan refugee families were sent to a hotel on the outskirts of town. The signs bear benign-sounding messages we can all get behind like PROTECT OUR NEIGHBORHOODS, but it doesn’t take an AP English class to read between those lines. If they were to say what they really meant, it would be harder to get people to put the signs up.
“Did you hear what the graffiti squad is claiming now?” Keith asks. A couple weeks ago, three students returned to the campus in the middle of the night with faces covered in masks and hoodies drawn tight. They had spray-painted a swastika and a crude schematic of male anatomy onto the brick exterior of the school. The school Wi-Fi connected to their phones while they were there, which made for digital fingerprints on their artwork.
“I heard Wyatt tried to argue his First Amendment rights were being violated,” Yusuf says. Wyatt has always been trouble. He’s the type who doesn’t talk much in class and seems to be watching people from behind the mesh of his overgrown bangs.
“He would. I had two classes with him last year and I don’t think he even got his name right on quizzes. Plus, I heard they were drunk. Wyatt’s dad rewards them with a six-pack every time the football team wins,” Keith says.
“Good thing our football team sucks,” I say, and both Keith and Yusuf laugh. I feel a tiny tingle at Keith’s reaction.
There isn’t room for the three of us on the sidewalk, so Keith walks with one foot on grass and the other on concrete. Yusuf’s in the middle and I’m closest to the street. In the fall, I felt like an intruder in these conversations, but then I noticed Keith would throw a question my way to include me. I don’t do as much talking in the morning when it’s the three of us, but because Yusuf leaves early for his independent study in the afternoons, the walk home is different. When Yusuf isn’t there, I feel like I’m a whole person and not just the extra from a buy-one-get-one-free deal.
