The Pact We Made. Layla AlAmmar

and couldn’t breathe, couldn’t scream. Flashes of light burst behind my eyes, and water sank into my ears. My yathoom wrapped his legs around my chest and squeezed. There were hands grabbing at me, strong arms lifting me and pressing me against broad shoulders, water draining off my body. Mama screamed at her cousin—a cousin who, orphaned as a child, had been raised in her house as a sibling, and who we called Uncle Omar—screams of panic and confusion and anger and still I couldn’t breathe. His face swam before my eyes, blurry and indistinct, until they closed. My lungs gave up. Then there were fists on my chest, hitting much too hard, rattling my ribs. Then two lips, slimy and cold like fish, on mine, forcing my mouth open, forcing the air in, blowing me up like a balloon. Rough hands gripped my face when it wanted to turn away. Wet fingers, like sea cucumbers, made my mouth stay in place. Rubber lips, hot air, fists on chest, over and over and over. And still I couldn’t scream.

       5

       The Architect

      The next day my mother and I called a truce, unacknowledged and porous as it was. I’d woken with fingertip bruises and little crescent moons on my arms. There was a kink in my shoulder that I couldn’t stretch out and a purple bruise, the size of a lemon, on my hip from the fall in the shower—a sour reminder of bruises long faded.

      After my shower, after the panic, as I’d lain wrapped in a towel on my bed trying to connect with my lungs, I’d heard yelling from the living room. I got up and pressed my ear to the cool wood of my door to make out their words. In my head, there’d been the echo of a teacher from my childhood, telling me that the punishment for eavesdropping was flesh-eating worms blanketing you in the afterlife. It didn’t stop me though, and I heard my father say, ‘Leave her alone. Let her be for now.’ ‘She didn’t even apologize,’ Mama said. ‘Pushed me into the dresser and your daughter didn’t even apologize.’ I heard Baba’s harsh breath and snort of frustration. ‘I’m sure she will. It was an accident.’ (It was an accident, but she got no apology from me.) There was quiet then, a quiet so long I thought perhaps my father had gone to their room, but then I heard her voice, low and resigned. ‘I worry about her.’ ‘Of course, you do,’ he said. ‘Stop pushing her. Let her breathe a bit.’ That was all I’d heard; any reply my mother might have made was too low, and I’d returned to my bed.

      So, the day passed in silence, and as evening fell she asked me to sit in the living room with her while she watched an old Egyptian movie. I sat on the sofa opposite her with my sketchbook in my lap. I’d found a print by Fuseli the other day at work, depicting Ariel flying on a bat, and the lines and curves had me transfixed. I had the print stapled to a page in the sketchbook, and I’d started trying to replicate it on the opposite side. But as the actors in Mama’s movie barked at each other in their rough dialect and my mind wandered, so did my pen, so that I was no longer moving it across the page, but across the bare skin of my thigh. I’d pulled the hem of my shorts up and was pressing the black ink into my flesh. I couldn’t get much traction, but I kept at it until I had a basic outline – Ariel, balanced on the back of a bat in flight, one leg up behind him and one arm high overhead like a ballerina going into an arabesque, a cord of dripping stars whipping around his body.

      The front door opened downstairs. ‘Baba?’ I said, thinking it was too early in the evening for him to be home.

      ‘It’s me.’ Mona’s voice came ringing up the stairs, followed by the clicking of her heels.

      I sat up, putting my sketchbook aside. We hadn’t spoken since that day at the mall. I’d avoided her calls and ignored her texts; the only time I replied was in our group chat with Zaina. She came into view, her pixie-cut hair standing almost straight up in what I called her punk look. Aside from thick black eyeliner wings, her face was bare. Her gray dress was loose, stopping at her knees and slipping off one shoulder. She headed to my mother, kissing her cheeks and asking after her health. Mama hadn’t seen her for a while and made her sit for a chat. The next few minutes were filled with inquiries about the health of Mona’s parents and invitations for them to come out to the beach house. She asked about her husband – Mona avoided my eye – and whether they were thinking of children yet. Her response was a bubbly ‘no’ and a fluid lie of how they were still enjoying their couple-dom. The answer strained Mama’s belief, I could tell, their marriage being nearly five years old at that point. In Mama’s mind they ought to have been on their second child. When the chit-chat was over and one last reminder of the invitation was issued, Mona and I headed to my room.

      ‘So is this it?’ she said as soon as I’d shut the door behind us. ‘You’re just never going to speak to me again?’

      I turned to her and plopped down on my bed. ‘I’m upset.’

      ‘Yeah, I got that,’ she replied, hands on hips, her face in a frown. Mona’s first instinct was to go on the defensive, and I was not thrown by the aggression. ‘But it’s been like two weeks now. We should talk about it. You can’t just shut me out.’

      ‘I was processing,’ I said, smoothing the cover of my duvet so I didn’t have to look at her.

      ‘Processing?’ There was a lightness in her tone that hit me like the snapping of a rubber band.

      ‘Yes, processing. It’s not every day you have to deal with the knowledge that your best friend is cheating on her husband.’ She had the decency to lower her eyes at that. ‘And not just once, Mona! It’s not like you did it once and realized what a shitty thing you’d done. No, you continued to do a shitty thing. You have this great life, this great husband who adores you, why would you do this?’

      ‘It’s been difficult, okay?’ she finally said, shaking her head. ‘Things with Rashid have been difficult.’

      ‘Difficult how?’ I replied. ‘You never said anything.’

      She shook her head again, blew out a breath and brushed a finger down the wood of the little human mannequin on my dresser that I used for drawing. ‘Marriage is different, Dahlia. I don’t come running to you guys with our problems the way I did with boyfriends. Zaina doesn’t tell us about her marriage; do you just assume everything is perfect there?’

      I did, I had, and Mona knew it. She looked at me like I was terribly naive, and I dropped my eyes back to the duvet cover. Ariel’s upraised hand peeked out from the hem of my shorts; it was smudged now.