On Wednesdays, Sits’s house smelled like lamb stew. On Saturdays, like chicken marinated in sumac and lemon, the meat so tender it fell apart under the fork’s gentle probe. That was it for meat - just two days a week. On the other five days, there were lentils: brown, green, or red, mingled with sharp onion and sweet basil, simmering in her blue enameled pot.
It made Hiba sick to her stomach. All of it.
The whole world conspired to make her fat. That’s what it had to be. When she thought of her gigantic ass atop legs that had no calves, her ass below a flat torso, it disgusted her. God and the ancestors had pranked her, sending all the curves to the wrong damned place.
Sits had given her a bedroom on the third floor. She’d called Sitti Maha “Sits” since she was a baby – it was a family joke now, but Hiba had never stopped using it. Even up here, the floor was tiled, so her bare feet – even they looked thinner now – froze.
Sits swept the whole house once a day; three times a week, she dumped a cup of lemon juice and a half-cup of olive oil into a bucket of soapy water, and mopped all three floors. She even covered her hair when she cleaned. Instead of her usual white linen veil, cleaning day meant she wore her orange bandana that read “Mick’s Bike Shop” in thunderbolt lettering. She explained to Hiba that some nice boy in a black leather jacket had been handing them out on the street. She’d asked for one, and he’d smiled and gave it to her.
“He was laughing at you.”
“No. I don’t think so. He asked me about this.” She pointed to the rough cross and the lamb inked on the inside of her wrist. “He wanted to know who did it,” she said and shrugged. “I told him in the old country, and maybe Jesus had one like it.”
“I think he thought you were silly.”
Sits shrugged, but she had a strange look on her face, like Hiba was a stranger.
She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. Hiba, coming off her own humiliation, lingered on Sits’s ignorance of hers.
Seedo took care of the outside. Wasn’t much of an outside, though. Her parents’ lawn was one acre, bisected by a winding, curling driveway. The front lawn of Sits and Seedo’s house was Thatcher Street, which had four potholes that the city promised to fix and never did.
Thatcher Street and potholes and rowhouses and homeless people were why Mama had refused to live anywhere but Wentworth when they’d gotten married. Thats where Hiba had grown up, and it was very expensive. When Seedo once talked to Mama about how much she spends, she snapped, “Demetri is a rich man.” And she’d added, “Why do you think I put up with him?” She didn’t know they heard that, Hiba and her sister Mina, but they totally had. So Hiba had grown up in the posh neighborhood, where the grocery stores had cafes and restaurants inside, and where your neighbors lived half-a-mile down the road, where men on machines came to trim the grass. In the suburbs, the girls were all skinny. They all dieted starting in middle school, talking about Atkins and Paleo on the bus. Two girls, Mary Thomson and Jennie Stonefeld, were always fainting and loving the attention, but it was because they needed to eat. Alexis Moore was more yellow than white because she was so damn hungry. Here in Baltimore, the girls were more varied; Hiba watched them walking to and from school – tramping down the sidewalk in their boots, lugging their backpacks. Some of them thin, some athletic and muscular, some round and chubby. But here, the fat girls wore tight leggings like the skinny ones and they didn’t seem to give shit how they looked.
Everything was strange here, but Hiba liked it. Here in Baltimore, the grocery store was a corner deli, where they sold one kind of milk, one brand of toilet paper. The only fruits came in cans in heavy syrup. Sits walked eight blocks to the open-air market for the fresh stuff, and once a month, she and Seedo took the bus to the other side of the city. There, between a synagogue and a strip of car dealerships, there was an Arabic grocery store, where they stocked up on sumac, warak, cumin, and lentils. Hiba never went with them. She hadn’t ventured past the front door since she’d arrived, but when they came home, loaded with bags and bags and Sits’s metal shopping cart, she did help carry the lighter bags inside and stock the tall pantry in the kitchen.
“Why doesn’t she go out?” asked the tall lady who lived across the street, the one with the flat-ironed blueblack hair and the penciled eyebrows. Her name was Liz, and she talked to Sits all the time, conversing across the narrow street. Hiba could hear them from her bedroom. She was so tired, but still giggled when they shouted to be heard over a car rather than pause their conversation, their voices rising as the vehicle chugged closer. “Did you get the COUPON FROM THE RITE-AID that came in the circular?”
“She visiting us.” That was Sits’s voice, so gentle but firm. “She student in za college.”
“But it’s November.”
“She on a leetle break now.”
The backyard of their house was something. Hiba had grown up with a ten-acre backyard, and she’d never once sat in it. There had been a small playset with a slide but Mama had had it torn down years ago, when Hiba finished fifth grade. “No need to keep junking up the yard,” she’d said.
Seedo and Sits’s yard was just a rectangle of cement with a table and a lounge chair and a crucifix on the brick wall. In one corner, there was an apple tree, slender and fragile, growing out of a stack of black rubber tires, their centers packed with dirt like filled donuts.
But she came out here every day. And sat. Sometimes she cried, she thought about Snapchat and the texts and the whole last month and how she’d been brought to this. She was in Baltimore, for God’s sake, living with her grandparents, who didn’t even have WiFi.
***
Hiba sat in the lounge chair one evening and pulled her long sleeves over her wrists, cocooned in a sweater that had become oversized but that only last year had fit snugly over her breasts. Sits found her there and set two cups of coffee on the table.
“Your parents called again.” She spoke to Hiba in Arabic only.
Hiba answered in English. “I don’t care.”
“Ou wella bi him nee,” Sits assured her patiently. I don’t care either.
Hiba didn’t bite. Sits had been trying all month to make her speak Arabic, since she’d shown up on her steps with her Coach suitcase and Tori Burch sandals on her feet. She’d also been trying to feed her obsessively. Mama must have told Sits about her weakness for rice, so Sits served it with every meal, either plain, or when that didn’t work, colored with saffron, glittered with sauteed pine nuts, even sprinkled with cinnamon. But Hiba wouldn’t touch it. She barely ate any of Sits’s food at all, just pushed it around, made small hills of it on her plate, sitting quietly because Seedo insisted if she wanted to stay there, she had to join them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She didn’t have to pray, but she had to fold her hands and lower her eyes respectfully while they did.
“Any other rules? Anything else I need to do to stay here?” she’d asked that first night, sitting angrily on the kitchen chair, her forehead beaded with sweat. She’d brought a Get Out of Jail free card, stashed it in her room. But she would let them talk, and say whatever they wanted, to think they were in charge.
“You can help with the chores, if you feel up to it.” Seedo had said in Arabic. He was a tall, stout man, with a beefy chest and a thick white moustache. “Your grandmother is 76 now. I’m 82. The garden needs work. The dusting needs to be done.”
“Why don’t you just hire someone, like my mom does?” She’d stared scornfully at Sits’s hands, the back of which were stretched and shiny like wax, the veins bulging on her forearms. Hiba’s nails were usually polished and neat, because that’s what Mama expected. She’d had her first mani-pedi when she was ten, and every two weeks since. Here, though… here was different. Hiba’s nails were chewed and bitten, eaten away the way she wanted to devour herself, devour her pain. It made her laugh to think how Mama would grimace if she’d seen them.
“Hire someone? To clean my own house?” Sits had looked incredulously at Seedo and chuckled. “Istaghfirallah.” Seedo smiled too, his white moustache curving like a tuft of snow settling on a tree limb.
“Fine. I’ll do chores. Anything else?”
“Yes.” He stared at her somberly. “In this house, we pray. I know you don’t, so izz ok.” He shrugged. “But we also smile. So you have to smile at least once a day.” He grinned at her, his eyes disappearing into his cheeks. “Seeing you in our house is like waking up to a dream, my angel.”
She thought about his words now, as she sipped Sits’s coffee. Her grandparents spoke in casual poetry, dropping phrases like “you’re blooming today” and “you bury me because I love you so much.” They always always always called her habibti and ya ayooni. My love. My eyes. The fact was that she wasn’t used to this, this awkwardly normal way of discussing intense emotions.
Her mother only used flattery on board chairmen, her father only on waitresses. But with Hiba, they were like teachers, where “caring” also meant assessing you, grading and judging. “Watch your expression,” Mama liked to snap. “Head high. Remember who you are.” How could Hiba tell her she longed for any memory of who she was, any memory at all.
***
Jennie texted her on the Saturday of her third week.
You ok. Haven’t heard from you.
Staying with relatives. Taking the rest of the semester off.
Dina’s taking over your space. Wanted to see if you’re ok.
All good. Just need time off.
Glad you’re ok. Your rents ok with time off from school?
Don’t care.
K.
Yep.
She’s loving all the extra dorm space. Bitch.
I bet. Bitch.
He’s in there every night. Probably eating it.
Daniel?
Yeah. He’ll fuck anything that moves. You saw the shit he posted that time?
Yeah.
That poor girl.
Yeah.
***
During week three, Sits told Hiba to help her clean the windows. This meant moving all the knock-knacks -- the porcelain Victorian ladies, the picture frames, the vases of plastic flowers, off the windowsills and wiping them down, then standing on the sill and windexing the glass top to bottom. At her parents’ house, there were windows that were twelve feet tall, and that men came with ladders and sponges on poles to clean. But Hiba obeyed Sits, because when Baba had told her “enough is enough,” and “get your pathetic ass out of my house,” it was only Seedo who’d said “come.”
There was one photo of herself, her sister Mina, and their brother Amir, all in their Christmas outfits, flanking her parents in front of the tree. Mama’s “Macy’s tree,” Hiba always called. She must have been about ten in the photo, and she looked like a goddamn whale. Her sparkly gold dress made her look bloated, especially next to Mina, who always wore sleek black dresses at the holidays. Hiba picked up the photo and carefully moved it to the side, then climbed up on the sill.
She stood carefully, aiming the spray bottle of blue cleaner up at the top. She started to rub the bubbles with her towel, when Sits stopped her. “No,” she said in Arabic, “we don’t want streaks.” Then carefully, she coached Hiba how to wipe down, down, in one smooth motion, then move back to the top of the window. When it was finished, she stood there, her body in the window frame, and looked down at Thatcher Street, at the girls playing double dutch. One of them, with long, blue-tipped braids, was in the cage now, her chubby stomach and thighs bouncing as she jumped. Her mother sat on her stoop, smiling and clapping along with the beat for her. When she messed up, her ankle catching the rope, her mom clapped even harder and shouted something that made the girl flick her braids and smile. Hiba wished she could go down to the street and rewind it, to hear the words that the mother had said.
“Khalasti?” Sits asked her. “We have two more rooms.”
“One more second.”
“What’s wrong?”
Hiba continued looking at the girls. “Can you throw away that picture of me?”
Sits picked it up. “No, I love it.”
“I wish you would.” She climbed down carefully, her arms not as steady as they’d been in the past.
Later that night, when all the windows sparkled and Sits and Seedo had gone to bed, she carefully removed the photograph from the glass and completely and cleanly cut her body out of the picture.
***
One day, Seedo requested her help. “I’m tired,” Hiba said, lying down on the couch. She slept here a lot, in the midday, wrapped in the numerous blankets that Sits crocheted. Her favorite was one of multi-colored, mismatched yarn. “This one is so warm, but the pattern is strange.”
Sits had shrugged. “I had a big box of leftover yarn. So I kept crocheting until I had none left.” Hiba loved that she could understand Arabic better since moving in with them. Now Sits looked suspiciously at Hiba. “You know, I made you a blanket when you were little. For your tenth birthday.”
“I don’t have a blanket from you.”
“A big light blue and gray one?” Sits stretched out her arms. “It’s for a twin bed -- so big.”
But Hiba had never seen it.
“Humpf,” Sits had snorted, then gone back to stirring the lentils in the pot.
But Seedo made her shed the blanket, put on an extra sweater, and come outside. He wanted her to work in the garden.
“You don’t have a garden,” she explained to him calmly. He raised a palm to his heart and looked offended. “Ilsanik,” he chided. Your tongue. But he was laughing, and she laughed too. It felt so strange, how much they laughed. They didn’t have cable or Netflix, or goddamn Wifi, but they told each other jokes and laughed all the time. One day, Seedo had said he felt like eating lamb, and Sits had reminded him it wasn’t Sunday. “But I feel like having it,” he said stubbornly, winking at Hiba, and Sits’s response had been a cool, “I’ll make it at your funeral.”
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked, as he handed her a trowel.
“Dig holes here, about six inches apart,” he instructed her. “And we’re going to plant these.” He pointed to a flat, cardboard box, like the kind they hauled apples in from the outdoor market. It was filled with clumps of dirt.
“You’re going to plant dirt?”
He looked up at the sky. “They claim she’s in college, heavenly father,” he spoke to the clouds.
She tried not to, but in spite of herself, Hiba giggled.
His head snapped forward, and he winked. “This is garlic.” He fluttered his hand around the dirt in the box, shedding it to reveal white bulbs like curved, ivory fangs.
So they squatted before the trough of dirt, and she used the trowel to dig holes. Her arms ached and, at one point, they shook from the exertion. Seedo said softly, “It’s okay. It’s good for you. This is like exercise. Make you strong.”
“Make me have an appetite?”
He grinned and winked. “Your Mama - she’s is smart too.”
Hiba turned her attention to the dirt. Everyone said that about Mama, but she wasn’t smart, Hiba thought. She was just busy. She acted busy. She looked busy. Sitting on the boards of charity groups. Going to fundraiser galas anywhere between DC and Philadelphia. She always said Baba had made his money in real estate, not in something like medicine or law, so she had to make up for that lack of prestige in this way. Every time she said it, Baba stood and left the room.
Hiba had always hated Mama’s charity work. Once she got a community service award at some fancy party in a ballroom, she and Mina had to dress up and be shown off like an accomplishment. Their brother had been there too; this was before Baba had sent him to rehab for drugs. Mama hardly ever talked about Amir, and when she did, the story was that Amir had somehow betrayed her.
***
Hiba scraped her finger on something sharp, a shard of wood. The skin separated and the blood ballooned out in a big, fat drop. “I’ll be back.”
“No, just wash it here, with the hose.”
“No, Seedo.” She shook her head. “I need a band-aid.”
There was a shelf in the bathroom where Sits kept extra towels, cotton balls, band-aids. But she heard a noise in her bedroom and walked in. Sits had her hands in Hiba’s top drawer, digging under the bras and t-shirts. Hiba could see her mattress had been moved, the sheets messed.
Sits slowly withdrew her arms. She held the bottle in her closed fist.
“What the hell.”
“We were worried. We told you not to bring anything that could hurt you.”
“I’m leaving.”
“No,” Seedo said, from the doorway. “No, angel. You’re staying here until you’re better.”
***
One day, when she couldn’t take it anymore, she texted Jennie.
What’s with Dina and Daniel?
He posted a pic of them trashed. From last week.
Right before finals.
I told her to be careful. He posted the pic of that one girl, he’ll do the same to her.
Good pt.
Idk. She’s a bigger skank than he is.
***
One morning, Hiba ‘s cheek bones pushed out against her skin. They’d been disappearing these past three weeks, as she’d been lulled into Sits and Seedo’s quiet life. But now they were back, jutting out sharply, like marble, giving her face a distinct, sophisticated, sharp look. A look that said, “Stay away from me, or I will hurt you too.”
She thought - not for the first time - that she looked scary.
Had she appeared like this to Daniel? She’d struggled so hard, and it hadn’t been good enough anyway, but now she wondered if she had been pretty at all. Maybe he didn’t care – the picture hadn’t been of her face, after all.
When he’d leaned over her after, while she slept, what had he thought? When he’d raised the camera, what had he hoped to capture? Something gross? His caption had said, “At the beach, bitches.” Because there she’d lain, like a big whale on a messy bed, her back to the camera.
Sits always liked to touch her face, to tug affectionately at her hair, to say “jameela” - beautiful - several times a day. That’s how she was. Always touching. Seedo too -- he kissed Sits’s hand every time she brought him a cup of tea, patted her shoulder whenever he walked past her. Without thinking, it seemed. It’s just how they were.
How had Mama grown up in this house? Hiba imagined her as a little girl, being carried on Seedo’s shoulders, being wrapped in a handmade blanket on a cold night, having two people worry when she got sick. She imagined Seedo getting up early to sponge brown dye on Mama’s school shoes then smooth it through the leather so it gleamed. Had she hated this life? Is that why she threw out any shoes with a scuff? Any sweater that sprouted a thread? This was not poverty -- not the kind she saw in her textbooks, or the kind that they talked about at the galas on whose boards Mama served on. No swollen stomachs here, no famine, nobody swatting flies and walking to the well for water. What had made her the kind of mother who assessed each one of them before they left the house, making sure their hair was stylish, their makeup right, their handbags and shoes Prada or nothing? A woman who’d once tossed away Hiba’s craft bin when she’d started painting t-shirts with puffy paint for fun. Who’d insisted on hair relaxers to ease the frizz. Who had a manicurist on call at the salon in case she chipped a nail.
Sits noticed her cheekbones. She ran her waxy palm over them. “Ya rouhi, ya rouhi,” she said. A few minutes later, Hiba watched her burn incense in a black cast iron bowl and mutter prayers over it. She took the smoking bowl upstairs, and an hour later, when Hiba went to lie down in bed, she smelled its aroma everywhere -- her sheets, her closet, her dresser -- a sad, sweet smell, like something she missed.
She wanted to say to Sits:
You’re so good to me.
I think you’re beautiful. Your gray hair like steel, the wrinkles at the corner of your eyes, the shuffle in your walk -- it’s the purest beauty I’ve ever seen.
Sits, she wanted to say, I hate the way I look.
She focused instead on being here in this house. On the concrete moments. Touching the tiled floor with her bare feet. Listening to Liz shout at Sits across the street. When she was watching Seedo through the kitchen window as he hunched over the apple tree, tying it at one point to the fence to keep it from collapsing.
“You need to go outside, and walk a little bit,” Sits said during week five. She’d received an application form from her teachers to request an extension to turn in her incomplete work, but she hadn’t filled it. She hadn’t even read through it.
She’d only been going outside to sit on the lounge chair, soaking up the light like a human solar panel. Sits had taken away all her long sleeve shirts, but neither she nor Seedo said a word about her thin arms. She’d also hidden all the knives in an overly dramatic move, but Hiba didn’t blame her. She heard Sits talking on the kitchen phone to Mama, asking her what she should do. “No, no, she can stay here as long as she wants. But I’m worried. Wallah, I’m scared for her.”
It was really bright and sunny the day that Sits insisted. They walked to the produce market, and Hiba pulled a metal cart behind her.
“Look at these,” Sits said, running her rough hands over a bin of cucumbers. “They’re cheap and they’re small, like the fakous we eat.” She looked at the burly man behind the stall. “Hello, Mauricio,” she said in her English.
Hiba stood quietly, her hands deep in the pockets of her hoodie. The sun filled her eyes and she didn’t have shades, so she pulled her hood up and over her head.
“Your granddaughter?” Mauricio asked.
“Hiba. Yes.” She patted her chest. “Ma do-tur’s girl.”
He nodded at Hiba, but she smiled back in a quick way then ducked her head again. The glare was making her eyes water.
“My grandson… he help me too. Good boy, he works with me.”
“That’s good boy.”
“How many you want?” He smiled at Hiba. “You need a lot. You gotta feed this one. She too thin.”
Sits asked Hiba if she’d like to try them and she nodded just to say something. She really wanted to go home, to her little clean room on the third floor, where everything smelled like lemon and wind, and lie down in her soft bed where the scent of incense lingered a week later. She didn’t want to imagine Daniel in her old dorm room, climbing into Dina’s bed the way he’d climbed into hers, kissing Dina and telling her she was beautiful, as he’d told her. He wouldn’t ever. She was sure of it.
“How about these tomatoes? These look good to you, habibti?” Sits held up a dark red one, like a softball. Hiba peered at it, squinting. “I’ll get a few, yes?” Sits smiled and Hiba could tell she was worried. She’d gone back to not eating at all in the last two days, since Jennie’s text. She’d picked at small fragments of her food, enough to keep the acid down, but her energy was draining. What had she eaten yesterday, she wondered, as she watched Mauricio bag some tomatoes? Half an apple. Ten almonds. A piece of chicken the size of her thumb.
Jennie hadn’t figured it out. Snapchat got rid of it, but surely someone… someone had figured it out. Her hair had been spread across the pillow… not many girls on campus had hair like her.
Further down the stalls, she pulled Sits’s metal cart as her grandmother loaded up on green peas, bananas, and potatoes. Hiba had not eaten a potato in two years, not since senior year of high school, at Jennie’s graduation party. She wondered what Jennie was doing now. Probably studying for mid-term exams. Maybe planning the Halloween bash on campus. Maybe sitting on the quad, eating her pho from the takeout place, not giving a shit that she’d gained twenty pounds since freshman year.
Hiba’s head buzzed. As they turned a corner to visit a new row of stalls, the sun hit her harder than ever. This row didn’t have the wide umbrellas that the others did, and the glare lasered down on her full-force.
“They have fresh apricots, habibti,” came Sits’s voice, seeming far away. There was a lot of noise, but from where? Hiba squinted through the yellow flashes before her eyes, swimming in heat, and registered -- right before she collapsed -- that Sits had started to scream.
***
They told her that Mauricio and his grandson had lifted her like a feather into the backseat of Seedo’s car. The doctor in the emergency room said she was severely dehydrated and she found herself on an IV. They couldn’t detect a vein in her inner elbow so they punctured one in the back of her hand, and then began forcing her body to accept calories.
Sits and Seedo sat on the chairs in her room, pecking away at the cell phone they shared. It was a flip phone but they texted on it anyway, hitting the number keys repeatedly until it reached the letter they needed. When they left the room to huddle with the doctor, she took the phone they left on the side table. Using her free arm, she scanned their messages.
She sick. Come.
She does this all the time.
Need you.
It’s her drama. If we come, she’ll know she won.
Haram.
She wants attention.
She desirv it.
***
Mama and Baba did not come.
Instead, they sent Mina.
Mina, a younger, less plastic version of Mama, swung into the hospital room carrying an expensive bag and wearing tight jeans and beaded sandals. Her eyebrows had been tattooed on her face that summer during a trip to Beirut with their cousins. Hiba hadn’t been invited. She’d never been Mina’s choice of a friend. Mina felt the same about her -- she had no doubt. Mina, for sure, felt she’d been dealt a bad hand in getting a dud, depressive for a sister.
“The doctor said you’re underweight,” Mina said, perching on the chair. “Tell them you’ll start eating more and they’ll let you go.”
“Okay. I will.”
“Make it believable.”
“Yep.” She was too tired for Mina today. Or any day.
Her sister noticed the faded vinyl purse on the floor. “Is this Sits’s?”
“She went for a walk with Seedo. They come at eight every morning and stay all day.”
Mina saw the cooler with the wheels and looked at Hiba.
“They bring their own food,” she explained. “They don’t like the cafeteria food.”
“There’s UberEats. Or GrubHub.”
“They have a flip phone, Mina.”
“Fucking Christ.” Mina snickered. “How do you deal with them?”
“They’re fine,” Hiba said, suddenly annoyed.
“You’re so weird, Hiba.” She readjusted herself on the chair. “You could have just come home. Mama and Baba aren’t mad. Just embarrassed.”
“Right. Okay.”
“Mostly Mama. Baba’s worried about you and wants you to come home.”
Mina’s eyebrows looked like two sword blades, about to cross each other. She looked like a monster, with her carefully lined lips and her skin coated in primer and contouring makeup. A clown in some sick nightmare.
She leaned closer to Hiba. “So. You had a boyfriend. And he dumped you. Big fucking deal.”
“It was a big deal.” She looked at Mina’s manicured pink nails, thought about Daniel’s fingers pinching her waistline.
“Get over it.”
Hiba wanted the bed to either swallow her or snap together in half and kill her.
“There’s a silver lining, right? You lost some weight. That’s good. Now just don’t overdo it.”
The fingers in her right hand, where the IV pierced her tissue-like skin, looked like the chubby worms she’d had to dissect once. That was in high school, where she’d first realized she was fat. The soft curves of one’s upper arm were no longer sweet. Having a butt that filled out your jeans meant you were a pig. Eating in front of other girls was a disaster. Everyone was on a diet and nobody was ever hungry. She’d eaten half her sandwich, then a bag of chips one day, and by tenth period, her new name was “Hippa.” She’d carried it through graduation.
But college was a new beginning. And she’d lost weight over that summer, getting in shape throughout her freshman fall. That spring of freshman year, she’d met Daniel, when she thought she was finally trim and fit. Except after she’d let him fuck her, her first time, on her bed in her dorm room, with Jennie in the next room, he’d run his palm over her belly and said, “You need to get this under control.” She’d tried. Because she craved having someone like Daniel put his arm around her in the student lounge, in front of everyone, of having him kiss her on the quad while people walked past. For once, people looked at her like she was more than just a brown girl with frizzy hair, more than just the girl you asked for the class notes. She was attached to someone. She belonged to Daniel. And she wasn’t about to give it up.
And then one morning he left, and after class she’d seen her picture – the picture of her bare ass in bed – on his Snapchat. He’d never called or apologized. The dorm buzzed for a week about whose ass it was. Jennie asked if it was hers, and she’d said no. It turned out he was fucking two other girls, so hardly anyone knew about her anyway. And the most pathetic part, she’d thought, before having a breakdown in her room and swallowing the pills, was that she’d almost been glad because that was the slimmest her ass had ever looked. She’d had pretty dimples in her cheeks, the way skinny girls did when their jeans hung low. When she’d woken up in the hospital, she’d refused to be released to her parents’ home. Mama had looked almost relieved.
“Mama said if you want to come home, you should. She’d just telling everyone you’re doing some kind of yoga retreat thing.”
Hiba decided that if the bed didn’t swallow her or do her the favor of killing her somehow, she’d make herself disappear. She’d done it before, when she’d heard girls gossiping about her ass in study hall, or even when Mama had tsk-ed over her taking a second helping at dinner. “God, that shit wiggles like Jello when she walks.” “Do you really need that, Hiba? It will take you an hour on the elliptical to burn it off.”
She’d cocooned herself in silence during those moments. Now she did it again, by imagining herself in the small backyard, by the odd apple tree, in her worn hoodie, sipping Sits’s coffee. She became the tree, slipping into the hollow center of the black tires, sinking into the soil. Mina’s words couldn’t scale this. Her sister talked, tried to wring a compromise out of her, but Hiba remained silent until Mina shook her head and finally left.
When Sits returned, she sniffed the air. “Who was here? Your mother?”
“Mina.”
“I smell her perfume.” She coughed. “Did she leave any in the bottle?”
Hiba stayed quiet, wriggling her fat fingers, making the skin on the back of her hand stretch painfully.
“It reeks of arrogance,” Sits muttered in Arabic, then cried in alarm at the choking sound coming from the bed. “Habibti, what is it?”
Even Hiba needed a few seconds to recognize the sound of her own laughter.
***
“They want to come and see you. It’s Eid al Milad.” Sits was a Christmas maniac. She started decorating right after Thanksgiving with her embroidered tatreez table cloths and runners.
“I don’t want to see them.”
They were sitting in the yard, and snow had dusted everything, even the leaves of the apple tree. It was still standing because Seedo had tethered it to the wall. But with its white coat, it glistened like an angel. It could be a Christmas tree, if she hung some decorations from it.
“You should,” Sits said. She set two trays, filled with lentils, on the table, one in front of herself and one in front of Hiba, then began picking carefully through them. “Look for small stones or dirt.”
Hiba obeyed, watching how Sits’s fingers scurried across the pan, sifting and inspecting.
“How do stones get in there anyway,” Hiba asked, reluctantly pulling her hands out of her sleeves and stretching her arms across the tray.
“They just do. And I have to make sure they’re clean before I cook them.”
“My mother never cooks addas.”
Sits snorted and paused to sip her coffee, then went back to picking. “Food is love. You have to pass your love into the food,” Sits said solemnly, like she was reading from her Bible. “We lived during three wars. Lentils kept us from starving. Eating them reminds us of those days.”
“Why would you want to remember? If they were such bad days.”
“It’s good to remember,” Sits said, nodding. “So you can look at your life now and say alhamdulilah.”
Hiba continued steadily picking, watching how Sits’s fingers worked in acute, precise movements. She wanted, she realized, Sits to take care of her, to belong to her. Her grandmother’s knuckles were big and knobby, flicking through the dry beans, clicking and shifting them across the wide aluminum pan, separating out the stones that would hurt you.
Contributor Notes
Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of the FARAH ROCKS (Capstone Books) series, the first chapter book series to feature a Palestinian American character. Her short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, was named the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. It also won the 2016 Arab American Book Award, a 2016 American Book Award, and was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award. In 2018, she was named a Ford Fellow by USA Artists. In 2019, she launched the viral #TweetYourThobe social media campaign to promote Palestinian culture. Later that year, she was named winner of the Rose Nader Award, by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), an award given by the Nader family to a person who “demonstrates an unwavering dedication and commitment to values of equality and justice.” In January 2020, Capstone Books launched her debut children’s chapter book series, Farah Rocks, about a smart, brave Palestinian American girl named Farah Hajjar. Farah Rocks is the first chapter book series to feature a Palestinian American protagonist.
She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches fiction writing at the Johns Hopkins University. Susan is a recipient of many awards, including the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and a Ford Fellowship for her books.
You can find her at www.SusanMDBooks.com.
