Eighteen-year-old Hayat Amanullah has it all: a loving family, a carefree life, and a future at the Ivy League school of her dreams. But her perfect life shatters when her oldest brother suddenly dies in a car accident. The tight-knit Amanullah fami...
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~ Purple lilac (flower): the first emotions of love ~
It takes me three days to recover from my sickness. It turns out I drank expired juice and, while I hadn't noted anything in taste, it messed with my stomach and head.
All three days, Ihsaan works from home, grumbling and constantly clarifying that he isn't doing it for my sake.
But every day he works at the table in my room, and every couple of hours he whips up something to eat and continuously reminds me to take my medicine. And every time he thinks I'm not looking, he throws me concerned glances.
Before my dad leaves for work every day, he kisses my forehead and instructs Ihsaan to take good care of me, to which Ihsaan responds by scrunching his face and giving me the stank eye, but nodding at my dad.
My mom is, of course, mostly confined to her room.
You know when you're sick and you suddenly start to remember a million things that make you sad, and a million reasons to cry? Over the past three days, I must've eaten Ihsaan's ears off with my constant lamentations about everything that has been going wrong in my life. I mumbled about our broken family, how terribly I missed Arafat, my wilted garden, my lost friends, and somewhere in that haze of delirium I accidentally blurted out something about my acceptance to Princeton University.
Ihsaan, though he had been listening to me with a forlorn expression on his face before, suddenly sat up when I said Princeton, confusion marring his features.
"What did you say?" he said. "You got into Princeton?"
Panic had flared through me. "What?" I replied hastily. "I never said that."
"Hayat, you just said Princeton."
I shook my head, heart beginning to beat rapidly against my chest. "I just meant I really wanted to go there. I never said I got in."
Ihsaan tilted his head and scrutinized me with narrowed eyes. "But I heard—"
"Oh, my God, Ihsaan," I huffed, turning to the side and pulling the covers over my head, hoping he hadn't detected the alarm on my face. "Stop eating my brain. I want to sleep."
He hadn't bothered me after that, but I could sense the tension radiating off of him, so I pretended to fall asleep and he eventually resumed typing on his laptop.
Abeer has been texting me over the past three days, too, and even insisted on visiting. It took a lot of convincing to stop her from coming over. I don't want her to get sick, too, especially since the semester began a couple days ago.
Yesterday, when I was almost back to normal, I got a text from a random number.
hey salaam, abeer mentioned that you're sick. just wanted to check in and see how you're doing.
