The Easiest Target

Temporary Housing Unit

 My heart stutters in my chest, and for a moment, I think I misheard him. Marry him? No, this is a sick joke. I force myself to breathe, but the room spins. I can hear Toki shouting something—something about extortion—but the words don't fully register. Azan steps closer, and my mind screams for me to move, to say something, but I can't.

Marry him? The idea is so completely insane, that I almost laugh—except I can't. His eyes are too serious. He means it. This isn't a joke — at least not completely.

Suddenly, I'm ten years old again, standing in my aunt's living room in Yemen, hearing the adults talk about marriages as if they're business transactions. My stomach churns, and I think of my younger sister, and the constant threat of Yemen that hangs over both of us if I don't comply. Marriage or Yemen. It's the only two options we're given as girls but this... this is a nightmare.

I glance at Toki, who's glaring at Azan, his jaw clenched and it reels me back to reality: my parents would never agree to me marrying him.

"...ut the hell up, Tokyo," Azan grimaces, stepping closer to me. Toki steps between us. "You're a background character for once so act like it, alright? She's gonna marry me and you're gonna piss off and watch."

"If you think I'm gonna let you —"

"You're irrelevant," Azan interrupts coldly, standing nose to nose with Tokyo. "I wanna get away." Toki is silenced and I'm still frozen. He turns his attention to me and speaks in Arabic. "My family has my whole life planned out for me and I'm tired of it. They even have a wife in Jordan waiting for me. I just need a nice girl from a good family so I can marry here. I don't want to go to Jordan."

"Speak in English, coward" Toki blocks my view. "Don't listen to him, Hadeel. He's a pathological liar."

I glance from Toki to Azan uncertainly. "Why don't you just leave? You're over eighteen," I manage to muster.

"Age means shit when you're Arab," Azan snaps. "I'm the first son! They're never going to leave me alone," his voice cracks and I feel tears well in my eyes. I relate too much to that comment. Only I am a girl so it's a million times worse for me. Even though having a daughter in Islam could bring a parent to Paradise, Yemenis still prefer boys. Even the mothers, who were once that unwanted daughter. It terrifies me how they can just blindly continue the cruelty. Sometimes I sit there and listen to my mother retell how disappointed my father was when I was born. He's never shown me anything contradictory to that so I guess it's true.

"Hadeel, he's a liar," Toki turns to face me. "He's lying."

But is he? Toki can never understand. Because as much as we hate our culture, our family and our lives, it is all we have and it is something we can't leave. And if we manage to get away, we're ruining the futures of our innocent siblings — and we always have siblings. I don't know any single-child-Yemeni.

"Hadeel," Azan says, his voice softer than I knew a man's voice could be. "You'll get away from your family. You can do whatever you want — buy whatever you want. Study wherever you want. Just agree to marry me."

Toki grips the board's edge tight before stepping aside, exposing me to Azan's plea. He's insane if he thinks I'm going to marry him. I'm sixteen! I'm not ready for marriage!

"Oh," Azan raises his eyebrows, as though adding an item on a grocery shopping list, "and I won't touch you. It'll just be a marriage for show. I don't like you like that."

His eyes trail down my baggy sweats before they shoot to the door, as though he remembered that woman with the cellulite. Nausea sweeps through me as I wonder if he's slept with her or if he's going to try to after we leave. Is he conscious of his wandering eyes? Is he doing it to make me feel sick? Because it's working.