Battered, With Love

Chapter 17 -- Restless Hearts

Happy belated birthday, Laila! Thank you for your help with Battered, With Love and writing my fairytale. I hope your year is wonderful, along with the rest of your life :) Ameen!

"Everyone is like a kaleidoscope. Look at them one way--they look normal, like they're having a grand old time. Look at them from another and you'll see something else--someone who's suffering, trying to get through life." -- Ash

            As the tomato soup simmers, I lean back against the counter opposite of the stove and stare at the steel pot and the red velvety surface of the soup. Problems are like simmering soup on the stove, aren’t they? It’s like you can fool yourself, pretend like it’s not there and forget about it for a while but then it boils and you’re forced to confront it again.

            Story of my life. I walk over to the window by the dinner table and push back the blinds to trace my pointer finger in the shape of a heart on the cold sheet of glass. No problem of mine is fully resolved. Not The Creep, not Hamza, not where I want to go to college, not Juwariyah, not my fake “friends.” God, I’m in over my head, I think as a rest my forehead against the icy sanctuary.

            The soup boils, a pocket of liquid bursting the bubble, splattering some drops of soup on the floor. I cautiously turn the stove off and move the soup to a cool spot, immediately wiping up the floor after. The house is silent as I pour the soup into a bowl and take it upstairs to Harun’s room. My phone rings in my pocket, but I ignore it.

            When I open Harun’s door, I see he’s lying on his bed, with his laptop. He looks up when he sees my bright blue sweatpants, the flash of color catching his peripheral vision. “Thank you,” he signs as I set down the tray. His eyes are watery, the side effect of being sick, his nose is red, and he’s breathing through his mouth. Not a pretty picture on anyone, but he looks a lot better than I do when I’m ill.

            “Take a seat,” he offers and I sit down on his desk chair, watching him as he eats. He shut the lid of his laptop really quickly when I walked in, which makes me wonder if something’s up. Dad mentioned last night that he felt that Harun was acting different and distant, but I haven’t seen anything that made me question his behavior before…until now.

            I shake off the feeling for now. “I told the teachers you’d probably be back next week.” It’s Tuesday night, and I don’t see Harun getting well enough to go back to the school this week.

            He nods. “Do you have my assignments?”

            “I’ll give them to you in a minute. You’re lucky you got sick during a light week or you would have been in trouble.” He sighs and pushes the food away, lying down with his hands tucked behind his head. As we’re silent, I glance around his room. It’s painted a sleek glossy black on one wall with three white walls. In grey paint on the black wall, hundreds of numbers and stocks cover the wall, courtesy of Juwariyah and Jamal’s artistic abilities. It was a birthday present, this whole room makeover thing. The accessories in his room—his bedspread, the frames, the lamp—are all red. His room is pretty awesome, made to represent his dream, which is to work on Wall Street, in something to do with finance.

            I’m observing a picture of Juwariyah, Jamal, and Harun framed in cherry red painted wood. It was taken outside our house, and the sky is a crisp blue, the bright green of the palm trees competing with it with their intensity of color. The scenery crowns all three glowing faces. In the picture Harun is in mid-jump and giving Juwariyah a noggie; her thick black hair is splayed as she tries to get away. Jamal has his arm around Harun, and they’re all grinning. The picture has a cardstock border around it. At the bottom of the heavy, expensive-looking paper is Juwariyah and Jamal’s handwriting intermingled. The message is simple yet touching: ‘What you lack in hearing you make up for in heart. Allah will help you go far in life. Never give up on your dreams—Juwariyah and Jamal.’ Harun never voiced this, but I could see it in his eyes that he needed someone to tell him that because even he is human and knows what people say about him, knows that people doubt he will ever amount to anything in life.