Free All We Have Left by Wendy Mills Page A

the ice shift underneath me, and grab for my ice tool to steady myself. I’m breathing in big gasps, and I’m suddenly not sure I’m going to make it.
    “Hey.” Adam’s voice floats from below me. “I’ve got you, okay? I won’t let you fall. Just concentrate on the next move.”
    I put my forehead against the ice, feeling the rough, cold edges, and then I look back up at the top.
    “You can do this, Jesse.” It’s the first time he’s said my name, and something about the way he says it gives me the strength to kick in another foothold, and push myself up. Step by step, with Adam yelling encouragement, I make it to the top and collapse.
    “You okay?”
    “I’m okay!” I force myself to get up and secure an anchor for him.
    He comes up, and it’s like he flows up the mountain, like a waterfall going backward, and then he’s at the top with me, and we’re both laughing up at the sky, not thinking about anything but right here, right now.

Chapter Eleven
Alia
    I’m almost running as I head toward the subway. I pass a group of kids being ushered along by a nanny pushing a stroller, and sidestep a deliveryman feeding boxes through a metal hatch onto a conveyor belt that slides deep into the bowels of a shop. I feel reckless and impatient, like I’ve left something important unfinished, and the permission slip crinkles in my pocket. It’s a constant reminder of the dream that I am letting slip away.
    Because it’s my fault I did not make my parents hear me. I let so many opportunities pass when I could have told them what this NYU program means to me.
    What can I do though? Both my father and my mother have said no, but if I don’t turn the permission slip in today, then I won’t be able to go to the NYU program. Maybe it’snot the end of the world, but if I let them do this to me, what else will I let them talk me into? Will I wake up one day in college, studying to be a doctor or lawyer and wonder how I got there?
    I drop an absentminded pat on the head of a coin-operated horse outside a shop. I remember there was one like it down the street from where we used to live in LA. I would beg Ayah to drop quarter after quarter into it and sit in the saddle and clutch the reins while it bounded up and down.
    Ayah is the one I need to convince. As in-your-face as my mother is, she listens to my father. Like when I chose a creative arts high school, instead of one of the more academic ones, and my mother and I screamed and yelled for an entire week. Finally I went to Ayah and told him how much it meant to me. He somehow poured water all over my mother’s raging inferno, and in the end I got to go to the school I wanted.
    Ayah didn’t listen to me this morning, but all of a sudden I don’t want to give up.
    Maybe he will listen, if I try one more time.

    I barely catch the crowded express train going to Manhattan. A girl, older than me, probably in college, gets on and stands across from me. She’s dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved blouse, with a beautifully patterned purple scarf over her head. She catches my eye.
    “ As-salaam alaikum ,” she says in Arabic, the universalgreeting among Muslims. Her voice is as American as my own.
    Peace be upon you.
    “ Wa alaikum as-salaam ,” I answer automatically.
    And upon you be peace.
    She nods at me in sisterly camaraderie, and I smile, feeling a small glow of warmth and acceptance. I sit back on the hard, plastic seat I was lucky to get this time of the morning as the train rocks back and forth. Pulling my notepad out of my bag, I sketch the girl in broad, quick strokes, capturing her slender face and the delicate edge of her scarf, and write the dialogue bubble above her head:
    Lia, I want you to know that the entire world is counting on you. I know you can do it!
    I finger my Hand of Fatimah amulet on its thin gold chain around my neck as I consider Lia’s response to her newest fan. I sketch Lia slowly melting into the wall of the subway seat as she pulls