Free All We Have Left by Wendy Mills Page B

on her camouflage burqa. I draw a cloud shape with smaller circles going down to Lia’s head to indicate a thought bubble:
    I wish I were as sure as she is that I can win this battle.
    The train accelerates as it slides under the river, and I sit with the notepad in my lap, thinking about what I will say to Ayah.
    I know he’s worried about me making bad decisions. And really, after what I did, how can I blame him?

    My sophomore year, Mike Stanley sat behind me in my Humanities band, and he sailed paper airplanes with messages over my shoulder, saying stuff like: My eyes are crossing. Are your eyes crossing? and I’m pretty sure it’s possible to die of boredom. It was funny, and I thought he was cute with his deep brown eyes and strong dancer’s legs. Pretty soon he started walking with me after class. We talked on the phone, and I told myself we were just friends, that it was okay if we were just friends. Carla thought he was hot and said if I didn’t grab him, she would. And then he asked me if I wanted to go see the new Pearl Harbor movie with him, and somehow I didn’t just say no. Two hours before he was supposed to pick me up I went into the living room and told my parents.
    “It’s not a good idea, Lala,” my father said, and at least he sounded sympathetic.
    Mama just shook her head and said, “Have you lost your mind, Alia?”
    That set me off, and before long Mama and I were trading words so fast it felt like we were in some kind of raging ping-pong game.
    “You don’t want me to be happy!” I yelled. “I hate it here, I want to be in LA, and you don’t care ! You want me to be miserable!”
    “Don’t be so dramatic, Alia,” my mother said. “Of course we want you to be happy. It’s because we want you to be happy that we are asking you to believe that we know what’s best for you.”
    “How could you possibly know what will make me happy?”
    Eventually my father intervened, telling me gently that faith was a road map to happiness, God willing, not a roadblock to fun, and asked me to go to my room to calm down. I burned with embarrassment when I heard the door buzzer a while later, hating them, hating them , and wondering what they had told Mike when he showed up at our door.
    Later that night, I packed a bag and snuck out while my parents were sleeping. It was wrong, it was stupid, but I’d felt so powerless. It felt like if I stayed there even one more night I would wake up as a puppet, dancing to my parents’ commands. Carla’s mom was out of town, so we had two glorious days of freedom, or at least that’s how it seemed at the time.
    The second night, Carla threw a party on the roof of her building. She lent me some clothes, and we giggled and laughed as we dragged chairs from her tiny apartment up two flights of stairs to the roof. I was trying not to think about my parents, who had called Carla over and over again. Every time she lied smoothly: “Oh gosh, how terrible , Mr. and Mrs. Susanto, but I haven’t seen her!”
    It was the first Saturday in June, and at first it was damp and foggy. The only lights we could see were the twinkling, colored strands of Christmas lights I’d helped Carla put up. A bunch of people were there, chilling and talking, and we watched as the damp fog rolled back and suddenly we could see the lights of the buildings around us, shining like starson the ground. Carla cranked up the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” and we all yelled the refrain at the top of our lungs.
    I was standing at the edge of the roof when a paper airplane landed on the wall beside me. I knew who it was, even if I didn’t see him arrive. Without turning around, I opened the note: I missed you last night.
    I turned around and Mike was standing there, his hands in his pockets, wearing a tight blue T-shirt. He was so handsome I felt my pulse jump a little. Okay, a lot.
    “Here,” he said, and handed me a beer. “What happened last night?” He leaned up on the wall