Free Don't Tell Me You're Afraid by Giuseppe Catozzella

and . . . ?”
    â€œI’ll leave the country and . . . I’ll marry Mo Farah,” I gasped.
    â€œYou see? I was right!”
    Then we burst out laughing and made up. Every now and then one of the adults, hearing our screams, stuck his head inside.Seeing us play, he said something we didn’t even hear and quietly went back to where he’d come from.
    As we lay side by side, Alì sometimes began singing. I had told him that I liked it when Hodan sang, and to tease me he started wailing in falsetto, his voice pitched artificially high like a girl’s. But he was so out of tune that most times we started hitting each other and tickling again.
    When we were together, Alì went back to being the way he’d always been. Only when he was with me did the melancholy that now always clouded his eyes fade.
    I was worried about him.
    I had tried many times to ask him what was wrong. I’d tried to talk about Ahmed, who hadn’t been seen at our house since the night I’d won the annual race; I reminded him of the encounter that long-ago evening when Ahmed had protected us from the two fundamentalist kids. But Alì never responded.
    Just raising the subject made him darken even more. So he won and we didn’t talk about it.
    We never talked about it, for two whole years.

CHAPTER 10

    B Y DAY , HOWEVER , every day for two years Alì continued to be my coach. He had gone to the city’s old library and borrowed all the training manuals he could find. For months, every afternoon in the courtyard he forced me to read them to him. As a result, we also succeeded where we had failed a long time ago: Thanks to his passion for racing and training, Alì learned to read.
    He always said that whereas the heart was the engine and breath the gasoline, the muscles were the pistons, and they had to be strong, resilient, and responsive.
    In the courtyard in the afternoon or late at night, when the others were already in their rooms, he made me do reps, thirty-meter sprints, from one side to the other at maximum speed. As many as a hundred in a row. I started from the back wall and sprinted to the entrance wall. Then I turned around and did the same thing in reverse. Again and again, until I collapsed on the ground, utterly spent.
    â€œEnough, please,” I begged him, exhausted, drenched with sweat.
    â€œSamia, do you remember the first rule? Don’t complain and do everything I tell you,” Alì said, sitting in the shadows on the wicker chair Aabe used in the evening. I hated him.
    â€œNo. I said enough. I’m ready to drop.” I tried to move him to pity by throwing myself on the ground and pretending I was about to pass out.
    At that point Alì made me get up, with the dust stuck all over me, and do another ten reps. Finally, a lap all around to cool down.
    To strengthen my arm muscles, he’d made weights out of tin cans or plastic bottles he’d found in the street or at the Bakara market by filling them with sand. He liked going to the market; he loved being in crowded places with thousands of people all talking at the same time and scurrying around, jostling and shoving, bumping into one another like busy ants. I, on the other hand, didn’t like it at all. Not just because of the crowds, which I hated, and the reek of sweaty armpits that collected under the blue plastic awnings hung over the stalls to protect them from the scorching sun, but also because Bakara scared me. Not only was it the biggest market, but it was also the area of the city where most terrorist attacks occurred. Killers from the clans, as well as Al-Shabaab extremists, liked having all those people together.
    I never wanted to go, whereas Alì, who wasn’t afraid of anything, found a thousand excuses to go back there.
    As a result, he’d come up with the idea of the weights.
    There were thirty-three-centiliter cans of Coca-Cola, half-liter bottles,