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“Did you
enjoy
Serenity Ridge?” Haifa asks. Amazing, she thinks I just got back from a trip to … Hawaii! Her question reminds me: I can’t feel the beige leather seat (but I
can
hear). Convenient. Allah forgot to turn off the audio.

“Yes, I did.
Very
much.” I’ve mastered the Good Boy tone: flat, humble and certain. Now, if only I could get the straight dude part of my act down, everything would be fabulous. “Thank you for sending me there.”

My stepmother nods, “pleased.” I study her hair. It’s rock hard. A helmet. I can’t figure out the look. Accidental motorcycle mama? Or, escapee from the
Planet of the Apes?
Then, I see the netting, and realize, that’s not Haifa’s hair but a wig! Thank G-D, no homosexuals were involved in her ’do. I blame Moustapha. I bet he told her that a bad wig counts as a head scarf. That reasoning fits with
The Phantom of the Opera
soundtrack. This being the couple who tell everyone they’re “strict,
observant
Muslims”—and so fake I want to barf.

Hating them changes nothing. I shift my thoughts to the car’s alloy wheels. Beneath us, those wheels speed over asphalt—miles and miles of black … tar. I pray the road liquifies under the brutal late August heat.

Flash! Black letters on a yellow face. The sign reads: LAS VEGAS, 30 MILES.

Two days ago, in the cafeteria during breakfast, Eric leaned toward me and whispered, “There’s a store a couple miles after the sign that says, ‘Thirty miles to Vegas.’” I’d said, “Uh-huh,” and promptly forgot. Everyone said Eric was crazy. But damn if crazy Eric wasn’t spot-on
correct.

“Uhhh!” My body shivers. The sign signals escape (mine) is mere minutes away. Boy Scout, be prepared. Problem is, I got kicked out of Cub Scouts for trying to kiss a boy, Timmy. Also: I can barely keep my eyes open.

“
Wake up!
” A girlie-boy voice. Oh, fucking hell. I’m hearing voices. Figure, it would belong to Lance. “
Wake up, darling! Rise and shine!
”

I want to shout, “Lance, would you shut the fuck up!” But I don’t. Talking out loud to my (invisible) roommate from Serenity Ridge would be the perfect excuse (“He’s crrrraaaaaazzzzzz yyyyyy”) for my parents to turn around, drive me back to Serenity Ridge and drop me off.

All I need to do is keep my eyes open, my mouth shut and—What!?! I muffle my shriek. Where my male Mata Hari eyes should be (in the rearview mirror), there’s two squinty blue eyes. Blink: Corn-colored eyelashes come down like a pair of giant, frilly fans. Lance.

I must be
really
loaded. Because I know he’s not here in this luxury car slash coffin. Lance, he of the square-jawed, blond flat top, football player body of death and … lisp! I met Lance the day I “officially” checked into Hotel d’Serenity Ridge. Looking at him, I’d expected a deep-voiced dude. Then he opened his mouth and a purse fell out. Looked like: Thug. Sounded like: Bitch.

“
Wake up,
” Lance trills. Bitch is per-
sist
-ent. For the next twenty-nine miles, Lance’s voice keeps me awake, repeating the horror story. What Happened. To him, to me, to all of us: “
You couldn’t hide….
”

I look away from the rearview mirror. No good: Lance’s face is there, in the window’s tinted glass. I surrender, listening to our story unspool like a book on tape, “‘
Cause even if you didn’t get a boner when they were showing you the pornos
…”

The Mercedes lurches, rolls onto a large, dirt lot and parks between two semis. “Miller Time!” promises the side of the semi with its bright, painted letters. Beer is
not
what the doctor ordered. I need something to wake me up. Ritalin. Or, speed. Surely, there must be a meth lab tucked away somewhere in one of those desert trailers.

I look back, blinded by the windshield field, bright and mi-grainey. What am I doing here? Can I really escape? My confidence dips. Lance’s voice pipes up, “
… this little thing tracked your pulse, telling them when you got excited.
”

I reach for the door handle. Locked. In the rearview mirror, my father’s eyes drill into me. This pit stop is a test. See Ahmed Run. Knock Ahmed Down. Watch Ahmed Crawl. If only Moustapha knew how much energy it takes just for Ahmed to grab the handle. The lock clicks. The handle moves. The door swings open.

My right leg steps out. Somehow, the rest of my body follows. I stand, suspended in hot air, dusty from the semis’ tires churn. My legs buckle and my lungs seize up. Cold to hot. My body’s shocked by the abrupt change in temperature.

Sorry, Lance, but I can’t follow through on my half-assed plan. I’m too weak. Or, I might have caught a cable movie disease. You know, when the adult playing the child actor starts aging prematurely and dies in the quick ninety minutes that passes in-between commercials?

“
And then they’d shock you.
” Lance’s lisp makes me remember: the dark room. The wires that creep up and reach between my legs, electric tentacles.

I reach, grip the door, then the roof. I hold up my body. I feel like an old man. I can’t do this.

“
It felt like when you drag your feet over carpet.
”

Oh, yeah. Now I remember. The electric shocks. To my dick and balls. The pain. Every time I looked at the pictures on the wall.

I can’t go back. No
fucking
way am I going back.

White dust cakes my lips, tongue and mouth. Fuck it, I breathe deep
because I can.

Suddenly, I really am outside, alone, almost free.

Soon, I’ll be able to walk anywhere, speak with anyone, live.

M
oustapha’s hand tightens on my tiny left bicep. He “guides” me across the parking lot, grip crushing both my arm and self-confidence.

“Moustapha!” Haifa shouts. “Wait! I need something.”

She’s stepped out of the car. I can’t believe my luck: Inside a store, Haifa always demands an escort. She won’t go anywhere alone.

Glad as I am, I can’t help but think, My
real
mother wouldn’t pull this crap. Even though she left when I was like,
two,
I know her. Know what she’s like. For one, I inherited her common sense.

This is how my stepmother shops: She drags my father into the liquor section and leaves me to wander the aisles. Mou-stapha acts tough, but he cannot resist the gravitational pull of my stepmother’s planet-sized demands.

Our family’s shopping habits haven’t changed in eleven months. At some point, I will be left alone. And left alone to wander the aisles means
Escape.
My heart rate speeds up. I cannot, for the life of me, control my pulse.

“
My dick started bleeding and they blamed me, called me ‘uncooperative,’”
Lance says, reminding me what happened the last time my heart sped up: It triggered a virtual fireworks display of electric shocks.

“Make it quick!” Moustapha barks. He’s a die-hard fan of the bark-shout. I guess he thinks I’m not just gay but deaf, too. Add that to my case of premature, movie-of-the-week aging disease and I have so many health problems that it’ll be a miracle if I can make it inside the bathroom. He gives me a shove. I mouth a silent, “Thank you.”
Really.
I am that exhausted, grateful for every extra bit of help.

The bathroom’s a cubicle-sized room. One toilet with matching sink. It stinks of shit, piss and vomit. Footsteps. Mou-stapha’s behind me. Is he here to change my diaper? Or, help me unzip?

I don’t dare raise my head or look him in the eye. Still, I manage to survey the layout. The window over the urinal is propped open. Fresh air squeezes through the crack. The second it hits the bathroom’s warm, disgusting soup, it collapses.

I suck at math. Today, however, panic turns me into a human calculator. I’m able to instantly calculate the distance from floor to window. Too far. I nix that escape route.

I push, opening the stall door. No hand’kins. Fuck! I’d planned to splash my face with cold water and wash off the sleep. I am not
about
to touch the faucet knob. The round push button’s smeared with bacteria, trillions of invisible germs. I look for a stack of cheap doily napkin wipes (you always need a handful ’cause the first five dissolve). I don’t mean to, but I look in the toilet.

Soggy turds float in the yellow-brown water. They’re pressed up against one another like dead coy fish. My stomach revolts. I taste bile, the pre-vomit stuff that dances in your throat
right
before you barf. Which only guarantees that you
will,
in fact, barf. If only I’d known today I’d be so barf obsessed, I would have stolen a barf bag from the seat pocket on my flight back from Honolulu. Oh, silly me.

I turn to leave. Moustapha stands outside the stall. Oops. The stall door slams into his Santa Claus–sized paunch: While I was away and Haifa (or, her twin) got to work transforming her face into an Arabian Wonder Woman, Captain Cuckoo’s been
pigging out on Ding Dongs and Ho Hos. Suddenly, I understand why he’s agreed to stop. Junk food raid.

“Sorry.” My apology’s drowned by the outside roar of several semi engines. Moustapha’s eyes are invisible behind the sunglasses’ mirrored panes. I’m face-to-face with Darth Vader.

“Done?”

The Force of Darkness does a double take. He sees the shit-filled toilet bowl. Oh joy! Darth puts out an arm and blocks my body.

“Flush it,” he commands. “Or didn’t they teach you that?”

“But—”

He spins me around, and shoves me back, into the stall. I hold down the flusher. It’s stuck. The toilet gurgles, churning, tossing up shit chunks and dirty water.

“See?” I step aside. “It won’t flush.”

Darth’s thick lips press together, his Bert unibrow knitting. This is his “serious” look. The “don’t give me any lip” expression.

“I think it’s broken.” I instantly regret voicing my opinion. Ever since Haifa opened my journal and read the scrawled words, “I might be queer,” Moustapha’s lived for confrontations that pit his anger (righteousness and hypocrisy) against my budding sexual identity.

“We’re not leaving till—”

“Ahmed?! Moustapha?!”

Haifa possesses the instincts of a homing pigeon. I wonder if she knows that my father hires hookers.
That
I wish I’d written down in my journal: the afternoon I walked into his office and found him face fucking a tranny.

I bet that incident crosses Moustapha’s mind, too. He grabs my head, shoves me down and holds my face near the cloudy brown water. My stomach tightens, forcing up breakfast and tranquilizers. I taste the stew just before it hits the cloudy water. The shit soup splatters, up and onto my face.

My eyes are tightly shut. Still, I feel hot tears burn my cheeks. I just lost hope that my father might ever look at me as anything
other than an animal. I remind myself I’m lucky to be alive and, literally, eating shit. We’ve all heard stories about Arab parents who think nothing of killing their queer kid.

My head jerks up. Blind, I cannot see him. But I hear his low, nasty laugh.

“Feel better?”

Arms out, I step forward and touch … nothing. He’s gone.

I stagger to the sink and throw water on my face.

“Is he all right?” Haifa’s voice drifts into the bathroom through the open window. I’m surprised by the concerned tone of her voice. Then again, she’s so good at faking everything else, even her concern’s probably a put-on.

“He claims he’s sick. Hurry up!”

“One—” I stop short, cut my impatient tone. Readjust, Ahmed, use the Good Boy tone (flat, humble, certain). “Please, could you give me one minute?”

“We’ll meet you in the store!” My stepmother’s voice is crisp and round, Broadway style, Janice Dickinson on mood elevators.

I step out the bathroom. The water ran out every two seconds and I only had ten. So I’m not sure if I cleaned off the shit slime. Again, my will to run slips. Doubt rushes in—nature abhors a vacuum—and I know, I can’t follow through.

“
But after a while,
” Lance says. “
They didn’t know how to make the bleeding stop.
”

I walk toward the Shop ’N Go. Flies swarm my face. They’re drawn to my skin. It must be glazed with shit slime. Although I’m anxious to flee the flies, I slow my pace and look, taking notes. Rows of semis form long alleyways. Each one is a potential escape route. I could run right now, but I’d risk getting lost. I might turn the wrong way.

I shoo away a cluster of flies. My hand touches my left jaw, grazing my throbbing tooth. Again, I reconsider my half-assed escape plan. If I stay with my parents I will get my tooth fixed. Relief from the constant, throbbing pain. That, or I’ll overdose on Haifa’s sleeping pills.

Nearby, I hear a chorus of gunning engines, race cars anxious
to blast the starting gate. I’m starting to feel like I stepped into a video game.

I feel someone staring at me. I glance to my left. Two girls, tough looking and sexy, stride between the trucks. They work a look that screams, “Dyke!” I know this because I’ve never seen a straight girl who dresses like supermodel truck driver—I am a secret fashionista.

In every way, they’re extreme. The blond isn’t just blond, she’s PLATINUM blond. White hair bristles her head like ice picks. Backlit, the brunette’s shoulder-length mane looks a devilish blue in the sun. They both wear tight, faded jeans, frayed bottoms licking the top of steel toed, black motorcycle boots. The white tank tops plastered to their taut torsos barely contain their breasts. The material is so sheer I see matching sets of four, quarter-sized areolas.

Barbed wire and flame tattoos circle their biceps, and their wrists are bound with three-inch-thick leather bands. Evenly matched in height and stride, one looks like an angel, the other a demon, both spit from chariots and sent from heaven and hell to meet—who,
me?
—in this dusty parking lot.

“Hurry up!” Moustapha stands between the Shop ’N Go’s stuttering automatic doors.

I resume walking, toward the store and away from the dykey supermodels. I sneak a peek. They’re looking at
me.
They smile,
Sly.
I imagine that’s their signal, my invitation to run and join them. I’d leave with them, for sure, but I don’t know how to signal them back. Except … left hand behind my back, I twiddle my fingers. Lame, it prolly makes me look like a dork. But I gotta do something, let them know, “Yeah! I’ll go! Wait for me, um, somewhere nearby!”