The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (40 page)

“We cannot. They hold our future in their bodies and heads,” Yael said.

“You know, sometimes I really wish you’d stop talking like that,” Lea said.

“Me too,” Yael said.

“Me three,” Avishag said.

The girls were speaking with thirst. The guns were still wet with gasoline. Mocking them, so near, sleeping with them as if on purpose. The boys were in charge. They didn’t understand why, but they knew it through their bones. The door in front of the girls was not theirs to open.

O
NE OF
the girls’ sweat had begun to smell different. It smelled like an alarm.

Avishag offered her solution. “We should just write it. It is just stones. Someone will move them. It’s just words. We’ll get back at the boys as soon as we’re out. They’ll be sorry later.”

“Just words?” Lea asked. “Maybe.”

“Just stones?” Yael asked. “Nothing is as written as much as a thing written in stones.”

“Yael,” Lea said.

And Avishag was preparing to talk more. Yael wondered if she had been encouraging her to talk too much, after all.

“No!” Yael shouted, and filled the other two with fear; of her, of the boys who might hear. “We are no Harry Potter. We don’t get to have second chances. This is this. We are not Jesus. We don’t get to come back. Either this is the Jewish state, or it is not.”

“Yael,” Lea said.

“Please stop talking,” Avishag said.

“If we don’t face this now, we’ll hurt someone else later. The boys will never forgive themselves. Lea, you’ll always
watch TV instead of doing what you really want to be doing. Avishag, you’ll always say ‘sorry’ when someone bumps into you. I will always hate me, me talking like this,” Yael said.

“You sound very passionate about this issue,” Lea said, and she smiled. And she didn’t cry.

That night the boys came only for Lea, then again.

“Lea, princess,” Yael said when she heard the boys approach the third time. “I don’t know everything. I haven’t been everywhere,
remember
?”

“Do or do not. There is no try,” Lea said.

“May the force be with you,” Avishag said.

Yael felt the weight of all the words and sounds she had ever shared with her friends like a waterfall exploding inside her mouth, in that moment. She needed to imagine a way out, and soon.

B
Y THE
fourth morning the girls did not trade any words. Yael wanted to say something very powerful, to whisper an ancient truth, but the thirst did not let the back of her mouth form the consonants, and besides, she herself knew she was becoming silly.

Avishag was making dolls from the weeds that grew through the cracks on the wooden floor. Hearts and babies and cats. Simple shapes that were the cartoon versions of real objects. Weaving and tightening and ripping. Yael did not notice when she started doing this, but by morning there were six dolls and one becoming one in Avishag’s peeling hands.

When Yael noticed this, she took the bamboo stick that
was holding up an anemones office plant that hadn’t been there when the girls first came to the caravan. She made holes in it with her teeth, and then it was a flute.

For her to play.

“If you are playing for me, Yael, then don’t. I told you a million times. I am like Shylock’s daughter, Jessica. I cannot hear music,” Lea said.

“We are not doing Shakespeare right now, are we?” Avishag said.

“I mean, that’s a little gay, I admit it,” Lea said.

“Right. Because we all know Hitler was gay,” Yael said.

The girls looked at her. And they were afraid, and mostly, then, for themselves for listening to her.

“And by Hitler I mean Shakespeare,” Yael said.

Then she asked for permission to sleep.

Y
AEL DOVE
inside her body to find sleep. She imagined ocean waves beneath her, demanding calm. Then she thought of all the happy times when she sat on the floor and eagerly listened to the opening theme songs of her favorite TV shows and remembered all her tears that rolled with the song during the credits at the end of each episode. She remembered her childhood body, awakening flooded with delight that curled her toes and opened her nose in the middle of all those dreams in which she was taken by another human being for safe keeping. To a room with a bed that locked, where all that happened was that she was fed and pitied.

In her daydreams, the ones she used to have during history
class, it was always a woman math teacher who took her and kept her. The woman always looked a little different: tall, blonde, dark. In reality all of her math teachers were men who did not see her. After she saw
Mean Girls
in high school, the image of the woman math teacher was fixed. It was always Tina Fey, or the math teacher she pretended to be in that movie.
What a stupid girl I used to be
, Yael thought.
What a stupid girl I still am
.

But then she thought more. And she opened her eyes.

“Mean Girls,”
Yael said, while still lying down.

“Let’s not talk unless it means something. My voice is tired,” Avishag said.

“This means something. Remember how the girls in that movie always say the opposite of what they mean?” Yael asked. She sat up.

“All Americans always say the opposite of what they mean. Just look at their movies. All heroes. It’s because they don’t have real ones,” Lea said. Ron had a strong anti-American bias that he’d picked up from doing some business with them, and Lea had adopted it.

“Right,” Yael said. “We have to become a little American. We have to be the opposite of what we are. It will break the boys. Avishag, you stop being sorry. Don’t ever say ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you.’ Just say again and again, ‘I don’t deserve this. I am a good person,’ and Lea, you do the opposite. Apologize. Thank. Smile,” Yael said.

“Do you think you may have Stockholm syndrome?” Lea asked. “I am just asking,” she said. “I find this all to be very interesting.”

“No,” Yael said, calm. “I am trying to cause the opposite.
The boys must get the Lima syndrome. They must learn to love us, a little.”

“But if we are acting the opposite of who we are, then they don’t love
us
us,” Avishag said.

“They are. They are loving what we can be. And we can be everything we want to be,” Yael said.

“Now you are sounding like the national children’s channel again,” Lea said.

“And that’s how you love me,” Yael said, and she looked at Lea.

“And that’s how she loves you,” Avishag said.

I
T WASN
’
T
until the afternoon that the boys came. A little before that, Yael started to cry.

“You know, how come you guys didn’t ask me how I am supposed to act now?” she asked. She was sobbing and pulling her hair.

Avishag and Lea did not speak.

“I have to not make a sound. Be the opposite of making sounds,” Yael said.

“Okay,” Lea said.

“So why are you crying so loud now?” Avishag asked.

“And pretty soon I may become a song,” Yael said. And she moaned all her knowledge onto the other four ears.

The caravan was five steps wide and seven steps long and the ceiling was above the three girls on the mattresses.

T
HE BOYS
came and the boys took and the boys came and the women were what they were not. It was very hard to do.

P
EOPLE DIED
in the after war: 6,422 civilians and combatants in Syria the following month.