Hollow Fires

News/Crunch Online Magazine

October 20, 2021

JAWAD

I made a jet pack. And they killed me for it.

It wasn’t even real. It was plastic and tubes, glue and paint. I wanted to be a steampunk inventor for Halloween because I’d seen this awesome old anime called Steamboy about a kid who liked to tinker and create stuff, kinda like me.

In fifth grade, some of the kids started calling me Contraption Kid because I loved inventing things. Because someone gave me a stick of gum, two paper clips, and a string, and I invented a tool to sneak Starbursts out of the bowl on the attendance secretary’s desk. It definitely wasn’t as quick and easy as walking by and pocketing a candy when her head was turned, but it was way more fun. She only bought the original flavors. But that was fine by me because orange was my favorite anyway. I wish I could taste orange now. I wish I could taste anything.

For our elementary school engineering contest, I made a bridge out of Popsicle sticks and tape that held 150 pennies! Twenty pennies more than anyone else’s. The trick was to turn the bridge upside down to hold the cup of pennies, to work against its natural bend. I got a ribbon for it and won a book about how to make cool stuff out of recyclables, called Hey! Don’t Throw It Away! My parents were so proud. Baba always used to say that flipping your thinking was sometimes the best way to come up with an answer to a tough problem. Building that bridge was the first time I understood what he meant. My dad used to say a lot of stuff that went over my head.

Then this fall, right after I started ninth grade, the physics teacher organized an after-school club in the makerspace where we could work on our own projects. When I decided I wanted to build a jet pack for my costume, Ms. Ellis was totally into it. Recycle! Reuse! Repurpose! she’d always say. She knew exactly what I was doing. Saw my sketch and approved it. We’d been taking apart old electronics, like radios and TVs with dials and antennas, and Ms. Ellis said I could use any materials I could salvage. I was so excited, I took the whole project home to finish two weeks before Halloween.

My jet pack turned out so cool. I built it from two empty plastic soda bottles that I turned upside down and glued together, then linked with black plastic tubes—the stretchy kind you sometimes see on a vacuum. I added a TV knob and a dial from an old radio that had numbers from 88 to 108—its little needle was stuck on 96. Glued the whole thing to a ripped backpack I found in the trash.

I painted the pieces bronze and silver with leftover paint Baba kept in our building’s basement, the same colors we used to upcycle the old pink bike our neighbor gave me when I was seven and we didn’t have money to buy a new one.

I couldn’t wait for Halloween to show Ms. Ellis the jet pack, so I took it in early. She loved it. “Being creative takes courage,” she told me. “Never forget that.” She had that look in her eyes that teachers sometimes get when you surprise them in a good way. I had the jet pack with me in English class, but when Ms. Jensen saw it, she said it looked like a bomb. I thought she was joking at first. I mean, it was painted soda bottles! I didn’t even know what a real bomb looked like. But she kind of freaked out. Not the yelling kind of freaked out. The real quiet kind. The kind that’s so much scarier. Her face turned gray, and she started stepping away from me. I shrugged and headed to my next class.

They walked me out the school door on a bright October day in handcuffs. Hands behind my back, like I was a criminal. I told them over and over that it was a jet pack for my Halloween costume. But it was like they didn’t understand English. I was trying so hard not to cry. All I kept thinking, kept saying, was It’s not real. It’s a jet pack. It’s not real. It’s not real. Please. Kids were in the hallway taking pictures, livestreaming, whispering.

I thought that was the worst day of my life. Turned out, I was dead wrong.

JAWAD

The news reports kept calling us Iraqis. Eye-rack-eez. That’s how they said it. Like we weren’t Americans at all. Like my parents and I didn’t have US passports. Like my mom didn’t protect them like prized possessions. But that wasn’t the story the reporters wanted to tell. This was:

In my real life, on my first day back from my three-day suspension for the “bomb hoax,” someone had taped a shooting target—the kind that looks like a bull’s-eye—to my locker. Then someone yelled at me. Others started yelling, too. Like a chant: Bomb Boy. Bomb Boy. Bomb Boy.

At that moment, right then, it felt like I was dying inside. Turns out, that’s not what dying feels like at all. Dying was fast, but also slow. And cold. And hard. I barely had time to scream for help before it all ended. Before all my words were ripped away from me.

When I went back to school after the bomb hoax suspension, my parents told me I couldn’t go to the after-school makerspace club anymore, at least for the rest of the quarter. Even though I’d been cleared. Even though I promised not to make anything else that could seem suspicious. When I went to tell Ms. Ellis, I thought she was going to cry.

“Don’t let hate crush your creativity,” she said. “Don’t let them take away your shine.”

I looked down at my shoes and whispered, “It’s that… my parents want me home right after school from now on.”

Ms. Ellis nodded her head. “I understand. I’m sorry for… everything. It will get better. I promise.” She put her hands together like she was praying.

Now, even though it’s too late to matter, I realize that sometimes adults—even the good ones—make promises they know aren’t true. Promises made of fancy words they know they can’t keep. I think they mean well. They probably think the truth is too sharp. But false hope cuts, too. At least it did when I was alive to feel things.

Ghosts don’t have to go to school. I’m not saying that because it’s the silver lining. It’s that we don’t have to go anywhere. But I visited Bethune anyway. I wasn’t sure where else to go. It was the morning. First period. And I was never late to school. I guess habits stick around even when you don’t need them to.

But going back to my old school, standing in the middle of the hall with everyone walking by me, almost made me feel actual pain again, like that thing when you lose an arm but feel it anyway. A phantom limb. In some ways it was barely different from when I was a real boy. No one really saw me then, either.

Except Ms. Ellis.

I thought maybe she’d be able to see me now. Hear me. She looked sad sitting there at her desk. I got kind of close to her. For a second, she stopped her grading. Almost looked up. I was so close. But then she shook her head and picked up her pen again. I think she blames herself for what happened to me, because she ran the makerspace club after school, because she encouraged me, because that was the beginning of my end. I don’t blame her, though. It wasn’t her fault at all. She was one of the kind adults, the ones who cared. I never told her that I knew she was on my side. That I appreciated her. Maybe she knows? I hope she knows. I hope she won’t let them take away her shine, either.

Then I visited my old locker. They never reassigned it. Maybe they think it’s haunted. (Spoiler: It is.) It’s empty. A shell. Three days after my suspension had ended, someone duct-taped another sign to my locker: Go home, raghead! I peeled it off, but sticky residue from the tape is still there. That stripe of tacky gunk outlasted me.

SAFIYA

JANUARY 18, 2022

I didn’t see it until they took the boy away… took Jawad’s body and loaded it into the back of an ambulance.

When they turned it over—turned him over—I noticed how gentle they were. The rubber-gloved hands of the EMTs worked in unison, like a machine, but softly, with their voices hushed, making no unnecessary sounds. As if he could feel the pressure on his cold, bruised skin; as if his ears could be damaged from loud noises. Even still, when they moved him from the culvert to the stretcher, his body landed on the vinyl green pad with a quiet thud. I cringed.

Right before they covered his body with a gray blanket—the kind they’d wrapped around my shoulders because I couldn’t stop shivering—I saw a tiny glint of silver and blue dangling from his belt loop, a flash in the cold sun. A flicker of something vaguely familiar, a dulled hook snagging at a wisp of childhood memories. I shook my head and closed my eyes, in case I’d imagined it, but when I opened them, it was still there: a key chain, a small silver hand of Fatima, a blue and white stone at its center. A promise of protection.

JAWAD

The police never gave me my jet pack back. Guess they destroyed it to make sure it wasn’t a bomb. It meant I didn’t have a costume for Halloween, which was okay because I didn’t feel much like dressing up anymore. A couple weeks after I got back from suspension, things finally started quieting down. “Bomb Boy” stuck, but mostly life was getting back to normal. My parents even said I could maybe go back to makerspace club after winter break.

That’s when I started getting the texts. I ignored them. I’d gotten real good at ignoring things I didn’t want to see or hear. I never told my parents. I didn’t want to worry them even more. I was trying to be a good son. They both seemed so tired after my arrest. Even their bodies moved slower, like they were kind of broken. Like they got old overnight.

I guess I should have told them about the texts. I guess I should’ve told someone. But it was easier to pretend that nothing was happening. That everything was okay. All I needed to do, I thought, was keep my head down. Keep my eyes on my own paper. Keep my mouth shut. Disappear. I tried to make myself invisible. Turned out I was too good at it. Turned out vanishing was my superpower.

I died clutching my key chain. That silver hand of Fatima I’d held on to for so many years and always had with me. I thought about the last time I needed it, when I was a real boy.

Now all I am is a whisper in the dark to a girl who doesn’t want to believe in ghosts. How do I get Safiya to believe in me? I need someone to believe in me.

State’s Exhibit 1

Text messages sent to Jawad Ali, Nov 8–11, 2021, via Burner app

SAFIYA

JANUARY 3, 2022

No one wanted to talk about the letter our mosque got the week before Christmas. No one, not even my parents, wanted to consider it a real threat. But “threat” was the only way to describe it:

Everyone wanted us to go around like it was a regular December. Fa la friggin’ la. Deck the halls. Down the eggnog. Fire up the TV yule log. A normal winter break—for Muslims whose mosque had been sent a letter about a possible mass shooting. Nothing to see there, I guess. The note had been postmarked on December 16 in London. London. Why the hell would anyone in England want to threaten a small community mosque on the South Side of Chicago? How did they even know we existed? The police gave us extra patrols at Jummah after the community pushed for it, but generally the police department was treating the letter like a prank.

All the adults kept saying we shouldn’t let them scare us. Ummm? Why not? It was scary. I panicked when I first heard about the note. A massacre worse than Christchurch? Over fifty people were killed there! Our mosque was basically a neighborhood storefront. Even for Eid we probably didn’t get more than fifty or seventy-five people for prayers. Why target us?

My parents kept reminding me that we’d seen worse. They remembered 9/11. I didn’t, so I wasn’t around to witness that fallout. But I was here for the first Muslim ban. And the second. And America’s ongoing, relentless wars in the Middle East that started before I was born and that, honestly, I’ve never been able to fully distinguish or understand. One giant, endless conflict with a lot of nameless dead civilians. Killed by drones, which somehow made Americans feel less responsible, because drones aren’t people. But only a person can issue a kill command.

Was it comforting for my parents and the aunties and uncles to know we’d been through worse? Maybe there was some twisted adult logic to that, but it didn’t exactly feel like a warm blanket on a cold night.

That was the first week of winter break, and it was quiet after. I started thinking that maybe my mom was right: It will pass, beta. Anonymous haters are all bark and no bite. Aside from the weirdness of her casually dropping “haters” into the conversation, I started to forget, too.