All My Rage won’t hit shelves until next spring, but EW has the first three chapters.
Sabaa Tahiris going in a new direction with her next novel.
“The desert permeates the gloaming colors, the rising and setting suns, the grittiness of the text.
Credit: © Ayesha Ahmad Photography 2021
He sipped a cup of tea and surveyed the storm looming above the kite-spattered skyline.
Change her mind!I wanted to scream.Tell her I’m not ready.
I did not have to speak.
‘All My Rage’ book cover.Penguin
My father looked at me, and he knew.
“Come now, little butterfly.”
He turned his moth-brown eyes to mine and patted my shoulder.
“You are strong like me.
You will make the best of it.
And at last, you’ll be free of your mother.”
He smiled, only half joking.
I bent my head to the ground in prayer regardless.
Let him be a good man.
I should have prayed instead for a man unbroken.
Are you listening?”
He calls me Sal instead of Salahudin so I don’t hear the slur in his words.
Hangs on to our Civic’s steering wheel like it’s going to steal his wallet and bolt.
In the ink-black morning, all I see of Abu’s eyes are his glasses.
The taillights of traffic going into school reflect off the thick square lenses.
He’s had them so long that they’re hipster now.
I hunch deep in my fleece, breath clouding.
“I will be there,” Abu says.
“Don’t worry.
Okay, Sal?”
My nickname on his lips is all wrong.
“You said you’d go to the last appointment, too,” I tell Abu.
“Dr. Rothman called last night to remind me,” Abu says.
“You don’t have to come, if you have thethe writing club, or soccer.”
“Soccer season’s over.
And I quit the newspaper last semester.
I’ll be at the appointment.
Ama’s not taking care of herself and someone needs to tell Dr. Rothmanpreferably in a coherent sentence.”
I watch the words hit him, sharp little stones.
Abu guides the car to the curb in front of Juniper High.
A bleached-blonde head buried in a parka materializes from the shadows of C-hall.
She saunters past the flagpole, through the crowds of students and toward the Civic.
The pale stretch of her legs is courageous for the twenty-degree weather.
Ashlee is close enough to the car that I can see her purple nail polish.
Abu hasn’t spotted her.
He and Ama never said I can’t have a girlfriend.
Abu digs his fingers into his eyes.
His glasses have carved a shiny red dent on his nose.
He slept in them last night on the recliner.
Ama was too tired to notice.
Or she didn’t want to notice.
“Putar"Son.
Ashlee knocks on the window.
Her parka is unzipped enough to show the insubstantial “welcome to tatooine” shirt beneath.
She must be freezing.
Two years ago Abu’s eyebrows would have been in his hair.
He’d have said “Who is this, Putar?”
His silence feels more brutal, like glass shattering in my head.
“How will you get to the hospital?”
“Should I pick you up?”
“Just get Ama there,” I say.
“I’ll find a ride.”
“Okay, but text me if”
“My cell’s not working.
“Because you actually have to pay the phone company, Abu.
The one thing he’s in charge of and still can’t do.
Muttering “ullu de pathay"sons of owlswhen they said no.
I lean toward him, take a shallow sniff, and almost gag.
It’s like he took a bath in Old Crow and then threw on some more as aftershave.
“I’ll see you at three,” I say.
“Take a shower before she wakes up.
She’ll smell it on you.”
Neither of us says that it doesn’t matter.
That even if Ama smells the liquor, she would never say anything about it.
Slamming the car door, eyes watering from the cold.
Ashlee tucks herself under my arm.Breathe.
Seven seconds out.If she feels my body tense up, she doesn’t let on.
“Warm me up.”
Seven seconds out.Cars honk.
A door thuds nearby and for a moment, I think it is Abu.
I think I will feel the weight of his disapproval.Have some tamiz, Putar.I see it in my head.
I wish for it.
But when I break from Ashlee, the Civic’s blinker is on and he’s pulling into traffic.
Call him and eat crow.
She’s not here, though.
Noor and I haven’t spoken for months.
Ashlee steers me toward campus, and launches into a story about her two-year- old daughter, Kaya.
Last fall, after the Fight between Noor and me, I spent a lot of time alone.
We’d shoot the shit.
One day, to my surprise, she asked me out.
I knew it would be a disaster.
But at least it would be a disaster I chose.
She calls me her boyfriend, even though we’ve only been together two months.
It took me three weeks to even work up the nerve to kiss her.
But when she’s not high, we laugh and talk aboutStar WarsorSagaor this showCrown of Fateswe both love.
I don’t think about Ama so much.
“You’ve been missing class.
Detention if you’re late.
First and only warning.”
Don’t touch me, I want to say.
Ernst moves on, and Ashlee reaches for me again.
Later, I’ll write about this.
“Don’t look like that,” Ashlee says.
“Like what?”
“Like you wish you were anywhere else.”
A direct response would be a lie, so I hedge.
“Heyum, I have to go to the bathroom,” I tell her.
“I’ll see you later.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“Nah, go on.”
I’m already walking away.
“Don’t want you to get in trouble with Ernst.”
Juniper High is massive, but not in a shiny-TV-high-school kind of way.
The gym looks like an airplane hangar.
Everything is a dusty, sand-blasted white.
The bathroom is empty, but I duck into a stall anyway.
Boots scrape against the dirty tiles as someone else enters.
Through the crack in the stall door, I make out Atticus, Jamie Jensen’s boyfriend.
He enjoys soccer, white rappers, and relaxed-fit racism.
“I need ten,” Atticus says.
“But I only have a hundred bucks.”
He wears his typical red plaid and black work boots.
I’ve known Art since kindergarten.
Even though he hangs out with the white-power kids, he gets along with everyone.
Probably because he supplies most of Juniper High with narcotics.
“A hundred gets you five.
Art has a smile in his voice because he is truly the nicest drug dealer who’s ever lived.
“I give you what it’s possible for you to pay for, Atty!”
“Come on, Art”
“I gotta eat too, bro!”
Art digs in his pocket and holds a bag of small white pills just out of Atticus’s reach.
No wonder Art’s smiling all the time.
Atticus curses and hands over his cash.
A few seconds later, he and the pills are gone.
Art looks over at my stall.
“Who’s in there?
You got the shits or you spying?”
“It’s me, Art.
For a guy who careens from one illegal activity to another, Art is uncannily oblivious.
“Hiding from Ashlee?”
His laughter echoes and I wince.
“She’s gone, you’ve got the option to come out.”
If a dude is dropping anchor in the bathroom, it’s rude to have a conversation with him.
I grimace and step out to wash my hands.
“You doing okay, man?”
Art adjusts his beanie in the mirror, blond hair poking out like the fingers of a wayward plant.
“Ashlee told me your mom’s up shit creek.”
Ashlee and Art are cousins.
And even though they’re whiteand I stupidly thought white people ignored their extended familiesthey’re close.
“Yeah,” I say to Art.
“My mom’s not feeling great.”
“Cancer sucks, man.”
She doesn’t have cancer.
“When my nana Ethel was sick, it was miserable,” Art says.
“One day she was fine, the next she looked like a corpse.
I thought she was a goner.
She’s fine now, though.
And she got a painkiller prescription she never uses, so that’s lucrative.”
Art’s laugh echoes off the walls.
Cuz I could give you an old friends' discount.”
“I’m good.”
One shit-faced person in the house is enough.
I hurry away just as the bell rings.
The dirt quad empties out quicker than water down a drain.
As I turn the corner to the English wing, Noor appears from the other side.
The sun hits the windows, painting her braided hair a dozen colors.
Her head is down and she doesn’t see me, instead intent on racing the bell.
We reach Mrs. Michaels’s door at the same time.
Noor’s face looks different, and I realize after a second that she’s wearing makeup.
She pulls out her headphones, hidden in her hoodie, and a tinny song spills from them.
I recognize it because Ama loves it.
“The Wanderer.”
Johnny Cash and U2.
“Hey,” I say.
Noor confessing that she was in love with me.
Me shoving her away, telling her I didn’t feel the same.
Spewing every hurtful thing I could think of, because her kiss was a blade tearing open something inside.
Noor staring at me like I’d transformed into an angry kraken.
She had a pine cone in her hands.
I kept waiting for her to peg me with it.
The door slams behind her and I grab the handle to follow her.
The hall clock behind me plods on, each tick a dumbbell slamming to the floor.
“Mera putar, undar ja,” she’d tell me now.My son, go inside.
I sigh and as I reach for the door, a bony hand grabs my arm.
“Mr. Malik” The handle slips from my grip.
Ernst’s pale green eyes bore into me, daring me to snap, or wanting me to.
“What did I say earlier?”
“Don’t,” I jerk away from him.Shut up, Salahudin.
“Don’t touch me.”
I wait for him to paw at me again.
“Incorrect,” Ernst says.
“I said ‘first and only warning.’
Chapter 3
Noor
My uncle loves theorems.
He loves explaining them to other people.
But the audience for his genius is limited.
It’s either me; his wife, Brooke; or the drunks who come into the liquor shop.
He likes the drunks best because they always think he’s brilliant.
He refills both every Sunday.
The door jangles and Mr. Collins walks in.
Cold air follows him in.
The sky outside is dark.
I can’t even see the mountains that ring Juniper.
There’s still time to do Fajrthe dawn prayer.
But I don’t.
Chachu wouldn’t like it.
“God,” he likes to rant, “is a construct for the weak-minded.”
My head aches as I restock the candy aisle.
I look up at Chachu, but his skinny form is turned away.
I peek at my screen.
The message is from Misbah Auntie.
She’s not actually my aunt.
Misbah Auntie: Happy 18th birthday, my dear Noor.
You bring such light into my life.
I hope you will come to see me.
I made your favorite.
Above that message is a string of others.
Misbah Auntie: Are you angry at me too?
Misbah Auntie: I miss you, my Dhi.
I’ll make paratha on Saturday for you.
Misbah Auntie: Noor, it is raining!
I am thinking of how you love the rain.
Misbah Auntie: Noor, talk to me.
Misbah Auntie: Noor, yo.
I know you are mad at Salahudin.
But can’t you talk to him?
I’ve read that last message a dozen times.
It still makes me mad.
Salahudin is Misbah Auntie’s son.
He’s also my former best friend.
So cliche and so, so stupid.
Misbah Auntie came into the store a couple of Sundays ago.
I wanted to hug her.
Tell her Sal had broken my heart and that I was lost.
But I froze up when she spoke to me.
I haven’t seen her since.
Chachu’s voice makes me jump.
I shove my phone back in my pocket, but he’s not looking at me.
“Finish stocking.”
“Sorry, Chachu.”
He hates that I call him Chachu.
It’s the Urdu title forfather’s brother.
Mr. Collins nods as Chachu wraps up.
The strains of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” fill my head as Mr. Collins’s face lights up.
A caveman discovering fire.
I shouldn’t be surprised.
No matter how obscure the theorem, Chachu can explain it.
It’s his gift.
“You could be doing my job,” Mr. Collins says.
“Hell, you don’t even have an accent like some of the guys working at the base.
Why are you here selling liquor and groceries?”
“The vagaries of fate,” Chachu says.
His voice has that edge.
Mr. Collins looks to where I’m restocking.
“Noor, is it?”
Sometimes, Mr. Collins comes in Sunday mornings when I fire up the store.
“You as smart as your uncle?”
I shrug.like shut up.
Mr. Collins does not shut up.
“Well, don’t waste it,” he says.
“If you’re anything like him, you’ll get into any college you want.”
Chachu bags Mr. Collins’s bottle and catches my eye.
“Has Noor been talking about college?”
I’m glad I didn’t eat breakfast.
I feel sick and breathless.
“No,” Mr. Collins says.
“But she should be.
You’re a senior, right?”
At my shrug, Mr. Collins shakes his head.
“My son was like you.
Now he’s a human billboard for an apartment building in Palmview.”
Mr. Collins looks at me like I’ll be joining his son any second.
I want to throw a Snickers bar at him.
Hit him right between the eyes.
But that would be a waste of good candy.
When he’s gone, Chachu crumples up the graph paper.Turn on the radio.
Our love for nineties music is the only thing we have in common, other than blood.
We don’t even look alikemy hair and skin are darker, my features smaller.Turn it on.
Instead, he nods to the other end of the shop.
“There’s something for you out back,” he says.
I’m so surprised I stare at him until he waves me away.
Chachu hasn’t remembered my birthday in five years.
I pick my way through the storage room.
Outside, the wind rips the back door’s handle from me and I struggle to close it.
A battered silver bike.
It’ll make all our lives easier.”
People love talking about the greatness of the human heart.
No bigger than a fist, pumps two thousand gallons of blood a day.
But the human heart is also stupid.
At least mine is.
Don’t push your luck.The thought makes me angry.
Why can’t I ask my own uncle for some aspirin?
Why when
Stop, Noor.I can’t be angry at Chachu.
He is the only reason I’m standing here.
I was six when an earthquake hit my village in Pakistan.
Chachu drove for two days from Karachi because the flights to northern Punjab were down.
He tore at the rocks with his bare hands.
The emergency workers told him it was useless.
His nails were ripped out.
But Chachu kept digging.
He heard me crying, trapped in a closet.
He pulled me out.
Got me to a hospital and didn’t leave my side.
Chachu brought me to America, where he’d been in college.
He gave up everything for me.
Now it’s my turn.
“You look like a FOB with those braids.”
I don’t respond.
I had the braids in my passport picture, too.
They remind me of who I was.
Of the people who loved me.
“Your shift starts at three fifteen,” Chachu says.
“I have to be somewhere.
Don’t be late.”
Some days, I think of throwing Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem in his face.
It’s the idea that any logic system in existence is either inconsistent or incomplete.
Basically, Godel is saying that most theorems are bullshit.
Which I hope is true.
Because Chachu has a theorem about me, too.
Chachu’s Theorem of the Future, I call it.
It’s pretty simple:
Noor + College = Never going to happen.
My face is frozen by the time I lock my bike to the school rack and head to English.
But I don’t mind.
The ride to school let me think.
About Auntie Misbah and the hospital where I volunteer.
About Salahudin and school.
Right now, I’m thinking about numbers.
University of Virginia was my early-action school.
I applied because they have a good bio program, and because I thought I’d get in.
The rejection arrived yesterday.
My face gets hot with anger.
I force it away.
I’d have needed a scholarship to attend anyway.
And it’s one school.
One out of seven is no big deal.
Mrs. Michaels clears her throat at the front of the class.
I don’t remember opening the door.
I want to disappear, but I’m frozen at the threshold.
Jamie Jensen turns to stare, ponytail swinging.
Her blue eyes fix on me, so everyone else’s do, too.
“The lights, Noor.”
Mrs. Michaels positions her wheelchair next to her laptop.
I sink into my seat in the back row, next to Jamie.
Who is still watching me.
The Police’s creeptastic “Every Breath You Take” plays in my head.
Ten bucks says that one day Jamie makes a band perform it at her wedding.
“What’d you get?”
Nods to the downturned paper on my desk.
Last week’s essay.
Mrs. Michaels must have handed them out before I got in.
I gave it my best shot.
But I know it was a crap essay.
When she realizes I’m not going to answer her, she settles back.
Smiles her tight, fake smile.
It’s next to the red fire alarm.
And it’s empty.
But it shouldn’t be.
Salahudin was behind me.
I thought he followed me in.
“Mr. Malik,” a voice says in the hall.
Principal Ernst, nailing Salahudin for being tardy again.
Ernst says “Malik” like “Mlk” because vowels are beyond him.
I pull out my notebook.
Salahudin is not my problem.
I have bigger ones.
Like the rejection from UVA.
Like Chachu’s Theorem of the Future and what it means to defy it.
Jamie corners me in PE.
My name rhymes with “lure.”
But Jamie’s always pronounced it “Nore” like “bore.”
For the first five or six years of my life here, Jamie mostly ignored my existence.
Then, in seventh grade I got Student of the Month.
I won a speech contest.
I took advanced classes.
She didn’t befriend me.
But she did start keeping an eye on me.
“You look tired.”
Her eyes linger on my face.
“The Calc problem set last night was brutal, huh?”
Jamie is innocent enough on the surface.
A pleasantness that got her on homecoming court even if it didn’t get her the crown.
“Have you heard from any colleges?”
I haven’t told anyone at school about applying to college.
There’s no one to tell.
Until six months ago, Salahudin was the only friend I ever needed.
There’s an awkward pause.
After Jamie realizes I’m not going to say anything, she steps back.
Her face goes hard.
She sounds a little like a seal barking.
Once the image is in my head, I can’t get it out.
Which means I smile.
Which makes her madder, because she thinks I’m laughing at her.
A crowd of seniors passes, Grace and Sophie among them.
They look at us curiouslythey know we’re not friends.
Jamie jogs to them, her thousand-kilowatt smile pasted on.
She’d make a great politician.
I catch a flash of rigid brown stomach muscle.
“What did that psycho want?”
The casual way he talks.
My brain refuses to formulate a response.
When he said I’d ruined our friendship.
Now I can’t remember a single one.
I should ignore him.
But the way he looks at mecareful and hopefulit’s a punch.
“Reremember when she told you to dress up as a terrorist for Halloween?”
Never trusted her again.”
We glare at Jamie’s retreating back.
For a moment we’re kids again.
Unified against an invisible evil.
“God, I wish she had a weakness.”
I glance accusingly at the sky, though God probably doesn’t live there.
“She’s got heinous taste in shoes.
Look at those” He nods to Jamie’s neon Nikes.
“Like her feet got eaten by traffic cones.”
Salahudin usually has dad humor, but that wasn’t bad.
I almost say so.
He glances at my face.
I want to hide.
He sees too much.
I wish he didn’t see so much.
“You should go.”
Ashlee watches us from the field.
“Your girlfriend’s waiting.”
That word still makes me want to kick him in the teeth.Girlfriend.
I’d glare at him, but I’d have to crane my neck.
Last time I was this close to him, he was two inches shorter.
If the universe were just, he’d have shrunk.
Grown questionable facial hair.
A wart would be good.
Maybe a personality transplant, too.
A potbelly instead of a six-pack.
But the universe is not just.
“Right,” Salahudin says.
“YeahI wanted to ask you a favor.”
I cross my arms.
A short conversation is one thing.
But we both know he shouldn’t be asking for favors.
“Could you text my mom?”
“Tell her to push her doctor’s appointment?
Ernst gave me detention for being late and” He lifts up his phone.
“It’snot working.”
“I have a charger.”
“No, it’s” He fidgets, which is weird because Salahudin isn’t a fidgeter.
“There’s a problem with our account.
Ama’s on a separate plan, though, so her phone’s fine.
Forget I asked.”
The bunched cords of his neck tell me he’s upset.
As soon as I think it, I’m angry.
I know him so well.
I wish I didn’t.
“Hey” I reach for his arm, then quickly let him go when he jumps.
I shouldn’t have grabbed him.
He hates being touched.
Though as soon as I do touch him I want to do it again.
Because touching him makes him real.
And that makes me remember how I used to feel about him.
How I still feel.
“I’ll text Auntie,” I say, thinking about her message to me this morning.
About the food she made me.
I know that in my bones.
Salahudin being an idiot isn’t her fault.
“And I’ll stop by after I’m done at the hospital.
How is she doing?”
He could say a hundred things.
But his shoulders harden.
His brown eyes drift away.
“Not great.”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened?”
Salahudin gives me a sad half smile.
I don’t recognize it.
“In Him we put our trust,” he says.
One of Auntie’s religious sayings.
Salahudin would argue with her about it.
“What about our will?”
“What about what we want?”
She’d answer in her don’t-make-me-smack-you-with-my-chappal voice.
“What you want is what you want.
What you do is what God wishes for you to do.
Now ask for forgiveness, Putar.
I don’t want the gates of heaven closed to me because my son was disrespectful.”
Then he’d ask for forgiveness.
Auntie knew how to answer his questions.
She knew what to say to him.
But I don’t.
I let him go.
