Love from a to Z

ZAYNEB
THURSDAY, MARCH 21
ODDITY:
HEART PAIN
I 
READ HIM THE PARTS
that hurt. The not-angry parts.
The parts where things felt confusing, like I would never ever figure out
this world. A world that didn’t seem to work.
Because the moment you’re feeling secure, someone hates on you.
Like being happy on the plane, headed over to Doha, and then the hateful
woman shows up.
Like coming to class to learn and instead being served hate.
“It makes you distrustful. Well, it makes me distrustful,” I said, closing
my journal.
He reached his right hand forward and placed it on the teapot. “I’m going
to pretend this is your hand. Because I want to touch it, but I’m not gonna,
okay?” He drew his hand up a bit, then rested it again on the teapot, but
lightly this time, almost hoveringly. “How’s your hand so hot?”
I laughed, grateful for his corniness taking the edge off what was
happening inside me.
“You know what my mom would say here? She’d say be up-front. Be
Zayneb. Tell your mom everything. About the woman on the plane, the man
in the pool, everything about your teacher.” The way he looked at me, I
knew he was being serious. “Like I said, that was the thing about my mom.
She liked knowing stuff.”
“Maybe that’s the thing with moms in general.”
“Yeah. Maybe it is. So do it. Just tell her. What you’re thinking, why
you’re doing the things you do. That’s what this mama’s boy says.”
I nodded and ate the rest of the cookie. “I am going to. After I leave here.
Because I don’t think I’m ever going to stop getting in trouble, like she

---

wants me to. Even if I never win.”
• • •
Before we left, we went and stood in front of the Marvels of Creation and
Oddities of Existence manuscript again. Without fighting like last time,
without talking much even, except to read bits of the caption out loud to
each other in documentary-style voice-overs, his impressions more funny
than mine, because he actually did a posh British accent, while I pretended
to be an old, grave man and ended up sounding like a talking walrus,
according to Adam.
Then we asked someone walking by to take a picture of us beside the
exhibit, using both our phones in turn, and right then and there we made the
pics our lock screen and wallpaper images.
It was the best, because we were both holding our journals, with the
inspiration for them right between us.
And we have the happiest expressions in our eyes.
Even though we were going to be continents apart in two days, we knew
we weren’t going to be apart.
• • •
Adam called his friend Zahid to drive us home. As we waited outside, he
told me about this friend, how he’d helped him when he’d needed it. “It was
one of the worst moments of my life,” he said, running his fingers forward
through his hair to stay it against the slight breeze. “But then Zahid was
there like a guardian angel.”
“Do you think you should get some sort of a medical bracelet or
something? So you can get help fast?” I put my hands in the pockets of my
jean jacket. It worried me. That he could just be struck with something
suddenly. “Also, can I call you at any hour of the day? If I get a sudden gut
feeling that I need to check on the onion in my life?”
He smiled, and with the sunlight he squinted into and the symmetry of
the museum behind him, it was an image I didn’t want to forget. “That’s
why I’m going to the neurologist on Friday. To figure that out. But yeah,
you can call me whenever, H
2
O.”
Zahid pulled up, and when we got in the car, he weirdly seemed to know
me, shooting Adam a knowing glance when he heard my name.

---

Adam sat in the front and chatted with him, and I sat in the back and
looked at the beautiful palm trees streaming by and thought about the long
arc of things.
Of how I’d begun this journal when I was sixteen, and now I’d beyond-
this-world connected with someone because of it.
But then Adam had a longer arc with his journal. He’d started his at
fourteen, a few years after his mom died.
But then there was an even longer arc here—with Al-Qazwini, the author
of the original Marvels and Oddities, how he wrote something so long ago,
trying to figure out the world he lived in.
And now here we were, almost a thousand years later, still doing it.
Trying to make sense of what was happening around us.
Maybe that’s what life is, really.