SAFIYA
JANUARY 3, 2022
Fact: There are no monsters under your bed at night.
Truth: The monsters are all walking around in the daylight.
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:
Dear Muslim Scum,
We will be coming to your mosque. It will be a massacre on a scale never seen. Christchurch will pale in comparison. You can pray all you want to your God.
But God is Dead.
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.
The first day back at school was an unusually mild one for a January in Chicago. The sun warmed my face as I walked through the neighborhood, dodging the drips of awning icicle melt. It was a winter day with a hint of spring, of bright, new things; but every Chicagoan knew not to be duped by the false promise of a sunny day.
This was it—the final push to graduation. I’d applied early admission to college and gotten in, but there were still five months between me and the cap and gown. Until I could be rid of DuSable and most of all Dr. Hardy, our principal, who’d planted a target on my back after my very first op-ed in sophomore year, which said the school admin gave special privileges to varsity athletes. Duh. Reporting the obvious truth had landed me on his crap list.
I got to school early, so I planted myself on my bench across the street, readjusted my black wool beanie over my ears, uncapped the mitts of my fingerless gloves, and pressed PLAY on my phone’s Voice Memos app. I’d done exactly zero schoolwork over the break, and my next Be the Change column was due Wednesday. I couldn’t show up to journalism class with nothing.
BEGIN RECORDING.
DuSable Prep isn’t the most privileged place in the world, but you can see it from here. It’s mostly limousine liberal, faux woke privilege that prides itself on voting the right way. But it’s one of those “celebrate diversity on paper, not necessarily in the admissions policy” situations, because for all the recognition of Day of the Dead and Lunar New Year and the Jewish High Holidays and even Eid, less than ten percent of the student body is Black, indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC!), which doesn’t even come close to repping Chicago as it actually is. Ironic, since the school’s named after a Black Haitian man who was the first non-Native settler of Chicago. The diversity numbers are even more abysmal for faculty, the administration, and the board of directors (which is all white this year). Sure, we have our annual MLK celebration, where we hear three minutes of the “I Have a Dream” speech and get some rah! rah! talks about diversity, equity, and inclusion from the administration and listen to the mostly white choir singing “We Shall Overcome” with no sense of irony. But do we ever read the full text of Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” when he calls out white moderates? No.
Before break, the Spectator had published an open letter from the Organization of BIPOC Students that called on the administration to address racial, religious, and identity-based biases at school, especially in light of a racist anti-Black meme that had been posted on the school’s Facebook page. This, after the administration claimed it wasn’t the school’s responsibility, because it was a public page and the meme had only been posted as a comment from an unknown source. But it also stayed up for two days before they took it down because “free speech.” And remember when the assistant principal told upset students in his office that they needed to be “civil” and “make an appointment” if they wanted a dialog—
PAUSE RECORDING.
“Safiya! Hey!”
I turned my head toward the alarmingly cute boy who was jogging up to me.
“You planning on skipping school on the first day back from break?” Richard Reynolds hovered above me, his pale-blue eyes sparkling in the winter sun. The space between us warmed, like his smile could thaw the coldest winter freeze.
“Ha! Me? As if. We were lab partners for a whole semester. Did you not pay attention at all?” I grinned.
“Oh, I paid attention,” he said.
The way he looked at me when he said that—like I was the only interesting person on earth—made the tips of my fingers tingle. We’d known each other since I started at DuSable, but it wasn’t until chemistry class last semester that I started to consider him more than a rich, preppy athlete. I began to look at him as a hot, rich, preppy athlete. One that was kinda sweet and funny. And fun to talk to. Someone who didn’t overshare but truly listened and paid attention to other people, unlike so many popular guys at our school who couldn’t shut up about themselves. But he was definitely not someone to crush on. One-hundred-percent, absolutely not crushworthy. Nope. This hard-boiled, tough-as-nails investigative journalist was not susceptible to his incredibly cute dimples. Or to his low voice that made you lean eagerly toward him when he spoke, like he was about to share a dazzling secret.
“Did you do anything fun over break?” he asked, knocking me out of my ridiculous heart-eyed reverie.
“Worked at the store. Watched a lot of holiday rom-coms. Too much hot cocoa. Tried to teach myself how to crochet a scarf.” God. I sounded like a middle-aged lady with a lot of cats and embroidered pillows. Could I be any more of a dork?
Richard tried to suppress a smile.
“What?” I said, my defenses rising.
“Nothing. It’s… kinda cute. Do you have fuzzy slippers, too?”
“Shut up.” I gently nudged the toe of his boot with my worn Docs. I scooched over on the bench so he could join me.
“What about you? Were you jet-setting somewhere?”
“The only interesting thing I did was watch a bunch of movies suggested by our esteemed editor in chief.”
I bit my lower lip for a second. I’d recommended some of my favorite journalism movies, like the total nerd I am, and he’d actually watched them? He had been listening when I was going on and on in chem lab about being a journalist.
“Seriously?” I said.
“What? I have layers.” He grinned. “I can spend hours watching movies that have zero action, confusing plotlines, and a lot of talking with furrowed brows.”
I laughed, doing my best imitation of that journalist-at-work look. “Which ones did you pick?”
“Shattered Glass and All the President’s Men. Oh! And Almost Famous. What was that one line they kept saying?”
“‘It’s all happening,’” Richard and I said in unison. My cheeks warmed as we locked eyes.
“Not gonna lie. I fell asleep during All the President’s Men. But the other two at least kept me awake.”
“Ha ha ha. I love both of them—they’re like two sides of the same coin.”
Richard scrunched his eyebrows at me. “How do you figure?”
“They’re about journalists who misrepresent facts. Except in Almost Famous, that kid lies about his age but writes the truth and has a good heart. In Shattered Glass, that dude was intentionally misleading. He told lies and pretended they were facts. That’s why he gets busted. Good old fact-checking.”
“Whoa, that’s deep. It’s very ‘truth will out,’” he said as he joined me on the bench.
“Look at you, dropping Shakespeare references.” I smiled, glancing up at him.
“I’ll have you know it wasn’t merely my athletic prowess that got me into this school.… It was also my dad’s very large donation.” He laughed.
I grinned. I liked that he could be self-deprecating.
Richard placed his palm on the bench in the space between us and scooched a little closer to me.
I tucked a long stray hair into my cap and turned to him to respond, but at that moment, a singsongy voice rang out from across the street, by the school entrance. “Richard! Richard!”
Richard looked up and waved at Dakota, a perfectly perky junior he’d gone to a couple dances with. She beckoned him over with a wave of her hand and a tilt of her head.
He turned back to me and rolled his eyes. “Sorry. I gotta give her something. Winter Ball committee stuff. You’ll keep schooling me on these movies later?”
“Count on it,” I said, making a finger gun with my right hand and clicking my tongue. Ugh. I was the worst at this. Whatever this was.
I watched him jog toward the school. Dakota looped her arm through his as they walked in. I sighed and turned back to my phone. I listened to what I’d recorded so far. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to finish the column. I always included an ask, one way students could “be the change.” But my thoughts were disorganized. Half angst-steam ahead, half thinking about Richard’s pillowy lips.
I sighed. Again. So much sighing, and the semester hadn’t even technically begun.
I dropped my phone into my bag and watched the students amass on the stone steps that led to the large red doors of our turreted main building. Especially on misty, gloomy days, DuSable Prep looked like a spooky British boarding school without the verdant rolling hills or accents. We didn’t have ghosts, but that didn’t mean we weren’t haunted. Everyone is haunted by something.
There was always post-holiday chaos on the first day back from break—students swapping stories about where they went skiing or snorkeling—but now there was a gaggle of students all staring down at their phones. Statue-like. Cold. Unmoving. This was not normal.
My first thought: school shooting. Or that some new, vaccine-resistant virus mutation had been found in Europe and was sweeping the continent. It was hard to know if my worst-case-scenario thinking was the world’s fault or mine. Probably both. As I reached into my bag to snag my phone and see what the trash fire/horror show of the day was, I saw Asma waving wildly at me and running across the street, her long black hair in loose waves that framed her deep brown skin and killer contoured cheekbones. Unlike my nonexistent makeup, hers was impeccable, as always, but it couldn’t hide the wide-eyed look of panic on her face.
“What are you doing? How are you not in journalism already?” she yelled as she neared the bench.
“And a very happy New Year to you, too!” I said. She and her family had been in Paris for the holidays. I was helping my parents in their desi grocery shop. Asma and I might have been a couple of the only desi Muslims in our class, but we occupied different stratospheres. Still, we’d had each other’s backs since she caught Paula Ryan trying to clandestinely spit in my soup during our first year at DuSable—because why not prank the scholarship kid? Asma proceeded to “accidentally” knock the soup into Paula’s lap. Paula was furious, but Asma didn’t even catch detention. That girl could outbargain the Angel of Death.
“Your phone must be blowing up. Have you even looked at the Spectator site?”
“No. Why would I? We’re not posting new stories until later. Speaking of which, did you write—”
“We’ve been hacked.”
I rolled my eyes. “What? Some sophomore post a picture of their butt or something? I swear, if—”
“Safiya. Stop talking for a second. You need to look at it.” Asma shoved her phone in my face.
I glanced at the screen. My jaw dropped.
BY SAFIYA MIRZA GHOST SKIN
This is a disruption in your regularly programmed lefty brainwashing at this snowflake school. You need to wake up from the SJW-forced curriculum being crammed down your throats and realize this school is where free speech goes to die. Everyone is protected at this school. Except the pure, the alphas, who deserve to rule. Time to take this school back from the fawning beta multiculturalists and those who want to open the nation’s floodgates to illegals. It won’t be long before the cockroaches will be swarming at the school’s doors. This school, this newspaper, this editor, they are all feeding you fake news pablum. Spit it out. Reclaim your space like we claim this one. We are everywhere. This place is ours. Wake up.
I am the herald of lightning.
It was my column. My byline. But crossed out and replaced by a racist manifesto? I felt like I’d been slapped. I looked up at Asma. “What’s a herald of lightning?” I asked, a fireball whirring in my chest. Whoever the hell Ghost Skin was, I wasn’t going to let them get away with this.