Farah Rocks Florida Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Half Title Page

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Tatreez Artwork

  Glossary of Arabic Words

  Glossary

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Copyright

  Back Cover

  Cover

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

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  2

  back cover

  Chapter 1

  As I stand in front of Harbortown Hospital’s large, sliding-glass doors, I hesitate.

  “It’s okay,” Baba urges behind me. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Yallah, Farah,” he adds.

  I believe him, of course. He’s my father, and he’d never tell me to do something that wasn’t good for me. (Except maybe for the time I had a bad stomachache, and he told me to eat ice cream because he thought it would cheer me up. Let’s just say that my stomach thought it was terrible advice.)

  But here’s the thing: I think hospitals are nightmare-scary.

  I mean, it’s a building that is literally filled with medicines, needles, and germs.

  It’s filled with sick people.

  And one of them is my little brother.

  Baba shifts the cooler to his other hand. When I got home from school today, he was home, packing food for Mama. She’s staying at the hospital with Samir. I’m carrying the tall insulated cup Baba uses when he works at the quarry. He filled it with the dark Arabic qahwah and stirred in only a tiny amount of sugar “because your mama is already so sweet.”

  Samir gets sick all the time. We worry a lot about Samir.

  He was born very early, like three whole months, and he didn’t walk until he was almost four. His lungs did not grow the way they should, and so he has asthma. He also has trouble gripping a pencil because some of his muscles aren’t strong yet. He still has trouble pronouncing certain letters, like r. When he says my name, it sounds like “Faw-wah.”

  Last night, he woke up feeling sick. He kept saying, “My hawt, my hawt,” touching his palm to his heart in the center of his small chest.

  “What does he look like?” I ask Baba now, still hesitating in front of the hospital’s doors.

  “Like Samir. Silly and funny, just sleepy too.”

  “Like when he eats too much cake and gets all hyper and then suddenly crashes on the couch?”

  “Sah.” He smiles halfway, like he’s too tired to do it all the way. Baba has a great smile—it stretches along with his mustache across his face. But today, even his mustache looks exhausted. “That’s a good way to describe your brother right now.”

  The hospital doors open wide, then snap shut behind us after we enter.

  Everything inside Harbortown Hospital is white and gold. I immediately think about Mount Olympus, where most of the chief gods lived. The floors and walls and desks and chairs and doors are all gleaming-white, like howlite. (That’s a pretty white rock. I have a chunk of it in my rock collection at home.) After a second, I realize that the gold is from the sun shining brightly through the lobby’s glass skylights. It is reflecting off the white and making everything glitter.

  A nurse with a turquoise streak in her blond hair smiles at us. She tells Baba, “Go on up.”

  “Up,” Baba explains on the elevator, is the children’s ward. The walls here are bright blue. There’s a huge aquarium of colorful fish against one wall, and a mural of butterflies covers another wall. Colorful balloons are anchored to all the nurse’s stations, and I feel like maybe we’ve walked into someone’s birthday party by mistake.

  “Is this Samir’s sister?” asks one nurse, who is wearing a top decorated with emojis.

  I nod, noting the bright-red thread woven through her long braids.

  “How are you feeling today?” she asks, leaning toward me. “Want to show me?” She indicates the emojis, like options, on her sleeve. One is smiling, one is laughing, one is crying, one looks scared.

  I know what she’s doing. I’m in sixth grade at the Magnet Academy, which is a special school for kids like me and Allie Liu, my Official Best Friend. We’re called “gifted and talented” (which just means we get more homework than everyone else). I understand that this nurse, with the pretty brown eyes
, as dark as Mama’s qahwah, is trying to help me relax.

  Even though it’s a trick, I am grateful anyway.

  Pointing to the emoji with the panicked, wide eyes, I say, “That’s me.”

  “Understandable. Let’s go say hi.” She puts her hand on my arm. “Don’t be afraid if you see a lot of machines in the room, okay? They’re making him better.”

  As I enter the room, I think, Here’s what she should have said: There will be so many machines, beeping and clicking and blinking, that you may not even know where to find your brother.

  I finally do see him, under a white blanket. He’s huddled like a turtle, with only his black, curly hair sticking out. His right arm hangs out. There is a tube taped down on his skin that connects to a big machine behind him.

  He is fast asleep.

  “Hi, Farah,” says someone else.

  Mama.

  She sits, holding her rosary beads. Her face is pale, but she looks at me happily.

  “I missed you,” she says and hugs me.

  As I hand her the coffee, she explains that something is wrong with Samir’s heart. The nurse adds, “We need to study him for a while to see exactly what is going on.”

  That sounds good to me. They can keep him here and figure out what is wrong, and then he’ll come home. It’s only Wednesday. If he comes home tomorrow, we can have Friday night movie night and Saturday morning snuggle-under-the-covers with library books—two of Samir’s favorite things to do.

  Then Baba says, “Tell her the rest.”

  Mama sighs and sips her coffee before she speaks. “Farah,” she begins, “Samir will be here for at least a week, maybe longer. I have to be with him. When he gets out, I’ll have to take care of him at home—we don’t know yet how much time he needs to get better. Baba cannot stay home from work another day. He already took off today and tomorrow, and his boss will be mad if he takes more.”

  “I can stay by myself, or with Allie.”

  “Listen,” Mama says in a big exhale, “I bought you a plane ticket to Florida.”

  “Wait, what? Florida?” I stop and think hard. “But the only person we know in Florida is… is… !”

  “Farah, please understand…”

  “Please, no!”

  “You’re staying with Sitti Fayrouz for a little while.”

  “How little of a while?” I ask.

  “Until everything goes back to normal here.”

  Holy hummus.

  Chapter 2

  Sometimes adults think they can hide their feelings, but if you pay attention, you can see right through them.

  Example: Baba.

  He mutters at the car in front of us, which is crawling like a turtle on the freeway. And then, at a red light, he glares at the light like it’s causing all his problems.

  Translation: He is stressed out.

  Before we left the hospital, the nurse said that they would run more tests on Samir tonight. Big Important Tests that will help the doctors decide which other Big Important Tests need to be done. As we left, I reminded the emoji nurse that Samir is only six, and he weighs about forty-five pounds, so they need to give his body a break. (Mama used to call him asfour, or little bird, until he decided he didn’t like it.) The nurse nodded and said she would remember.

  “You can back your suitcase tonight,” Baba says, as the light changes to green. “I will take you tomorrow morning to the airbort.” In Arabic, there are no p’s and v’s, so Baba uses b’s instead. You should hear him say “pepperoni pizza.”

  “Okay,” I say, trying to sound like it’s no big deal that my family is putting me on a plane, which I have never even been on before, and getting rid of me.

  “I’m sorry you have to be away from us for so long,” he adds. “But Samir needs time to heal. And Sitti Fayrouz misses you anyway. She is lonely down there and… she is very… fun.”

  Fun is not exactly the word I would choose to describe my grandmother, but I stay quiet.

  “She likes everything so clean,” he says in Arabic and shakes his head. “I remember when I was a boy.… You couldn’t come in the house if you’d been playing outside. She hates dust and…” His voice trails off as he sees my expression in the mirror. Then he smiles sheepishly and changes the subject.

  Later that afternoon, I stand in my room with a big suitcase open on my bed. Allie, who’s come over to help, hands me shirts from my dresser. I roll them up so they don’t wrinkle too much and stack them in the suitcase.

  “I remember your grandmother,” Allie says. “She was always cooking and sewing.”

  Sitti Fayrouz lived with us when I was really little. She used to spend the winter in Florida because she said her “old bones” would crack in the Harbortown cold. Then, before Samir was born, she decided she wanted to live in Florida all year long. If we want to see her, we have to go visit her there.

  And we have. We drive down a couple of times a year, although we missed last year. I know she’s been complaining about that. That explains why my parents are sending me there for a week, or maybe even longer. While they focus on Samir, I’ll keep Sitti company so she’ll stop complaining about being lonely (even though she is the one who moved in the first place).

  “The last time I saw my grandmother,” I tell Allie, “she said rocks were dirty and I shouldn’t play with them.” I sigh. “I tried to tell her I wasn’t playing with the rocks—I was studying them.”

  “Yeah,” she says, handing me socks.

  “She has all these rules. Everything in her condo has a rule attached to it. I can never keep them straight.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like hang the towel a certain way and brush your hair and tie it up tight in a ponytail so it looks neat. And then she makes me speak Arabic all the time, but I don’t speak one hundred percent.” Arabic is the other language we speak 1) at home and 2) when Mama doesn’t want people to understand us while we’re out in public.

  “I don’t speak Chinese one hundred percent either,” Allie says. “It’s soooo annoying when people think I should.”

  “Also, I really don’t want to go to Florida,” I confess. “I’ll miss Samir and my parents and you. I’ll even miss my room. I just got used to being in it again.”

  “I don’t like how it happened, but your room is beautiful now,” Allie says. We had a house fire a few months ago, and it took a long time to fix it and move back in. My new room is still closet-small, but it’s now painted grape-purple (that was the name on the paint can, just so you know). It has a pillow-soft lilac carpet that I love walking on barefoot.

  “And,” I complain, “I might miss the meetings for the Rock Stars!”

  The Rock Stars is the geology festival that Magnet Academy holds every year. The students design exhibits of anything related to rocks and minerals. Then the judges award prizes for the best ones. Allie and I were hoping to make a dynamite presentation.

  “It’ll be weird not to have Farah Rocks at the meetings,” Allie admits. Everyone at school has called me Farah Rocks basically forever. My name is Farah Hajjar, but my last name means “rocks” or “stones” in Arabic. The name has stuck since first grade the way that glitter sticks to everything.

  Allie promises me that she will attend the meetings and take lots of notes. “We just have to think of a great idea first,” she says.

  Baba comes into my room then. “Ms. Maximus from your school is on the phone.”

  Allie pulls on a thick lock of her black hair, twists it around her finger, and grimaces.

  Ms. Maximus’s job title is “assistant principal,” but she actually controls the whole school. She is also very tough, and she sticks to the rules one hundred percent.

  “Well. First of all, I am sorry about your brother. I have no doubt he will be fine.” Then she pauses before she says, “Now.” That’s how I know she�
��s getting serious. “This is a highly unusual situation, Farah,” she says. Her voice sounds like when Mama shreds carrots on the grater. “I will have your teachers email all your work to you for the next week. If you end up missing school longer than that, you will do other work virtually. You’re also expected to check in frequently with them.” Her voice softens just a little. “You will get the grades you deserve for the work you do.”

  “I will get it done,” I say, feeling annoyed.

  I finish packing, and Allie hugs me before she leaves.

  “Wish me luck,” I say, hugging her back, hard. “I really need it.”

  Chapter 3

  I’m sitting on a small plane, my seat belt cinched glove-tight, in the middle of three seats. A big, white tag hangs from a ribbon around my neck that says “Farah Hajjar—Minor.”

  Minor means a child, and minors get to board the airplane first. So now I’m waiting while people trudge by me, bonking their bags down the aisle while looking for their seat number. Bored, I remove the paper tag from its plastic case and use my black pen to insert tau after the o in minor.

  The lady who helped me board sees me return the tag to the plastic case. “What are you doing?” She’s wearing a navy blue uniform, and her makeup looks thick, like she painted it on her face with a brush.

  “Decorating my tag.”

  Bending down, she reads, “Minotaur. What does that mean?”

  “Just a character I like from Greek mythology. Actually, I feel kind of sad for him.”

  “Why?” she asks with a tight smile.

  “He’s trapped in a labyrinth,” I explain. “Isn’t that awful?”

  “A what?” She stands tall again and scrunches her eyebrows at me. “Look, honey, just don’t tamper with your tag.”

  She moves away, down the aisle, and I sigh, looking around me as other people continue boarding. It’s my first time on an airplane. Attached to the back of the seat is a tray that folds down, like a little table. But I can’t open it, the lady said, until after the plane is in the air. I brought my colored pencils and my red notebook, so that I can do some drawing during the flight.

  When we’ve visited Sitti in Florida in the past, my father drove us in our car, and we slept in a small hotel along the way. It takes ten hours. This plane ride, according to my ticket, should take only one hour and forty-two minutes. That is amazing to me! There are seven hundred miles to cover, so I try to calculate how fast the plane must be flying.