Where does a girl go when she cannot go anywhere?

Look up Return to the room

There’s a place not everyone can go.

It’s a place with thick green grass, a million stars, and the most beautiful horse whose mane smells of the wildflowers a girl who loves him braids through it. It’s a place where the mere is wider and deeper than it is at home, where caves sometimes begin as the dark gap between two of the roof beams above my bed, where the reed matting sags. Its borders are made of men’s hands and terror-filled screams.

Storymere isn’t on a map; I don’t know how to tell you to get there. The language isn’t Hassaniya; it’s not even the Qur’anic Arabic we use when we pray. It’s something different, something much older. Something that sounds like my Lalla’s song, the one with the melody that reminds me of the crested lark’s lonely but beautiful cry.

Yahya.

He’s the son of Sidi Mahmoud. His family used to own mine. They do still control the house we sleep in, the land Dada works, and the goats that feed us. The village loves Yahya: he saved a woman’s life, gave others grain when the harvest failed, and repaired a roof damaged by a storm. Once, when I was small, he let me ride his horse.

When he threw me down, I tore, bled, and panicked because he opened an old wound. The pain was such it ripped me from Storymere. I’m only fifteen; I’ve never known a man, but now they say my body is evidence of sin. Aminetou says there’s a word for what he did: rape. She says I should speak because we’re not slaves anymore.

Or are we?

Lalla, Mama, and Dada say I cannot speak. It would take only one word from Sidi Mahmoud, and we would lose everything.

I don’t know who or what to believe. I miss the sound of fish splashing in the water in Storymere. If I could stay there, I could be safe. I’ve started visiting more and more; I’m not afraid there.

Except for the woman. She is always near the water. Sometimes walking. Sometimes sitting with her hands folded in her lap. I have watched her for years. I thought she belonged only to me; I thought I made all of them.

Until the night I described her to Lalla.

Lalla stopped singing and said, “Where did you see Awa?”