Pavement of Sapphire

Chapter Two

Everyone sat still for a moment, too afraid to move. The sound of the engine grew louder and louder before cutting out suddenly.

“Hide,” Magdalen said quietly. No one moved from the spot they were locked in on the floor. Anwar looked around from face to face. It was as if when the engine cut out, everything froze in mid-air with it, leaving them all wide eyed and powerless

“We’ll have to take apart the tables. Then we hide,” Linus said solemnly. Anwar gave his friend an empty stare. How did Linus expect him to move? He would never move again; time would be forever frozen in that moment, under the table, with fear locked in all of the refugees’ bodies. Anwar was pretty sure that his heart had stopped beating permanently.

“Come on,” Pamano said, and slowly each of them crawled out from their makeshift shelter. They were all trying to make as little noise as possible, as if being loud would tempt God to forsaken them even more. Anwar stood up, not sure what to do with his thin, awkward body. Pamano and Linus were taking the tape off the tables, and Grainer, Cadel, Shiloh and Bankim soon joined them. Between them, the table legs were all getting detached from each other, so Anwar stood with the girls, who were either still as stone or tapping their feet nervously. Anwar stuffed his hands in his pockets and kicked a book that had landed where he stood. Charles, who also was left duty-free, walked slowly up to where Cadel was peeling duct tape off of the table, looking to help but unsure how.

Anwar wondered if any of them really knew what they were doing. Every plan, the duct tape tables and now this, was guess work at best. But it made them feel as if they were doing something to protect themselves and the girls. It was just like life, he thought, everyone running around trying to avoid death, even though they know it’s coming anyway. He thought back to when he was three years old, and his grandparents in Pakistan had been killed by an American bomb. His mother was sitting next to him on a battered sofa, holding his little sister tightly and rocking back and forth with tears streaming down her face. His uncle had sat on the woven Persian carpet on the floor, pulling bay leaves off of their stem for the evening meal. Life had to go on, after all. Everyone dies, Anwar remembered his uncle saying in Urdu with a shrug.

Anwar looked down at the frayed library carpet and thought about the smell of those bay leaves. When he was younger he would always steal a leaf after his mother came home from the market, just to sit in the corner of the room that he shared with his sister and hold the leaf up to his nose until the fragrance wore off. He would always get scolded afterwards because his hands smelled of the leaves, but his mother never really put the leaves out of his way. It was a fact of life for the family that on market day Anwar could be found in the corner, smelling bay leaves.

The other boys were now moving the tables into random patterns to make it look like everything was damage from the earthquake. Anwar picked up the other end of a table that Grainer was carrying and helped him move it to be almost perpendicular to the one that Linus and Charles were carrying. The boys stepped back to look at what seemed to be a coded pattern written in tables.

“We should hide now,” Magdalen said, touching Bankim’s arm. Bankim scanned the room.

“Just try to cover yourselves,” he said finally. They all fanned out, trying to find spaces where they wouldn’t be noticed. There weren’t many places in the library that provided that kind of concealment. He finally decided to crouch behind a copying machine. Looking around, he saw that the others hadn’t done much better. Most of them were just sitting behind battered yellow wood bookshelves with their knees pulled up to their chests.

Linus and Deena had ended up sitting next to each other behind the bookshelf to the right of Anwar. Anwar could hear Linus whisper to her, and he smiled to himself. Over the past year it had become obvious to him that Linus had a crush on Deena. It was subtle things with Linus, but Anwar had been friends with him for over four years and knew that he treated Deena differently than others. Whenever Linus would pass Deena in the hallway, he would stare at her and greet her nervously, and he tended to smile a lot more when they had conversations with Deena than with only the other boys. Of course, Anwar knew that Linus would rather die than admit it to anyone, and Deena probably had no idea.