Huda and Me by H. Hayek (readict txt) 📕

Huda was part of someone’s family, the way she’s standing there looking around with such excitement on that round, chubby face.

I catch up to her and she whispers in my ear, ‘Almost there, Akeal, almost there.’ She giggles, but I feel like wetting myself.

The queue moves slowly. Tickets are scanned, passports double-checked, and then, one by one, families disappear behind the glass doors to get onto the plane. I notice two security guards standing a few metres away, and my fingers clench around the straps of my backpack. I want to spew. My back is sweaty and my singlet clings to my skin. We’re going to be arrested, I know it.

‘You look green, Akeal,’ says Huda. She’s scrunching up her face like she’s grossed out by me. ‘If you keep breathing like that, you’re gonna faint. I’m too small to pick you up off the floor.’

I want to tell her we’re going to one of those jails for children. The ones where we only get to see our parents once a month, and where we have to shovel horse poo for eight hours a day and eat homebrand cornflakes with no sugar every single day for breakfast. Instead, I stare at the patterned tiles on the floor and swallow hard.

Huda’s still looking at me in disgust as we get to the front of the line and I finally pull my gaze from the floor. I see a woman smiling at us. She’s wearing bright-red lipstick and has a hanky tied around her neck.

‘Ah, unaccompanied minors. Boarding passes, please.’ I can see now that she’s fake-smiling. She has a little smear of red lipstick on her front tooth.

‘Here you go, miss,’ says Huda, handing over her ticket. She grabs mine from my sweaty palm and passes it over too.

Red Tooth analyses our boarding passes. Her eyes narrow. She doesn’t scan our tickets.

Huda shoots me a look and purses her lips together. Her left cheek twitches.

‘Passports, please.’

Huda nods and hands them to the woman quickly. Red Tooth opens my passport to the photo page, looks at my picture, and then looks at me. She turns to Huda, opens her passport, looks at her too, then raises her eyebrows.

This is all my fault. I wish I stopped Huda from taking Aunt Amel’s credit card. I wish I stopped her from booking the tickets on the internet. I should’ve known better. I knew we’d get caught.

‘Step to the side, please, children,’ says Red Tooth. She’s not smiling anymore. She gestures to the security guards to come over. They stand on either side of us.

‘What’s wrong, miss?’ Huda asks. I know she’s trying to sound bubbly. It’s the voice she uses just before she bursts into tears.

‘Standard protocol, dear. We need to call your parents to make sure you’re okay to fly.’

‘Oh, you don’t need to do that, miss. They’re the ones who booked us these tickets. Because they miss us so much.’

‘Yes, little girl. But we need to make sure just one last time that your parents have given permission for you to travel today.’

Huda bites her lip. Her dimples are gone.

My stomach cramps. I can feel puke in my throat. My sister looks at me. Her lips are turned down and her eyes are watery.

We’re dead.

Party’s Over

The disaster all started a week ago. It was Mr Kostiki’s birthday, and everything seemed normal enough. Huda spent the day with Mr Kostiki, looking at his coin collection and eating tinned sardines, and then came home to help Mum bake his birthday cake. Mum and Dad don’t celebrate birthdays, but they think Mr Kostiki is a nice old man, and he’s also Huda’s best friend, so they didn’t want him to be alone on his special day.

Mr Kostiki came for dinner, and after our first course, he asked my eldest brother Omar to put on some special Polish music in his honour. He then rather unexpectedly jumped onto the big coffee table in the middle of our family room and showed all us seven kids how to Polish dance.

‘What you really need to do, children, is to bend the knees nice and tight, then spring up like you’re a jack-in-the-box!’ Mr Kostiki shouted. Then he bobbed all the way down until he was almost squatting on the table and jumped back up.

I’d never seen him move that fast. This was also the first time I’d ever seen Mr Kostiki belly laugh. Usually he only chuckles softly at Huda’s weird ideas or jokes about chickens.

Omar used Mum’s phone to find a clip of traditional Polish dancers, where all the men wore cool belts and held long axes. The women in the video wore flowery dresses and had red bows in their hair. Huda pretended to be like them, twirling around the coffee table. She looked as if she was in her own world, probably imagining she was in Poland a hundred years ago.

Omar held up the phone so Huda could copy the dancers. He might be seventeen and look almost like a grown-up, with wispy man-hair on his face, but I know he likes to spend time with us – even though he says we’re annoying.

My big sister Kholoud grabbed Mr Kostiki a long wooden spoon from the kitchen drawer, so he could pretend it was an axe to dance with. This made him even happier and gave him even more energy to spring about on the tabletop.

Kholoud stood by the couch, clapping along to the Polish tune, her fluoro-yellow nail polish and silver nose-stud sparkling under the lampshade. I knew she was too embarrassed to dance with us – she’d be thinking about what her friends in Year 10 would say – but I grabbed her hand and copied Mr Kostiki’s moves anyway. Kholoud rolled her eyes at me and flopped her arms along as I hopped around her.

Mum and Dad watched from the kitchen, laughing. Mum was finishing the last of the icing on Mr Kostiki’s cake and Dad was