Esther told Tamarvan everything the police had told her and he stood in the living room of his home in shock that his friend was missing; Yusef who got the paper for Mrs. Jenkins every morning because she used a walker in her old age, and who would volunteer as a tutor at the community center in the late spring to help younger students prepare for the end of year exams. He had a young following of black fifth graders who watched Dragon Ball Z on his suggestion because of the nobility that Goku represented as a man of power who used it for the preservation of life. Yusef also taught younger kids about meditation and his following was known to sit around with legs crossed and eyes closed. Tamarvan couldn’t believe that anyone would want to hurt him.
Tamarvan left his mother and went to talk with the Hassans, who were all sitting in the living room — the father and mother, three sons and two daughters — except for Yusef. He had only been missing for about eight hours by that point, but the faces on the family that night did not inspire much confidence that Yusef would return unharmed. They were afraid because they knew what people were capable of in the new reality left in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon just a month before. They had seen the news stories about people being beaten or shot just because they appeared to be Muslim. Yusef’s father was yelling on the phone as Tamarvan stood quietly beside his mother who was being consoled by her children. The police weren’t as worried as Mr. Hassan was and he eventually slammed the phone on the floor, shattering it into pieces. “They say he has to be missing longer! How does that make sense?”
Meanwhile, Yusef was bloody and dead in the spot where he would be found the next day. It was the edge of a field that in the summer time grew corn, but in the fall was mostly straw and dirt. The boys had drug Yusef out of their car and threw him to the ground where he struck his arm on a rock and broke the bone and opened his skin, covering the rock in a crimson coat that baked under the sun the next morning. Yusef would have recognized at least one of them, James Lawrence, the big boy he’d fought on the bus. And Lawrence would later tell the police that the whole thing was his idea because he knew Yusef was a bad person and he was happy that they had flown those planes into those buildings, when really, Lawrence only wanted to finish what he had started on the bus to show his little cousin how to demand respect. He said that it wasn’t his intention to kill Yusef, just to show him that you couldn’t mess with America. Lawrence didn’t even know where the World Trade Center was, not even after the attacks; his public defender told him to say all that stuff so that he would get sympathy from the judge. Lawrence and his friends took turns kicking Yusef in the stomach until he vomited blood and then Lawrence decided to teach his little cousin how to square up a punch. One of the boys held Yusef up, his shirt was drenched in blood and his arm dangled like a sack of bone fragments, and Lawrence and his cousin ruined Yusef’s face; he would be unrecognizable when the family was asked to identify the body, only his pants and shoes looked anything similar to the way they’d looked when Yusef left for school in the morning.
As the search for Yusef commenced the next day, Tamarvan and Roger went to the police station with Yusef’s family to demand that they organize a search party. Tamarvan had driven around with Yusef’s father the night before, yelling out his name and asking random people if they had seen him; only they had no reason to think that they should drive south past the border. They had gone the opposite direction and ended up driving highway 74 into all of the towns that existed along it, stopping at gas stations to show Yusef’s picture. Tamarvan didn’t want to admit that he knew their search wouldn’t turn up anything, he had a bad feeling that he described to his mother as a rumble in the bottom of his stomach. But he wanted to do something for Mr. Hassan who was panicked and so afraid that each second that passed made it more likely that he would never see his son alive again.
At the police station, Mr. Hassan yelled and pounded on desks. “Why is no one concerned?” He seemed to repeat over and over until an officer yelled that he would break something and needed to calm down. Eventually, they realized that thete was nothing to be done at the police station and the family left feeling powerless.
Tamarvan and Roger went back to the Hassan home and said a prayer with them before they headed to the community center, where they had deluded themselves into believing that Yusef would be there waiting for them. Like he had been the day before.
The day before the football game, Tamarvan met Roger at the band room so they could walk to the cafeteria together.
And then there was a call that was nothing like the relief that it should have been.
Yusef’s body was found by the dogs of the farmer that owned the land where he had been killed, which only allowed for further desecration. Mr. Hassan was hysterical when they estimated as he yelled to police officers and the paramedics who transported the body that Yusef should be rushed to the washing room in Charlotte.
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