Page 111 of Sing For Us

Women have been taught that we must find a middle ground in all aspects. Work, relationships, sex, mental and physical health, how we look and how we act. When I was seventeen years old, my psychology professor told me I should lower my hand in class. I was the one who always got every question right, and that pissed him off. He would let the boys answer, but not me. After a while, it was apparent that he was a raging misogynist. I couldn’t let that slide.

I was getting sick and tired of how he undermined the female students, so I put a stop to it. At home, I looked for any proof that he did something illegal. To my dismay, nothing came up. Then I realized that misogyny should be punished and is an awful act. So, one night I snuck into his house and slit his throat. I didn’t do my call-off sign because I didn’t want the murder to be linked to my father.

“And that was the first time I looked at myself and saw how wrong everything could go if I let emotions run my entire life.”

I turn around to face him, and there’s silence.

Noa is looking at me with a hardened look. Great.

“I’m glad you killed that asshole.” Wait what?

“Why are you defending what I did?” I ask him.

“You killed a misogynist; I don’t see anything wrong with that. Imagine how many female students suffered under him,” he says with conviction and a firm stance.

“No! You shouldn’t understand me,” I yell at him. I put my hands on his chest and start pushing him. He isn’t doing anything; he’s just letting me rage.

“No, no, no!” I keep on hitting his chest with my fists, and I feel my tears bubbling up. Noa grabs my hands and forces me to look at him. I yank my hands away and cross my arms.

“Why won’t you just tell me where you were the night my baba was murdered? You have all the evidence stacked against you, and you aren’t even defending yourself! Give me one reason to hate you. You are–”

“I went to Tuzla and prayed!”

He stares at me, chest heaving, sweat running down his temple.

“I was praying.”

Three words.

Three words that shatter years of certainty.

Silence stretches between us until it becomes unbearable.

“I didn’t tell you, or anyone for that matter, because I was embarrassed,” he says quietly.

I slump to the ground and drown out everything, including Noa.

I have spent my entire life searching for the truth. That was what my father taught me.

Not to believe everything at face value.

Not to trust appearances.

Not to let emotion cloud judgment.

Now the pillars I built myself on are crashing down. The truth was always there. Buried beneath fear. Beneath grief. Beneath the stories people told themselves to survive. A devastating story I told myself repeatedly.

My job was to find the truth and my gift in the same breath. I’ve always believed I was a good judge of character. Or at least, I was. Because if Noa was innocent…then the one person I had sworn I would never fail was the one person I had failed.

My baba.

The man who taught me even the smartest person in the room could be deceived if they wanted something badly enough. I walked right into a trap, and I let my need for revenge cloud my judgment.

Not because I was unintelligent. That made it worse. I was intelligent and exceptionally trained. Other people came to me when they needed the truth. My team leaned on my expertise and battle strategy.

I had built an entire organization around my ability to judge people and to recognize deception. And yet when it came to avenging my father… I hadn’t searched for the truth hard enough.

Because my father had been murdered and my mother was gone. No one there to comfort me or to guide me. The last piece of the life I loved had been taken from me. And I gave it a name.