Watched - Softcover

Budhos, Marina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553534211 ISBN 13: 9780553534214

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

An extraordinary and timely novel, a Walter Dean Myers Award Honor Book, examines what it’s like to grow up under surveillance in America. 

Be careful what you say and who you say it to. Anyone might be a watcher.
 
Naeem is a Bangledeshi teenager living in Queens who thinks he can charm his way through anything. But then mistakes catch up with him. So do the cops, who offer him an impossible choice: spy on his Muslim neighbors and report back to them on shady goings-on, or face a police record. Naeem wants to be a hero—a protector. He wants his parents to be proud of him. But as time goes on, the line between informing and entrapping blurs. Is he saving or betraying his community?

Inspired by actual surveillance practices in New York City and elsewhere, Marina Budhos’s extraordinary and timely novel examines what it’s like to grow up with Big Brother always watching. Naeem’s riveting story is as vivid and involving as today’s headlines.
 
Walter Dean Myers Award Honor Book, We Need Diverse Books
Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Honor Book
YALSA Best YA Fiction for Young Adults
 
“A fast-moving, gripping tale.” —SLJ, Starred

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marina Budhos is the author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. Her novels for young adults are Watched, Tell Us We’re Home, and Ask Me No Questions. Her nonfiction books include Eyes of the World: Robert Capa & Gerda Taro & The Invention of Modern Photojournalism, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers and Sugar Changed the World, which she co-wrote with her husband, Marc Aronson. Budhos has received an EMMA (Exceptional Merit Media Award), a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers, and two fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to India and is a professor of English at William Paterson University.

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Chapter 1

 

 

I’m watched.

 

There’s a streetlight near my parents’ store, and I hear the click, a shutter snapping as I round the corner. My gaze swivels up, but there’s nothing. Just a white-eyed orb, a lamp, ticking. The dim sky floating behind. I shiver, tell myself it’s all in my head. Nothing.

 

Click. Click.

 

Hunching my shoulders, I hurry down Thirty-Seventh Avenue, the sweat warm against my sweatshirt hood—past the thin shed of a shop with glittery bangles and cheap plastic frogs swimming in plastic tubs, past Mr. Rahman’s table of beads hung on metal hooks, folded prayer rugs and little engraved Qurans. He, along with the other uncles who stand on the street, scans me, disapproving. They know. I’m up to no good. I’m not working in my parents’ little store, as I should be.

 

I did spend most of the afternoon there, my stepmother hovering by the cash register, pretending to tally the day’s earnings, but really she was grazing me like a worried searchlight. Her pencil tapping the side of the register. I know that look. I see you.

 

Usually when it isn’t busy in the store, and I’ve finished tying up the old newspapers and moving around the milk cartons, I sit on a crate in the back, next to the humming refrigerator, textbook balanced on my knees. But today it was hard to focus. My brain danced; I got antsy, thinking of where I’d rather be.

 

The store was quiet. Only one customer—a desi guy, tweed jacket, jeans, blowing on his Starbucks coffee. He comes in a lot. “You have Post-its?” he asked. My stepmother shook her head. Disappointed, he bought some Tic Tacs.

 

Then my phone vibrated against my thigh. I always keep it on silent when I’m in my parents’ store. Meet me at the mall 4:30, Ibrahim texted. Urgent! It’s always urgent with Ibrahim.

 

Slamming the book shut, I jerked up from the crate. My concentration was shot. Whenever I hear from Ibrahim it’s like a bowling ball cracking into the pins in my head, all my thoughts toppling over. There’s no hope of picking my way through pre-cal equations.

 

“Hey, Ma.” I said this shyly, the way it always is between us. “I gotta go. Anything more you need?”

 

She glanced at me, alarmed. The eraser on her pencil did a little bob. “What about studying?”

 

“That’s what I’m going to do,” I lied. “Meet a friend. We’ve got pre-cal finals coming up.”

 

Here her expression went sad, wistful. “Calculus, yes,” she sighed. “When I was in high school I am getting eighty-five in this subject.”

 

I feel bad for Amma. I call her Amma, as if she is my own mother, not my stepmom. She’s always speaking English with me, not Bangla, trying to show how she was almost like an American-born, going all the way through twelfth grade, until her parents arranged a marriage to my father.

 

I knew Amma just wanted me to keep her company. But I couldn’t help myself. I needed to get out of that little gloomy corner, everything so dusty and sad. Even the lottery ticket flyer—the only reason folks come in here—is peeling off the wall. The boxes of sugar cubes that have sat on the shelf since the store opened up. Abba, who buys sugar cubes? I want to shout. He’s lost track of what they’re doing with this place. It kills me, seeing all the customers hurry into the store across the street, the one that has the fresh new awning and fancy lettering, plastic chairs outside, and is always changing its stock, offering discounts. Or their friends, who have gotten together and opened a food mart with huge fish tanks and a halal butcher. They have capital, my stepmother sighs. We have nothing.

 

“Wait, I am showing you my outfit?”

 

I shot her a puzzled look.

 

“For graduation!”

 

I shook my head. “Ma, it’s six weeks away!”

 

“No matter. Shop is having sale.”

 

She bustled to the back of the store, where she’d hung a shalwar kameez on a hook on the back of the door, then brought it to the front, spreading the rustling plastic across the counter. “See!” she said proudly. “I even have it dry cleaned, so it is all ready.”

 

This made me sad and angry too. Amma saved every bit of extra money—fifty cents here, a dollar from the groceries, stowing it in her empty tin of Darjeeling tea leaves. The outfit was beautiful—sea green, with blue beads dangling from the yoke like ice drops. But half the reason she was making such a big deal over this was because of me, and half because of her, all she gave up to marry my father.

 

“That’s really nice, Ma.”

 

“And your father, he is inviting many people to celebrate.”

 

We both looked through the window, where we could see my father standing just outside the store, under the awning. His hands were tucked at the small of his back, his stomach pushed forward. More and more that’s all he does: opens the store, puts away the Snapple bottles and milk cartons, and then leaves the rest to Amma. He sighs. He walks the pavement. Chats with the other shopkeepers. Complains about his bad knee. Mostly, he stares off at the rooftops, as if trying to glimpse something, just beyond, that escapes him.

 

 

 

The watching, it seeps into everything in our neighborhood. It’s like weather, the barometric pressure lowering. Before the monsoons came in Bangladesh, you could feel the air thicken and squat on your head. A constant ache behind your eyeballs.

 

For the past few years there’s been another kind of pressure: a vibration around us, the air pressing down, muffling our mouths. We see the men, coming down the metal stairs from the elevated subway, or parked in cars for hours on end: clean-cut guys, creased khakis, rolled‑up sleeves. The breath of Manhattan steaming off their clothes. They aren’t from around here—that we can tell. Not like the young couples with their big padded strollers. Or the girls with peacoats and holes in their black tights, who moved to the nice part of Jackson Heights, carry yoga mats in cloth bags from stores I’ve never heard of. No, these people are different. They stroll into stores, finger the edges of the newspapers in their racks, check out flyers taped to the side of the fridge.

 

One day two of them came into my parents’ store, pretended to buy some gum, and then asked a few questions about the travel agency upstairs. Where is the man who runs the place? Mr. Ahmed? How often does he come in? Does he stay after hours?

 

Abba shook his head. “I do not watch my neighbor so much. He is from Pakistan, that is all I know.”

 

“Yet you hold packages for him?”

 

“Yes, but that is because they are not open all the time. It is favor.”

 

The man consulted a tiny notebook. “You attend the same mosque? Al-Noor Masjid?”

 

At this, Abba froze, fingers resting light on the register, staring at the door. “No, we are praying at different place.” It hurt my heart, hearing this. Abba’s English, when he spoke to strangers, was halting, yet proper. He’d studied some English in Bangladesh and hated sounding uneducated to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0553534211
• ISBN 13: 9780553534214
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: EMBER; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/imprints/EM/ember; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland