“So, now people are going to think you’re the one who likes Babar,” Maryam said.

  “Do you think Babar thinks it?”

  “Probably. You touched his knee.”

  “So knobbly.”

  An A-level boy walked toward them saying, “Look who’s grown this summer.” Zahra was accustomed to comments about her height, and it took a moment to see where the boy’s eyes had actually landed. His name was Hammad; he was one of the “thuggish boys,” known to have friends beyond the school walls who were either criminals or headed in that direction. Rumor placed a gun in the glove compartment of his car.

  Zahra made a noise of disgust and walked on, pulling Maryam along with her, hoping she’d done so in a manner that would make an observer say they both “swept past him.” But there were only a few feet to sweep before she reached the chemistry classroom and had to say goodbye to Maryam. As she made her way toward an empty desk, ignoring Babar waving his hand to indicate the place next to him, she heard one pair of footsteps in the corridor slow down and another speed up.

  It had been happening since last year without anyone but Maryam and her tailor taking much notice, but London had accelerated it. All that chocolate and ice cream and fast food had settled in unexpected places, and brought with it the discomfort of underwired bras and a body that felt unknown. For a while, in London, she thought she had lost the ability to judge her own dimensions, which was why her breasts kept bumping into strangers, until she realized it was almost never women with whom she was making the unexpected contact. Once understood, she didn’t know how she felt about it. Sometimes she wanted to cry, other times she was triumphant.

  It was purely humiliating, though, to overhear her father tell her mother that she needed to go to Oxford Street and buy their daughter an entirely new wardrobe because all her clothes looked “indecent.” So out went her favorite shirts—the Madonna one, the tiger-with-diamanté-eyes one, the nautical-striped one. The new shirts were looser fitting and without images or ornamentation that might draw people’s eyes to her chest. It made little difference to the men bumping into her on the Tube, or to that friend of her parents’ who’d started squeezing her shoulders affectionately and pulling her close the way her “uncles” had always done, but never him.

  The previous summer in London, she had imagined visibility was what she wanted. In Karachi, men stared if you were a girl; it was something to which she was accustomed and shared with every other girl in the city. In London, people looked through you. The contrast was disquieting. Notice me, notice me, notice me, she’d chanted internally when walking down the streets. And now, wish granted, she had passed into a new category of person, her relationship to the world around her altered. At the same time, everything seemed to carry on as it always had.

  There was no one in London she could talk to about this. A significant number of her parents’ Karachi friends decamped to flats in Mayfair and Kensington and Knightsbridge for the summer with their children, none of whom were old enough for Maryam to want to spend time with. She was entrusted with babysitting when all the parents went out for dinner or to a movie, and had used the increased responsibility to argue her way into greater independence. During the plentiful daytime hours she was allowed to head out of the Mayfair flat with her Walkman, drifting in the direction of Hyde Park or toward the music store in Piccadilly Circus. Sometimes she made it as far as Trafalgar Square, where she watched boys and girls her own age laughing together while trying unsuccessfully to climb onto the backs of the bronze lions that surrounded Nelson’s Column.

  As the summer wore on, she increasingly fell into the routine of walking to the Trocadero by Leicester Square, where she’d learned to ignore the dispiriting air of a place where teenagers should be having fun but no one was, and instead focused on the turning racks near the entrance that displayed postcards of Hollywood actors and Top Ten singers. Here, Tom Cruise in a white vest and blue jeans looking the kind of sad that only needed a girl’s smile to make him happy; there, the women of Bananarama staring straight into the camera as if to say, Impress us if you can. Then back down Piccadilly, where the cost of everything made no sense when you translated it into rupees, which didn’t stop her parents and their friends from buying biscuits from Fortnum & Mason, coffee table books about Islamic architecture, and vintage cars from Hatchards. Maryam rarely entered any of the shops, and when she did, it was only briefly. The previous summer she’d mentioned to her parents how helpful shop assistants in London were, repeatedly asking, “Can I help you with anything?” Her parents informed her that was the English way of saying, Buy something or leave. She had been embarrassed not to have realized that. Back in Karachi, she’d prided herself on her skill at reading subtexts.

  From Piccadilly she made her way into Green Park, where she sat beneath a favorite tree and spent a very long time writing a postcard to Zahra, thinking through each sentence carefully so that everything that had been most important in the preceding twenty-four hours could fit onto the back of the card. She used the entire space, including the lines reserved for the address, knowing that Pakistan’s postal system made it useless to actually mail the letters, so she would simply take them to Karachi at the end of the summer and hand them over to Zahra all in one go.

  But on the last day in London, she picked up one of the postcards and read the lines, I was wearing a denim shirt and I undid the top two buttons when I saw a group of boys, a couple of them really cute. I could feel them looking at me after I walked past but I didn’t look back because I want them to look at me but I don’t know what I want after that. She put all the postcards into a black garbage bag, pulled empty juice cartons and packaging for fish fingers out of the kitchen bin, and threw them on top of the postcards, tied the bag securely, and took it out to the large bins on the landing.

  Only on that first day of school, during break time, watching Zahra reach over the heads of students standing in front of her to pay the man in the tuck shop for two bottles of Coke and two packets of chili chips, did it all make sense. There had always been a joke at the heart of their friendship, a gag that appeared first at the visual level before revealing itself to run through many layers. Now there was Zahra, all straight lines, and Maryam, all curves, adding another element to their study in contrasts.

  “Thanks, Stan,” she said, taking her Coke and chili chip packet from Zahra.

  “Welcome, Ollie.”

  She wondered if Zahra shared this feeling of completeness when they were together that could surely only be possible when you’d been best friends with someone since the age of four and your character had been defined by the other. She suspected not. There were things Zahra wanted from the world that Maryam didn’t understand—things she found in books and in her own mind, which sometimes wandered far away from Maryam into places she rarely talked about because she knew Maryam couldn’t follow her there. When Zahra did say things like, “Do you think everyone has a purpose in life or do we invent purpose to stop feeling irrelevant?” Maryam never knew how to answer. She didn’t know which part of the question made less sense to her—purpose or irrelevant. She had tried to come up with an answer, something to do with wanting to expand her family’s business into the international market, and Zahra had frowned and said, “That’s ambition, not purpose.”

  They wandered into the front yard, noticing how the departure of the previous year’s second-year A-level students had altered the configuration of things. The area around the flagpole where the most dazzling of the second-year students had lounged during break last year was now occupied by two smaller groups of Class 11 students; the new group of dazzling second-years had marked the stone archway under the bell as their territory for the year. Maryam heard her name called out and took Zahra’s elbow to steer her toward the flower beds near the music-room entrance, where several of their friends had claimed a spot, some sitting on the low whitewashed borders of the flower beds while others stood, half in conversation with their seated friends and half bantering with whoever was walking past. It was humid and close, the rain clouds no longer a threat but a tease.

  Zahra sat, Maryam stood. A standing Zahra towered over everyone else; seated, she was half a head taller than the girls beside her, though some of the boys were finally catching up. She’d once said to Maryam, in her matter-of-fact way, that she thought her personality would have been different if she were a few inches shorter. She simply didn’t fit among the girls who leaned their heads together to gossip among themselves. But really there was no question of not fitting; they’d all been friends so long. After her two months in London, caught between children and adults, Maryam wanted to embrace everyone around her for how easily conversation flowed, how lightly they teased one another, how entirely at home she felt. Babar came to join the group and Maryam said, “Parade clothes from a bygone era! Parade!” and Babar marched back and forth, turning the march into a gyrating dance, the girls clapping out a beat and the boys calling out, “Oye, oye, oye,” in time, so that the joke was entirely on the teacher for her choice of expression. Babar inclined his head in Maryam’s direction, thanking her for finding a way between the awkwardness of pretending that classroom exchange hadn’t happened and the embarrassment of saying something sympathetic. She didn’t require any thanks or even acknowledgment; she was filled with the satisfaction of being with a group of people and knowing the words and tone that would produce exactly the effect you wanted. This was what was meant by belonging and home, words she understood in the way that Zahra understood purpose and irrelevant.

  Hammad walked across her line of sight, and her thoughts shifted to what other effects she could produce.

  On Wednesdays, Zahra came home with Maryam and her two younger sisters. “Home” to Maryam was a single-story house in Old Clifton, set behind high boundary walls and now with armed guards stationed at the gate. It lacked all the potential for playing with the downstairs neighbors’ dog and sneaking down to the sea that existed in Zahra’s flat in Sea View, though Zahra showed little interest in either. This routine had started when Zahra’s father took on a TV role as anchor of a cricket show—he had to be at the studio on Wednesday afternoons, so he couldn’t pick Zahra up as he otherwise had been doing since her mother was elevated from class teacher at Zahra’s school to principal of a newly opened school.

  Maryam still missed Mrs. Ali, as she was in school—Aunty Shehnaz outside of it. There had always been a brightness to those few seconds of the day when the understated elegance of Mrs. Ali crossed paths with Maryam and greeted her with the smile of Aunty Shehnaz. Every other teacher regarded Maryam as brilliant Zahra’s slightly inexplicable best friend, a middling student whose parents bought her cashmere sweaters in London for the winter uniform when everyone else, including those who drove around in Pajeros, did just fine with the local cotton-polyester ones. She knew they scorned her for this because Saba had informed her that her aunt, Mrs. Hilal, said the staff room had been wondering if Maryam was allergic to polyester. Maryam, like every other student in school, allowed her mother to choose her school clothes without thinking too much about it, but that conversation with Saba made clear that even the smallest of decisions shouldn’t be left to either of her parents.

  On this particular Wednesday, a social crisis had detonated in Maryam’s household, and the girls arrived to find Maryam’s mother on the phone instructing her husband to come home from the office right away because there were things to discuss.

  Things to discuss meant it was too sensitive for a phone call, not so much because everyone knew that the intelligence services were always listening in but because crossed lines meant that someone you knew might end up eavesdropping on your call, though they’d intended only to call their mother to ask her to remind them how so-and-so was related to so-and-so. Ever since Maryam’s mother had found herself on a crossed line with her cousin’s husband speaking to his previously unsuspected mistress, she’d refused to say anything on the phone that she wouldn’t happily shout across the aisles of Agha’s Supermarket.

  Maryam’s father pretended there was work keeping him in the office, but really it was Maryam’s grandfather who ran the family business, which provided luxury leather products to the rich of Pakistan. Maryam’s father merely had an office with his name on it in which he spent his days solving crosswords, approving products that had already met his father’s exacting standards, and occasionally having meetings with someone important to the company who needed to feel appreciated. Maryam’s father made everyone feel appreciated, and knowing the ubiquity of his appreciation didn’t stop anyone—other than his immediate family—from being won over by his ability in this regard.

  So, lunch was delayed until Maryam’s father returned home. Zahra and Maryam made their way through the long, painting-lined hallway where a clumsy sketch of a cow, drawn by Maryam’s father when he was at Oxford, hung among Sadequain and Chughtai and Gulgee and Naqsh. The paintings gave way to a cluster of photographs of Maryam’s mother’s antecedents in all their aristocratic pomp; their unimpeachable class allowed the cow drawing to be amusing rather than a crass symbol of the wealth that had made the art collection possible. Maryam found it mortifying.

  The hallway led to Maryam’s bedroom, where Maryam shooed out her sisters, closing the door behind her. The central air-conditioning made the faintest of hums, the marble floor cool beneath thin socks when they kicked off their shoes. Maryam told Zahra to choose the music, and got onto her knees on her double bed to plant a kiss on the mouth of George Michael, who was hanging on her wall in his “Last Christmas” incarnation.

  “Your turn,” she said.

  Zahra remained where she was, walking her fingers through Maryam’s CD collection on the white shelf with blue trim. Just beneath it was the bookshelf lined with Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon, Jackie Collins—on the inside of each book’s back cover were numbers, written in a code known only to Maryam and Zahra, listing which pages had the “good bits.” And beneath that was a desk with the computer—Maryam’s own home computer, the Apple IIGS, her pride and joy—which had allowed her to start the O-level computer science class miles ahead of everyone else in programming knowledge.

  “Why do you speak to Hammad when you think I’m not looking?” Zahra said, back turned toward Maryam. “I saw you again today, when I came out of history.”

  “You don’t approve of him.”

  “What difference does that make? We tell each other everything.”

  They both understood everything to mean everything that happened within school. Their family lives were a different matter. So, for instance, Maryam never discussed how embarrassed she was by the indolence of her parents’ lives, the superficiality of their concerns, so at odds with the kind of adult behavior she saw in Zahra’s home. Even the names by which her parents were known to their friends—Toufiq and Zenobia shortened to Toff and Zeno—were caricatures compared to the solidity of the Alis, Habib and Shehnaz.

  In the first week of O-level economics, Maryam had learned about division of labor and understood that her family’s version of this was for her grandfather to run the business while her father procreated so there’d be someone competent to whom the business could be handed down. Her father had managed three daughters and no sons before her mother said that was quite enough, this was the twentieth century, his daughters would inherit the company. But it was obvious early on that the younger two had taken after their father in replacing competence with charm, and so it was understood that all actual responsibility must fall to Maryam. Sometimes her grandfather teased her and said perhaps once she went to university in England or America she would never want to come back. She only rolled her eyes at that. He knew perfectly well that the summers in London were enough to excise any desire to live Elsewhere. Elsewhere was where you were no one. To be honest, she wasn’t at all sure why she had to go to university, but her grandfather seemed to think it was necessary.

  “Okay, but first, your turn.” Maryam gestured again to the poster, and Zahra went to stand next to the bed. Maryam saw her draw back a little at the sight of the fleck of spit that Maryam hadn’t realized she’d left on George Michael’s mouth, and that made her wipe her lips and feel aware of her body—the saliva in her mouth, the blood of her period, the weight of her breasts. Zahra hastily kissed the corner of George Michael’s mouth, and went to sit down at the foot of Maryam’s bed rather than in their usual pose—shoulder to shoulder and propped up against the headboard.

  “So yes, he stops to talk to me whenever he sees me. What am I supposed to do—pretend I haven’t heard him?”

  “Have you ever spoken to him on the phone?”

  “He asked for my number and I didn’t give it. Happy?”

  There was the slightest shift in the air with that, the first lie between them.

  “Even being seen talking to him could be bad for your reputation.”

  This word—reputation—carried such weight in Zahra’s life. Maryam knew it had something to do with the uncertainty of her social position, and that made it unkind to laugh. “She’s smart and well mannered and thoughtful and any good family would welcome her in,” Maryam’s mother had said once, anticipating a bright future for Zahra in which marriage would unyoke her from the background of her parents, who were “decent, hardworking people,” a phrase that was clear in its condescension toward those who couldn’t simply assume a position in the world, regardless of character or action. Maryam gestured to the space next to her, and Zahra placed herself where indicated, slouching down and leaning slightly into Maryam, who had pulled herself upright, bringing their heads level.