“Bibi, I can drop you both home,” said a voice from near the front gate, which she recognized as belonging to Saba’s driver, Manzoor.

  The driver’s-side window of the Suzuki rolled down and a man leaned out and said, “Challo,” as both command and enticement. He was a few years older than Hammad, wearing a shiny shirt and cologne that was pungent but not unpleasant. His hair was cut like Wasim Akram’s, so thick and deep on top you could lose a cricket ball in it, and that made the acne-scarred face all right because he shared that with the fast bowler too.

  Hammad said, “Come on, let’s go, don’t make a scene in front of the drivers.” He gestured to Zahra to go to the passenger seat and she did, around the back of the car where she saw decals of a pair of boxing gloves and the words good 4 u, which could be either boast or praise; she wondered which one the driver of the car intended. Just as she was about to open the car door she heard a “Za!” from Maryam, who was pointing her thumb toward the gate. The man in the driver’s seat leaned over and opened the door. Zahra ducked inside the car. A moment later, Maryam slid into the backseat, Hammad following after.

  The man—he really was a man, not a boy—regarded Zahra without much interest, and then tilted his rearview mirror and looked at Maryam, extending the moment just long enough to become an appraisal.

  “Welcome to Jimmy’s FX,” he said, gunning the engine to life. He had his car seat pushed back as far as it could go so that he looked almost as he if were reclining. That meant Hammad had an excuse—as if he needed it—to sit pressed up right against Maryam.

  “Maryam, Zahra, Jimmy,” Hammad said, as Jimmy accelerated fast to leave the party behind. “Anything you want done in Karachi, this is the man who’ll do it for you.”

  “In that case—Jimmy, could you drop us at Zahra’s. It’s Sea View.” Maryam spoke as though she were talking to Driver. Zahra hated her more then than she had at any other point in the evening.

  Jimmy glanced toward the backseat. “She wants to run away from you already, lover boy,” he said, speaking in Urdu except for that last word, and raised the volume on the car stereo, drowning out any response with “Beat It.” He turned toward Sunset Boulevard rather than Phase Five. Zahra found herself delighted that for once Maryam’s imperiousness had so little effect.

  Once they were on the broad expanse of Sunset Boulevard, Jimmy drove billboard-blurringly fast. It was like being on one of the rides at Funland, but sitting next to a university student rather than your class fellows. Zahra rolled down the window to feel the rush of speed more intensely, the shock of the cold wind strangely pleasurable. Michael Jackson made her drum her hands against her thighs and move her lower body in time to the music. The city lights dazzled, posters of Benazir hung everywhere. Jimmy overtook cars and motorcycles with loud triumphant music blaring. MQM’s election song, Benazir’s election song, Michael Jackson braided between them as if mixed by a DJ. More music spilled out of roadside kiosks where men bought cigarettes and paan and the chance to loiter; on Clifton Bridge there were donkey cart races—high spirits everywhere. And beyond all this, the feeling of freedom, of choosing at last to embrace life outside the same circuit of homes and families that had been her entire existence. She slipped her hand under the collar of her shirt, felt her skin, the interruption of her bra, her skin again. Here it was, life itself, at last she was in it, not just watching it from the next car over but actually really in it.

  She was aware of bodies moving in the backseat, but the music drowned out all sound. Zahra bit down on the tip of her thumb so she could concentrate on that instead of imagining Hammad’s hand under Maryam’s shirt, looked at Jimmy and tried to want his attention rather than Hammad’s. She didn’t like his face much, so she looked at his hands on the wheel instead, dark hair at his knuckles that should have been disgusting but wasn’t. How would those hands feel on her? He was driving toward the Pearl Continental Hotel, where she knew the older students went late at night to the ground-floor restaurant where you could eat cake and drink coffee under crystal chandeliers. Was that all that would happen tonight?

  Jimmy’s hand came toward her leg, but he was only pressing in the lighter. From the backseat, Hammad handed him a cigarette and Jimmy placed it between his lips. The lighter popped out, and Jimmy snapped his fingers at Zahra. She pulled it out, with its glowing circular end, and tried to pass it to Jimmy, but he kept his hands on the wheel and leaned his head toward her, his eyes still on the road, his foot pressing down on the accelerator. She had never been in a moment so devastatingly cool. She brought the glowing lighter to the end of Jimmy’s cigarette, her fingers inches from his lips, and hoped Hammad was watching. Jimmy took hold of the lit cigarette between index and middle fingers and withdrew it from his mouth. His tongue emerged to lick his chapped lips and then slid wetly back in.

  It took just that instant of repulsion to dissolve the feeling of potential and possibility and see him as a man far too old to be behaving this way with fourteen-year-old girls. A creep.

  She turned to look at Maryam, seated directly behind her, but Maryam had her head tilted back, eyes closed, arms crossed over her body. Her expression was annoyed, maybe slightly bored. Hammad had the look of a boy who has been denied a birthday present. Jimmy took one hand off the steering wheel to place his fingertips against Zahra’s cheek and guide her gaze forward again. It was the hand holding the cigarette, she could feel its heat against her face. His touch was soft but not gentle, as if he knew she would obey the slightest pressure. As if he were instructing her that she must obey every mildly expressed order if she wanted mildness to continue to be the tone of command.

  A snaking terror moved from her stomach up her windpipe. She breathed in deeply through her open mouth, trying to get past the constriction in her chest. The wind was pummeling her, whipping her hair into her face, numbing her lips and nose with cold, but she didn’t know if she was allowed to roll up the window.

  Jimmy drove past the Pearl Continental. Maryam was saying something in the backseat, but the music was so loud Zahra couldn’t hear her and she dared not turn around again. He turned onto Bunder Road, the city’s central artery, and a traffic snarl made him press down on his brake as he hadn’t done for any red light. Men were sitting at pavement tables outside some place called Cafe VIP, just feet away from her. One nudged another, jerked his head in her direction. Jimmy raised his eyebrows at her, daring her to open the door and get out. There were men, only men, at the cafe tables and in the cars and motorcycles around them. Her father’s newspaper office was nearby, she’d often visited him there, but that was during daylight hours—Karachi’s nights were not for girls or women.

  Even without turning around, she was aware of Maryam’s bare arms in the backseat, the brightness of the white shirt molded close to her chest. Jimmy tossed his cigarette out of the window and rolled it up, gesturing to her to do the same. She didn’t know which was worse—being watched by the pavement men or being sealed in here with him—but she knew she had to obey. Her hand was clumsy on the window crank, but she got the window all the way up and everything turned even darker inside. Jimmy’s sweet-and-spice cologne mingled unpleasantly with the lingering cigarette smell, the music jarring through the scratchy speakers with too much bass. The traffic eased, and the car moved past the pavement men.

  Maryam so close, so out of reach. Zahra considered slipping her hand in the space between the passenger seat and the vinyl door panel to find her hand, feel her strength, but that might make Jimmy angry.

  Jimmy ejected the tape, flipped it, and turned the volume up again for “The Girl Is Mine.” He drove past the Port Trust Building and turned onto the road leading toward the beaches—Hawkesbay and Sandspit—at the outer limits of the city. Traffic thinned, then disappeared. Trucks hulked on the sides of the road, parked end to end; polythene bags and other debris filled empty stretches of land. Street dogs prowled; a piercing howl entered the car so close her entire body lifted off the seat for a moment. It was the opening to “Thriller”—the howling, the creaking door, the footsteps, she’d heard it a thousand times. Jimmy laughed. They had left all habitation behind, only little shacks lined the road—in the daytime they sold cold drinks and fruit and cricket bats to beachgoers but now they all had their shutters down. The road was empty ahead, leading all the way out of Karachi and toward the distant hills. Was this how kidnappings happened? Two girls in a car on a deserted road, held hostage without knowing it. Maryam’s family could pay any ransom, but her family couldn’t. Maybe he knew this. Maybe he’d take Maryam and drop Zahra on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere—but there were fishing villages nearby all along the coast, she could go there for help. A flicker of hope, awful to recognize. Maryam was in this car because of her.

  Jimmy slammed on the brakes, and Zahra’s head almost hit the windshield before she was thrown back again. There was no obstruction, no animal running in front of the car. Jimmy switched off the engines and the headlights. The music was swallowed by an absolute silence. There were no streetlights, and the darkness was vast.

  “Sometimes trucks come round that bend,” he said, pointing to something Zahra couldn’t see just ahead. “The drivers have such long shifts they stub their cigarettes out on their hands to stay awake.”

  “Jimmy, come on, man,” Hammad said. “Take us home.”

  “So much for lover boy.” Jimmy turned on the interior light and turned to look at Maryam. “You want me to take you home? Ask nicely, and maybe I will.”

  “I want you to die.” Maryam’s voice cold, precise.

  “Maybe,” he said, flicking the light. “But then we all will.”

  Hammad made more sounds of protest, but Jimmy’s hand, raised in reprimand, silenced him.

  They sat, looking at the road ahead, waiting for a juggernaut of a vehicle to come charging at him. After a little while Zahra could hear waves, faintly.

  Jimmy looked at his watch. Then he switched on the ignition, put the headlights on full beam. He turned the car around with a loud screech and drove toward the city, its lights beautiful as they approached. She’d never been so happy to see Karachi’s late-night traffic—red brake lights in one direction, white headlights in the other.

  They were behind a slow-moving truck, its back overladen with stuffed gunny sacks, held in place by a thick rope. Jimmy weaved into the other side of the road, a bus bearing down on them. He accelerated—bus horn, headlights, the driver’s shouting face. At the last possible moment he swerved back into his lane ahead of the truck. Hammad was yelling, Zahra biting her fist, Maryam silent. Across Netty Jetty Bridge, toward the gateway to the port, through which Zahra had driven countless times with her parents on the way to an evening on a fishing boat. She could almost smell the kerosene lamps and damp cushions and spiced crab. The thought of her parents, the safety of their presence, made her want to cry. He would put them on a boat and take them somewhere no one would ever find them. On the fishing boat, crabs scrabbled about in a wooden crate, trying to climb over each other to escape, as if they knew they would soon be lifted out and cracked apart. She was going to be sick. She couldn’t be sick in Jimmy’s car. She recited “Daffodils” in her head, but that didn’t work, so she tried “The Charge of the Light Brigade” until she got to “the valley of Death,” and then she cried silently.

  They were almost at the gateway to the port when Jimmy pulled up on the side of the road. A man who had been squatting on one end of a speed bump, watching traffic, stood up, retrieved something from the shadows behind him, and walked up to the car, carrying a duffel bag on his shoulder. The contents of the bag shifted against each other, something hard, maybe metallic. Guns everywhere in Karachi, the phrase “Kalashnikov culture” part of their everyday lives. Jimmy got out of the car, taking the keys with him.

  He’d barely closed the door when there was a sharp cry of pain from the backseat. With Jimmy out of the car, Zahra turned to look. Maryam had caught hold of Hammad’s little finger and twisted it. “You get us home now,” she said quietly, “or I’ll have you expelled from school.”

  “I swear I didn’t know this was going to happen.” Hammad cowered, though whether he was more terrified of Maryam or of Jimmy it was hard to know.

  Maryam looked at Zahra. “I should have listened to you about him.” Nothing about her voice or her expression suggested any emotion beyond irritation. It was only when she took a closer look at Zahra that her expression changed and her voice rose. “Are you crying?”

  “You change places with her,” she ordered Hammad.

  But as soon as Hammad opened the door, Jimmy said, “Stay where you are,” and he quickly closed it.

  “Don’t cause any trouble,” Zahra said to Maryam, and she turned to face forward before Jimmy had to tell her to.

  Jimmy opened the hatchback and placed the duffel bag in the boot—the metallic sound of guns unmistakable now, and separated from Hammad and Maryam by little more than the thin vinyl seats. When he got back into the car, he was smiling.

  “Please will you take us home?” Zahra managed.

  “Home?” he said, starting the car engine. “I’m not taking you home. You want to get out, get out, but your friend is staying.” Zahra realized only now that he hadn’t readjusted his rearview mirror since Maryam had got into the car, and must have been watching her all along.

  A few hours earlier, Maryam had had stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror, enjoying the sight of herself. She’d felt different since Benazir’s inauguration. A woman was in power. Maryam spent a good portion of her days imagining a meeting with Benazir. She’d say she was going to take over the family business and Benazir would put an arm around her shoulder and say, Welcome to the club. She felt a charge running through her at the thought of Benazir’s hand on her in a way she never did at the thought of Hammad’s touch. But even so, something had to change in life; how could everything be as it was before Benazir placed one hand on the Quran and held the other one up and took the oath of office with a voice of complete authority, as though she had always known this moment would come? And so she’d said yes to Hammad, and hoped her older cousin had been right when she said the act of kissing could turns frogs into princes. (She’d also said, with a creepy flickering of her tongue, that it could turn princes into frogs, but Maryam tried not to think about that.)

  When she saw the FX, though, she knew they shouldn’t get into it. But Hammad had ushered Zahra toward the car and Jimmy opened the door and for some reason Zahra did what the boys wanted her to do. When Hammad got in next to Maryam, he tried to put his arm on her thigh, and she pushed him off. Why had he asked Zahra to come along, and who was this man with the cheap cologne and cheap clothes and forgodssake “Beat It,” was he living in 1982?

  And what was wrong with Zahra, singing along, swaying her body, window rolled all the way down? What music video did she think she was in? Hammad stretched his arm across the seat just a few inches above Maryam’s shoulders. Maryam turned to look out of the window. A few seconds later his arm dropped onto her shoulder. Maryam shoved him away from her and looked up at the roof of the car, which was the only direction that allowed her to avoid the sight of both Hammad and Jimmy and their reflections. The longer Jimmy drove, the more she was aware of a deep loathing. Loathing for the boy who couldn’t manage anything as simple as finding a way for them to be together in private, and loathing for the man who had almost instantly revealed himself to be one of those cheapsters whose fast driving and overpowering cologne were attempts to compensate for being a nobody. She knew he was watching her, but she didn’t want him to think she’d noticed or cared.

  And so, with her eyes on the roof, she hadn’t noticed when the singing, swaying Zahra disappeared and a frightened Zahra took her place. She’d left her on her own in the front seat, and now Zahra was crying; that bastard had made Zahra cry, and he would have to learn that this wasn’t allowed.

  He slammed down the hatchback. What was in the duffel bag? If she had to guess from the sound of its contents sliding around, she’d say videocassettes—pirated videos, all the latest in WWF, no doubt.

  But why did Zahra have to speak to him in that pleading tone of voice, allowing him—that nobody—to speak to her as if she were disposable? “You want to get out, get out, but your friend is staying,” he said.

  Maryam leaned forward between the front seats, one hand on Zahra’s shoulder. “So, here’s the situation,” she said, in her most conversational tone of voice, even while her thumb moved in reassuring circles on Zahra’s denim shirt. “It’s been about half an hour since we were expected back at Zahra’s. By now her parents will have called our hosts, who’ll speak to their driver and get a description of you and your car, and then her parents will call my parents, and my parents will call the DIG Police, who is an old friend of theirs, and he’ll soon have all his officers looking out for us, if they aren’t already.” In fact, it was the previous deputy inspector general of police who had been a friend of her grandfather’s, but he’d fallen into some kind of professional disgrace and been replaced by someone new whom her grandfather hadn’t yet cultivated. “So why don’t you start driving us home now, and maybe the DIG will get a call from my parents to say we’re safely home before a police van stops you and has a look in the boot of your car.”

  There was a satisfying silence when she’d finished. Hammad shifted farther away from her. Jimmy started the engine and drove without a word, not so fast or wild. Maryam kept her hand on Zahra’s shoulder, wishing her friend’s muscles would start to uncoil now that Maryam had taken charge. They were on the busy, broad avenue of Bunder Road, Hammad’s hands folded on his lap, Jimmy still silent.