He was a kind voice, a steady hand. The four of us—Toufiq, Junaid, my father, and I—shared laughter and stories and endless pots of tea. Junaid never asked about children, though my own mother pestered me endlessly. He never criticized. He just appeared, a quiet old soul, content to be near us.

  And then, one day, Junaid did not come.

  chapter 19

  Sal

  April, now

  When Noor and I watched TV shows about criminals doing stupid shit to make money, I’d mock them.

  Now I get it. The stupid shit is temptingly simple. And the payoff is huge.

  Though it doesn’t make me less paranoid that I’ll get caught. I worry that everything I’m trying to fix will fall apart. That Abu will find my stash and start using it. That Ernst will catch me and expel me. That the police will arrest me.

  But worse than the fear that I’ll get thrown in jail is imagining Noor’s face if she knew what I was doing. The Fight 2.0. Not a silent, broken-hearted Noor, but an enraged one. Shithead dealers, she’d said. If she found out, she’d never speak to me again.

  A few weeks after I start working for Art, he meets me behind the motel. “Saaaaal!” he shouts, holding out both hands like a mob boss greeting a loyal hit man.

  He’s irritatingly chummy, but I’m not about to complain. During my first week under his tutelage, I made enough to get the Civic back from the repo lot. A week after that, I paid the water bill, the trash bill, and the electric bill. Yesterday, I paid First Union eight hundred dollars and got them to extend their deadline to April 30.

  The hospital keeps calling—but they’re easy enough to ignore. I’ll pay them, too, now that I’m finally getting a handle on things.

  After I hand over Art’s cut, he offers me my next week’s supply, neatly packed in a Tupperware.

  “My mom sent cookies.” He grins at me, because he loves using these stupid codes. “You’re not keeping your shit at home, right? Or in the car?”

  I shake my head. It’s one of the first things he taught me, and I’ve been using a paint can in a shed at the back of the motel. The last thing you need is for anyone to rob you, he’d said. When I asked if I should carry a weapon, he laughed at me and started calling me Walter White after the Breaking Bad character.

  As I stuff the Tupperware in my backpack, Art digs around for a cigarette, cursing when the wind puts out his Zippo. “I saw Atticus being friendly with you. Remember—”

  “Clients aren’t friends.” I repeat his words back to him, but I don’t need the reminder. Though I’ve not been picked on much since middle school, I’ve never had a horde of buddies, either. Juniper is casually racist, and even though I have what Noor refers to as “male sportsball immunity,” there’s still the occasional snide comment or shove in the hall.

  Though now, even the assholes who’d cough “camel jockey” when I passed are polite. They want their pills. I want their money.

  “Why do you sell to Ashlee,” I ask Art, “if we’re not supposed to be friends with our clients?”

  “Ashlee is family,” Art says. “She’d never screw me over.” He considers me. “You’re doing well,” he says. “I have stuff that’s more lucrative than Addy and Oxy. Interested?”

  That April 30 date looms in my head. “Yeah,” I say. “That’d be great.”

  “Salahudin?”

  Noor comes around the corner of the motel into the alley, backpack hanging off one shoulder. She stopped wearing makeup for a few weeks, but she has it on again today. Her eyes seem bigger, cheekbones sharper.

  “I thought that was your voice,” she says, and briefly, I panic, wondering how much she heard. “Hey, Art.”

  “Greetings, fair lady.” I practically sprain my eyes trying not to roll them as Art looks between us with a knowing grin. “I will excuse myself. See you around, Sal.”

  “What was he doing here?” Noor walks back to the apartment with me, and the Tupperware in my backpack suddenly feels heavier than Abu when he’s full-on passed out.

  “Smoking a cigarette,” I say, because it’s not a lie.

  Noor looks askance at me. Her boots crunch in the sand that dirties the parking lot. Ama used to sweep it clear every week, a cussed war she waged with the desert.

  “But what were you talking about?” Noor says. “I didn’t know you were friends.”

  “He mentioned Ashlee,” I say after a pause. I am the king of assholes for bringing up my ex, but it does the trick. Noor’s face closes up and she doesn’t ask about Art again.

  Before I started dealing, I would never have manipulated her like that. I hate that obscuring all this from her is habit now.

  Maybe working for Art is changing me. I think of a book we had to read in eleventh grade English. The Picture of Dorian Gray. How the main character’s portrait becomes uglier and uglier as he does worse and worse shit. How every act of deception and vice makes the next one easier.

  Once we’re inside, Noor says salaam to Abu, who appears half-sentient for the first time in days, and is actually renting out a room.

  I promised Noor I’d talk to him, but it went about as well as I could expect. He nodded the whole time, then walked off. Two hours later, he snuck a bottle of Old Crow into his room. When I called his sponsor, Janice, she sighed.

  “We can’t help him unless he wants to help himself, Sal.”

  Noor washes, then prays namaz in the front room as she does most afternoons. She hasn’t commented the past few weeks when I’ve skipped namaz. But today she offers me the worn green prayer rug.

  “It helps,” she says quietly. “Trust me.”

  When I finish the prayer, I don’t get up. Ama’s favorite part of namaz was the end, when she’d ask God for everything she needed. Little things, like for the NO on the vacancy sign to get lit up. And bigger things, like patience or better health.

  “The more you ask for,” she’d say, “the better. Because it means you’ve put your faith in something greater than yourself.”

  I never did it, because it felt like I was ceding control. If I left everything to the almighty, then what the hell was I supposed to do?

  Now that I’m sitting here, I figure I should ask for something. Does God listen to drug dealers? I’ll pretend the answer is yes. Please let Ama be at peace. Please let Noor get into college. Please let Abu stop drinking. Please let us keep the Clouds’ Rest.

  After folding up the rug, I find Noor digging around in the fridge.

  “Sorry, there isn’t much,” I say, because all the money I’ve made has gone to overdue bills. I did buy eggs, though. I go to grab them, and when I nudge her out of the way, she jumps about a mile.

  “Whoa,” I say. “You okay?”

  “Sorry!” she squeaks at the same time. “The freezer door slammed on my arm at the store and it hurts like hell—”

  “Hey, it’s okay.” She’s acting weird, but I let it go. Not like I can judge. I pull out some eggs. “Aanda curry?”

  She nods. “Make it chat-pati, though. None of that weak jalapeño you buy from Ronnie D’s. Use the good stuff. Lal mirch.”

  “Lal mirch gives me a stomachache!”

  “How are you even Pakistani, Salahudin?” She digs around the pantry and pulls out an old spaghetti sauce jar filled with cayenne. “You’re so embarrassing.”

  “Rude. When you pour Tabasco on our fries, I don’t get jalapeño face about—”

  She groans and puts her fingers on my lips. “No vegetable puns—”

  I realize she’s touching me at the same time she does.

  “Sorry,” she whispers, not squeaky now, but soft and buttery like the word is made of caramel. Neither of us moves. Her brown eyes make my head spin, that delicious vertigo of tipping your head back on a playground swing and watching the horizon crest and crash. I wonder how I could have been so stupid last fall, when she kissed me. I want to find that Salahudin and kick his ass.

  I let the anger fade, and instead hold on to the perfection of this moment. The way Noor smells, minty and warm, and the way her body curves beneath her worn the Cure T-shirt, her delicate brown fingers, and the silver stud in her nose.

  “Noor,” I whisper. At that exact moment, when she’s arching toward me and my skin is tingling in a good way for once, my accursed burner phone, on the counter behind Noor, dings.

  I don’t have names in the phone, but I recognize the number—Atticus. I can’t ignore it. He’s having a party this weekend. It’s a chance to make a lot of money.

  “Just—um—just one sec.” I step away, and after I text him that I’ll be there, I find Noor watching me.

  “New phone?” she asks, and her gaze is so steady that I’m certain she knows exactly what I use it for.

  “Ama had a separate cell for business,” I say, which isn’t a lie, even if it has nothing to do with me selling drugs. I turn to the eggs. “Hand me a bowl?”

  Please don’t ask more questions, I beg. Please.

  One day soon, I’ll have First Union paid off. I’ll figure out how to make the Clouds’ Rest profitable. I won’t have to do illegal shit. Maybe then I’ll tell Noor about all this. She can yell at me and be angry, but I can promise her that I’ll never do it again.

  She turns to her own phone, and the sound of an electric guitar hums through the air. “Who is this?” I ask.

  “Echo and the Bunnymen,” she says quietly. “ ‘The Killing Moon.’ Salahudin—” She glances at my burner phone and I make myself breathe. Five seconds in, seven seconds out.

  She shakes her head then. “Don’t forget the lal mirch,” she says, and hands me the jar.

  chapter 20

  Noor

  April, now

  You can’t sneak into the Juniper mosque. Because it’s not exactly a mosque. It’s a twelve-by-twelve room in the north wing of the All Faith Chapel on Juniper’s military base. Hindus get the room on Thursdays. Muslims on Fridays. Jews on Saturdays. Protestants get it the rest of the week.

  I haven’t been here in months because it requires going through the gates of the military base. And that means I have to show my ID and answer questions like “Where are you going?” and “Why?” and “Wait, we have a mosque on base?” from soldiers holding giant guns.

  Today, though, I have time. Oluchi, the hospital’s volunteer coordinator, let me off early.

  “Go have a life, Noor,” she said. “Go to a party. Live a little. You’re like a grizzled old sea dog in a teenager’s body.”

  But I’m not in a partying mood. I’m in an “oh crap, I better pray” mood. Since my last rejection, I’ve gotten another. Northwestern doesn’t want me.

  Which only leaves UCLA.

  This Friday afternoon, there are five other people at the “mosque.” Imam Shafiq, Khadija, an army guy in camo, and an older couple I don’t recognize.

  There’s no sermon at this time—Imam Shafiq saves that for the noon namaz. Prayer’s just started when I enter and Khadija beckons me to sit next to her.

  I try to fall into the rhythm of Imam Shafiq’s voice. Usually, the mosque calms me. No matter how low I feel, there’s a sense of community here.

  But today, all I can think is that if I don’t get into UCLA, I’m stuck in Juniper, working at the liquor shop. I’d go to Juniper Community College. Transfer to a four-year later. But Chachu won’t let me.

  I don’t get to have what he didn’t.

  Anger is something I have in common with Chachu. I guess that’s why I hate it so much. It rises in me now. I try to smother it.

  You are better than this place. More than this place. The hope Auntie left me battles my rage, trying to silence it, or at least tame it. Auntie believed in me. Even at the end, she believed.

  The prayer concludes. It feels sudden, but I just wasn’t paying attention. Khadija disappears outside, phone held to her ear. I’m still on the prayer mat when Imam Shafiq comes over.

  “Noor, salaam—” He glances at my hands, curled into fists so tight it looks like I’m about to start boxing. I loosen them. My nails have imprinted angry half-moons in my palms.

  “Glad you came. Help me clean up? I want to make sure the place is ready for our Jewish brothers and sisters tomorrow.”

  “All eight of them?”

  “Twelve now.” The imam smiles. “Rabbi Alperin said a new family just moved here from LA.”

  They don’t know how bored they’re about to be. I fold up the prayer mats while Imam Shafiq sweeps the floor.

  “How are you holding up, Noor?” he asks after a few minutes. “You and Auntie Misbah were close.”

  “I miss her. Salahudin does, too.”

  “I’m glad you guys are talking. He needs a friend right now. You both do.”

  A friend. I relive that moment I had my finger on Salahudin’s lips. The way he looked at me. I thought, Finally. Finally.

  Since then, nothing. Yesterday, after I finished the laundry and Salahudin wrapped up the rooms, we wandered around in Swat and Karachi on Google Maps. Watched travel vlogs about the Badshahi Mosque and Lahore Fort. I must have visited both when I was little because when I look at them, I smell the earthy red sandstone. Feel the reverberations of the call to prayer in my bones and hear the crackle of live electric wires.

  “I miss it,” Salahudin said that day. “Even though I only visited once.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I remember Ama with all her cousins, gathered around this giant barrel of iced mangoes. They were cutting them open and juice was dripping and everyone was laughing. I remember missing you. Wishing you were there.”

  “Pakistan lives in the blood,” I told him. “If you ever visit, you better take me. Your Punjabi is passable but your Urdu is embarrassing.”

  “I’d want you to come even if you didn’t speak better Punjabi.” He’d given me a look then, brief and dark. A look that set me on fire.

  A look I definitely don’t want to be thinking about when I’m talking to the imam.

  “—was like a parent to you, I imagine,” Imam Shafiq is saying.

  “Do you think you and Sister Khadija will ever have kids, Imam Shafiq?” After I blurt out the question, I realize how personal it is. How rude for me to ask. “I’m sorry—”

  “No, it’s okay.” The imam is surprised. “We’re pretty young,” he says. “Khadija wants her law practice established. But sure, eventually.”

  “What—what makes a good parent?”

  “Good parents take care of you,” Imam Shafiq says. “They shelter you, guide you, feed you. They respect and protect you.”

  When he looks up, his brows are furrowed. I feel like a spotlight’s on me. But he goes back to sweeping. “That last thing—protection,” he says. “That one’s pretty important.”

  “What if a parent doesn’t do that?” I say. “What if the parent’s actions hurt their child?”

  The broom goes still. Stupid, Noor. Why did I open my big mouth?

  “Noor. If someone is hurting you, you can tell me. Or Khadija, if you’d rather.”

  “No, you misunderstand,” I say. “I’m worried about Uncle Toufiq. Salahudin’s dad.” I say it fast. So fast that the words become true. Uncle Toufiq. I’m talking about Uncle Toufiq.

  “Salahudin’s been running the motel alone since Auntie Misbah died. Uncle Toufiq—he drinks all day. Every day. He doesn’t hurt Salahudin physically. But . . .”

  Imam Shafiq sighs. “I’d wondered. Misbah didn’t speak of it.”

  “Uncle Toufiq won’t go to meetings, or talk to his sponsor. Salahudin needs to graduate high school—have a life. Instead, he’s trying to do everything Auntie Misbah did.”

  “We all have our struggles, Noor,” Shafiq says. “Uncle Toufiq’s is heavy. I should have visited him. There might not be many Muslims here in Juniper, but none of us should feel alone. Thank you for reminding me.”

  He ushers me out and locks up the room. Khadija steps out of their SUV.

  “Hey, throw your bike in the back,” she says. “Come have dinner.”

  “I’m going to make chicken biryani,” Imam Shafiq says. “My nani’s recipe. She taught me the last time I visited Lahore. Invite Salahudin; we could pick him up.”

  I wonder what it would be like to have dinner with Khadija and Shafiq. To hang out with them and Salahudin like we’re a family. To sit with people who don’t hate me for going to mosque.

  And the food. My mouth waters at the thought of a steaming bowl of spiced rice. Little garam-masala-soaked chunks of chicken baked in. Fried onions on top.

  I practically have to wipe the drool off my face.

  “Thanks, but I’m good.” My taste buds squeal in protest. Sorry, taste buds. If Chachu sees Imam Shafiq and Khadija dropping me off, I’ll never hear the end of it. “Chachu is making keema-aloo tonight. Also um, paratha.” Lying to the imam. I wonder where that falls on the scale of forgivable to hell-bound.

  Khadija gives Shafiq a look, but I’m on my bike already. Imam Shafiq pats his stomach.

  “More biryani for me. Door’s always open, okay?”

  When Auntie Misbah got jealous, she’d say: Minue theh aag laagi-hoi eh. I am aflame.

  Right now, I burn. Imam Shafiq visits Pakistan every year. I’ve seen his Pixtagram. His Urdu is effortless. His sisters played dholki at his wedding in Lahore. His family leaned into each other in the videos he posted. Teased each other in the comments below.

  He’s been to Saiful Muluk, the lake in northern Pakistan where a prince fell for a fairy. Eaten cayenne-dusted, charred corn in Anarkali Bazaar, named after the courtesan who died for love. He’s seen Hunza Valley and Hingol Park, and the Palace of Mirrors in Lahore.

  Imam Shafiq was born in America. But he knows Pakistan the way I want to, down to the biryani.