I mutter a goodbye and ride off. The pedals are stiff from the cold. I should go home, but instead I ride around the base until it’s dark out. My throat feels tight. Thoughts rise in my head.

  Don’t think it. Shut up. Shut up, Noor. Don’t think it.

  But I do think it: I wish Imam Shafiq and Khadija were my family.

  I hate myself for it. Hate that I’m still that stupid FOB who came over from Pakistan. Hate that I wish for something that will never happen.

  I’m angry again. A biting, cutting anger. I can’t silence it.

  I guess that’s why I don’t bother coming in softly when I get to Chachu’s house. Why I walk into the living room, even though going straight to my room is smarter.

  “Where were you?” Chachu flips off the TV. He hates keema-aloo. Hates paratha, too. Like he hates everything from Pakistan, including me. Especially me.

  The rest of the house is quiet. Brooke is at the store Friday evenings.

  “I was at—at the library,” I say. “I have a bio project.”

  Chachu finishes his sandwich. Chews it slowly. Then he stands.

  “Do you think I’m stupid, Noor?”

  If I did, I wouldn’t have broken out in a sweat. “No, Chachu.”

  “You think that because I work at a liquor shop, I’m an idiot. That because I have an accent—”

  “You don’t have an accent—”

  “I know you went to the mosque.”

  “How did—how did you know?”

  He goes into the kitchen. A cabinet slams when he chucks his trash. “I didn’t,” he says. “I passed you when you were heading to the base. That backward little prayer group is the only reason you ever go there. You just confirmed it.”

  Chachu returns to the living room. He paces back and forth. So many times that I lose count. He does that thing with his fists. Opening. Closing.

  There’s a song by Radiohead I found a few years ago. It’s called “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” I wish I could live that song. I wish I could fade out of this moment, and this room. Fade out of this family. Fade out of this life.

  I watch Chachu. Those fists opening. Closing.

  Closed.

  Chachu is the only reason I’m standing here.

  I was six when an earthquake hit my village in Pakistan. Chachu drove for two days from Karachi because the flights to northern Punjab were down. When he reached the village, he crawled over the rubble to my grandparents’ house, where my parents lived, too. He tore at the rocks with his bare hands. The emergency workers told him it was useless.

  His palms bled. His nails were ripped out. Everyone was dead. But Chachu kept digging. He heard me crying, trapped in a closet. He pulled me out. Got me to a hospital and didn’t leave my side.

  That’s who Chachu is. He saved me.

  He saved me.

  He saved me.

  “I wish you’d listen to me,” he says when I emerge from the memory. His voice drops. “You never listen. Why don’t you listen, Noor? I’m not a fool. I had an education. But you think you’re so much smarter, huh? Well, if you’re so smart, figure out how you’re going to get to school tomorrow without the bike. You can’t be trusted with it, clearly.”

  I head to my room. The light stays off. My back hurts. My arms. I unbraid my hair. It’s so heavy that if I had scissors nearby, I’d cut it all off.

  Homework. Think about homework. The next part of my “One Art” paper is due. It’s a Veruca Salt kind of night, so I put “Seether” on repeat, and for a while, I’m lost in Nina Gordon and Louise Post’s rage, in their failed attempts to silence the girl inside as she screams and breaks things.

  My phone dings.

  Salahudin: Hey. What are you doing?

  In bed.

  Salahudin: Sorry! Sweet dreams.

  Not sleeping.

  Mrs. Michaels’s essay. I don’t get this poem.

  Salahudin: One Art? You want help?

  Yes, if you could transplant your brain into mine, that would be great.

  Salahudin: Sure I can. Not sure if you want to be in my brain though ha ha

  How come? Impure thoughts?

  As soon as I type it, I want to take it back. Three dots blink for the longest time and I make myself not say anything else because I’ll make things worse. Please ignore it, I think. Please.

  Salahudin: Where are you stuck on the essay?

  The first sentence. Ha ha ha. Kidding.

  Not really.

  Salahudin: OK, well everything you had about Elizabeth Bishop’s background was good. You need to analyze the poem now.

  How’s this for analysis: Don’t lose all your shit, Lizzie.

  Salahudin: It’s about loss, yeah. She starts with objects, right? Because they’re easy to lose. Think about all the shit I lose.

  Bhondthar-eh-ah!

  It’s what Auntie Misbah called Salahudin when he forgot his jacket or phone or keys. It doesn’t have a translation. But it’s like saying, “Your head doesn’t work!”

  Salahudin: Ama wasn’t wrong. Bishop’s talking about grief. About how when shit is bad for a long time, losing becomes a habit. You could argue she’s warning us. Telling us that once you get used to losing, you start losing bigger things. Houses, people. Etc. The more you lose, the higher the cost.

  I reread the poem. I get what he means. But maybe Bishop’s not giving us a warning. Maybe she wants us to practice losing. Because loss can be good. It can save you.

  When Salahudin and I were in fourth grade, he came over to watch a movie. Chachu was yelling at Brooke in the kitchen. Salahudin kept looking at the kitchen door, and then at me. I hated him when he did that because he didn’t understand. He didn’t realize that even when the adults in your life were shouting, you could still watch a funny movie with talking rabbits. You could lose yourself in it, if you wanted to badly enough.

  Elizabeth Bishop lost lots of things. Keys, and houses, her girlfriend. She saw the truth about loss. She learned that the more you lose, the better you get at it. The better you get, the less it hurts.

  I slam my laptop shut. There’s no need to write this essay. I won’t get into UCLA. I won’t escape Juniper.

  Salahudin: Noor?

  I’m trying to think of a response when he calls.

  “You okay?” he says.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “Noor, are you crying? Do you want me to come over? What happened?”

  I wipe my face. My voice shakes. Sometimes, I hate being human.

  “Don’t come over,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  “Is it the essay? Mrs. Michaels loves you; I’m sure she’d—”

  “I got rejected from six schools, Salahudin,” I say because it’s the easiest explanation. “I’m stuck in Juniper.”

  “Noor,” he says after a long, quiet moment. “Why are you crying?”

  Because I hurt, I want to say. My back hurts. My head hurts. Because I’m scared.

  “I have to go,” I say. “Out of battery.”

  I hang up. Turn off my phone. Turn off the light. For a while, I lie there in silence. But there’s too much in my head. So I pull on my headphones, listen to the gunshots that ring out at the beginning of “My Life,” and let the Game speak my pain for me.

  chapter 21

  Sal

  Trying to get Noor to talk about her feelings is about as successful as trying to shake down Uncle Faisal for cash.

  “You hung up on me, Noor.” The quad fills up around us and I lower my voice. I have five minutes between English and Trig to get her to talk—I won’t see her again until after school. By then, she’ll change the subject relentlessly until I want to backflip off a cliff.

  “I told you,” she says. “My battery ran out.”

  “You were crying. Why?”

  “I don’t want to go to community college.” The dark shine of her eyes is almost lost in the purple shadows beneath them. Even with the makeup on, I can tell she hardly slept. “I’m a snob. And when Jamie finds out, she’ll be horrible.”

  “You still haven’t heard from UCLA. You never know—”

  My burner phone buzzes—but I ignore it. Since I started selling for Art, I figured out why he was gung ho about me taking over his turf at school. It’s a shit ton of work—and I do all of it while he collects his thirty percent.

  “There’s no way I get into UCLA,” Noor says. “I had to write a whole different set of essays for that application, and by the time I got to them, I was dead tired. I barely looked at the questions. For one of them, I went on about the liquor shop and tea with Auntie Misbah and music. Music, Salahudin.”

  “Did you write about Chai-kovsky?”

  “Did you just dad-joke me in the middle of my breakdown?”

  “You walked right into it. Anyway, tea and music isn’t so bad—”

  “I’m applying to the bio department.”

  Shit. “Right, well, that’s not great. But you can’t take it Bach, so—”

  “Stoooop.” She swings her backpack at me and I jump out of the way.

  “Okay, okay,” I say. “Send me the UCLA essay. I mean it. I bet it’s great.”

  My phone buzzes again, and Noor breaks away from me. “You should get that. Might be your dad. Oh, and can I get a ride after school? My bike’s—busted.”

  “Yeah,” I say, before realizing that she’s cleverly dodged my questions.

  “Noor—”

  But she’s gone, heading for gym, and even though I look stupid standing stock-still in the quad, trying to get one last glimpse of her, it’s worth it when she smiles at me over her shoulder.

  “Nice side hustle you’ve got, Sal.” Jamie Jensen breaks away from her friends and falls into step with me. She’s much shorter and I’m about to be late to Trig, so she’s soon jogging to keep up. I find this oddly satisfying.

  “Usually I do business with Art,” she says. “But he says—”

  “I’m not selling to you, Jamie.”

  She rears back as if I’ve slapped her. I’m thinking she doesn’t hear “no” often.

  “You want to make money, right? Mine’s as good as anyone else’s.”

  “It’s really not.”

  “It is when I want a month’s worth of stuff.”

  A month of Adderall will net me a few hundred bucks, even after Art takes his slice. I’ve socked away more than two grand. But First Union has been calling twice a day. They want their money and I’m still short.

  Jamie senses me wavering. “I’ll throw in an extra hundred dollars.”

  I do a quick calculation in my head. We got a new weekly tenant—one of Curtis’s co-workers. I’m close. Jamie’s money could put me over the top.

  She’s smiling. Satisfied. Like she can tell how much I need it. “Meet me—”

  “Nah.” I walk a little faster. “Get your fix somewhere else.”

  “What does your girlfriend think about this?” Jamie asks, and I think of that old movie Jaws, where, when the shark attacks, all I could see were fins and fangs. Jamie’s teeth are nicer. But when she grins, the effect is the same.

  “Should I tell her about your operation? Or wait—is she in it with you? Selling out of that little liquor store?”

  A lifetime of putting up with motel guests who casually ask for condoms or five cans of Spam has given me a solid poker face. So Jamie attacks from another angle.

  “Don’t know why she’s been so grumpy lately.” Jamie gives me a cunning look. “She got into the schools she wanted.”

  I stifle a laugh. Noor says Jamie will make a good politician—but I disagree. She’s too artless to be truly manipulative.

  “Piss off, Sherlock.”

  “Which college is Noor going to?” Jamie demands. Her petulance throws me off. Ama’s funeral flashes in my mind, those moments when she was lowered to the earth, and my abu clutched at the coffin moaning, “Vapas dey dey.” Give her back.

  How can a moment like that exist in the same world as Jamie’s pettiness? The gulf between them is so vast that it makes no sense.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I stop outside the Trig classroom and give Jamie all of my attention. “She’s never done anything to you. Why do you hate her?”

  “She deserves to know that you’re a drug d—”

  “Tell her what you want. It’s not like she pays attention to you.”

  I slam the classroom door in Jamie’s face. I try to forget about her.

  But her threat gnaws at me.

  * * *

  By the time I meet Noor at my car after school, I have two dozen texts on my phone that tell me it’s going to be a lucrative night. I’ve learned my lesson, though. I turn it off.

  “You seem happy,” Noor says as I start the car.

  I want to tell her what a relief it was to pay my cell phone bill and buy a full cart of groceries with milk and apples and strawberries.

  Plenty of kids at Juniper High have money issues. In this town, either your parents work at the military base and live well, like Art’s or Jamie’s, or they don’t and you scrape by. There’s some middle ground, but not much.

  But no one talks about paying bills or buying eggs. In the end, most of the kids at school can count on having a roof over their heads.

  Then again, that might just be how it seems. Maybe there are other kids like me, trying to make a legit dinner out of lal mirch and rice, knowing that if they talk about it, they’ll feel more freakish.

  “I’m happy because I’m with you,” I say in response to Noor’s comment. I figure it’s better than I’m happy because I can pay for gas, woo-hoo.

  But the awkward silence that fills the car makes me want to dissolve into the seat.

  Noor looks startled—probably because she thinks I fed her a line. Not even a clever one.

  Then again, she made that comment about impure thoughts last night. Which made me wonder if she had impure thoughts. About me.

  “Salahudin?” She waves her hand in front of my face as I pull out of the school parking lot. “Penny for your thoughts—”

  They are extremely, very, super impure and mostly about me kissing you. “Um—” My voice is strained and weird. I clear my throat. “You want me to drop you off at home?”

  “The store.” When she reaches for her seat belt, she gets a pained expression on her face. The color drains from her cheeks—something I’ve read about but never seen happen on a real human before.

  “Noor?” I say. “You okay?”

  “Seven schools. Six rejections.” She fishes her phone from her backpack. “We’ve talked about this. Hey, let me play this song for you.”

  Noor lets me change the subject when I don’t want to talk about something. Maybe I should let her do the same.

  Or maybe that’s the problem between us. Maybe when she’d said, “I’m in love with you,” I’d have seen how terrified she was to bare her soul. And maybe when she tried to kiss me, she’d have felt how afraid I was to have someone so close.

  Maybe we’d have understood each other.

  “I know there’s something wrong, and it’s not just the college thing,” I say.

  She turns slowly to me. There’s a plea in her eyes, but I don’t know if she wants me to dig deeper or let it go.

  I pull the car over, silent as the traffic passes us by. The wind shakes the Civic between its teeth.

  “Noor.” I take her hand in mine slowly, carefully. “Talk to me.”

  How can you know someone for years and still not know their inner currents? I want to sink into the swirls and eddies of her ocean. I want to understand her. But I can’t unless she lets me.

  She doesn’t let me.

  “It’s the college thing.” She pulls her hand away. “Really. Let’s go.” She says it in a voice that’s not hers. It’s Noor folded up and crumpled until she’s nothing but tired creases.

  I put the car into drive. After a minute, Noor plugs in her phone. The song that fills the car is old—older than both of us. “Shiver” by Coldplay, about a guy lamenting how invisible he is to someone he loves.

  I glance at Noor, but she’s looking out the window.

  I do see you, I want to say. I do. But not all of you.

  What don’t I see, Noor?

  What are you hiding?

  * * *

  After I drop Noor off, I pick up a bottle of pills, and some of the harder stuff Art gave me a few days ago.

  Heroin, I think as I grab a dozen bags from the storage shed. Call it what it is.

  The bags go into the pocket where I used to keep my journal—relegated to the bottom of my sock drawer. Once, I read that Teddy Roosevelt stopped journaling during the worst times in his life. Maybe he felt like I did—like writing down the worry and fear would make it sharper, honing the edges until it could cut like a knife.

  I get to work, and nearly four hundred dollars later, I arrive home to find all the motel lights off. Abu must be passed out for the night.

  Or maybe he’s still drinking and doesn’t give a damn. Either way, we’ve missed out on three hours of business because he couldn’t bother to turn on our signs.

  I throw the car into park and hurry to unlock the office. It’s not until I’ve flipped all the lights on that I see the pale figure draped atop the bench in the front yard. Ashlee glances over her shoulder, waving through the office window.

  When I get outside, she pats the seat next to her. I don’t sit. “You walked right past,” she murmurs.

  “What are you doing here, Ashlee?”

  “Business keeping you out late?” She lifts an eyebrow.

  “You talked to Art?”

  She gives me a reproving look. “I would have lent you money, Sal. Or my mom would have. I love Art, but he’s an idiot.”