“Did you come here after the Fight?”

  “No,” I admit. “Felt too weird.”

  My burner phone buzzes softly. I’ve ignored it all day, so when Noor gets up to refill her soda, I take a quick look. A bunch of numbers I don’t recognize, and one I do. Ashlee.

  She’s been asking for painkillers again. I know it’s bullshit to suddenly acquire morals when you are dealing people poison. But when she called, I wanted to hang up because I heard Kaya in the background. I heard Ashlee’s mom calling them both.

  At the same time, Ashlee’s pain is real. And I need money. She knows what she’s doing, I tell myself. She’ll be fine.

  Ashlee: Look up.

  I’m snapped out of my thoughts. Ashlee is in a booth on the other side of Thurber’s with Kaya and her mom, both of whom have their backs to me. When I meet her gaze, she smiles, and I’m struck by how gaunt she looks. Like she’s lost ten pounds in the few days since I’ve seen her.

  As her mom gathers up Kaya and throws out their trash, Ashlee gestures me over.

  I look away—down—anywhere but at Ashlee. I sense her gaze flicking between Noor and me, and I glance up in time to see her stiffen. Then she follows her mom and Kaya out.

  Noor stares thoughtfully after her. “Next time, maybe say hi.”

  “I thought you didn’t like Ashlee,” I say as Noor finishes her fries and starts poaching mine.

  “You thought wrong,” she says. “Hey, I got my first F today. On the ‘One Art’ draft essay.”

  I put down my sandwich. “Is that why you got so sick in class?”

  “No.” Just like that, Noor seems to lose her appetite. “Six rejections, Salahudin. Thank God Chachu never checks the mailbox. If he even knew where I was applying—” She shudders. “I haven’t heard from UCLA. No email. No envelope. Every time I try to get into the stupid portal, it says there’s an error. Probably because they kill the accounts of everyone they reject. To them, I no longer exist.”

  Her eyes go distant and I wonder if she’s in the village where her family died, or with Ama at the hospital, or alone in Chachu’s house.

  “You can’t just give up.”

  “You’re telling me I can’t give up? How’s your contest entry coming, Salahudin?”

  “I’m different,” I say. “I have to deal with the motel. Anyway, I always knew I was going to Juniper Community. I’ll transfer to a four-year eventually. But you need to get out of here, Noor.”

  “I only applied to seven schools, bro.”

  I smile to hide how much I hate that she just called me bro. “You haven’t actually heard from UCLA. It only takes one yes.”

  “I’m low-key offended you’re trying to get rid of me, Salahudin. Don’t you want me to stick around?”

  “Of course I want you to stay,” I say. “But I love you too much to—ah—”

  A flush creeps up her face.

  “Oh my God,” she whispers. “What is this weird hot feeling? Am I blushing? What is the point of being brown if you can blush? Not blushing is literally one of the only perks we get.”

  “I don’t see anything.” I look purposefully toward the ceiling, even though Noor blushing is one of the best things I’ve ever witnessed, and I’d give a month of my life to watch the whole thing again.

  Noor covers her face with her fingers. “A gentleman,” she says. “Sparing my dignity. It’s okay.” She drops her hands, composed once more. “I know you meant it as a friend.”

  “Untrue.” I say it before I think. Because I’m an idiot.

  Or because I’m done trying to control everything. The brave version of me, the one who pulled the fire alarm this morning, wants her to know how I feel.

  Slowly, so she can pull away if she wants, I reach for her hand. When I take it, she squeezes and closes her eyes. She seems—sort of happy. Sort of not. But something about that look shoots straight to my lower belly.

  Damn.

  “You know I’ve got . . . some issues,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says. “You and me both.”

  “Tell me. The other night, you—”

  “You tell me your secrets, Salahudin Malik.” Noor opens her eyes. “And I’ll tell you mine.”

  For a moment I skim a dark lake in my mind, like a bird dipping a claw into the water, only to flinch at the bone-chilling cold.

  I go clammy, my skin prickling, and let go of her. We sit there, staring at each other. Food forgotten. Only a foot between us, but it feels like the whole universe.

  chapter 25

  Noor

  After Thurber’s, we drive to the motel. A familiar gray SUV is parked in the driveway.

  “Imam Shafiq.” Salahudin rests his forehead against the steering wheel. He’ll have to hide Uncle Toufiq’s alcohol. Rush to clean the house. Pretend his father’s not a drunk.

  I fidget, imagining Salahudin’s expression if Imam Shafiq mentions the conversation he and I had about Uncle Toufiq.

  “I should get home.” I hop out of the car and Salahudin’s head jerks up.

  “Don’t leave,” he whispers. Khadija’s in the SUV, her window rolled down. “Come inside for five minutes? Distract the imam? While I hide Abu’s . . . stuff.”

  Great passions grow into monsters in the dark of the mind; but if you share them with loving friends they remain human, they can be endured.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t clean up the house or hide your abu, Salahudin,” I say. “Maybe Imam Shafiq needs to see that.”

  “No one needs to see that.” Salahudin gets out of the car, grabbing my backpack from the back seat. “Abu would be so much easier to hate if he were meaner. If he got mad or broke things. If he used his fists, the way the drunks in movies do.”

  My body goes numb at those words. “Imam Shafiq ran mosques in big cities,” I make myself say. “He’s dealt with worse than your dad.”

  “Asalaam-o-alaikum, guys.” Khadija waves from the driver’s seat. She has a giant file open in her lap.

  “Hi,” Salahudin says. “I mean, Walaikum Asalaam, Sister Khadija. Can I—do you need something?”

  Khadija shakes her head. She looks between us and smiles. “Shafiq wanted to check on your dad. He meant to come by after the funeral, but he got wrapped up in work. He’s waiting for you inside.”

  Salahudin runs his fingers through his hair. It sticks up crazily. I want to fix it. Put my palms on his shoulders. Some things are out of our hands, I want to say. And maybe for good reason. Maybe you need to ask for help. But I feel weird doing any of that in front of Khadija.

  “The thing is,” Salahudin says, “my dad’s probably—ah—”

  “We all have our struggles, Salahudin.” Khadija says his name, but she looks at me. “Shafiq knows that. It’s not his place to judge.”

  I can’t look away. She’s talking to Salahudin. So why is she staring at me?

  Khadija’s phone rings. “I should grab this.” She turns away and Salahudin looks at me with puppy eyes.

  “Noor—”

  “Don’t lie to Imam Shafiq. He’s a good guy, Salahudin. And coming from me . . .” I don’t like people, mostly. Salahudin knows it.

  He hauls up my backpack and hands it to me. “If you feel shitty again or you hear from UCLA, call me,” he says. “You told me not to get stuck in my own head. Take your own advice.”

  The walk home is too short. Chachu’s car is out front. My bike is still chained to the fence on the side of the house.

  The sun’s setting, the sky a color pink that deserves its own section in the dictionary. It’s light enough to walk, so I circle the block, stopping near a Joshua tree in the empty desert nearby.

  Izote de desierto, they’re called. Desert dagger. There’s a U2 album named after this tree. Chachu played it once when I was little and I loved it so much, I asked him to play it again. He refused. Hid the record. When I finally got my own phone, The Joshua Tree was the first album I bought.

  I think about what Khadija said. We all have our struggles. My fists clench. Another habit I’ve picked up from Chachu. Anger fills me up so fast. It’s like it’s just waiting in my mind. The second I pay attention to it, it takes over.

  Anger doesn’t really cover what I feel, though. You get angry because someone almost runs you over in the bike lane. Angry because someone cuts in line at Walmart.

  What’s the word for when someone drinks so much, they are ruining your best friend’s life? Or the word for a man so vengeful about his own past that he wants to destroy your future? What’s the word for a woman who was sick for months, but refused to go to the doctor until it was too late? The word for the girl at school whose personal mission is to mess with your head?

  Anger’s not the right word.

  Rage. That’s what this feeling is, eating me up.

  I scream into the cold night. Almost before the sound is born, I smother it, slapping my hands over my mouth. I was so loud that I freaked myself out.

  My better sense kicks in. I bottle my rage. Shove it deep in my head. Anger won’t help anything. I don’t even know who I’m mad at. Chachu? Toufiq Uncle? Jamie? Misbah Auntie? God?

  Myself?

  Forgive, Misbah Auntie told me when she was dying. Her last attempt to guide me, to help me. Forgive.

  But it makes no sense to me.

  Who do I forgive, Auntie Misbah?

  How do I forgive?

  chapter 26

  Misbah

  November, then

  Juniper, California

  My father took a government posting in the city of Quetta when I was a year from matriculating. As our driver passed vividly painted trucks on the mountain roads of Balochistan province, Baba turned to me.

  “Quetta is filled with so many apple orchards, little butterfly,” he said, “that you can taste their sweetness in the air. It is a place in the clouds, five thousand feet above the sea. Did you know it was leveled completely in the 1935 earthquake?”

  “And they rebuilt it? The whole thing?”

  “Yes,” Baba said. “It still stands, a testament to the strength of humanity.”

  Quetta was dry and dusty in the summer, but the mountains around it were draped in snow in the winter, a promise of something pure. We only lived there for two years, but I loved those mountains on sight.

  I remembered Quetta here, in America, as Toufiq navigated our green Honda along a road that hugged the rocky blue Sierra Nevada. The car window was freezing. The night sky was like Quetta’s, too, clear enough to see the thick cloud of the galaxy exploding across it, illuminating the snow-dipped peaks, giving them an unearthly feel.

  Baba would love this place. He wept when I left, though my mother was stalwart. It pained me to know that we would rarely, if ever, look at the same stars at the same time.

  “Will Ajeet be there?”

  Ajeet Singh had brokered the motel’s sale. Toufiq knew him from university. “It will give you a good income in case you have difficulty with your job,” Ajeet had told us.

  He knew Toufiq well.

  “No, but he’ll visit,” Toufiq said. “I’ve heard there are a few Indian families. The base has people coming through all the time. Many stories for you, my heart. And Yosemite is not so far. We can visit. Though, I never thought—”

  —that this would be how. With both of his parents dead. Uncles and aunts gone. His cousins scattered. He was a rare Pakistani with little family. No one to keep him tethered to a place that only brought him pain. When he got the engineering job at Juniper’s military base, there was no decision to make. Pakistan was my home, but not his. And I wanted him to be happy.

  We drove down a two-lane highway for so long that the dotted yellow line began to blur. After hours, Toufiq pointed to a vast, darkened valley in the east.

  “There it is.”

  Lights twinkled in the distance, cheerful against the empty midnight desert surrounding them. As we turned off the highway and down a narrow connecting road, strange rock formations rose up around us. It felt as if we were in another world. My stomach jumped in excitement. This was the beginning of a new adventure, the kind I’d wanted to have as a girl.

  The town appeared almost abandoned, other than a McDonald’s where a lone car dawdled. A police vehicle roamed the main avenue, slowing down as we passed.

  “There.” I pointed to a battered green street sign beside a parking lot that said MCFINN’S FORD. “Yucca Avenue.”

  We parked beside a cluster of low structures. In front of them, a waist-high white wall formed a rectangle around three pale trees and a stretch of dead grass. The trees clacked in the wind.

  Beyond the front yard, a squat building with a broad glass window had a single light glowing within. The rest of the motel was dark. A cat watched from the brick wall, unafraid.

  When I emerged from the car, the wind was so strong that it nearly ripped my hijab off. A large, unlit sign moaned like a cranky old man. YUCAIPA INN MOTEL, it read.

  “The first thing we must do,” I told Toufiq, “is give this place a new name.”

  He removed our suitcases from the boot of the car and peered owlishly at the sign. “Why?”

  “Yucaipa comes at the end of the alphabet,” I told him. “Bad for business. And we need something melodic. Something that makes our guests feel welcome.”

  Toufiq wrestled with the stiff lock, and we flipped on the inner lights to find a small, sparse office and a freezing apartment. An envelope from the last owner sat on a rickety desk. The place smelled like dust and soap. The bed, in the larger of two back rooms, was stripped bare and had a suspicious stain.

  I pulled out a sheet from one of the suitcases. As soon as the sheet settled, Toufiq collapsed onto it. He was asleep in moments.

  I did not understand how he could be tired. My excitement was so great my feet did not even touch the floor. I ran my fingers along the fat-bricked chimney that echoed with the howls of a wild wind. I passed through a small bedroom with a window that would spill sun onto a crib, should we be so blessed. The L-shaped kitchen had gleaming linoleum floors, and a wooden counter so old I could carve my initials into it with a fingernail. There were crackers in the cabinets, and I nibbled at one, then slathered it with dark honey from my mother’s bees in Lahore.

  The ceiling crackled rhythmically beneath the soft paws of an animal traversing it. Beneath it, I paced my new home, considering.

  A name could make a person. It could make a place, too. I thought of hotel names I’d seen. The Avari. The Pearl Continental. The Park Lane. None of those names seemed right.

  It came to me in the middle of the night, deep in dreams. I shook Toufiq awake.

  “The Clouds’ Rest,” I whispered to him. “We’ll call it the Clouds’ Rest Inn Motel.”

  chapter 27

  Sal

  Inside the apartment, Abu is at the dining table. Imam Shafiq sits across from him, and I’m relieved that I cleaned the kitchen this morning. The smell of Pine-Sol almost masks the sweat-and-liquor reek rolling off Abu.

  At least his bottles are out of sight. And he’s upright.

  Imam Shafiq nods in greeting. “Sit down, Salahudin. I was chatting with your dad about how I’d love to see him at the masjid. I’m there Friday mornings, too, if you want to come when it’s less crowded.”

  As I can count the number of Muslims in Juniper on two hands, I don’t think crowded is a word that applies to our one-room mosque.

  “Definitely.” I nod anyway. “Thank you.”

  My father fidgets like a surly kindergartner. It’s embarrassing and I practically tear holes in my palms, my fists are curled so tight. Just for one night, I wish he’d behave like a damn adult.

  “Do you want something to eat, Imam Shafiq, or—” I blurt it out. The habits of generations of Pakistani hosts die hard.

  “I brought karahi over,” Shafiq says, out-Pakistani-ing me. “Khadija made the rotis so they’re . . . country-shaped, instead of round? But they taste good. Let me see if she wants to join.”

  “How much have you had?” I ask Abu when Shafiq is gone. “Can you sit through a meal?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Abu, he made dinner.” Which is more than your drunk ass can manage. I don’t say it, but he flinches at the way my voice bites. “The least you can do is eat it.”

  “I didn’t invite him.” Abu almost whispers the words. He’s not belligerent. Just confused.

  “Go shower,” I say. His hands shake, and I steel myself and take them. His head jerks up. I’ve probably touched him twice in the weeks since Ama died, and once was to wake him up when I couldn’t find the car keys.

  “Please, Abu—can you just try? He and Khadija were Ama’s friends.”

  Maybe it’s that I’m touching him. Maybe it’s that I mention Ama. Probably it’s that he hasn’t had a chance to get deep into the bottle. His shoulders straighten. He looks into my face and my eyes get hot, because I can’t remember the last time he did that.

  Abu? I want to say, as if the man who’d shuffled through the house for the last two years were a stranger and I could finally kick him out and welcome back my real dad.

  Abu squeezes my hands. “Okay.” He stands and I think about how Noor kept telling me to talk to him. I should have tried again after it went wrong the first time. “You two get started. I will join you.”

  By the time the shower is running, Shafiq is back with a tureen of food but no Khadija.

  “Prosecutor’s office is trying to pull a fast one,” he says. Khadija’s a criminal defense attorney. “She’ll come pick me up in a bit.”

  I take the tureen from him—it’s still warm and it smells so good I want to abscond with it. Pour the entire thing down my throat while snarling at anyone who gets close.

  Shafiq glances at where Abu was sitting. “Did I scare off your dad?”