She rolls her eyes, but takes the spool and unwinds the line. I barely have to launch it. The mountain wind grabs the kite, yanking it so hard that Noor seems to lift up off the ground, insubstantial as paper.

  Fear seizes me at the sight. I’m convinced she’ll disappear, like Ama. But then she steadies herself and we drop to the sheet. Slowly she loosens the line, until Gandalf is a rippling white mote against the vast blue sky.

  Noor holds the spool in one hand and my fingers in the other. I marvel at the feel of her. Skin. Heat. As good as what a hug is supposed to feel like. I marvel that it doesn’t hurt.

  “Secret power,” I say. “Invisibility, flight, or transfiguration?”

  “Transfiguration into a dragon,” she says. “So I could fly. And I’d have a blue stomach so I could disappear into the sky.”

  “No, no, no,” I say. “You have to pick one power—”

  I’m two paragraphs deep into why her answer doesn’t qualify when I realize that her head is turned toward me.

  Speaking is suddenly a complex endeavor that requires too much coordination between my mouth and my brain.

  “Hey.” She lifts her hand, and it hovers close to my face. I can feel her warmth.

  “Hi,” I say, and then lean into her hand for a few seconds. I pull away before it starts to feel bad. She doesn’t seem upset. We reel in Gandalf, and make bulrush boats to race across the stream.

  “Three stones each,” Noor says. “Whoever sinks the other gets the last piece of chocolate.”

  I win, because her aim is shit, but give her the chocolate anyway. We argue over dumb celebrity feuds and listen to a dozen songs she hadn’t yet introduced me to.

  “You’ve been holding out on me,” I accuse her. “You know I can’t find this shit on my own.”

  “I was saving them,” she says. “For a day like this.”

  I glance at her phone. Something called “I See You” plays, by Kygo. When I see the album title—Kids in Love—I think I’ll float away. The old floral sheet becomes an island without time. I don’t hate Ama and Abu for their choices. Riaz isn’t a monster; Noor’s not in pain.

  It’s like last year’s ill-fated trip to Veil Meadows—but done right. Noor’s warmth mingles with mine, and the fear that’s hung on her like a pall since this morning starts to dissipate.

  When night falls, we lie back and marvel at the stars. Noor points out Orion’s Belt, and flutters her eyelashes.

  “He’s my celestial boyfriend,” she says. “So noble with his bow.”

  I glare up at the constellation, feeling a surge of hatred for it. “Screw him, then.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Of a stupid bunch of stars?” I snort, then consider. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  She shivers in my sweatshirt, because it’s colder than a penguin’s armpits up here at night. The meadows are officially closed, but there’s no one to bother us. When Noor taps my legs, I pull up my knee, confused, and she nudges my legs apart, settling herself between them, so her back is against my chest.

  Too many synapses are firing. Too much of her is touching too much of me. My whole body prickles.

  She goes still. But not in a bad way. In an I’m-trying-to-learn-your-language way. After I relax a little, she leans back. Uncertain, I hold out my hands like I’m balancing on a tightrope; then she skims her palms along my forearms and folds my fingers into hers. I feel the heat of her along my legs, my stomach, my arms, my chest. She’s everywhere.

  I hold her carefully, worried my arms are too heavy on the parts of her that hurt. She pulls me closer. The long curve of her neck begs to be kissed, so I bend my head, breathe her in, and bring my lips to her skin. She makes a funny sound, between a gasp and a moan.

  Which makes me feel things that I’m very concerned she will also feel, so I pull my body back a little.

  “Are you okay?” she whispers, and even that sends tingles through me, because her voice is low and sort of raspy, and I’m stupidly, spectacularly turned on by it.

  “ Yes,” I try to say. “Ynnghh” is what comes out.

  “Salahudin,” she says. “I owe you an apology.”

  I’m bewildered. “You do?”

  “When we were little, I heard Auntie say a million times, ‘I’m going to hug you, okay, Putar?’ And back in the fall, during the Fight, I still threw myself at you. I didn’t—I didn’t give you a choice.”

  “I don’t know why I’m . . .” Like this, I was going to say. But I find it hard to talk at all.

  She flips around fully and I find I miss her warmth.

  “You’re perfect,” she whispers. “Okay?” I look up into her eyes glimmering darkly and put my hands lightly on her waist. Then I run one thumb along the soft skin above her hips. Her whole body trembles, but when I stop, she growls at me. More.

  Her hands are on my forearms, my biceps, my shoulder. She runs her fingers through my hair, watching my face all the while. When she rakes her nails lightly across my scalp, with torturous slowness, I hold her closer. Something inside me coils in tight, and every part of me tingles, awake in the best possible way.

  She pushes me onto my back. Her hair comes down on either side of my face, stars twinkling between like she’s made of them. Her eyes drop to my mouth.

  “Are—um—are you sure?” I ask. “You’re hurt.”

  “I want to feel something else,” she whispers. “Just for a little while. I want to not hurt. I want to forget. Help me forget, Salahudin.”

  When our lips touch I’m sure I’ll transform into a living current. Suddenly, I need her, all of her. I need her to be close to me. I sling an arm around her waist and pull her against me.

  Everything falls away. There are no shadows between us. We’re bound together, her lips on mine, the flare of her waist underneath my fingers. I explore her mouth deeper and she sighs into me, her hands light on my arms, my chest.

  She pulls away, gasping for breath. The grass around us ripples and sings an ode to Noor, the moon lights her hair blue. Her big brown eyes are happy and hot on mine. Remember this, I think, almost frantic. Remember.

  “Whoa.” She smiles; my heart clenches and I want to kiss her again, but I don’t, because then we might do things that we’re not ready for and I refuse to mess this up, since it’s the best thing that’s happened in my entire life.

  “Noor,” I whisper. “We should stop. If we don’t, we might, um—”

  She rolls away from me. “We’re not supposed to do this,” she says. “You know. Religiously. Not unless we’re . . .” She looks away, embarrassed.

  I grin at her. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  “Oh my God, no!” I don’t have to see her to know she’s blushing.

  “I’m teasing,” I say. “Anyway, there are probably other things God gets more upset about than two people kissing,” I say. “Wars. Bombings. Murders.”

  “Monsters,” Noor whispers. With that one word, reality slams into both of us like a meteor. These past few hours, this sheet, this meadow—it was all a distraction from the terrible shit that has happened to her. That has happened to us both.

  “Noor,” I say, and she turns away from me. “Will you—will you tell me what happened?”

  “Nothing—I—” Her voice is choked, her demeanor as panicked as it was when I first picked her up. “Chachu is the only reason I’m standing here. He—he drove—”

  She stops herself.

  “I can’t talk about it,” she mumbles. “I just want to forget. I’m sorry.”

  We gather up the sheet and walk along a moonlit path that traces the curves of the river. I wish I could beam her to a hospital in the blink of an eye. I wish I could beam Riaz off the planet. Into the vacuum of space, where he could suffocate. Or to Mordor, where the orcs could eat him.

  I need Noor to tell me what happened. Because I’m afraid that if she doesn’t, she’ll convince herself to go back to Riaz’s house. To go on as before.

  “Memory is weird,” I say. Maybe to feel safe talking about scary shit, she needs me to take the leap first. Maybe to open the door to her secret, she needs to hear someone else’s. “I say I don’t know why touch makes me uncomfortable. But I wonder—I wonder if something happened to make me feel that way.”

  I trip over the words that I’ve never let myself think, let alone say.

  “I—I know something bad happened,” I whisper. “My body knows it. I think that—that’s why control is so important to me. But I don’t remember this bad thing. Not remembering makes it feel like it didn’t happen. And if it didn’t happen, then I don’t know why I’m broken.”

  “You’re not broken.”

  “A part of me is broken,” I say. “Saying I’m not erases the fact that someone did something horrible to me. It erases that I’ve survived. Because yeah, maybe I’m broken, but I’m strong, too.”

  I turn inward, the way I’ve never let myself. To a strange space inside, an empty space that is pure white, the white of a funeral shroud, the white of a morgue floor, the white of an asylum wall. That space is the hurt. That space is the thing that happened. I want to find the moments that fill that space, but I don’t want to find them. I want to understand it, but I want to run away from it.

  I wonder if it will be like this when I am twenty-eight and thirty-eight and one hundred and eight. If I will one day die with that white space still open and gaping inside me, sharp-toothed and forever unknown.

  “I’m just saying,” I go on, “that there are some things we shouldn’t forget, because if we do, then bad people get away with bad shit. And we keep getting hurt.”

  “He gets so angry,” Noor says. “He tries not to. He’ll pace or smoke. Talk to himself. But nothing I can say is right. Nothing I do is right. And then he loses it. It’s like there’s a monster inside him.”

  “It’s him,” I say. “He’s the monster.”

  “Whenever he—he gets angry, I go into my head because it’s easier than thinking that this is all there will ever be. Except he’s this geyser of hatred and I’m the black hole where he pours it and sometimes it’s too much. But I messed up his whole life. Is it any wonder he’s mad?”

  “It’s not your fault.” I stop walking. “It’s not. Noor, stay at my place. I won’t bother you. Neither will my dad. He probably won’t even notice. I’ll sleep on the couch. Please.”

  “I can’t. You have enough to worry about,” Noor says. “Did you ever figure things out with First Union?”

  “I paid them but forget that—”

  “How?”

  She asks the question quickly enough that I do a double take.

  “I . . . heard some stuff,” she says. “About you and Art. I heard that you were . . . into some shit.”

  Maybe I should come clean. I’ve absorbed enough of Ama’s dramas to know that keeping secrets always has a cost. But Noor has a lot on her mind. We only just became okay. Telling her will ruin this beautiful, fragile thing between us.

  “A brown dude hangs out with Art,” I scoff. “Of course people are going to talk shit. Nothing’s going on.”

  Her face is in shadow and she hums something familiar, something slow that she’s played before.

  “ ‘Terrible Love,’ ” she says quietly. “By the National.”

  We walk the rest of the way in silence.

  chapter 39

  Noor

  How can the worst day of your life also be the best?

  Salahudin and I pack our stuff into the car and sit inside, fingers interlaced. We howl along to Jimi Hendrix singing “All Along the Watchtower.” I tell him about decking Jamie. He tells me what happened with his abu in the laundry room.

  I ask him if he’s been to Auntie Misbah’s grave yet. He doesn’t answer and I tell him a little about the hours before she died—though I don’t tell him everything.

  I’d stay forever in his car if I could. My music playing. His voice low and warm. But when it’s past midnight, he starts the engine.

  “My abu, Noor,” he says. “We got into it earlier. He’ll be worried. And . . .” His eyes sweep over my face. “I’m taking you to the hospital,” he says. “Please don’t threaten to jump out of the car. When we get there, I’ll call Imam Shafiq. He can help us figure out what to do about telling the police.”

  One time, when I was eight, someone heard me crying. The neighbors, maybe. The police showed up at the house. Chachu welcomed them in, brought me out. I smiled because he told me what would happen if I didn’t. They asked him a few questions. He knew just how to answer. They left.

  After that when things got bad, I’d stare at myself in the mirror. Tell someone, I’d think. Just tell someone. But who would I tell? The cops wouldn’t believe me. Teachers at school would call CPS and I’d be put in foster care. Chachu was family. My only family. If I lost him, I’d have no one. I didn’t want to get Auntie Misbah involved. What if he hurt her, too?

  I had so many excuses, each one born of fear. I was afraid I wouldn’t be believed. I’d be screaming “He’s hurting me” out into the world and the world would keep on going.

  I close my eyes and lean my head back. The road is smooth beneath the wheels, the window cool against the bruise on my cheek. Anna Leone sings “Once” about what it means to move on from the past.

  “Sometimes, Salahudin,” I say, “it feels like too much. I think about the shit we’ve read in school. Those books all about one problem. A kid who’s bullied. A kid who’s beaten. A kid who’s poor. And I think of us and how we’ve won the shit-luck lottery. We have all the problems.”

  “Nazar seh bachau.” He utters Auntie Misbah’s oath against the evil eye so fervently that I laugh.

  Famine comes when you lament the flood, I hear Auntie Misbah say in my head. It could always be worse.

  “Do you think our adulthood will make up for everything we’ve had to deal with as kids?” I ask him.

  “Like we get out of here and you go to med school and I become a writer and our lives will be amazing?”

  “They don’t have to be amazing. Just not . . .” My face throbs. “Not this.”

  “You’re going to escape this place, Noor.” He looks over at me. “You’re going to become a doctor. Your adulthood is going to make up for all of it.”

  Hope kindles in my chest as he says it. He sounds as sure as Ama did when she talked about God. Sure enough to make me believe.

  Salahudin takes the turnoff into Juniper, and seeing those tiny lights draw near makes me shudder. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to face what comes next.

  “What about you?” I distract myself. “You still have that writing contest to enter. And college classes to sign up for.”

  “Abu wants to sell the motel.”

  I wondered how long it would take Uncle Toufiq to come to that conclusion. “You could move to a bigger town,” I say. “I could go with you guys. Go to community college. Get away from Chachu. Your abu could get help.”

  “No way.” Salahudin’s hands are tight on the steering wheel. “The Clouds’ Rest mattered too much to Ama for me to let it go.”

  “Remember that song your ama loved? ‘The Wanderer’?” I ask, and he nods. “The entire thing is based on a Bible passage about how you shouldn’t put value in things. In places. All of that is meaningless and it will just make you feel empty. Your ama knew that, Salahudin. She’d understand if you guys sold the Clouds’ Rest.”

  He’s shaking his head. “You’re like the narrator in ‘One Art,’ ” he says. “Telling me that it’s okay to lose things. But I can’t. Ama would be so disappointed. Trust me. I knew her the way you didn’t.”

  No you didn’t, I want to say. Instead, I keep quiet. We’re in Juniper now. The streets are mostly empty. I want to forget about the hospital, to keep driving like this forever. But when we get to the main road, Salahudin takes a left toward the giant red cross in the distance and speeds up.

  My stomach twists.

  I don’t want to do this. I just want to sleep. I’m about to say it when lights flash behind us. A siren blares.

  “What the hell?” Salahudin is instantly tense, which is weird. As a rule, he keeps his emotions leashed tight.

  “Driving while brown,” I say. “How dare you?”

  Salahudin doesn’t laugh.

  “I must have been speeding,” he says. “Shit. Shit.”

  The car door slams behind us. The trim figure of a cop gets larger in the rearview. Salahudin takes a deep breath.

  “Hey. It’s fine.” I touch Salahudin’s wrist. He jerks away, like my skin burns him. “Salahudin, it’s going to be fine.”

  My face twinges. The bruises—the cuts. If the cop sees me, he’s going to think Salahudin did this to me. No wonder my friend is nervous.

  As the cop reaches Salahudin’s window, I pull up my hood, and lean my head against the window. Maybe if I pretend I’m sleeping, he won’t look closely at me.

  “You two are out pretty late.” The cop shines his flashlight in Salahudin’s face, letting it linger, before flashing it over me in a cursory fashion. He sounds bored as he asks for license and registration.

  “Speed limit is twenty-five,” he says as Salahudin hands them over. “You were at forty-five, easy.”

  “I’m sorry, officer.” Salahudin’s voice shakes. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, and I want to take them just so he’ll stop. “I’ll slow down.”

  “Where were you headed?”

  “The hospital. My friend’s—not feeling well.”

  The officer turns his flashlight on me and I hold a hand up.

  “Please put down your hand, miss, and look at me.”