Shit. I do, and the flashlight stays way longer on me than I want it to. I feel the cop taking in every bruise. Every scratch. I can’t see his face very well, but I spot his name tag. MARKS.

  “Wait here.” Marks’s tone is hard. Cold. He disappears to his car. His radio crackles.

  “Shit,” Salahudin says. “I know this guy. He almost arrested Abu at the hospital the day Ama died.” He glances over his shoulder. Then he lunges for the glove compartment. He grabs something from it. A paper bag.

  He scans the back seat and finally hides the bag beneath a floor mat, then shoves my backpack on top.

  “Salahudin, what—”

  “It’s fine,” Salahudin says, but I can tell he’s talking to himself. Not me. “Everything is fine.”

  Officer Marks is still in his car. Someone passes slowly—another cop, and pulls in ahead of us.

  Salahudin’s breath hitches. He grabs at his cargo pants. Whatever he tears out shines dully. He hands the objects to me. Both plastic. One solid, one slippery—a pill bottle, a baggie.

  “What is this?” I whisper. “Salahudin?”

  “Shove them under your seat,” he hisses. “Hurry!”

  I don’t think. I just do what he says, right as Officer Marks reappears.

  “Mr. Malik.” He has a hand resting on his belt. Not quite on his gun. But not far. “Please step out of the vehicle.”

  “Hey,” I say. “He didn’t do this.” I gesture to my face. “It wasn’t him—”

  “Miss, stay where you are. Mr. Malik, I need you to get out of the car. Now.”

  “Sure,” Salahudin says. “No problem.”

  Salahudin moves like he’s new to his body. His skin is blue in the squad car’s spotlight. A gust of wind blows a tumbleweed past and dust swirls. Across the street a truck slows down to rubberneck. The desert outside the car feels so big. Like it goes on forever. Like there’s nothing else but us, this car, and the emptiness beyond.

  My panic rises. It has no outlet. “Why are you getting him out of the car?” I blurt. “Just write him a ticket so we can go.”

  “Miss.” Marks speaks slowly, as if to a little kid. “We’re just going to talk real quick.”

  Everything will be fine. Nothing awful will happen because life has been shitty for too long and neither of us deserves for it to get worse.

  We’ll tell this story years from now. We’ll laugh about it.

  Marks has Salahudin against the car.

  “Why do you need to talk if he was speeding?” I call out the window. The question comes out angrier than I mean it to.

  Calm down, Noor. Hold it in.

  But I always hold it in. I always hide what I feel. It hasn’t done me any good.

  “This is bullshit!” I yell it now, too enraged to be afraid.

  Officer Marks radios for backup. There are already two cop cars and three officers here. They all have guns. We have snacks and a wizard kite.

  I reach for the door handle. Then I think of the time Chachu called the police when a customer started breaking bottles. The guy was mad because Brooke carded him. The cops arrested Chachu instead. That’s how it goes in small towns. Juniper’s no different.

  If I get out, I might make things worse. So I sit back. I seethe.

  Salahudin’s door hangs open. His window, too. The officer pats him down and I can’t see his face, but I can imagine him grimacing.

  Then Salahudin curses. I lean over his seat, trying to figure out what is going on.

  The officer has pulled something out of Salahudin’s pockets. He keeps searching—and finds other items that are too small to see.

  A flash of silver. Salahudin turns, putting his hands behind his back. His jaw is tight—but that’s all I can make out of his face. I don’t understand what’s happening.

  And then I do.

  The officer is cuffing him.

  He’s arresting Salahudin.

  “No—hey!” I start to get out of the car. But another officer stands by my door, her hand out. I didn’t even notice her walk up.

  “Miss,” she says. “Stay in the vehicle.”

  “He’s arresting my friend. We didn’t do anything—”

  “Miss.” Her voice snaps and I jump. “Stay in the car. Hands on the dash, where I can see them.”

  I do as she asks. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” I say. “Just give him a ticket and let us go. He didn’t do anything. We didn’t do anything.”

  The cop exchanges a few words with Marks, and when she turns back to me, her voice is quieter.

  “I need you to get out of the car slowly—and walk with me over here, to the curb. I’m going to open the door now.”

  I do as she asks. When we get to the curb, she tells me to put my arms over my head.

  “I’m going to pat you down. Are you hurt anywhere else, other than your face?”

  “My ribs,” I say, and when she pats me down, her touch is gentle. I see her looking at my cheek, a furrow between her brows. Salahudin is also on the curb, but on the other side of the street. Two officers stand over him. I can’t hear what they’re saying.

  “Why are you arresting him?”

  “Your boyfriend knows why we’re arresting him.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend—and he didn’t do anything.”

  The officer—whose name tag says ORTIZ—sighs. “Does he get mad a lot?”

  “He never gets mad,” I say. “Ever.”

  “Who did this to your face? And don’t tell me you tripped and fell.”

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  Ortiz clucks. “You kiss your mama with that mouth?”

  “My mom died when I was six.”

  It’s not a sentence I say often. I don’t have to. Everyone at school knows I live with my uncle and aunt. Everyone who comes into the store knows it, too. And that’s pretty much my world. If anyone has ever been curious about my parents, they’ve never asked.

  I can’t see Ortiz’s reaction. It’s too dark, and she has a flashlight on me. But a few seconds go by, and she clears her throat.

  “Does your friend make you sell drugs?”

  “No!”

  “Do you make him sell drugs?”

  “No,” I say. “And I’m done talking to you.”

  I practically spit in her face. People always see the wrong things. Jamie looked at me and saw a cheater. Ortiz looks at Salahudin and sees an abuser. But they’ll look at Jamie and see a popular girl instead of a racist asshole. They’ll look at Riaz and see a savior who took in his orphaned niece instead of a monster.

  “Look,” Ortiz says. “I can’t help you unless you help me. Your boyfr—your friend—is in cuffs. He can’t hurt you.”

  “He didn’t hit me.”

  “Let’s set that aside for now. You think we’ll find anything when we’re searching the car?”

  I glance at the Civic. The trunk is open. Gandalf is on the ground, half under the boot of one of the cops. Two more officers search the front seat. Tires crunch as another squad car pulls up.

  Salahudin talks—I hear his voice but not what he’s saying. Don’t tell them anything, I want to shout at him. The more you tell them, the more they can screw you.

  “Tell me where you guys hid your stash,” Ortiz says. “Maybe we’ll go easier on you. You’re young. And whether you want to admit it or not, it’s obvious he’s hurting you.”

  That stuff I shoved under my seat—pills. But Salahudin must have an explanation for them. Because he told me he wasn’t dealing. And he doesn’t lie to me.

  “Well, shit,” one of the officers searching the front seat of the car says. Suddenly, everyone is tense and silent.

  “Marks.” The officer breaks the quiet. “You need to come take a look at this.”

  chapter 40

  Sal

  It took me a long time to fit in when I was little. Before I knew what was wrong with me, the other kids seemed to. They sensed it in the way I kept my eyes down, and the way I didn’t seem to hear the teacher, and the way I did everything a second too late. They never talked to me more than they had to. They never sat next to me. They listened to that part of themselves that whispered: Different. Other.

  It made me sad. Because they didn’t know things I did. Because they could have been kind, but they didn’t know how to be.

  Maybe that sadness would have transformed into something worse. Bitterness. A lifetime of rage. But it was held up, robbed of its potency a month into first grade by a girl who showed up late and entered alone, no parent to fuss over her.

  Her clothes hung on her and her hair was pulled into two uneven braids. She didn’t speak English.

  A kind person would have looked at her and seen a six-year-old girl who needed love. The teacher, Mrs. Bridlow, looked at her and saw a pain in the ass. “This is Nora,” Mrs. Bridlow said. “She’s from Pack-ee-stan. Like Sal!” She put the girl in the only empty seat, next to me, in the back of the class.

  The other children talked and laughed and played. The girl and I stared at each other like two surly dogs, brown eyes locking, broken meeting broken-hearted, Salahudin meeting Noor.

  I didn’t know then what role those eyes would play in my life, how often I’d look into them, how often I’d look away. We didn’t say anything. We just stared. Neither of us seemed to find this strange.

  “What’s that?” I pointed to something purple and green on her arm.

  She covered it up with a hand, but didn’t speak.

  “Ghoray varga lagadha heh.” It looks like a horse, I said, since she was from Pakistan, and I wasn’t old enough to realize that she might not speak Punjabi.

  She peered down at it, as if she’d never considered that pain could take the shape of a farm animal. The teacher called us for story time; Noor followed me to the mat and sat next to me when the story began. She laughed when I laughed, which wasn’t when all the other kids laughed. At one point, she pointed to a spider making its way up the shelf of toys beside us. We watched it together.

  Suddenly, I understood why my ama told me, with that anxious look in her eyes, to make friends. Why all these kids clustered together. Because it felt good to have a friend.

  It was the first time I’d called someone that, in my head. And all other friends would never live up to the feeling I got that day from thinking that word, because there has never, ever been anyone quite like Noor.

  I think about that day now, as the cops pull the drugs from the car. As they put cuffs on her. As they push me into the hard plastic back seat of the police cruiser. As she turns to look at me through the glass, jaw clenched, eyes full. As she comes face-to-face with the extent of my lies and deceit and stupidity.

  As she realizes her life will never be the same.

  I watch, and I wonder at the horrific symmetry of it all. Outcasts always from then to now. From the moment that she saved me as a child to the moment that I’ve damned her as an adult.

  I wish she’d sat anywhere else that day, long ago. I wish I’d been horrible to her. I wish she’d been horrible to me. I’d trade every adventure we’ve ever had if it meant that she wouldn’t have to face what’s coming.

  But I can’t. Her life will forever be divided into the moment before we got pulled over and the moment after.

  And it is my fault.

  PART V

  I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

  some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

  I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  —Elizabeth Bishop,

  “One Art”

  chapter 41

  Misbah

  January, then

  I have never been a violent woman, but your first grade teacher, Roberta Bridlow, was so horrible that my fingers itched to give her a thappad across the back of her head, the way my nani did to anyone impertinent.

  Mrs. Bridlow had a small helmet of yellow-gray hair and lips that looked like she had eaten too much sour achar.

  “Salahudin.” Sall—ee—you—dinn. Her butchering of your beautiful name made me wonder how she became a teacher if she didn’t know how to read simple letters. “He’s unmotivated, Mrs. Malik.”

  “He’s six years old.”

  “He won’t write. He won’t read.”

  I crossed my arms. “He loves stories,” I said. “He will learn.”

  “Look,” she said. “I don’t know how it is where you come from, but here in America, parents have to be active participants in the school life of their children. I have thirty-two children in that class and I can’t help all of them.”

  “Just the white ones, then?”

  She opened and closed her mouth like a particularly stupid fish. “This—this has nothing to do with that. Sal—we call him Sal in class—isn’t thriving, Mrs. Malik. Does he speak English at home?”

  “He speaks perfect English. Punjabi, too.”

  “The multiple languages must be confusing him—”

  “Or perhaps you aren’t doing your job.”

  She swallowed so loudly I thought she’d choke on the sound. Then she cleared her throat. “Perhaps homeschooling—”

  “You want me to homeschool him because you cannot do your job.”

  “There are social issues, too, Mrs. Malik. He doesn’t fit in. He gets upset if the other children touch him. Is he—safe? At home? Are you? I knew a girl once who was married to a Muslim man and they can be—”

  I stood so fast the child’s chair I’d been sitting in landed on its back with a thunk. “I will be speaking with the principal about this conversation, Mrs. Bridlow.”

  I left. I did not speak to the principal. I spoke to her then-partner, Dr. Ellis.

  Your teacher did not bring up homeschooling again.

  But she was right that you struggled to fit in. I took you to a doctor—a therapist. She wanted to keep seeing you, but I was worried it would make you remember what happened. Make you relive it.

  It broke my heart, the way you had changed. Little things. Silence where there was once laughter. Reticence where once you would run to me. You didn’t seem to understand it yourself. Deep in the night, you would wake up and cry out. But worse was when you were quiet. Unreachable.

  I didn’t know what to do. Your father couldn’t help me, no matter what I said to him. Maybe I should have let you keep seeing the therapist. Maybe she would have helped you understand yourself.

  But I was young and foolish. I did not return to her. Instead I thought: Who my child becomes is not the sum of what happened to him. I would not let anyone break you. If a hug gave you no comfort, then perhaps a story would. If conversation alarmed you, perhaps kindness would soothe you. If the other children didn’t understand you, then I would speak to you of God, who understands us all, mind, heart, and soul.

  I tried, my son. I tried to give you back what that monster took. I hope it worked. Because now, as time escapes me, I realize the greatest thing he could have stolen from you was not your innocence, but your hope.

  chapter 42

  Noor

  May, now

  Friarsfield, California

  The booking area of the county lockup is packed. It sounds—and smells—like Juniper High’s girls’ locker room. The officer I’ve ridden with—I don’t see his name—hands me off to a stocky blond cop who uncuffs me and scans my fingerprints. She escorts me to a blank white wall. I don’t understand that she’s taking my mug shot until she says, “Look here,” and points to a tiny laptop camera.

  I wonder if Salahudin was brought to the county jail in Friarsfield, too. My chest hurts, thinking of him. I knew something weird was going on. But I didn’t want to believe it. And he didn’t think I was worth the truth.

  Twelve years of friendship, of him being the gravity that kept me from spinning into nothingness. And now I am cut loose.

  Why why why, Salahudin?

  No, he’s not Salahudin anymore. He’s the Liar.

  The officer finds a small metal desk, sets me down, and gets the basics. Name. Date of birth. Citizenship.

  “I need your green card.”

  “It’s—it’s in my things. But I know the number.”

  She notes it down. “Where were you born?”

  “Kot Inayat, Pakistan.”

  “Kot-a-who?”

  “Kot—In—ay—at.” I say it slowly. She makes me spell it.

  “Pakistan, huh? That’s near Afghanistan, right?” Her “Afghanistan” rhymes with “a span of man.” At my nod, she whistles. “A lot of terrorist types up there.”

  She says this like I might know them personally. Like maybe there are a few in my family.

  “Yeah, a ton. They’re all over the place.”

  If she catches my sarcasm, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she goes through the rest of the questions: Address. Occupation. Social security number.

  “Let’s step into the hall for your phone call.”

  I shake my head. There are only two people I’d call in this situation. One is dead and the other is a liar.

  The officer shrugs and takes me down a cinder block hallway to a plain white door. I know it’s a county jail and not the state pen. I know I’ll be in here for a few days, maybe. Not years.

  Still, I think of “Prisoner 1 & 2” by Lupe Fiasco. The collect call at the beginning. The cell doors clanking open and closed. That song taught me more about jail than anything on TV or in a book. When I first heard it, I was surprised that it wasn’t about fear.

  It was about anger. About despair.

  Songs help me process life. They help me feel. But right now, I don’t want to do either. I push the music from my head.