“Sure. Yeah.” I say it too quickly, ignoring the disappointed flip in my stomach. When I look down at her, she doesn’t meet my eyes, but I don’t mind. For a second, I think I’ll hug her. But I am afraid of what that would feel like.

  “For what it’s worth,” I say. “I’m really sorry.”

  It doesn’t take me long to get back to my street, and when the motel comes into view, I stop. Because when I walk inside, it won’t be home. Ama won’t be waiting for me. There will be a mess from dinner. Sheets to clean up. My passed-out father.

  Later when I can’t sleep, when I get up at three a.m. to wander the house like a shade, I won’t hear Ama puttering toward me, or see her face shining out of the dark.

  Chai, beta? She was so courtly when she asked. I’m making a cup and it’s no fun to drink it alone. Come, I’ll tell you the story of the woman with the silver-and-ruby heart who stole an entire room from under our noses!

  Ama, I hate tea.

  I know, she’d say. But I always hope.

  Hope didn’t help her, though. She hoped Abu wouldn’t be a drunk. She hoped that she’d get better. Hope was, in fact, a shit strategy.

  I sit down in the middle of the road, and the wave slams into me, pouring out of my eyes so fast that I can’t see. I thought I would eventually write about today. Order my thoughts, put my pain into words. Now I realize that I won’t. I can’t. Today is a poltergeist I’ll chain to the back of my brain, one forever linked to freezing desert wind and dirty asphalt and a loneliness so deep that it shouldn’t belong to this world.

  In the last few months, as Ama got sicker, as it finally sank in, I thought: One day my ama will die. Everything that she ever was will die with her. The way she walked quickly, and flour in her hair when she made roti, the lines in her forehead when she yelled at me for doing something stupid. Her Saturday morning parathas and her smell, cardamom and Pine-Sol and lotion.

  I figured that such thoughts would prepare me for her death. They didn’t.

  I’ll survive this. I’ll live. But there’s a hole in me, never to be filled. Maybe that’s why people die of old age. Maybe we could live forever if we didn’t love so completely. But we do. And by the time old age comes, we’re filled with holes, so many that it’s too hard to breathe. So many that our insides aren’t even ours anymore. We’re just one big empty space, waiting to be filled by the darkness. Waiting to be free.

  chapter 10

  Noor

  When Salahudin and I were ten, we broke into Chachu’s study in the back of the house. I knew better than to go in there. But Salahudin made me brave.

  Or stupid.

  He decided that Chachu had a stash of full-size Kit Kats. Said he had a dream about it. We didn’t find candy. Just stacks of papers and envelopes where Chachu kept every piece of mail he’d ever gotten. On the bookshelf, next to the CDs of Depeche Mode and Pixies and Snoop Dogg, we found math textbooks. I opened one. The page was covered in meticulous notes and faded highlighter.

  Being in there felt awful. Like I was a thief.

  That same feeling came over me at Auntie Misbah’s house. Pakistani cooking shouldn’t exist if Auntie Misbah isn’t scolding me for sampling it. Prayers don’t feel real without her teasing me for wrapping my scarf too tight. Like a gray-haired village granny worried about her virtue, she used to say.

  Being at the motel without her was wrong. Unnatural.

  I don my headphones. I’ll go inside to Chachu’s house after I listen to a song. Just one song. I find Sigur Rós’s “Untitled #8.” It’s nearly twelve minutes long.

  Standing in the dark of the porch, I watch the stars and think of how I never saw my own parents die. I barely remember them.

  Until I saw Auntie’s coffin, I think some little kid part of me hoped my parents were alive. Sitting in a whitewashed brick house ten thousand miles away. Eating dinner in a courtyard, sighing when the power went out, sending a cousin to crank the generator. Waiting for me in a village that’s forever lost.

  But today—the funeral, the coffin—reminded me of what death is: final.

  Auntie Misbah slow-cooked kofta for me when I aced a test. Taught me why ullu da patha—son of an owl—was her favorite Punjabi curse. Told me about hearing the legendary Noor Jehan when she was a girl. Her voice was so powerful I thought it would split my soul. Maybe your parents named you after her. That’s why you love music.

  Everything Chachu refused to do because it was too Pakistani? She did it because it was Pakistani.

  But I didn’t visit her when she needed me. All because of a stupid fight with Salahudin.

  There are some things in life I’ll never be able to take back. Avoiding the only person on this earth who loved me like I was her own child is one of them.

  Snow Patrol’s “Set the Fire to the Third Bar” comes on. A guitar strums. A piano joins in. A man and woman sing of distance and longing. I slip the key in the lock and open the door slowly. Brooke doesn’t wake up easy, but Chachu is a light sleeper.

  “Noor.”

  I jump. Scramble to switch my music off. Chachu sits in the living room. His brown hair pokes up over the back of the couch. The TV is on low in the background. He turns, his features in profile. My father’s face flashes in my head. I try to hold on to it.

  My chest hurts. I miss . . . something. A place? A person? I don’t remember much from before the earthquake. I don’t want to. Those memories wake me up in the middle of the night. They trick me into thinking I’m trapped in that closet, back in the village.

  But this memory isn’t like that. It’s warm. Sticky luddoo sweets at a wedding. The creak of a rope bed as I snuggled with my grandmother. Chasing a skinny chicken through a courtyard. The mellow green of my grandfather’s hookah. A littler voice. Brother? Sister? Cousin?

  I don’t know. Chachu won’t tell me anything and there’s no one left in Pakistan to ask. The village was leveled. The quake killed everyone but me.

  The memory fades. I feel empty. It’s that emptiness that drives me into the living room with Chachu. That need to look at another human who shares my blood. My uncle puts down the paper he’s reading. Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More” plays in the background. The Heartbreakers’ Greatest Hits album was the first one he played for me after I moved in with him. “It will help you learn English,” he said. Maybe it did. But mostly it taught me that music can be more of a home than four walls and a roof.

  “How was it?” Chachu’s voice brings me back. He wants to know about the funeral.

  “Sad. But a lot of people came.”

  “They weren’t scared off by the chanting and bowing?”

  I should have gone to my room. “They came to the burial,” I say. “They didn’t stay for the prayer.”

  “But you stayed.” Chachu stands. Turns off the music, and drops the newspaper, unfolded.

  I am quiet. Still.

  “I don’t understand why you believe in that trash.” His accent is usually undetectable. When I hear it, it’s best to disappear. Like now. But sometimes leaving makes things worse. So I stay. I try not to get mad. Before she died, Auntie Misbah told me to “forgive.”

  I try to forgive.

  “Do you even understand what they’re saying in Arabic?” Chachu asks. “It’s backward and illogical, Noor.” He shakes his head, disappointed. “ ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. It is the opium of the people.’ Karl Marx. Misbah was stupid to encourage it.”

  “Faith isn’t stupid,” I say, because someone should stand up for Misbah Auntie. “Auntie knew prayer made me feel better. She knew it made me miss Pakistan less.”

  Chachu laughs. “If you’d grown up in Pakistan, you’d have wanted to leave. Our family lived in a hut. Your grandfather went to masjid every day, all five prayers, holiest man in the entire damn ilaqa—”

  Ilaqa. Neighborhood.

  “—white pagri on perfectly straight every day.” Chachu goes on. “He even looked like a saint. What did it get him? A hovel that collapsed on him and killed everyone he loved.”

  Except me.

  A door creaks from down the hall. Brooke, listening. Chachu doesn’t notice.

  “You know we found them together. The whole family. My parents wrapped in each other’s arms. Your father with a Qur’an in his hand. I could have told my brother that a book wouldn’t hold up a jhompri built of hope and mud.”

  I try to remember what jhompri means. House? Hut? I don’t ask. Chachu never talks about our family. No pictures. No videos. No stories. This is the most he’s ever shared. It hurts, what he’s saying. But I don’t blink, because I want him to say more.

  “He’d argue with me, your dad,” Chachu says. “Because I wanted to do something with my life. He—”

  Chachu is there now, in that moment, years and miles ago, with an older brother who disapproved of him. His fists close. Open. Close.

  Open.

  I breathe again.

  “I need you to take a full morning shift.” He turns to his room. “I have to enroll for summer classes tomorrow. I’ll be in at noon.”

  Usually I only work until ten on Sundays. Which is why I have a phone interview with UPenn tomorrow at 11:45. I don’t want to reschedule it. But I also don’t want to imagine Chachu’s face if he walks in on me in the middle of it.

  “I promised, um, Jamie, that we’d go—go over an English essay tomorrow morning.” The trick is to pick someone he’s heard of, but who he won’t run into.

  He turns. Slowly.

  “Misbah taught you so much, but not that lying is wrong?”

  Down the hall, the door to Brooke and Chachu’s room closes. I take a step back.

  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.

  Chachu studied math and engineering in college. He got an internship at the weapons center in Juniper—a coveted spot. He was a natural. But he gave it up when he was only twenty-one. Because he had to take care of me.

  That’s who Chachu is. He saved me.

  The front door slams. He’s gone now. Brooke emerges. She walks the way she did when she moved in years ago. Like she’s avoiding broken glass.

  She met Chachu at the store on a Saturday a few months after I got to America. Her then-boyfriend threw a bottle of Duggan’s at her in the parking lot. I screamed when he did it. Chachu called the cops.

  Brooke stumbled inside the store, taller than us both. Shoulders rounded from a part-time job at the DMV. Eyes blank from a string of shitty boyfriends.

  Chachu wiped the blood off her face and sanitized the cut. She brought a plain cheesecake the following weekend to say thanks. A year later, they got married in the courthouse while I was at school.

  Her eyes are still blank.

  We’ve never been close. But sometimes, she’ll leave me gifts, like the NYX lip gloss I found outside my door a couple weeks ago, or a bag of T-shirts from Goodwill. When Chachu heads to Los Angeles to buy stock for the store, Brooke and I will make popcorn and watch a movie. But she doesn’t talk much. Never has.

  She drifts past and silently folds up the newspaper. Straightens a tilted lampshade. Takes Chachu’s plate with a half-eaten sandwich to the sink.

  I go to my room. My arms ache. My head. I hear a step outside my door and tense up.

  “It’s me.” Brooke. She closes the door behind her and leans against it, shifting from foot to foot.

  “You get your letter a few days ago?”

  The UVA rejection. We haven’t spoken since the day Auntie died, I realize. “Yeah. Thanks for giving it to me.”

  “Did you open it?”

  “I didn’t get in, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Brooke nods. She never pushes. Some days, I wish she did.

  “Can you get the colleges to email you? I don’t want your uncle seeing one of these.”

  “He hasn’t checked the mail in about a decade.”

  “I know. But in case he does.” When I don’t respond, she takes a step forward. “Are you . . . ”

  Okay? Sad? Scared? Whatever the word is, she doesn’t find it. She just gives her head a little shake and leaves. I lock the door behind her and take out the letter from UVA.

  I imagine texting Auntie Misbah. I got a rejection last week. I’m so sad. I’d sneak out my window and walk the fifteen minutes to the motel. She’d be waiting, ice cream in hand. “Ben aur Jerry tay ter-reh chang-ay tay pehreh vakth tay prah vah,” she’d say. Ben and Jerry are your brothers, in good times and bad.

  But my “brothers” aren’t here now. Neither is Auntie Misbah. My room—my posters of distant galaxies where I’d rather live, the bio books I know by heart—will have to be enough.

  I tear the letter into tiny pieces and think of what Auntie Misbah said.

  You are better than this place. More than this place.

  I have to get out of here. For Auntie. For myself. I have to become something. I didn’t survive an earthquake and learn English and lose everything and rebuild everything so I could rot in Juniper. There’s something better for me. Auntie believed it. So I need to believe it, too.

  I put my headphones on. I close my eyes as Ani DiFranco sings about her “Swan Dive.” About how she just needs a shot—one little chance—at making something of herself.

  You are better than this place. More than this place.

  One school down. Six to go.

  chapter 11

  Sal

  The last time I cried like my soul was being ripped out was years ago, when Noor, Ama, and I all watched this movie Ama loved as a kid. The NeverEnding Story. There’s a part where a horse named Artax sinks slowly in a swamp while his rider desperately tries to pull him out. It’s brutal. I lost it.

  I’d forgotten how crying hollows you out, drains away all the shit, and leaves everything clearer.

  By the time I get home I’m not feeling better, exactly. Just less like I want a rogue tornado to snatch me up into the ether.

  Though when I see Ashlee slouched against the office door, the wind pulling at her hair, I rethink that sentiment. She comes in for a hug, and I’m too exhausted to step away.

  Though I shudder at her closeness, she holds me tight. When we first got together, Ashlee realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t great at touch. I told her I had allodynia.

  “ ‘A severe nerve-related condition’ ”—she’d looked it up on her phone—“ ‘in which the patient feels pain from stimuli that don’t usually cause it.’ ”

  I don’t have allodynia. Saying I do is shitty since there are people who actually have it and suffer. But it’s the only thing that gets people to back off. How else do I explain that Ama’s hugs felt like home, but a stranger’s tap feels like an attack? That when Noor touched my arm today, it fizzed electric in the best way, but a tussle on the soccer field can make me nauseous? That if I accidently touch another person, I’m fine, but if they do the same, I want to cannon them into the stratosphere?

  It doesn’t make any sense. Thus allodynia.

  Finally, I can’t take it and I pull away. “Where’s Kaya?” I ask.

  “At home with my mom.” Ashlee’s clear-eyed now that whatever shit she took this morning has worn off. “Are you okay, Sal?”

  I step back. She must know the answer to that.

  When I don’t say anything, she reaches for me again, but I sidestep and sit on the wrought iron bench Ama placed outside the office. It’s strangely fancy, incongruent against the whitewashed cinder blocks and winter-shriveled rosebushes on either side.

  “Ashlee, did you tell Art my mom had cancer?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I thought it was okay. He’s my cousin—”

  “She didn’t have cancer,” I say. “She had advanced kidney disease. Cancer is mercurial. Sometimes you can beat it and sometimes you can’t. But Ama could have stayed healthy. She just had to rest and go to dialysis and she didn’t.”

  “Why—why didn’t she go?”

  “Too much to do at the motel,” I say. “Too expensive. We don’t have health insurance. I should’ve made her go. Abu should have helped her with the motel. My asshole uncle should have donated a kidney. But none of us did what we should have done.”

  “Maybe it hurt,” Ashlee says. “And she was afraid.”

  I don’t know. I never will. I didn’t talk to my ama enough. I didn’t listen to her.

  “Hey,” she says. “Your—mom. She had a painkiller prescription, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Why?”

  “Do you—would you mind if I—”

  Oh. Oh. It takes me a second, but then I understand.

  “My prescription’s out,” she says at the look on my face. “And my back’s really been—”

  “What the hell, Ashlee?” I once read in a magazine that you’re never supposed to break up or hook up after a major life event. But whoever wrote that probably didn’t have a girlfriend ask them for their mom’s painkillers the day of her funeral.

  Anger sears my chest—at Ashlee, but it feels bigger than that. I’m angry at Abu, for the way he hunts for oblivion in a bottle. At Ama, for not listening to her doctors or her body. At myself, for not fixing her.