It was a slow night, up until this guy fell from the sky.
No, not merely fell. He plummeted, as harshly uprooted and roughly swept away as a shooting star, sun streaming and teary eyed. He fell, and he brought with him several dislodged pigeons, a handful of tinsel, and one or two errant balloons with their stomachs glutted on dirty city exhalations and gutter backwash.
I mean, I could have stopped his fall.
Maybe. Well, honestly, I value my life.
And maybe I’d have had more sympathy and thoughtless altruism if it hadn’t been the hundredth time this month that some rich partygoer had toppled off a balcony in his attempt to imitate a YouTube parkour video.
Also, and more reasonably, it was Christmas Eve, and the police probably had better things to do than field their hundredth call of the year from King of Kuisine (“the food you hate to love from the people you love to hate,” according to my youngest aunt, which was met by no end of snickers and scolding depending on which generation she said it in front of).
In any case, it also wasn’t as though a man falling from the sky was unprecedented. Our cart had the misfortune of being parked next to a historically protected and ridiculously ostentatious water fountain, which drew teen boys for ill-advised stunts any time of the year. I’m not sure what I could have done, honestly, besides hustling out of the cart and holding my arms up like I was a Ghibli character.
And the last time I checked, I was not.
So floating guy got a face of concrete. This was unfortunate and made a very unpleasant sound reminiscent of the spiced-mutton patty currently working its way toward a good burn on the grill.
I winced and gripped the hem of my apron a little tighter. Yes, I’d seen falling men before, but that sounded like a particularly rough landing.
“Um . . . excuse me . . . ,” I started.
The gray lump on the sidewalk shifted a bit, and then let out a pathetic cough.
“Um . . .”
I reached back without looking away, fingers fumbling and triumphantly clamping down once they met with cool metal.
I held up my weapon to the light, and deflated.
My greasy spatula. It figured.
Still, there was no time for hesitation or doubt. I inched my way out of the cart and down the stairs toward the lump on the ground.
“Um, sir . . .”
I prodded at him with the spatula. He shifted and groaned again, rolling over with a grimace.
Okay. Here’s the thing. When you’re the daughter of a dad who still remembers his Casanova of a college roommate and the five girlfriends he managed to have at a relatively conservative campus, and said dad pretty much flatlines at the mere suggestion of the word “date” out of the context of Ramadan and the innocuous dried fruit, you don’t see many guys in your social circle—or admit to having many guys in your social circle—who are, well, second-glance material.
I know some of my friends are not as choosy, but for me, cousins do not count.
But this guy was more than second-glance material. I’d hazard to put him at a 10.5 out of ten, along with a tossed-in giggle with a close female companion and a bumbled attempt at a sly candid to post on Snapchat: I DIDN’T KNOW ALLAH MADE THEM THAT FINE IN THIS AREA.
Looking down at his wild shock of dark hair, the blue-black eyebrows perfectly arched as though drawn with the steadiest hand, and the mouth that already had the gentlest laugh lines forming at the crease, I won’t lie: I finally knew what it meant to be thirsty.
Seeing the glass in front of you and needing to reach out for it just to reassure yourself it was sitting there.
It is a moment I am not 100 percent proud of, but I readily own it.
You wouldn’t have raised your eyebrows at me if you’d seen him. That’s all I’m saying.
I blinked, and the boy had managed to peel himself off the stain-studded pavement with more grace than I expected from someone who had hit solid concrete. He leaned his weight on the cart, reaching down to inch a sneaker up his foot. I opened my mouth to ask if he wanted me to call 911, and my jaw hung there.
His sneaker was smoking.
And his hand was glowing.
There was no other way to describe it. Later, it would be easier to pass it off as my own shock, but for a moment, his fingers glistened as though they dripped stardust and deferred dreams. And then I blinked, and there was a handful of wadded bills and brown, callused fingers.
Had I really seen that?
“Did you just . . . ,” I started, and then blinked rapidly as he shook the bills directly in my face.
“As-salaamu alaikum. Sorry, should have led with that once I saw the hijab. Emergency services aren’t needed. Just give me whatever carbs you got on hand.”
Two minutes later, I was leaning on the counter, watching as he dug into a layered bowl of Egyptian-style kushuri—pasta, fresh tomato sauce, lentils and rice—digging deep for the flecks of onion I’d snuck in and humming to himself. I wasn’t the biggest fan of kushuri on our menu myself, mainly because my memories of it had the bitter aftertaste of disappointment and deception.
Time for a quick flashback. So, we were in Egypt, circa . . . well, whatever year it was when I was thirteen and moody and wanted to have time to myself and skulk through the pyramids, where surely the atmosphere would be dark and dank enough to reflect the tortured depths of my soul.
But Ma didn’t want that to happen, because “that’s a huge tomb and you don’t know WHAT might be waiting in there,” and Baba had somehow sweet-talked his way into a dinner invitation with our cab driver at some hole in the wall, and the way his eyes were glinting as he pored over menu items, I knew my ideal sightseeing day was going to be given up for the greater good of King of Kuisine, as always.
And I hated it. I hated Egypt. I hated its food. And then Baba leaned over the table, went, “You have to try this!” and shoved a good spoonful right into my sulking mouth.
It was amazing. But I wouldn’t admit that, even now.
Apparently, though, I was really easy to win over. The sight of this guy totally devouring kushuri—my kushuri, the type that always seemed a little sloppier in execution compared to my father’s efficiently tiered bowls—almost had me understanding my dad’s obsession with watching the customers eat, which was scary.
“Good food should temper the shock of the fall, but you really should get medical assistance.”
“This is good enough. Wait, scratch that. This is amazing enough,” he said, and gave me a devastating smile. I didn’t even know those were real, but he had one. There was even a hint of dimples.
I flushed. “Freshly made every day,” I managed. “But hey, your sneakers . . .”
He waved it off. “It happens from time to time. I’ll live.”
Obviously, I wasn’t going to get much more out of him. So I settled. And watched him eat. He polished off the kushuri and a few fish patties that weren’t on the official menu but more like Ma’s personal gift to our regulars. Those were more of our usual home fare, the type of thing that felt warm in my mouth and grounding and that I often selfishly “vanished” rather than share with the customers. I separated categories in my head: cart food and our food. I knew other friends whose parents had restaurants, but I still balked from asking them if they had similar feelings, ways in which they drew the line between the business and them, what territories they could have to themselves.
Watching him gulp down several of the browned and spiced patties, though, oddly didn’t sting. I didn’t even argue when he claimed the rest of the baklava I had triumphantly shaped and filled under the guidance of Aunty Busra up the block (all the while bitterly realizing that my father’s pride meant it would end up on the counter at work and not in the house). He eyed the empty pots longingly, and, with a sigh, I passed a white paper bag over the countertop. He raised his eyebrow at me inquisitively.
“One of my friend Lila’s special pastries,” I explained. “Consider it a complimentary gift for spending more than any customer I’ve had in a night and effectively clearing out the rest of our inventory.”
“I can’t tell if this is heartfelt or sarcastic, but thanks anyway.” He pressed it into his shirt pocket and patted it. Something about the gesture made my heart melt.
For a moment, as he smiled at me and finally passed back the plate I found behind the counter, he seemed entirely normal.
And then he slid off into the night when I paused in the middle of clearing away his containers to take a call from my mom.
(That wasn’t embarrassing at all: trying to fumble through the usual “yes, I’m fine,” “no, there’s nothing going on,” “yes, the big butcher knife is under my stool” and awkwardly turning my back on another flash of dimples.)
All that was left was a large wad of money—I’m talking a good stack of twenties, from the peek I took—and a note.
There was a smiley face, too. I smiled back at it, if you want to know how low I fell over a guy with cute eyebrows and a healthy appetite and some foolish ideas of how to spend his night.
And then I got on my phone and tried to figure out if we were really free of liability since he had fallen in front of the cart.
Not to sound all jaded or anything, but I really expected that would be the end of it.
It was one of those nights, in that type of city.
And at least for that moment, I had felt bemused and bedazzled and almost magical. Something bizarre and curious had happened to me, in a city full of other people’s dreams. He had been that change, that taste of something else that I needed for just that moment. And now it was over. I would never see him again.
* * *
As it turned out, Falling Boy—or, well, Hasan Mahmood—came back for that meal he had alluded to in the note. And another one after that. And another one. You would think that all that time spent together would have lifted some of the fog of mystery around his shoulders. But it only deepened.
When I asked where he went to school?
“Rowbury High.”
“That’s where I go!”
“Well, then, there you go.”
I mean, he’s the type of guy you would remember seeing in the halls, though, at some point.
Then again, I’m not always the most observant person at school. I spend a great deal of time shopping around the previous night’s leftovers and using my friends’ enthusiasm for my ventures into spiced kofte and pistachio-laced rice pudding cups as a reason to eat something different for once, even if it was bland hamburgers off the hot lunch line and not face the whole “what do you want to do with your life” question that everyone in high school seems to want you to grapple with.
Anyway, Hasan and his appetite were always a good distraction.
And even when he was eating, or waiting hungrily for something to come off the grill, those eyes were always fixed on me—smiling, gleaming brightly in preparation to tease me, but just . . . there.
Present. Actually caring about what I had to say.
It was different.
It was nice.
We didn’t agree on everything. That was the best part sometimes.
Tonight, though, we were back on his favorite topic to needle out of me—well, everyone’s favorite topic to bring up as soon as they saw my face, apparently: what Munira plans to do as a career. In the future. For the rest of her life.
Cart not included.
It was the type of topic I usually shied away from with even my closest friends, but Hasan just knew how to work it in and make me talk about it as well as he could sniff out whatever was left in the fridge that he might devour.
I ended up telling him about the internship application I had taken out of the guidance office—one I hadn’t even bothered showing my parents while I considered my own feelings about it.
The internship was in event planning, which was a little skip of the stone away from my usual, to be honest, but not so detached that I’d have trouble getting past the door. It was a boutique setup that focused on intimate weddings and bridal showers, and honestly, I watched enough Say Yes to the Dress and Cheapest Weddings in my downtime that I thought I could dig it: arranging color palettes, making bouquets, and . . . well, setting out the food.
But at the same time, it wasn’t the cart. It wasn’t what I was always told I was good at. And I guess that scared me. A little.
Well, a lot.
“I like the sound of the internship, but being a wedding planner doesn’t sound like a career where you can just blend into the background. Maybe I’m meant to be a photographer. Your name’s at the bottom and you’re credited, but at the same time, you’re not necessarily as awesome or as remembered as the person in the frame.”
“I won’t argue with that,” Hasan said, “but I will point out that a lot of photographers are burdened with awards and recognition, so if you want to skulk in the shadows for the rest of your life, I might not go that way.”
“Okay, fine. I’m just not sure why it’s an issue if I just stay with the cart for the rest of my life.”
“I’m not saying that you can’t. You seem to do pretty well in the food cart. I’m surprised that you’re planning your future around it but not seeing yourself as, like, co-owner or taking over for your dad when he retires.”
“And how is that different from skulking in the shadows elsewhere for the rest of my life?”
Hasan didn’t respond for a moment. He seemed to be staring into the distance as he bit into his lamb skewer. It was his second of the night, which made me a little proud. Apparently I was getting better, toeing the line between entirely charred and perfectly scorched. Not that Hasan ever complained about my food.
It helped that I was working with a pretty awesome recipe. Baba had this way of drawing out the tender in his meat, marinating and using delicate pinches of spice that he dusted gently over the hills and valleys of slices and rolled balls and rural-hewed chunks destined for gyros or meat trays or to be garnished with salad within a deliciously sloppy naan sandwich.
He always seemed so confident that, if I just watched his hands, if I took the same small pinches, my fingers would learn the same movements and be able to result in that same welcoming taste. I always kept my eyes down as I rolled ground chicken between my palms and formed fists in bowls piled high with raw, marbled goodness, hoping that if I focused on it as passionately as I tried to concentrate during prayer, I would feel something close to the way he seemed to feel about it. I wanted to. I really did. But it never seemed to work.
I absently knocked over one of the glasses on the countertop when my elbow stretched out too far, and Hasan—who had up until that moment been nursing his glass of sour cherry juice—sat up straight.
“What was that?”
“That was my fault! Sorry!”
I tugged the glasses back in line, watching out of the corner of my eye as Hasan glanced both ways on the quiet, dark street before he settled back down.
Recently, he had been really . . . well, it sounded like wishful thinking, but Hasan was acting almost protective over me.
It had started when I said I thought I saw the same guy lurking near the cart on the evenings Hasan tended to turn up. I’m not an alarmist, so I was willing to write it off the first few times, but Hasan nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Where? When? What does he look like?”
He’d never been that forceful, so I freaked out a bit myself. It must have shown on my face, because he cooled down, apologized, and said he was a little on edge due to the rumored increase in crime plastered all over the papers: kidnappings, bank robberies, and the stray appearance of some creepy guy in nineties flasher gear menacing girls in lonely alleyways.
“You’re here by yourself most nights,” he ended. “And you’re important to me. I don’t want to see anything happen to you.”
I didn’t understand most of his concern (city life pretty much equals crime and the occasional holdup while you’re browsing an aisle at your local deli), but I was mostly stuck on that whole “you’re important to me” line he snuck in as subtly as raisins in a platter of Afghani rice. That was enough to make me nod and smile, probably a bit gooey around the edges.
After that, for a few weeks, Hasan had turned up a bit earlier, glowering at the gathering shadows around the cart, and the guy’s appearance turned more sporadic. It was probably a coincidence, but I didn’t point that out. Hasan’s company was worth it.
“Anyway, don’t change the subject.” Hasan raised his eyebrows at me and took another bite. I scowled and then realized he had white sauce stuck to his collar.
“Um . . . you’ve got a little . . .”
I reached for a napkin as he eyed me bemusedly.
“Thanks, Mom.”
I flushed. It was rare that Hasan even made a reference to family outside of my own. He didn’t like talking about his family. Like, at all. Any mention of them was small—“Oh, my mom cooked something like this once”—and tended to be hastily curtailed. It was odd, but I could get a hint: There was some painful backstory there, and he wasn’t ready yet.
To be honest, and I’m not too proud to admit it, I had other things to focus on besides Hasan’s family. The thought that he was dressing down to be as comfortable as possible for his outings here—getting cozy for these marathon feasts, these moments shared with me—made my cheeks warm, as did the idea that he actually enjoyed listening to me ramble on about my family problems.
It took me a good minute, caught up in this reverie, to realize that Hasan’s cheeks seemed similarly flushed, and that my hand had foregone the napkin to pluck absently at his decidedly clean and crisp collar.
“Oh!” I dropped my hand like it was touching a hot pot handle. “Sorry!”
“No harm, seriously. I’m good for a laundry run anyway.” Hasan cleared his throat.
“Oh, you’re going now?” I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice. It wasn’t entirely over Hasan leaving—well, there was a lot of that. It was just that, even if that weird guy hadn’t appeared recently, I’d had the feeling I was being watched. Maybe those headlines had gotten to me after all.
But I didn’t tell Baba. And I certainly wasn’t telling Hasan. He obviously had other problems.
Hasan’s devastating smile made an appearance. “I could stay, if you’re really that lonely.”
Tempting. Very tempting. But it was getting later, and the street was quiet enough, and I didn’t want to be that big baby who was jumping at shadows, so I let him go.
Maybe I shouldn’t have.
A few minutes later—or maybe it was just seconds, long enough for him to make it around the corner and out of sight—I turned away to wipe down the counter and clear off the empty containers like I always did.
And then I was thrown forward.
And my only thought was, Ow, who rammed their car into the cart?
Maybe that wasn’t my first thought. Maybe it was just Ow, ow, ow. Because it hurt. I could feel the sticky damp of hot sauce seeping into my jeans, and my head was throbbing. And then I realized the reason I hadn’t stood up and started taking down a license plate was because the cart was on its side.
And there was a man standing in front of it.
I dazedly dragged myself out, a hand to my head.
“Um . . . can I help you?”
He just stood there, looking at me.
He had on a fedora—a fedora—and a pinstriped suit. He really didn’t look like a paying customer for King of Kuisine, so my odds were on him being the jerk who’d just toppled over my father’s babies—both of them, literally. And then, before I could even wrap my head properly around that, he sprang up, physically, onto the capsized counter and planted his knee into the steel until it gave under him, just melted down and into a meek shelf for him like it was dollar-store plastic.
“Girlie, you’ve got five minutes to tell me where the Comet is.”
I grasped my ridiculous spatula and just stared at him, even as a scattering of would-be customers gaped from a safe distance. My hesitation was a mistake. He reached out, and before I could even react, he had hold of my arm.
And then, in a slick judolike move—no, that made it sound realistic, human, like something a person actually did without it being impossible and scary—he lifted me off the ground and then smacked me back down. Hard.
The city lights scattered about my head like bobbing, filmy stars. I, the girl who was supposed to protect King of Kuisine and my father when they both reached their middling ages, sat there on the ground and held my head and whimpered over my scraped elbows and watched as that creep trashed my life as I knew it right in front of me.
That was the last thing I could focus on: that cart, my family’s trust in me, being crushed under his heel.
No. That’s wrong.
All of a sudden, there was something else. Someone else. There was a boy, in an incredibly unflattering yellow suit with a lightning bolt across his chest and a cliché mask over his eyes. And he fell from the sky like a star, in such a familiar plummet that I felt sure that this time he was going to land on the cart and get his body egg-scrambled and die and come back to sue me for not having a softer place for him to land.
But he didn’t. He landed quietly, like a cat on velvet paws, and he saw me on the ground, and our eyes met. He rushed over to me, and he lifted me in his arms, and that was the moment when I was sure that I had succumbed to a concussion around the time the creep had slammed me to the ground, because the way he said “Munira,” so gently, like his breath alone would find all the places I was cracked and make me come entirely undone . . .
It sounded like Hasan. And I wanted it to be Hasan.
And even with my brain dazed and my legs aching, I was focused enough to feel guilty that I could even think of that.
And then the fedora guy caught sight of him and snarled, and I watched as the boy in the yellow suit . . . no, it was Hasan—the boy who tried to devour me out of house and home, the boy who laughed with me and listened when I needed him to, the boy who was apparently a superhero—neatly caught what was left of our side cooler in his right hand and crumpled it and tossed it back, ablaze with a near-heavenly fire.
And then there was this huge battle, where the Comet screamed a lot of things about how I shouldn’t have been brought into this, and the fedora guy screamed back about how he decided who was brought into it or not, and then apparently I managed to drag myself upward and bean him in the back of the head with a frying pan while shrieking, “King of Kuisine isn’t your personal playground!”
I wish I couldn’t remember this happening.
I also wish I could forget what happened afterward, later that night in the hospital, after my teary-eyed parents kissed my brow and tucked me in and I closed my eyelids against the raw, open devastation on my father’s face, when the boy who was the Comet and also who I thought was becoming my best friend slipped through the hospital window.
And we fought.
“I was careless,” Hasan admitted. “I don’t have a family who worries in the same way, and I felt that when I was with you, I was close to that. Apparently, I got too comfortable and settled into a pattern. I’m sorry, Munira. I really am.”
“I wish I could say I get that,” I seethed back, “but unlike you, I don’t play pretend with other people’s lives when I know there’s a risk of them getting hurt.”
“I already said it was my fault. I already said I knew he was looking for me. I don’t know what you want from me. Would you rather I left you there to die?” Hasan roughly tugged at his hair. “Don’t make me apologize for not being able to. I couldn’t do that to you. You’re the last person I could ever leave behind like that.”
At any other time, those words would have been everything I wanted to hear, but my drama-heroine quota had run dry for the day. I was in pain, I had a needle stuck in my arm, and the boy I was starting to realize I had more than a crush on apparently was some mask-wearing, high-flying vigilante in tights who had ruined everything my parents had worked for.
I didn’t want to admit that I might have been angrier with myself than with Hasan: for the relief that washed over me when I remembered that, even if tomorrow was a working day, there was no shift to miss. King of Kuisine was a goner.
“No matter what is going on with you and I assume your . . .”—I waved a hand toward the costume, the glimmering arches of his brows, his whole terrible, brilliant self—“mission or saving the world or whatever . . . you should have been honest with me from the beginning that something like this could happen.”
“Would you have believed me? If I just went, ‘Oh, hey, Munira, guess what? I’m a famous superhero, and there’s this whole organization after me because they don’t like the thought of some caped wonder boy foiling their schemes!’ ”
“I would have tried! If you had at least done more to keep my family out of it, I would have tried.” I shook my head, both out of dizziness and to fend off tears. “And now I can’t.”
“Munira . . .” His voice turned tender, pleading.
“You said you didn’t know what it was like to have a family who worried about you,” I bit out, roughly. “And you’re right.”
It wasn’t kind. I’m not proud I said it. He had all the earmarks, looking back, of the privileged but pushed-aside kid: the kid who was told he was loved, but not shown it outside of high-tech trackers and a supersuit that came with its own baggage. Afterward, I could remember how his face had crumpled down the middle and hate myself for it.
But in that moment, I pressed on.
“You jeopardized us. I know you’ll try to laugh this off and say something about not being able to resist the free baklava.” I raised my chin and tried to keep it from quavering. “Unfortunately, I don’t have one to give you for the road. Because, you know, our cart is down for the count.”
“Munira,” he said again, but it sounded more defeated this time.
And then the nurse came in, and I had to pretend that the reasons for my one-sided dialogue and tear-glazed eyes were, respectively, the soap opera rerun on my TV screen and the lack of morphine in my veins.
End scene on our not-breakup breakup.
End scene on my friendship with the boy who fell like a golden star.
And of course, again, I assumed that was the last I would see of Hasan.
Or the Comet.
Whatever.
* * *
Fast forward six weeks. I was grumpily hanging out in my aunt’s café. It was no King of Kuisine. There was a lot I was finding I hadn’t properly appreciated about our little truck until it had been smashed to smithereens and had to be slowly coaxed back into the world of the living by a dedicated team of mechanics, like the fact that it didn’t involve time spent cooped up with relatives who think that seventeen is far too close to old-maid status and who you can’t tell that the last boy you were interested in turned out to be a superhero and ruined your life.
Well, not entirely. If you must know, I got the internship.
It probably helped that Baba was still so dazed over King of Kuisine that when I brought it up at the dinner table, he blinked and nodded and went, “Well, that’s a good way to fill your time for now, sweetie.”
Which I took as approval.
Ma was a bit more reticent. She went in with me the first day and smiled and nodded along with the bubbly receptionist who gave me my “very own badge!” and a “brand-new locker!” and assured me that I was going “to love it here!” And then she went home and got on the phone and bragged to all her friends that her daughter, the eldest one, is now a wedding planner, and all their kids should keep her in mind for their future nuptials.
That would probably bring up its own set of problems, but it was good to realize that the world wasn’t going to cave in and my parents didn’t really care that I was doing something outside of the cart and away from a stove. They really just wanted me to be happy. And make good money, which was why Ma instantly tried to haggle up the monthly transportation stipend I was offered.
And a lot of the food cart regulars—well, not customers now, but friends—still came around, whenever they could. I still had Lila’s sweet confections in my life, and her friendship, which was just as sweet. Some guy actually wrote into the local newspaper trying to get a fund going for our repair fees, complaining that he had lost access to the one good halal place on Hungry Heart Row, which was flattering.
I did a lot of eating instead of serving those days, when I wasn’t at my internship. That particular afternoon, I was seated at my aunt’s counter with a plate of rui fish and rice: a beloved Bengali dish that seemed like a good antidote for heartache. Besides, working out the bones between my lips and pressing my finger against their sharp edges was cathartic. I couldn’t beat up the guy who ruined the cart, but I could show a fish who was boss.
I doubt I was reassuring any of the other wary regulars, who had all been informed by my aunt about my sensitive state, by gnawing on the bones.
“Um. You seem to be very engrossed there,” a familiar voice broke in tentatively.
Of course. I should have known better than to expect that he would vanish from my life that easily. I kept my eyes on my plate and took another generous bite of fish, making sure to scoop up the fried onions and a bit of the fat that had soaked up enough of the turmeric, ginger, and garlic sauce. “I’m calling on the strength of my ancestors.”
“Is it working?” There was a smile in his voice. It hurt.
“Considering that you’re still here, not the way I want it to.”
Hasan exhaled.
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“I’ve apologized to . . . well, my family, you could call them. They warned me I was living dangerously, and they were right.”
I nodded. “Good. And, to be fair, I guess I wasn’t reading enough into all your extracurricular, altruistic activities.”
Hasan offered me a weak smile. “I guess you were too busy enjoying the fact that I bought three trays of your meatballs and chased it down with two shakes, huh?”
The words almost slipped from my lips, the words that his puppy-hopeful expression and subtly clasped hands made me want to say: No, I enjoyed seeing you. I enjoyed being with you. You eating my food without making faces or tugging bone shards out of your mouth was a bonus.
I sighed and pushed the plate back, swiveling to face him properly.
“Okay, listen. I’ll be upfront because I believe in transparency and honesty. I don’t want you to grovel. I don’t want you to bend at the knees and promise me you’re shipping off to madrasa or something to learn the errors of your ways. I just . . .”
My voice trailed off for a moment.
“I just wish you had found some way to let me know besides, you know, waiting for some weird macho guy literally wearing a fedora to trample all over my dad’s hopes and dreams.”
“Yep, he’s literally crying a river right now,” my aunt piped up. I’d almost forgotten she was there, and I glowered at her as she studiously slid a cup of coffee in front of an equally uninvolved customer, who I suspected was one of her gossipy masjid friends.
“Totally heartbroken upstairs in my apartment. It’s amazing my brother can even be so engrossed in the cricket match right now when he has a tissue stuffed up each nostril and pressed against his eyes like he watched the ending of Devdas on repeat.”
Hasan let out a suspiciously stifled sound, but when I whirled back to face him, he was fidgeting with his collar.
“I just want us to be cool,” he said quietly. “I mean, I don’t want this to be awkward, but . . .”
We both glanced at my aunt. She sighed, shook her head, and gestured to her friend. They both stood, perhaps with a little too much whispering and head craning between them, and headed out to the terrace.
Thank God.
Almost as soon as she left, though, I wanted her back there. The shop suddenly felt larger, and so did Hasan’s presence next to me.
“Okay, listen.” Hasan looked me straight in the eye. “I want to be honest now. I like you. I really like you.”
I like you.
There was a boy, a cute, Muslim, superhero boy standing in front of me and telling me that he really, really liked me. And he wasn’t done.
“You didn’t find it weird when I was always hungry. You spilled your guts about your family and made me feel like I was part of it. You always smiled at me. I really like the way you smile.” And then he smiled. “I definitely like the way you cook.”
Okay. Things were getting out of hand.
“Um . . . uh . . .” I swallowed hard. “I appreciate your honesty. But . . .”
“We’re going to pay for the truck.” I didn’t have to ask who we were. “We’re going to stay out of your family’s affairs. I promise, I promise, I promise we will.”
“But you . . . want to stay in mine.” I regretted the phrasing as soon as it escaped my lips, particularly when it made that smile so much wider.
“If that’s the way you want to put it.”
And then, bold as a Bollywood hero, he reached out, grasping my hand. Just the fingertips, nothing brash enough to tempt the Haram Police into bursting into the shop and gasping in horror over the extreme skin-to-skin contact. But I could feel myself flare up and flush.
This was happening.
He was here, and he was holding my hand and smiling at me and telling me he liked me.
But I just couldn’t make my mouth form the words back. King of Kuisine was gone, but I could still feel that presence behind me of the warm stove and the crowded cooler with its soda cans and syrupy juices. I could remember learning how to count off the coins in the drawer and the first time Baba cut open one of my burgers and said, chest puffed out with pride, “This is well done.”
For all the nights I had kicked at the wheels and tugged down the shutters to study for the SAT in peace (and shamefully stuck a few bills in the tip jar to even the balance), I loved King of Kuisine in my own way. And, even if it wasn’t Hasan’s fault, even if it wasn’t what he meant to happen, that life—those nights—weren’t coming back. Not quickly, at least, and they would never be the same.
“Hasan, listen,” I said. “This is not something I ever thought I would say. You changed my life. And there are ways in which I would never take that change back, whether it was making up alter egos for the street pigeons or that time I tried to make firni.”
“I thought we weren’t talking about your attempt at making firni.”
“You’re right. We weren’t. But I’m super nervous, and I want you to know that I do like you.”
“There’s a but there.”
“There is. But I don’t know how to deal with you right now. We can joke about it, but King of Kuisine was a big part of our family. Even if your people—whoever they are—replace it, that’s going to be changed for us now. We’re going to have to adapt, start back up, gather up our regulars, and maybe change locations so that we aren’t as easy a target.”
“I don’t want you to think of yourself as a target,” Hasan protested, grasping my hand a little tighter. “I just want you to think of yourself as Munira.”
“That’s what you want, but I don’t think that’s what your world will be satisfied with. And I’m not sure if you’re ready to stand against them.”
His grasp loosened from my fingers. And then he pulled himself up and squared his jaw, and I could see—in that moment, even without the incredible costume and the emblem across his chest—where the hero was in him.
“I think it’s more of them not being ready to stand against me,” the Comet said, and his voice reverberated through the shop and its walls and my skin and my bones.
I exhaled and nodded once. “Okay. Wow. I can believe you. But I just can’t tell you what you want to hear right now. I’m sorry.”
I almost hated myself, watching him as the light ebbed out of his eyes, as he tried to smile and nodded once. But I knew that I would hate myself more if I stepped over my resolve—over what my family meant to me, over all we had to rebuild and scrape back into normalcy—if I seized back his hand and promised him my heart when it just wasn’t there yet.
It took me a moment to realize he was headed for the door.
“Wait!” I called, and he paused.
“No offense, Munira, but if this is the moment where you ask if we can still be friends . . .”
I winced. “It kind of is. But I really mean it. Not awkward tense friends, not friends who can’t forgive each other for everything that’s happened. But friends who build past it.”
For a long moment, I held my breath and watched Hasan as his face shifted. And then, though I couldn’t see out the window, the sky cleared as he broke into a smile.
“Define what the end game is, and you’ll have a deal.”
“All of it, except . . .” I gestured to both of our hands—currently not grasping each other—and felt my cheeks flare. “That can wait for later. Much later.”
And though I wasn’t sure if I could hold to that promise myself, an hour later—laughing as Hasan gulped down a glass of water and fanned his mouth, an open container of spicy ramen on the counter—I could live with a little less steamy Bollywood and a little more open, honest time.
That’s the thing about fairy-tale, neatly tied happy endings. They don’t exist, even for heirs apparent to huge family food dynasties (or, well, one very singed truck currently in repairs) and bright, beaming, currently sweaty-faced boys who fall from the stars.
But the ones you have to share, with everyone you love around you and good food spread over the counters and the city you love spread out before the open window with all its glimmering magic and promise?
Those I could live with.
And plan to.