CHAPTER THREE

Gingerly Afia stepped out of the restroom. She looked both ways before she scurried back to the bleachers. Gus was on the far right court now, three other Enright players on the nearer courts. Shahid’s woman coach prowled back and forth like a blond lioness watching her cubs. Afia perched on one of the top bleachers, out of Gus’s sight, to wait for her brother. She tried to look into the middle distance, as if she were thinking about her biology class, or Maryam’s wedding, or anything other than the salty taste of Gus’s mouth on hers five minutes before.

It wasn’t the first time he’d kissed her. That had been last week, the night he had taken her out for her first hamburger, to Local Burger in Northampton, where he said they got the beef from nearby farms so it was probably close to halal anyway. She’d had a chocolate milkshake with the sandwich. She hadn’t thought much of the meat—she liked her mother’s kofta better—but the shake was creamy, delicious. When he’d pulled the car over to the curb to drop her off, Gus had put his hand gently on her jaw and turned her to him. Pulling away, she had felt a stirring deep inside, like the froth on the milkshake.

But that had been in Gus’s car, in the dark. This kiss had come suddenly as she’d been heading toward the restroom, in the hallway where anyone could be passing by. Suddenly Gus had been in front of her, his squash bag slung over his shoulder, and before she could speak he had cinched her waist with his free hand. Wish me luck, he had said, and his lips were on hers, his tongue flicking quickly in and out of her startled mouth. His fingers had feathered against her hips before he kept going. Anyone could have seen them, anyone.

But no one had. No one, she reminded herself as she practiced her absentminded gazing. Just like the first time the plane lifted away from the tarmac in Peshawar and she was sure it was going to fall, it was turning, it was falling, and then it didn’t fall but rose safe into the blue sky, a free-floating panic grabbed at her breath and pumped through her veins long after the danger was past. And she thought—as she’d thought then—never again, while at the same time the rush of pleasure slipped back and she realized terror wasn’t the only feeling in her veins. And this time, as she pushed herself back onto the bleacher, to look as though she had been there a long while, she felt also the damp warmth and tingle between her legs that Gus’s kiss had ignited. In the restroom she had soaked a paper towel and held it cold to her face, then a dry towel; she had wiped her glasses and fixed her scarf. All she had to do now was appear mildly distracted.

“Hey, Shahid, man,” she heard. She turned to see her brother’s friend Afran rounding the corner from the locker rooms. “Your sister’s right where you left her!”

She smiled modestly at Afran. Behind him, Shahid bounded out. “You go invisible, or what?” he asked in Pashto.

“That’s my power,” she said. And as she lifted her book bag to follow him out, she knew it would be all right. He hadn’t noticed a thing. Though he talked to the coach before they left, she didn’t even stop in front of Gus’s court. She had become expert at dividing her life into compartments, the way fetal cells differentiated until one group could function only as a heart, another only as bone marrow. When Shahid had told her about Maryam’s wedding and the tickets Baba was sending, she had felt only a surge of excitement and homesickness—not the homesickness she’d felt last year, when Massachusetts food made her ill and the winter cold threatened to kill her, but a longing to be back in Nasirabad, with its smells of spice and animal dung, with her sisters’ silly games and the clack of knitting needles from her grandmother, her anâ. By contrast, when Gus rang on the dorm phone—he knew not to ring her mobile—she felt only her heart rising in her chest, as if his call meant their future was unfurling before them as unblemished as a fresh carpet. Now and then she reminded herself that the heart and the bone marrow have to work together, or a person will not survive. But normally she put off for another day the question of reconciling her two separate lives. Only now did she have the memory of that sudden encounter, his hand on her waist, his lips. Like a jewel that glows in the dark.

•   •   •

When they’d picked up a pair of halal burritos and settled into Shahid’s dorm room, he put on the DVD of Othello he’d checked out of the library. Outside was windy, with fat gray clouds scudding across the sky, the last yellow leaves of fall dancing across Shahid’s window. Already the hours they had spent together last spring, with her hauling him through Principles of Physics, were a distant memory. He wasn’t taking any more sciences, just this lit course and then business and economics. Shahid was a better writer than she, Afia kept telling him; Shakespeare should be easier for him. But he had trouble grasping these plays. When the video was over, all he could talk about were the scenes that weren’t in the version he’d read for class.

“And they show a lot of sex, you know,” he said in Pashto, not looking at Afia. “Because it’s for the Americans, they need that.”

“They show it between married people,” she said quickly. “They wouldn’t show it on the stage.”

She had read the play, for his sake. If he could nail this class, he’d bring his GPA above 3.5, which was what the fellow at Harvard said he needed for that job, next year. She had her own paper to write, for Microbio, but she could do that tonight, with lots of tea. She marked a few places in Act Three. “You see how it’s morning when Cassio asks Desdemona for a favor? Emilia’s with her. She’s never alone with Cassio. But by that night, Othello’s sure his wife has been unfaithful and he strangles her.”

Shahid shook his head. “I’m lost already,” he said. “And it’s all in this old English—”

“But remember in the movie. There’s just the one night that Othello spends with his wife.”

“Yeah, when she marries him against her father’s wishes. I thought I could write about how it’s fated not to work because she’s so headstrong. And in the movie, what they do—”

“Shahid, it’s an American movie. We see that stuff all the time.”

“We don’t write about it.”

“Ignore the sex. If you look at the time frame—”

“Still, he’s a Moor. She’s Italian. Maybe it’s kismet, you know, that they die.”

“Where would you find the evidence, Shahid lala?”

He stood and stretched. His dorm room was smaller and more cluttered than hers. He’d drawn a single this year. “You don’t need evidence,” he said, looking down on the leaf-strewn quad. “This isn’t science.”

“I took a class in poetry last spring. You needed evidence even for that.” Carefully she pointed out to him that Shakespeare’s play let only twelve daylight hours elapse between the time Othello first becomes jealous and the moment he kills Desdemona. “And see here,” she said, pointing to where she had highlighted lines in yellow, “how he says she’s committed the act of shame with Cassio a thousand times. But she hasn’t had the chance to do it once!”

In the end, Shahid couldn’t stop talking about Desdemona’s planting the seed of suspicion by the way she dishonored her family. That was, Afia thought later, the way Baba would see it, and Khalid too—especially Khalid. So she helped Shahid write his paper about Desdemona’s disobedience and kismet. Even if the evidence wasn’t strong, she thought it would get him the B he needed.

Just as they were finishing, three of the squash guys came by to persuade Shahid out for a hamburger. Afia adjusted her hijab and averted her eyes. She knew all Shahid’s teammates. But Gus was among the three, and she didn’t trust herself. “I have to take my sister back to school,” Shahid said to them.

“Both of you come out with us,” said Yanik. “You’re not keeping halal anymore, Shahid. Don’t give us that bullshit.”

“My sister is,” said Shahid.

“Valerie’s hostessing tonight,” Yanik said. “C’mon, dude.”

“I have to get back,” Afia said. It hurt not to lift her eyes to Gus. He was the only secret she kept from her brother—well, he and her job. Three afternoons a week, she bagged groceries at the Price Chopper in Northampton. The scholarship she had from Smith covered tuition and housing, but she had told her family it covered everything, just like Shahid’s scholarship and his allowance from Uncle Omar. The older women at the Price Chopper knew about Gus and didn’t mind when he came by. She called them all “Aunty,” the way she would have at home. At the end of the day, they usually gave her a bag of dinged cans and boxes they’d found, and she sorted through for what was halal. It lifted her spirits, to tie on her apron and spend the dark evenings in a bright place where she felt cared for.

But she could not tell Shahid about the shameful job she held, bagging other people’s food and mopping up their messes; and she could not let him see how well she knew Gus. She put the Gus-feeling away, like moving a wayward cell with a tweezers back to the organ it was meant to serve. As they stepped out of the brick dormitory onto the parking lot, she saw the clouds that had been threatening all day had opened, and rain was coming down. She slipped off her flats and waited barefoot on the cold sidewalk for Shahid to bring his Honda around.

“What, no Wellingtons?” he said when she slid in.

“I bought some last year. They leaked.”

“Where’d you buy them?”

“I think it’s called Payless?”

He chuckled. “Silly sister. Those are cheap, you can’t expect them to last.” He glanced at the clock on the dash. “We’ll swing by the outlets,” he said. “Get you something for rain and snow too. What’d you wear last winter for the snow?”

Afia shrugged. She didn’t want to tell him she had ruined her sturdiest leather shoes, the only ones that could keep her warm enough. She couldn’t expect a brother to notice such things. That he thought she could buy anything at all was odd, since he didn’t know about the grocery job—but even with her own money, she was a burden. Shahid had had to ensure she was safely transported and cared for on weekends and school breaks. He had to answer to Moray and Baba for any tarnish on the gleam of her promise in America.

“They have good boots here,” said Shahid, pulling up in front of Clarks. “Britisher boots, rains all the time there.”

Afia hung back while he pulled one model after another off the shelves and examined them critically. Her eye was drawn to a pretty pair with a buckle on the side and a stacked heel, but she let Shahid ask the saleswoman questions about waterproofing and warmth. “Here,” he said in English when the woman had fetched her size, “try these.”

He handed her a pair of strangely elegant workmen’s boots. They laced up from a padded toe but ended in a flap of shearling. When she stood up in them her feet felt hugged. “These are the kind Patty wears in winter,” she said in Pashto.

“That’s the idea. They’ll keep you dry and warm too.”

She glanced at the tag dangling off the shelf. “But Shahid,” she said, “these are more than a hundred dollars. You can’t spend this on boots!”

He snorted. “You don’t know what Uncle Omar sends me for allowance, do you?”

“But that money’s supposed to be for you—”

“Do you like them? Do they fit?”

Her eyes strayed to the pretty pair. But they were even more and would not keep the rain off. Her toes began to feel the way they felt when she wiggled them in front of a fire. “They’re perfect,” she said.

The rest of the way to Northampton—her boots on in the car, her feet a pair of little ovens—they talked about Maryam’s wedding, the tickets Shahid would buy with Baba’s credit card, the dates they would each be finished with exams. Afia was excited to fly home in the middle of the year. She had told the other girls in her suite about Maryam’s wedding. She had even told her favorite professor, Sue Glasgow, about it. It would be fabulous, Professor Glasgow said, for her to see her family. She didn’t ask, the way the girls did, how long Maryam had known her fiancé; she didn’t ask if Afia liked this young man. Professor Glasgow taught biology, but she understood a lot more about the way families could be organized than the members of Al-Iman, which Afia had been invited to join when she arrived at Smith last year. The Al-Iman girls were mostly Jordanians, and they wore the hijab in the Turkish style, not at all like Pakistanis. The famous Muslim feminists they talked about were from the Middle East, and they all seemed wealthy, with winter vacations on the Black Sea or in Cancun. She didn’t have any more in common with these students, she complained to Shahid, than with the women in the South Asian club, who were all Indians and Sri Lankans.

“It’s the same for me,” Shahid said. “The only one who even starts to understand is Afran, and he’s from Turkey. That’s practically Europe.”

“So strange they are bringing us home now,” Afia said. “Our cousin Geeta was married when we were on spring break, but they didn’t even talk about flying us back. It’s so expensive.”

Shahid’s mouth twisted. “Baba probably wants to talk to me about the farm.”

“He’s not ready to turn over the farm!”

“No. And when he is, it should go to Khalid. He’s Baba’s true son.”

“Baba doesn’t think that way. He’s never made a distinction.”

Shahid shrugged. “Khalid’s the oldest. And I have no interest in the farm.”

“So why—”

“Baba will dangle something. To persuade me to return, not now but sometime, maybe with a Harvard degree.”

Afia’s stomach hollowed out. “And you won’t?”

“There’s nothing for me there. I love home, Afia. Just as much as you. But I can’t be a doctor, tending to poor women in the tribal areas. I’m not going to be an engineer. And I don’t see myself at the Peshawar Sports Academy.” They were turning up Afia’s narrow street. Shahid’s wipers squeaked across the windshield; his headlights shone on a carpet of wet leaves. “Inshallah, Baba could find you a husband who’s emigrating to America,” he said. “Another doctor, or something.”

“What, so I’ll stay in America and keep you company? It never works that way, Shahid. When does Moray see Uncle Omar?”

“She sees him.”

“Well.” He’d pulled over in front of her dorm. She gathered up her cloth bag of books and her old shoes, and hoisted her pocketbook over her shoulder. “I have almost three years still to go,” she said. “Let’s not talk about being separated yet.”

Impulsively, she leaned over and planted a kiss on her brother’s cheek. He turned to her, his eyes wide with shock. “What’s got into you?”

“Thank you,” she said, “for my boots.”

“Thank you for my essay.”

She made her way up the puddled walk and through the old-fashioned foyer of the dorm, so much cozier than Shahid’s. Gus had not reentered her thoughts—not since she had glimpsed him in Shahid’s room, and not yet, not until the tie to Shahid loosened and this strange life of her own slipped in. She climbed the curving stairs to the third floor, where her room was open. On the floor sat Patty and Taylor, eating pizza. “Hey, girlfriend,” Patty called out. “I hear your bro did good.”

“He did. About Chase, I am sorry he loses, Taylor.”

“’S’okay,” Taylor said, not taking her eyes from her laptop screen. “Chase is a punk.”

“They had a fight,” Patty explained.

“Oh! I am sorry.”

“But look here,” Patty went on. “You’re a total celeb, my hijabi roomie.”

Afia sat on her bed and pulled off her boots. They were not beautiful boots, but she would treasure them. Already, on the thin carpet, her feet began to cool. That Chase and Taylor would fight seemed a tragedy, but no one in the room was acting that way. “What is a celeb?” she asked.

“A famous person! Look here.”

They made room for Afia by the coffee table. At Patty’s nod, she lifted a slice of the pizza. Then she peered at the screen Taylor tilted toward her. “This is Smith College,” she said.

“Look closer. Look at the faces. It’s like a slide show.”

Chewing, she watched while a photo of a girl in a graduation cap gave way to one of a girl hitting a hockey ball, which faded to a pair of girls with a professor—she recognized Sue Glasgow—staring at a test tube. That image, too, rolled away, and there was a crowd of excited young women, holding aloft pieces of cardboard with slogans: We are Smith! Diversity = Strength! There, at the right edge, stood Afia herself, her right hand in a high five with a girl from Somalia and her left holding a hand—oh, Allah be merciful, a man’s hand—that connected to a figure who had been cut from the frame. She remembered the event, in late September. She remembered Gus’s hand.

“Roll it back,” she said, the pizza slice poised in the air, halfway to her mouth. Though what she wanted to say was, Take it back, erase it.

“Just wait,” Patty said. “It’ll come around again. Cool, huh?”

As the photos rotated through, a knot of fear gathered under Afia’s rib cage. The rally appeared again. “Cool,” she managed to say.