“Why do you ask?” She glances up at him.
He shrugs one shoulder. Mumma smiles. She resumes kneading the dough. He regrets asking immediately. She must know. She always knows everything. She begins to list the families invited, raising a dusty finger each time, but none of the last names are Amira’s. She stops speaking and sprinkles more flour into the bowl, a trick for when the dough is too sticky. He turns to walk away, and fills with a disappointment or deflation he cannot precisely define.
“Oh,” his mother calls after him, “I forgot one.”
He turns around and she is smiling at him in her knowing way. She says the Ali family. Amar nods and walks away as calmly as he can, raises his fist in the air as soon as he is out of her sight.
On the day itself he irons his clothes for the first time in his life. It confuses him, the knobs and the different settings. He rushes to finish before his mother is done showering. He cannot risk any more of her knowing glances, her embarrassing smile. He is ready an hour before the function begins. Another first. He asks his mother if she needs any help, just to have something to occupy his hands. She beams at him. For her, he pours cold mango lassi into plastic cups and arranges them on trays. He lounges in the living room near the entrance, though the party is outside, the men on one side of the garden, the women on the other side or in the family room. Every time the doorbell rings he looks to the door. Every time it is anyone but her family, he feels pathetic.
Hadia enters the kitchen, dressed in a baby blue shalwar kameez that drags to the floor. She looks nervous, knowing that the event is for her; she twists her watch on her wrist. Home is home when Hadia is in it. Amar offers her a cup of lassi and she takes it. Whenever Hadia visits, Huda and Amar remember that they are friends too, and the three of them gather in her bedroom, stay up late talking, or they take their homework to a café, just to be near her. Huda appears, puts her arm around Hadia, and tilts her head quizzically to one side as she takes Amar in.
“Someone looks good today,” Huda teases him.
He fills a cup and places it on the tray. Then another.
“No better than any other day,” he says.
His sisters watch him. Huda grins. He takes a sip. Then their doorbell rings, and he looks up, and Mumma opens the door, and it is her family. He tries to meet Amira’s eyes without making it appear as though he’s trying, but she follows her mother straight into the garden with a lowered gaze. Tables have been set up in the backyard—some for the ladies, some for the gentlemen. All afternoon he is aware of where she is. There is a gravity about her and he finds he is not the only one pulled into her orbit. A group of other girls surround her. Even the older girls lean into her; when she speaks they listen, ready to laugh. She affords whomever she is speaking to her entire attention. Once he overhears an elderly lady comment how pyari she looks, a word that he knows means “lovely.” She is wearing a red and orange shalwar kameez, a delicate red orni is wrapped around her neck. Her lips have been painted red. This is new. He sulks about the garden upset that they cannot be alone. A few of his friends are there too, but he engages in conversations with them as if he is only overhearing them.
“Time for a walk?” Abbas asks, their code for sneaking away for a smoke.
“Baba would be mad,” he says, shaking his head, which is true, in a way, but not the reason he does not want to leave, not even for a minute. Abbas watches him a moment longer, in that same suspicious way Huda just had, and Amar wonders how he can be so transformed by his thoughts that his closest friend and sister notice instantly.
Amira stands at the farthest edge of the garden, by Mumma’s mint plants. A breeze lifts her hair then lets it go. A cloud moves over the sun and the entire world is shifted. Why had he expected it to be any other way? He’s upset too, that it is clear to him now that he has constructed this all in his head. That to her, he is no one, at most just a friend of her brother’s.
Despite the disappointment, he cannot deny how his garden is changed just by her being there. The air, changed. The charge of his body moving through it, changed. There is even delight in knowing that Huda and Abbas noted that change within him. So she does not speak to him, she does not even lift her eyes to his, so she does not smile, it is still a pleasure, feeling this way, inhabiting this space he has lived in for years without a modicum of enchantment.
For once, he does not wish that everyone would leave as soon as possible. But as the sun begins to set they gather their coats and adjust their scarves and approach his mother to thank her for a wonderful afternoon, and one by one they go. The last moments of the day always make him uneasy, the changing color of the sky, the empty feeling of knowing another day is about to be swallowed by the dark. Even in this, he is so separate from his father, who waits for dusk to step out for his walk, either around the backyard or to the horse pasture streets away, looking up at the world as though its wonders were made to be beheld by him alone.
Her family leaves and she leaves with them. The garden is just a garden. The living room just a living room. The long haul up the staircase. The sound of the door shutting behind him. Alone again in his bedroom that is just a bedroom.
Something white on his pillow catches his eye. It is a piece of paper, folded into a tiny square. He unfolds it. It has been carefully ripped, as though it had been pressed down with a nail before being torn, and its edges are softened. He does not recognize the handwriting, but appreciates its neat, measured quality before reading it. It says: I am afraid to lose my capacity to feel, to really feel.—A. P.S. What’s it like?
At first he is confused. Then it hits him: she is answering the question her mother had interrupted. She wants to continue their conversation.
He reads it again.
Then again.
Then one more time.
Then he sits at his desk and takes out a blank sheet of paper and a fine-tip black pen.
* * *
HADIA WAKES TO a paper taped on her door: a drawing of a boy playing basketball, wearing red shoes and jumping impossibly high. Soon she realizes that posters just like it have been taped on every bare wall, on both sides of every door—even on the door of their parents’ bedroom. Some posters are simple: drawings of red shoes sketched in marker, a black-and-white sketch of a boy smiling wide, the only color the red of his shoes. Some have quotes by boys in Amar’s class.
“THESE ARE THE BEST SHOES I’VE OWNED!” —Omar M.
“MY PARENTS WERE SO KIND TO GET ME THESE SHOES.” —Gabe M.
“I HAVE NOT TRIPPED ONCE WHEN WEARING THESE.” —Michael C.
Their favorite posters are the emotional appeals to Mumma and Baba, written in big, block letters:
DON’T YOU WANT TO MAKE YOUR ONLY SON AND YOUNGEST CHILD HAPPY FOR ONCE?
AFTER THIS I PROMISE TO NEVER ASK FOR ANYTHING ELSE.
LAST YEAR FOR MY BIRTHDAY I GOT A BOOK.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS IS NOTHING IF IT BUYS SO MUCH HAPPINESS.
WE HAD ENOUGH MONEY TO GET UGLY NEW LIVING ROOM CURTAINS.