THIS IS THE first walk they take together. The hallway on the seventeenth floor is carpeted and their footsteps make no sound. Already he has memorized the gaudy red pattern of twisting vines on the floor, and her feet encased in golden shoes, taking slow steps—maybe, he thinks, to elongate their walk. He had made a list of what he could bring up when he ran out of things to say—the main point being how his counselor told him there was definitely a chance of him graduating, so long as he did a lot of catch-up work, met regularly with his teachers, and attended mandatory tutoring sessions during some lunch hours. Amira responds with genuine relief, excitement even. He makes a note to remember to do the same for her, if she ever comes to him with good news. Every time someone opens one of the hundred doors, a panic seizes her and him too; they step away from each other as if shocked. But it is only a man holding a briefcase. Or an elderly woman in a turquoise dress, adjusting its pleats, glancing at them only once, but smiling at them as if she knows.
He is so happy he could dance, uncharacteristic of him, but maybe with her he is someone who dances. Maybe with her he is someone who can do anything. It is time the world knew, he thinks—a line from a poem his teacher had assigned. He marvels at how the words he read before return and ring true now. It is time the stone made an effort to flower. Celan’s lines and Rilke’s on his mind—how foolish he would appear if he admitted that, how she would roll her eyes and think he was trying too hard, or that he was not as cool as he seemed. But there is a part of him that does not care, that wants to take the hair that has fallen into her face and tuck it behind her ear, gently brush against the skin of her cheek, and say the line he recalls—how everything exists to conceal us.
She talks about her day. Her elaborate hand gestures. When did they become people who cared about the most insignificant details of their lives? He laughs at all the right moments. Something closed in her unlatches and she twirls, her outfit is one that fans out before falling against her legs and she gushes, “I can’t believe we’re doing this. What if someone catches us?”
“They won’t.”
“You’re so sure.”
He extends his hand to trace his fingers against the textured wall, the door frame, the smooth length of the door, the door frame again—because he can’t touch her.
“Tell me something,” she asks.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything that counts.”
So he thinks. Far behind them there is the ring of the elevator. They freeze, then look to one another and laugh. They keep walking. What can he say? He should have prepared more. There are already things he knows he cannot tell her. Partially because he does not want to set a bad example, risk influencing her negatively. He remembers how quick she was to ask for a cigarette when she stumbled upon him and Abbas half a year ago, smoking in the tall trees behind her house. Why can’t I, if you can, she had said to Abbas, are our lungs so different, that different standards apply? Abbas turned to Amar as if to say, see what I have to deal with? And then he shrugged and passed her the cigarette, and said to her, I won’t even mention you tried to Mumma or Baba, but only because I would rather you try with me than alone, and only if you drop it with the equality stuff for at least a week. At least a week, Amira. And she saluted him, which endeared her to Amar, and held the cigarette between her index finger and thumb, sniffed it and scrunched up her nose before taking it to her lips and smoking it, giving it back after she started coughing on her third drag. You boys are dumb, she said when she returned the cigarette to Abbas, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that Amar was grinning, it might have stung. Batamiz, Abbas joked as she walked away, begharat—which meant, the one who is disrespectful to their elders, the one who is without shame. She turned on her heel and replied khushi se—with pride, with happiness. How much more fun it was to throw Urdu terms at one another in jest; how different it felt when the same words were spat from their parents’ mouths.
So he cannot tell her, tell anyone, that he had sought out Abbas’s friend Simon a few months ago. Simon was the only person who had been in the car who had survived the accident that killed Abbas. When Mumma heard there had been a survivor, she had said, “What is it about these tragic accidents, a group of people touch death and God chooses one to come back and tell us about it.”
What was it that Simon could tell him, he had wondered, and in pursuit of an answer they had become sort of friends. One night, Amar followed him to a house party at the edge of town. He had smoked cigarettes with Abbas and the other boys for years; they had even, a few times, smoked weed. But that night, when a red cup of beer was handed to him, he accepted it. There was no immediate effect, the foam fizzy on his lips, but with each sip he felt like he was stepping out from his old world. Later, he took a bong hit too quickly and went outside to breathe the fresh air and massage his chest to dissolve the feeling of glass in his lungs, swaying on the heels of his feet, not knowing why he was there, accepting one drink and then intentionally going back for another and another, in a room full of people he did not know, and the only person who he did know was nothing like Abbas.
That night the bright moon hung low in the sky. As a child, Amar’s belief that the moon followed him calmed him, but seeing it then, with his lungs still filled with crushed glass, he felt the panicked sensation of a hand being pressed on his neck, and he knew he could not tell anyone how far out from his world he had ventured alone, certainly not his sisters, and definitely not Amira, who he had just begun to write to, who he wanted desperately to impress. The pebbly stars took turns dimming and glowing. And though he could not remember the last time he had stood sincerely in prayer, a thought like a prayer rose in his mind and he was so surprised by its presence it struck him like a blow: that his sisters never experience the doubts he was feeling, that they never shake in their certainty of being Muslim, never think that maybe there was no hell and no heaven and therefore no point. Never wonder if everyone had gotten it wrong or maybe they had all gotten it right in their own way, which meant that no way was superior to any other. That his sisters never stray from the path outlined for them, and that if there was a heaven, they would be in line waiting to enter.
So why would he say anything that would infect Amira’s thinking, now that he has started to regard her with the same kind of love he reserves for those he is closest to?
“In eighth grade I stole from grocery stores, gas stations,” he says, thinking that this is what she might be looking for. An actual secret, but one that is far enough behind him that it will not change how she looks at him now.
Her eyes widen, incredulous. He imagines her sheltered life. Never really alone without a father, brother, mother nearby and watching. But his life has been sheltered too.
“You’re terrible,” she jokes.
He tells her he hid chocolate bars in his sleeves, but doesn’t mention that he had been there with her brother, or that they would walk there with a group of other boys after Sunday school, during lunchtime while others lined up for spaghetti or sandwiches.
“Why did you do it? Just to see if you could?”
He shrugs. “I didn’t even want to.”
“Did you ever get caught?”
He tells her about the time the cashier at a gas station saw him on a security video, how the man ran out after him and how Amar, startled, dropped the green mint Tic Tacs and ran and ran until he couldn’t breathe.