“Thank you,” Mrs. Elhadad says, hugging Mom.
They launch into conversation—a little English, a little Arabic—as Aya and I size each other up. She has the same dark eyes as her father. Her mustard-yellow maxi dress, faded denim jacket, and leopard-print hijab that matches her shoes are seriously cute.
“I like your outfit,” I say.
She smiles. “I was thinking the same about yours.”
The backs of my knees are sweating inside the rolled-up jeans that I paired with a navy paisley mini-dress. I don’t know how Aya can stand wearing so much clothing. Maybe living under the Egyptian sun her entire life has made her immune to the heat, because her makeup doesn’t look like it is melting off her face the way mine does. “Thank you.”
“I am excited to meet you. My father says only that you are a girl about my own age.” She speaks slowly, maybe because she’s translating Arabic to English in her head first. Which is impressive in itself. English is a complicated language. “And Adam tells me nothing, no matter how often I ask.”
“There’s really not much to know,” I say. “But Adam didn’t say much about you, either. Only that you’re hoping to go to college.”
“Yes,” she says. “I would like to study engineering, inshallah.”
“What is inshallah?”
“If it is God’s will.”
Grandma Rose has a favorite saying that goes: “If the good Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise,” which sounds similar to inshallah, albeit a little more colloquial. But it really brings to mind the part of the Lord’s Prayer where we say “thy will be done.” Either way, Christian or Muslim, it seems like we all hope we’re on the same page with God.
“Inshallah, then.”
“Thank you.” Her smile grows, dimpling her cheek. “Will you go to university too?”
“Yes,” I say. “But I haven’t applied to any schools yet—I’ll be doing that this fall—and I’m not sure what I want to study.”
Aya’s eyes widen. “You do not have to choose a program?”
“Well, some people know what they want to study, but others wait to decide on a major until after they’ve taken some classes,” I explain. “I’ve been thinking about anthropology, but I’ve also considered sociology and communications. So I think I’ll wait and see.”
“You are fortunate,” she says. “Here, your test scores decide which areas of study are open to you. If you meet the score of your preferred subject, you have a better chance of being placed in that program.”
“What if you don’t get your preferred subject?”
“Then that is also God’s will,” she says. “But if I work very hard and score high on the exam, there is a strong chance I will not be disappointed.”
I’m glad I don’t have to leave my future to fate, but if this is how it’s done in Egypt, I admire Aya for rolling with it when she could be freaking out. “That sounds like a good plan.”
She says something to her parents in Arabic and Mrs. Elhadad’s light brown eyes—just like Adam’s eyes—appraise me. It feels as if she is judging me, and I wonder if her husband told her about the way I stared at their son in the koshary shop. My face grows warm under her scrutiny, but then she nods.
“There’s a McDonald’s just next door,” Aya says. “I asked if you and I might go there together for a drink.”
“I’d like that.”
Mom and I walked from our apartment, which is just down the block from the hospital. She says, “I’ll see you at home.”
Outside, with our parents left behind, Aya says, “I hope this is not too personal to ask, but I have never met an American girl my own age before. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I did,” I say. “But we broke up before I moved.”
“Did you kiss him?”
There were nights when Owen and I kissed for hours, until our lips were puffy and our tongues were sore. There were other times—not nearly as often—that his hand would creep under my shirt while we were making out. The answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no, but I tell her yes.
She sighs. “Was it like the Nicholas Sparks movies?”
I laugh out loud, then feel bad when her smile slips. “Not exactly. I mean, Owen and I were fourteen the first time we kissed. His mouth crashed against mine and our teeth bumped, which was kind of . . . painful. Eventually, though, we totally learned how to kiss like in the movies.”
It’s not the whole truth because sometimes Owen’s tongue had a mind of its own and a heart set on my tonsils. He kissed like a teenage boy instead of a movie star, but Aya’s smile reappears, so I let her enjoy the fantasy.
Just before we reach McDonald’s, a group of boys around our age comes toward us. The one in the lead pushes his way between us and says something to Aya that makes the other boys snicker. One of them trails his fingertips down my braid as he passes and I curl my fingers into my palm to keep from slapping his hand away. My heart races as I take Aya by the arm, pulling her into the restaurant as the boys move on, jostling each other and laughing.
“What did he say to you?”
“Something I would not like to repeat,” she says.
Once, when I was twelve, I was walking home from school when I reached a busy intersection. I started across just a few minutes too late and the light changed when I was about midway. I jogged the remaining steps and when I reached the opposite curb, the guy in a waiting car clapped and yelled, “Nice tits,” as he drove away. I don’t know any girl who doesn’t have a similar story, but mostly they are isolated incidents, not an unrelenting part of our everyday lives. “How do you deal with this?”
“There is nothing I can do to stop it,” Aya says. “I fear speaking out will make it worse. So I try to ignore and pray that Allah will judge them with the fairness they deserve.”
“Guys like that deserve to have their dangly bits snapped off by crocodiles.”
Her voice is low, her mouth behind her hand, when she says, “Sometimes I pray for that, too.”
The restaurant resembles just about every other McDonald’s restaurant I’ve ever visited, but the menu items are listed in both Arabic and English, and the girls behind the counter wear tan hijabs that match their uniform baseball caps. The menu also offers Chicken Big Macs and McArabia sandwiches with kofta patties—basically flat meatballs—folded into pita bread. It reminds me of the McRib sandwiches back home, which Hannah always called the McWhy—“Why get it at McDonald’s when it would taste better literally anywhere else?”