“Now this is food,” her grandmother likes to say, beaming at the colorful salads on the table. “From the soil to our mouths.”
There was another garden, Riham has been told, though the details of it are hazy to her, almost fictional. All she knows is this garden was in Palestine, and it burned down. It is linked to the war she learned about in school and to her father being away a long time ago. The adults rarely speak of these things, giving vague responses to questions. It is clear they find this talk painful, and Riham isn’t the type of girl to ask for more.
This summer, her mother’s cousin Khalto Mimi is here. Khalto Mimi’s husband died the previous year and now they spend much of their time at her small house. Riham had envisioned a silent, somber home, everyone draped in black, but instead Mimi and her daughters wear bright dresses and laugh often.
There are dozens of photographs of the father, a handsome man with a thick mustache—kissing a pudgy toddler Lara, his arm around Khalto Mimi, smiling in front of a cake dotted with candles—and the girls bring him up casually in conversation.
“It was when Baba first got sick,” Lara corrected Mira once while talking about an old family vacation. They are both sunny and beautiful, with sleek black hair. Riham is envious of their trim bodies, the easy way they tease their mother.
“How wonderful,” Alia says often, “that Lara and Mira are so close in age to you.” Karam’s absence means that Riham has no excuses not to spend time with them. She wants to explain to her mother that Mimi’s daughters are a different breed of girl, akin to some of the ones in Riham’s private school in Kuwait, pretty, daring, streaking their hair with henna and lemons.
She knows Lara and Mira are aware of this, but they are nice to her, politely inviting her along. They have the magnanimity of the innately beautiful.
“Would you like me to straighten your hair?” Lara asks her sometimes. They eye her with an optimism—as though she is a ratty car with a decent engine—that Riham finds alarming. In the shops they coax her to try dresses on.
“Hmm,” they say. “Flowy designs definitely suit you, with your . . . body type.” She knows they are trying not to say fat.
Afterward, they get ice cream cones and sit on the balcony, their brown legs stretched onto each other’s chairs. Lara and Mira speak voraciously of the future.
“Paris,” Lara says, as though she were a woman in her twenties. “Definitely Paris. It’s the only place to become a real dancer.”
“Ugh, Paris. Too cold. I’m going to move to Spain. Or California.” Mira, fifteen years old, with a waist so small Riham could wrap her hands around it.
“What will you do there?”
“Sing,” Mira always says. She sometimes sings for the adults when they gather for tea. She winds her hair into a bun, tilts her long neck back, and parts her lips. It is like watching someone paint the sky.
“What about you, Riham?” the girls ask her. “What do you want to do?”
The answer is complicated. Riham is mousy and shy, her body pudgy in the thighs and hips. Her left breast is treacherously larger than her right one. A smattering of acne mars her forehead, and her limp hair never curls like her sister’s.
Still, she burns with daydreams of growing up and moving to Europe. Riham has never been there but imagines a life with a studio apartment, eating jam on baguettes and drinking green tea, days filled with reading novels and drawing.
When Riham thinks of her future self, it is of a person transformed, so removed from her current self that the only remnants will be phantomlike. In her daydreams, future Riham simply erases current Riham, forgets her entirely. And if this causes a twinge of preemptive mourning or protest, the smallest tendril of sorrow for herself now—with her love of soggy cereal, the way she drapes strands of hair like a mustache over her lips while reading, her thrill at the scent of old books—it is slight and she resolutely ignores it.
But, of course, she cannot say all of this, and so she quietly replies, “I want to live in an apartment by myself,” and the girls exchange glances of confusion and pity.
In the past few months, she has amended her fantasies to include boys, someone kissing her full on the lips. It happened without warning; suddenly she was dreaming of faceless boys touching her, dancing with her. She always wakes breathless and ashamed, a dampness between her legs. During the day, her thoughts race and circle, heliocentric, always returning to boys.
Well, one boy.
Lara and Mira speak frankly about boys, in a way that Riham’s friends in Kuwait—girls Riham has known since kindergarten, shy girls who like to swap books and talk about films, their only transgression an afternoon when they bought cigarettes and smoked until they became dizzy—never have.
“So luscious,” Mira croons about a rock star. “Those eyes are like caramel drops.”
In the afternoons, Lara and Mira gather with their friends at a neighborhood pastry shop. They buy kanafeh and sticky rolls, gossiping and laughing. Sometimes boys from their school come in, sweaty from playing football. They are rowdy with one another, teasing when the girls, demurring, call out for them to be careful.
Riham watches these interactions with fascination, an anthropologist observing a new tribe. The girls toss their hair and smile at the boys.
“You’re disgusting,” they say when the boys spit. And the boys grin.
Sometimes one of the braver boys, usually Rafic, will catch an insect and chase the girls around with it, but slowly, giving them time to escape. The girls shriek and run away, flushed with attention.
“Stop!” they call. They punch the boys playfully on the shoulder.
Of all the neighborhood boys, Riham likes Bassam the most. He is Lara’s age, one year younger than Riham, and yet oddly poised. He never roughhouses or spits, like Rafic, and she has seen him smoke a cigarette only once. He isn’t handsome like Rafic either—slightly chubby, always wearing the same scuffed sneakers. His face is oval as an egg, and his eyes are faintly slanted. Tufts of curls stick out around his head. The other boys call him Romeo, and Riham can tell he is well liked.
“Why do they call him that?” Riham once asked Lara.
Lara rolled her eyes. “Oh, Bassam.” She explained that he’d once, on a dare, kissed a girl in the middle of the playground.
“Anyone could have seen it. The teachers would’ve kicked him out.”
“Did he get in trouble?” Riham asked. She felt jealous of the girl.
“No,” Lara had said. “But he’s been Romeo ever since. Which is hilarious because he’s so chubby and has all that weird hair and he barely speaks. You know?”
“Definitely,” Riham replied, her plainly affected indifference giving her away.