“No, I mean, who are you to her?” he asked.
Her eyes drifted to the walls, that same indigo as the mushrooms his mother found at the markets when she was a child. The caps pale lavender, the gills deep blue-violet, stems bleeding that same color.
“I can’t do this right now,” she said. “Can we talk tomorrow?”
“Are you her sister?” he asked. “Cousin? Aunt? I don’t know.”
Aracely looked up. “I’m nothing, Sam. I’m a woman who had a room free.”
Sam put his hands in his pockets. “I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t have to.”
She could not talk him out of this. He would not forget that he’d realized Miel and Aracely both wore out their shoes the same way, the right sole thinning before the left, the wear heavier on the outside edge than the inside. These were things that did not come from living with each other. These were traits and tendencies each had been born with, and there were too many of them.
“You don’t owe me the truth,” he said. “But you owe it to her.”
Aracely turned around. “If you think the truth is so great, how about you start?” She scanned his shirt and his jeans. Under her stare, his binder felt a little tighter, his jeans not quite loose enough to hide what he didn’t have. “This thing you’re doing…”
“It’s not a thing,” he said.
Maybe bacha posh were words that did not belong to him. They were only his through the stories his grandmother had told him, of families across the border from Peshawar, mothers and fathers dressing their youngest daughters as sons.
But they were so much more his than they were Aracely’s. His grandmother’s father had welcomed into his home men whose youngest daughters lived as boys until it was time for them to be wives. He had done business with these men. To mark their arrival, Sam’s grandmother and great-grandmother had shelled almonds and pistachios for sohan, their whole house sweet with the smell of cardamom.
Miel understood this. That day she’d seen enough of him naked to wonder, when she’d waited for him on the back steps, she’d been quiet enough to let him explain bacha posh. He remembered grasping at the words that would distill it down, words he could get out fast enough to keep her there, to stop her from running back to the violet house and telling him she never wanted to see another of his moons outside her window.
Where my grandmother comes from, sometimes parents who have girls but no boys dress one of their daughters like a son. Then it’s like they have a son. She can do things boys can do and girls can’t. And she can be a brother to her sisters. Does that make sense?
Miel hadn’t been looking at him as he spoke. She’d been looking down, at their legs next to each other, his in jeans, her knees showing at the edge of her skirt.
But she’d nodded, and she’d stayed.
If Miel had been able to understand when she and Sam were both children, Aracely, a grown woman, had no excuse now.
Sam looked back at Aracely. “You don’t get to pick apart bacha posh,” he said. “You don’t know anything about it.”
“I know enough,” Aracely said. “I asked your mother because I’d never heard of it before.”
“That’s right,” he said. “You’d never heard of it. So don’t pretend you know anything.”
“I know that these girls live with the freedom of being boys for years and then they’re expected to become wives. They’re expected to forget everything they knew about being anything other than what they’re supposed to be.”
The words turned the back of his neck hot. They left him tense with the feeling that Aracely was lecturing not only him but the grandmother who had told him about Pakistan, and about bacha posh, and who was no longer alive to speak for herself.
These girls. What they’re supposed to be. All of it felt like Aracely’s judgment of a world she did not know, and a world that had given him a quarter of his blood.
“You want to play whose culture is more backwards?” Sam asked. “Because I can do that. Women like you, with your cures and your prayers and your different-color eggs, you know what they say about you? Those old women—what do you call them, the se?oras?—they’re nice to you to your face. They send their sons and their daughters to you. And then they call you a witch behind your back. A bruja. Even I know that word.”
Aracely’s eyes were still as open as they’d been before, neither closing with a flinch nor spreading wider.
“And these are your own people,” Sam said. A cruelty, a kind of rubbing it in, had slipped into his tone before. Now he let it wrap every word. “They want you for what you can do for them when no one’s looking, and then in church they curse you. That’s your culture. I pick mine any day.”
Aracely watched him, her face unchanged.