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"Maybe I'll wear one when I'm older." I reach up and skim my fingers along the cotton hem. "This one's my favorite, because of the roses."
Huda laughs. "You're too young to worry about that."
"You don't even have your period yet," Zahra says.
"Bleeding isn't what makes you grown-up," I say.
Zahra inspects her fingernails. "Clearly you don't know what it means to be grown-up."
We turn at a brick building. Heat shimmers off the pavement and Zahra's black hair. Down the street, a man sells tea from a silver jug on his back,
say. "Today is the anniversary of when Abu Sayeed lost his son. Mama didn't want him to be alone."
"He had a son?" Somehow I never imagined Abu Sayeed had a family.
"And we're distracting him with food." Zahra kicks a stone and scoffs. She seems almost mad. "We're worried about cumin."
"Abu Sayeed is like us, then." I look down at my plastic sandals, still warm from the sidewalk stones. "He's missing the most important ingredient."
Huda slows. "I never thought of it that way."
The sun simmers the silver roofs of cars.
"We should play the spinning game with him," I say.
"Spinning game?" Zahra smirks. "Speaking of made-up."
Huda checks the street signs before we turn away from the tangle of cars. It's cooler on this street, and the iron gates of the houses are curled into the shapes of birds and the tufts of flower petals. Ladies in crisp dresses water window boxes or fan themselves on the upper balconies. We pass an apartment walk lined with tiny gray-and-white filler stones, and I snatch up a pebble.
Huda catches hold of my hand again and squeezes it. "The spinning game. How do you play?"
I grin and hop in front of her, walking backward and swinging my hands. "You close your eyes and spin around. Then the magic takes you through different levels, and you count to ten while you spin, one spin for each level you pass through. And when you open your eyes, things look the same, but the magic makes them different."
"Levels?" Huda tilts her head toward voices in the distance, the black-orange bark of a car backfiring.
"Levels of existence," I say, throwing open my arms. "There are different layers of realness. Like, underneath this one there's another one, and another one below that. And all kinds of things are going on all the time that we don't even know about, things that won't happen for a million years or things that already happened a long, long time ago." I forget to watch my feet, and I bump into the curb.
"Nour's lost it again," Zahra says.
"So these other realities," Huda says, "are running alongside ours at the same time, like different streams from the same river? Then there's a level where Magellan is still sailing around the world."
"And one where Nour is normal," Zahra says.
"Maybe there's a level where we all have wings," Huda says.
"And a level where you can hear Baba's voice," I say.
The words grab me like my feet have grown roots to the other side of the planet, and I stop in front of the iron gate of an apartment building. Panic weights my ankles, the thought that I'll never hear Baba's stories or his voice ever again. Why should a missing story leave a hole so big when it's just a string of words?
The sun drip-drops along the leaves of a crooked poplar tree. The next block is lined with closed halal markets and shawarma shops, the owners heading home early to break their fasts. No one says anything, not even Zahra. Nobody mentions how Mama and Baba used to live here in the Old City when Huda and Zahra were just babies. Nobody brags that they know all the shops and restaurants, how even Zahra speaks better Arabic than me.
But I feel all those things, the not-homeness of this city, the way nobody hangs blankets from their balconies in New York, the way Central Park had maples instead of date palms, how there are no pizza shops or pretzel carts on the streets here. How Arabic sounds funny in my mouth. How I can't walk to school with my friends anymore or buy gum from Mr. Harcourt at the newspaper stand. How sometimes this city shakes and crumbles in the distance now, how it makes me bite my lip so hard I swallow blood. How home is gone. How, without Baba, I feel like home is gone forever.
Excerpted from The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar. Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar. Excerpted by permission of Touchstone. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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