Chapter 1

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The last Saturday of August smelled like cut grass and something burning two houses down, and Samira Javidi was lying upside down on her bed trying to decide whether she was ready for seventh grade.

She had decided she was not.

She had decided this about forty-seven times already that summer, and each time she decided it, the decision felt new and terrible, like a test she hadn't studied for. The ceiling above her bed had a water stain shaped, she had long ago determined, like the country of Italy if Italy had been stepped on by a small dog. She stared at it now, her dark hair hanging off the edge of the mattress, her feet propped up on the wall beside the window where the afternoon light came through gold and slow.

Downstairs, her little brother Arman was yelling at a video game. Her mother was on the phone in the kitchen, speaking in the rapid, soft Farsi she used when she was talking to Samira's grandmother in Isfahan, a Farsi that sounded like water running over smooth stones. Her father, Samira knew without looking, was in his office at the end of the hall, sitting in front of his computer with two monitors and a coffee mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST DAD, which Arman had given him for Father's Day as a joke.

Samira sat up. Her head spun a little from being upside down. She looked at herself in the mirror on the back of her door and did not know what to think about what she saw. A girl with a long face, and dark eyebrows she had been told by her aunt Shirin were beautiful and would one day be the envy of everyone, which Samira privately doubted. A girl in a T-shirt from a 5K her mother had made her walk two summers ago. A girl who looked, Samira thought, exactly the same as she had looked in June, which was alarming because something was supposed to have happened over the summer. Something was supposed to have changed.

In her experience, the summer between sixth and seventh grade was the summer other girls became different. Ava Bellamy, who had been Samira's best friend since third grade until Diya moved to Ridgewood and became Samira's best friend in a deeper, quieter way, had texted Samira a picture of herself in July wearing lip gloss. Just the lip gloss. The picture was only of her mouth. Samira had not known what to say about it, so she had replied with a thumbs-up emoji, which had apparently been the wrong thing to say, because Ava had not texted her again since.

Samira flopped back onto the bed.

"Samira-jan?"

Her mother's voice floated up the stairs, warm and a little tired.

"Yeah?"

"Come down, please. I want to talk to you."

That was never good. When her mother wanted to talk to her, it was almost always about either (a) a dentist appointment, (b) a relative Samira was supposed to remember but did not, or (c) some new piece of advice about growing up that Samira did not want.

She swung her feet off the bed and went down.

Her mother, Laleh, was standing at the kitchen counter, chopping onions with the speed of someone who had been chopping onions since she was seven years old. Laleh Javidi was a nurse at Ridgewood Memorial, and on her days off she cooked as if an entire village were coming to dinner, which sometimes they nearly were. Tonight there was going to be gheymeh, because Samira could see the split peas soaking in a bowl and the tomato paste open on the counter, and the smell of the saffron her mother had bloomed in hot water was already climbing into the corners of the kitchen and making Samira's stomach rumble even though she had just eaten lunch.

"Sit," her mother said, without turning around.

Samira sat at the kitchen table and put her chin in her hands.

"I saw Aaliyah today," her mother said.

"Aaliyah who?"

"Aaliyah Farrell. From Chestnut Street. The young woman."

Samira knew who she meant, actually. Aaliyah Farrell lived three blocks away in a small green house with a big porch, and she was one of those adults whose age Samira could never quite guess. She was older than a college student but younger than Samira's parents, and she had the kind of laugh that made you look around the room to see what was funny. She had given Samira a bag of plums from her backyard once, last September, when Samira and her mother had been walking to the post office. Samira remembered the plums. They had been very small and very sweet.

"Okay," Samira said, waiting.

"She is starting something. A group. For junior youth."

"What is junior youth."

"Ages eleven to fifteen. It's called a junior youth group."

Samira frowned. "That is not a thing."

"It is a thing," her mother said mildly. "It is a real thing. People all over the world do it. I know about it because my cousin Mina did one in Tehran years ago, before she moved to Canada. It is a kind of group that meets once a week. They read a book together. They do a project to help the neighborhood. They talk about, how do I say, becoming good people."

"Mom. Everyone is trying to become a good person."

"Not everyone," her mother said, and her voice got a little sharper, the way it did when she did not want to argue but would if pushed. "A lot of people are trying to become rich. Or famous. Or thin. Aaliyah is gathering a group of young people your age to spend time thinking about what kind of person they want to be. It is, I think, a good thing."

"Who else is going?"

"Diya."

Samira sat up straighter.

"Her mother told me. Also Eden Reyes, down from Mrs. Peralta's house. And a boy named Marcus. And Jin-woo Park, from your old elementary. And Aliyah Teklemariam, I don't know if you know her, she goes to Saint Anne's."

"There's a lot of Aaliyahs."

"There are two. Different spellings." Her mother set down the knife and turned around, wiping her hands on a towel. "Samira. Will you go? Once. Just once."

Samira looked at her mother's face. Laleh Javidi had come to America when she was twenty-two. She had worked nights as a nursing assistant and then day shifts when she had moved up to a registered nurse, and she had a line between her eyebrows that Samira was pretty sure had been there since before Samira was born. Her mother rarely asked for things. When she did, it was important.

"When is it," Samira said.

"Tomorrow. Three in the afternoon. At Aaliyah's house."

"Tomorrow is Sunday."

"Yes."

"I was going to, um," Samira said. She could not think what she had been going to do. Water the plants. Reread a book. Lie on her bed for three more hours and stare at Italy on the ceiling.

"Try it," her mother said. "If you hate it, you can come home. Walk there. It is six minutes. If you hate it, you walk back. I will not make you go twice."

"Promise?"

"Qasam. I promise."

Samira sighed. The saffron smell was deep and warm in the kitchen. Outside, a sprinkler was ticking somewhere. Summer felt, in that moment, like a long golden thing that was ending, that was in fact nearly over, and Samira realized she did not know how to stop it.

"Okay," she said.

Her mother kissed the top of her head, which Samira tolerated because her mother did not do it often.

"Now," her mother said, turning back to the onions, "peel me some garlic."

That night, Samira lay in her bed and listened to the house. The windows were open and the September-before-it-was-September air was coming in, and she could hear the cicadas and a dog barking somewhere over on Sycamore. Her father had come home from his office down the hall looking pale. He had eaten two plates of gheymeh without saying much. Her mother had watched him eat. Samira had noticed, but she had not asked. She was twelve. There were things you did not ask.

She thought about tomorrow. A house on Chestnut Street, three blocks away. A woman she barely knew and five kids she barely knew either, and a book she had never heard of. Her stomach did the little floppy thing it did when she thought about something new.

Then she thought about Diya. Diya would be there. Diya Patel, her best friend since second grade, who had moved into the corner house on Linden the day Samira had been building a fairy house in her front yard with twigs and pinecones. Diya, who had walked right up and said, very seriously, "You need a door," and had gone home and come back with a piece of bark and then they had been best friends forever and ever.

If Diya was going, Samira could go.

Samira rolled over. The cicadas were very loud. Italy was in its usual place on the ceiling. Seventh grade was coming.

She closed her eyes and tried not to think about any of it.

Sunday afternoon was the kind of bright that made every color look too sharp. Samira walked down Linden Street toward Chestnut with her hands in the pockets of her jeans and a feeling in her chest like a moth that did not know where to land.

She had changed her shirt three times. The first one had been too nice, like she was trying. The second had a stain on the cuff she hadn't noticed before. The third one, a plain blue T-shirt, was fine. It was fine. She was fine.

She was not fine.

Diya was waiting for her at the corner of Linden and Chestnut, bouncing a soccer ball on her knee. Diya Patel was eleven and a half and exactly the kind of person who bounced a soccer ball on her knee while waiting for her best friend, because she could not stand still for more than four seconds in a row. She had cut her hair shorter over the summer, to her shoulders, and the end of her ponytail was bright turquoise, which her mother had finally, finally given in and let her dye at a salon instead of doing it in the bathroom with the cheap stuff from the pharmacy.

"You came," Diya said, catching the ball.

"I said I would."

"You say a lot of things. I didn't know if you would."

"I came."

"Good." Diya tucked the ball under one arm and linked her other arm through Samira's. "Come on. We are walking into our doom."

"Don't say that."

"I'm kidding. I think." Diya looked at her sideways. "My mom made me promise I would stay the whole hour, but if it is weird we can pretend we have to go home."

"What would be weird."

"I don't know. If there is singing. If we have to do a trust fall."

"There will not be a trust fall."

"You don't know."

They walked the rest of the way mostly quiet, the way best friends can be quiet together. Aaliyah's green house was at the end of Chestnut, set back a little from the street, with a porch and two rocking chairs and a row of sunflowers along the front walk that were nearly as tall as Samira. There was a welcome mat at the door that said PLEASE COME IN, which Samira found weirdly reassuring.

Diya rang the bell.

The door opened almost immediately, as if the person on the other side had been standing there, and there was Aaliyah Farrell, in a long denim skirt and a yellow blouse, her hair braided back from her face, smiling.

"Diya," she said, warmly. "Samira. I'm so glad you came. Come in, come in, the others are in the back."

"Everyone," Aaliyah said. "This is Samira Javidi, and you all know Diya. Samira, this is Eden Reyes, Jin-woo Park, Marcus Thompson, and Aliyah Teklemariam. Spelled differently from me."

"Hi," Samira said, softly, and sat down on the end of the couch because it was the closest open seat. Her hands felt big and useless. She did not know what to do with her hands.

"I made cookies," Eden announced, as if in answer to a question no one had asked. "Well, my abuela made them. Polvorones. They are very good. You should all have one."

"Thank you," Samira said. She took one. It was powdered-sugar-and-almond, and it melted in her mouth, and she felt, for the first time that day, slightly better.

"Okay," Aaliyah said, settling into one of the armchairs. "Before we start. I want to say this is not going to be like school. I am not going to stand at a board and teach you things. This is going to be more like — a conversation. That we have once a week. Over many weeks. Where we read together and think together and, eventually, do things together. Out there." She nodded toward the window, where Samira could see a slice of the street, the sunflowers, a blue car going by.

"Like what kind of things?" Jin-woo asked. He had the kind of voice that was quiet but clear, like he had thought about what he was going to say before he said it.

"Like things that serve the neighborhood. The community. We'll decide together, later, what we want to do. But for now, today, I want us just to talk."

"About what," said Marcus. Marcus was dark-skinned, had short twists, and the notebook on his lap was closed but his pen was in his hand, the way a person holds a pen they are always about to use.

There was a silence. The kind of silence that happens when a question is bigger than the room is used to.

"This is like homework," Diya said.

"It is like homework," Aaliyah agreed. "Except you don't have to raise your hand and there is no grade."

"I'll go," Eden said. "I will go first because I always go first and my mom says it is my one big flaw. I love the panadería. That's my abuela's bakery, on Hemlock. I love it in the morning when it smells like butter and everyone who comes in says hi to my abuela in Spanish and she says hi back and then they buy a conchita and go. I love that. I would change — " she tilted her head, thinking — "I would change the corner by the gas station where there is a lot of trash always. Like a lot of trash. I don't understand why nobody picks it up."

"Good," Aaliyah said. "Who else."

"I love the oak tree on Maple," Marcus said. His voice was low. "The really big one. It's like four hundred years old or something. I don't know. It feels old. I sit under it sometimes." He paused. "I would change — I don't know. Maybe the way some people look at you when you're walking alone."

Samira glanced at him. He had not looked up from his notebook. She did not know what to say to what he had said. She felt, somehow, that Marcus had said something true that had taken a lot of small bravery to say, and nobody said anything for a second.

"Okay," Aaliyah said, gently. "Thank you, Marcus. Aliyah?"

"I love my grandmother's garden," Aliyah Teklemariam said. "She grows injera teff in the backyard. You are not supposed to be able to, but she does. I would change — the way the bus never comes on time on Sundays. That's small. I know. But it bothers me."

"It is not small," Aaliyah said. "Jin-woo?"

Jin-woo adjusted his glasses. "I love the library. I go there every Saturday. I would change that more people in my school actually talked to each other. They just look at their phones. It is very weird."

"Diya?"

"I love that I can run to school and nobody thinks it is strange. In the city we lived in before I moved here, you could not just run down a sidewalk. People thought you were in trouble. Here no one cares. I like that. I would change — hmm. I would change that there is no good field to play soccer on that is not locked up for other people's teams. I don't like that."

Everyone was looking at Samira.

Samira swallowed. Her face felt warm.

"I, um," she said. She tried to think. She thought of her mother's kitchen, of saffron in hot water. She thought of Italy on her ceiling. She thought of the fairy house Diya had put a bark door on. She thought of something she had not thought about on purpose, which was the way her father had looked at the dinner table last night. Pale. Quiet.

"I love," she said, and her voice came out smaller than she meant, "I love that I can walk places. To the library. To Eden's abuela's panadería. To here. I like that. Where my family is from, in Iran, my mother says when she was a girl she walked everywhere. I like that I can do that here too."

"And change?"

Samira looked at her hands. "I would change — I don't know. I would change — " She hesitated. "I would change the way new school years start. How everybody comes back different and you don't know if you are going to fit anymore." She laughed, a short little laugh she did not really feel. "That's stupid."

"It is not stupid," Aaliyah said, very seriously, and her seriousness was somehow kind. "Samira. That is not stupid."

Nobody teased her. Nobody rolled their eyes.

Samira breathed out.

They talked for over an hour. Somehow the hour passed in a way Samira had not expected, not the slow dragging way an hour in school passes but fast, like water. They talked about their neighborhood. Eden told a story about a man on Hemlock who fed fifteen stray cats out of a cardboard box. Marcus told a story about the oak tree getting hit by lightning one time and surviving. Jin-woo told a story about finding a dollar in a library book that had a note in it that said KEEP THIS. Samira told the story, because Diya made her, about the fairy house with the bark door.

When Aaliyah said, "All right, I think that's probably enough for our first time together," Samira was surprised. She had not been watching the clock.

"Next Sunday," Aaliyah said. "Same time. I am going to give each of you a book. It is called Walking the Straight Path. Read the first chapter before you come. Don't try to read the whole thing. Just the first chapter. Okay?"

"Okay," they all said, more or less in unison.

Aaliyah handed each of them a paperback, soft-covered, with a design on the front that looked like a footprint and a path disappearing into the distance. Samira tucked hers under her arm.

Outside, on the porch, the sun was starting to go low, the kind of late-afternoon gold that made everyone's face look better. Diya took the soccer ball out from under the bench where she had stashed it.

"Well?" she said, as they started down the walk together.

"Well what?"

"Are we pretending we have to leave, or are we coming back next Sunday."

Samira thought about it.

"We are coming back next Sunday," she said.

Diya grinned. She bounced the soccer ball once, high, and caught it, and then they walked home down Chestnut together under the sunflowers and the slanting light, and Samira did not say so, but she felt for the first time in a long time that summer might not have been wasted after all.

School started on Wednesday.

Samira had laid out her clothes the night before the way she had laid out her clothes the night before every first day of school since she was six, which was something she was not going to tell anyone about. A pair of dark jeans. A green T-shirt her mother had brought back from a conference in Boston. The sneakers she had gotten for her birthday. Her hair, she had decided, she would wear down.

"When did you get that," Samira said.

"Soccer tryouts were last week. I made the team."

"You did not tell me that."

"I am telling you now."

"Diya."

"Sorry. I wanted to see if I made it first." Diya looked embarrassed, which was something Diya rarely was. "I did. I made the seventh grade team. I am the youngest. Don't make a big deal."

"I am making a big deal," Samira said. "Congratulations. You are the youngest."

Diya punched her softly in the shoulder. "Come on. Don't want to be late."

Ridgewood Middle School was a boxy building with too many windows, set back from the road behind a wide front lawn that every year the town threatened to replace with something low-maintenance, and every year did not. The front doors were propped open with bricks. Samira and Diya walked in together and immediately were separated by the tide of kids, and Samira, who had promised herself she would not do this, felt her stomach lurch.

She found her homeroom. She found a desk in the third row. She put her backpack down and sat and looked at the smartboard where her teacher, Ms. Greco, whom she did not know, was writing WELCOME SEVENTH GRADERS in pink marker. Samira recognized about half the kids in the room. Two of them were her old elementary friends, Ava Bellamy and Brie Cho, and they were sitting in the back corner and laughing quietly about something Samira could not hear, and when Ava's eyes flicked over Samira, they did not quite land.

Samira turned back to face the front.

She had, she told herself, a thing Ava and Brie did not have. She had, in her backpack, a book with a picture of a path on the cover, and the knowledge that on Sunday she was going to walk three blocks and sit in a living room with five people who had listened to her say a not-stupid thing.

That, she told herself, was going to have to be enough.

She made it through the morning. English with Ms. Greco (who was, she discovered, the kind of teacher who made you write your name on an index card on the first day and then collected them and pretended to eat one, which Samira found both weird and promising). Math with Mr. Harding, who had a mustache that moved when he talked. Science with Ms. Okonkwo, who smelled like peppermint and immediately made them pair up and measure each other's arm span with a piece of string, which was possibly the first activity Samira had ever enjoyed on a first day of school.

At lunch she found Diya in the cafeteria and they sat at a table by the window with Eden, who was also in seventh grade and also had second-period math, and with a new girl named Priya whom Diya had met at soccer tryouts and who had come from somewhere in Michigan and had a laugh so loud three teachers had already told her to use her indoor voice. Samira ate the lunch her mother had made her — cold leftover rice and a little container of gheymeh from Saturday night, warmed up so the smells mixed and rose when she opened the lid — and for the first time since she had walked into the building she felt okay.

At the table behind them, she heard laughter. She turned her head, just barely, and saw Ava and Brie and a third girl she did not know, a blonde girl with the kind of sharp cheekbones Samira associated with high school, whispering about something. The blonde girl glanced over at Samira's table and then back at Ava and Brie, and they all laughed harder.

Samira looked down at her lunch.

Diya, whose antennae for nonsense was extremely good, said, "Don't."

"I wasn't," Samira said.

"You were."

"I was not."

"You were thinking about it."

"Diya, eat your sandwich."

Samira ate. The food was good. The food was hers.

Sunday came. Samira had read the first chapter of Walking the Straight Path on Friday night, sitting up in bed with her reading light on, and then she had read it again on Saturday morning because the first time she had been too worried about whether it was going to sound religious in the way she feared, which was a way she did not have the exact words for but which involved somebody telling her she was bad or going to be bad unless she did certain things in a certain order.

It was not like that.

The book was, Samira was surprised to discover, not really a book about believing things. It was a book about becoming things. It talked about qualities. Truthfulness, for example. It talked about truthfulness not as a rule but as something you build, like a muscle. It talked about the difference between knowing what is true and saying what is true, and about how neither of those was the same as living what is true. It talked about justice — not the courtroom kind, but the kind where you looked at people and tried to see them fairly. It talked about service. It said that every person has the ability to become someone who helps make the world better, and that this ability was like a seed, and that the seed had to be watered.

Samira had read the chapter twice and had not understood all of it. But she had underlined a few things.

Across many moments.

She had written that on a Post-it Note and stuck it on the inside cover of the book.

At three o'clock on Sunday she walked over to Aaliyah's again. Diya met her at the corner of Linden and Chestnut like before. The day was cooler. Samira had a light jacket on. Autumn, she thought. Autumn was actually coming.

Everyone else was already there. Jin-woo was on the floor. Marcus was on the pillow again, the notebook closed on his lap. Aliyah was at the kitchen table in the other room, talking in a low voice with Aaliyah about something Samira could not hear. Eden was on the couch with a plate of something on a napkin.

"Empanadas this time," Eden announced, when Diya and Samira came in. "From last night. Take one."

"We just ate," Diya said.

"Take one anyway."

They took one.

They talked for a while about the first chapter. It was not like school. Nobody got called on. Aaliyah sat and listened and asked questions, and the questions were the kind that slowed you down. What did you think about, she asked, when you read the part about truthfulness? What is one moment in your life when you were tempted not to be truthful, and were? What is one moment when you weren't, and wished you had been?

Samira was quiet for a lot of that conversation. But she thought. She thought about the time in fifth grade when she had broken a vase in the living room that had belonged to her grandmother and she had not said she had done it, and her mother had spent three days sad about it, assuming it had happened on its own, and Samira had not said, and finally her mother had stopped being sad about it and Samira had lived for years with the knowledge that she had let her mother go on being sad about something Samira could have fixed with one sentence.

She did not tell that story to the group.

She told a smaller story. She told about a time she had taken a piece of gum from a friend's backpack without asking. It was a smaller confession, but her cheeks still went hot, and Aaliyah had nodded, not in judgment but in the way a person nods when they recognize what you are talking about.

At school that week, something else happened.

Ava had moved her desk. During second period, before the teacher came in, Ava had gotten up and gone to the back of the room and sat with Brie and the blonde girl — whose name, Samira had learned, was Emma Whitfield, and who was new, and who, Samira had also learned, had an older sister in high school who was apparently famous at Ridgewood, which made Emma already famous by association. The three of them sat together now. They whispered together. They walked to the bathroom together. They had, between them, the kind of energy that made a hallway part around them.

In the past, Samira had been part of a group like that. With Ava. Just the two of them. Sometimes with Brie. They had not been mean. They had not been anything. They had just been two girls who had known each other since third grade and who had sat together at lunch and who had decided, once, when they were ten, to wear matching headbands for a week.

Now it was September of seventh grade and it was as if the two of them had never known each other.

Samira thought about this a lot. She thought about it so much that it started to feel like a small rock in her shoe that she was walking on and could not get rid of.

On Thursday, after school, she went to the kitchen and sat at the table and watched her mother make dinner and did not say anything for a long time.

"Something is wrong," her mother said.

"No."

"Yes."

"It is nothing."

Her mother put down the spoon and turned around. Her eyes were tired. Her eyes had been tired for weeks, actually, though Samira had not wanted to look at that too directly.

"Samira-jan."

"Mom. It is nothing. It is just — seventh grade."

"Okay," her mother said. "Seventh grade." She came over and sat down across from Samira. "Tell me."

Samira did not know how to tell her. How did you tell a grown-up that a person you used to eat lunch with was not eating lunch with you anymore? It sounded stupid when she tried to put it into words. It sounded babyish.

"People are different," she said finally. "At the beginning of the year. They change over the summer."

"Yes," her mother said. "That is true."

"But not everybody."

"No. Not everybody. But enough people that it feels, I imagine, like the whole world has moved and you did not get the memo."

Samira nodded. Her throat was tight.

"This is a hard thing," her mother said. "It is a hard thing at twelve. It will happen again at fourteen, at sixteen, at twenty. Every time a group of people decides to move toward something together, other people who were in that group will feel left behind. This is how people are." She reached across the table and took Samira's hand. "But you, Samira. You do not have to go with them. You do not have to do whatever it is they are doing. You can choose."

"It is not like that is easy."

"No. It is not easy."

"Mom."

"What."

"Are you and Dad okay?"

Her mother's face did something small. A small tightening. A small lift at the corner.

"Your father is tired," she said. "He is working on something at work that is difficult. It is fine. We are fine."

Samira looked at her.

"Samira."

"Okay."

"We are fine."

"Okay."

After dinner, Samira went upstairs and opened Walking the Straight Path and read the second chapter, which Aaliyah had not assigned yet, but Samira read it anyway, because she wanted to. She was not sure, later, what it was exactly that the chapter had said that stayed with her. But she knew that when she closed the book and lay back on her bed, Italy was still on the ceiling and the world had not shifted, but something inside her had shifted the littlest bit — like a piece of furniture moved an inch in a room, so that everything else in the room had to reorient to it.

She turned off her reading light and went to sleep.

On the third Sunday in September, there was a new person in Aaliyah's living room.

He was sitting on the couch when Samira and Diya arrived, and he was looking at the coffee table and not at anybody, and his hands were in his lap. He was about their age, Samira thought, maybe a little older. His skin was a warm brown and his hair was curly and a little long, falling into his eyes. He was wearing a gray T-shirt that looked like it had been washed many times and a pair of jeans that were a little too short for him in the way jeans get when you grow four inches in a summer.

"Everybody," Aaliyah said, from her chair, "this is Felix Delgado-Brown. Felix moved to Ridgewood with his family this summer. He will be joining our group."

"Hi, Felix," they said, in the ragged way a group of middle schoolers says things together.

"Hi," Felix said. He did not look up from the coffee table.

Samira took her spot on the end of the couch. Felix was at the other end of the couch. She could see, from the side, that he had a small scar on his temple, a pale line, like he had fallen off something when he was smaller.

"Felix goes to Ridgewood Middle with most of you," Aaliyah said. "Seventh grade."

"Seventh," Felix said, softly.

"Great," said Diya, who had the instinct for when someone needed to be pulled into a conversation. "Who do you have for English?"

"Ms. Greco."

"Me too!" Diya said. "Samira is in her third period. You must be, what, fifth?"

Felix nodded.

"Oh wow okay," Eden said, already reaching for the tupperware she had brought. "Felix. These are polvorones. My grandmother made them. Here, have one, have two, have three. You look hungry."

Felix looked up, finally, and smiled a small smile. His smile was better than Samira had expected, because it made his whole face look less closed.

"Thank you," he said, and took a cookie, and then took another one. And then another one. He ate three polvorones in the first five minutes of the meeting, while the rest of them ate one or two each, and Samira watched him eat the third one quickly, the way you eat something when you have not eaten in a while, and she thought vaguely that maybe he had come without lunch and then she put the thought away because it seemed rude to think about it, and Aaliyah was starting the meeting.

"Today," Aaliyah said, "I want us to begin talking about a service project."

"Like what," Marcus said.

"Like whatever we decide together. I have some ideas. But I would like to hear yours first."

There was a pause. Samira tried to think. A service project. Something that served. Something for other people.

"Tutoring," Jin-woo said. "We could tutor kids. Younger kids. At the library. Reading. Math."

"That's good," Aaliyah said. "Anyone else?"

"Park cleanup," Diya said. "There is, like, so much trash at Deeley Park after every weekend. Every weekend."

"Yeah," Eden said. "And the corner by the gas station. We could do that. There is always trash there."

"A food drive," said Aliyah Teklemariam, thoughtfully. "My church does one every Thanksgiving. We could do one too."

"Or something more — focused," Marcus said. "Not just a food drive in general. Like a specific need. Like — "

"Like coats," Felix said, quietly.

Everyone looked at him.

"Coats?" Aaliyah said, gently, encouraging him to go on.

"There is a shelter," Felix said. "Over on Holder Street. The family shelter. My mom said, um, she read in the paper that last year they had a lot of kids come in in December without coats."

"Without coats?" Diya said.

"Families come in with what they can carry," Felix said. He said it in a flat voice, the way you say something you have been told many times. "They don't always have winter clothes. Especially kids. Kids grow out of their stuff. Nobody has extra."

Samira looked at Felix. Felix was looking at the coffee table again.

"That is a really good idea," Aaliyah said. "A coat drive. For a specific shelter. For winter. Do we want to vote?"

"Can I ask a question," Eden said. "How much does a coat cost? Like — if we bought them."

"Eden," Diya said, "we cannot afford to buy a hundred coats."

"I know. I was just asking."

"Coats cost a lot," Felix said. "New ones at the store. Like a kid's winter coat, a good one, fifty, sixty dollars. A grown-up one can be more than a hundred. People don't know. People think they are cheap."

Samira noticed the way he said people don't know. Like he was telling them something they ought to hear. Her stomach did a small, strange thing that she did not examine.

"So we would need to collect used coats," Jin-woo said. "Donated. Not buy them. How many kids at that shelter."

"Last winter it was over forty families," Felix said. "My mom said."

"So like a hundred coats, maybe," Jin-woo said, already running the math in his head. "To cover kids and adults."

"A hundred coats," Marcus said. "That's a lot."

"We can do it," Diya said. "I bet we can."

Everyone raised their hand. Even Felix, whose hand went up slowly, like he did not quite expect his vote to count.

"Passed," Aaliyah said. "Unanimously. Good. Next week, we start planning. Where to collect coats. How to ask for them. How to let people know. We have, by my count, about eight weeks until we would want to deliver them, before it gets really cold. That is not a lot of time. But it is enough."

"It is enough if we start now," Jin-woo said.

"It is enough if we start now," Aaliyah agreed.

On the walk home, Diya was quiet, which was unusual for her.

"He's nice," she said, eventually.

"Felix?"

"Yeah. Seems nice."

"He ate a lot of cookies."

"Yeah." Diya smiled a little, and then the smile sort of faded. "He was hungry."

"Maybe he just likes polvorones."

"Maybe."

They walked a little further. The sunflowers on Aaliyah's block were taller than ever, but one of them had started to droop its head, the way they did when autumn started getting serious about arriving.

"We should do a good job with this," Diya said. "With the coat drive."

"We will."

"Really a good job."

"Diya."

"What."

"Yeah. I know."

At home that night, Samira wrote in her notebook the names of the six people in her junior youth group, which she had never done before. She wrote them in a list. She drew a small box next to each name. She did not know what the boxes were for. She just wanted to see the names.

Samira Diya Marcus Eden Jin-woo Aliyah Felix

Seven names. Seven boxes.

She did not tell anybody she had done this, and she certainly did not tell herself why.

The following Sunday, Aaliyah made them sit in a perfect circle on the floor, and she said they were going to learn something called consultation.

"It is not the same as voting," she said. "It is not the same as arguing. It is — how do I put this — it is a way of thinking together. About a problem. You bring your idea and you put it in the middle of the circle, and when it is in the middle, it is not your idea anymore. It is the group's idea. Everybody can turn it around and look at it. And then somebody else brings their idea and puts it in the middle, and together the group looks for what is most true."

"Like a meeting," Jin-woo said.

"Sort of. But more patient than a meeting."

"Where did it come from," Marcus asked.

"It is an old practice," Aaliyah said. "Many cultures have a form of it. In the Bahá'í community, it is a part of how we make decisions together, and it was taught to us by 'Abdu'l-Bahá and before him by Bahá'u'lláh. The idea is that when people consult honestly, with love and care for each other, the group as a whole can find a better answer than any one person alone."

"Are we a Bahá'í group?" Diya asked, carefully.

"No," Aaliyah said. "We are a junior youth group. We are open to everybody. Bahá'ís, non-Bahá'ís, kids from any faith, kids from no faith. We are practicing some things that come from Bahá'í teachings, because they are good things that help people grow. But you do not need to be Bahá'í to be here, and nothing we do requires you to become Bahá'í."

"Okay," Diya said.

"Okay," Aaliyah said, and smiled.

"So what do we consult about," Eden said.

"The coat drive," Aaliyah said.

They consulted for an hour and a half about the coat drive.

The first question was where to collect the coats. Jin-woo thought they should do only one location, to keep it simple and to not be confusing. Eden thought they should do five or six locations, to reach more of the neighborhood. Marcus thought Jin-woo was right, because they were only seven kids and they could not watch too many places at once. Diya thought Eden was right, because they had to be where the people were. Aliyah Teklemariam said maybe a middle answer was three locations.

"Where," Aaliyah said.

"The library," Eden said immediately.

"Everybody goes to the library."

"My abuela's panadería."

"Sure."

"Aaliyah's house."

"Sure."

"What about my mosque?" Diya said. "They have a big community room. And my dad could put flyers up."

"That is four," Jin-woo said.

"Four is okay," Eden said.

"Four is okay if the four are spread out," Marcus said.

Samira had been listening. She had not said anything. She had been listening and turning things over in her head. Finally she spoke.

"Are we going to have somebody at each place? All the time?"

"That's a good question," Aaliyah said.

"Because," Samira said, "if we don't, how do the coats get taken care of. Like they can't just be left in a pile on a sidewalk. There has to be a box or something. And somebody has to empty the box."

"Yes," Marcus said, slowly, looking at her. "Yes, that is right. We need a box at each place and somebody who empties the box. Or the box fills up and nobody can put anything in, or the box gets rained on, or the coats walk off."

"Or we need a shift schedule," Diya said.

"We are seven people," Jin-woo said. "There are four places. Over how many weeks? Six?"

"Six," Aaliyah said.

Jin-woo started counting on his fingers. Everybody watched him.

"Six weeks, four locations, seven people, if we each do one two-hour shift a week, that is seven shifts, enough for at least one person per location per week with someone left over for the busiest place. Library probably."

"That is a beautiful sentence," Diya said.

"Thank you," Jin-woo said.

They kept going. They consulted about flyers. (Marcus offered to design them. Eden wanted them to be bright pink. Aliyah Teklemariam thought pink would be hard to read. They settled on white with big dark letters because they would be on bulletin boards and you had to see them from across a room.) They consulted about how to ask people for coats. (Samira thought you had to be polite but also specific. People needed to know exactly what was needed. Kids' coats, adults' coats, any size, clean, used okay, don't worry if the zipper is a little broken because the shelter had volunteers who could fix zippers.) They consulted about a deadline. (Six weeks from that Sunday, they would deliver.) They consulted about the van. (Aaliyah said she could borrow one from a friend at her work. Everyone clapped.)

At the end, Aaliyah said, "Okay. Take a breath."

They all took a breath.

"This is consultation," Aaliyah said. "It takes a long time. It is hard work. You had to listen to each other, even when you disagreed. You had to be willing to let your idea change when somebody else's idea made yours better. You had to let go of the idea that you were going to win. Nobody wins in consultation. Everybody gets a little smarter together."

"It's like soccer," Diya said, thoughtfully. "When the team is good. Nobody is the star. Everybody is passing."

"It is a little bit like soccer," Aaliyah agreed.

They broke up then. Eden passed out rosquillas. Felix took two. Marcus took one and ate it slowly. Samira took one and did not eat it right away but held it in her hand and looked at it and thought about what had just happened and about how it had felt, for the first time in maybe her life, like a grown-up thing she had been trusted with. A grown-up thing, and she had not blown it.

That night at home, her parents were arguing.

They were arguing quietly, behind the closed door of the bedroom, but Samira could hear them on her way back from the bathroom. She stopped in the hallway with her hand on the wall.

Samira's ear pressed up against the bedroom door by accident, and she pulled it away, because she had not meant to listen. She went back to her room quickly and closed the door quietly and got into bed.

She lay there with her eyes open.

Samira thought about her father at dinner tonight. He had eaten a little bit. He had laughed once at something Arman had said, but the laugh had come out wrong, and he had gotten up and taken his plate into the kitchen.

Samira pulled her quilt up to her chin.

The coat drive, she thought. The coat drive. She would think about the coat drive. Jin-woo's math. Marcus's flyers. Diya's mosque. She would think about the boxes of coats. She would think about the schedule. She would think about the people who needed the coats, the kids and the parents and the elderly people who did not have enough, and she would think about how she could help them, because helping them was a thing she could actually do.

She fell asleep thinking about it.

It started on a Tuesday.

Samira did not know, at first, that it had started. She knew only that, at lunch, when she sat down at her usual table, Priya, the loud new girl who had been at their table since the first week, was not there. Priya was at a different table. Priya was sitting with Ava and Brie and Emma Whitfield, and she was laughing, though Samira thought she saw Priya look over at their table with something like uncertainty in her face.

"Where did Priya go," Samira said.

"I don't know," Diya said, but she said it in the voice of someone who did know.

"Diya."

"Eat your food," Diya said. Which was a very un-Diya thing to say.

Samira opened her lunchbox. Her mother had packed her khoresh-e karafs over rice, with a small container of mast-o-khiar on the side, and a little tangerine. The smells came up out of the container the way they always did, warm and deep, celery and lamb and turmeric, and Samira put her fork in and took a bite, and it was good.

Something was wrong.

It took her twenty minutes to find out what.

After lunch, in the hallway, Diya pulled her by the sleeve into the alcove by the drinking fountains.

"Don't freak out," Diya said.

"Oh great. Now I am going to freak out."

"Emma is saying things."

"What kind of things."

Diya looked miserable. "She is saying you smell."

Samira stared at her.

"I am sorry," Diya said. "I am sorry to tell you. But I wanted you to hear it from me."

"She is saying I smell."

"She is saying you smell like — like, old food. She said it at gym. She said something like, why do I smell old food, and the other girls in gym laughed. And then at lunch she sat at a different table from Priya on purpose and she said — she said something about it again. She said your lunches smell. She used the word smell. Three times."

Samira felt the blood go out of her face and then come back hot.

"She is saying my lunches smell."

"Yes."

"My mother makes those lunches."

"I know."

"My mother gets up at six in the morning and makes those lunches and packs them in a little container and she —"

"Samira. Samira. I know."

Samira leaned back against the cold tile wall. The hallway was full of seventh graders moving toward their next period. Somebody was yelling about a missing binder. The bell was going to ring.

"She is saying I smell," Samira said again, like she was trying to make the sentence fit somewhere.

"She is saying it because she is mean," Diya said. "She is just — you know the kind of mean where people pick one specific thing to laugh about because they don't know what else to be. That is her kind of mean."

"Has Ava — "

"Ava just laughs at whatever Emma says."

"That is Ava's answer to everything."

"Well. Yes. It is."

The bell rang. Samira picked up her backpack, which had slid to her feet during the conversation, and she went to class, and she sat in her seat, and she did not hear a single word the teacher said for forty-five minutes.

The next day, Samira told her mother she did not want to take lunch.

"You need lunch," her mother said.

"I'll buy it at school."

"The school food is not good."

"The school food is fine."

"Samira." Her mother was looking at her with the look she used when she was trying to figure out what was going on behind Samira's face. "Samira. What is going on."

"Nothing. I just want school food this week."

"Is your stomach hurting?"

"No."

"Is something happening?"

"Mom. I just want school food this week."

Her mother looked at her for a long second.

"Okay," she said, finally, but she said it in a way that Samira knew meant we are not done with this. "Okay. Six dollars. Eat something with protein. Do not only eat chips."

She bought the school lunch. It was a gray piece of pizza and a carton of milk and some baby carrots. She ate half of it. It did not smell like anything. It did not smell like her mother. She sat with Diya and Eden and she did not say much, and Priya came over at one point and tried to sit with them again, and Diya said "thought you were over there now" and Priya looked hurt and sat down anyway and nobody said anything for a long time.

By Friday, Samira had eaten so little at school that she got a headache walking home.

At junior youth group that Sunday, she was distracted. She could not focus. Aaliyah was talking about the coat drive, about the shifts next week, about the flyers that Marcus had designed (they were beautiful — spare, clean, with a drawing of a coat on a hanger in one corner), and Samira tried to listen. She tried to listen very hard. But her head was full of gray pizza and laughter from another table.

After the meeting, when people were putting on their jackets to leave, Diya took her by the arm and pulled her out onto the porch.

"Hey."

"Hey."

"Listen," Diya said, and her eyes were fierce and a little wet. "Listen to me. You stopped eating your lunch."

"How do you know."

"Because I have eyes and I eat across from you every single day."

"I had school pizza yesterday."

"You had half of school pizza yesterday."

"Diya."

"Samira. You have to eat. You cannot let Emma Whitfield make you not eat. You cannot let Emma Whitfield take your mom away from your lunch. Your mom makes the best lunches in that cafeteria. And you know what? You know what? The food Emma eats — I saw it — it was, like, a plain turkey sandwich on white bread with NOTHING on it. Nothing. No mustard. No cheese. Not even a lettuce. The saddest sandwich I have ever seen in my life. She does not get to tell you your food smells. Her food does not even have a smell."

Samira laughed, because you could not help laughing at Diya when Diya was in a state, but the laugh came out wet and then Samira was crying, which she had not planned, and Diya put her arm around her and they sat on the porch steps with the last sunflower of Aaliyah's row bending its head over their shoulders, and they cried a little together, because Diya always cried when Samira cried.

"I am going to hate seventh grade," Samira said.

"No you are not."

"I am. I hate it already."

"You are not hating seventh grade. You are hating Emma Whitfield. That is different."

"Is it different."

"It is very different."

Marcus came out onto the porch. He stopped when he saw them.

"Oh," he said. "Sorry. I can go."

"It's okay," Samira said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand.

Marcus hesitated. He was holding his notebook, as always. He looked at Samira for a moment, and then at Diya, and then back at Samira.

"I have a thing," he said. "In my notebook. It is a poem. I wrote it last year."

"Marcus," Diya said, "you do not have to read us a poem."

"I don't — " Marcus said, "I don't read it to people. Usually. But Samira. I think. If you want."

Samira looked up at him. Marcus was tall and his face was serious and he was holding his notebook open to a page near the back, and Samira could see the blue ink lines of a poem there.

"Yeah," she said. "Okay."

Marcus sat down on the step below them. He cleared his throat. He read the poem in a quiet voice, not performing it, just saying it, and the poem was short, only twelve lines, and Samira did not remember all the words later. What she remembered was that it was about being looked at the wrong way. About being seen as a thing instead of a person. About wanting to disappear into a coat or a book or a crowd, and about how, when you were looked at the wrong way, the world became small for a minute. And then about how, afterward, you had to make the world big again, one breath at a time, and how sometimes that was the hardest work of all.

When Marcus stopped reading, nobody said anything for a long moment.

"Marcus," Diya said, finally. "That is really good."

"Thanks."

"Marcus," Samira said. Her voice was raspy. "Thank you."

"Yeah," Marcus said. He closed the notebook. He did not look at her. "Yeah. Well. I just — I thought you might — anyway."

He got up and went down the steps and down the walk to the street, and Diya and Samira sat there a moment longer, and then they went home.

On Monday, Samira took her lunch.

Her mother had packed fesenjan, which was her favorite, with pomegranate and walnuts and chicken, over rice. Samira sat down at her usual table with Diya and Eden, and she opened the container, and the smell came up — sweet and deep and dark — and she took her fork, and she ate, and she did not look up. She did not look at Emma Whitfield. She did not look at Ava. She did not look at anyone except Diya, who was looking at her with her fierce eyes.

"Good?" Diya said.

"Very good," Samira said.

"Good."

And Samira ate her lunch.

The flyers went up on a Saturday.

Marcus had printed forty of them at his uncle's copy shop, which turned out to have been a thing his uncle could do for free, which had made Aaliyah clap her hands when he announced it. The seven of them — Samira, Diya, Marcus, Eden, Jin-woo, Aliyah Teklemariam, and Felix — spent three hours walking Ridgewood putting flyers up. On bulletin boards at the library. On the corkboard inside Eden's abuela's panadería, which already had four flyers on it in Spanish and which Eden's abuela made room for with an amused smile and a little adjustment of her reading glasses. On the community board at Diya's mosque. On telephone poles (not too many, because Aaliyah said telephone pole flyers were sometimes illegal depending on the ordinance, and also they blew off). On the bulletin board at the grocery store. On the one at the library. At the school.

Felix walked with Samira for part of the time.

He was quiet, as he usually was. He was good with the tape, which was a thing you did not always notice about people until you were putting up flyers with them. He held the flyer up, Samira stretched the tape across, they stepped back together, looked at it, moved on.

"How do you know about the shelter," Samira said, at one point, when they were alone on the sidewalk outside the small drugstore on Hemlock.

"What?"

"The shelter. You knew about it. About the coats."

Felix did not answer right away. He was straightening the flyer on the bulletin board, even though it was already straight.

"My mom is a social worker," he said, finally.

"Oh."

"She — she knows about those things. The shelters. What they need."

"Does she work with Aaliyah?"

"What?"

"Aaliyah is a social worker too."

"Oh." Felix looked, Samira thought, surprised. "I didn't know that."

"Yeah."

"No. She does not — she doesn't work with Aaliyah. She is between jobs right now, actually. She was in another town."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

They walked to the next place.

The first collection day was a Monday, after school.

Jin-woo had a clipboard with the shift schedule. Two people per shift, two-hour shifts, six weeks. The first shift was Diya and Eden at the library. Samira and Aliyah Teklemariam had the Tuesday shift at the panadería, right after school.

Monday evening, Jin-woo texted them all the update. They had collected the first coats of the drive.

Four coats.

"Four coats," Diya said, on the phone with Samira that night. "Samira. Four coats. We need a hundred and ten. We did four in a day."

"It is the first day."

"We did four."

"It's fine. It is going to go up."

But the next day, Tuesday, when Samira went to the panadería after school and took her shift, they got three coats. A nice older woman brought a long brown coat that smelled like rose. A father brought a snowsuit his kid had grown out of. A teenager, a high schooler, sheepishly brought a jacket he said was his big brother's and not his. Three coats.

By the end of the first week, the count was seventeen.

"Seventeen," Jin-woo said, on Sunday. "In the first week. We are at about fifteen percent of goal."

"We will not get to a hundred ten at this rate," Marcus said. "At this rate, we will get to a hundred two."

"Actually a hundred two is not bad," Aaliyah said.

"It is not a hundred ten," Jin-woo said, firmly. He was a Jin-woo about numbers.

They sat in the living room of Aaliyah's house and looked at each other.

"We have to get the word out more," Eden said.

"We put flyers everywhere," Aliyah Teklemariam said.

"Flyers are not enough. Flyers are — flyers are passive. You need to go to people."

"Go where."

"Doors," Felix said.

Everybody looked at him.

"Doors," he said again, quieter. "We knock on doors. We tell them what we are doing. People will give things if somebody comes to their door. My mom said — " He stopped. "Sorry. I mean. I have seen this. People give if somebody asks."

"Door to door?" Diya said. "All of Ridgewood? There are like a thousand houses."

"We don't knock on all of them," Jin-woo said, already thinking. "We pick neighborhoods. Five streets. Maybe ten. We do two people per street. We go on a Saturday. We say who we are, we say what we are doing, we give them a card with our phone number in case they want to find a coat later."

"I can draw the card," Marcus said.

"Aaliyah," Diya said, "can you come with us?"

"I'll come with one group and drive between the others," Aaliyah said. "I think this is a good idea. Let's do it."

They did it the next Saturday.

Samira was paired with Felix. They took Maple Street, all six blocks of it, starting at one end and working their way to the other. The day was gray and cold, cold enough that Samira was glad of her winter coat, and the leaves on Maple Street were down now, a carpet of yellow and brown crunching under their feet.

Samira had thought she would be the talker. She had practiced what to say in the car on the way over. But when they got to the first house, she froze, and Felix, very quietly, stepped up and knocked on the door.

An old man answered. He had white hair and a cane.

"Hi," Felix said, in a voice Samira had not heard him use before — a clear voice, a polite one, calm and confident. "Sir, my name is Felix, and this is Samira, and we are from a junior youth group in Ridgewood. We are collecting winter coats for families at the Holder Street shelter. If you have any coats in your closets you do not use anymore, even if they are a little old, we would be very grateful to take them. We will bring them to the shelter before it gets cold."

The old man looked at them.

"Come in," he said. "Wait here. I am going to go look."

Ten minutes later they walked away from the old man's house with four coats. Four.

"Felix," Samira said, when they were back on the sidewalk. "That was — you were — how did you know what to say?"

"I said what my mom says. When she has to call people."

"It was so good."

"It was just asking."

"Felix."

"What."

"You are good at this."

He did not say anything. He just kept walking. But Samira thought she saw the corner of his mouth go up, just a tiny bit.

They got seven coats on Maple Street.

Diya and Marcus got eleven on Sycamore. Jin-woo and Eden got nine on Poplar. Aliyah Teklemariam, paired with Aaliyah herself on Birch, got ten. By the end of Saturday, they had added thirty-seven coats to the drive. The total count was now fifty-four.

"We are over halfway," Aaliyah said, back at her house that evening, everyone sitting on the couch exhausted and flushed with the cold and triumphant and eating empanadas.

"Halfway," Jin-woo corrected. "We are at fifty-four. The goal is one-ten. Halfway is fifty-five."

"Jin-woo."

"Sorry. We are almost halfway. Very close to halfway."

"Can we do another door-to-door Saturday."

"Yes," everybody said.

They did another door-to-door Saturday. Pine Street. Willow Street. Beech. They got twenty-nine coats. The count went to eighty-three.

Then Jin-woo brought up, at Sunday meeting, an idea.

"The thrift store," he said. "Second Chance, on Whitney Avenue."

"What about it."

"I was there with my mom last week. They have coats they cannot sell. Coats that have been there all year. They are going to throw some of them out. I asked the manager, in a hypothetical way, whether, if a group of kids asked very nicely, they might donate the ones they were going to throw out."

"Jin-woo," Diya said. "What did the manager say."

"The manager said they would consider it."

"Jin-woo."

"I did not commit us to anything."

"Let's go commit us to something," Aaliyah said.

They went on Tuesday, the whole group, after school, all of them squeezed into Aaliyah's little car. The manager of Second Chance was a woman named Ms. Harbury who had a pen stuck in her hair and a voice like gravel. She looked at the seven of them standing in the middle of her store. She looked at Aaliyah.

"These your kids," she said.

"My group," Aaliyah said. "They are running a coat drive for the Holder Street shelter."

Ms. Harbury folded her arms.

"How many have you collected so far."

"Eighty-three," Jin-woo said.

"Eighty-three. How long."

"Four weeks."

"Huh," Ms. Harbury said. "You need more?"

"Twenty-seven," Jin-woo said.

"Come with me."

She took them to a back room. A back room with a rolling rack of coats, hung thickly, a long row of them. She pulled one down and inspected it. She pulled another. She made a small pile. She pulled more. She made a bigger pile.

"Thirty," she said, finally, looking at the pile. "I can give you thirty."

They thanked her. They thanked her a lot. They carried the coats out in black plastic bags. Ms. Harbury stood at the door and watched them go, and when Samira turned around at the last minute to wave, Ms. Harbury lifted one hand in a half-salute, like a person waving at a boat.

The count went to a hundred thirteen.

Jin-woo, very calmly, lost his mind.

"One hundred thirteen," he said, at Aaliyah's house, with his hands on top of his head. "One hundred thirteen. That is three over goal. That is over goal. We are over goal."

"We are over goal!" Eden shrieked.

"We are over goal!" Diya shrieked.

"We are over goal," Marcus said, more softly, but with the biggest smile on his face Samira had ever seen on his face.

Samira sat on the couch and let herself feel it. A thing she had helped make. A real thing. Coats, in bags, ready to be carried to a shelter full of people who needed them. A real thing she had helped do.

She looked over at Felix. Felix was standing at the window, looking out at the front yard. His hands were in his pockets. His face was turned away.

Samira thought, for a moment, to go say something to him. But she did not know what to say. And the moment passed, and then Aaliyah was saying they were going to deliver on Saturday, and they were assigning everybody to carry boxes, and Samira was caught up in it, and she did not notice, after that, whether Felix had turned back from the window or not.

Saturday morning was cold in the way late October gets cold. The air had a bite in it. The sky was high and gray. Aaliyah had borrowed the van from her friend at work, and it sat in her driveway with its back doors open, and the seven of them had filled it with boxes of coats.

Forty-one boxes. One hundred thirteen coats.

Samira had put on her own coat, a red one with a big collar, and her gloves, and she had come down to Aaliyah's at nine in the morning, and she had helped load. She had been surprised by how heavy one box of coats could be. She had been surprised by how much space one hundred thirteen coats could take up, and also by how little. They filled the van, but not so full that they could not fit in themselves. Eden had brought a box of her abuela's bolillos and a thermos of hot chocolate for the drive. Jin-woo had brought a clipboard with the inventory on it because he did not go anywhere now without a clipboard. Marcus had brought his notebook. Felix had brought a pair of gloves he did not seem to know what to do with, holding them in his hand rather than putting them on.

The Holder Street shelter was ten minutes away by car. Aaliyah drove slowly, both hands on the wheel.

"Now," she said, as they got close, "I want to say something to you all. When we go in there. I want you to remember something."

"What," Samira said.

"These are our neighbors. Everybody inside that building. They are people who live in our town. Some of them might be people you have seen before and did not know. The people inside are not — they are not a charity. They are not objects of pity. They are us. They are our neighbors, and they are going through a hard thing, and we are helping them because they are us and because that is what neighbors do. Do you understand."

"Yes," they all said.

"Not pity," Samira repeated. She wanted to be sure she heard it right.

"No pity. Just care. Okay?"

"Okay."

The van pulled into the small parking lot. The shelter was a brick building, two stories, with a sign that said HOLDER STREET FAMILY SHELTER and underneath, in smaller letters, A PROGRAM OF RIDGEWOOD COMMUNITY SERVICES. Samira had passed this building before. She had never looked at it.

A woman came out of the front door. She was short, with long dark hair, and she was wearing a fleece jacket. She shook Aaliyah's hand.

"Ms. Farrell. So glad you made it. My name is Vanessa. I am the director. We are really grateful for this. Come on in, the kids have the common room."

"The kids?"

"The families. Sorry. It is mostly families. Come on."

They carried the boxes in, two by two, Jin-woo and Eden, Marcus and Aliyah, Diya and Samira, Felix and Aaliyah. Samira's box had a coat on top that was a children's size 7, a bright purple one with white faux fur around the hood, and she thought briefly of a small girl putting it on. Somebody's daughter. Somebody.

The common room was at the back of the shelter. It was a big room, with couches along the walls and a round rug on the floor and a TV mounted up in the corner. There were families in it. There were a lot of families. Samira saw, in one quick look, a mother with two little kids on her lap, a father reading a book to a toddler in a chair by the window, three teenagers in a corner looking at a phone together, an older woman with white hair knitting, a man Samira's father's age sitting alone at a small table, a young mom bouncing a baby on her shoulder.

Samira and Diya set their box down on the floor where Vanessa pointed.

"Coats are here," Vanessa called, clapping her hands lightly. "We have coats if anybody needs one. All sizes. Come over when you can."

People came over slowly. Samira helped. She pulled coats out of the boxes and laid them out on the long table Vanessa had set up. Kids' coats in one pile, adults in another, teenagers in another. A little boy came up with his mother, and he could not decide between a blue one and a green one, and Samira crouched down and asked him which he thought was warmer, and he thought very seriously about it, and he said the green one, and Samira helped him put it on and it fit him almost perfectly.

"That is a fine coat," the little boy said, looking down at himself.

"It is a very fine coat," Samira said.

Some people were shy. A mother with two kids hesitated at the edge of the table, holding her kids' hands, not coming forward. Diya went over to her with a couple of options and spoke to her quietly, and the mother smiled and nodded and picked out coats for both of her children. A teenage boy refused to take one at first, and then Aaliyah walked over and said something to him and he took one, a big gray one with a hood, and he put it on and did not take it off.

Samira was pulling a coat out of a box when she glanced up, automatically, the way a person glances around a room.

At the back of the common room. Half-hidden behind a couch, in the corner. Three people. A woman. A girl, maybe seven or eight, with curly hair pulled into two puffs on the sides of her head. And a boy.

A boy.

Samira's hands stopped moving.

The boy was sitting with his back mostly to the room, but she could see his profile. The curly dark hair falling into his eyes. The gray T-shirt. The jeans that were a little too short.

Felix.

Felix was at the back of the room.

Samira's brain did something that took a few seconds. It started with no, which was the first thought. No. Felix came with us. Felix rode in the van. Felix is — where? She turned her head, very slowly. She looked around the common room. Jin-woo at the adult pile, holding up a men's jacket. Eden laughing with a little girl. Marcus, writing something in his notebook while watching Aliyah Teklemariam hand a coat to a grandmother.

She did not see Felix. Felix who had ridden in the van. Felix who had gotten out of the van with her. Felix who had carried a box in with Aaliyah.

She looked back at the couch. Her eyes found him again. The boy in the gray T-shirt, in the corner. The woman next to him who must be his mother. The little girl on the woman's lap.

It was him.

It was Felix.

He was staying here. He lived here. The Holder Street family shelter. He was one of the families.

Samira's hands started working again, slowly, automatically. She pulled a coat out of the box. She laid it on the table. She pulled another. She laid it on the table. Her fingers did the work, but her chest felt — she did not have a word for it. Heavy. Full. Sad. Not pity, Aaliyah had said. Not pity. But something else.

She did not know what to do. She did not know whether to go over. Whether to say hello. Whether to pretend she had not seen.

She pulled another coat out of the box.

And then, as if he felt her watching, Felix turned his head. His eyes crossed the room and found hers. And for a long second, across the length of the common room, with the noise of the shelter and the volunteers and the families between them, they looked at each other.

Samira did not smile. She did not wave. She did not do anything. She just let her eyes be on his for that long second.

Felix's face, in that second, did something small. Something small and complicated. A flush, along his cheekbones. A tiny tightening around his mouth. And then he looked away. He turned his face back down to the floor, and he did not look up again.

Samira bent her head over the box. She pulled out the last coat. She laid it on the table.

She did not say anything to anybody. Not to Diya, not to Marcus, not to Aaliyah, not to Jin-woo, not to Aliyah Teklemariam, not to Eden. Not on the drive back in the van, when everyone was loud and jubilant and talking over each other about the little boy and the gray-coat teenager and the moment when Vanessa had told them they had brought in more coats than any donor group in three years, and she was not even counting the other fifty they had gotten just in time. Samira sat in the back seat with her forehead against the cold window of the van and she watched the gray sky go by.

She did not know what to do. She had been told that consultation was how you figured out a hard thing. But she did not know if this was a thing she could consult about. She did not know if this was a thing that was hers to tell. She had seen something that Felix had not wanted her to see, and she had seen it by accident, and Felix knew she had seen it. And that was all she knew.

At home, she went up to her room and lay on her bed and looked at Italy on the ceiling. The ceiling was the same ceiling it had been at the beginning of the summer. Italy was in its same place.

Italy, Samira thought. What do you do, Italy, when you find out a friend is carrying a thing like this, and you were part of carrying the coat that went to him.

Italy, obviously, did not answer.

Samira closed her eyes.

Something had changed. She felt it, in the way you feel the temperature change when you step out of a doorway. The world had reorganized itself around a new fact, and the new fact was Felix, in the corner of a shelter common room, looking away.

She did not know what she was going to do on Sunday when he walked into Aaliyah's living room.

She did not know what she was going to do any of it.

But she would have to figure out. She knew that. She would have to figure something out.

She lay on her bed with her eyes closed and the quiet of her house around her and she thought of the little boy in the green coat, and she thought of Felix walking the neighborhood with her, holding the flyer up while she stretched the tape, and she thought of Aaliyah saying, not pity, just care. They are us.

Outside her window the gray afternoon went slowly on.

[END OF PART 1 — TO BE COMBINED WITH PART 2 FOR FULL BOOK]

[CONTINUING FROM PART 1]

The heater in Aaliyah's old blue Corolla made a sound like a teakettle that had forgotten how to whistle. It hissed and rattled and every so often gave a small, surprised pop, as if the car itself couldn't believe it was still working. Samira buckled her seatbelt and leaned her head against the cold window. Outside, snow had started falling again — not big movie-snow, but the kind of snow that can't make up its mind, drifting sideways like it was looking for something it had lost.

"Okay, Javidi," Aaliyah said, putting the car in drive. "You want music or you want quiet?"

"Quiet," Samira said. Then, because Aaliyah always taught them to be honest about small things so big things would come easier, she added, "Please."

"Quiet it is."

They pulled out of the shelter's parking lot. The tires made a wet, heavy sound against the slush. Samira watched the shelter get smaller in the side mirror — the brown brick, the flag with the snowman on it, the window on the second floor with the light still on.

Felix was behind that light somewhere. Or a light like it.

She didn't know which window was his. She didn't know if he had his own window. She didn't know anything, she was starting to realize. Not really.

Aaliyah drove with both hands on the wheel, the way she always did — Samira had noticed, over the last few months, that Aaliyah drove like she was carrying something fragile. Once, at a meeting, Marcus had asked her why she drove so slow, and Aaliyah had laughed and said, "Because I'm always carrying y'all somewhere. And y'all are precious cargo."

Marcus had pretended to gag. But Samira had seen him smile afterward, the way he smiled when he was trying not to.

"You okay over there?" Aaliyah asked now. Her voice was easy. Not pushing. Just asking.

"Yeah."

Aaliyah didn't say anything else for a whole block. Then she clicked her turn signal on, waited for a lady pushing a stroller to cross, and said, "You don't have to be okay, you know. Being not-okay is allowed in this vehicle."

Samira pressed her forehead harder against the window. The cold felt good. It felt like proof she was in her body and her body was in the world and the world was still there, even though inside her head everything was doing loops.

"Aaliyah," she said.

"Mm-hmm."

"Is it... did you know? About Felix?"

Aaliyah didn't answer right away. She drove half a block. She tapped her thumbs on the steering wheel, once, twice.

"I knew some things," she said finally. "I knew his family was struggling. I knew they didn't have a stable place. I knew Felix asked me to keep it private, and I told him I would."

"So you lied. Kind of."

Aaliyah's mouth did a thing that wasn't quite a smile. "I kept a confidence. That's different from lying, even though I know it can feel like the same thing from the outside. When somebody trusts you with something hard about their life, the information isn't yours. It's theirs. You're just borrowing it for a minute."

Samira thought about that. The snow was coming down harder now. A kid on the corner was pulling a red plastic sled, even though there wasn't really enough snow to sled on. He was committed, though. He was giving it everything.

"So if I tell Diya, I'm stealing it."

"I didn't say that."

"But it's kind of like that."

Aaliyah glanced over. "Samira. You're allowed to feel things about what you saw. You're allowed to need to talk about it. The question isn't whether you get to have feelings. You always get to have feelings. The question is how you carry someone else's story when it becomes part of yours."

Samira swallowed. Her throat hurt in that pre-cry way, the way she hated, the way that felt like a thumbprint pressing up from underneath her chin.

"He looked away from me," she said. "Felix. When he saw me. He just — he turned around like he didn't know me."

"Yeah."

"Why'd he do that?"

"Why do you think?"

Samira tried to think. She tried to imagine being Felix — being twelve, being in the junior youth group only since September, being the newest and quietest and the one who always asked before he took a second cookie at the meetings, as if someone might say no. She tried to imagine Felix in the hallway of the shelter, carrying a bag or a toothbrush or nothing at all, looking up and seeing a girl from his group standing there with a garbage bag of coats like a very small and very confused Santa.

"Because he didn't want me to know," Samira said slowly. "Because he didn't want to be... that, in my head. The kid at the shelter."

"Mm."

"Because it would change what I thought of him."

"Would it?"

Samira didn't know how to answer. It had already changed what she thought of him, hadn't it? The whole drive, his face had been sitting behind her eyes. The flush on his cheeks. The way his shoulders had gone up like he was trying to make himself a smaller target.

"Yes," she said. "No. I don't — I don't know if it's bad-change or not. But it's change."

"That's honest." Aaliyah stopped at a red light. The wipers swished, swished, swished. "That's really honest, Samira."

"Should I tell Diya?"

"What do you think?"

"I think I want to tell Diya."

"Why?"

"Because Diya is my best friend. Because I tell her everything. Because if I don't tell her, there's going to be this — this thing inside me, and I'll have to hold it by myself, and I'm not good at holding things by myself."

Aaliyah nodded slowly. The light turned green. She eased forward. "And what might happen if you tell her?"

"She'd keep it a secret too."

"Maybe. Diya's a good human. And — she's eleven. And it's a big secret. And secrets can feel like a hot potato sometimes. You get them in your hand and you kind of want to pass them."

Samira felt her stomach drop a little. She thought of Diya at the lunch table, whispering to Eden, who might whisper to Marcus, who might mention it to Jin-woo because Jin-woo was Marcus's best friend and they didn't keep anything from each other, and then —

"And then everybody would know. And Felix would find out that everybody knows. And he'd know I was the one who started it."

"Yeah. That could happen. It doesn't have to, but it could."

"So I shouldn't tell her."

"I didn't say that either."

Samira almost laughed. "Aaliyah. You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you make me figure it out."

Aaliyah smiled — really smiled, this time, the smile that made her look both older and younger at the same time, the way good smiles sometimes do. "Girl, that's the whole job description. What did you think this was?"

"I thought it was the junior youth program."

"That's what I just said."

Samira did laugh, then. Just a little. It escaped out of her before she could stop it and it surprised her, because she hadn't thought she had any laugh in her right now.

They drove in quiet for a few blocks. Aaliyah's Corolla huffed. A man walked a big gray dog that looked like a small bear. A bus went by with an ad on the side for a dentist who had very white teeth and very sad eyes.

"Here's what I'm going to say," Aaliyah said eventually, "and you can do what you want with it. This isn't a rule. This is just Aaliyah talking."

"Okay."

"Felix told me something in confidence. I am keeping that confidence. Which means, for me, I'm not sharing his story with anyone who doesn't need to know it for a really concrete reason. And even then, I ask him first."

"Okay."

"You didn't sign up for that confidence. You didn't promise him anything. You found out by accident, because the world is small and snow is cold and coats need to get delivered somewhere. So technically, you aren't breaking a promise if you tell someone. Technically."

"Technically."

"But." Aaliyah lifted one finger off the steering wheel. "But. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's the kind of thing you want to do. You know what I mean?"

"I think so."

Samira turned that over. "I should ask Felix."

"Eventually. When it's the right moment. Not today. He just saw you in a shelter hallway with a garbage bag. Today is not his day for more."

"Okay."

"In the meantime, you don't have to be alone with it. You can talk to me. You can write about it in that notebook I know you keep. You can pray, if that's a thing you do. You can tell your mom. You can even tell Diya that something's going on and you can't say what, and ask her to just be your friend without knowing the details. Good friends can do that."

"Really?"

"Really. You'd be surprised what friendship can hold."

Samira thought about Diya. About all the ways Diya had held her, just this fall — when she got the bad grade on the social studies quiz, when she and her mom had that big fight about the phone, when her cousin in Tehran had been sick. Diya had held all of it, and had never once made it about herself.

"She could hold it," Samira said. "Diya could."

"I bet she could."

They turned onto Samira's street. The snow had started to stick on lawns now, thin and lacy, like a tablecloth. In the driveway of her house, Samira could see her family's car — her dad's car, the dark green sedan with the dent in the back bumper from when he'd backed into the basketball hoop two summers ago, a dent that he had laughed about for about three days and then never mentioned again.

The light was on in the kitchen. But the living room light was on too, and the TV wasn't on, which was weird because her dad always had the TV on when he was in the living room. He liked to have noise around him. Her mom called him a noise-hoarder.

"Aaliyah?"

"Yeah."

"Thanks. For — for not telling me what to do."

"That's a trick I learned from somebody smart."

"Who?"

"My grandma. And my grandma's grandma. And probably my grandma's grandma's grandma." Aaliyah turned in her seat to look at her. "Listen. Whatever you decide, I'm in your corner. And Felix is in your corner, whether he knows you know or not. And if you need to talk, you text me. You hear?"

"I hear."

"All right. Go be with your family."

Samira got out of the car. The cold slapped her cheeks pink. She waved, and Aaliyah waved back, and the old Corolla huffed and hissed and pulled away down the street, its one slightly-dim taillight blinking at her like a tired eye.

Samira stood in the driveway for one more second. Watching her own house. There was something about a lit-up house at dusk when you were still outside it — some kind of hush that landed on it, as if the house had something to say and was waiting for you to come in to say it.

She went up the steps. She opened the door.

"Samira?" her mom called from the kitchen. "Is that you?"

"It's me, Maman."

"Boots off, please. Did you eat? There's rice."

"I'll eat in a minute."

She toed off her boots. She hung her jacket on the hook. She walked past the living room — and stopped.

Her dad was on the couch.

He was just sitting there.

No TV. No phone. No newspaper. His hands were folded in his lap, like a kid who was trying to behave in church. He was staring at the rug.

"Baba?"

He looked up. He smiled at her. It was her dad's smile, the good one, the one that made his eyes fold at the corners. But there was something underneath it, like a second smile behind the first that wasn't smiling at all.

"Hi, joonam," he said. "How was the delivery?"

"It was — it was good."

"Good."

He looked back down at the rug. Samira stood in the doorway, holding her one sock foot on top of her other sock foot, a balancing habit she'd had since she was six.

Samira looked at her baba. Her baba looked at the rug.

"Baba, is everything okay?"

"Everything is fine, joonam."

"Are you sure?"

He looked up again. He opened his mouth. He closed it.

"Go eat," he said softly. "Your mother made khoresh. You like khoresh."

"Baba —"

"Please, Samira. Go eat."

She went. Because when her baba said please like that, in that low voice, it wasn't a question and it wasn't a command, it was a small folded-up paper note that said I am asking you to let me have this moment. And Samira loved her baba, and she wanted him to have his moment.

But she stood in the kitchen afterward with a plate of rice in her hand, and she looked at her mother's back — her mother scrubbing a pan that she was pretty sure was already clean — and she thought, Something is about to break. Something is about to break, and when it breaks I am going to have to help hold it.

She didn't know how she knew. But she knew.

That night, she lay in bed and listened to her parents talking in the kitchen. She couldn't hear the words. Just the shape of the voices. Her mom was doing most of the talking. Her baba was doing most of the quiet.

And somewhere across Ridgewood, in a shelter with a paper snowman on the window, Felix Delgado-Brown was probably lying in a bed that wasn't his in a room that wasn't his, and maybe he was also listening to voices through a wall.

Samira closed her eyes.

She didn't pray, exactly. She wasn't sure what she was doing.

But she held both of them in her head at the same time. Her baba, and Felix. And she thought, in a voice that was her own and also not quite her own, Please. Please. I don't know what I'm asking for. But please.

And then, eventually, she slept.

Her baba told them at breakfast.

Her baba was already at the table when she came down. Usually he wasn't. Usually he was already at work by seven-fifteen. Samira saw him at the table, in his blue sweater and not his work shirt, and she knew before he said anything. Her stomach knew before her brain did.

Her mom was at the stove. The kettle was going. The kettle made that soft under-sound, the one right before it whistles, the almost-sound.

Kian, who was eight, was eating cereal and kicking the leg of the table, unaware, happy, the way eight-year-olds get to be in the mornings.

Her baba said, "I have something to tell you both."

Kian kept chewing.

"I lost my job," her baba said. "Two weeks ago."

The kettle started whistling. Her mom didn't move to turn it off. The whistle got louder and louder and finally her mom seemed to remember she was a person who could move, and she went and lifted it off the burner, and the whistle died into a sigh.

"What do you mean you lost your job?" Kian said, mouth full. "Like it got stolen?"

"No, azizam. The company is letting some people go. I am one of them."

"Why you?"

"Because the company wasn't doing well, and they had to make choices."

"That's not fair."

"No," her baba said. "It isn't."

Samira hadn't said anything. She was holding a spoon. She wasn't sure why. She couldn't remember picking it up.

"Baba," she said.

He looked at her.

"Baba, why didn't you tell us?"

His face did something then. It wasn't a cry. Not yet. It was like his face was trying to hold its shape and the shape was getting too heavy.

"I wanted to find a new job first," he said. "I thought I could. I have been looking. Every day I have been looking. I —"

His voice cracked.

She had never heard her baba's voice crack before. Not once. Not when his own father had died two summers ago, not when Kian had fallen off the monkey bars and broken his wrist, not when his cousin got arrested in Iran for who-knew-what. Her baba's voice was a steady thing, a level thing, the thing she'd set her own feelings on like a shelf.

And now the shelf was shaking.

"Baba," she said. "Baba, it's okay."

"No," he said. "It isn't okay. I have not been honest with my family and that is not okay."

Her mom came to the table and put her hand on his shoulder. She didn't say anything. She just kept her hand there.

"I am sorry," he said to Samira. To Kian. To the table. "I am sorry. I thought if I fixed it first you would never have to worry. That was wrong. You are my family. You should know."

And then her baba cried.

He didn't cry loud. He didn't shake. He just sat there at the breakfast table with his hand over his eyes and tears coming down below his palm, and her mom's hand stayed on his shoulder, and the kettle hissed on the cooling burner, and Kian stared with his spoon halfway to his mouth, milk dripping onto the table.

Samira started crying too. She didn't mean to. She just — opened, somehow. Like a window that had been stuck and then wasn't.

"Baba," she said. "Baba, Baba, Baba."

"It's okay, joonam."

"I'm so sorry."

"It's not your sorry."

"I know, but — I'm sorry anyway."

He took her hand across the table. His hand was big and warm and dry. His hand had built two bookshelves and fixed the dishwasher three times and carried her on his shoulders through a parade when she was five and peeled a thousand oranges for her in a thousand kitchens. His hand was the best hand she knew.

"We will be okay," he said. "All of us."

Kian was crying too now, quietly, in a confused way. "Are we poor?" he said.

"No, habibi," her mom said. "We are not poor. We are going to be careful for a while. We may need to move to Ameh Layla's for some months. But we will be okay. We have each other. We have food. We have a family that loves us. We are not poor."

"But Ameh Layla's apartment is small."

"Yes. It will be cozy."

"I don't want cozy."

"I know."

Samira looked at her little brother, who was still in his pajamas with the race cars on them, and she saw his face do that thing where it tried to be brave and couldn't. And something in her — some lever, some small inside muscle — clicked into place.

"Kian," she said. "Hey, buddy. It's gonna be fine. Ameh Layla has that cat. What's the cat's name?"

"Mr. Whiskers."

"We'll be with Mr. Whiskers. Think how cool that is. Mr. Whiskers will sleep on your head."

"I don't want a cat to sleep on my head."

"Okay, on your feet then."

"Okay."

He laughed, one little snort-laugh. And then he went back to crying. But a softer crying. The kind of crying that had something to hold onto.

Samira looked at her baba. Her baba's eyes were red. He mouthed thank you at her.

She nodded.

She kept crying too. But quieter now. A steady rain instead of a storm.

Later, much later — after her mom had made her call in sick to school for the day, after Kian had fallen asleep on the couch with his head in her baba's lap, after her baba had gone upstairs to make phone calls — Samira sat in the kitchen at the table and stared at her cold tea and tried to find a way to feel.

She was scared. That was the first feeling. A low shaking scared, like a motor running underneath her skin.

She was sad. That was obvious.

But underneath those two things, turning slowly like a piece of something heavy at the bottom of a pool, was another feeling she didn't want.

She was angry.

Not at her baba. Not really. A little at her baba, for not telling them sooner — but that was a small anger, almost affectionate, like being annoyed at somebody you loved for a thing that was very them.

She was angry at something bigger. Something she couldn't point to.

She was angry at the company. Angry at the way money got to push a family around. Angry at the fact that her baba, who had never done anything but work hard and be good, had been downsized. Downsized. What a terrible word. Who invented that word? Like her baba was a size. Like he could be shrunk.

But underneath even that — she noticed this later, when she was alone — she was angry at God.

The thought sat in her chest like a stone.

Could she be angry at God? She wasn't sure if that was allowed. Her family wasn't super-religious in a rules way, but they prayed before meals when Nani visited, and her baba sometimes said alhamdulillah when something went right. And at junior youth, Aaliyah had told them that being upset with God was part of a lot of faith traditions — that the prophets themselves had questions, that wrestling was part of it.

But knowing it was allowed and feeling it were two different things.

What had her family done, Samira thought. What had her baba done. Nothing. He had done nothing wrong. He went to work. He came home. He kissed her forehead every morning. He helped Kian with homework. He told bad jokes. He was a good man.

And he had lost his job.

If God was love, like Aaliyah always said. If God was love, and God saw everything — then why didn't God see this? And why didn't God do something about it?

And if God couldn't do something about it, what kind of God was that?

And if God wouldn't, what kind of love was that?

Samira pushed the tea away.

She didn't finish the thought. She stood up and went to her room and lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, where she had stuck those plastic glow-in-the-dark stars when she was seven and had never bothered to take them down. In daylight they were just blank plastic. You couldn't tell they were stars at all unless you already knew.

Junior youth met on Wednesday.

Samira didn't want to go. She'd been in her own head for three days. She had not told Diya anything. She had not talked to anyone except her mom, briefly, and her baba had been on the phone so much with job-recruiter-people that she'd barely seen him.

But her mom said, "Go. You need your friends."

"I don't want to see anybody."

"Go."

So she went.

The meeting was at Jin-woo's house that week. Jin-woo's living room was small and very clean and smelled like something his mom had just baked — some kind of savory pancake, Samira thought, but she didn't have the energy to ask. She sat on the carpet and hugged her knees and tried to listen.

They were talking about the next service project. They were halfway through a workbook unit about oneness. Marcus was reading something aloud. She should have been listening. Her eyes were on the carpet, which had a blue swirly pattern that repeated, and she was counting the repeats in her head, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, like a tiny heartbeat she could control.

"Samira?" Eden said.

Samira looked up.

"You okay?" Eden said.

"Yeah."

"Are you sure? Because you have the face."

"What face?"

"The face," Diya said. "The you-face. The face where your eyebrows do the thing."

Samira's eyebrows did the thing. Everyone's face was on her now. Felix was looking at her too, she realized — Felix, sitting cross-legged near the bookshelf, not looking away.

"I'm fine," she said.

"You're not," Marcus said, not meanly. "But if you don't want to talk, that's cool."

"Thank you, Marcus."

"Just saying, group. She's got the eyebrows."

Aaliyah, who had been sitting on the couch with her hands around a mug of tea, said, "Samira, do you want to step out for a minute? I'll come with you."

Samira almost said no. It would be weird. It would make it a thing. But the idea of walking out of this room full of faces and into the cold hallway was suddenly so much more attractive than staying.

"Okay," she said.

Aaliyah handed the workbook to Marcus. "Take over, poet. Oneness, page fourteen."

"I got it."

"Don't make it weird."

"When have I ever."

"Every single time."

Marcus grinned. Aaliyah followed Samira out.

They stood in Jin-woo's front hallway, which was narrow and had a row of shoes lined up against the wall in perfect parallel, the way Samira had noticed Korean houses often did. Aaliyah kept her voice low.

"What's going on."

Samira opened her mouth. She didn't know where to start. The whole week was a tangle.

"My baba lost his job," she said.

"Oh, honey."

"And — and that's the main thing. That's the biggest thing."

"Okay."

"But it's all — it's mixed up with — with Felix, and with everything, and with — "

She stopped. She felt her throat do that pre-cry thing again. She hated that thing. It was happening too much this week.

"Take your time," Aaliyah said.

"Aaliyah."

"Yeah."

"If God loves us, why does this happen?"

The hallway was very still. From the living room, she could hear Marcus reading in his reading-aloud voice, which was a voice that was about ten percent more dramatic than his normal voice, and she could hear Jin-woo's mom moving pans in the kitchen, and somewhere outside a kid was yelling something about a bike.

Aaliyah didn't answer right away.

"That's the question, isn't it," she said quietly.

"Do you know?"

"No."

Samira felt tears on her face. "You're supposed to know."

"I'm not. I really, really am not."

"You're the animator. You're the adult. You're supposed to —"

"Samira." Aaliyah put her hands on Samira's shoulders and turned her so they were face to face. "Let me say this as straight as I can. I don't know. I have been a person for twenty-five years. I have been a Bahá'í since I was fifteen. I have been a social worker for three years. I have seen things that broke my heart in ways I can't even describe to you, because you are twelve and because I won't. I have asked that question. Why. Why does it happen. I ask it. I still ask it. I don't know."

"Then —"

"But."

"But what."

"But." Aaliyah took a breath. "What I have come to believe — not know, believe, which is a different thing — is that tests are part of how we grow strong. I don't mean God is out there picking tests for us like a teacher picking homework. I don't think that's how it works. I think life just — life. Hard things happen because we live on a planet where hard things happen. What we get to decide is who we become inside them."

"That sounds like a fortune cookie."

"It does a little. I know."

"I don't want a fortune cookie."

"I know."

"I want my baba's job back."

"I know, Samira. I know."

They stood in the hallway. Aaliyah's hands stayed on her shoulders. Samira cried for a while, not a loud crying, just a leaking. Aaliyah didn't say anything. She didn't try to fix it. She just kept her hands where they were.

After a while — Samira didn't know how long; time did weird things when you were like this — Aaliyah said, "The other thing I know."

"What."

"We don't grow alone. We're not supposed to grow alone. That's the part I do know, hard. You don't have to do this by yourself. Not this test, not any test. You have your parents. You have your brother, who's little but he's family. You have me. You have — " Aaliyah gestured toward the living room. "You have them."

"They don't know."

"You could tell them."

"I don't want them to feel sorry for me."

"There's a difference between sorry-for and with. They'll be with you. That's what they're for."

Samira wiped her face with her sleeve. Her sleeve got a wet patch. Her eyebrows did the thing, again.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"I'll — I'll tell them. Not today. But soon."

"Okay."

"Can we go back in?"

"Whenever you're ready."

Samira took a breath. It went down crooked. She took another one. That one went down straight.

They went back in. Marcus was mid-sentence, reading something about unity. Everyone looked up at her. She sat down next to Diya. Diya reached over and squeezed her hand, just once, without saying anything, the way she sometimes did.

Samira squeezed back.

The meeting kept going. Samira didn't participate much. But she listened. And somewhere in the second half, while Jin-woo was quietly explaining something about how a circle is the shape where every point is equally far from the center, which he said was maybe why humans keep drawing circles when they want to feel together — somewhere in the middle of that, Samira looked across the room at Felix. Felix was looking at the floor, the way he sometimes did.

I see you, Samira thought. I see you and I don't know what to do about it yet. But I see you.

Felix didn't look up. But he shifted a tiny bit on the carpet, the way a cat shifts when somebody walks into the room, and Samira thought, maybe, that he'd felt her.

Maybe.

Felix was sitting alone at the far end of the third lunch table, by the window. This was not new. Felix often sat at the far end of the third lunch table by the window. He'd been doing it since he started at Ridgewood Middle in September. It had taken Samira a while to notice, because the lunchroom was a loud blurry place and because she was usually surrounded by Diya and Eden and their whole chattering gang, but once she'd noticed she couldn't un-notice.

Felix had a sandwich today. A small sandwich. Squashed-looking. A half-bag of pretzels. A bottle of water.

Samira stood at the edge of the lunchroom with her tray and did the math.

She could go to her usual table. Diya was already there. Diya was waving. Eden was making a gesture that meant come HERE, I have something to TELL you. Aliyah was laughing at something. It was warm over there. It was her place.

Or.

Or she could go sit next to Felix.

The idea of going to sit next to Felix made her stomach clench. Not in a bad way. In a this-might-go-wrong way. Felix might look at her and know she knew. Felix might think she was sitting with him because she felt sorry for him. Felix might — Felix might just say nothing, and she would sit there in a pool of silence, and the whole lunchroom would watch.

She thought about what Aaliyah had said. You could ask him. In the right moment.

She wasn't going to ask him today. Not here. Not with chicken nuggets on her tray.

But maybe — maybe sitting next to him was a different kind of answer to the question of what you do when you know something about a person and they don't know you know. Maybe sitting next to him was not about the secret at all. Maybe it was just about — being there.

Sitting next to Felix would be a new thing. New things were how people stopped being who they used to be and started being who they were next.

Samira took a breath. She walked the long way around the tables.

"Hey," she said, sliding into the seat across from Felix.

Felix looked up. His eyes did a surprised thing. Then his eyes did a guarded thing.

"Hey," he said.

"Is this seat taken?"

"Uh. No."

"Cool."

She set her tray down. She opened her milk. She peeled the wrapper off her straw.

Felix watched her for two seconds, then looked back down at his sandwich.

"How's your day?" Samira said.

"It's okay."

"Mine's weird."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Math test. Got a 74. Kian tried to make toaster strudel and it exploded. My mom's car won't start. It's one of those days."

Felix made a small sound that was maybe a laugh. Not really a laugh. Like the ghost of a laugh.

"That's a lot of stuff for one morning."

"Right?"

They ate for a minute. The noise of the lunchroom went on around them. Samira could feel Diya's eyes on her from across the room, doing the what-are-you-DOING stare. Samira made her own eyes do an I'll-tell-you-later stare. Diya made her eyes do an okay-BUT-I-expect-a-full-report stare. Friendship was a lot of eye-talking sometimes.

"Hey," Samira said.

"Hey."

"Do you want half of this?"

She held out half of her sandwich. It was a tuna sandwich. Her mom had put a little too much mayo, which Samira had been planning to scrape off. But she held it out, extra-mayo and all.

Felix looked at the sandwich. He looked at her.

"I have a sandwich," he said.

"Yours is smaller than mine."

"I'm not that hungry."

"I made too much."

"You didn't make it."

"My mom made too much."

Felix almost-smiled. It was a tiny almost-smile, but it was an almost-smile nonetheless.

"Thanks," he said. He took the half. "You want some of my pretzels?"

"Yes."

He pushed the bag across. She took a few pretzels.

They ate. They didn't talk much. Samira did not bring up the shelter. She did not bring up anything. She talked about the math test some more, because it was safe and dumb. She told him about the toaster strudel, which was a true story, because Kian had in fact exploded a toaster strudel that morning and her mom had said a word that she didn't usually say.

Felix laughed once. A real laugh, small, but real.

When the bell rang, they both stood up.

"Hey, Samira?" Felix said.

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for the sandwich."

"Thanks for the pretzels."

"Your mom uses too much mayo."

"I know, right?"

He shook his head, a tiny, surprised shake, and walked off toward his next class.

Samira stood there for a second. She felt — she wasn't sure what she felt. Lighter. Also heavier. Both.

"SAMIRA JAVIDI," Diya hissed, appearing at her elbow. "EXPLAIN YOURSELF."

"I sat with Felix."

"I can SEE that."

"He needed company."

"Since when is Felix your lunch buddy?"

"Since today."

Diya looked at her. Diya had a way of looking that was part X-ray and part hug. "Something's going on with you."

"Yeah."

"You gonna tell me?"

"I want to."

"But?"

"But it's not all mine to tell."

Diya considered this. Diya was a fast thinker. You could practically see the little gears going behind her eyes.

"Okay," Diya said. "I'm gonna let that go. For now. Because I'm a good friend. But I want it documented that I am being a good friend."

"Documented."

"Documented."

"You want me to write it on a piece of paper."

"I want you to write it on two pieces of paper. One for each of us. Notarized."

"What does notarized even mean."

"I don't know. My dad says it."

Samira laughed. She hugged Diya, quick, the way they sometimes did in the hallway. "I love you."

"Yeah, yeah, you love me. Get to class. We're gonna be late."

The next junior youth meeting, Samira watched the room.

They met at Eden's family's panadería that week. Eden's abuela made conchas, which were these pastries with a crumbly sugar top shaped like seashells, and the whole bakery smelled like a warm hug. They were sitting in the back room, which Eden's family let them use for meetings and which had a long wooden table and mismatched chairs and a Virgen de Guadalupe candle on a shelf that had never, as far as Samira could tell, been lit.

Samira watched the room.

Marcus was laughing at something Eden had said. Aliyah was arguing with Jin-woo about whether a triangle could be considered spiritual. Diya was trying to eat a concha without getting sugar on her hoodie and was not succeeding. Aaliyah was reading the workbook and occasionally making notes in the margin with a pencil.

Felix was there too. Felix was eating his concha slowly. He ate slowly, Samira had noticed. Like he was making each bite last.

None of them knew that Felix's family didn't have a home. None of them knew that he slept at a shelter. None of them knew about the space heater that probably made noise, or the shared bathroom down the hall, or any of it. They saw Felix and they saw Felix, their quiet funny friend who was good at drawing maps and who always asked before he took a second cookie and who could spell anything.

And maybe, Samira thought, that was what Felix wanted.

But also — they were his friends. They were his group. They did service together. They talked about oneness. And oneness was supposed to mean something, wasn't it? Oneness wasn't supposed to be a word for the inside of your own comfortable head. Oneness was supposed to actually mean you were connected to these people. And you couldn't be connected to someone and not know one of the biggest things about their life.

Could you?

But also, she thought, he has the right to decide. It's his story.

She thought about what Aaliyah had said in the car. Felix told me something in confidence. The information isn't yours. It's theirs. You're just borrowing it for a minute.

But she was carrying the information now, whether she'd meant to or not. And she was going to have to carry it differently than Aaliyah was. Because Aaliyah was his animator; that was a grown-up role. She was his friend. And friendship was a different carrying.

After the meeting, as they were cleaning up, Samira hung back. Felix was helping to sweep crumbs off the table. He did it carefully, getting into the corners. It was the kind of careful that said he'd done a lot of table-wiping in his life.

"Felix?" she said.

He looked up.

"Can I — can I talk to you for a minute? Outside?"

His face went still.

"Okay," he said.

They went out the back door, into the little alley where Eden's family kept the bread flour in big paper bags covered with a tarp. It was cold. Samira hadn't grabbed her coat. She hugged her arms.

"So," she said.

"So."

"I — I want to say something and it's going to be a little weird. Can I just say it and then you tell me if I'm being weird?"

Felix half-smiled. "Sure."

"I saw you at the shelter. The night of the coat delivery. I wasn't — I wasn't looking for you. I didn't even know you were there. It was an accident. But I saw you and you saw me and you turned away. And I've been — I've been thinking about it ever since."

Felix's face did not change. Exactly. It was already serious. It got a little more serious.

"I talked to Aaliyah about it," Samira said, rushing now, because she needed to get it out. "I didn't tell anybody else. I won't tell anybody else. That's your — your thing, to tell or not tell. I just — I didn't want you to feel like I knew and you didn't know I knew. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah."

"And I wanted to say — I don't think about you different now. I mean, I do, but not — not bad-different. Just like — I know more about you now. And I think you're great. And I don't want you to feel like you have to hide. From me."

Felix was very quiet.

"But also," Samira said, because this was the part that mattered, "also, I don't want to be — I don't want to make it a thing if you don't want me to. If you want me to just pretend I don't know, I'll pretend. I'm a good pretender. Ask my mom. I've convinced her I liked stuffed peppers for years."

Felix laughed. A real laugh. A surprised-out-of-him laugh.

"Stuffed peppers are terrible," he said.

"They are the worst. Don't tell my mom I said that."

"I won't."

They stood in the alley. A pigeon flapped down from somewhere and walked around their feet and flapped away again, uninterested.

"Samira," Felix said.

"Yeah."

"Thanks for saying that out loud."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. Most people, when they find out, they — they get weird. They get pity-face. You know pity-face?"

"I know pity-face."

"It's the worst face."

"It is the worst face."

"You don't have pity-face."

"I'm trying not to."

"You're doing okay."

He looked at his sneakers. His sneakers were old. The laces didn't match. One was white and one was black. Samira had never noticed that before.

"Can I ask you something?" she said.

"Yeah."

"Do you — do you want to tell the others? The group?"

He was quiet for a long time.

"I don't know," he said finally. "Part of me wants to. Part of me really, really doesn't."

"Can I tell you what I think? Only if you want."

"Go ahead."

"I think — I think the group loves you. I think if you tell them, they'll love you the same amount, just bigger, because they'll have more of you to love. And I think if you don't tell them, that's okay too, because it's your story. But if you ever want to tell them, I'll be next to you when you do."

"Next to me."

"Next to you."

He nodded slowly.

"Can I think about it?" he said.

"Yeah. Of course. As long as you want."

"Okay."

"Okay."

They stood there a second longer. The smell of bread came out of the back door in a warm wave.

"I'm cold," Samira said.

"Me too. Let's go in."

They went back inside. Nobody noticed they had stepped out. Eden was trying to teach Jin-woo a dance move that Jin-woo was taking with great seriousness, like it was an engineering problem. Marcus was reading something off his phone to Diya, who was pretending to be unimpressed. Aaliyah looked up and caught Samira's eye. Samira nodded, small. Aaliyah nodded back, smaller.

On the way home that night — her mom was picking her up, because it was her mom's day off — Samira sat in the passenger seat and watched the streetlights go by and thought about trust.

Trust was not one thing. Trust was a lot of different things stacked on top of each other. There was the trust of telling someone a secret. There was the trust of keeping it. There was the trust of knowing somebody knew and being okay with it. And there was — this was the newest one, the one Samira was still figuring out — the trust of telling somebody you knew, and then giving the steering wheel back to them.

"You're quiet," her mom said.

"Thinking."

"About what?"

Samira thought about telling her about Felix, in generic terms, without using his name. But she didn't.

"About how sometimes the loving thing is to step back," she said.

Her mom looked over at her. Her mom had that look, the look that said my kid is changing under my nose and I don't know whether to be proud or scared.

"Yes," her mom said softly. "Yes, that can be the loving thing."

"But sometimes it's not."

"No. Sometimes the loving thing is to step forward."

"How do you know which one it is?"

Her mom laughed. "Oh, joonam. I am forty-two years old and I still don't always know."

"That's not reassuring."

"I know. But at least you're asking the right question."

Samira looked out the window. A man was walking a dog in a puffy green coat. The dog, not the man. The dog's coat was puffy and green. The dog looked very dignified.

"Maman?"

"Yes?"

"How's Baba?"

Her mom's hands tightened on the wheel. Loosened. Tightened. Loosened.

"He is — he is working on it. Today he had two interviews. He's tired. But he is working."

"Can I do something?"

"You are doing something, Samira."

"What?"

"You are being a good sister. You are being a good daughter. You are still being a good student. You are going to your junior youth meetings. You are being — yourself. Fully yourself. That is what he needs. He needs to know that whatever he is going through, his family is still his family. You are giving him that."

"It doesn't feel like doing anything."

"Mm." Her mom smiled. "That's usually how it feels when you're doing the right thing. If it felt like something, everyone would do it."

They pulled into their driveway. The driveway was still their driveway, for now. The house was still their house. Samira sat there for a second, looking at the front door.

Things were going to change. She knew that. They were going to pack boxes. They were going to move to Ameh Layla's. Her baba's face was going to stay tired for a while longer. Felix's life was going to keep being what it was, at least for now. Junior youth was going to keep meeting.

But she was here. She was still here. She was still Samira.

And that, maybe, was something.

Felix asked for the floor at the next meeting.

They were at Marcus's apartment this time. Marcus's apartment was on the fourth floor of a building on the east side of Ridgewood, with a narrow living room that had bookshelves built all the way to the ceiling and a couch that sagged on one end because Marcus had jumped on it too many times when he was seven. Marcus's mom, who worked at the city, was at work. Marcus was very proud of having his own apartment-key, which he carried on a lanyard around his neck like an athlete's medal.

Everyone had come in, taken off their shoes, and gotten comfortable. Aaliyah had brought a bag of clementines, and there was a small pile of clementine peels accumulating on a plate on the coffee table, like a tiny sunset. Diya was on the floor. Eden was on the couch. Aliyah was in the armchair. Jin-woo and Marcus were sharing the other armchair in a way that should not have been physically possible. Samira was sitting cross-legged on a throw pillow. Felix was on the floor too, near her, hugging his knees.

Aaliyah was about to start the workbook, and she had just asked her usual check-in question - "Anything anyone wants to bring to the group before we start?" - when Felix's hand went up.

Everyone looked at him.

Felix never put his hand up at check-in. Felix was a listener, not a raiser.

"Yeah, Felix?" Aaliyah said. Her voice had that careful tone. Not different, exactly, just - attentive.

Felix looked at his knees. Then at Samira, just for a second. Samira gave him a small nod.

"I have something I want to tell everybody," he said.

"Okay," Aaliyah said. "Take your time."

He took his time. His mouth opened. It closed. It opened again.

"I - my family - I live at a shelter right now. Me and my mom and my little sister. It's a family shelter on Linden Avenue. We've been there since October."

Nobody said anything.

"My dad left six months ago," Felix went on. His voice was steadier than Samira had expected. Small, but steady. "He and my mom had been fighting for a long time. One day he packed up while we were at school and he left. He didn't say where. He hasn't - we haven't heard from him since then."

Marcus made a little sound, like someone had hit him in the chest very gently. But he didn't interrupt.

"My mom works two jobs. Cleaning at the hospital in the mornings and at the nursing home at night. She's the hardest-working person I know. But our rent went up in September, and she couldn't pay it, and we got evicted. And - and that was when we went to the shelter."

He paused. He took a breath that shook only a little.

"The shelter is okay. It's clean. The ladies there are nice. I have my own bed. My sister sleeps in my mom's bed. We have a cubby for our stuff. We get dinner at the dining hall and breakfast too. It's not - it's not a bad place. But it's not - it's not home."

He stopped. He looked down at the clementine peels.

"I didn't want you to know because - because I didn't want you to think of me differently. I didn't want to be the kid who lives at the shelter. I just wanted to be Felix. In the group. Like everybody else."

He looked up. His eyes were wet. He didn't wipe them.

"But Samira found out. By accident. And she was really - she was really cool about it. She asked me if I wanted to tell you. She said she'd sit next to me. So I - I'm telling you."

The silence was a kind of silence that had a shape to it. Samira could feel it, the shape, sitting in the middle of the living room like a thing you could reach out and touch.

Diya was the first to make a sound. A tiny hiccupy sound. Then Samira looked over, and Diya's whole face was wet, and Diya was crying silently, sitting cross-legged on the floor with tears sliding down her cheeks and dripping off her chin onto her hoodie.

"Dee," Eden said quietly.

"I'm fine," Diya whispered.

"You're not."

"I'm fine. I just - Felix, I'm so - I'm not sad for you, I swear, I'm - I don't know what I am."

Felix almost-smiled. "I know."

Marcus was wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Marcus, who made fun of poetry that had too many tears in it. Marcus, who wrote very serious poems and pretended he didn't care what people thought of them.

"Bro," Marcus said. His voice came out rough. "Bro. Why didn't you - "

"I didn't want pity-face," Felix said.

"We don't pity you."

"You don't know yet."

"I'm not gonna. I swear. Swear on my grandma."

"That's a big swear," Jin-woo said quietly.

"I know it is."

Jin-woo was very still. Jin-woo got still when he was thinking hard. He was looking at a spot just past Felix's shoulder, the way he did when he was working through a math problem in his head.

Eden got up off the couch. She walked over to Felix. She stopped about a foot away.

"Felix," she said.

"Yeah."

"Can I hug you? Is that okay?"

Felix let out a breath. A real breath. The kind of breath that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than lungs.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that's okay."

Eden knelt down and wrapped her arms around him. She did it the way Eden did everything - all in, whole-body, no holding back. Felix's face went into her shoulder, and his shoulders started shaking, just a little.

Samira looked at her lap. It felt right to look at her lap for a minute. Some things you didn't stare at.

When Eden let go, Diya went next, wordless. Then Marcus, who did his hug with one arm because he was Marcus and one-arm was the most he could do publicly, but he held on for longer than Samira had ever seen Marcus hold anything.

Aliyah went. She said, "You're a good one, Felix. You know that? You're a good one."

Felix said, "Thanks."

Jin-woo didn't hug, but Jin-woo reached out and touched Felix's foot with his own foot. Just a little tap. A Jin-woo tap.

Samira didn't hug him. She was sitting right next to him already, and she reached over and put her hand on his shoulder, the way Aaliyah had put her hand on hers in the hallway at Jin-woo's house.

"Thanks for telling us," she said.

"Thanks for - making it easier. A little."

"Was it? Easier?"

"Yeah. It was."

Aaliyah had not spoken through any of this. She was just sitting in her chair, watching them, her face careful. Now she leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.

"Felix," she said. "Thank you. That took courage."

"Okay."

"I want to ask the group something. Is that okay with you?"

He nodded.

"Group," Aaliyah said. "Felix has shared something big with us. What does the group want to do?"

Nobody answered right away.

"I mean," Eden said. "We want to help. Right?"

Heads nodded. Marcus. Diya. Aliyah. Samira. Jin-woo.

"But how?" Eden said. "Like - what do you even do?"

"We could give him money," Diya said. Then she winced. "I mean - oh, that sounds - "

"That sounds gross," Marcus said gently.

"I didn't mean - "

"I know you didn't. But it kinda does, right? Felix, doesn't it?"

Felix was quiet.

"It's not that it's gross," he said carefully. "It's just - it's not - I don't want to be the group's charity case. I don't want you guys to look at me and see, like, a piggy bank."

"Yeah," Aliyah said. "That's what I was thinking. Money kind of - it creates a thing. Between people. When it's like that."

"But we can't just do nothing," Diya said. "What's the point of - of any of this - " she gestured around at the living room, at the workbook on the coffee table, at the clementines - "if we know and we don't do anything?"

"We don't do nothing," Marcus said. "But we have to figure out the right thing."

Aaliyah let them talk. She didn't jump in. She just watched. Samira knew this was a thing Aaliyah did on purpose - she called it "holding space" - and sometimes it drove Samira crazy, because she wanted Aaliyah to just tell them, but today she understood why. If Aaliyah had told them, the answer would be Aaliyah's. They needed the answer to be theirs.

Jin-woo had not spoken in a while. Samira watched him. Jin-woo was still staring at the spot past Felix's shoulder. His hands were folded in his lap.

"Jin-woo?" Samira said. "You've been quiet."

Jin-woo blinked. He looked around.

"Sorry," he said. "I was thinking."

"What about?"

Jin-woo took a breath. "I was thinking - what if we help with dignity? Like - what if Felix helps decide? What if Felix tells us what kind of help feels okay to him, and we do that?"

The room got quiet again.

"That's - that's actually - yeah," Eden said. "That's really good."

"Because otherwise," Jin-woo said, "we're just deciding what he needs. And we don't know what he needs. Only he knows. And his mom."

"Yeah," Felix said softly.

"Felix," Aaliyah said. "Is there anything your family needs that the group could help with? You can say no. You can say you want to think about it. But can we ask?"

Felix thought for a long time.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know what you could do."

"Okay."

"It's mostly - it's mostly a waiting thing. My mom is trying to get into a transitional housing program but the waitlist is long. She's saving up for a deposit but it's slow. She's trying to do this certificate course thing that would get her a better job but she doesn't have time because she's working two jobs."

Marcus had stopped wiping his eyes. Marcus was sitting up. Marcus had his thinking face on.

"What program?" Marcus said. "The housing one."

"I don't remember the name."

"My mom works at the city housing office."

The whole room went still.

"What?" Felix said.

"My mom. That's where she works. Housing. She - she knows all the programs. She knows the people. She knows who moves the waitlists."

"Oh," Felix said.

"I could - I mean, I don't want to be like, weird. But if your mom wanted. I could ask my mom to talk to her. Not to do her a favor. Just to, like, make sure she's in every program she qualifies for. Because my mom says a lot of people don't know what they qualify for."

"That would - that would be okay, I think."

"I'll ask my mom tonight."

"Okay."

Eden had leaned forward. Her eyes were shining.

"Can I do something?" Eden said.

"What?"

"What if - what if we cooked? Like, together. At my abuela's panaderia. And brought food to the shelter. Not just for your family. For everybody there. Like, we'd bring enough for the whole place. And we'd bring it as, like, a meal. Not as - not as help-you food. As everybody-food."

"Everybody-food," Felix said slowly.

"Everybody-food. Like - you know how my abuela makes too much pan dulce every Saturday? And it goes to all the neighbors? She doesn't say 'poor you, here's bread.' She just says 'I made too much, have some.' That's everybody-food."

"I like that," Aliyah said.

"I really like that," Diya said.

"We'd cook it ourselves," Eden said. "All of us. I'd get my abuela to supervise. We'd make - I don't know - beans and rice. Salad. Bread. Enough to feed a lot of people. Felix, your family would just be eating it because they're people. Like everybody else."

Felix's face did something that Samira hadn't seen it do before. His chin wobbled. His eyes overflowed. He didn't try to hide it.

"That sounds good," he said. "That sounds really good."

"So two things," Aaliyah said, gently summarizing. "Marcus's mom makes the housing connection. Eden's family and the group do a meal for the shelter. Felix, how's that sit?"

Felix nodded. Then he shook his head. Then he nodded again, sheepishly.

"I have to say something," he said.

"Say it."

"I don't want to be - " He paused. He found the words. "I don't want to be the project. Okay? Like - I want this to happen, and I want to help cook, and I want my mom to talk to Marcus's mom. But I don't want to be - I don't want every meeting now to be, like, about me. I still just want to be Felix. In the group. Doing regular stuff. Okay?"

"Okay," Aaliyah said.

"Okay," said everybody else, in a little quiet chorus.

"You're not the project," Samira said. "You're our friend. Those are different."

"Yeah," Felix said. "Those are different."

They did the workbook after that. They did it badly. Nobody could really focus. Marcus kept reading the same sentence twice. Aliyah kept asking what page they were on. Diya put her head on Samira's shoulder halfway through and didn't lift it again until the meeting was over. Jin-woo made three pages' worth of notes about something none of them understood. Eden drew tiny loaves of bread in the margins of her workbook.

Felix was different. Not much. A little. He sat up straighter. He laughed once at a joke of Marcus's. He took a third clementine without asking if it was okay. He reached across the coffee table for the clementine, and nobody stared, and nobody made a thing of it, and he ate it, and it was small but Samira saw it and she felt something in her unclench.

On the way out, in the hallway of Marcus's building, Felix touched her elbow.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"I'm glad you sat with me at lunch that day."

"Me too."

"Tuna with too much mayo really is the worst."

"I've been saying. Nobody listens."

He laughed. It was a bigger laugh this time. And then his mom was at the end of the hall, waiting - a small woman in a waitress uniform under a big puffy coat, holding a canvas bag and giving Felix that tired, loving look that moms give their kids after long days - and he walked to her, and she hugged him, and they walked out together into the cold.

Samira stood there with Diya, watching them go.

"Samira," Diya said.

"Yeah."

"That was - "

"Yeah."

"Can I - can I just hold your arm on the walk home? I'm a little wobbly."

"Yeah, Dee. Come here."

They walked home arm in arm. The streetlights were just coming on. Diya didn't say much. Samira didn't either. But they walked together, and that was saying something.

The group decided to meet extra that week to plan. Aaliyah called it a "consultation," which was a word the junior youth had been using for months without fully feeling the weight of - it meant, basically, talking through a thing together until you found the truest answer, and it was a thing Baha'is did and also a thing, Aaliyah said, that humans had been doing forever under a lot of names.

They met at Samira's house on a Saturday afternoon.

It was the last meeting at Samira's house, she realized, before they moved to Ameh Layla's. The boxes had already started accumulating in the corner of the living room. Her baba had packed a few, her mom had packed more, and Kian had packed one box of exclusively LEGOs, which was categorized incorrectly on the outside as "books." Samira didn't mention it. Kian had enough to deal with.

Her mom had made chai. Real chai, with cardamom, the way her mom's grandmother made it. The whole house smelled like cardamom and warm milk.

"Sit, sit, sit," her mom said, ushering the junior youth in. "Diya, come, you look thin. Eat a biscuit. Marcus, the chai is hot, be careful. Jin-woo, is this too strong? I can make it weaker."

"It's perfect, Mrs. Javidi."

"Call me Sanaz, habibi. Aaliyah, always a pleasure. Felix, you I have not met. Welcome, welcome."

"Hi, Mrs. - Sanaz."

"Very good. You learn fast."

Samira watched her mom buzz around the living room and felt a strange mixed-up thing in her chest. Her mom was being her mom - loud and warm and feeding everybody - and for a minute it was hard to remember that they were moving out of this room in three weeks.

But that was okay. Tonight the room was full. Tonight the chai was hot.

Her mom left them to it after a while. "I will be in the kitchen pretending I am not listening," she said. "Call if you need more chai."

They sat in a circle on the floor. The coffee table had a plate of Iranian chickpea cookies on it, and a plate of Eden's abuela's conchas, and a bowl of clementines, because Aaliyah had brought clementines and it seemed she always brought clementines now. The clementines had become a thing.

"Sound good."

"Felix, you're the person most connected to this situation, so you have a special role - you're our compass. We'll check with you. Not because you have to decide everything, but because we want to make sure we're going toward true north. Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"And one more thing. This is going to be hard. We might disagree. That's fine. Disagreeing is how consultation works. But disagreeing with kindness. Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"All right. Let's start. What are we doing."

Marcus went first. He had already talked to his mom. His mom had said yes, she would reach out to Felix's mom. She had a list of programs Felix's mom might qualify for - the transitional housing program Felix had mentioned, plus a rental assistance thing, plus a childcare subsidy, plus a workforce development grant that might cover the certificate program. Marcus's mom had said, in her very Marcus's-mom way, that nine out of ten times when someone thinks they don't qualify for something, they actually do, but they got turned away by somebody at a desk who didn't know the rules.

"My mom knows the rules," Marcus said. "And my mom, when she calls, she is very hard to say no to."

"Does she have a scary phone voice?" Diya asked.

"She has the scariest phone voice in North America."

"Can I meet her."

"She loves meeting people. She will invite you to dinner on the spot and make you eat three plates."

They got sidetracked for two minutes about Marcus's mom's phone voice. Then Aaliyah, smiling, pulled them back.

"Okay. So housing connection - Marcus's mom will call Felix's mom this week. Felix, is that okay with your mom?"

"I asked. She said yes. She said she has tried to get into some of these programs and been turned away. She said the word 'interminable.'"

"Yeah, that's the word, huh."

"She said Marcus's mom sounded like a 'godsend.'"

"I'll tell my mom," Marcus said, pretending to be embarrassed. "She'll love that. She'll bake you a cake."

"Do I have to eat the cake?"

"No, but don't let her know that."

Next was the meal. Eden had already floated it to her abuela, who had lit up like a Christmas tree - Eden's words - and said of course, of course, we cook, we bring, we feed, that is what we do. Her abuela wanted to make enchiladas. Big trays. Enough to feed - Eden estimated, conservatively - forty-five people.

"Forty-five?" Diya said. "The shelter has that many?"

"Maybe more," Felix said quietly. "There are eight family rooms. And maybe fifteen singles. And the staff eat too sometimes."

"Okay," Eden said. "Forty-five. My abuela will say that's not enough. She'll do sixty."

"Sixty?"

"You don't say no to my abuela. That is something you learn in my family before you learn your own name."

They talked through details. When they would cook. How much it would cost - Eden's family was covering most of it, because that was what they were going to do, but the group pooled allowance money to help with ingredients, because it felt right that they all contributed. When they would deliver. Who would deliver - they decided all of them together, so that nobody was a helper and nobody was helped. They would eat together at the shelter. If the shelter said yes.

"I'll ask the shelter director," Aaliyah said. "She's a friend. I'll frame it as a community meal, not a charity drop-off."

"Good," Samira said.

"And - Felix. If this is too much. If walking in with all of us feels weird. You tell us. We can pivot."

Felix thought. "It'll be weird," he said honestly. "But - I think the weird kind of weird might be okay. I think the weird kind of weird might be - good. For my mom. For my sister. For the other people. I don't know."

"That's enough of a yes," Aaliyah said.

"It's enough of a yes."

They talked for an hour. Diya wanted to make a banner that said something welcoming, and spent twenty minutes workshopping it, and finally settled on - after much debate - nothing at all, no banner, just the food, because a banner, Jin-woo pointed out, would make it feel announced, and announced food was different from just food. Eden agreed. Diya pretended to be crushed, and then said she'd design a napkin instead, which everyone agreed was an acceptable compromise.

Jin-woo worked out the math. How many servings of rice per tray. How many trays. He did it in his notebook with tidy numbers. When he was done, he had a spreadsheet in his head that he transferred to paper. Eden's abuela was going to make the enchiladas; Eden's mom was going to do rice; Samira volunteered her mom's khoresh, which her mom would definitely agree to because her mom always made more than they could eat anyway, even now; Marcus's mom would bring cornbread, because Marcus's mom was from Atlanta and cornbread was not optional.

"And bread from the panaderia," Eden said. "Just the extra. Whatever's left at closing that day."

"And cookies?" Aliyah said hopefully.

"And cookies."

Halfway through, Felix had gone quiet. Samira noticed it. She didn't point it out. She just kept an eye on him.

When Aaliyah called a five-minute break, Samira went over and sat next to him on the couch, where he'd migrated after they'd gotten up to stretch.

"You okay?" she said.

"Yeah. I - yeah."

"Felix."

"I'm okay. I promise. It's just - " he gestured at the room, at the coffee table, at the mess of lists and plans and clementine peels. "Nobody has ever - nobody has ever done this for us. Before."

"That's - Felix, I'm - "

"It's a good thing. I just don't know how to - how to - "

"You don't have to know."

"Okay."

"You don't have to say anything right. You don't have to be grateful in a shape that makes sense to anybody. This isn't a transaction. You're our friend. Your mom's going to eat enchiladas because Eden's abuela made too many. That's the whole thing."

"That's the whole thing," Felix said.

"Yeah."

"Okay."

"Okay."

He leaned his shoulder into hers, just a little. She leaned back. They sat like that for the whole five-minute break.

When the break was over, the group came back together and Aaliyah asked if anyone wanted to say anything to close.

Marcus cleared his throat.

"I want to say something," he said. "Can I?"

"Yeah."

"I - I just want to say. I feel like - " he paused, the way he did when he was reaching for a word he wanted. "I feel like we talk about oneness every week. And I'm the one who usually makes jokes about it because oneness sounds like a bumper sticker. But today - today I get it. A little more. I think oneness is what was happening in this room today. When we were figuring this out. It wasn't me saving Felix, it wasn't Eden saving Felix. It was us being one thing, trying to figure out how to be a person for another person. And that is - that is the whole book we've been reading, maybe."

"Marcus, that was a speech," Diya said, a little teary.

"I wrote it in my head while I was listening."

"You're a poet."

"I know."

Aaliyah looked at Marcus a long moment. "That was right, Marcus. That was right."

"Thanks, Aaliyah."

"Anybody else?"

Felix raised his hand.

"Yeah."

"I want to say thank you," he said. "And I don't want to make it a big thing, because you guys already heard me say I don't want this to be the Felix project. So I'm going to say thank you and then we're going to get on with our lives. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome," Eden said.

"And also," Felix added, "I still want a turn in the workbook next week. I still want to argue with Jin-woo about whether math is spiritual. I still want Marcus to make fun of my drawings. I still want Diya to try to braid my hair even though my hair is too short to braid. I want all of it. I want it to keep going. Okay?"

"Okay," Diya said. "But your hair is braid-able, I maintain."

"Your hair is not braid-able," Jin-woo said.

"Stay out of this, Jin-woo."

"It's a matter of fiber length."

"It's a matter of me wanting to braid it."

They broke up in laughter. Samira looked across the room and saw Aaliyah looking at her. Aaliyah was smiling, a small quiet smile. Samira smiled back.

In the kitchen, after everyone left, her mom was washing dishes. Samira picked up a dish towel and started drying.

"Those are good kids," her mom said.

"They are, Maman."

"That Felix. He has a kind face."

"He does."

"And that Jin-woo. So quiet. Deep well."

"Deep well."

"And Marcus." Her mom smiled a little. "Marcus will be a writer someday. You watch."

"You think?"

"I know. I know writers when I see them. His mother must be proud."

"She is."

Her mom handed her another plate. For a minute they just washed and dried. The clinks of dishes. The water running. Her mom's hands were soapy. Samira's hands were dry. The world felt strangely held.

"Samira."

"Yes, Maman."

"I am proud of you. You know this?"

"Maman -"

"I am. I am very proud. It is not easy, what you are doing this year. Many things all at once. And you are meeting them. You are meeting them. Your baba and I see it."

"Baba sees it?"

"Every day."

Samira put down the towel. She hugged her mom. Her mom's shoulder was exactly the right height for her forehead. It had been for about a year, and Samira knew that one of these days she was going to pass her mom in height and it would be weird, and she tried to remember what this was like - forehead on mom's shoulder, hands around her mom's waist, her mom smelling like cardamom and cooking oil and, faintly, the lotion she'd used for as long as Samira could remember.

"We're going to be okay, right, Maman?"

"Yes, joonam."

"How do you know?"

"Because I know us."

"That's not a reason."

"It's the only reason I have. And it's enough."

They moved on a Saturday in late January.

It snowed that day - not a lot, just enough to make the air feel soft, just enough that the little flakes caught in the hair of the movers and stayed. The movers were not real movers, Samira wanted to say. The movers were her baba, and her uncle Kambiz, who was Ameh Layla's husband, and Marcus's mom in her big old SUV, and Aaliyah in the huffing blue Corolla, and Eden's dad, who had driven over without being asked because Eden had told him and Eden's dad was the kind of person who, when he heard a thing, just showed up.

They moved the Javidis out of their house in six hours. It went faster than Samira had expected. When everything was packed, the house looked different - smaller, in a way, and also bigger, because with the furniture gone you could see all the places where the paint wasn't quite the same color as the walls, like little ghost-shapes of a life.

Samira walked through her old room last. She stood in it. Empty room, empty closet, the stars on the ceiling.

"Kian," she called.

"What."

"Come here a second."

Kian came in. He was holding a sandwich. He was always holding a sandwich these days. It was his coping thing.

"The stars," Samira said, pointing up. "Can we get those down?"

"Why?"

"I want to put them on the ceiling at Ameh Layla's. In our new room."

Kian looked up. He looked up for a long time.

"Okay," he said softly.

They spent twenty minutes peeling glow-in-the-dark stars off the ceiling. Some of them came off clean. Some of them took little patches of paint with them. Samira put each one in an envelope.

When they drove away, her baba was quiet. Her mom was quiet. Kian was quiet. Samira was quiet. Then her baba, at a red light, said, "Okay. Enough sad. New chapter."

"New chapter, Baba."

"Kian. Tell me a joke."

"Baba, I don't - "

"A joke. Now. Come on."

"Um. Why was the math book sad."

"Why."

"Because it had too many problems."

Her baba laughed. It was a real laugh. Rusty but real. Her mom laughed too. Samira laughed a little.

"Good joke, Kian-jan."

"Thanks, Baba."

"Tell another."

Kian told another. It was worse. Her baba laughed harder.

Ameh Layla's apartment was on the second floor of a building that overlooked a small park. Ameh Layla was waiting at the door with Mr. Whiskers in her arms, and she kissed Samira on both cheeks and said, "Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is your home now. Come, come."

It was a small apartment. Two bedrooms. Samira and Kian were going to share a room. Her parents would have the other room. Ameh Layla and Uncle Kambiz slept on a pull-out couch in the living room, which they insisted on because they said it was just for a few months and because they had been trying to convince themselves to use the living room couch more anyway.

The room Samira and Kian were going to share had one bed, which was Kian's. Samira had a cot. Her stuff was in three plastic bins against the wall. Half of her stuff was at her Ameh's basement. She had been given permission to bring only what she really needed.

That first night, lying on the cot with Kian already snoring in the bed, Samira stared up at the ceiling. It was a ceiling with no stars.

She got up very quietly. She opened the envelope. She put the stars back on, one by one, in the same pattern they had been on her old ceiling - Orion, she had tried to make, though it was a child's Orion, with his belt slightly wrong. She stuck the last star and climbed back in the cot.

After a while, Kian spoke.

"I thought you were asleep," he whispered.

"I thought you were asleep."

"I was watching you put the stars up."

"Sorry."

"It's nice."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

They lay there. A siren went by outside. Mr. Whiskers meowed in the living room. Her baba's voice was low and her mom's was lower, talking in the other bedroom.

"Samira?"

"Yeah."

"I don't like it here."

"I know."

"Is that okay?"

"That's okay. I don't love it either. But it's only for a little while."

"How long is a little while."

"I don't know."

"Samira?"

"Yeah."

"I'm glad we share a room."

"Yeah. Me too."

The weeks went by. Nothing moved fast and everything moved.

Samira's baba had interviews. He had one, then none, then three in a week, then none again. He came home in his good shirt. He took off his tie and draped it over the back of a chair. He read the paper with his reading glasses on the end of his nose. He called people on the phone in his steady voice and hung up and rubbed his eyes.

He did not cry again. Not in front of them. Samira thought he might cry in the bathroom sometimes, because the water would run for a long time after his shower was done. She didn't ask. There were some things you left alone.

And then one Thursday, he came home and his face was different. He didn't smile. He just looked tired in a new way.

"I got something," he said.

"A job?" her mom said.

"Part-time. It's not what I wanted. But it's something."

It was at a small logistics company. Twenty hours a week. Less money than his old job, even if he'd been full-time. The commute was longer. But it was work.

"I'll take it," he said. "While I keep looking."

"Baba - "

"While I keep looking. But I'll take it."

Her mom kissed his forehead. Her baba closed his eyes.

Six weeks later, another call. An old colleague. A smaller company, more like a startup. Full-time, lower pay than he'd been making, but real work and a real team and people who valued him. He said yes. He started the next Monday.

He still looked tired. But the tired had a different texture to it. It was tiredness from doing, not from waiting.

Felix's family had news too.

Marcus's mom had made the calls. She had pulled, Marcus said - that was the word she used, pulled - and by March, Felix's mom was in a transitional housing program, in a small one-bedroom with a kitchenette on a tree-lined street in the east side. Felix had his own corner, with a curtain his mom had hung to give him privacy. His little sister had a fold-out bed. They had a window that got morning sun.

Felix's mom was in the certificate program. Twice a week, evenings. Medical billing, Felix said. His mom said when she was done, she could get a job that actually paid enough to live on.

The community meal had happened in February. All the families had come - Eden's abuela had, as promised, made sixty servings, along with Eden's mom and Marcus's mom and Samira's mom and, incredibly, Jin-woo's mom, who had shown up with a tray of savory Korean pancakes that had become the surprise hit of the night. Diya's family had sent rice pudding. Aliyah's family had sent injera and stew. Felix's little sister, whose name was Valeria and who was six, had greeted Samira with a small shy hand-wave and had spent the entire dinner eating enchiladas and staring at Eden, who she declared the prettiest person she had ever seen.

"She has good taste," Eden said.

They did it again in March. A different shelter, this time. Aaliyah had known two other places. The group was getting a reputation.

Samira did not always go to every service thing. She couldn't. Her life was busier now - her mom had picked up extra shifts at her part-time, and Samira was watching Kian some afternoons, and she had schoolwork, and she had started tutoring a younger girl in math because the girl's mom had offered ten dollars a session and Samira had a habit, now, of putting five of those ten dollars into an envelope labeled "family."

Her mom had found the envelope and cried. Then her mom had told her she didn't have to do that. Then her mom had hugged her for a long time. Then her mom had put the envelope back and said, "Keep it for yourself. But - thank you. Thank you for the heart that made you do it."

Junior youth kept going. They met at Felix's new apartment once - Felix's mom insisted, even though it was small. She made them limeade. She called them mi amores and made them sit in a close circle, and she hugged each one before they left, looking into their faces like she was memorizing them.

Samira watched her, and saw something that looked like Felix's face but older, with more weather on it. A face that had been through things. A face that was hopeful again.

They did a Feast for the elderly that month, too. There was a woman across the street from Ameh Layla's apartment - Mrs. Kaminski, ninety-two, lived alone, widowed for twenty years - and Samira had noticed her one evening trying to carry a bag of groceries up her front steps. Samira had run over, taken the bag, and had ended up staying for an hour, because Mrs. Kaminski had offered her tea and then told her, in that slow voice of very old people who know they have your attention, about Warsaw in 1938.

Samira had told the group. The group had decided to do a dinner. They invited Mrs. Kaminski. They invited four other elderly people Aaliyah knew. They set up a long table in the basement of a Baha'i friend's house, and they cooked, and they served, and they sat and ate with their guests, and they listened.

Mrs. Kaminski held Samira's hand for the last ten minutes of the night and told her that she was beautiful, which had made Samira feel beautiful, which had made her understand that beautiful wasn't a thing in a mirror, it was a thing somebody saw in you when they had enough attention to really see.

They tutored younger kids. Samira and Diya worked with a group of fourth-graders at the library on Saturdays. Fractions. Reading. Jin-woo taught a kid who was struggling with long division, patiently, the way Jin-woo taught anyone anything. Marcus wrote a poem with one of the kids and the kid's mom framed the poem and Marcus tried to pretend he didn't care, and failed. Aliyah helped a girl write a book report on a book Aliyah had loved when she was ten.

Samira got to know her Ameh and her uncle. Uncle Kambiz turned out to be a great chess player and a terrible singer, and he sang loud Persian pop songs in the shower every morning, so loud that Samira could learn the choruses. Ameh Layla was a pastry chef, privately, for her own family - she didn't work professionally, but she made baklava that could change your life. Samira learned to make it. Her fingers got good at the thin phyllo dough. Her baba ate three squares one night and cried, a little, again - not a sad cry this time, just a cry.

Samira and her parents went for walks at night. This was new. This had started a few weeks after the move, when her mom said, "Come. Walk with me. I need air," and Samira had gone, and then her baba had joined, and then it was a habit. They walked around the block. They walked around the park. They walked for an hour sometimes, in silence sometimes, in talking sometimes.

"I was angry at God," Samira said, one of those nights. She had not planned to say it. It came out.

Her baba walked in silence for a beat.

"Yes," he said. "I was too."

"Are you still?"

"Sometimes. Then I am angry at myself. Then I am not angry. Then I am angry again. It moves."

"Is it okay to be angry at God?"

"I think God can take it."

Her mom laughed. Her baba smiled.

"Really?" Samira said.

"Really. If God is as big as we say God is, God can take a few hard feelings from a man who lost his job. And from his very smart daughter."

"Baba."

"Yes."

"I think I'm going to be okay."

"I know, joonam. I know you are going to be okay. I have known it for many years."

"Are you going to be okay?"

"Yes, joonam."

"How do you know?"

"Because of my family."

They kept walking.

School got harder. It was spring, which meant projects and state tests and the annoying little buzz of kids getting squirrelly. Samira started staying up late to finish homework. She got a 92 on a math test. She got a 78 on a social studies test. She got a 100 on a writing assignment where she had written about a girl who was moving houses and didn't know if she would like the new house, and her teacher had written in the margin, You have a gift, Samira. Keep going.

Samira had kept the paper. She had tucked it in her notebook, the one she kept for everything - ideas, prayers, lines she wanted to remember, a sketch Felix had given her of a map of their neighborhood with all of their houses marked in different colors.

Her hair got longer. Her cheekbones got a little more cheekbone-y. Someone at school told her she looked like she was thirteen, even though she wasn't, quite, and Samira had smiled for the rest of the day.

March became April. April became May.

The crocuses came up in the little garden outside Ameh Layla's apartment. Then the tulips. Then, one morning, Samira walked to school and the air smelled different - that particular spring smell of wet earth and cut grass and something alive that had been waiting - and she knew it, she could feel it in her chest, winter was over.

The last junior youth meeting of the school year was at the panaderia.

Aaliyah had asked them to come prepared with something to share - something they had learned this year. It didn't have to be long. It didn't have to be polished. It just had to be true.

They sat in a circle in the back room. It was a warm afternoon. The door to the alley was propped open with a brick, and you could hear the city going by - a bus, a kid on a scooter, someone laughing far away. Eden's abuela had made pan dulce, a whole tray of it, and a pitcher of agua de jamaica, which was dark red and cold and tasted like flowers and summer.

Aaliyah sat in the circle with them. No workbook today. Just the circle.

"Okay," she said. "This is our last meeting before the summer break. We will meet again. This group is not ending. But some of you are going to eighth grade in the fall, and some of you are still going to be in middle school, and Samira, my friend, you are going to become a junior youth leader next year because you asked for it and because I said yes. So things will shift a little. But this circle continues."

"Samira, you didn't tell me that," Diya said. "Since when."

"Since last week. Aaliyah asked me."

"I get to boss you around now?"

"No."

"But in spirit."

"In spirit, sure."

Aaliyah smiled. "All right. I'm gonna go around the circle and invite each of you to share. There's no pressure to be fancy. It's just what you learned. If you want to pass, pass. If you want to speak last, I'll double back. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Diya, let's start with you."

Diya took a breath. She'd been fidgeting with the hem of her hoodie. She stopped fidgeting.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Here's mine. I learned - I learned that my best friend can survive hard things."

Samira's throat did its thing.

"I watched her this year," Diya said. "I watched Samira move, and her baba lose his job, and her whole world shift under her, and I watched her be different and also still be her. And - and I had always thought that when hard things happened to somebody you loved, you'd know how to help. But I didn't know how to help. Not in the way I thought. I just - I just stayed close. And I learned that was sometimes all you could do. And that was enough. Staying close is enough."

"Dee."

"Don't cry, or I'll cry."

"I'm crying."

"Now I'm crying."

They both cried, a little. Eden passed them napkins. They laughed.

"Marcus," Aaliyah said. "You're next."

"I wrote a poem."

"Of course you did."

"It's short. Don't make fun of me."

"We won't make fun of you. Much."

Marcus cleared his throat. He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket. He read.

"The year I turned twelve, the year my friend told us a hard thing, the year I learned that strong can also be soft - I found out the words I thought were just words were actually instructions. (I cried.) I didn't know. I kept going. I'll keep going."

The room was quiet.

"Marcus," Jin-woo said. "That was really good."

"Thanks, man."

"Really good."

"It's just a draft."

"It's really good."

Marcus rubbed his nose, which was his way of saying he was pleased and embarrassed at the same time.

"Eden," Aaliyah said.

Eden sat up. "Mine is shorter."

"Go."

"I learned that feeding people is a prayer."

She paused.

"That's it. That's what I learned. My abuela has known this forever. I'm just catching up. When we cooked for the shelter, I thought we were doing something new. But we were doing the thing she does every day. Feeding people is a prayer. The hands doing it is the praying. The people eating it is the amen."

"Eden."

"I know. I know. Don't make it a thing."

"That is a whole religion," Marcus said.

"My abuela says it is."

"I believe her."

"Jin-woo."

Jin-woo cleared his throat. Jin-woo had brought a piece of paper too, but it had numbers on it. He unfolded it.

"I thought about this for a long time," he said. "I almost did a whole math proof. Then I decided not to, because it would be annoying."

"Thank you for deciding not to," Diya said.

"But I will say one thing. The thing I learned. I learned math can be an act of love."

He looked up.

"When I helped plan the meal - when I did the numbers for how many trays and how much rice - I was doing math. And it was for people. It was for feeding Felix's neighbors and for not wasting food and for making sure there was enough. And it felt - different. Than when I do math for school. It felt like love. Math can be love. I know that sounds weird. It's not weird to me."

"It's not weird to us," Samira said.

"It's really not," Felix said.

"Thanks," Jin-woo said, and folded his paper, and sat back.

"Aliyah."

Aliyah, who had been quiet the whole time - the other Aaliyah, with the A-L-I-Y-A-H, the Ethiopian-American eleven-year-old Aliyah, confusingly similarly named to the animator - took a breath.

"I learned I can speak up," she said.

She didn't go on right away.

"I've always been quiet," she said. "Not quiet like Jin-woo. Quiet like scared. I didn't want to say the wrong thing. I was always waiting for somebody else to say it first. This year, I said things. In consultation. I said things in school. I said things to my mom. Some of the things were wrong. Some of the things were right. But I said them. And the world didn't fall down. So I'm going to keep doing that. I'm going to keep saying things."

"You said that beautifully just now," Aaliyah said.

"Thanks."

"Felix."

Felix was sitting very still. He had been looking down at his lap. Now he looked up.

"I learned I'm still me," he said, "even when things are hard. And I have friends who know who I am."

That was all he said. He didn't try to say more. And somehow, that was enough.

Samira felt tears on her cheeks. She wiped them off.

"Samira," Aaliyah said softly. "You're last."

Samira took a breath.

She had thought about what she would say for a week. She had written it and un-written it. She had tried to make it pretty. She had tried to make it short. She had landed, finally, on just the thing that was true.

"Okay," she said. "Here's mine."

"Mm-hm."

"I started the year thinking I was going to become a more religious kid. My mom and baba had signed me up for junior youth, and I thought - I don't know what I thought. I thought I'd come out the other end and feel all these feelings about God and be able to recite a lot of prayers. I thought there'd be a moment. Some kind of moment."

She looked around the circle.

"I didn't get that. I didn't become a more religious kid. Not in the way I thought I would. I got a lot more questions than answers."

She took a breath.

"But I became a kid who knows my friends are part of my faith. Who knows the questions matter as much as the answers. Who knows that when things break - and things break, they really do break - they can be repaired. And the repair is - the repair is beautiful in a new way. It's not the same as the before. But it's not worse. It's different."

She stopped. She had more. She said it anyway.

"I learned the word for God I can say. I can't always say 'God.' It feels too big, or too sharp, or like I have to mean a lot with it. But I can say 'you.' Sometimes when I'm scared or alone or - or really happy - I can say 'you' in my head and I mean - " she waved her hand, which was a pretty Persian-family gesture, a mix of grandmother and exhausted mother, "- you. Everything. Whatever is under everything. Whoever is listening. That's my prayer, now. Just 'you.' And it works for me."

"Samira," Aaliyah whispered.

"And I learned - I learned I don't grow alone. You told me that, Aaliyah, in Jin-woo's hallway, back when I couldn't figure out how to be. And I didn't believe it then. I believed it was a nice thing to say. But I know it now. I know it because of all of you. I have grown this year. I know I have. And I didn't grow alone. Not one inch. I grew because of all of you. And Maman and Baba. And Kian. And Ameh Layla. And Felix's mom. And Mrs. Kaminski. I grew because the whole world held me when I needed it to."

She stopped. She looked down. She put her hands flat on the floor.

"That's what I learned."

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

Then Aaliyah reached across the circle and put her hand over Samira's.

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you, Samira."

"Thank you, Aaliyah."

Aaliyah looked around the circle. "Group," she said. Her voice was a little rough. "Group, you did it. You did the year. I am so proud of you I could burst."

"Please don't burst," Marcus said. "We like you."

"I'll try not to burst."

They laughed. Then they were quiet again.

"One more thing," Aaliyah said.

"Yeah?"

"This is the part where I say something to close. And I'm going to keep it short. This group - you six - you are going to remember this year. You'll remember it when you're forty. You'll remember it when you're eighty. You won't remember every meeting. You won't remember every page of the workbook. But you'll remember each other. And you'll remember what it felt like to be part of something that was bigger than you but also entirely made of you. That's a rare thing. Hold on to it."

"We will," Felix said.

"We will."

They cleaned up. They stacked chairs. Eden's abuela came in with a second tray of pan dulce and they made noises about being full and then ate it anyway.

The sun was starting to set when they spilled out of the panaderia onto the sidewalk. The light was the particular light of early summer, the golden-gentle kind, the kind that made Ridgewood look like somebody had Photoshopped it. The street was full of regular people doing regular things - a dad pushing a stroller, two old men playing dominoes on a folding table outside the barbershop, a kid chasing a dog that was chasing a pigeon.

"Hey," Eden said. "Abuela said we can have milk and cookies. Like - actual milk and cookies. We don't have to go home yet."

"Now?" Diya said.

"In the panaderia kitchen. She'll set it up. She already said."

"Guys, my mom is going to wonder where I am."

"Tell her. We'll wait."

"Fine."

They stood on the sidewalk while Diya called her mom. Then Marcus called his mom. Then Aliyah called hers. Then Jin-woo, because Jin-woo's mom required precise information about exact locations. Then Felix called his mom from the payphone inside - Felix didn't have a cell yet - and then finally Samira called her mom, who said, "Of course, joonam, of course, and walk home when you're done, yes?"

"Yes, Maman."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

Inside, Eden's abuela had set up the big wooden table at the back with seven glasses of cold milk and a plate of cookies that was too big by half. The cookies were warm. Like she had baked them knowing the junior youth were coming. Maybe she had.

They sat. They ate cookies. They drank milk. Nobody took pictures. Nobody said anything very deep. Marcus made a joke about Jin-woo's milk mustache. Jin-woo said, very seriously, that milk mustaches were a natural consequence of drinking milk and he refused to apologize for his. Diya tried to braid Felix's hair. Felix let her try. His hair was still too short. Aliyah laughed so hard she snorted milk, which made Eden snort milk, which made Marcus snort milk on purpose for comedy.

Samira sat at the end of the table and watched them.

They were so beautiful. Not in a photo way. In a real way. Each of them was so particular and so themselves and so sitting in this bakery at this moment of this evening at this age that they would never be again. Marcus was twelve. Diya was eleven. Felix was twelve. Jin-woo was twelve. Eden was eleven and a half and maintained that the half mattered. Aliyah was eleven. Samira was almost thirteen.

Almost thirteen.

Her birthday was in a week.

It wasn't that she wasn't scared of it. Things still scared her. Her baba was still building back. Felix's family was still rebuilding. Her own body was still doing whatever it was doing. School next year would be harder. Her friendships would shift. Her mom and baba would keep being who they were but in new shapes. Everything would be different.

But she could hold it. She had just spent a whole year figuring out that she could hold things.

"Hey," Felix said, leaning over.

"Hey."

"You have the face again."

"What face?"

"The thinking face."

"Oh."

"You going to tell us?"

She looked up. Everyone was looking at her, with milk and cookies in their hands and crumbs on their mouths.

"I was just thinking," she said, "I turn thirteen next week."

"WAIT," Diya said. "WHAT."

"Diya, you've known this. My birthday is in May."

"I forgot it was THIS May."

"It is this May."

"Are we doing a party?"

"I don't know. My family can't really afford - "

"We're doing a party. I'm doing it. I'll do it at my house. Eden, cake?"

"Cake. Obviously."

"Okay. Good. Next Saturday. Everybody free?"

Everybody was free. The calendar was easy when you were twelve.

Samira laughed. "Thank you."

"Thank us when you eat the cake."

They finished the cookies. They hugged the abuela. They spilled out again, onto Ridgewood, the long light of the evening sliding over the storefronts and the cars and the painted faces of houses.

They walked together for three blocks before they started to split off. Aliyah's mom was picking her up. Jin-woo lived near the panaderia. Marcus and Diya were going the other way. Eden was staying at the panaderia.

Felix was walking in Samira's direction.

They walked together for a while. Not talking much. Just walking.

"Hey," he said. "Samira."

"Yeah."

"Thanks. For the year."

"Yeah. You too."

"I don't mean - I don't mean in like a fake speech way. I mean for real. I don't know what - I don't know what my year would have looked like without this group. And without you."

"Felix."

"I just wanted to say. That's all."

"Thank you."

They walked. At the next corner he stopped. His building was the other way.

"See you next week?"

"See you next week."

"Happy birthday for next Friday."

"Thanks."

He walked off. Samira watched him go for a second. Then she turned and walked home.

Ameh Layla's apartment was lit up when she came in. Her mom was on the couch with a book. Her baba was at the table doing something on the laptop. Kian was on the floor with Mr. Whiskers, who was allowing Kian to dress him in a scarf, barely.

"How was it?" her mom said.

"Good."

"Tell me."

Samira sat on the couch. She leaned against her mom. She told her some of it. Not all of it. She was starting to understand that some things were for saying out loud and some things were for keeping in. Both were ways of loving them.

Later, in bed, under the stars on the ceiling, she lay awake for a while.

Thirteen starts next week, she thought.

She had thought, a year ago, that thirteen would feel like a line. Like a door. Like a threshold you stepped across and were a different person on the other side.

Now, lying in the dark of a room that wasn't exactly hers in a building that wasn't exactly home, she knew thirteen wouldn't feel like that. Thirteen would feel like twelve, mostly. With different weather. She was going to wake up on her birthday and she was going to still be Samira. She was still going to have questions. She was still going to be figuring it out.

And that was okay. That was, maybe, the whole point.

Because she had a group now. A group that had been through something with her. A mother and a father and a brother and an aunt and an uncle. A girl named Diya who would stay close. A boy named Felix who was, improbably, one of her favorite people in the world. A woman named Aaliyah who drove a Corolla and didn't have all the answers and loved her anyway.

She had her questions. She had her people. She had her breath, in and out, her chest rising and falling, her hands on the blanket.

I'm ready, she thought. And then, because it was nicer than she expected, she thought it again, to herself, to whoever was listening.

I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready.

She closed her eyes.

Outside, Ridgewood went on. The streetlights buzzed. A dog barked. Somewhere, a screen door opened and shut. Somewhere, somebody laughed.

And Samira Javidi, almost thirteen, went to sleep in the good night of her life.

THE END

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

The junior youth spiritual empowerment program is a real thing in the Baha'i community - a global initiative that works with young people between the ages of roughly eleven and fifteen, recognizing this stage of life as a time of exceptional moral and spiritual awakening. In real groups around the world, an older youth or young adult "animator" walks alongside a small circle of junior youth as they read together, talk together, and take on service projects in their neighborhoods. The themes they work with - oneness, justice, service, consultation, the idea of tests as opportunities for growth - are drawn from the Baha'i Writings, but they belong, in a deep sense, to the whole human family. Any reader, of any faith or no faith, can explore them.

Middle school is a time of moral becoming. It is when children start to see, really see, the world beyond their own households. They begin to feel the weight of injustice, the pull of friendship, the terror and delight of their own questions. They start to ask things like why and what about that and is this fair. Those questions are holy. This book was written in the hope that kids like Samira - full of questions, full of doubt, full of love - will find themselves in these pages and know that the asking itself is a form of faith.

If anything in Samira's story spoke to you, I hope you will find or gather a group of your own. The repair is beautiful in a new way.

- Crimson Ark Publishing