Chapter 1

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The first thing Rana noticed about the school was that the floors were too clean.

In Tehran, the floors at her old school had been a dull, practical gray, worn soft at the center of every hallway by twenty years of girls walking in neat lines. The floors here at Northgate International were a pale wood, honey-colored, polished to a shine that looked, to her, almost indecent. She could see her own reflection in them if she looked down — a thin girl with dark hair tucked behind her ears, wearing a navy blue cardigan that her mother had chosen because it was the most American-looking thing in their suitcase, and a pair of jeans that were half an inch too long and bunched over the tops of her sneakers.

The sneakers were new. Her mother had bought them at a store called Target two days ago, pulling them off the shelf with the reverence of someone handling glass. They had been on sale. Her mother had said the word sale out loud, in English, as if practicing it. Sale. Sale. Sale.

Rana walked down the hallway and tried not to meet anyone's eyes.

There was a woman from the school office walking ahead of her. Her name was Ms. Delacroix — or something like that, Rana had not quite caught it — and she wore a pencil skirt and low heels that clicked on the clean floor. She was talking to Rana over her shoulder, cheerfully, brightly, the way adults talked to children who they suspected did not understand them.

"Now, your first-period class is going to be English, and I think you'll just love Mr. Hassan. He's a wonderful teacher, very funny, all the kids adore him. And then you've got math with Ms. Park, and then it's lunch, and after lunch you've got —"

Rana had stopped listening somewhere around Mr. Hassan. She was watching the students instead. They moved past her in clusters, loud, casual, laughing. A boy with a laptop bag slung over one shoulder was arguing with a girl about something called a "midterm." Two girls in matching headbands were laughing so hard that one of them was crying. A boy in a pressed white shirt was speaking what sounded like French into his phone and rolling his eyes.

Everything here was loud. Everything here was easy.

Rana's English was not bad. She had been studying it for six years, since she was eight, in a private class her mother had insisted on paying for even when the money got tight. Her teacher, an old woman named Mrs. Afshar, had made her memorize entire poems — Wordsworth, Frost, Dickinson. Rana could recite "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" from memory and did, sometimes, when she could not sleep. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. She said the words to herself in the dark of the bedroom she now shared with her little brother, and the woods in her head were not American woods, had never been American woods, had always been the woods of some imagined elsewhere that belonged only to her.

Her English on paper was excellent. Her English out loud was a problem.

Because when she opened her mouth, the words came out in the wrong order, or came out too slowly, or came out with an accent that turned every d into something softer, every th into something impossible. She heard the accent in her own voice and hated it. She had decided, on the plane from Istanbul, that she would speak as little as possible until she sounded like everyone else. It would be easier that way. It would be safer.

Ms. Delacroix was stopping in front of a door. A133. There was a paper sign on the door that said MR. HASSAN — ENGLISH 9 in a curly font.

"Okay, sweetheart," Ms. Delacroix said, putting one hand on Rana's shoulder. Rana went rigid under the touch. "Mr. Hassan knows you're coming. He's going to introduce you, but you don't have to talk if you don't want to, okay? We want you to feel comfortable. Okay?"

Rana nodded. She did not trust her voice.

Ms. Delacroix knocked twice and opened the door without waiting for an answer. The room inside went quiet all at once, a quick, curious kind of quiet, and Rana felt twenty pairs of eyes land on her like small stones.

Mr. Hassan was a tall man with a black beard and a green cardigan. He was standing in front of a whiteboard that had the words SHOW, DON'T TELL written across the top in red marker. He smiled at Rana. His smile was warm. Rana did not trust it.

"You must be Rana," he said. "Welcome to Northgate."

He had said her name correctly. He had said the a like an ah and not like the a in rain. Rana almost looked at him in surprise. She did not. She kept her face smooth, a skill her mother had taught her without meaning to, a skill she had picked up from six months of living in a country where you could not let anything show.

"Everyone," Mr. Hassan said, turning to the class, "this is Rana Mehdizadeh. She is joining us from Iran. Please make her feel welcome."

A ripple of hellos. A few smiles. One boy lifted his hand and waved, then laughed at himself and put it back down. A blonde girl in the front row whispered something to her neighbor, who giggled. Rana felt her face get hot.

"There's an empty desk over there," Mr. Hassan said, pointing to the right side of the room. "Next to Aditi."

Rana walked to the desk. She walked the way she had learned to walk in the bazaar in Tehran when she did not want to be noticed — head down but not too far down, steps even, arms close to her body. The desk was by the window. Through the window she could see a lawn, and on the lawn there was a tree, and under the tree there was a boy playing a guitar. He was not in class. She did not know if it was allowed or not, here, to not be in class. His eyes were closed. He was moving his lips like he was singing, but she could not hear him through the glass.

She sat down. The girl in the next desk — Aditi, Mr. Hassan had said — glanced at her. She had long black hair in a thick braid over one shoulder, and a small gold stud in her nose that caught the light. She smiled once, briefly, and then turned back to her notebook.

"So," Mr. Hassan said, picking up a book from his desk, "we were talking about point of view."

He kept talking. Rana understood most of the words. Some of the words she did not understand, she could guess from context. Some of the words she knew perfectly but could not have said aloud to save her life. She took out the green notebook her mother had bought her, also at Target, and wrote the date at the top of the page, in the Persian calendar and then, below it, in the Gregorian. She had been doing this since they arrived in America. She did not know why. It felt important to know what day it was in both places.

Mehr 12 / October 4.

Her father was in a prison in Tehran on Mehr 12. He had been there for sixty-two days.

She pressed the tip of her pen into the paper until the ink pooled. Then she lifted it and kept writing.

Mr. Hassan was reading from a book. Rana caught the rhythm of his voice and let the words wash over her and did not try, very hard, to follow. His voice was not unkind. The class was not unkind. The problem was not the class.

The problem was that she was here at all.

The problem was that six months ago she had been sitting on the balcony of their apartment in Yusefabad, eating a pomegranate her father had brought home from the market, and her father had been laughing about something, a neighbor, an old joke, and her mother had been in the kitchen humming, and her little brother Kian had been drawing a picture of a giraffe on the tiles with a piece of chalk. The chalk had been blue. The giraffe had been blue. Kian, who was six then and seven now, had refused to believe her when she told him giraffes were not blue.

The problem was that that balcony was four thousand miles away and her father was in a cell and her mother was cleaning other people's offices at night and her little brother was asking her every morning when they were going home.

The problem was that she did not know how to answer him.

"Rana?" Mr. Hassan said.

She looked up. He was smiling at her, gently.

"I asked if you wouldn't mind reading the next paragraph. But only if you want to. It's okay to say no."

Rana looked down at the book on the desk in front of her. She had not noticed someone had put it there. It was open to a page. The page had a paragraph circled with a highlighter.

She could read it. She knew she could read it. But the room was quiet now, and everyone was looking at her, and her mouth had gone dry.

She shook her head.

"No problem," Mr. Hassan said, easily, without pity. "Thanks anyway. Aditi, would you?"

Aditi began to read. Her voice was clear and quick and confident. Rana closed her eyes, just for a moment, and listened to the English wash over her like water over a stone. The stone did not move. The water kept going.

Outside the window, the boy under the tree kept playing his guitar.

---

At lunch, Rana did not know where to sit.

The cafeteria at Northgate was the largest room she had ever seen in a school. It had two stories. There was a staircase in the middle and a glass ceiling and long tables and round tables and small booths along the walls, and the noise of it — the clatter of trays, the overlapping conversations, the laughter — rose and echoed off the glass until it sounded like a train station. She stood in the doorway with her tray in her hands and felt her heart going very fast.

She had bought a sandwich. Turkey, the woman at the counter had said, pointing, and Rana had nodded without knowing whether turkey meant the meat or the country. It turned out to mean the meat. The sandwich had a slice of yellow cheese and a leaf of lettuce and a pink sauce she did not recognize. She had also bought an apple and a bottle of water, because those were the only things she was sure of.

The blonde girl from Mr. Hassan's class walked past her and did not see her. The boy who had waved was sitting at a table with four other boys, all of them laughing at something on a phone. The French boy from the hallway was at a table near the window, talking to a girl with a lot of silver jewelry.

Rana looked for an empty table and could not find one.

She was about to give up and go eat her sandwich in the hallway — or the bathroom, the bathroom would be fine — when someone touched her elbow.

"You can sit with me," Aditi said. "If you want."

Rana turned. Aditi had a tray in one hand. On the tray was a plastic container of rice and some kind of yellow stew.

"I didn't know you were behind me," Rana said. Her voice came out small. It did not sound accented to her, in that moment, but she knew that was only because her own voice always sounded correct in her own ears.

"I was," Aditi said. "Come on. I have a table."

"This is Rana," Aditi said, setting down her tray. "She's new. From Iran."

"Hey," said the boy with the sketchbook, barely looking up.

"Welcome to Northgate," said the girl with the curly hair. "I'm Maya. Is this your first day?"

Rana nodded.

"It's the worst day," Maya said, matter-of-fact. "First days are always the worst. By next week you'll be fine."

"That's optimistic," Aditi said. "It took me a month to be fine."

"You're never fine," the boy with the sketchbook said.

"Shut up, Miles," Aditi said, and threw a balled-up napkin at him. He dodged it without looking up.

Rana sat down. She unwrapped her sandwich. The pink sauce was sweet when she tasted it, sweeter than anything she had ever put on a sandwich before. She made herself chew. She made herself swallow.

Miles, the boy with the sketchbook, did not speak again for the rest of lunch. Every so often Rana glanced at him and saw that he was drawing something — a hand, she thought, or a leaf, she couldn't tell. His pencil moved in quick, light strokes. He had paint under his fingernails.

Maya talked about a movie Rana had not seen. Aditi had seen it and did not like it. They argued about it. Rana listened and tried to remember the name of the movie so she could look it up later, and then forgot the name almost as soon as she had learned it.

When the bell rang, Aditi stood up and stretched.

"What's your next class?" she asked.

Rana pulled out the schedule the office had given her. "Math."

"Ms. Park?"

Rana nodded.

"I've got Park too. Come on. I'll take you."

Rana followed Aditi out of the cafeteria, through the clean halls, past the boys and the girls and the posters on the walls advertising clubs she had never heard of — Model UN, Robotics, Quiz Bowl, Spanish Honors Society, Black Student Union, South Asian Student Association, Film Club, Chess Club, Debate.

There was a poster for something called the Muslim Student Association. Rana slowed down to look at it.

"Oh," Aditi said, noticing. "Yeah. They're nice. Are you Muslim?"

Rana opened her mouth and closed it.

"No," she said, finally. "I'm — no."

Aditi waited. When Rana did not say anything else, she shrugged.

"Cool," she said. "Park's room is this way."

Rana was grateful again.

---

Her mother was sitting on the couch when Rana got home. It was four in the afternoon, and her mother was supposed to be sleeping — she had worked the night shift at the office building on Thirty-Second Street, and she would have to work again at ten tonight. But she was awake, sitting on the couch with a paperback textbook in her lap, the one about English grammar, and her reading glasses pushed down to the end of her nose.

"Maman," Rana said, dropping her backpack. "You should be sleeping."

Her mother looked up and smiled. The smile was tired. Her mother's smile had been tired for six months now. "I couldn't sleep. How was it?"

"It was fine."

"Just fine?"

"It was a school," Rana said. "It was fine."

Her mother closed the textbook. She patted the couch next to her. Rana sat down. Her mother smelled like the detergent they used at the office — a sharp, chemical smell that had begun to seem, in the last few weeks, to be her mother's natural smell. Rana leaned her head against her mother's shoulder. Her mother put her arm around her.

"Did you make any friends?"

"I — there was a girl. Aditi. She sat with me at lunch."

"Aditi. That's a pretty name."

"She's Indian."

"Indian? Like — from India, or —"

"I don't know," Rana said. "American, I think. But her family is from India."

Her mother nodded. "The world is in that school."

"Yes."

"And you — you spoke English today?"

"Some."

"Good. Good, jan-am. You have to speak it. You can't just read it."

"I know, Maman."

"I know you know."

They sat in silence for a while. Outside, a car alarm went off somewhere down the block, and then another car alarm answered it, and then both alarms stopped and the street was quiet again.

"Kian is where?" Rana asked.

"At the Kadirs'. They invited him to play. They said they'd feed him. I was going to go get him at seven."

"I'll go."

"You don't have to."

"I want to. I want to walk."

Her mother looked at her — a long look, the look she had started giving Rana in the last few months, a look that had too much in it for Rana to want to meet. Rana looked at the carpet.

"Okay," her mother said. "At seven. Not later. It gets dark here early."

"I know."

"And take your phone."

"I always take my phone."

"Take your phone," her mother said again, because her mother had lived in a country where taking your phone sometimes wasn't enough.

---

At seven, Rana walked the six blocks to the Kadirs' apartment. The Kadirs were a Pakistani couple their age who had been in America for eleven years and who had, in the confusing week after Rana's family had first arrived, adopted them almost without asking. Mrs. Kadir cooked too much food and brought it over. Mr. Kadir had helped her mother find the custodial job. Their son Amir was five and he and Kian had become instant, serious best friends, the kind of friendship that is only possible when you are too young to remember that you have not known each other your whole life.

Rana walked with her hands in the pockets of her cardigan and her breath making small white clouds in the cold. The air in this city smelled different from the air in Tehran — more metal, less dust. There was a smell of something cooking from a restaurant on the corner, something with onions and butter. Rana did not know what it was and did not want to.

At the Kadirs', Mrs. Kadir hugged her and tried to feed her. Rana refused, politely. Mrs. Kadir persisted. Rana accepted a small container of kheer to take home. Kian was called from the other room and came out dragging a plastic sword and laughing, and for a second — just one second — he looked so much like he had looked on the balcony in Yusefabad, laughing about something, that Rana had to turn her face away.

"Khahar," Kian said. "Sister. Look, Amir gave me a sword."

"I can see."

"Can I keep it?"

"If Amir said so."

Amir, behind Kian, nodded importantly. Mrs. Kadir laughed and kissed the tops of their heads, both of them, and pressed the container of kheer into Rana's hands.

"You take care, jan," she said in Urdu-inflected Farsi, a strange warm hybrid that Rana had come to love. "You call us if you need anything. Anything."

"Thank you, khaleh."

Rana and Kian walked home together. Kian held her hand, the plastic sword tucked under his other arm. He chattered about Amir and Amir's mother and something on the television, and Rana let him. She did not have to talk. She only had to listen.

When they were half a block from the apartment, Kian said, "Khahar?"

"Hm?"

"Do you think Baba will be home for Nowruz?"

Rana's chest went tight. She kept walking. She kept her face forward.

"I don't know, Kian jan."

"Maman said maybe."

"Maman said maybe. That's right."

"If he is," Kian said thoughtfully, "I want him to see my sword."

"Okay," Rana said, and her voice did not crack, which was a small miracle. "Okay, Kian jan. He'll see it."

They walked the rest of the way home in silence. Above them, through the gaps between the buildings, the sky had gone the soft rose color it went at sunset in this city, and the first star — or the first thing that looked like a star but was probably only a plane — was visible over the rooftops.

Rana had a new school. Rana had a new country. Rana had a new bed and a new language and a new silence to carry with her everywhere, and inside the silence her father's voice, and inside her father's voice a question she did not know how to answer.

---

The next morning Rana woke up before the alarm.

She always woke before the alarm now. She had not owned an alarm clock until they came to America; in Tehran she had woken to the sound of her mother in the kitchen, or the sound of the call to prayer from the mosque down the street, or the sound of Kian, three years old then four then five then six, coming into her room and climbing into her bed and pressing his cold feet against her legs. Now the alarm clock on the nightstand was a small cheap one from Target, white and plastic, with red numbers that glowed in the dark. Rana had set it for six-thirty. She woke up at six.

She lay in the bed with her eyes open and listened to Kian breathing in the other bed. He slept with his mouth open, the way he had always slept, and a small rasp came out of him that sounded like a tiny engine running on one cylinder. It was the only familiar sound in the apartment.

She got up. She made her bed. She made Kian's bed with him still in it — tucking the blanket more carefully around his shoulders, the way her mother used to do for her when she was his age. Then she went into the kitchen.

Her mother was not home yet. Her mother came home at seven on the nights she worked, and on the nights she worked she slept from seven to one, then woke and studied until three, then slept again until six. It was not a life. It was a schedule. Rana had watched her mother, who had once been an architect, reduce herself to a schedule, and she could not look at it directly without wanting to break something.

Rana made herself toast. There was jam in the refrigerator, a small jar of strawberry jam that Mrs. Kadir had given them. She ate two slices of toast standing up at the counter. She drank a glass of water. She put a cup of tea in front of Kian's place for when he got up. She rinsed her plate.

At six forty-five, she heard her mother's key in the door.

Her mother came in quietly, shoes in her hand. She was in her work clothes — a long gray tunic and loose black pants — and her hair was pulled back tight, and her face was gray.

"Maman," Rana said. "Sit down. I made tea."

"Rana. Why are you up so early?"

"I'm always up early."

Her mother sat at the little kitchen table. Rana brought her the tea. Her mother held the cup in both hands. She did not drink it. She looked at the steam.

"How is your English going?" her mother asked, after a moment.

"It is fine, Maman."

"Are you speaking?"

"I am speaking when I have to."

"Speak when you don't have to," her mother said. "That is the trick. Speak when no one asks you to."

"Okay, Maman."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

Her mother looked at her. Her mother's eyes, in this light, were the same color as the tea. The same tired color.

"I was an architect," her mother said. "I designed a hospital once. Did I ever tell you that?"

"Many times."

"A hospital in Isfahan. It had a courtyard with a fountain. I designed the fountain too. They asked me to do only the building, but I designed the fountain too and they used my design."

"I know."

"They used my design," her mother said. "I could design a fountain. I could design a hospital. I can design a hospital. Your mother can design a hospital."

"I know, Maman."

"But I clean offices. Because in this country I clean offices until my English is good enough that I can take the test and get my license again, and until then I clean offices and my back is killing me and I clean offices."

"Maman —"

"No, listen. Listen. This is why you speak English, Rana. Speak English so that you don't have to clean offices. Speak English so that they know who you are when they look at you. Speak English so that you are not invisible."

Rana stood very still. Her mother's hands around the teacup were tight.

"I will, Maman," she said.

Her mother nodded, once. Then she put the teacup down and covered her face with her hands for just a moment, and when she took her hands away she was not crying. She never cried in front of Rana anymore.

"Go," she said. "Get ready for school. Wake your brother. I will sleep a little."

---

At school, Aditi was waiting in the hallway outside Mr. Hassan's room.

She was not waiting for Rana. Rana told herself this carefully. Aditi was just standing there, her backpack against the wall, her phone in her hand. She was scrolling. She looked up when Rana walked by.

"Hey," she said.

"Hi."

"You sat next to me yesterday. Ready for more?"

"Okay."

"That was supposed to be a joke," Aditi said. "You can laugh."

Rana made a small sound that was something like a laugh.

"Okay, fine," Aditi said, laughing herself. "Come on."

In class, they sat next to each other again. Aditi opened her notebook and Rana opened hers. Mr. Hassan came in with a stack of papers and handed them out.

"Short assignment," he said. "No pressure. I want each of you to write me a paragraph — just a paragraph — answering the question at the top of the sheet. Hand it in by the end of class."

Rana stared at the question for a long time.

She was good at a lot of things. She was good at math, which was the same language in every country, thank God. She was good at painting, although she had not painted since Tehran and had no paints here and did not expect to get them anytime soon. She was good at memorizing Persian poetry, and good at making Kian laugh, and good at fixing her mother's hair into the complicated braid her mother liked when she had to go somewhere important. She was good at being quiet. She was good at waiting. She was very, very good at waiting.

But none of those things were things you could write about in a paragraph of English in a ninth-grade classroom at a private school in America.

She looked at Aditi. Aditi was already writing. Aditi's hand moved fast across the page, pink pen, loopy letters. Aditi's paragraph was halfway done.

She stopped.

She looked at the sentence. She did not know if she believed the sentence. She had been good at languages in a country where everyone spoke her language. Was that the same thing? She was not sure.

She crossed it out.

She stopped again. That one was true. But she did not want to write a paragraph about it, because if she wrote about why she was good at listening she would have to write about her father and her mother and the night two years ago when she had sat on the landing outside her parents' bedroom and listened to them argue in low voices about whether they should leave the country, and the argument had gone on for three hours, and her father had said no and her mother had said yes and her father had said no again, and in the end her mother had begun to cry, and her father had apologized, and Rana had gone back to her room and lain in the dark and stared at the ceiling and not slept.

She crossed out the second sentence.

The bell was going to ring in thirty minutes. Rana's paper still said, in cross-outs, two false sentences.

Aditi glanced over.

"You okay?" she whispered.

Rana nodded.

"You can write anything," Aditi whispered. "It doesn't matter. He just wants to see you write."

Rana looked at her.

"Anything?"

"Literally anything. He graded mine last week on whether I used a semicolon correctly. Write about, like, your favorite food. Or. I don't know. Your favorite kind of shoe."

I am good at finding my way around new places. I learned it because I have moved many times. Every time I move I walk around the new place for a few days and I make a map of it in my head, where the shops are and where the buses stop and where it is safe to walk at night. My mother says I have a map in my head. She says I could find my way anywhere.

She read it over. The grammar was not perfect. She fixed two small things. She thought about writing more and decided that what she had was enough. She put down her pen.

Aditi was watching her.

"Done?" Aditi whispered.

"Done."

"Fast. Nice."

"My hands were tired," Rana said.

Aditi grinned. It was the first full grin Rana had seen on her face. It was a very good grin. It transformed her.

"You're funny," Aditi said.

"I am not."

"You are. You just don't know it yet."

"No," Rana said, "I know I am not."

"Whatever," Aditi said, still grinning, and turned back to her paper, and Rana sat there in the soft quiet of a classroom in a country that was not hers, with one person in it who had looked at her and grinned.

She took a breath. She let it out. She watched the clock on the wall. The second hand moved. Somewhere, thousands of miles away, her father was sitting in a cell and didn't know she was in a classroom in America with a girl who had grinned at her and told her she was funny.

Then she scribbled it out before anyone could see.

---

After class, Aditi said, "Do you want to have lunch with me again?"

"Okay," Rana said.

"It's not a pity thing," Aditi said. "In case you were wondering. I don't do pity."

"I wasn't wondering."

"Okay," Aditi said. "Good."

"Your bracelet," Rana said, surprising herself. "Is beautiful."

"Oh. Thanks. My dad got it for me when I was ten." Aditi touched the Star of David. "He's Jewish. My mom's Hindu. I'm — both, I guess. Neither? Both."

"Both," Rana said.

"Yeah. It works, mostly. What are you?"

"Bahá'í," Rana said, before she could think.

Aditi stopped walking.

"What?"

"Bahá'í," Rana said again, more carefully. "It is a religion. It is —"

"I know what it is," Aditi said. She had a funny, serious look on her face. "My grandmother's friend in Delhi is Bahá'í. We went to her son's wedding. They are — they are the ones in Iran who —"

She did not finish the sentence. Rana waited. Aditi's mouth was pressed into a line.

"Yes," Rana said, quietly. "That is who we are."

Aditi did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, "Is that why you came here?"

"My father —" Rana said, and stopped. "My father is — in prison. For it."

Aditi closed her eyes for a second, just a second, and then opened them. There was nothing performative about the gesture. She did not put a hand on her heart or sigh or do any of the things people sometimes did when they heard something sad. She just closed her eyes for a second and opened them and said, "Come on. Let's get lunch."

Rana followed her. She felt, all at once, the way she sometimes felt after sitting in the sun too long — lightheaded, a little shaky, unbalanced in a way that was not entirely bad.

She had told someone. She had told someone who knew what it meant.

---

The apartment was on the third floor of a yellow brick building on Forty-Fifth Street, above a laundromat and below a family that, from the sound of their footsteps, contained at least one person who wore high heels and at least three children who liked to run.

The apartment had a small living room with a brown couch, a brown armchair, and a coffee table that Rana's mother had found on the sidewalk one Saturday and dragged six blocks home. It had a kitchen with a window that looked onto an airshaft. It had two bedrooms. In the first bedroom, Rana and Kian slept; in the second, their mother slept. There was no dining room. They ate at a small table they had pushed up against the kitchen window.

Rana, four days into her time at Northgate, was sitting at that kitchen table doing homework.

Kian was on the living room floor with a coloring book. He had decided, this week, that he was only going to use green crayons. He would not explain why. He was coloring a picture of a fire truck green. The fire truck was not pleased about it.

"Maman," Rana said, "do you need help?"

"No, jan-am. Finish your homework."

"I am almost finished."

"Then finish."

Rana looked back at her math. The math was easy. The math had always been easy. Ms. Park had given them a worksheet of twenty problems that were exactly like problems Rana had been doing in sixth grade in Tehran, and she had finished them in nine minutes, and now she was pretending they were taking her longer because she did not want her mother to feel bad that Rana was so ahead of her new grade that the work was boring.

Her mother did not need to feel bad about anything else.

Rana doodled in the margin of her worksheet. She doodled a small cat, and then a small flower, and then — without thinking, without planning it — a small bird. The bird was simple, just a line for the body and a line for the wing and a tiny dot for the eye. She looked at it and thought of Miles.

Miles had sat at their lunch table again today. He had not said three words. He had drawn a hand in his sketchbook — Aditi's hand, Rana had realized, watching him watch Aditi reach for the salt. He had drawn it quickly, almost carelessly, and when Aditi had asked to see it he had closed the sketchbook and shaken his head. Aditi had threatened to steal it. Miles had smiled, just barely, and pulled the sketchbook closer to his chest.

Rana did not know what Miles's life was like. She only knew that his silences did not feel hostile, which was a thing she was learning to notice.

"Rana," her mother said, "come set the table."

Rana got up. She set three plates. She set three glasses. She got out the yogurt from the refrigerator and the little bowl of pickled cucumbers. She filled a jug of water.

"Kian," she said, "come to dinner."

"One minute. I am finishing the fire truck."

"Finish it after dinner."

"The fire truck is almost done."

"Kian."

"One minute."

Rana sighed. Their mother came out of the kitchen with the platter of rice and the stew. She set them on the table. She wiped her hands on a dish towel. She looked at Kian.

"Kian, come to dinner."

Kian came to dinner.

They sat. Their mother said the short grace she always said before meals — a Bahá'í prayer, very short, the one Rana had known since she was old enough to talk. They ate. The food was good. The food was always good. Rana's mother could cook on a twenty-dollar grocery budget in a way that made you think you were at a wedding.

"School today was good?" their mother asked.

"Yes, Maman."

"And the girl? Aditi?"

"She is good."

"She is nice to you?"

"Yes."

"Her parents — you have met them?"

"Not yet."

"You should meet them."

"Okay, Maman."

Kian said, "Maman, when are we going to call Baba?"

The fork in their mother's hand paused, halfway to her mouth.

"Soon, jan," she said.

"You said soon last week."

"I know."

"I have a picture I want to show him."

"You can't show him yet, jan. We can't — the phone can't send pictures right now."

"Why not?"

"Because we talk on the phone that only lets us talk. Not see."

"But I want him to see the picture."

"I know, jan."

Rana watched her brother's face. Kian was not going to cry. Kian was going to get angry. Kian got angry when he did not know what else to do with his feelings, which was a trait, Rana thought, that he had inherited from his sister.

"Kian," Rana said, "show me the picture. I will describe it to him when we call."

"You'll describe it?"

"Every part of it. I will tell him every color."

Kian considered this. Then he got up from the table without asking and ran to the living room and came back with the coloring book. He flipped it open to the green fire truck. He held it out to Rana solemnly.

"This is the truck," he said. "The green is because green is the best color."

"Okay," Rana said. "I will tell him."

"And the sky is green too because the sky can be any color if you are coloring it."

"I will tell him that."

"And this little line," Kian said, pointing, "is the shadow. I did it with the side of the crayon."

"You are a good artist."

"I am a good artist," Kian agreed.

Their mother made a small sound. It was not a laugh. It was not quite a laugh. It was some close relative of a laugh, and it was the first one Rana had heard from her in a while. Rana pretended not to notice it, because she knew her mother would not want her to notice it.

They finished dinner. Rana cleared the table. Her mother washed the dishes, and Rana dried them, and Kian went back to the green fire truck.

When the dishes were done, Rana's mother sat down at the kitchen table with her textbook. She opened it. She put her reading glasses on. She began, in a low voice, to read.

"The boy is running. The boys are running. The boy was running. The boys were running."

Rana sat across from her. She opened her own book. She pretended to read. She watched her mother's mouth shape the English words, and she saw in her mother's mouth the lips that had taught her Hafez, Rumi, Saadi; the lips that had sung her to sleep when she was very small; the lips that had shaped the word architect; and now shaped, slowly, with difficulty, the sentence The boy was running, the boy is running.

Her mother's lips were chapped. They had not been chapped in Tehran.

The telephone rang.

It was the old landline, the one they had installed two months ago because cellular connections to certain numbers were unreliable. It rang with the old-fashioned rasping bell that Rana associated with her grandfather's house in Shiraz. Her mother looked up sharply, then got to her feet.

"Kian," her mother said, "go to your room."

"Why?"

"Because I say so. Go to your room, jan. I will come get you in a minute."

"I want to —"

"Kian."

Something in her mother's voice. Kian got up and went to the bedroom without arguing. Rana stood up too.

Her mother was already in the kitchen, picking up the receiver. She held it to her ear.

"Alo," she said.

Her mother put a hand to her mouth.

Rana stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her mother listen. Her mother did not speak. Her mother listened for a long time. The voice on the other end was too faint for Rana to catch, but she could hear the shape of it, the cadence of it, and she knew from the cadence that it was not her father.

Maryam was her mother's cousin in Tehran. Maryam was the person who got news.

Her mother said, into the phone, "Yes. I understand. Yes. I — yes. Yes. Oh, Maryam. Oh. Okay."

Rana's heart was beating the way it had beat the morning they had left Tehran, which was to say, in her ears.

Her mother said, "Thank you. Thank you. I will. I will. Yes. Give my love to your mother. Yes. I will. Khoda hafez."

She put down the receiver. She did not move.

"Maman?"

Her mother turned. Her eyes were not crying. Her eyes were doing the thing where they were too bright and too empty at the same time.

"Come here, Rana."

Rana went. Her mother took her hands. Her mother's hands were cold.

"Your father," her mother said, in Farsi, the careful Farsi she used when she was trying not to break, "is all right. Understand? He is all right. They — they let him send a message to Maryam. He wanted us to know he is all right."

"Okay, Maman."

"They also —" Her mother stopped. She took a breath. "They also have set a court date. It will be in two months. Maybe three. We do not know yet what they will charge. We do not know yet what he will say."

"Okay."

"He asked about you and Kian."

"Okay."

"He said — he said to tell you —"

Her mother closed her eyes.

"He said to tell you to go to school. To study. To be good to your mother. To help your brother. He said — he said he thinks of you every day."

Rana felt something in her chest move like an animal.

"He sent a message," she said. "Before — with his voice?"

"The old one. From before. You can listen to it again. If you want to."

"I want to."

Her mother reached into the pocket of her robe and pulled out a small phone. The phone was the phone that was only used for this. The phone had one voice memo on it, a voice memo that had been sent to them three days before her father's arrest, a voice memo they had not known would be the last thing for — for how long. The voice memo was two minutes and forty-one seconds long. Rana had listened to it twenty-two times. She knew every silence in it.

Her mother pressed play.

The voice memo ended.

Rana's mother put the phone down on the counter. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, hard, and held them there for a long time. Then she took them away, and her eyes were red, but she was not crying.

"He said he is coming home," Rana said.

"He said he is coming home," her mother said.

"He said he will see us soon."

"He said he will see us soon."

"Go get your brother," her mother said, after a while. "Tell him to come kiss me goodnight."

"Okay, Maman."

Rana went down the hall to her bedroom. Kian was sitting on his bed with the coloring book. He looked up when she came in.

"Was it Baba?"

"It was Auntie Maryam. About Baba. She says he is okay."

"Okay."

"Maman wants to kiss you goodnight."

Kian got off the bed. He took her hand. His hand was small and hot and slightly sticky from the crayons. He walked with her down the hall.

Rana did not cry. Rana did not cry until much later, when Kian was asleep and her mother had gone to bed and the apartment was quiet and Rana was in the bathroom with the door locked and the faucet running, so that no one could hear.

And even then she only cried for about four minutes.

And then she washed her face, and she brushed her teeth, and she went to bed.

---

There was a boy at Northgate who, on a Tuesday, came to class wearing a tuxedo.

He was not the boy Rana had been watching. The boy Rana had been watching was Ezra, the guitar boy from under the tree; the boy in the tuxedo was someone else, a junior, a boy named Fenwick who was rumored to be the son of a very wealthy man who owned a chain of hotels. Fenwick, it turned out, had been at a wedding the night before and had come to school in the tuxedo because, according to Aditi, he thought it was funny. He walked around the cafeteria eating a sandwich in the tuxedo and talking loudly about the wedding, which had been in Lake Como, which he pronounced as though Lake Como were a neighborhood down the street.

"Is he — serious?" Rana whispered to Aditi.

"Fenwick?" Aditi said. "Fenwick is always serious. Fenwick is serious about being ridiculous. It is his one real talent."

"The wedding was in Italy?"

"The wedding was in Italy. His whole family flew there. They flew back last night. He has jet lag, he says."

"Has he been to Iran?"

"Fenwick? I don't think so. Fenwick has been to, let's see — Italy, obviously. Switzerland. Japan. South Africa, there was a safari thing. Whatever those little European countries are where he goes skiing. Dubai."

"But not Iran."

"Not Iran."

"Then why does he wear a tuxedo?"

Aditi laughed so hard she choked on her water.

Rana had not meant to be funny. But once she realized Aditi thought she had been funny, she kept her face perfectly serious, which made Aditi laugh more, which made Rana's face crack into a small smile, which she hid by looking down at her sandwich.

"Oh my God," Aditi said. "Oh my God, Rana. You are so — you say the quiet part out loud."

"What is the quiet part?"

"The part nobody says because you're not supposed to say it but it's the most obvious thing in the world. Like — okay. Fenwick wears a tuxedo. You say, so why does he wear a tuxedo? That's the quiet part. Most people would be like, oh ha ha, Fenwick and his tuxedo. You'd be like, excuse me, sir, but is there a reason?"

"There should be a reason."

"Yeah," Aditi said. "There should be."

She was still laughing.

It was a new feeling. She tucked it away to examine later.

---

Rana, by the end of her first two weeks, had a map of it in her head. The map was detailed. She knew which hallway had the best light. She knew which bathroom was empty at lunch. She knew that the girls' bathroom on the third floor of the academic building had a vent in the ceiling that rattled, and that this meant you could cry in it without anyone hearing you, if you needed to. She had not needed to. But she had filed it away.

She walked through the school quietly. She went to her classes. She took notes in a small, neat hand, and her notes were mostly good, and in math her notes were better than good, and at the end of the second week Ms. Park called her up after class and asked if she wanted to be moved up to Honors Algebra.

"I don't know," Rana said.

"You've done every problem I've given you correctly. Every one. I have a student from Hong Kong who is the second-best student in my regular class, and you are the best, and the Honors class is more challenging and would be a better fit."

"My English —"

"The Honors class is still mostly numbers."

Rana thought about it.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay yes or okay no?"

"Okay yes."

"Good," Ms. Park said, smiling. "I'll arrange it. You'll start Monday."

Rana walked out of math class feeling a strange small heat in her chest. It took her a moment to recognize the feeling, because she had not felt it for a long time.

Pride. She was proud of herself.

She did not tell anyone, at first. She did not tell Aditi until Friday, in the hallway between classes, and when she told her Aditi punched her in the arm and said, "See? I told you. I told you you were good."

"You did not tell me I was good."

"I told you you were smart."

"You did not tell me that either."

"I was thinking it."

"Aditi."

"I was thinking it loudly."

Rana laughed, a real laugh, small but real, and Aditi grinned at her, and somewhere in the back of Rana's head she filed this moment too — to examine later, to keep.

---

On Thursday of the third week, Rana's American history teacher, Mr. Dowling, announced that for a unit project they would be doing a research paper on "an international event of your choosing, from 1979 to the present."

He passed out a sheet of paper with a list of suggested topics. The list included the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Rwandan genocide. The Arab Spring. The breakup of Yugoslavia. The Tiananmen Square protests. The war in Afghanistan. The 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Rana's eyes stopped on the last one.

She read it again.

"Is there a problem, Rana?" Mr. Dowling said, stopping by her desk.

Rana looked up. Mr. Dowling was a small cheerful man with gold-rimmed glasses. He was, she had noticed, genuinely interested in his students. He was not the teacher she had expected an American history teacher to be.

"No," she said. "There is no problem."

"Good. Pick a topic by Monday. You'll have three weeks."

"Mr. Dowling?"

"Yes?"

"Can I pick — can I pick that one?" She pointed to the list.

Mr. Dowling looked. "The persecution of religious minorities?"

"Yes."

"Of course. Is there a particular reason you —"

"Yes. I have a — I know about it. My family."

Mr. Dowling looked at her. Not the pitying look. The other kind. The attentive kind.

"I see," he said, quietly. "Then I think that would be an excellent topic. I look forward to reading your paper."

Rana nodded.

Mr. Dowling moved on to the next student.

Aditi, two desks away, had heard. She did not say anything at the time. But at lunch, she said, "That's brave."

"What is?"

"Writing about — you know. That."

"It's not brave."

"It is."

Rana looked at her sandwich. Today it was cheese. She had learned which sandwiches were safe.

"In Iran," she said, "we could not talk about it. Not out loud. Not in school. Not anywhere. If a teacher asked me what I was, I said nothing. If a neighbor asked my mother, she said nothing. Our whole religion, for my whole life — we did not say it. We did not say the word. We were called other things instead. Everyone knew we were — but nobody said it."

Aditi was listening carefully.

"And here," Rana said, "a teacher puts it on a list. Next to the fall of the Berlin Wall. On a piece of paper. In a classroom. It is —"

She stopped. She did not have the word.

"It's free," Aditi said.

"No," Rana said. "It is more than free. It is — visible. It is on the list."

"Yeah."

"I did not know," Rana said, "that it could be on a list."

Aditi did not say anything to that. But she reached across the table and squeezed Rana's wrist, once, very quickly, and then let go.

Miles, at the other end of the table, did not look up. But Rana saw his pencil pause for just a moment, and she had the strange certainty that he was listening too.

---

At the end of the third week, on a Friday afternoon, Rana was walking past the auditorium on her way to the library when she heard music.

It was a guitar. She could tell it was a guitar because she had heard guitars before — at a wedding in Tehran, once, when she was ten, a cousin had played guitar for the bride. But this was not like that guitar. This was — cleaner. Colder. More difficult. Each note stood alone and fell into silence and was followed by another note that stood alone and fell into silence, and between each note there was a tiny space that was not empty but full, full of the last note still ringing.

Rana stopped walking.

She stood in the hallway with her backpack hanging off one shoulder and her books in her arms and she listened.

The music went on. It rose; it fell. It paused. It started again. She did not know the piece. She had no words for what it was doing. She only knew that whoever was playing had spent hours, years, sitting with this instrument, coaxing out of it this exact sound, this exact care.

She walked, very quietly, to the auditorium door. She opened it by a hand's width and looked inside.

The auditorium was empty except for one person. He was sitting on the edge of the stage with his legs crossed and a guitar in his lap. His head was bent over the guitar. It was the boy from under the tree.

It was Ezra.

Rana had not spoken to Ezra. She had barely noticed him in the hallways, because Ezra, despite being visible under the tree, was not the kind of boy who made himself visible in the hallways. He was tall. He was quiet. He walked with his head slightly down, and when he did look up, his gaze slid over the crowd and caught on nothing.

He was playing a piece she had never heard. His long brown fingers moved over the strings with a calm, concentrated precision, as though he were having a private conversation with the instrument.

Rana did not go in.

She stood at the door. She listened. She closed her eyes.

The music made her think of her father.

It made her think of the evenings in Tehran when her father had come home from work and sat in the chair by the window and put on an old record — he loved records, her father; he had a collection of them in a cabinet in the living room that her mother teased him about but never made him get rid of — and listened to it with his eyes closed, while Rana lay on the carpet at his feet and drew pictures and pretended not to be listening too. The records had mostly been Iranian classical music, and some Western classical music, and some jazz. Her father's tastes had been wide. Her father's silences when he listened to music had been his most attentive silences. You could go up to him in those silences and he would put out his hand and pull you against him without opening his eyes, and you would sit in the chair with him and the music would be the thing you shared without having to say it.

The music in the auditorium ended.

Rana stood in the hallway with her eyes closed for another second. Then she opened them and quietly shut the door, and she walked away, and her heart was beating very hard, and she did not know why.

She would not speak to Ezra for three more weeks.

But she would come back to this hallway every Friday at the same time, and she would stand outside the auditorium door, and she would listen to him play.

She would not tell anyone.

It would be, for a while, the only thing at Northgate that was entirely hers.

---

The first day of the fourth week, Rana walked into the cafeteria and Coco Dubois was sitting at her table.

Rana did not know her name yet. She only knew that there was a girl at the round table in the back who did not usually sit there — a girl in a cream-colored sweater with a thin gold chain at her throat and a dark smooth bob cut to just above her jaw, and a pair of leather boots that, Rana noticed, looked more expensive than anything Rana's family currently owned. The girl was sitting in Rana's chair, and she was talking, and Aditi was listening with the faint, patient expression Aditi wore when she was annoyed but polite.

Rana hesitated at the edge of the table with her tray.

"Oh," the girl in the cream sweater said, looking up at her. "Hi. Sorry, am I in your seat?"

"It's fine," Rana said.

"No, here —" The girl stood up, not ungracefully, and slid over to an empty chair on the other side of the table. "I'm Coco."

"Rana."

"I know," Coco said. Her smile was wide and sudden. She had a small gap between her two front teeth that Rana noticed she displayed, rather than hid. "I've been hearing about you."

"Hearing what?"

"Oh, that you're new. That you're super smart. That you got moved up in math."

Rana looked at Aditi.

"I didn't tell her," Aditi said, not quite rolling her eyes. "Coco has a — radar."

"I do have a radar," Coco said, cheerfully. "I know everyone at this school. It's my thing. Hi, Rana. Welcome."

"Thank you," Rana said.

She sat down. She unwrapped her sandwich. Coco, across the table, was leaning on one elbow with her chin in her hand and watching Rana with a frank, unembarrassed curiosity.

"So," Coco said, "you're from Iran."

"Yes."

"Where in Iran?"

"Tehran."

"Tehran," Coco repeated, giving the word a French shape. "I've never been. I want to go."

"You want to go to Iran?"

"Oh, massively. I want to go everywhere, honestly. But Iran — the architecture, the food, the poetry. I have a friend whose dad used to live in Shiraz and he says it's extraordinary."

Aditi, across the table, was eating her lunch with the steady determination of someone who had learned to let Coco talk.

"My mother is an architect," Rana said. "Was. Is."

"No," Coco said. "Really?"

"Yes."

"What has she built?"

"A hospital. In Isfahan. She designed the courtyard."

"Oh my God," Coco said. "Oh my God. Isfahan. I'm going to look it up. Tonight. That's amazing."

"She doesn't work as an architect here," Rana said, and the sentence came out, to her surprise, flatly. She had not meant to volunteer it. She did not know why she was volunteering it. Perhaps because Coco was looking at her as though she were a small interesting thing, and Rana wanted, for once, to puncture the looking.

"Oh," Coco said. She did not drop her smile, but the smile changed a little. "Why not?"

"She has to get her license again. In English."

"That's — that's a lot of work."

"Yes."

"What is she doing instead?"

Rana looked at her.

"She cleans offices," Rana said.

Coco's smile held for another half-second. Then it faded, and she said, "Oh."

Aditi, across the table, stopped eating.

"That's a lot," Coco said, after a moment. Her voice had shifted into a lower register. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," Rana said. "It is not your fault."

"I know it's not my fault. I meant — you know. I'm sorry that it's happening."

"Okay."

There was a silence. Coco picked up her water bottle and drank from it, and Aditi went back to her lunch, and Miles, who had been drawing something in his sketchbook, did not look up but turned a page.

Rana ate her sandwich. She could feel Coco looking at her, still, although Coco was now pretending to look at her phone.

"So," Coco said, after a minute. "Where's Iran? Like — on a map. Where is it really? I know it's over there somewhere but I never can remember exactly."

She said it lightly. She said it the way she said everything, which was as though it were one of a hundred questions she was going to ask today and would not remember having asked tomorrow.

But the table went very quiet.

Aditi stopped eating. Miles lifted his head.

Rana felt her face get hot. She felt her ears get hot. She felt the old humiliation of being the strange one, the new one, the one who had to produce, on demand, an explanation of herself for the entertainment of the ones who did not have to.

"It is," she said, in a voice that came out steadier than she expected, "between Iraq and Afghanistan. South of the Caspian Sea. North of the Persian Gulf. It has seventy million people. It used to be called Persia. In the seventh century —"

"Oh my God, I didn't mean it like that," Coco said, laughing. "I just — I literally meant where on the map. Okay, that's my bad. I should know."

"It is between Iraq and Afghanistan," Rana said again.

"Yes, I —"

"Coco," Aditi said, "read the room."

Coco looked at her. "What?"

"Read the room."

"I was being friendly."

"You were asking her where Iran was."

"I — yes, because I wanted to know."

"You know where Iran is."

"I don't! I don't, actually —"

"Google it."

"Aditi."

"Coco."

Coco looked from Aditi to Rana. Her smile had gone a little tight. She put her hands up, palms forward.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I was trying to be nice. I'm sorry if it came out wrong. Rana, I'm sorry."

"It is fine," Rana said.

"It's fine. Okay. I'm going to go sit with — I'm going to go. Nice meeting you. Really. Welcome."

Coco got up. She picked up her tray. She walked away with her head high, the cream sweater swinging, and she did not look back.

For a long moment no one at the table said anything.

Then Miles, without looking up from his sketchbook, said, "She's not that bad."

"She is that bad," Aditi said.

"She's not. She just — has no filter."

"Having no filter is a choice, Miles."

"Is it?"

"Yes."

"I don't think it is."

"Of course you don't, you literally never talk."

"That's different."

"It is not different."

Miles shrugged. Aditi shook her head, but Rana thought she saw something like a reluctant smile at the corner of her mouth.

"Rana," Aditi said, "are you okay?"

"I am okay."

"You don't have to be okay. You can be mad."

"I am a little mad."

"Good. Be a little mad. She deserved a little mad."

Rana looked down at her sandwich. She was, she realized, trembling a little. Not a lot. Just a fine, thin shake in her hands that she did not think anyone else could see.

She was not upset about the question. The question was stupid. She could have answered the question in her sleep. She was upset about the way Coco had said it, lightly, publicly, as if a country and a language and a mother and a father and a little brother and a grandmother's kitchen and a revolution and a prison and a long flight and a yellow brick apartment building and the smell of saffron and the sound of a guitar in an auditorium were all things you could compress into one casual dinner-party question at a round table in a cafeteria at a school.

She set her hands flat on the table to still them.

"Okay," she said, in a low voice, "I am mad."

"Good," Aditi said.

"I am mad for a minute."

"Take all the minutes."

Miles, across the table, opened his sketchbook to a fresh page. He took out a different pencil, a softer one. He began to draw, in quick loose lines, a small map. Rana watched him. He drew the Persian Gulf, and the Caspian Sea, and the borders with Iraq and Afghanistan, and he drew the shape of Iran in the middle, and then he drew, in the middle of Iran, a small star.

He pushed the sketchbook across the table to her.

"For next time someone asks," he said. "If you want."

Rana looked at the map. It was a good map. The shape of the country was exactly right.

"Tehran is up here," she said, pointing.

Miles moved the star. "Here?"

"Here."

He adjusted. She nodded. He tore the page carefully from the sketchbook, folded it once, and handed it to her across the table.

"Keep it," he said.

Rana took it. She folded it once more, very small, and put it in her pocket.

"Thank you," she said.

"No problem," Miles said. And he went back to his drawing, and Aditi went back to her lunch, and Rana sat in her chair at the round table in the back of the cafeteria, and she felt, around her, the small quiet shape of her first real friendships.

---

Coco caught her in the hallway after school.

Rana was on her way to the library. The hallway was half-empty, the last of the after-school rush drifting out through the doors to the buses. Coco was standing by the water fountain, waiting. When she saw Rana, she stepped forward.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Can I — can I walk with you for a second?"

Rana did not say yes. She also did not say no. Coco fell into step beside her.

"I wanted to say — I wanted to apologize again," Coco said. "Actually apologize. Not the half-apology in the cafeteria. A real one."

"Okay."

"I was being a — a dick. I was trying to show off. I don't — I don't know why. I don't even mean it when I do it, I just do it, and then five minutes later I realize I was being a dick, and then I want to undo it and I can't. So. I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry."

Rana walked.

"I don't know where Iran is," Coco said. "I mean, I do. Kind of. But not really. And that's — that's my problem. You shouldn't have had to give me a geography lesson in front of everyone. I wasn't thinking."

"Okay."

"Do you — do you hate me?"

Rana stopped walking and looked at her. Coco was taller than Rana by half a head, but she had made herself smaller for this conversation, her shoulders pulled in, her chin tucked. Her face, up close, was younger than it seemed from across a cafeteria table. There was a small constellation of acne on her left cheek that she had tried to cover with makeup. Her lipstick was slightly uneven.

"I don't hate you," Rana said.

"Are you sure?"

"I don't know you yet. I cannot hate you yet."

Coco let out a small surprised laugh. "That is — honestly — that is the fairest thing anyone has ever said to me."

"Okay."

"Can I try to — can I try again? Can we start over?"

Rana thought about it. She thought about her mother's face this morning, gray under the fluorescent light of the kitchen. She thought about her father in a cell. She thought about all the reasons she had, in this country, to harden her heart.

She also thought about the way Coco's chin was trembling, a little, trying not to.

"Okay," Rana said. "You can try again."

"Okay."

"But not now. Later. Some other day."

"Okay. Okay, that's — that's fair. Thank you. Thank you, Rana. Really."

"Okay."

"Okay. Okay." Coco took a step back. She nodded — a small, almost formal nod — and then she turned and walked quickly away down the hallway, her boots tapping on the clean wooden floor, and Rana watched her go.

Rana stood by the water fountain for a moment. She took the folded map out of her pocket. She unfolded it. She looked at the star in Tehran. She refolded it, very carefully, and put it back.

Then she went to the library.

---

Rana's art elective met twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in a room on the third floor of the arts building.

She had not chosen art. The office had placed her in it because every ninth grader at Northgate had to take an arts elective and because every other elective had been full by the time she registered. She had been prepared to dislike it. Art in her old school in Tehran had meant copying Persian miniatures from a textbook and being told that her copies were not good enough. Her art teacher there had been a small angry man with yellow fingernails who had once, when she was eleven, torn her painting in half in front of the class because she had gotten the proportions of a horse wrong.

Art at Northgate was a different kind of animal.

The teacher was a woman named Ms. Greene. She was in her forties, with gray streaks in her hair, and she wore paint-splattered overalls to class, and she had a habit of sitting cross-legged on her own desk when she talked to the students. Her studio room was full of things — easels, tubes of paint, jars of brushes, stacks of canvases, a taxidermied raven on a shelf, a human skull (plastic, Rana had checked) on another shelf, a goldfish in a bowl who was named, for reasons Ms. Greene had never explained, Frederick the Great.

Rana had liked her from that moment.

Miles was in Rana's art class. He sat two tables away, in the corner by the window, and he worked on whatever he was working on with a quiet, unhurried attention. Rana had watched him, in the first weeks, without meaning to. He drew people. He drew people all the time. Sometimes he drew Ms. Greene. Sometimes he drew students from their class — quick, light sketches that caught a gesture, the tilt of a head. Sometimes he drew from photographs he kept on his phone. When he drew, his face went completely still. He was not a smiling boy. But his face, when he drew, had the particular softness that Rana remembered on her father's face when he had listened to records — the softness of a person all the way inside of what he was doing.

On the second Tuesday of the fourth week, Ms. Greene announced a new assignment.

"Bring me a drawing next class," she said. "Of something that matters to you. Anything. A pet, a person, an object, a place. I don't care what. I want to see it drawn with care. I want to see you think about the shape of it. I don't want a photograph and I don't want your Instagram aesthetic. I want a thing you actually love."

Rana wrote down the assignment. She walked out of class with her hands in her pockets and a knot in her chest.

A thing I actually love.

Not because it was hard. Because drawing it would make it true.

---

The next Tuesday, she brought a blank piece of paper.

Ms. Greene walked around the room, looking at everyone's drawings. Aditi had drawn her grandmother in India, a careful pencil portrait from a photograph. A girl named Gwen had drawn her dog. A boy named Rashid had drawn his brother's hands. Fenwick — who was not in the class, so never mind — had not drawn anything; but a boy named Henry had drawn the skyline of Cape Town, from memory, and it was lovely.

When Ms. Greene got to Rana's table, she looked at the blank paper.

"Rana," she said.

"I did not finish," Rana said.

"Did you start?"

Rana did not answer.

Ms. Greene looked at her, not unkindly.

"It's all right if you didn't. We can try again next week."

"Okay."

Ms. Greene moved on.

Rana sat at her table. Miles, across the room, was working on something. She could not see what. She looked at her blank paper. She picked up a pencil. She put it down.

She picked up the pencil again.

She drew, on the left side of the page, the line of a face in profile. She drew her father's forehead, which had always had one horizontal crease in it, just one, above his eyebrows. She drew his nose, which was long and slightly curved, like Kian's would be someday, like hers already was. She drew the corner of his eye — not open, closed, the way he had closed his eyes when he listened to records. She drew the line of his jaw, which was thinner than it used to be, she knew, because he was in a cell and he was not eating enough. She did not know how she knew this. She had not seen him in months. But she knew.

She drew his ear. She drew a little bit of the hair above his ear, which had gone gray at the temples the year she was eleven, and which he had refused to dye even when her mother had teased him about it.

She drew his shoulder, the beginning of the curve of it.

She did not draw his mouth.

She could not make her hand draw his mouth.

She sat back and looked at the drawing. It was a half-finished profile of a man who was clearly her father — anyone who knew him would know it was him — and his mouth was missing. It was a man listening to music with his mouth missing.

She set down the pencil.

Miles was standing next to her.

She had not heard him come over. He had moved, she realized, with the same quiet he did everything with.

"Can I see?" he said.

She did not want him to see. Her first instinct was to cover the drawing with her hands. But she did not. She sat very still and let him look.

He looked at it for a long time.

He did not say it is good or it is bad. He did not say is that your father or tell me about it. He looked at the drawing the way he looked at his own drawings, which was with a serious, unhurried attention that did not need to produce words.

Then he took out the small soft pencil from his pocket. He held it up.

"May I?" he said.

Rana nodded, before she had thought about what she was agreeing to.

Miles leaned over her paper. In the corner — the upper right corner, as far from the face as possible — he drew something very small. It took him perhaps ten seconds. When he straightened, she could see what he had drawn.

A bird. A tiny bird, with its wings tucked, perched on nothing.

"For the page," he said. "So it's not empty."

Rana looked at the bird. The bird was not on the page. The bird was in the upper corner of her father's empty sky. The bird was where, in a painting, the artist signed their name.

"Okay," she said.

Miles went back to his table.

He did not say anything else. He did not look at her for the rest of class. But when the bell rang and the students got up and started filing out, he paused by her table on his way to the door and said, very quietly, "You don't have to finish it today."

"I know," Rana said.

"Okay."

He walked out.

Rana sat for another minute. She looked at the drawing. She looked at the bird in the corner. She thought about the line of her father's jaw in her pencil and the tiny bird in Miles's pencil and the fact that, for the first time in months, she had made something. She had made a thing on a piece of paper. It was a small thing. It was unfinished. But it was a thing.

She folded the paper very carefully and put it into the back of her math notebook, where nobody would look.

Then she went to her next class.

---

That evening, at home, she took the drawing out again. She was sitting on her bed, and Kian was in the living room watching cartoons, and her mother was asleep. She unfolded the drawing and looked at it.

She thought about her father's mouth. She thought about how her father had smiled — the way one side of his mouth had gone up first, just barely, a kind of small private smile that only his family had ever gotten to see; and then, if the thing was really funny, the other side would catch up and the whole smile would break open like a crack across his face. Nobody else's smile worked the way his had worked. Kian's did not, yet; maybe it would someday.

She picked up her pencil.

She drew, very carefully, the mouth. She drew it closed. She drew it with one corner slightly higher than the other, the way it went when he was listening to music and was about to say something about the music and had not quite decided to speak yet.

She sat back.

The drawing of her father was now finished, or almost finished. There were things wrong with it. The proportion of the ear was a little off. The shadow under the jaw was not exactly right. It was not a good drawing. It was a student drawing. It was a drawing by a girl who had not drawn in six months and whose hands were not as steady as they had been.

But it was him.

Rana folded the drawing again. She put it back into her math notebook.

She lay down on her bed. She stared at the ceiling.

Somewhere in a cell in Tehran, her father was — she hoped — sleeping. She hoped he was not cold. She hoped he was not afraid.

She had drawn him. She had put him, in graphite, onto a piece of paper in America. She had given him a small bird in his sky.

She closed her eyes.

When her mother came home that night, at seven, and looked in on her, Rana was asleep with her hand on the math notebook and her mouth slightly open, the way Kian's mouth was slightly open when he slept, the way her father's mouth had been slightly open in the only photograph they had from the week before his arrest.

Her mother stood in the doorway for a long time and did not go in.

---

At school the next day, Miles did not mention the drawing. He did not look at Rana differently. He did not come over to their table at lunch with any new, strange energy. He sat down, opened his sketchbook, and began to draw a bowl of fruit from memory. At one point he asked Aditi if she had an extra sharpener. Aditi gave him one.

She filed it away.

She added it to her map.

---

The invitation came on a Thursday, in the hallway between third and fourth period, and it came with a casualness that Rana had begun to recognize as one of Aditi's specialties.

"Hey," Aditi said, falling into step beside her. "What are you doing tomorrow night?"

"Nothing."

"Are you sure? Don't you want to think about it?"

"I am sure. Tomorrow night I will be home. My mother is working. My brother will be there. I will be there."

"Okay, so — no plans."

"No plans."

"Do you want to come to dinner at my house?"

Rana turned and looked at her. "Dinner?"

"It's Friday night. We do a dinner. My dad — Friday night is his thing. He does Shabbat, which — do you know what that is?"

"Jewish."

"Yeah. Jewish. So he does a Friday night dinner, always, every Friday, even when my mom complains that she's tired, and he lights candles and says the thing, and my mom makes this weirdly amazing biryani that she learned from her grandmother, and my little sister throws food, and — I don't know, it's a whole thing. It's actually nice. You should come."

"Your family celebrates — both?"

"Both. Well. Kind of. Depends on the week. My mom's family is Hindu — they live in Mumbai, we go there in the summer — and my dad's family is Jewish, they're from Long Island, and our house is — it's a lot. There's a Menorah on the mantel and a Ganesh on the bookshelf and my mom makes us learn both sets of prayers, and I complain about it a lot but secretly I think it's okay."

"That is —"

"Chaotic, I know."

"I was going to say beautiful."

Aditi looked at her.

"Yeah," she said, after a second. "Yeah, I guess it kind of is. Okay so will you come?"

"I have to ask my mother."

"Obviously."

"I will ask her tonight."

"Tell her my parents are not weird. They are a little weird. But they are not creepy weird. They are just normal parents weird."

"Okay."

"And tell her that if she wants to come, she can come."

"She is working tomorrow night."

"Tell her another time, then."

"Okay."

"Okay. Text me after you ask her."

"I do not have your number."

Aditi stopped walking in the middle of the hallway. "Wait. We do not have each other's numbers?"

"No."

"Rana. What."

"What?"

"How have we been friends for, like, four weeks without —"

"I do not have many people's numbers."

"Okay, well, give me your phone."

Rana handed it over. Aditi typed her number in, called herself from Rana's phone, hung up. Handed the phone back. The name she had typed in for herself was ADITI BEST FRIEND with a small heart next to it.

"There," Aditi said. "Fixed. You are welcome."

Rana looked at the screen. She did not know what to say about the heart, so she did not say anything about the heart. She just put the phone in her pocket and walked.

That evening, she asked her mother. Her mother looked at her over the tea she was drinking, the reading glasses pushed halfway down her nose, and said, "A Jewish-Hindu family?"

"Yes."

"And you are sure they invited you?"

"She invited me."

"And her parents know?"

"I think so."

"Okay," her mother said, slowly. "Okay. You will take something."

"What will I take?"

"A gift. You cannot go to somebody's house empty-handed."

"I know, Maman."

"Do we have anything to give?"

Her mother was already getting up, opening the cupboard, looking. The cupboard was mostly lentils and rice. Then her mother opened another cupboard — the small one where she kept the things she was saving — and she pulled out a small paper box, tied with a ribbon. Rana knew the box. Her mother had brought it from Iran. It contained an assortment of sweet pistachio nougat that Rana's grandmother had made before they left — gaz, the real kind, wrapped in wax paper and folded into powdered sugar. There had been four boxes. Three of them had already been opened and eaten — small gifts for Mrs. Kadir, for the woman at the immigration office, for the family that had helped them move in.

This was the last one.

"Maman. No. This is —"

"Take it."

"Maman, it is Mama-bozorg's. It is the last one."

"Take it. Your friend's family will have never had real gaz. It will be nice for them."

"But —"

"Rana. Take it."

Rana took the box. She held it in both hands. It was light. It was the weight of four sheets of paper.

"Okay," she said.

"And be polite. Remember your manners. Ask how you can help. If they ask you to help set the table, you help. If they ask you if you want more food, say yes even if you are full, because that is how you say you liked it. Do not talk about anything political unless they talk about it first. Do not stay too late. Call me when you are leaving and I will tell you what train to take."

"Maman. Maman. I know all of this."

"I know you know. I am telling you anyway. It makes me feel better."

"Okay."

"You will have a good time."

"Okay."

Her mother kissed her forehead. Her mother's hand, when she touched Rana's face, was dry, the knuckles red from cleaning chemicals. Rana leaned into the hand for a moment. Her mother did not take it away.

---

Aditi's apartment was in a tall brick building on Eighty-Fourth Street. The doorman was a small friendly man named Oscar who knew Aditi by name and said "Miss Chaudhuri!" and waved her in. Rana followed, carrying the paper box.

"My family is very loud," Aditi warned her in the elevator. "I hope you are ready."

"I am ready."

"My little sister is eight. Her name is Priya. She is — not normal."

"What do you mean?"

"You will see."

"We are home!" Aditi shouted. "And I brought Rana!"

A woman came out of a doorway. She was small and quick, with Aditi's eyes and hair that was going silver at the part. She was wiping her hands on a towel.

"Rana, welcome," she said. "I am Shreya. Aditi's mother."

"Hello, Mrs. —"

"Shreya. Please. Come in, come in, take off your shoes, yes, there is a place for them —"

Rana put her sneakers on a rack by the door. She held out the paper box.

"My mother sent this. For you."

Shreya took the box. She untied the ribbon very carefully, the way a person handles a gift that was clearly packed with love. She opened it. She looked at the gaz.

"Gaz," she said. "Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. From Isfahan?"

"My grandmother's."

"Your grandmother made this?"

"She used to. My mother brought it from Iran. It is — it is the last of it."

Shreya looked up at her. Her eyes had gone a little bright.

"Aditi," she said, "your friend's family has sent us something very precious. Tell your father."

"Ma —"

"Tell him."

Aditi disappeared down the hall. Shreya closed the box and put it very carefully, with both hands, on a high shelf in the hall closet, as though it were a thing that needed to be protected.

"Rana," Shreya said, "thank you. Thank your mother. I will eat this very, very slowly."

"Okay."

"Come in. Come meet everyone."

---

The dinner was — chaotic was right. Aditi's father, a tall bald man with round glasses, was in the kitchen wearing an apron that said KISS THE COOK and stirring a pot. He pulled Rana into a hug the moment he saw her. She stood in the hug, stiff, and then decided it was okay, and relaxed.

"Rana! Welcome! Aditi will not stop talking about you! I am David!"

"Hello, Mr. —"

"David. What are you drinking? We have water, we have seltzer, we have juice, we have a bottle of wine that I am saving for when Priya goes to sleep —"

"Seltzer, please."

"Seltzer, coming up!"

Priya, it turned out, was a small ferocious person with a mass of black curls and one front tooth missing. She stared at Rana for approximately three seconds and then announced, "I have a tooth missing."

"I can see."

"It fell out on Tuesday."

"That is impressive."

"I have seven dollars from the tooth fairy."

"Seven dollars is a lot of money."

"I know. I am going to buy a dog with it."

"Priya, we have been over this," Shreya said, from the kitchen. "Seven dollars is not enough for a dog."

"I am saving. This is the start of saving."

"Good. Keep saving."

At some point the dining room table was set, with a white tablecloth and silver candlesticks and a braided bread that Rana knew was called challah because she had read about it, and a small bowl of salt. David brought out a prayer book. He put it in front of himself. Shreya put her hand on his shoulder.

"Okay," he said to Rana, gently, "you do not have to do anything. You can just sit. Or you can close your eyes. Or you can say the words with us if you want. Okay?"

"Okay."

Priya, who had been sitting impatiently, whispered, "Can I say the Shema?"

"Yes, jan," David said.

Priya said something in Hebrew, small and fast, her eyes closed tight, the way Kian closed his eyes when he was being serious. Aditi said the words along with her. Shreya smiled.

Then David picked up the cup of wine. He said the blessing over the wine. He took a sip, and passed the cup to Shreya, who took a sip, and passed it to Aditi, who took a sip, and passed it to Priya, who took a tiny ceremonial sip and made a face, and then passed the cup to Rana.

Rana hesitated.

"You do not have to," David said quickly. "You can pass it. Entirely optional."

"I just — I never have before."

"No pressure."

Rana looked at the cup. It was silver. It had a small engraving on the side that she thought was Hebrew letters. The wine inside it was dark and red and reflected the candlelight.

She thought about her father.

She took a small sip. The wine was sweeter than she had expected. She passed the cup to David, who completed the circle.

Her eyes were stinging. She blinked fast.

"Okay," David said, "NOW WE EAT."

---

The biryani was extraordinary. Shreya had been right to be proud of it. It was layered and perfumed and there were bits of caramelized onion crisped on top, and raisins in it, and saffron, and the rice had been cooked so it was in distinct long grains. Rana had not eaten food like this since Tehran. She ate two helpings. Shreya watched her eat with a satisfaction so deep and undisguised that it made Rana want to laugh.

"Your mother is a cook?" Shreya asked.

"She is. She used to cook every day. Now she works at night so —"

"So now who cooks?"

"I cook, a little. My mother on the weekends."

"You cook?"

"Simple things. Eggs. Rice. Ash. Sometimes khoresh if she left it for me."

"What is khoresh?"

"A stew. With dried lime and beef. Or with herbs."

"Tell me the one with herbs."

"Ghormeh sabzi. It has fenugreek, and parsley, and cilantro, and lots of leeks, and kidney beans, and dried limes, and beef."

"Oh my God," Shreya said. "We have to cook together. Someday. You will teach me. I will teach you biryani. Rana, yes?"

"Yes," Rana said, and her voice caught on the word, just a little, and Shreya looked at her but did not say anything about the catch, and passed her more biryani.

---

After dinner, after dessert (halva, made by Shreya; gulab jamun, store-bought, which Priya had demanded), after David had gotten out a small glass of that wine he had been saving and poured one for himself and one for Shreya, after Priya had gone to bed with loud complaints, after the dishes had been stacked in the kitchen and Aditi had insisted that Rana not help wash them, the two girls went into Aditi's room.

Aditi's room was a mess. Books stacked on the desk, on the floor, on the nightstand. Clothes on the chair. A corkboard on the wall with postcards and movie ticket stubs and a photograph of Aditi with two other girls at what looked like a summer camp, all of them in swimsuits and laughing. A shelf with a small wooden Ganesh, and a framed photograph of an older woman with white hair and a nose stud — Aditi's grandmother, Rana guessed. A menorah on the dresser. A poster on the wall of a band Rana did not recognize.

"Sorry," Aditi said, shoving clothes off the chair. "Sit. You can sit on the bed if you want."

Rana sat on the floor, on the rug, cross-legged.

"The floor is cool," Aditi said. "Okay."

Aditi sat on the floor too. She leaned against the bed. For a long minute neither of them said anything.

"Your family is nice," Rana said, finally.

"They are a lot."

"They are nice."

"Yeah. They are nice. I know they are nice. Sometimes I want to kill them, but they are nice."

"You are lucky."

Aditi looked at her.

"Yes," she said. "I know."

"I am not — I am not saying it like — I am not trying to make you feel —"

"No, I know. I know what you are saying."

There was a silence.

"My father used to say grace at dinner," Rana said, surprising herself. "Every night. A short Bahá'í prayer. Not long. Just a few lines. I have not said it since we came here. My mother does not say it anymore either. She forgot, at first, and then I think she decided to forget, because she did not want to cry every night."

"Rana."

"It is okay. I am just — I am telling you. Because tonight — tonight I heard a family pray. I had not heard a family pray in a long time."

Aditi did not say anything. She reached out, though, and put her hand on Rana's knee, just for a second. Then she took it away.

"When your father comes home," Aditi said, "he will say the prayer again."

"I hope so."

"He will."

"You do not know that."

"No. But I am going to say it anyway."

Rana looked at the rug. The rug was a faded red wool rug, maybe Persian, in fact, maybe not. She ran her hand along the pattern of it.

"Can I tell you something?" she said.

"Yes."

"I have not prayed in three months."

"Okay."

"I was raised to pray. Every day. We have obligatory prayers, in our religion. My father said the long one, always. My mother said the short one, usually. I said the medium one, because I was fourteen and I was supposed to. I have not said any of them since we came here."

"Why?"

"Because I am — angry. I am angry at God. Is that bad? It is bad, right? Maybe it is bad."

"I don't think it's bad."

"I am angry at God because my father is in a cell and my mother cleans offices and I am in a country where nobody can say my name right except for one teacher. I am angry at God because I have a brother who is seven and he is the only one who still thinks everything is going to be fine."

"Rana —"

"I am not — I do not want you to — I am just telling you. Because tonight was a prayer and I felt —"

"What did you feel?"

"I felt —"

Rana stopped. She did not know how to say it.

"I felt that God was still there," she said, finally, "and I was not ready for that."

Aditi did not say anything for a while. Then she said, "Do you want to stay over?"

"What?"

"Stay over. Tonight. We have an extra bed. Priya's old bed. Ma will call your mom."

"I did not bring —"

"I have pajamas. I have a toothbrush. We can walk you home in the morning if you want. We can have pancakes. My dad makes pancakes."

Rana looked at her.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay. I will tell Ma."

Aditi got up and went out to tell her mother. Rana sat on the rug and did not move.

She put her hand on the rug. The rug was warm from the radiator under the window. Outside the window, the city was doing its Friday-night thing — horns, sirens, a distant laugh, the rumble of a bus.

---

She went home in the morning. She had pancakes. David made them shaped like animals. Priya ate three pancakes and announced that she was going to be a dentist when she grew up. Shreya sent Rana home with a container of leftover biryani and a small tin of halva. Aditi walked her to the subway.

"Text me when you get home."

"Okay."

"I mean it. Text me. I will worry."

"You will not worry."

"I will worry."

"Aditi. I am fine."

"Text me."

"Okay. I will text you."

Aditi hugged her at the top of the subway stairs. The hug was long and warm and Aditi smelled faintly of the cardamom from the tea they had drunk at breakfast. When Rana pulled back, Aditi was looking at her with a seriousness she did not usually show.

"I am glad you came," Aditi said.

"Me too."

"I am glad you are my friend."

"Me too."

"Okay. Go."

Rana went down the subway stairs. She took the train. She got off at her stop. She walked home.

In the apartment, her mother was at the kitchen table, and Kian was eating cereal on the couch, and the radio was on low playing an Iranian song that Rana did not recognize but her mother did, and her mother looked up when Rana walked in and her mother's face — her mother's face was rested. Her mother had slept. Her mother had actually slept.

"Rana jan," her mother said. "Come. Tell me everything."

Rana put down the container of biryani on the table. She put down the tin of halva. She sat. She told her mother everything — about the candles, about the bread, about the cup, about David's pancakes, about Priya's dog plan. She told her mother about the moment she had felt that God was still there. Her mother listened. Her mother did not interrupt.

When Rana was done, her mother was quiet for a long time. Then her mother said, in a voice that was a little hoarse, "I am glad."

"You are glad?"

"I am glad. I am glad you went. I am glad you felt it. I am glad you came home and told me."

"Maman —"

"We will pray tonight. Together. If you want. The short prayer. Just the short one. Not because we have to. Because we choose to."

Rana felt something unclench in her chest. She had not known how tightly it had been clenched.

"Okay, Maman."

"Okay, jan."

Later, when Rana was alone in the bathroom washing her face, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was coming out of its braid. Her eyes were tired. There was a small pink line down one cheek from where the pillow at Aditi's house had creased her skin.

She cried, then — for the first time in about three weeks, really cried, the shoulders-shaking kind, with the water running so no one would hear. She did not cry for long. Maybe six minutes. Then she splashed water on her face, and she dried her face on a towel, and she went out into the living room, and she sat on the couch next to Kian and let him show her his new drawings, one at a time, all of them, for as long as he wanted.

---

Mr. Hassan assigned it on a Monday.

"I want you to write about a place," he said, standing at the front of the room with his hands in his pockets. "Not just any place. A place that made you. A place that is inside of you now — that you carry around like a room you live in even when you are not there. You can write about it any way you want. You can write about it in scenes. You can write about it in a list. You can write about it as an argument with yourself. You can write about it in the second person. I don't care. I want you to be specific. I want you to put me there. And I want it to be yours. If I read ten papers about the beach I will go home and cry."

He sat down on the edge of his desk.

"A thousand words minimum. Due in two weeks. Any questions?"

Aditi, next to Rana, raised her hand. "Can we write about a place that is not real?"

"You mean like — imaginary?"

"Yeah. Like — a place in a book."

"Hmm," Mr. Hassan said. "No. I want a place that is real. A place you have been. A place you have felt. If you have spent enough time in a place in a book that it is real to you, we can talk. But in general, no. Real places."

Aditi nodded, scribbling.

"Mr. Hassan?" a boy in the back said. "Can it be, like, our bedroom?"

"If your bedroom made you, yes."

"I think it did."

"Then write about it."

Rana wrote down the assignment in her notebook. She did not put her hand up.

She already knew what she was going to write about.

---

She started the paper that night. She started it four times. She crossed out the first three starts. She tore the pages out of her notebook and crumpled them and threw them away and started again on a fresh page.

The problem was that her grandmother had been dead for two years.

The problem was that the kitchen, therefore, was gone in a way that Iran was not gone. Iran she might someday go back to. The kitchen she would never go back to. The kitchen existed only in her head now, and in the heads of her mother and her aunt and her cousins, and when those heads were gone the kitchen would be gone with them.

The problem was that writing about the kitchen in English felt — wrong. The kitchen had been a Farsi kitchen. It had been a kitchen where words like bia bokhor and noosh-e jan and hava-t-o daram had been spoken. How was she supposed to write about it in the language of the country she was now in?

She put down her pen.

She thought about this for a long time.

She picked up the pen.

My grandmother's kitchen was on the second floor of a house in the Elahieh neighborhood of Tehran. You got to it by climbing a staircase with a wooden railing that had been polished smooth by sixty years of hands.

She kept writing.

---

She worked on the paper every night for a week.

She did not show it to anyone. She did not talk about it at lunch. When Aditi asked how her paper was going, Rana said, "It is going," and Aditi did not press. Aditi was good at not pressing.

The paper was twelve hundred words long when she finished. It was longer than she had meant it to be. It was longer, she thought, than maybe Mr. Hassan had wanted.

It was about her grandmother's kitchen. It was about the way the light came through the small window above the sink in the afternoon. It was about the spice cabinet with the glass jars that her grandmother had labeled in her careful handwriting. It was about the jar of cardamom that sat at eye level and that her grandmother had let her open and smell from the time she was three years old. It was about the smell of saffron dissolved in hot water. It was about the sound of her grandmother's radio, which was always on in the kitchen, always tuned to a station that played old songs from the sixties. It was about the way her grandmother had cut vegetables — sitting at a low stool with a cutting board in her lap, the knife moving so fast you could not see it. It was about the kettle on the stove that was always, always on, so that at any moment of any day a visitor could be given tea.

She wrote all of this. She wrote it plainly. She tried not to make it sound like a story. She wanted it to feel like a room.

She printed it out at the public library on Saturday morning. She put it in a folder. She took it to class on Monday and handed it in.

Mr. Hassan took it without reading it. He took everyone's papers without reading them. He would read them later, he had said, in the quiet of his apartment, with a cup of tea.

---

A week later, on Monday, Mr. Hassan asked her to stay after class.

Rana's stomach dropped when he said her name. Teachers asking you to stay after class could mean many things and most of them were bad. She packed up her bag slowly, so that she would be the last one out.

When the room emptied, Mr. Hassan came over to her desk and sat down on the edge of it, the way he sat on the edge of his own desk. He had her paper in his hand. He had written on it with a red pen.

"Rana," he said.

"Yes."

"This paper is extraordinary."

Rana did not know what to say.

"I want you to know that. I have been teaching ninth-grade English for fourteen years. I have read about two hundred papers about grandmothers. I have read maybe fifty about kitchens. This is one of the best papers I have ever gotten."

"Okay."

"That was not — I was not fishing for an 'okay' there, exactly. I wanted to say something and you can take it however you take it. But I meant it. You have a real voice. You have a gift. I would like to know what you think about that."

Rana looked at the paper in his hand. She could see, from where she sat, the red marks. There were not many. She thought she could see an A circled at the top.

"I did not know I had written something good," she said, truthfully. "I was — I was just writing about the kitchen."

"Well, that's the trick. That's always the trick."

"I thought it was maybe too long."

"It wasn't too long."

"I thought — I thought maybe it was too sad."

"Was it? It didn't feel sad to me. It felt — rich. It felt alive. Your grandmother is alive in it."

Rana looked at him. She felt something hot and unfamiliar behind her eyes. She blinked.

"She has been dead for two years," she said.

"I know. You say so in the paper. But she is not dead in the paper."

Rana nodded. She could not speak.

Mr. Hassan handed her the paper. He was not looking at her too closely, which she was grateful for.

"I want to ask you something. If it is okay."

"Okay."

"There is a literary magazine at this school. It is called Crosshatch. It publishes student writing, four times a year. I help run it, with a couple of students. I would like to submit this piece to the magazine, if you will let me."

"You want to — publish this?"

"Yes."

"My paper?"

"Your paper."

"Under my name?"

"Under your name. Or under a pseudonym, if you prefer. Or anonymous. But I think it deserves to be seen by people, if you are willing to let it be seen. That is for you to decide."

Rana looked at the paper in her hand. The folder was a little crumpled from being in her bag.

"I have to ask my mother."

"Of course. Take your time."

"Okay."

"There is no pressure. If you decide no, we say no. It stays between us."

"Okay."

"And Rana —"

"Yes."

"Whatever you decide, I want to tell you one more thing. In case nobody else has told you this in a while."

She looked up.

"You are a writer," Mr. Hassan said. "You are. I know it is the kind of thing teachers say that can sound cheesy and fake. I mean it. The way you write — the way you notice — the way you put words on a page — this is not something you have learned. This is something you are. Keep doing it. Whatever else happens, please keep doing it."

Rana nodded. She could not speak. She put the paper in her folder and the folder in her bag, and she stood up and slung her bag over her shoulder, and she said, "Thank you, Mr. Hassan," and her voice was steady, almost, and she walked out of the classroom.

She walked to the bathroom on the third floor, the one with the rattling vent. She locked herself in a stall. She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. She put her head in her hands.

She did not cry. She was past crying, somehow, this time. She sat very still.

She did not say it out loud. She just thought it. It was the first thing in America she had allowed herself to think about herself with no qualification.

---

That night, she told her mother. Her mother was eating a late dinner at the kitchen table, in her work clothes, before her shift.

"He wants to publish it," Rana said.

"In a magazine?"

"In the school magazine. For the students."

Her mother put down her fork.

"What is the paper about?"

"Mama-bozorg. Her kitchen."

Her mother was silent for a long time.

"I would like to read it," her mother said.

Rana got her folder. She handed it over. Her mother pulled the paper out. Her mother put on her reading glasses. Her mother sat at the kitchen table and read the paper, and her mother read slowly, because her English was still slow, and Rana sat at the other side of the table and watched her mother read, and at one point her mother made a small sound, and at another point her mother pressed one hand briefly to her mouth, and at the end her mother put the paper down very carefully and took off her reading glasses and folded them up and laid them on the table.

"You wrote this," her mother said.

"I wrote this."

"In English."

"In English."

Her mother looked at her. Her mother's eyes were wet but her mother was not crying.

"Your grandmother is in this kitchen," her mother said, in Farsi. "She is in this kitchen. She is alive in this kitchen."

"Yes, Maman."

"You put her there."

"I did."

Her mother picked up the paper. She held it in both hands, and she looked down at it, and she did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, "Publish it. Let them read it. Let Americans read about my mother's kitchen."

"Maman. Are you sure?"

"I am sure."

"I can say no. It is okay to say no."

"Publish it, Rana. Your grandmother would want — your grandmother would want the whole world to read about her kitchen. She was a vain woman. She would love this."

Rana laughed, small and startled. "She was not vain."

"She was a little vain. She was a great cook and she knew it and she wanted the neighbors to know it. Publish the paper. Tell your teacher yes."

"Okay, Maman."

Her mother did not give the paper back right away. She held it for another moment. Then she got up and went to the cupboard, the small one, the one with the last box of gaz — which was not there anymore — and she took out instead a small brown photograph, a very old one, of her own mother as a young woman, standing in a doorway in Tehran in a housedress with a wooden spoon in her hand.

Her mother set the photograph on top of the paper. She did not say anything. She sat back down. She picked up her fork. She kept eating.

She picked up her fork.

She ate.

---

On the Friday after her paper was accepted for Crosshatch, Rana went, as she had been going every Friday for three weeks, to the hallway outside the auditorium, and she stood in her place by the door, and she listened to Ezra play.

It was a different piece this week. She had learned to tell them apart, even though she did not know what any of them were called. The first week it had been something fast and light, something that had made her think of water running over stones. The second week it had been something slow and heavy, something that had made her chest feel tight. This week it was something in between — something that climbed and fell, that asked a question and answered it and asked it again. The notes came out of the instrument and into the hallway and into the small space where she stood and they settled in her bones.

She had not told anyone that she came here. She had not told Aditi. She had not told Coco, who she was now tentatively friends with, or Miles, who she sometimes sat next to in art, or anyone. It was the one thing in her life at Northgate that nobody else knew about. It was hers.

She leaned her back against the wall and closed her eyes.

The music stopped, suddenly, mid-phrase.

Rana opened her eyes. That had never happened before. Ezra had always played through. She held very still, worried that he had seen her through the door, worried that she had been caught out.

Then the music started again. A scale this time. He was practicing. He had broken the phrase because he had been dissatisfied with something. He played the scale and then he played the difficult passage, slowly, three times, and each time it was a little better, and then he played it at tempo, and it was perfect, and then he did it once more for good measure.

Rana smiled, without meaning to.

This was how she had practiced the piano as a child. This was how her father had listened to her practice — with the patience of a person who knew that the first ten times you played something badly was part of the eleventh time you played it well.

She leaned her head back against the wall.

Ezra began the piece again, from the top. The piece that climbed and fell and asked and answered.

He got all the way through this time. When the last note faded, Rana stood very still in the hallway and did not move.

The door opened.

She had not expected the door to open. The door had never opened before. Ezra had always come out the other side, through the back of the auditorium, and had never walked past her. She had planned her ritual around this fact. She had believed in it.

But today, the door opened, and Ezra was standing in the doorway with his guitar case in one hand, and he was looking at her, and she was standing three feet away with her backpack on her shoulder and a look on her face that she was sure was the look of a person who had been caught doing something strange.

They looked at each other.

"Hi," Ezra said.

"Hi."

"Have you been —"

"I was just —"

They both stopped.

Ezra laughed, a short surprised laugh. "Okay. You go first."

Rana opened her mouth. She did not know what to say. She did not want to say she had been listening to him every Friday for three weeks. That was — strange. That was stalker behavior. That would be embarrassing.

"I was walking to the library," she said. "Through here."

"Oh."

"I stopped. You — you were playing. I stopped to listen."

"You stopped just now?"

Rana hesitated.

"I stopped — before," she said. "A few times. Before this."

"Oh."

Ezra looked at her, considering. He was taller than she had realized — she had only ever seen him from a distance, or sitting on the edge of a stage with a guitar. Up close, he was nearly six feet. He had a long face, a quiet face, with wide-set eyes the color of very dark coffee. He was not smiling, but he was not not-smiling either. He was looking at her like she was a thing he was trying to figure out.

"You like classical guitar?" he said.

"I do not know if I like classical guitar. I like what you play."

"That is kind of the definition of liking classical guitar."

"Okay."

"Were you listening through the door?"

"Yes."

"Every Friday?"

"Yes."

"Huh."

Ezra put down his guitar case. He leaned it carefully against the wall. Then he looked at her again.

"That is not a — you do not have to be sorry," he said. "I am glad somebody was listening. I just — I did not know."

"I was going to stop before you saw me. I was going to keep it — I did not want you to — I did not want to make you uncomfortable."

"I am not uncomfortable."

"Okay."

"What is your name?"

"Rana."

"Ezra."

"I know."

"You know?"

"You are — famous. For playing. Everyone knows."

"No they don't."

"They do. I asked somebody."

"Who?"

"Aditi."

"Oh. Aditi. Okay. Well. I guess if Aditi knows, everyone knows."

"Yes."

They stood in the hallway. Ezra shifted his weight. Rana wondered if she should go, if this was the part where she should go.

"Can I ask you something?" Ezra said.

"Yes."

"Why Friday? Why the auditorium? Could you not just — listen to a recording of someone playing? Someone good? I am not good. I am still learning. If you want to listen to good guitar I can recommend —"

"You are good."

"I am not very good."

"You are good."

"Okay."

"And I could not listen to a recording. A recording is not the same."

"How is it not the same?"

Rana thought about it.

"In a recording," she said, slowly, "the music is already finished. It has already been played. It is — done. It is like looking at a photograph of a meal. You cannot smell it. You cannot — hear the cooking. In the auditorium, I can hear the cooking. I can hear you making it. I can hear when you stop and start over. That is — better."

Ezra looked at her for a long moment.

"You are Persian," he said.

"Yes."

"That was a very Persian answer."

"Was it?"

"My grandmother used to say things like that. About music. About food. She would go to restaurants and she would look at the menu and she would say, this food was cooked by someone who is not thinking. This one was cooked by someone who is in love. You could taste the difference, she said."

"Where is your grandmother from?"

"Lagos."

"Lagos?"

"Nigeria. She lived in Lagos her whole life. She died last year."

Rana looked at him. His face had gone still. The quiet face.

"I am sorry," she said.

"Thank you."

"Were you close to her?"

"My grandmother died two years ago," Rana said. "My father's mother also died, before I was born. I had one grandmother. She was my mother's mother. She was — she was my person. The way you describe your grandmother. That was mine."

"I am sorry."

"Thank you."

They stood in the hallway. The hallway was empty. Somewhere down the corridor a door slammed. A cart rolled past, pushed by a custodian Rana did not know.

"I am going home," Ezra said. "Were you going to the library?"

"Yes."

"I can walk you."

"To the library?"

"To the library."

"Okay."

Ezra picked up his guitar case. He hoisted it easily. They walked down the hallway, together, and their footsteps fell into step without either of them meaning to, and when they passed through the glass doors into the covered walkway between buildings, the sun was coming through the glass in wide bright slats and catching on the edge of Ezra's guitar case and on the sleeve of his sweater, and Rana thought, somewhere very far back in her head, that this was a moment she would remember.

---

They sat in the library. They did not study, particularly. Ezra had homework, and he opened a book, but he did not open the book in earnest. He talked to Rana, in a low voice, and Rana talked to him. She did not know why it was easy to talk to him. Perhaps because he was quiet himself, and her quietness did not seem to bother him. Perhaps because he had also lost a grandmother. Perhaps because he, too, knew what it was to have lived in more than one place.

He told her about Lagos. About Geneva. About the year his father had worked in Nairobi and the family had lived in a house with mango trees in the yard. He told her that he had six cousins his age, spread across three continents, and that his favorite of them was a girl named Ngozi who lived in London and wanted to be a diplomat like his father.

She told him about Tehran. About her grandmother. About her little brother and his green crayons. She did not tell him about her father. Not yet. She was not ready for that, and he, she sensed, was not asking.

She asked him, eventually, about the guitar.

"I started when I was six," he said. "My grandmother bought me a tiny one. She said I had the fingers for it. I played for a year and I quit because I thought I was bad at it. Then I started again when I was nine. Then I quit again when I was eleven. Then I started again when I was twelve and I have not stopped since. It took me a long time to understand that being bad at something is part of being good at it."

"I am bad at English."

"You are not bad at English."

"I am afraid to speak it."

"Those are different things."

"Are they?"

"I think so. You can be good at something and afraid to do it. You can be bad at something and not afraid at all. They do not — they are not the same."

Rana thought about it.

"Then I am good at English and afraid to speak it."

"Yes."

"That is — interesting. I will think about that."

"Good."

They sat in the library. Outside, the sky was turning the kind of late-afternoon blue that it turned in autumn. The light on the books was warm. Somewhere two boys were whispering and the librarian was not yet telling them to be quiet.

"Do you play for anyone?" Rana asked, after a while.

"Not really. Not on purpose. My teacher. My parents, sometimes, when they remember to ask. I am going to audition for a conservatory summer program in May. I will play for them. I will probably lose. But I want to try."

"You will not lose."

"You have not heard anyone else play."

"I do not need to."

"Okay."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"Can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"Will you play for me sometime? Not through a door. In the same room."

He looked at her. His face was still quiet, but there was a small change in his eyes.

"Yes," he said. "I will."

"When?"

"Whenever you want."

"Okay."

"Okay."

She looked down at the book in front of her. Her heart was doing an odd thing in her chest. Not exactly fast. Just — present. Her heart was being present in a way that it had not been in a long time.

She did not know what to do with that, so she did nothing. She opened her book. She pretended to read. And Ezra, beside her, opened his book, and the two of them sat there, in the library at Northgate, not studying, not talking, but there, together, in a silence that was neither empty nor awkward, a silence that was, Rana realized after a while, like the silence between two notes in a piece of music. A silence that was full.

---

She told Aditi about it that night, over text.

---

That night, she could not sleep. She lay in her bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, and she listened to Kian breathing, and she listened to the radiator clicking, and she listened to a siren pass somewhere on the avenue below, and she thought about Ezra's face in the hallway outside the auditorium, and she thought about his long fingers on the strings of the guitar, and she thought about how he had said you can be good at something and afraid to do it.

She thought about her father.

She thought about what her father would say about Ezra. Her father, who had always liked serious boys, boys who played instruments or who drew, boys who had something they cared about that was not themselves. Her father would have liked Ezra. Her father would have asked him questions about the guitar and he would have listened, really listened, to the answers.

Rana closed her eyes.

She said, in the dark, in her head, not out loud — because her father had said to her once, when she was eleven, when she had asked him if God could hear a prayer that was not said out loud, that God could hear the prayers you said only in your head, that those were the real prayers anyway —

Baba. I am still here. I am still a girl. I am fourteen and I am still a girl. I met a boy today who is kind and who plays the guitar. I think you would like him. I wanted you to know.

Then she turned onto her side and pressed her face into her pillow, and she slept.

---

It happened on a Tuesday.

It was an ordinary Tuesday. It had started as an ordinary Tuesday. Rana had woken up. Rana had made her bed. Rana had made Kian's bed while Kian was still in it. Rana had put tea in front of Kian's seat at the kitchen table. Rana had eaten toast. Rana had walked to the train. Rana had gone to school. Rana had had English, math, art, history, Spanish, and lunch. She had sat with Aditi and Miles. Coco had come and gone. Ezra had walked past their table on his way out of the cafeteria and he had caught her eye and nodded, just a small nod, and she had nodded back, and Aditi had kicked her under the table, and Rana had kicked her back.

It had been an ordinary Tuesday.

She had come home. She had done her homework at the kitchen table. Her mother had been sleeping. Kian had been at the Kadirs'. Rana had been alone in the apartment, working on an essay for history and listening to the radio her mother had left on in the kitchen, tuned to a talk station, the sound of American voices talking about American things a steady pleasant wash in the background.

The phone rang.

It was the landline. The old phone. The phone that existed for this.

Rana stopped writing.

She stood up slowly. She went into the kitchen. She looked at the phone on the wall. It rang again.

She looked down the hall toward her mother's bedroom. The door was closed. Her mother was asleep.

The phone rang a third time.

Rana picked it up.

"Alo?"

There was a pause. Then a woman's voice, Maryam's voice, the cousin in Tehran, speaking quickly and in a low tone.

"Rana jan. Is your mother there?"

"She is sleeping."

"Wake her."

"Auntie, what —"

"Wake her, jan. Now. Please."

Rana put down the phone. She went down the hall. She opened her mother's door. Her mother was asleep on her side, one arm under her pillow, her other hand curled up near her face. She looked very young when she slept. Younger than Rana had ever seen her.

"Maman."

Her mother did not move.

"Maman."

Her mother's eyes opened. She looked at Rana, and her eyes focused, and the focus had something sharp in it, because she already knew.

"Who is it?"

"Auntie Maryam."

Her mother sat up. She got out of bed. She walked past Rana, through the hallway, into the kitchen. She picked up the phone.

Rana stood in the kitchen doorway.

"Alo. Maryam. Yes. It is me. Yes."

Her mother put her hand over the mouthpiece. She looked at Rana.

"Go to your room, jan."

"Maman —"

"Rana. Please. Go to your room."

Rana went. She did not go to her room. She went halfway down the hall and sat down on the floor against the wall, so that she could hear. This was old behavior. She had done it many times as a child, and then as a not-child, and she did it now.

Her mother said, into the phone, "Okay. Yes. Yes. Go slowly. Go slowly, Maryam."

A long silence.

"The date is set?"

Another silence.

"Which court?"

A silence.

"No. No. That is — no."

Her mother made a small sound. It was a sound Rana had heard only three or four times in her life. It was the sound her mother made when something had struck her hard and she had not had time to brace for it. It was almost a laugh. It was almost the opposite of a laugh.

"Okay," her mother said. "Okay. I understand. I understand, Maryam. I understand."

A silence.

"What are they saying — what are they saying he will —"

A silence.

"How long?"

A silence.

Her mother said, "Maryam. Maryam. Maryam, please. Tell me the number."

A silence.

Her mother said, in a voice that Rana did not know, in a voice that was not a voice her mother had, "Ten to fifteen years."

Rana pressed herself against the wall. The wall was very cold. She did not feel her back against the wall. She felt, instead, a high ringing in her ears, and the sense that the hallway was shrinking around her.

Her mother said, more quietly, "And if it is the other charge —"

A silence.

"Execution."

The word hung in the air.

Her mother said, quickly, "No. No, he will not. He will not. They are playing the card. They are playing the card to frighten us. Do you understand? They are playing the card. It is a bargaining — yes. Yes. I know. Yes, I know, Maryam."

A long silence.

Her mother said, finally, "Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for telling me. I will — yes. I will call you later. I love you. Kiss your mother. Khoda hafez. Khoda hafez, jan."

The phone clicked onto the receiver.

For a long moment, her mother did not move. Rana could hear her breathing. Shallow, fast breaths, like she had been running.

Then her mother walked across the kitchen and opened the bathroom door, went in, closed the door. Rana heard the bathroom fan come on. Her mother had turned on the bathroom fan so that Rana would not hear her cry.

Rana put her head in her hands.

She did not cry. She could not cry. She felt instead — she felt nothing, was what she felt. She felt a kind of numbness that spread from her chest outward and reached her hands and her feet. She had read about this. She had read that in the first moments after a hard thing, you do not feel the hard thing. That comes later.

She sat on the floor in the hallway. She listened to her mother not-cry in the bathroom behind the fan. She listened to the radio in the kitchen still talking about American things. She listened to a car horn on the avenue. She listened to herself breathing.

After a long time — she did not know how long — her mother came out of the bathroom.

Her mother's eyes were red. Her mother's nose was red. Her mother's face, though, was composed. Her mother walked past Rana without pretending not to see her sitting on the floor. Her mother stopped. Her mother turned. Her mother sat down on the floor next to her.

They did not speak for a while.

Then her mother said, "How much did you hear?"

"Enough."

Her mother nodded. Her mother put her arm around Rana. Rana leaned into her mother's shoulder. Her mother was warm. Her mother smelled of detergent and of the sleep she had just come out of.

"His trial date is set," her mother said. "For Farvardin."

"That is in — four months."

"Four months. Yes."

"And the sentence —"

"The sentence has not happened yet. There is no sentence yet. There is only the charge. They are — they are going to charge him with teaching religion, which is ten to fifteen years. They have not charged him with the other thing yet. They may not. The other thing is — they do it to frighten people. They do it to make a family say, yes, we will pay you, we will give you the land, we will — yes. They do it to bargain."

"But they could."

"They could. It is unlikely."

"But they could."

Her mother was silent for a moment.

"Yes," she said, finally. "They could."

Rana pressed her face into her mother's shoulder.

"I am so angry," she said.

"I know, jan."

"I am so angry. I am so angry, Maman."

"I know."

"I want to — I want to —"

"I know, Rana."

"I want to go back. I want to go back and I want to — I do not know what I want to do. I want to break something. I want to go to his prison and I want to scream at them. I want —"

"I know. I know, jan."

"I do not know what to do with this."

"I do not know either."

"Your father. You know what he would say to us right now?"

"What."

"Maman."

"That is what he would say."

"I know."

"Maman."

"That is what he would say."

"I know what he would say, Maman."

"Then we will do it. We will do it, jan. That is how we — that is how we hold him. We do not give up our life. We do not give up our lives. He is in a cell. We are not. Our being in a cell with him does not help him."

"Maman, I want — I want to go —"

"You will go to school tomorrow."

"Maman —"

"You will go to school tomorrow. You will sit with your friends. You will turn in your assignments. You will — you will go to school, Rana. Do you hear me."

Rana nodded against her mother's shoulder.

"Yes, Maman," she said.

"Yes," her mother said. "Yes, jan."

They sat.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay, Maman."

Her mother got up. She smoothed her hair. She went and washed her face in the bathroom again. She came out with her face composed and a smile on her face. Her mother's smile, when she put it on, was so convincing that it could have fooled anyone in the world. It did not fool Rana. But it fooled Kian, later, when he came home with his plastic sword and the remains of someone else's birthday cake in a paper plate.

Rana, when her mother went out to get Kian, stayed on the floor of the hallway for another minute. Then she got up. She went to her room. She shut the door. She sat on her bed.

On her nightstand was the green notebook, the one her mother had bought her at Target, the one she had been using as a journal. She had written in it every night for weeks. She had written small things — what she had eaten, what she had done, what Aditi had said.

She opened the notebook. She turned to a fresh page. She wrote the date at the top. Mehr 24 / October 16.

She sat for a long time with the pen above the page.

She read what she had written. She read it again.

She did not know what she had meant, exactly. She knew that she meant it.

She put the pen down. She closed the notebook. She lay down on her bed, on her side, with her face to the wall, and she stayed there for a long time without moving.

When her mother came back with Kian, and Kian came running down the hall calling Khahar! Khahar! Look what Amir gave me! — Rana got up. Rana went out to see what Amir had given him. Rana admired the plastic dinosaur. Rana asked Kian to tell her all about it. Rana let Kian tell her all about it. Rana made Kian his dinner. Rana sat with Kian while he ate it. Rana read Kian a bedtime story. Rana kissed Kian on the forehead before he went to sleep. Rana tucked the blanket up under his chin. Rana turned out Kian's light. Rana closed Kian's door.

Then Rana went into the kitchen, where her mother was making tea, and she stood in the doorway, and her mother turned, and her mother opened her arms, and Rana went into her mother's arms, and she stood there, in the kitchen of their yellow brick apartment in America, and she did not cry, and her mother did not cry, and they stood for a long time, holding each other, in the kitchen in America, with the radio talking about American things.

---

Later, when her mother had gone to her shift — her mother had gone to work, because her mother had to go to work, because the rent had to be paid, because the world did not stop for a trial date four months away in another country — Rana sat in her room with the notebook open on her lap.

Tonight my mother told me that my father's trial is in four months. He is charged with teaching religion. The sentence is ten to fifteen years. There is another charge that they might bring, and if they bring it, the sentence could be worse. Much worse. The worst.

My mother says it is a bargaining tactic.

I do not know what my mother believes. I know what my mother says. Those are not always the same.

I am fourteen years old. I am a freshman at Northgate International School. I have a friend named Aditi. I have a friend named Miles. I have a — something — named Coco. I have a teacher named Mr. Hassan who says I am a writer. I have a boy I listen to through a door on Fridays, and today he came out through the door, and his name is Ezra, and he walked me to the library. I have a little brother named Kian who thinks our father is coming home. I have a mother who designed a hospital in Isfahan and who cleans offices on Thirty-Second Street.

I have a father who is in a cell.

I do not know how to be a person who has a father in a cell. I do not know how to go to school tomorrow and sit in English class and raise my hand if Mr. Hassan asks a question and know this inside of me. I do not know how to eat lunch with Aditi and laugh at her jokes and know this inside of me.

But I will. Because I have to.

Because my father would want me to.

Because my mother told me to.

Because Kian will wake up tomorrow and he will need his breakfast and he will need his jacket zipped up to his chin and he will need someone to walk him to Mrs. Kadir's, and if I am in a cell with my father, there is no one.

I am here. I don't know who that is.

But I am here.

She closed the notebook. She set it on the nightstand. She turned out the light.

She lay in the dark. She listened to Kian breathing. She listened to the radiator. She listened to the far-off sound of a siren.

She thought of her father in a cell. She thought of him sleeping, if he was sleeping. She thought of him awake, if he was awake.

She thought of him saying her name.

She closed her eyes.

Before she slept, she did something she had not done in three months. She said a prayer. Not the obligatory prayer. Just a prayer, a small private one, that she made up, that had the shape of a prayer in her chest.

Keep him warm tonight. Keep him not afraid. Let him sleep. Let him dream of us. Let him know we are here. I am here.

And she slept.

---

---

From Rana's green notebook, between Mehr 24 and the end of Part 1. Kept in the small hours, mostly in English, sometimes in Farsi. Not shared.

Mehr 25 / October 17.

I texted her after school.

---

Mehr 26 / October 18.

I did not tell Aditi everything. I told her the trial date is set. I told her it could be a long sentence. I did not tell her the other thing. I did not tell her what my mother said about the other thing. I do not want to say the word. I will not write the word. The word makes it real.

I do not know how to have a friend who is here either way. I will have to learn.

---

Mehr 27 / October 19.

Today in art class Miles asked me if I wanted to try painting. He said Ms. Greene was bringing out the watercolors. He said watercolors are the best paint because you do not have to plan. You just put the color down and the water decides what happens.

I painted a small square of blue and a small square of green and I let them run together. Where they ran together, they made a color I did not have a name for. It was not blue and it was not green. It was a color that was the decision of the water.

I have not given it a name yet. I will give it a name when I know one.

---

Mehr 28 / October 20.

Aditi made a small strangled sound.

---

Mehr 30 / October 22.

Friday today. I went to the auditorium. Ezra was there. He was playing the same piece as last week. The one that climbs and falls. I did not stand outside the door. I opened the door. I sat down in a seat in the back of the auditorium, quietly, and I listened from there. He did not stop playing. He did not look up for a long time.

I said yes.

We walked to the library. We sat in the library. We did not talk, really. We opened our books. We did our homework. I was reading for history. He was reading for AP Chemistry. At some point his hand, putting a book back on the table, brushed against my hand. Neither of us moved. Neither of us acknowledged it. But neither of us pulled our hand back, either, and our hands stayed next to each other on the table, not touching, for a very long time.

When I got home, I could still feel where his hand had been next to mine.

I do not know what that means.

I do not know how to think about what that means when my father is in a cell and the trial is in four months and I am supposed to be a daughter and a sister and a — and whatever I am in this country, that is who I am supposed to be, and now I am also a person whose hand is near another person's hand on a library table.

I am too many people.

---

Aban 2 / October 25.

Today my mother brought home a letter from the landlord. The landlord is raising the rent. My mother looked at the letter for a long time. Then she put it in the drawer with the other letters. She did not tell me what it said. I saw it when I was looking for a pen.

She does not know I saw it. I will not tell her I saw it.

---

Aban 4 / October 27.

He was quiet for a long time.

He went to sleep. I stayed awake for a long time thinking about his hands.

---

Aban 6 / October 29.

In English class today, Mr. Hassan passed out copies of the latest Crosshatch. My paper was in it. It was on page eleven. My name was at the top. Rana Mehdizadeh, Grade 9.

At lunch, Aditi had already seen it. She had a copy of the magazine open on the table.

I did not know what to say to that.

Miles, at the end of the table, had his own copy open. He had not said anything. He was looking at the page. He was not looking at my face. He just kept looking at the page.

He nodded.

Ezra came by the table. Ezra had a copy under his arm. Ezra had been carrying a copy of Crosshatch around for the whole day, I realized. He had already read it. I do not know when he had read it.

---

Aban 8 / October 31.

Tonight my mother said the short prayer before dinner. Out loud. The first time since we came to America. Kian said it with her. He remembered all the words. I had thought he might have forgotten.

I said it too. My voice was small. But I said it.

She did not say anything else. She ate her dinner. She went to her shift. I put Kian to bed.

Before I went to bed, I stood in the kitchen for a while. I stood by the phone on the wall. I put my hand on the phone. I did not say anything. I just stood there with my hand on the phone.

I took my hand off the phone. I went to bed.

---

Aban 9 / November 1.

One more thing before I close this notebook tonight.

I was walking home from school. I was alone. Kian was at the Kadirs'. Mother was sleeping. The afternoon was cold. I walked the long way because I wanted to think. I walked past the church on Forty-Seventh Street and I walked past the bodega on Forty-Sixth and I walked past the empty lot on Forty-Fifth with the graffiti and I walked past the tree on our corner that has lost almost all of its leaves now.

I was thinking about nothing in particular. I was thinking about the homework I had due and what I would make for dinner and whether my mother had remembered to take her vitamins and whether Ezra would be in the library tomorrow.

I turned the corner. A woman was walking toward me with a small child in a stroller. The child was maybe three years old. The child was bundled in a small blue coat. The child was saying something to the mother — I could not hear what — and the mother was laughing at whatever the child had said, and the mother bent down to the child and kissed the top of the child's head, and the child put a small hand on the mother's face, and they kept walking past me, and they did not see me, and they did not know I had seen them, and they were gone.

I walked the rest of the way home. I put my key in the door. I let myself in.

I am fourteen years old. I have two homes now. One is the kitchen of my grandmother in a city I may never see again. One is a yellow brick apartment above a laundromat in a city I live in now.

I will learn to live in both.

I will learn.

---

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

[CONTINUING FROM PART 1]

The days after the phone call moved the way water moves under ice. You could see them going, but you could not feel them.

Rana woke. Rana went to school. Rana sat in her chair at the third table from the window in Ms. Takahashi's classroom. Rana opened her notebook and did not write in it. Rana ate half a sandwich at lunch and wrapped the rest in the waxed paper her mother had folded the night before. Rana walked home. Rana watched Kian do his homework at the small table, watched his tongue stick out the left corner of his mouth the way it always did when he was concentrating, and then she went to her room and lay on her back and stared at the ceiling until the light changed.

It was not that she could not speak. It was that speaking felt like lifting something too heavy, and there was no reason to lift it, and there was nowhere for it to go.

Her mother knew. Her mother did not ask. Her mother set the tea down on the small table by her bed in the mornings, and the tea was always strong and sweet, and Rana drank it, and her mother touched her hair once, lightly, like a wing, and then went to work.

Kian did not know. Kian was seven and Kian believed that things were going to be fine because he had been told, before the phone call, that things were going to be fine, and nothing had overwritten that yet. He talked about a boy named Diego at his school who could do a backflip off the low wall. He talked about a cartoon in which a dog solved crimes. He talked about whether they could buy cereal with chocolate in it, the kind with the little marshmallows. Rana nodded at him. Sometimes she smiled, because Kian made smiles happen in her face even when she did not ask them to, and she was grateful for that, in a quiet way that lived somewhere under her ribs.

At school, she said the minimum. "Here," when attendance was called. "Thank you," when someone passed her a paper. "I don't know," when a teacher asked a question, though she often did know; she just did not have the strength to say more than three words in a row.

Miles noticed first. She could feel it. He did not ask. He sat next to her in art and pushed the charcoal box closer to her edge of the table and said nothing. He was working on a portrait of a man with a beard, and he worked slowly, and he did not look at her, but his shoulder was turned slightly toward her, the way a plant turns toward a window. She took a piece of charcoal. She drew a line on her page. It was not a good line. She drew another one. Miles did not look over. After a while, he put a new sheet of newsprint on top of her bad lines, very gently, as if covering a sleeping animal, and she started again.

"Sorry," she whispered to him once, because she could tell he was waiting to see if she would say anything, and she wanted him to know she was still inside her body.

"Don't," Miles said. His voice was so low she almost didn't hear it. "You don't have to be sorry for anything."

Aditi came next. Aditi was not quiet. Aditi was not a not-asking person by nature. But Aditi knew how to show up, and that was a thing Rana had not known existed as a skill until she had seen Aditi do it.

On Tuesday, Aditi waited for her at the blue bench by the cafeteria. She did not wave. She just stood up when she saw Rana and fell into step beside her as if they had always been walking there together. She talked about a book she was reading, about a girl who could talk to birds. She talked about how her little cousin had put a piece of naan on his head at dinner and called it a hat. She did not ask Rana anything except, "Do you want to sit inside or outside?" and when Rana said, "Inside," Aditi sat inside with her and unpacked her lunch and ate it and kept talking, softly, like she was narrating a quiet film.

On Wednesday, Aditi brought her a small paper bag. Inside was an orange.

"My mom said you should have this," Aditi said. "She said Iranian oranges are the best in the world and this one is not as good but it is a reminder."

Rana held the orange. It was not a special orange. It was a regular grocery-store orange with a little sticker on it. She held it and her eyes filled, which they had not done in three days, and she was afraid for a second that she was going to start crying in the cafeteria, but she did not. She put the orange in her bag. She ate it that night by her bedroom window with Kian asleep in the next room and her mother doing dishes in the kitchen, and every section of it tasted like something she had forgotten she knew.

On Thursday, in English, Ms. Takahashi asked them to write for ten minutes about a moment of quiet. She said the word "moment" and she said the word "quiet" and she said, "Try not to explain. Just show me the quiet."

*In my grandmother's house there was a hallway with a small blue rug at the end of it, and at the end of the hallway there was a window, and at the end of the window there was a courtyard, and in the courtyard there was a pomegranate tree that my grandmother had planted the year my father was born. When I was small I used to walk down the hallway very slowly because I liked how the rug felt on the bottoms of my feet, and I would stand at the window and I would watch the pomegranate tree, and the tree did not do anything. It just was. And I would stand there and be quiet with it, and it would be quiet with me, and when my mother called me I would come back down the hallway, and I would not tell her where I had been, because it was not a place you told people about. It was a place you just went.*

She looked at what she had written. She did not like that she had written the word "grandmother" because her grandmother had died two years ago and she did not like to write the word down, it made the word too permanent. But she also did not cross it out.

Ms. Takahashi did not ask them to share. Rana was grateful for that. Ms. Takahashi was a small woman with short, neat gray hair and a very clean desk and a way of looking at you that made you feel that you were a real person, not a student, not a number. She walked between the rows and she glanced at their pages and she did not say anything, and when she passed Rana's desk she paused for only a second, and Rana felt her pause, and Rana felt her read, and Rana felt her move on.

After class, when everyone else had left, Ms. Takahashi said, "Rana. A moment."

Rana stopped at the door. She had been waiting for this, in some part of her mind, without knowing she had been waiting for it.

"Come sit," Ms. Takahashi said, and she gestured at the chair next to her desk, not in front of it.

Rana sat.

Ms. Takahashi did not say anything for a moment. Then she said, "I am not going to ask you what is happening at home. I want to tell you that if you ever want to tell me, you can. And if you never want to tell me, that is also fine. I am not the kind of teacher who needs to know things."

Rana nodded. She could feel, in the back of her throat, the hard place that meant she should not try to speak. She stayed silent.

"I want to say one other thing," Ms. Takahashi said. "Your writing is good. I do not mean good for your age. I do not mean good for a student new to English. I mean good." She paused. "I think you already know that. But I am going to say it anyway, because sometimes even when we know a thing, we need another person to say it out loud."

Rana, without planning to, said, "Thank you."

Ms. Takahashi nodded. "Okay. Go eat your lunch."

Rana stood. At the door she turned. "Ms. Takahashi."

"Yes."

"In my country we have a poet." She had not meant to say this. She did not know why she was saying it. "My grandmother liked her. Her name is —" She said the name.

Ms. Takahashi smiled. It was a small smile, but it was a real one. "I know her," she said. "I'll bring you something on Monday."

Rana walked out. In the hallway the bell had already rung and the second-period students were filing past her, and she walked against them, and she held her books against her chest, and she thought, for the first time in four days, about something that was not her father.

She thought about a poet. A woman. In the language she had grown up in. A book that might exist, that she had not read, that a teacher in a country that was not hers had said she would bring to her.

It was a small thing.

It was the first small thing.

That evening, when her mother got home from work, she came into Rana's room and sat on the edge of the bed. Her mother was tired. Her mother was always tired now, in a way that had grown a shape, so that you could see the shape of the tiredness even when her face was not doing anything. Her mother had small lines at the corners of her eyes that had not been there in Tehran, or had been there but had not been so deep. Her mother's hands, which Rana had remembered her whole childhood as architect's hands, neat and clean and moving over paper with certainty, were now the hands of a woman who cleaned for a living. They were raw at the knuckles. There was a small scrape, healing, on the back of her right hand.

"You are quiet," her mother said.

"Yes," Rana said.

"It is all right to be quiet."

"Yes."

Her mother put her hand on Rana's ankle over the blanket. She did not press. She just put it there.

"Your father would want you to eat," she said, after a long moment.

Rana looked at her. "That is the smallest thing he would want."

"Yes," her mother said. "But it is a thing. We start with the small ones."

Rana did not cry, because she had not cried in four days and she did not know how to start now. But she sat up, and she put her feet on the cold floor, and she followed her mother out into the kitchen, and she ate a bowl of rice with a piece of fish her mother had cooked, and Kian said something funny about a boy at his school who had sneezed into his own soup, and Rana did not laugh, but she made her face do the shape of something close to laughing, and her mother saw it and did not say anything about it, which was the best thing anybody had done for her all week.

That night, before bed, she opened her notebook. She did not write about her father. She did not write about the phone call. She did not write about the word "trial," which was a word in English that did not mean the same thing as it meant in Farsi, and she did not want to think about either meaning tonight.

She closed the notebook. She turned out the light. Outside her window, the city made its city sounds, which were not the sounds of Tehran, which would never be the sounds of Tehran. She listened to them anyway. She let them be what they were.

She slept.

On Friday morning, Rana stood at her locker for a long time before opening it. Her combination was not complicated, but her fingers had gotten slow and clumsy in the past week, the way fingers sometimes do when the mind is elsewhere. She dialed the numbers three times before the lock gave. Inside, her books were stacked the way she had left them, her gym shoes pushed to the back, a small photograph of Kian taped to the inside of the door — Kian at four, laughing, in her grandmother's courtyard. She had taped the picture there on her first day at Northgate and had almost forgotten it was there, because she no longer looked at it, exactly; she had memorized the way it hung, the angle of the tape, the small crease in the upper left corner where her thumb had folded it by accident.

She looked at it now. Kian at four. The pomegranate tree in the background. Her grandmother's hand at the edge of the frame, just visible, holding a cup.

She closed the locker.

Aditi was waiting at the end of the hallway. She did not wave. She just started walking when she saw Rana, slowly, so that Rana would catch up. They walked to English class together in silence. Aditi had gotten good, Rana thought, at being a silent person when silence was what the other person needed. Aditi was not a silent person by nature. Aditi had to work at it. Rana could feel her working. It was a kind of gift, work.

At the classroom door Aditi said, "Lunch?"

Rana nodded.

"Inside or outside?"

"Inside."

"Okay."

They parted. Rana went to her desk. She sat. Ms. Takahashi was writing something on the board. Other students were coming in. A boy named Hector dropped his textbook and the sound in the quiet classroom was loud enough that everyone looked up, even Rana, and for a second she was back in the kitchen in Tehran hearing a glass fall from a shelf, a glass her mother had loved, the glass that had broken on the tile and that her mother had picked up piece by piece without saying a word. She had not thought of that memory in years. She did not know why it came now. She blinked. The classroom returned.

Rana opened her notebook.

Monday came, and the book was there.

Ms. Takahashi put the book on her desk during second period without saying anything. Just walked by, set it down, kept going, as if she had forgotten it there. Rana understood the gesture. She slid the book into her bag.

At lunch, she found a corner of the library where nobody was sitting. The library at Northgate International was on the second floor, and it had big windows that looked out over the courtyard where the younger students played soccer in their blazers at recess. There was a particular armchair, green, that was too deep for most people to sit in comfortably; she had learned that if you curled into it a certain way, you could disappear.

She opened the book.

The translator's note was two pages long. She read it twice. The translator wrote about a poet who had been a woman in a country where women were not supposed to write the things she wrote, who had written them anyway, who had loved and been married badly and left her husband and lost her son and made films and died young in a car accident at thirty-two. Rana knew some of this. Her grandmother had told her some of it in pieces, over years, the way grandmothers tell things, in fragments that take decades to assemble.

She turned to the first poem.

Then she read the English.

The English was not the same. It was never going to be the same. But it was a door. The translator had found a door.

She sat in the green chair and she read five poems. She read them slowly. Some of the lines stopped her, and she sat with them, and she let them stop her for as long as they wanted to, and when she came out of them she did not feel the way she had felt walking in.

She thought, for the first time, not *I am alone* but *someone else was in this room.*

Not this exact room. Not this library, not this armchair, not this city. But this room. The inside room. The one where she had been sitting by herself for weeks.

Someone had been here. Someone had written from here. Someone had died, and their words had lived, and the words had found their way across an ocean and a language and a whole set of borders that Rana had crossed not too long ago herself, and the words had been put on her desk by a small woman with short gray hair who had not asked for thanks.

She closed the book. She held it in both hands.

It was a large thought, and it was a small thought, and it was also a door.

After school that day, she did not go home right away. She walked to the park at the end of the block and she sat on a bench, and she took out her notebook, and for the first time in six days, she wrote something that was not about her father and was not about hiding.

She did not answer. The answering was not the point. The asking was the point. She underlined the questions, and she closed the notebook, and she walked home, and she told her mother, when her mother came in from work, about a book. Her mother's face did something, when she said the poet's name. Her mother took the book from her, gently, and opened it to a page and read silently for a moment, and then her mother said, "She is not an easy one. But she is a good one to know."

"Did you read her?"

"Your father read her to me once," her mother said. "On a balcony. In the first year we were married."

Her mother did not say anything else. She handed the book back. She went to start dinner. Rana watched her. Her mother's shoulders were the shoulders of a person who had just heard, for a moment, a song she had not heard in a long time.

Over the next week, Rana's writing in English class changed.

It was not a dramatic change. Nobody threw her a parade. Ms. Takahashi did not even say anything about it for a while. But something had loosened. She had been writing, before, like a person translating herself in real time, trying to get the Farsi version across the bridge into English and then polishing it on the other side. Now she was writing differently. She was writing from the inside of the English, not from above it. She was letting the English be broken when it needed to be broken. She was letting the sentences be short. She was trusting that a short sentence could be a true sentence.

Rana wrote about the hallway in her grandmother's house. But she wrote it differently than she had written it before. She wrote about the rug. She wrote about the window. She wrote about the light that came through the window at four o'clock in the afternoon in late autumn, when the pomegranate was full and the tree had started to loosen its fruit, and a pomegranate had fallen once while she was watching, and the sound it had made on the tile courtyard had stayed with her for years, not because it was a loud sound but because it was such a particular sound, a small heavy sound that she had not known existed until it was over.

Ms. Takahashi handed the paper back with one word written in the margin, in pencil.

*Yes.*

Rana ran her thumb over the word. She did not know what she had expected. A grade. A paragraph of feedback. Not a single word in pencil that felt like someone had laid a hand very lightly on her shoulder and said, *I see you. Keep going.*

She kept going.

She started writing at night, after Kian was asleep and her mother had gone to bed. She wrote in her notebook. She did not write for anyone. She wrote about her grandmother's kitchen, about the sound of the samovar, about a wedding she had been taken to when she was six where a woman had cried so hard at a song that other women had helped her sit down. She wrote about the shape of her father's hands on a steering wheel, the particular way he held it, with two fingers on the top and the thumb tucked under, which was a way she had never seen anyone else hold a steering wheel. She wrote about the day they had left, and about the airport, and about how her mother had not let her look back, had held her face forward with a hand on her chin, not unkindly, and had said, "Forward, *azizam*, forward."

She wrote about forward.

She wrote about what forward cost.

She wrote about what forward was for.

She did not know the answers. But she was writing the questions, and she had never written questions like these before, and she understood, slowly, that to ask a question in writing was a different act than to ask a question in your head. In your head, the question was a cloud; on the page, the question was a shape, and you could walk around it, and you could look at it from different sides.

Ms. Takahashi said, in the hallway one afternoon, "Are you writing outside of class?"

Rana nodded.

"Good," Ms. Takahashi said. "Keep it in one notebook. A nice one. Not on scraps. You will want to find them later."

Rana bought a new notebook that weekend. It was not expensive. She had only a little money that her mother gave her, and she spent most of it on the notebook and the rest on a pen with blue ink. The notebook had a hard black cover and blank pages. She did not write anything on the first page for three days. She was afraid of the first page.

She closed the notebook. She put it under her pillow. She slept.

In the morning, she woke up, and the notebook was still there. It had not disappeared in the night. Nobody had read it. Her mother had not come in and found it and shaken her head. Kian had not scribbled on it. It was hers. It was a thing that was hers.

She had not known, before, how much a thing that was hers could steady her. She was finding out.

Ms. Takahashi gave her a list of poets that weekend. She brought it into class on Monday and set it on Rana's desk without comment, the way she had set the blue book. The list was handwritten on a piece of lined paper torn from a small notebook, and it had ten names on it, in Ms. Takahashi's neat sharp handwriting. Some of the poets Rana recognized. Some she did not. Next to each name, Ms. Takahashi had written a small note — "start with the later poems," "read aloud," "this one is difficult but worth it," "don't worry if you don't understand the first time."

Rana took the list home. She did not go to the library for any of them that week, because she was still reading the blue book, slowly, and she did not want to rush. But she kept the list folded in the front of her black notebook, where she could see it.

That week, she found that she could write more easily. It was as if the writing, which had been a small leak for weeks, had widened into a steady trickle. She did not write anything dramatic. She wrote descriptions. She wrote a description of the sound of the refrigerator in their apartment. She wrote a description of Kian's feet when he ran in socks on the linoleum floor. She wrote a description of the bus driver on the route she took home, a woman with a kind face and one silver tooth who said "evening, girls" to the girls getting on after school, and "evening, sir" to the old men, and who sang, quietly, when she thought nobody could hear, songs that were not in English and were not in Farsi, songs that were in some third language Rana could not place.

She showed none of these to anyone. They were practice. She knew what practice was, now. She had not known, before this year, that practice was a thing you did in writing. She had thought you just wrote what you wrote and either it was good or it was not. She knew now. She was starting to know. A description was a push-up. A page was a mile. You had to do them and do them and do them, and one day your arms were strong, or your legs, and you did not remember the day you had gotten strong; you had only been doing push-ups.

She thought about this, about the relationship between practice and strength, and she wrote it down in the black notebook, and she drew a line under it, and she went to sleep.

Ezra Okonkwo did not ask easy questions.

Rana had noticed this about him from the first time she had heard him speak in the music room, which had been before she had ever met him. She had been walking down the hallway of the arts wing, passing the practice rooms with their little rectangular windows, and she had heard a voice inside one of them saying, "No, but why is that chord happening there? What does it want?" And a teacher had said something, and Ezra had said, "Yes but why. That's not why. That's what, that's not why." And Rana had kept walking, not knowing at the time that the voice belonged to a boy she would come to know.

He found her in the courtyard two weeks after the blue book arrived.

She was sitting alone, not unhappy about being alone, with her notebook open on her knees. It was the first warm day of the year. The sun had changed its angle, the way it always did at the edge of winter, and the courtyard had become, for an afternoon, a place where you could sit without a coat.

Ezra said, "Can I sit?"

Rana looked up.

Ezra was tall, taller than most of the other boys, with a guitar case slung across his back and a pair of wire-framed glasses that he pushed up his nose with one knuckle, repeatedly, as if the gesture itself was part of how he thought. He was Nigerian-American. He had a kind of stillness when he played — Rana had seen him play once, at an assembly — that was the stillness of a person listening harder than most people listen.

"Yes," Rana said.

He sat. He put the guitar case down carefully next to him, flat on the bench. He did not rush to speak. Rana liked that. A lot of the boys at this school, she had noticed, rushed to speak.

"I'm working on a piece," he said, after a minute. "I need help."

"With what?"

"With Persian scales."

Rana looked at him. She had not been expecting him to say the word *Persian*. It was not a word that usually showed up in sentences boys her age said to her.

"I'm not a musician," she said.

"I know."

"My grandmother sang."

"I know."

"How do you know?"

"Aditi mentioned it."

"Ah."

He pushed his glasses up. He did not smile, exactly, but something at the corner of his mouth moved.

"I'm writing a guitar piece," he said. "It's a commission. Well — not a commission. It's for a competition. The prompt is 'a musical translation.' And I want to translate something from outside the Western tradition. And I've been listening to Persian music for six weeks, and I think I understand the *dastgah* system a little, but I do not understand it the way you would understand a language you grew up inside. I understand it the way I would understand a language I had started learning six weeks ago. And I don't want to write a fake thing. I want to write something that is — at least — honest about what I don't know."

Rana considered this.

"I also don't know the dastgah system," she said. "Not formally. I know what my grandmother sang. And what I heard at weddings. And on the radio in my uncle's car. I am not a scholar."

"That's fine," Ezra said. "I don't need a scholar. I need an ear. I have tried to find an ear. I have an ear that studied at Tehran University. He answers my emails once every two weeks and he writes things like 'you must study for ten years before attempting this.' Which is true. But I have to turn something in in March. So."

Rana almost laughed. She did not, but she almost did, and he saw it.

"So what do you need from me?" she said.

"I need you," Ezra said, "to hum scales your grandmother taught you, and to tell me when I get a note wrong, and to tell me when something I have written sounds like something you have heard or sounds like something you have not."

"That's not much."

"It's a lot."

She thought about it. She was afraid, for a flash of a moment, that this was a way of being singled out, a way of being *the Persian one*, a way of being a costume on a boy's project. Then she looked at him, at the very serious way he was holding his hands on top of his knees, at the glasses pushed up again, and she understood that he was not like that. He was asking because he needed to ask, and he had asked her because she was the one he could ask. That was different.

"All right," she said. "After school? Tuesday and Thursday?"

"Tuesday and Thursday," he said. "Practice room three. I'll bring the guitar. You bring — yourself."

"That is a low bar."

"It is a high bar."

This time she did laugh. A small one. But a real one. It was the first laugh of its size that had come out of her in three weeks.

They started on Tuesday.

Practice room three was small, with a piano she could not imagine anyone actually playing, and two chairs, and a music stand. Ezra unpacked the guitar — a classical, with nylon strings — and he sat and he tuned it, slowly, methodically, his ear tilted down to the body of the instrument.

"Okay," he said, when he was ready. "I'll play something. You tell me what it's missing."

He played. It was a piece he had written. It was pretty. It had a kind of cascading quality, like water down a hill. She closed her eyes to listen.

When he stopped, she said, "It is pretty."

"Pretty isn't the goal."

"No."

"What is it missing."

"I have to think."

"Take your time."

She thought. It was not that she had ever analyzed music before. She had only ever listened. But as she thought, she realized that what he had played was missing something that her grandmother's songs had always had, and she did not know the technical name for the thing, but she knew how to describe it.

"It is too even," she said. "It is all even. Persian music — the pieces I know — they breathe. There are places where the note hangs. Longer than you think it will. And then the next thing comes. And then there are places where the notes are close together, like a person whispering. But it is never even. Your piece is even. It is like a river. Our music — the music I know — is more like a — like a conversation."

Ezra was nodding. He was writing something in a notebook he had produced from somewhere. He was writing fast.

"Keep going," he said.

"And there are notes in between notes. There are — I don't know what you call them. Notes that are not exactly the note. That slide. That are between."

"Microtones."

"Maybe. I don't know."

"Okay. Okay. Hum me something."

"I cannot sing."

"You are not singing. You are humming."

"I will be embarrassed."

"I will also be embarrassed. That is the deal. We embarrass each other for three months and at the end there is a piece."

She made a sound halfway between a laugh and a cough. Then she hummed. She hummed a melody her grandmother had hummed when she washed dishes — she had not known, until she started, that she would remember it note for note. Her grandmother had been dead two years. But the notes were still in her. She hummed them the way she had heard them, with the breaths where the breaths went, and the hangs where the hangs went, and with one slide — a tiny slide — that she had always loved without knowing she had loved it.

She opened her eyes. Ezra was looking at her. His hands were still.

"Do it again," he said.

She did it again.

"One more time. Slower."

She did it a third time, slower.

"That note," he said. "The one you slid. Can you hum just that note without sliding, and then slide?"

She did.

He picked up the guitar. He found the note. He played it. Then he slid to it. Then he played it and slid to it. He played the whole melody, awkwardly, feeling for it. He played it again, less awkwardly. He stopped.

"That is — " he said, and then he did not finish the sentence.

Rana did not say anything.

He played it again. This time it was not awkward. This time it was a small melody on a guitar, a melody that a grandmother she had never met had hummed in a kitchen in Tehran, and it had crossed the world in her own throat and landed in the fingers of a Nigerian-American boy in a practice room in a school on a hill in another country, and it was still, in some way, the same melody. It had a different body now. But it was the same.

Rana felt her throat go tight. Not from sadness. From something else. From the feeling of a thing being carried.

"It is not the same," she said.

"I know."

"But it is —"

"I know."

They did not say anything for a moment.

"Again Thursday?" he said.

"Again Thursday," she said.

They met Tuesday and Thursday for five weeks. Sometimes they worked in silence for long stretches, Ezra writing on his staff paper, Rana with her notebook on her knee, humming occasionally when he asked. Sometimes they talked. They talked about music, mostly. But sometimes about other things. He told her about his family. His father was a doctor. His mother was a professor. He was the youngest of three. His older brother had gone to a conservatory in the States and his older sister was studying law in London. Nobody in his family played guitar seriously. He had picked it up at nine and everyone had assumed he would get tired of it. He had not.

"And you," he said once. "What do your parents do?"

He said it in the present tense. He did not know. She had not told him.

She said, quietly, "My mother is a custodian."

He nodded. He did not flinch. He did not say, *oh*. He did not adjust his tone.

"And your father?"

"My father is in prison," she said. "In Iran."

The words hung in the practice room like a note she had held too long.

Ezra put his guitar down carefully on his knees. He did not say anything right away. He did not try to fix it. He just held the silence with her, the way Miles had held the silence in art class, and she recognized, not for the first time, that there were people in her life now who knew how to do this, and this was a skill she had not known she was going to need in such abundance.

"I am sorry," he said finally. "Thank you for telling me."

"Thank you for not asking more."

"Okay."

They sat.

After a long minute, he said, "Does it help? Doing this?"

She thought about it. She had not thought about whether it helped. She had just kept doing it.

"Yes," she said. "I think it does."

"Okay."

"I think," she said, and she was speaking slowly, feeling her way, "that when you play the melody on the guitar, it is as if my grandmother exists for one more minute. That is not exactly what is happening. But it is close enough. And a minute is a minute."

Ezra nodded. He did not say anything. He lifted the guitar. He played the melody again. Slowly. The slide in the right place. The breath in the right place.

Rana closed her eyes.

A minute was a minute.

She let it be that.

On the fifth Tuesday, Ezra brought a small recording device. It was a narrow black thing that looked like a pen. He put it on the music stand between them.

"I want to record you humming, if that is okay," he said. "For me. Not for anyone else. I want to listen to the way you breathe the melody. I cannot hear it from inside myself. I have been trying to play it the way you hum it, and I am close, but not exact. If I could have the recording I could listen to it at home and I could match it."

Rana considered.

"You will not play it for anyone."

"I will not play it for anyone. I promise."

"You will delete it when the piece is finished."

"I will delete it when the piece is finished."

"Okay."

He pressed the little red button on the recorder. She took a breath. She hummed the melody. She hummed it twice, the second time slower, because he had asked, weeks ago, for slower. She hummed it a third time, softly, more to herself than to him, and he let that one run too, and she could hear her own breath in the quiet between the phrases, and it was strange to hear herself in a room that was not inside her own head.

He stopped the recorder. He nodded.

"Thank you."

"That is weird."

"I know it is weird."

"I could not hear myself like that before."

"No."

"It did not sound like me."

"That is because you have never heard yourself from outside yourself before. Nobody sounds the way they think they sound."

"Is it bad? What I sound like?"

He looked up at her.

"No," he said. He said it very simply, without making a thing of it. "It is beautiful. It is something your grandmother would be proud of. It is nothing you need to apologize for."

She did not know what to say to that. She looked at her hands. She had started, lately, to notice the shape of her own hands more than she used to. They were her mother's hands, a little. They were her grandmother's hands, a little. They were becoming, in some gradual way, the hands she would have when she was an old woman, which was a strange thing to think at fourteen, but she thought it, sometimes.

She said, "Okay."

"Okay," he said.

They worked on something else for the rest of the hour. He played her a section he had reworked the night before. She listened. She told him the one place where it was still too even, where it needed a breath. He nodded. He marked it. They ran it again. The new version had the breath. It was better. He grinned, briefly, and adjusted his glasses, and Rana thought, for the first time, that Ezra was a boy who did not grin very often, and that when he did it was a real thing, and she was a little proud, in a complicated way, that she had helped cause one.

The piece was finished three weeks later. He played the whole thing for her in practice room three on a Thursday after school. It was seven minutes long. She sat very still through all seven minutes. When it was over, she did not speak for a moment.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"I think my grandmother would have liked it."

"Really?"

"Yes. I think she would have said it was different. I think she would have said it was not what she was used to. But she would have liked it."

"I will take that."

"You should."

He submitted it to the competition a week later. He did not tell her when the results would come. He did not talk about the competition, after the submission, as if not talking about it was a way of not being disappointed if he did not win. Rana understood that. She understood also that she had helped make a thing that was now out in the world, that was going to be heard by strangers, that would live whether or not it won anything. That was its own kind of result. She told Ezra so, one afternoon, and he nodded, and he said, "Yes. I know." And she knew that he did know. He was that kind of boy. He had known it before she said it. He had just wanted, she thought, to hear someone else say it out loud.

Her uncle lived six hours away, in a smaller city with a river running through it and a university on a hill. They took a bus. The bus had a television at the front that played a movie with the sound too loud, and her mother slept through most of it, her head tipped against the window, her mouth slightly open. Kian, in the seat next to Rana, played a game on a borrowed phone for two hours and then fell asleep with his cheek pressed to her shoulder.

Rana watched the country go by. It was winter here in a way that was different from winter in Tehran. Tehran had snow sometimes, and cold, and the cold was dry and the light in winter was the color of pale honey. Here, the winter was wet. The fields were brown and the trees were black and the sky was the color of a washed pot, uniform and tired.

Her uncle met them at the bus station. His name was Farhad. He was her father's younger brother. He had been in America for twelve years, long enough that his English was fluent and his Farsi had the accent of a person who lived mostly in another language. He hugged her mother. He hugged Kian, who was half asleep and pliant. He looked at Rana for a long moment before he hugged her.

"You have grown," he said, in Farsi.

"Yes," she said.

"You look like your father."

"Thank you."

He drove them home. His car was warm and smelled like old coffee. His wife, Mahnaz, was waiting on the porch. Their two small children, cousins Rana had never met, a girl of four and a boy of two, peeked from behind her legs.

Mahnaz was younger than her mother by perhaps ten years. She had been born in America, or had come when she was small, Rana was not sure. She spoke Farsi with the careful pronunciation of a person who had learned it from her parents and had practiced it on purpose rather than absorbed it through her skin.

The house was small but clean. There were three bedrooms. Rana and Kian would share a room with the little cousins; her mother would sleep on a pullout couch in the living room. This had been decided before they came. Her mother had been grateful, had said so on the phone, and Rana had watched her mother's face as she said it and had understood that gratitude and humiliation were sometimes the same face, seen from different sides.

The first night, they ate a long dinner. Mahnaz had cooked ghormeh sabzi, and the smell of it when Rana walked into the kitchen was so much like her grandmother's kitchen that she had to stop in the doorway and put her hand on the frame for a second and breathe. Her uncle noticed. Her uncle did not say anything. Her uncle put his hand on her back, briefly, and moved past her to the table.

They ate. The children were too young to sit still for long, so they ate in shifts. The adults talked, the three adults, for Rana was counted, for the first time, as old enough to be in the adult talk. They talked about her father. Her uncle asked careful questions. Her mother answered them as well as she could. There were things her mother did not know. There were things her mother knew but did not want to say in front of Kian, who was tucked into the corner of the couch eating slowly, half listening the way he half-listened to everything, not understanding some of it and understanding more of it than the adults thought he did.

Rana ate. She did not say much.

Her aunt had a way of asking questions that Rana found difficult. It was not that the questions were bad. It was that they came one after another, without pause, and they came with a kind of briskness, as if her aunt were trying to fit Rana into a shape that was already prepared, as if the aunt had decided who Rana was going to be in the family and was now gathering the data to confirm it.

"Do you like your school?"

"Yes."

"Are you making friends?"

"Yes."

"American friends?"

"Some."

"That is important. To have American friends. So that you do not only have Iranian friends. Iranian friends are good, but you need the American ones for, you know, for moving through things."

"Yes."

"Are you getting good grades?"

"I think so."

"Your mother says you are."

"Yes."

"Your English is good?"

"It is getting better."

"That is the most important thing. The English. Without the English you cannot do anything here. I tell Leila," her four-year-old daughter, "I tell her every day, English first, Farsi after. Because without the English you are lost."

She did not say it.

Later, her aunt asked, "Are you seeing anyone at the school?"

Rana did not understand for a moment.

"A boy?" her aunt said.

"No."

"Good. It is too early. Focus on school."

"Yes."

"I went out with a boy when I was your age. I will not tell your uncle." Her aunt laughed, a single bright laugh. "But I will tell you. It was the worst thing. He was stupid. I wasted a year on him. You have to be careful. The boys here are different. They will tell you many things."

Rana nodded again.

"Do you pray?"

This one surprised her.

"Sometimes," she said.

"Your mother says your family are Bahai."

"Yes."

"I did not know before. Farhad did not tell me for a long time. He said it did not matter. But it matters, a little." Her aunt looked at her. Her aunt was not unkind. Her aunt, Rana understood, was trying, in her way, to figure out what her new niece believed, so that she could know how to hold her. "I am Muslim," her aunt said. "Not strict. But I am Muslim. Farhad, too, technically, though he does not pray. But your father, "

"My father is Bahai," Rana said. "My mother is Bahai. My grandmother was Bahai. That is why my father is in prison."

The sentence came out of her without warning. She had not intended to say the last part. Her aunt's face did something, a small flinch, not unsympathetic, but surprised.

"Yes," her aunt said. "Yes. I know. I am sorry. I did not mean, "

"It is all right."

"I only meant, "

"I know. It is all right."

There was a long silence. Her uncle had come in from the other room and was standing in the doorway, looking at them.

"Mahnaz," her uncle said gently. "Azizam. Let her rest. It has been a long day."

Her aunt nodded. She touched Rana's arm, lightly. "You are welcome here," she said. "I am saying it badly. But you are welcome. You will always be welcome."

"Thank you," Rana said.

She went to bed that night in the room she was sharing with Kian and the cousins, and she lay under a blanket that smelled like a detergent she did not know, and she listened to Kian's breathing and the small breathing of the four-year-old and the smaller breathing of the two-year-old, and she could not sleep. She had not expected to feel as tired as she felt. She had not expected the questions to tire her. She had not expected that defending the shape of her life would be a thing she would have to do even among her own family.

She got out of bed quietly. She walked on bare feet down the hallway, past the pullout couch where her mother was asleep, her mother's face half buried in the pillow, her mother's hand curled near her chin the way Kian sometimes slept. Rana stood for a moment and watched her mother sleep. Her mother looked younger asleep than she did awake. The tiredness was not on her face yet; it collected there only during the day, the way dust collects.

Rana took her uncle's spare coat from the hook by the door and put on her shoes and went outside.

There was a park two blocks away. She had seen it on the drive from the bus station. It was small, just a square of grass, some benches, a small pond, a skating rink. It was nearly midnight. She did not know if the park would be open. She walked anyway.

The rink was open. Not open exactly, there was no attendant, but the lights were on. A sign said it was a community rink and it was free and it was open until eleven, but it was past eleven now and nobody had come to turn off the lights. Two teenagers were still out on the ice, holding hands, skating slowly, their laughter small in the cold.

Rana sat on a bench at the edge of the rink. She pulled her uncle's coat tighter around her.

She watched the two teenagers. They were not good skaters. They kept almost falling. One of them, a girl, did fall, and the boy she was with pulled her up, laughing, and the girl was laughing too, and the laugh carried across the ice in a way that sounds carry over ice, clearer and farther than they should.

Rana thought about Tehran in winter.

She thought about the way it had snowed once, hard, when she was ten, and how her father had taken her and Kian (who had been four then, and had barely known what snow was) out into the street, and they had walked to the park near their building, and her father had made a snowball and had thrown it at a tree, and Kian had shrieked with laughter. She thought about the way her mother had come down twenty minutes later with a thermos of tea and three small cups, and they had sat on a bench, this bench she was sitting on now was not the same bench, but the shape of sitting on a bench in a park was the same shape, and they had drunk the tea together, and the snow had kept falling, and her father had said, This, this, look at this, and her mother had laughed at him, affectionately, because he had always said look at this at every beautiful thing, every sunset, every bird, every time the light hit the window a certain way at the end of the day. Look at this. This is a gift.

She sat on the bench in the city that was not Tehran. The teenagers finished their circuit and stepped off the ice, still laughing, and walked away down the path. The rink was empty.

After a moment, Rana stood up. She walked to the edge of the rink. She did not have skates. She stepped onto the ice in her shoes, just the edge, just to feel it. The ice was cold even through the rubber. She slid one foot forward a little, the way she had seen the girl do, and she almost slipped, and she stepped back off.

She sat back down on the bench. She did not cry. She had cried a little, earlier, in the bus, quietly, when her mother was asleep. She did not have more crying in her right now.

She tried. She looked. She tried to see what he would see.

She saw a small park in a city she did not know. She saw a rink. She saw lights that nobody had come to turn off. She saw her own breath making a small cloud in front of her, rising, dissipating.

She saw that she was alive and that she was here, and that this was not the worst thing, and that she had an uncle and an aunt and two cousins she had not known she had, and that her uncle had put his hand briefly on her back in the kitchen when she had smelled her grandmother's stew, and that was a small thing, and it was a true thing, and her father would have said, look at this. Even this is a gift.

She walked home. She got into bed. She slept.

In the morning her aunt was apologetic, in a way that she had not quite been the night before. Her aunt made breakfast and sat with her and said, "I ask too many questions. My mother used to tell me. I have not learned."

"It is all right."

"I am glad you are here."

"Thank you."

"Your father, " her aunt began, and stopped, and tried again. "Your father is a good man. Farhad says so. Farhad says he was always the serious one. Farhad was the wild one, he says." She laughed at this, a small real laugh. "I cannot imagine Farhad wild. But he says."

Rana smiled. "My father could be funny," she said. "When he wanted to be."

"Yes?"

"He did voices. When he read to us. He did a voice for every character in a story."

Her aunt nodded. She did not ask more. She put another piece of bread on Rana's plate.

That afternoon, Rana took Kian to the park. They did not skate, neither of them had skates, but Kian loved the rink anyway, and ran along the rail shouting to himself, and pretended to be a skater, and she sat on the bench and watched him, and when he fell, as he did twice, she did not rush. She let him get up on his own. He did. He came back to her, red-faced, pleased, and she wiped his nose with a tissue from her pocket and told him he was strong, and he grinned at her with the new gap where his front tooth had fallen out last month, and he said, "I am really strong," in English, and she laughed, and it was the second laugh of its size that had come out of her in a month, and it came easier than the first.

It came in February. Not through the mail. Through a woman.

The woman was named Ladan. She was a friend of a friend of her father's, a Bahai woman who had left Iran eight years ago and lived now in a city two hours away. She had traveled, for reasons that were not explained in front of Rana, back to Iran and back again, and she had brought things out with her, small things, things that could be hidden, and one of the things had been a letter.

The letter was on a piece of cigarette paper.

Her mother did not tell her at first that the letter existed. Her mother brought Ladan into the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon and made tea and they sat at the small table and spoke in low voices for an hour, and Rana, in her room, could hear the low voices but not the words. Kian was drawing at the kitchen table on the other side, not listening, not understanding.

After Ladan left, her mother came to Rana's door and knocked once.

"Come here," her mother said. "Come sit."

Rana came. Her mother was sitting on the living room couch. Her mother's hands were folded in her lap. Her mother's face was composed, but Rana could see that her mother had been crying, a little, and had wiped her face before calling her.

"What is it?"

Her mother held out a small folded square of paper.

"It is from your father," she said.

Rana took it. Her fingers were not steady. The paper was so thin it seemed it might dissolve if she breathed wrong. She unfolded it carefully.

The writing was impossibly small. It was in Farsi, of course. The letters were tiny and dense, filling both sides of the cigarette paper, written with what must have been the finest possible pen, or perhaps the point of something sharpened to a needle. She had to hold the paper close to her face. She had to tilt it toward the lamp.

She began to read.

My daughter.

It is late. I am writing to you in a place where I should not be writing. I will be brief because the paper is small and because I cannot waste a word.

I am well. I am as well as a person can be in the place I am in, which is to say I have enough food and a bed and my mind is my own. I am reading when I can. I am thinking of you every day. I am thinking of your mother and of Kian every day. You are the three things I think about, and in between the thinking about you I try to be a useful person to the men I am with here, some of whom are worse off than I am. This is how a day goes.

I am writing to tell you a few things. Listen carefully. I may not be able to write again for a long time.

One. Do not let them break you. I mean the ones around you, in that country you are in, who will not mean to break you but who will try, by many small gestures, to convince you that where you came from was small, or wrong, or unimportant. You came from somewhere. The pomegranate tree in your grandmother's courtyard is a real tree. The mountains north of Tehran are real mountains. The language you were born into is a real language. Do not let anyone, not even well-meaning people, make these things small to you. Carry them. They are heavy and they are yours and you are strong enough.

Two. Love your mother. She is doing work she did not train for. She is doing it without complaining because she is strong and because she loves you and Kian. But she is tired in a way you cannot see. Put your hand on her shoulder sometimes. Bring her tea. Sit with her when she is quiet. You do not need to say anything. Your presence is enough.

Three. Know who you are. You are my daughter. You are your mother's daughter. You are the granddaughter of your grandmother, who was the bravest woman I have ever known. You belong to a family and a faith and a long line of people who have chosen to be kind in places where kindness was expensive. You are not a small thing. You are not a borrowed thing. You are not a person who has to wait for permission. Remember this when the world asks you to be less.

Four. Plant gardens wherever you go. I mean this literally and I mean it the other way too. When you find a piece of earth, even a small one, put something in it. A tomato. A flower. A few herbs on a windowsill. And when you find a piece of a life, wherever you are, put something in that too. A kindness. A word for someone who needs one. A moment of attention to a child who has no one paying attention to them. We are in the world for a short time. What we leave behind, we leave behind. Plant.

I love you. I love your brother. Tell your mother I love her. Tell her I dream of her often. Tell her I am keeping my promises, the ones she knows about.

Do not answer this letter. It is not safe. Do not try. Live. Study. Be kind. That is the only answer I need.

Your father.

Rana read it once. She held the paper very still. She read it again. She read it a third time, her lips moving, sounding the words silently.

Her mother was watching her. Her mother had already read it, Rana realized. Her mother was watching her read it for the first time, and her mother was not going to speak until Rana spoke.

Rana looked up. Her eyes were full but she was not crying; the water was just there, along the edges, waiting.

"He is well," she said.

"He says he is well."

"Do you believe him?"

Her mother thought about this. Her mother did not give her a reassuring answer. Her mother said, carefully, "I believe he is as well as he can be. I believe he is not lying to us. I believe he is not telling us everything."

"Yes."

"It is a good letter. It is a letter I would want from him."

"Yes."

"Read it again."

She did. Her mother read it again too, leaning over her shoulder, and they read it together, silently, and the house was quiet, and Kian was asleep at the kitchen table with his head on his arm, his drawing half finished under his elbow.

"Plant gardens wherever you go," her mother said, softly, after they had finished.

"Yes."

"He always said that. To everyone. At weddings. To young people. I used to tease him. I used to say, You have one sentence, you only have one sentence. And he would say, It is a good sentence. It is enough."

Rana laughed, once, a small surprised laugh. And then she did cry, not hard, not all at once, but a steady quiet cry, the kind of crying that was more like leaking than weeping, and her mother did not try to stop her. Her mother sat next to her on the couch and put an arm around her, and Rana leaned into her mother's shoulder, and the cigarette paper was in her lap, folded again so she would not tear it, and her mother's shoulder smelled like the detergent her mother used at work, a different smell than the one her mother had used in Tehran, and Rana thought, I am adding this smell to the list of things my mother smells like. It is all right. I will keep the old one and this one.

She kept the letter under her pillow for a week. She read it every night before she slept and every morning when she woke. She did not show it to anyone. She did not tell Aditi, or Miles, or Ezra, though she wanted to. She felt, somehow, that the letter needed a time to be only hers, and her mother's, and Kian's (she did read it to Kian, very carefully, on the third night, leaving out the parts she thought were too old for him. Kian had listened with his whole small body still, and at the end he had said, "Baba said that?" and she had said yes, and he had nodded, and he had gone to sleep with a solemnity that a seven-year-old does not usually have access to).

After a week she put the letter in an envelope, and the envelope in a book, and the book on her shelf. She knew where it was. She could feel it there. She did not need to carry it around.

At school, she moved differently. Not dramatically. Nobody would have said, Rana has changed. But she moved differently. She held her head a little higher. She did not rush to apologize for things that were not her fault. When someone mispronounced her name, she corrected them, calmly, the first time, not the tenth. When a boy in her history class said something ignorant about the Middle East, in a class discussion, she raised her hand and said, "Actually, " and she corrected him, and her voice did not shake, and her teacher nodded, and the boy did not argue.

It was not that she was suddenly bold. She was not. She was still the quiet girl who sat at the third table from the window. She still ate half a sandwich at lunch. She still said thank you too often, a habit she had not lost. But the center of her had moved a half inch. It had moved toward itself. It had stopped drifting toward whatever the room wanted her to be.

Her mother noticed. Her mother did not say anything for a long time. But one night in March, as they were washing dishes together, her mother said, "You are standing up straighter, lately."

Rana looked at her.

"I am?"

"Yes."

"I did not notice."

"That is good. That is how you know it is real. When you are not doing it on purpose."

It happened at lunch. A Wednesday. The last week before spring break.

The cafeteria at Northgate International was a long room with high windows on the north side and a buffet line on the south side, and tables laid out in long rows in the middle. Rana sat at what she thought of as her table, which was the third from the buffet line, against the wall, because the wall was a thing to put your back against. Aditi sat across from her. Miles sat at the end. Ezra sat sometimes with them, sometimes with the music kids at another table; today he had come over and was sitting next to Miles, his lunch tray balanced on a stack of sheet music he had not put away.

Jamal Everett was there too. He had joined them, quietly, over the past month. Jamal was the African-American scholarship poet, a year older than Rana, a boy with round gold-rimmed glasses and a way of listening that reminded her of Ezra but was not the same. Ezra listened to understand. Jamal listened to remember. There was a difference, Rana had decided, although she could not have explained it yet.

Tomas Vargas was also there. He was the Mexican boy Rana had met in history class, and he was quick and funny and did impressions of teachers that made the others laugh, and he could be cruel if he wanted to, but he did not seem to want to be, most of the time.

Coco Dubois came in.

Coco was not alone. Coco was with her usual small group, two other girls whose names Rana knew but whose faces she still sometimes confused, and they were laughing about something, and Coco was in the middle of the laughing, which was usually where Coco was.

Coco was the daughter of a French diplomat. Coco had lived in five countries. Coco had a way of wearing cardigans that made it look as if the cardigan had been waiting all its life to be on her shoulders. Coco had, over the course of the year, mostly ignored Rana, except for the occasional comment that landed in the room without obvious aim but that settled, every time, on Rana like a small cold hand.

The cafeteria was loud. It was always loud. The laughing of Coco's group was one sound among many.

Rana was not listening to them. She was telling Aditi about a book she was reading, not the blue book, a different one, a novel Ms. Takahashi had recommended, when she heard the word Iran.

She heard it the way you hear your own name across a room. Instantly. Without deciding to.

She stopped talking. Aditi noticed, and turned, and looked.

Coco was at the next table. Her back was to Rana. Her two friends were facing Rana but were not looking at her; they were looking at Coco, whose voice was the loudest one at that table, not in a shouting way, but in the way that confident voices take up room.

"I mean, I love that she is so serious," Coco was saying. "It is sweet. It is like, you know, it is what they are like. They are a very serious people. I had a girl at my school in Brussels who was also from there, and she was also like that, like every word was a funeral. I think it is a whole way of being. It is because of, you know, everything that happens there. It is not their fault. But honestly, after a while, you just wish someone would make a joke, you know? It is exhausting."

The other two girls laughed. Not the full laugh, the half-laugh. The laugh you do when you are not sure if you should be laughing but you do not want to be the one who doesn't.

"Coco," one of them said, a little warningly.

"What? What? I am being nice. I did not say anything mean. I said I love that she is serious. It is a compliment. It is just, look, some cultures are joyful and some cultures are, you know, not. And that is fine. I am not judging. I am just, "

Miles was staring at Coco's back. His jaw was moving in a way that meant he was about to say something and Rana, without looking at him, could feel him about to say it, and she did not want him to say it, because it would be his words and not hers, and if anyone was going to say anything it had to be her.

Jamal was very still.

Ezra had put down his fork.

The rest of the cafeteria went on, unaware, loud.

Rana stood up.

"Oh, " Coco began. "Hi, Rana, I didn't see you, "

"I know you didn't," Rana said.

Her voice was not loud. It was not shaking. She had not known, before she started speaking, what she was going to say. She had only known that she was going to say something.

The cafeteria did not go silent, exactly. It was too big for that. But a silence moved out from their corner of it in a wave, and people at the next tables stopped talking, and then the tables after that, and within a few seconds there was a bubble of quiet around them that was about fifteen feet in diameter, with the rest of the cafeteria loud beyond it.

"I want to say something," Rana said.

Coco had stood up too. She had not meant to; she had stood up in response, the way people stand when someone else stands. Her face had flushed along the cheekbones, not an embarrassed blush, exactly, something more complicated.

"Okay," Coco said.

"I am from somewhere," Rana said. Her voice was level. It was not loud. The people around them were leaning in a little to hear, but she did not raise her voice for them. Her voice was meant for Coco. "I am from a country that has a name. It is called Iran. In my country there are mountains. There are poets. There is a kind of music my grandmother sang. There is a kind of soup my mother makes on cold days that takes eight hours to cook because it is supposed to take eight hours. There are people who are funny and people who are not funny. There are people who are joyful and people who are sad. It is, like everywhere, a whole country. It is not one thing."

Coco's mouth opened slightly. She did not speak.

"I am not a serious person because Iranians are serious. I am a serious person because something serious has happened in my family. I did not come here because I was bored. I came here because we had to come. My father is in prison for the religion he believes in. My mother, who used to be an architect, cleans offices at night so that my brother and I can go to a school where girls like you can tell each other at lunch that my culture is exhausting."

She heard herself say it. She did not stop.

"I am SOMEBODY," she said. The word came out harder than the others. She did not mean it to. It came out that way. "I am not a backdrop. I am not a mood. I am not here for you to have feelings about. You do not know me. You have not asked me a single question in six months. You have not looked at me long enough to see what color my eyes are. And then you sit at a table four feet away from me and you talk about my country like it is a documentary that you already know the ending of."

She took a breath. She was not crying. She had not known she was not going to cry; she had half expected to. But she was not. Her voice was steady.

"I will not pretend," she said. "I will not pretend to be less serious so you can feel comfortable. I will not pretend I am from nowhere so you can feel like you are from everywhere. I am from somewhere. And I am SOMEBODY. And the next time you want to talk about my country, you can ask me. I am right here. I have been right here the whole time."

She did not wait for Coco to respond. She did not want to. She sat back down. Her hands were steady when she picked up her fork. She took a bite of her food. It was tasteless; she was full of adrenaline and could not have tasted a thing. But she chewed it. She swallowed it.

The silence around their corner of the cafeteria held for another second. Then people, slowly, started talking again, in lower voices. Coco's two friends were staring at Coco. Coco's face was white, not flushed now, white. Coco had not sat back down. Coco was standing at her table with her hands at her sides.

Coco said, "Rana, "

"No," Rana said. She did not look up. "Not now."

Coco stood for another moment. Then Coco picked up her tray. Her hands were not steady. Her tray rattled a little. She walked out of the cafeteria, not fast, but steadily, and her two friends did not follow her; they sat at the table looking at each other and not at anyone else.

Aditi, under the table, squeezed Rana's wrist once, and let go.

Miles, at the end of the table, said quietly, "Rana."

"Yes," she said.

"You are, " he said.

"I know."

"That was, "

"I know. Please don't say anything else."

"Okay."

Ezra, across from her, caught her eye. He did not say anything. He nodded once. Slowly. It was a gesture that took less than a second but it was the gesture of one person to another saying, I see you. You did that. Good.

Jamal, next to him, said only, "Hm."

They finished lunch. They talked about other things, quietly. Tomas, who had been silent through the whole thing, said, after a long moment, "My country is Mexico. Also not a documentary." It was a half-joke and Rana laughed, one short laugh, and Tomas smiled at her, and it was a small bridge in a moment that needed small bridges.

When she walked out of the cafeteria, her legs were shaking. She had not noticed until she stood up. She walked to the bathroom. She went into a stall. She sat on the closed toilet lid with her hands on her knees and she breathed for a minute. Her hands, which had been steady during, were not steady now. Her whole body was catching up with what she had done.

She came out of the stall. She washed her hands. She splashed cold water on her face. She looked at herself in the mirror for a moment. Her face looked like her face. It had not become someone else's face. She had half-expected it to.

She walked back to class.

For the rest of the day, people looked at her. Not meanly. Curiously. A girl she had never spoken to stopped her in the hallway and said, "That was brave." Rana nodded and did not know what to say and said, "Thank you," which was what she always said, and the girl smiled and walked away.

A boy from her math class, who she did not know well, gave her a small thumbs-up across the hallway, half sheepish, and then looked quickly away.

Her history teacher, on the way out of his class, said quietly, without looking at her directly, "I heard what happened. Well done." Rana said thank you, again.

She walked home through the light of late afternoon. The light was changing from winter to spring, slowly, it was getting a warmer yellow to it, even though the air was still cold. She walked slowly. She was tired. She had not known that speaking could tire you like this.

I said the thing. I said it in front of everyone. I said I am somebody. I said I am from somewhere. My voice did not shake. I do not know where the voice came from. I know where it came from. It came from the letter under my pillow, which is now in a book on my shelf, but the letter is in me, and the letter wrote the words for me, or the letter let me write them. Either way.

I feel shaken and also calm. These are two feelings at the same time. I did not know you could have them at the same time. I am learning that you can have many things at the same time. I am learning that a person is big enough to hold them.

She closed the notebook. She went to bed. She slept more deeply than she had slept in months.

The next morning, Coco was waiting by Rana's locker.

She was there when Rana came around the corner of the hallway, and she was not with her friends, and she did not look like herself. Coco always looked like she had spent twenty minutes on her hair. Today her hair was in a ponytail that looked as if it had been put up in the dark without a mirror. She was wearing a hoodie, which Rana had never seen her wear. She was holding a paper cup of coffee with both hands, and there were small dark circles under her eyes, and she was standing very still in a way that Coco usually did not stand.

Rana stopped.

They looked at each other.

"Can I talk to you?" Coco said.

Her voice was small. Not performed small, the way some girls made their voices small to look harmless. Small in the way a voice is small when the person is very tired and is trying to be careful with what she says next.

Rana did not answer right away. She looked at Coco. She considered.

"Five minutes," she said.

"Thank you," Coco said.

They walked. Rana did not choose where they were going; she just walked, and Coco followed. Rana walked to a small landing at the end of the second-floor hallway where there was a window and two chairs and a plant in a pot that nobody watered. It was a place almost nobody went. Rana had discovered it in November, on a day when she had needed to not be around people, and it had become her place without anyone knowing it.

She sat. Coco sat in the other chair. Coco put the coffee on the windowsill. Coco put her hands flat on her knees. She took a breath and started talking, as if she were afraid that if she did not start immediately, she would not start at all.

"I was up all night," she said.

"Okay."

"I was up all night thinking about what you said. All of it. I was up all night thinking about what I said at lunch. I was up all night thinking about the last six months. I was up all night thinking about myself."

"Okay."

"Rana, I am sorry. I am so sorry. I am sorrier than I know how to say."

"Okay."

"I need you to let me say some things, because I have been putting them in order for eight hours, and if you stop me I will lose them, and I need to say them in the right order, because if I do not they will come out wrong and I will sound like I am still doing the thing I was doing before, which is the thing I am trying not to do. Can you let me say them?"

Rana considered this. It was, she thought, a fair request. People who were apologizing did not always know how to apologize, and sometimes the apology had a shape that had to be allowed to come out.

"Yes," she said.

Coco nodded. She looked down at her hands.

"When I was seven years old," she said, "my mother took me to Cambodia. We were living in Paris. My father had a job that had taken him to Phnom Penh for three weeks and my mother took me with her to visit him. She took me to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. I was seven years old. There are photographs on the walls. Photographs of people who were killed there. My mother walked me through all of it. She explained. I did not sleep that night. I had nightmares for a year."

Coco swallowed. Rana waited.

"I am not telling you this so that you will feel sorry for me. I am telling you because I need to tell you where I came from, so you will understand what I did. My mother does this. Has always done this. She takes me to the place where the worst thing in a country happened. She takes me to the museum about the genocide, about the famine, about the war. She tells me about the people. She does not take me to the park. She does not take me to the concert. She takes me to the museum of the worst thing, and then we go home, and she says, now you know that country. And I am, I was, seven, eight, ten, twelve, and I believed her. I believed that when you went to a country, you went to learn the worst thing that had happened there, and then you knew the country."

Coco looked up. Her eyes were wet but she was not crying, quite.

"So when you came in September," she said, "and my mother told me you were from Iran, I thought, I know about Iran. I know the worst things. I know about the persecution, I know about the wars, I know about the revolution, I know about the regime. I have read the books. I have watched the documentaries. I know."

She took a breath.

"But I did not know you."

"No," Rana said quietly. "You did not."

"I did not even see you," Coco said. "I saw a thing I had read about. I saw a set of worst things, walking around with a backpack on. And I thought I was being kind, by the way. I thought I was being kind. I thought, she has been through so much, she needs space, I will give her space. And also, underneath that, I thought, she is from that country, the serious one, the one with the worst things, and I am from France and I have been to many countries and I know about the worst things, so I am the one who knows, and she is the one who has suffered, and those are our two categories."

Coco stopped. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.

"And last night I was lying in bed," she said, "and I thought, I have not asked her a question. I have not asked her what color her eyes are. I have not asked her what she likes. I have not asked her what her mother cooks. I have not asked her about her grandmother. I have not asked. I have been looking at her for six months and I have not seen her, because I thought I already knew what was there, because I had read the books."

"Yes," Rana said.

"And I sat at lunch yesterday," Coco said, "and I said the thing about Iranians being serious. I said it because I thought I was being sophisticated. I thought I was being the person who had been to many countries. I thought I was doing the thing my mother does, where she summarizes a country in one sentence. And you stood up. And you said you are not a documentary. And I, "

She stopped again. She pressed her lips together hard.

"I went home," she said, "and I went to my room, and I sat on my bed, and for the first time in my life I realized that my mother has been wrong. About something important. For my whole childhood. My mother is a smart person. My mother is a good person, in many ways. But my mother is wrong about this, and she has been wrong, and I have been wrong with her, and I have been wrong with you."

She looked at Rana directly.

"I did not know I was like that," she said. "I did not. I know that sounds stupid. People who do bad things always say they did not know. But I really did not. I thought I was the person who cared. I thought I was one of the good ones. And you showed me, in front of everybody, that I was not. And I had to lie awake and look at that. And I am looking at it. I am still looking at it. I do not know how long I will have to keep looking at it. But I wanted you to know that I am."

She stopped. She waited.

Rana did not speak right away.

She looked at Coco. She looked at her carefully. She had always, secretly, thought Coco was older than her, more sophisticated, more sure of herself, because Coco carried herself that way. She saw now that Coco was fourteen. Just fourteen. A girl with a coffee she had probably made herself in the dark, a girl with a ponytail that had not been checked in a mirror, a girl who had been up all night looking at herself and who had not liked what she had seen.

Rana felt many things at the same time. She had not stopped feeling them since yesterday. She felt angry, still, some. She felt tired. She felt, underneath the tiredness, a kind of dignified strength that was new to her, that had not existed a week ago, that was beginning to feel like a place she could stand on.

She also felt, watching Coco, a small unexpected pity. Not pity that made Coco smaller; pity that was a kind of recognition. Coco had also been given a life. Coco had also been shaped by the people who had made her. Coco had thought she was being one thing and had discovered she was being another. That was not nothing.

She said, finally, "Coco. Thank you for telling me this."

"Yes."

"I heard you."

"Yes."

"It will take me time."

Coco nodded. She nodded hard, like someone who had been expecting this and was grateful for it. "Yes," she said. "Of course. Yes."

"I am not going to forgive you today."

"I know."

"I do not know when I am going to forgive you. I am not sure what forgiveness looks like, in this case. I am going to have to think about it."

"I understand."

"I am also not going to be your friend. Right away. I am not even sure what we are going to be. For a while, maybe, we are going to be two people who have a difficult thing between them, and we are going to be polite, and we are going to see what happens."

"Yes."

"But I want to say one more thing."

"Yes."

Rana looked at her.

"You have done the hardest part," she said. "You have looked at yourself. Most people never do. My grandmother used to say that the first step and the thousandth step are the same distance apart, and most people never take the first. You have taken it. I am not going to pretend you have not. I am going to keep watching, to see what you do with the second one. And the third. But the first one counts."

Coco's eyes filled. She blinked hard. She said, "Okay. Thank you. Okay."

They sat for another moment. Coco picked up her coffee cup. Her hands were not steady, still. She stood up. Rana stood up too.

"I am going to go to class," Coco said.

"Yes."

"Thank you for letting me talk."

"Yes."

Coco turned and walked down the hallway. At the end of the hallway she turned back and looked at Rana, once, and she did not wave or smile, she just looked, in a way that acknowledged that she was leaving, and that a thing had happened, and then she turned again and went on.

Rana stood at the window for another minute. She looked down at the courtyard. The younger kids were coming out for recess. They were running. One of them, a small boy in a navy blazer too big for him, was trying to do a cartwheel on the grass and kept landing on his shoulder.

She went to class.

The rest of the week, Coco did not approach her again. Coco did not sit at her old table in the cafeteria either; Coco sat at the end of another table, alone for a day, and then with one of her two friends, the one who had told her to stop at lunch. The other friend was not around Coco now. There had been, Rana understood, a small realignment.

Rana watched all of this from her own table. She did not comment on it. Miles asked her once, quietly, "Are you all right?" and she said, "Yes. I am thinking." And Miles nodded, and did not push.

An apology is not a door. An apology is a window. Through the window you can see whether the person has started the work. You cannot walk through a window. You cannot move into the room they are in. But you can look, and you can see, and you can decide how much of your heart to open, and when.

Coco has started the work. She did not have to. Nobody was going to make her. She chose it. I am going to respect that choice by not rewarding it too quickly. I am going to respect it by watching. I am going to respect it by being fair.

But I am also going to respect myself. I am going to let time do what time does. I am not going to rush.

Ms. Takahashi announced the project in April.

"It is your spring cultural heritage project," she said. "You have done these every year at Northgate since the seventh grade. This year, because you are ninth graders, the requirements are different. You will not just give a presentation. You will create a piece, of any form, that represents something real about where you come from. Any form means any form. A poem. A photograph. A dance. A recipe with an essay about the recipe. A short film. A song. A sculpture made out of paper. Any form. It should be fifteen minutes of your classmates' attention. It should not be longer."

She walked between the rows.

Rana, at her desk, was listening carefully. She had been thinking about this project since Ms. Takahashi had mentioned it in a handout two weeks ago. She had not known what to do. She had thought she might write something, because writing was what she did now, but she had not known what to write.

After class, she went to the library. She sat in the green chair.

She thought about what to do.

That night, at dinner, she asked her mother.

"Maman," she said. "Do you still have the drawings?"

Her mother looked up. She had been stirring something on the stove. She took a second to understand what Rana meant.

"The sketches?" her mother said.

"Yes."

"From Tehran?"

"Yes."

"Of the buildings?"

"Yes. Of the buildings, and of the neighborhoods. Do you still have them?"

Her mother put the spoon down. She wiped her hands on a towel. She sat down at the kitchen table.

"Why do you ask?"

"I have a school project."

"A school project."

Rana told her about it. She told her slowly. She told her the idea she had started to have in the library, which was that she wanted to make something that included her mother's architectural sketches, and a recording of Ezra playing the melody her grandmother had hummed, and a poem Rana would write, and a photograph or two her father had taken of their neighborhood in Tehran that were on an old memory card somewhere.

Her mother listened. Her mother's face was hard to read.

When Rana finished, her mother said, "You want my drawings to be in a school project."

"Yes."

"In front of your classmates."

"Yes."

"In front of their parents."

"The parents come? I did not know."

"Some come."

"Oh."

Her mother looked at her. Her mother looked at her for a long time.

"Rana," her mother said.

"Yes."

"I was an architect for twenty years. I have not drawn anything for nine months. Not one line. Not on a napkin. I have not picked up a pencil since we left Tehran."

"I know."

"I do not know if I am ready to have the drawings in a room with people."

"I understand."

"I do not think I can do it."

Rana did not push. She nodded. She picked up her spoon.

Her mother watched her. Her mother was quiet. They ate.

Later, after Kian was asleep, her mother came into her room. Her mother was holding a cardboard portfolio Rana had not seen before. It was the kind of portfolio architects used to carry drawings. It had a black cover and a clasp. It was old. It had stickers on it from cities Rana did not recognize, and one from a conference in Istanbul from years ago.

Her mother sat on the edge of the bed. Her mother opened the portfolio.

Inside were drawings. Dozens of them. Some on thin paper, some on thicker card. Some in pencil, some in ink, some in a kind of architect's wash that Rana had watched her mother do when she was eight, holding a brush and a cup of water and making a building look as if it were about to have weather happen to it.

Her mother spread them out on the bed.

"Look," her mother said.

Rana looked.

There was a drawing of the apartment building in their neighborhood, the one next to the bakery, the one with the blue tile across the top floor that had been there since 1962 when it had been built. Her mother had drawn it in such detail that Rana could see the crack in the third-floor balcony, the one she had noticed when she was nine.

There was a drawing of a mosque. Not a mosque they went to, because they did not go to mosques; a mosque that her mother had studied in school. The drawing was labeled in Farsi, in her mother's neat architect's hand, with arrows pointing to the dome, the minarets, the courtyard, the small door on the side where shoes were left.

There was a drawing of a pomegranate tree.

Rana saw it and she did not breathe for a second.

"You drew it," she said.

"I drew it many times," her mother said. "I drew it every time I went to your grandmother's house. It was what I did. It was a kind of meditation. I would sit in the courtyard and I would draw it. It taught me patience. Your grandmother would bring me tea and not say anything."

Rana touched the edge of the drawing, very lightly. The tree was alive on the page. Her mother had drawn it in late summer, with the fruit heavy on the branches, and the light coming from the left, and the tile of the courtyard showing in soft wash underneath.

"I did not know you drew it," Rana said.

"I did not show you. I did not show anybody. It was mine."

"Why are you showing me now?"

Her mother looked at the drawings. Her mother put her hand on the drawing of the tree.

"Because you are fourteen," her mother said. "Because you are doing a thing I am proud of. Because you are asking me to be a part of it, and I want to be part of it. Because I have not drawn anything in nine months and I do not know if I will ever again, but these drawings exist, and they are mine, and they are the best thing I ever made that is not a person, and if they sit in a portfolio until I die, what was the point of making them."

Her mother's voice was not quite steady. Her mother's hands were steady. Her mother had learned, over the past nine months, how to have a voice that was not steady while her hands were steady. Rana had watched this happen. It was one of the things she loved most about her mother, although she did not know how to say so.

"Take them," her mother said. "Use them. Choose the ones you want. I trust you."

Rana chose three. The apartment building. The mosque from the school. The pomegranate tree.

The next day she went to Ezra. She explained the project. She asked if he would let her use a recording of the piece he was writing, the one they had worked on together.

"Yes," Ezra said immediately. "Yes. I was going to offer. Is that weird? I was going to offer anyway."

"It is not weird."

"I will record it tonight."

"Are you sure?"

"It is your melody."

"It is your arrangement."

"Those are two different things. Stop being polite. I am going to record it."

He recorded it. He sent her a file. He had titled the file with the Farsi name for the scale, which he had painstakingly learned to write. Rana opened the file on her mother's laptop. She listened. The piece was different from what it had been two months ago. It had grown. The slide was in the right place. The breathing was in the right place. It did not sound like a Persian piece, and it did not sound like a Western piece; it sounded like what it was, which was two people from different places meeting in a practice room and learning something together.

Miles helped her with the design. He was the one who understood how to lay out a presentation. He scanned her mother's drawings on the good scanner in the art room, at a resolution high enough that you could see the grain of the paper. He built a slideshow that was not really a slideshow; it was a series of still images that moved slowly, like a film, with the music playing underneath.

Aditi helped her with the poem. Rana had written a first draft and hated it. Aditi read it. Aditi said, "It is good. It is too polite. Go back and take out the polite parts." Rana did. The second draft was better. Aditi said, "Now take out the parts where you are explaining." Rana did. The third draft was better again. Aditi said, "Now read it out loud. If your mouth does not want to say a word, change the word." Rana did. The fourth draft was the one.

The poem was called "The Hallway."

It was not long. It was thirty-one lines. It was about the hallway in her grandmother's house, and the rug, and the window, and the tree, and the sound of a pomegranate falling on tile. It was about leaving. It was about carrying a hallway inside yourself for the rest of your life.

Ms. Takahashi scheduled the presentations. Rana's slot was on a Thursday afternoon. Parents were invited, though they did not have to come.

Rana told her mother the day.

"I will come," her mother said.

"You do not have to."

"I want to."

"You have work."

"I will trade a shift."

"Are you sure?"

"Rana. I am sure."

On Thursday afternoon, Rana stood at the front of the classroom. Miles was at the laptop. Ezra was in the audience; he had asked if he could come, and Ms. Takahashi had said yes. Aditi was in the first row.

Rana's mother was in the third row, in her good blouse. She had come straight from work, and she had changed in the car. She had not worn makeup but she had put her hair up the way she used to wear it in Tehran, which Rana had not seen her do in a year.

Rana began.

"My project," she said, "is called The Hallway. It is about the house I grew up visiting, which was my grandmother's house, in Tehran. It is about the things in a house that become, over time, the shape of who you are."

Ezra's music began. Softly. The melody, on the guitar, with the slide in the right place.

Rana read the first stanza of her poem. Her voice was clear. She did not rush. She had practiced reading it out loud for a week and she had learned, over that week, where the pauses were, where the breath was, where the silence worked harder than the words.

The classroom was very quiet.

The slideshow moved. Her mother's drawing of the mosque came up. Rana read another stanza. The slideshow moved again. Her mother's drawing of the pomegranate tree came up, and Ezra's music, without anyone planning it, arrived at the slowest part, the part with the slide, and the drawing and the music did something together that Rana could not have planned. People in the audience inhaled, quietly, at the same moment.

Rana read the last stanza.

She did not look at her mother. She did not trust herself to.

The photograph faded. The screen went black.

The classroom was silent.

It was not the silence of people waiting for something. It was the silence of people who had been somewhere together, and who did not want to come back too quickly.

Ms. Takahashi, sitting in the back, let the silence be. She did not applaud too soon. She did not start the clapping. She let the silence stand, the way you let a good chord ring at the end of a piece of music.

Then, slowly, the classroom clapped.

Rana looked at her mother.

Her mother was crying.

Rana's throat was tight. She did not cry. She would cry later, at home. Right now she was a girl giving a presentation, and the presentation was almost over, and she had one more sentence to say.

"The hallway in my grandmother's house was small," Rana said. "It was not important. It was just a hallway. But I have carried it across an ocean in my body, and I will carry it until I am an old woman, and one day I will tell someone about it, and then it will be carried by someone else, too. This is how small things become large. This is how people survive losing the places they come from. This is what my mother has taught me, without saying, every day since we arrived here. Thank you."

She stepped back. Miles closed the laptop, softly.

The classroom clapped again. This time it was longer. Ms. Takahashi stood up and clapped too, which she did not do often, and her face was the face of a teacher who had not, in a long time, seen something that had made her feel the way she was feeling.

"He would have been so proud of you. I am so proud of you."

Rana did not trust herself to answer. She put her arms around her mother's neck, the way she had not done since she was nine or ten. Her mother held her. Other people looked away, kindly, to give them a moment.

They walked home together. Her mother was quiet on the walk home, but it was a different quiet than the quiet her mother had carried all year. It was a softer quiet. It was a quiet with light inside it.

At home, her mother sat at the kitchen table for a long time, with one of her old drawings in front of her. She was not looking at the drawing. She was looking past it, at something that Rana could not see.

After a while, her mother said, without looking up, "I want to buy a new sketchbook this weekend."

"Okay."

"Will you come with me?"

"Yes."

"I do not know if I will use it."

"That is all right."

"I think I might."

"That is all right too."

On the Saturday after the presentation, Rana and her mother walked to an art supply store on the other side of the park. It was a small store, one that had been there for twenty years, with wooden floors and a smell of pencil shavings and paper and linseed oil. The man behind the counter was old and did not look up when they came in. He was reading a book.

Her mother walked slowly through the aisles. She looked at the sketchbooks. There were many kinds. Hardcover, softcover, wire bound, spiral bound, rough paper, smooth paper. Rana followed her. She did not try to help her choose. Choosing a sketchbook, she understood, was like choosing a door. Her mother was going to know when she had found the right one.

Her mother picked up a sketchbook with a plain black hardcover. It was medium sized, not the biggest one, not the smallest. Her mother opened it. She ran her palm across the first page, testing the paper. Her mother had always done this, Rana remembered now, in the stationery shops in Tehran. Her mother had a way of touching paper that said she was asking it a question.

Her mother closed the sketchbook. She held it.

"This one," she said.

"Okay."

"And a pencil. I want a good one."

They spent another ten minutes choosing a pencil. They chose a wooden pencil, a 2B, with a good soft lead and a clean unchipped end. The man at the counter rang them up without looking at them much. Her mother paid. Rana carried the small paper bag out of the store.

On the walk home, her mother said, "I do not know when I will open it."

"That is okay."

"I might open it tonight. I might not open it for a month."

"That is okay too."

"I am not going to be as good as I was."

"You do not have to be."

Her mother looked at her, surprised, as if she had not been expecting that answer.

"No," her mother agreed, slowly. "I do not. I do not have to be."

They walked the rest of the way home in a quiet that was a comfortable quiet, a resting quiet, the first one Rana could remember sharing with her mother in a long time.

Her mother opened the sketchbook three nights later. Rana could hear the small dry sound of a pencil on paper through the wall. Her mother drew for forty minutes. Rana did not go in. The next morning, on the kitchen counter, there was a drawing. It was a drawing of the apartment window, with the curtain pulled half back, and the view of the city through it. It was not a finished drawing. It was a first sketch. It was her mother's hand remembering how to be her mother's hand.

Rana did not comment on it. She went to school. When she came home, the drawing was still there. By the end of the week, there were three more.

The call came on a Tuesday. It came at night. It came at ten-fifteen.

Her mother had been washing dishes. Rana had been in her room, reading. Kian was asleep. The phone rang and her mother wiped her hands on a towel and picked it up and said hello in Farsi, and then her mother did not say anything for a long time, and Rana, listening through her half-open door, understood something without knowing what she understood.

She came out of her room. She stood in the hallway.

Her mother was standing in the kitchen holding the phone. Her mother was very still. Her mother had the towel in her other hand, still, bunched, not moving.

There was a pause.

Her mother said, "Eight."

The word hung in the kitchen.

Her mother said, into the phone, "When."

Another pause.

"I understand."

Another pause.

"Yes. I will call you tomorrow. Yes. Thank you. Yes."

She put the phone down on the counter. She put it down carefully, the way you put down something fragile, although the phone was just a phone. She put her hands flat on the counter, on either side of the phone. She stood like that for a moment, breathing, not turning around.

Then she turned around.

Rana was in the doorway. Rana had known before her mother spoke, and she had not known, and both of these were true.

Her mother looked at her.

"Eight years," her mother said.

Rana did not say anything.

"Eight years," her mother said again, as if she needed to say it to make it settle.

Her mother's legs went.

It was not a dramatic collapse. It was more like her mother's legs simply agreed, at the same moment, that they were not going to hold her up any longer. Her mother slid down the front of the cabinet. Her mother ended up on the kitchen floor, with her back against the cabinet and her legs out in front of her and her hands in her lap, and her mother's face did something that Rana had never seen her mother's face do, which was to let go of all its shape.

Rana went to her.

She did not cry. She did not say anything. She walked across the kitchen and she sat down on the floor next to her mother, against the cabinet, and she put her arms around her mother, and her mother put her face against Rana's shoulder, and her mother made a sound that was not a sob, exactly; it was a longer sound, a held sound, a sound that was the shape of eight years compressed into one breath and let out again.

They sat on the floor.

Rana held her mother.

She did not remember afterwards how long they sat. It could have been ten minutes. It could have been forty. The kitchen light was on. The dish she had been washing was in the sink, still, with soap on it. The refrigerator made its small refrigerator sound. The window over the sink was black; outside, the city had gone on with its city life, cars in the street, someone laughing three floors down, a siren somewhere far.

Her mother did not say anything for a long time.

Her mother finally said, very quietly, "He will be older when he comes out."

"Yes."

"Kian will be fifteen."

"Yes."

"You will be twenty-two."

"Yes."

"I will be fifty-four."

"Yes."

"He will have missed all of it."

"Yes."

Her mother cried then, for real, in a way she had not cried in front of Rana in the whole year. Her mother cried in the way a person cries when they have been holding something for so long that the muscles of holding it have cramped, and when the thing is finally set down, the muscles release all at once, and the person weeps, because the weeping is the release.

Rana held her. She did not try to stop her. She did not say any of the things you are supposed to say, because there were none that applied. Eight years was not a thing you could say something about. Eight years was a thing you just had to let sit in the room, a second person, silent, next to them.

After a while her mother's crying quieted.

Her mother did not let go of her. They sat together on the floor. Her mother's head was against Rana's shoulder. Her mother's breath was slow again.

"I am sorry," her mother said finally. "I should not have, "

"Do not apologize to me."

"You are fourteen."

"I am your daughter. Do not apologize."

Her mother was quiet.

Then her mother said, "Your father told me, once, that the worst thing about his faith was what it cost the people who loved him. Not him. The people who loved him. He said he could bear anything, but he could not bear that we would bear it with him."

"I know."

"He said it to me on a balcony. I was pregnant with you. We were sitting on the balcony and he had made tea, and he said it, and I looked at him and I said, I am going to love you for the rest of my life, so whatever it costs me is paid for, in advance, by the fact that I loved you. And he cried a little. And then we drank the tea."

Rana did not know what to say.

Her mother said, "I am paying it now. But I told him, in advance, that I had paid it. I do not want to go back on that."

"No."

"But it is hard."

"Yes."

"Eight years is a long time."

"Yes."

"He will not be the same."

"No."

"We will not be the same."

"No."

Her mother took a long breath. Her mother sat up a little. Her mother pushed her hair back from her face with both hands.

"Okay," her mother said.

"Okay?"

"I mean, not okay. I mean, I am going to stand up. I am going to stand up now. I cannot keep sitting on the kitchen floor. I am going to stand up. Will you help me."

"Yes."

Rana stood first. She held out her hands. Her mother took them. Rana pulled her up. Her mother was not heavy, but Rana felt, for the first time in her life, that she had pulled her mother to her feet, instead of the other way around, and a small thing shifted in her, a thing she did not have words for.

Her mother stood at the sink. Her mother finished washing the dish. She did it slowly. The soap. The water. The rinse. She put the dish in the rack. She dried her hands on the towel.

"Is Kian asleep?" her mother said.

"Yes."

"We will not tell him tonight."

"No."

"We will tell him tomorrow. After school. I will make something he likes."

"Okay."

"Go to bed."

"Are you going to bed?"

"In a while. I will sit here for a while."

"Do you want me to sit with you?"

Her mother thought about this.

"No," her mother said. "Not because I do not want you. Because I want to sit with him for a little while. In my head. Alone. Is that all right."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

Rana walked down the hallway to her room. She did not turn around. She closed the door quietly. She sat on her bed. She did not cry. She had not cried all evening. She had not had room. She had been holding her mother.

She thought about the letter. She went to the shelf. She took the book down. She took the envelope out. She took the letter out. She unfolded it. She read it.

When she came to the part that said, Love your mother. She is doing work she did not train for, she stopped.

She read it again.

She did not feel proud, exactly. She felt something else. She felt the weight of a door opening inside her, a door she had not known was there. The door that led into the room where you were capable of holding the people you loved. She had always thought that room was for adults. She understood now that it was for anyone who walked in.

She had walked in tonight.

She did not know if she would be able to walk back out.

She did not want to.

She folded the letter. She put it away. She lay down. She could hear her mother in the kitchen, quietly, not doing anything, just sitting, as she had said she would. Rana lay on her back and looked at the ceiling.

She thought about her father. She thought about him sitting in a cell, eating food that was probably not good. She thought about him trying to be a useful person to the men he was with, as he had written. She thought about him reading when he could. She thought about him, eight years from now, coming home, older, thinner probably, with lines in his face that had not been there. She thought about being twenty-two and meeting him at an airport. She thought about him looking at her, a grown woman, and trying to find the girl he had left.

She did not know if she would still be the girl he had left. She did not know if she would be someone else by then. She did not know if he would be someone else.

She did not know if that was true. She believed it and did not believe it at the same time. But she said it to herself like a thing to try on, like a sentence to see if it fit.

I can do seven more.

She said it again.

I can do seven more.

Outside her window, the city went on. A car passed. A dog barked once, somewhere. The refrigerator in the kitchen turned itself off with a small click. The quiet that followed was the quiet of late night in an apartment with three people in it, and one far away, and the four of them all together, still, in the way that people you love are still with you whether they are in the room or not.

Rana closed her eyes.

She slept, eventually.

Outside, the city kept being a city. It did not know. It did not need to know. Everything that had happened had happened in one kitchen, on one floor, with one daughter and one mother, and the floor had held them, and the kitchen had held them, and they had, in their way, held each other.

It was enough. For tonight.

It was enough.

They told Kian the next afternoon. Her mother had made khoresh-e bademjan, which was Kian's favorite, and had cut the eggplant in exactly the way he liked it, and had put a small bowl of yogurt next to his plate. They had waited until he had eaten most of it. Then her mother had put her hand on Kian's hand, and had said, quietly, in Farsi, "Kian. I need to tell you something about Baba."

Kian, who was seven but not stupid, had put down his spoon. He had looked at their mother. Then he had looked at Rana. Then he had looked at their mother again.

"Is he all right?" Kian had said.

"He is all right. He is well. He is not hurt."

"Okay."

"But the court decided that he has to stay in prison for a while."

"For how long?"

Their mother had taken a breath. "For eight years."

Kian's face had done something. Rana had watched it closely. Kian was seven and seven-year-olds do not always understand the scale of a number like eight. Kian had done the math with his face. Eight. Eight was a long time. Eight years ago Kian had not yet been born. Rana could see Kian figuring that out, understanding that the amount of time he was being told about was longer than the amount of time he had been alive.

His chin had started to tremble. But he had not cried. He had held it. Kian had developed, over the year, a way of holding himself together that was new, that he had not had in Tehran. He had held himself together now.

"Will I be big when he comes back?" Kian asked.

"You will be fifteen," their mother said. "You will be almost a grown-up."

"Oh."

"But we will write to him, and maybe sometimes we will be able to talk to him. And we will tell him everything. Every single thing you do. We will tell him when you lose every tooth. We will tell him when you learn to ride a bike. We will tell him every report card. He will know. He will not miss anything in his heart, even if he cannot be here in his body."

"But I will be different."

"You will be different on the outside. You will be the same on the inside. He will find you."

Kian had cried then, in a small steady way, with his face pressed into their mother's shoulder. Rana had moved her chair closer. She had put her hand on Kian's back. The three of them had stayed like that for a long time, at the kitchen table, with the half-eaten khoresh cooling on their plates.

Later, when Kian had gone to bed, Rana and her mother had done the dishes together without speaking. There was nothing to say that had not already been said, or that could be said. Her mother had washed. Rana had dried. The dish towel had gotten wet and her mother had taken out a fresh one from the drawer.

Before they went to bed, her mother had hugged her, for a long minute.

"Thank you," her mother had said.

"For what."

"For being the person you are. For being fourteen. For being steady. I do not know how you are being steady. I am grateful."

"I am not steady. I am pretending."

"That is what steadiness is, sometimes. Pretending long enough that it becomes real."

"Is it becoming real?"

"I hope so. For both of us."

They had gone to bed.

The school had a roof.

Rana had not known this until Aditi told her. It was a flat roof, above the arts building, with a low wall around it, and it had been used for years by the gardening club, which met on Wednesdays after school and was run by a chemistry teacher who liked tomatoes.

"You can plant something there," Aditi said. "I asked Mr. Ng. He said yes. He said we can have a corner."

This was in late April, two weeks after the verdict. Rana had not told many people about the verdict. She had told Aditi, because Aditi was the person she told things to. She had told Miles, because Miles had a way of asking without asking that had made her tell him in the art room one afternoon. She had told Ezra, because Ezra had noticed that she was quieter even than usual and had waited for her in the courtyard one morning and had said, "I am not asking. I am just here," and she had told him because of that.

She had not told Coco.

But Coco knew. It had gotten around the class, somehow, after the verdict. Teachers knew. A teacher had probably mentioned it in a whisper to another teacher, and a student had overheard, and the word had traveled, in the quiet way those words travel. Nobody had come up to her and said anything. But she felt, in the hallway, the way people's eyes would find her and then slide away, and she knew. They knew.

She did not mind this, particularly. She had thought she would mind it. She thought she would feel like a spectacle. She did not. She felt, instead, that a truth had become known, and that the known truth was easier to carry than the hidden one.

On a Wednesday in late April, Rana and Aditi and Miles went up to the roof.

Mr. Ng met them at the door at the top of the stairs. He was a small man with a beard that was always a little flour-covered, although he did not bake. He smelled faintly of basil. He led them onto the roof.

The roof was bigger than Rana had expected. It had a low wall around it, as Aditi had said. It had raised beds along three of the four sides. The beds were wooden, old, cracked in places, and most of them were already planted, some with tomato cages, some with small green things that were just starting to come up.

"This is the corner," Mr. Ng said, pointing. "Over there. It is not a large corner. But it is yours, if you want it."

It was a small bed, maybe four feet by three, in the corner of the roof nearest the east. It got morning sun, Mr. Ng said. It had soil that he had prepared last year and had added compost to this spring. It was ready to receive something.

"What are you planting?" Mr. Ng asked.

Rana had thought about this. She had thought about a lot of things she could plant. Flowers. Herbs. Something difficult and ambitious.

She said, "Tomatoes."

Mr. Ng nodded. He approved of tomatoes.

"I have seedlings," he said. "You can have some. How many do you want?"

"Three," Rana said.

"Three is a good number for that bed. Come with me."

He took them to a small greenhouse at the other end of the roof. Rana had not noticed the greenhouse when they came up. It was plastic, temporary, but inside it were rows of seedlings in little pots, each labeled with a small stick. Mr. Ng let her choose.

She chose three tomato seedlings. They were about six inches tall. Their leaves were a bright new green, almost yellow-green, the color of leaves before they had decided to be the serious green of later summer. She held the three little pots on a tray and she carried them across the roof to her bed.

Aditi brought a trowel. Miles brought a small watering can.

Rana knelt at the edge of the bed.

She dug three holes, one at a time, with the trowel. She dug them at the spacing Mr. Ng had taught her, fourteen inches apart, in a triangle, so the three plants would grow without crowding each other. She was not fast. She was not efficient. She wanted to do it right.

When the first hole was ready, she picked up the first seedling. She worked it out of its little pot. The roots were pale and tangled. She loosened them with her fingers.

She put the seedling in the hole.

She held it there for a moment.

Aditi and Miles, who had been kneeling with her, did not say anything. They understood. They had always been the kind of people who understood when words were not the thing.

Rana, softly, in Farsi, whispered something to the seedling.

She said it partly to the seedling. She said it partly to herself.

She filled in the soil around the seedling. She patted it down. She took the watering can from Miles, and she watered the seedling, slowly, letting the water settle.

She planted the second seedling. She whispered to it. She watered it.

She planted the third seedling. She whispered to it. She watered it.

She sat back on her heels and she looked at the three small plants. They did not look like much. They were three small green things in a big bed of brown soil, on a roof in a city that was not Tehran. They were nothing, practically. But she knew, the way you know these things, that if she came back every week, and if she watered them, and if nothing went wrong, they would be taller than she was by August. They would have fruit on them. The fruit would be red. She would eat the fruit. Other people would eat it too.

She stood up. Her knees had dirt on them. Her hands had dirt on them. She looked at her hands.

Aditi looked at her.

"What's your summer?" Aditi asked.

Rana thought about it. The school year was almost over. In two weeks it would be the last week. In three weeks the summer would be here, and the school would be closed, and she would not see most of these people again until September, when everyone would be different, in small ways, the way people are different after three months.

"Working with my mom," Rana said. "She got me hired on at her cleaning company. For the summer. Just part time. It will be okay. It will be money."

"You're cleaning?"

"Offices. At night. Two or three nights a week."

"Huh."

"Reading. I am going to read a lot of books. Ms. Takahashi made me a list."

"That sounds good."

"And maybe writing to my father every week, even if the letters do not arrive."

Miles looked up from where he had been crouching next to the bed.

"Every week?" he said.

"Yes."

"Even if they don't arrive."

"Yes."

"Why?"

Rana thought about it.

"Because the letters are for me too," she said. "Not just for him. I think writing the letters is how I stay myself. If I write to him every week, I have to think about him every week. I have to ask myself, what would I tell him. What would I want him to know about this week. It makes the week into a thing I can see. Otherwise the weeks go by and I lose them."

Miles nodded slowly.

"That is a good reason," he said.

He reached into his bag.

He pulled out a piece of paper, folded once.

"I have something for you," he said.

Rana took it. She unfolded it.

It was a drawing. In pencil. Fine, careful lines.

It was two faces.

On the right side of the paper, she recognized her own face. He had drawn her in the art room in October, while she was reading, and he had shown her the drawing then, and the face had been only partly finished. He had worked on it, apparently, over the months since. The face now was fully drawn. It looked like her. It looked like her more than most photographs did, because he had caught something about her eyes that photographs never did, a slight downturn at the outer corner that she had inherited from her father and that most people did not notice.

On the left side of the paper, there was another face.

It was her father's face.

She had not shown Miles a photograph of her father. She had not, as far as she remembered, even described him in much detail. But there was her father, on the page, in Miles's pencil. Not exactly right. He had given her father a slightly squarer jaw than her father really had, and the eyes were not quite the right shape. But there was something right about it. Something had been caught. Her father, whom Miles had never met, whom he had pieced together from stray words Rana had said over eight months, whose name he had never asked, was on the page, and you could see that he was her father. You could see that they were a daughter and a father. Miles had drawn them so that her father was looking, slightly, at her, and she was looking, slightly, off the page, but they were in the same air together.

She stared at the drawing.

She did not cry. She had not cried in a long time. She did not start now. But something in her chest did something, a small complex rearrangement, and she put her hand to her mouth.

"Miles," she said.

"It is not right. The eyes. I got the eyes wrong."

"It is not wrong."

"I did not want to ask you for a photograph. I thought it would be, I do not know. Intrusive. I tried to draw from memory. I mean, from memory of what you had said."

"Miles."

"Yeah."

"Thank you."

"I wanted you to have it. It is not a big thing. I just wanted you to have it."

"It is a big thing."

"Okay. Well. Yeah."

She could not say anything else. She folded the drawing, very carefully, so as not to crease it across the faces. She put it in her bag, between two books, so it would not bend.

She looked at Miles. He was pretending not to be looking at her. He was rearranging Mr. Ng's trowel and watering can as if they needed rearranging.

"Miles," she said.

"Yeah."

"I am glad you are my friend."

"Yeah," he said. He cleared his throat. "Me too."

They went back down. They went back to their lives. The school year ended. Rana got her grades. They were good. She did not celebrate them. Her mother hugged her and said, "Your father will be proud," and Rana did not answer, because answering felt too hard, but she let her mother hug her, and she let the hug be the answer.

On the last day of school, there was a small ceremony for the ninth graders. Coco was there. Rana was there. They did not speak to each other. But at one point, in the hallway after, Coco caught her eye, briefly, and nodded. Rana nodded back. It was small. It was not forgiveness. But it was the second step Rana had promised herself she would watch for, and the third, and the fourth; Coco had been taking them, quietly, all spring, and Rana had been, also quietly, noticing. It was not nothing. It was not everything. It was a beginning.

That evening, Rana walked home from school slowly. The light was long. The light in late May was different from the light in September, when she had arrived. She thought about that. She thought about the girl who had walked down this sidewalk in September, with her backpack too heavy, with her English too careful, with her whole self pulled inward, not knowing anyone. That girl was still in her. That girl had not been left behind. But there was more now. There was more girl. There were more things she had found to put inside herself. There was Aditi, there was Miles, there was Ezra, there was Jamal, there was the tomato seedling that was going to grow, there was the drawing in her bag, there was the letter, there was the notebook with its black cover.

There was her mother, at home, waiting.

There was Kian, at home, waiting.

She walked home.

When she came in, the apartment smelled like food. Her mother had cooked. She had made rice, and a stew, and a simple salad with cucumbers and tomatoes and a little lemon and salt. Kian was setting the table. Kian had set it wrong, the way he always did, with the forks on the wrong side. Rana did not fix it. Their mother would not fix it either.

They sat down.

Kian said, "I have a joke."

Their mother said, "Tell us."

Kian said, "Why did the tomato turn red?"

Their mother said, "Why."

Kian said, "Because it saw the salad dressing."

There was a pause. Rana looked at her mother. Her mother looked at her. Kian was grinning, triumphant, seven years old, proud of his joke.

Rana laughed. She laughed before she had decided to. Her mother laughed. They both laughed, and Kian laughed too, more from delight at their laughing than from the joke itself, and the three of them sat at the small kitchen table in the apartment that was not Tehran, and they laughed at a bad joke, and the apartment felt, for a moment, warm all the way through.

Her mother, still laughing, took her hand across the table. Her mother's hand was rough from work. Her mother's hand was the hand that had drawn the pomegranate tree and the mosque, and the hand that had cleaned offices at night, and the hand that had covered her face on the kitchen floor two weeks ago, and the hand that had held Rana's cheek after the presentation. It was a whole hand. It had done many things. It was holding her hand now.

Rana squeezed her mother's hand.

Plant gardens wherever you go.

They ate.

They finished dinner. Kian went to brush his teeth. Her mother stood up and started clearing the plates. Rana stood up too and helped. They did the dishes together, not talking much. The water was warm. The evening light through the kitchen window was soft and gold.

Plant gardens wherever you go.

She closed the book. She turned out the light. The city sounds came through the window. She listened. She let them be what they were.

She slept.

That Sunday, the first Sunday of what was still, technically, the school year but was already summer in her head, Rana sat at the kitchen table with her black notebook open and a new pen her mother had given her — a blue one, ordinary, from a drugstore — and she wrote a letter to her father.

She did not know if the letter would ever reach him. She had been told, by the Bahai woman Ladan, that letters almost never reached the prisoners; that the letter her father had written had come out with the help of people she would never know, and could not be repeated often; that sending a letter into the prison, addressed directly, would only mark her father and make things worse. She had understood. She did not resent the rule. She understood that some loves had to be expressed in ways that did not involve the object of the love receiving them.

So she wrote a letter she knew he would not read. She wrote it anyway.

Baba, she wrote.

It is the end of the school year. I am fourteen. I am writing this at the kitchen table in our apartment. The apartment is small. There is a window over the sink. There is a light bulb that flickers sometimes, that we keep meaning to change. Kian is in his room doing something with colored pencils. Maman is at the store. The apartment is quiet.

I wanted to tell you some things.

I made friends this year. I did not know I was going to. I thought I was going to be a stranger here for a long time, and that is partly what happened, but it is not all of what happened. I made friends.

Aditi is my first friend. She is Indian American. Her family had a Shabbat dinner that we went to, though they are not Jewish; some of their friends are, and they invited us. Her mother is loud and wonderful. Her little sister talks a lot.

Miles is my friend. He is biracial. He draws. He is the quietest person I have ever known who also uses a lot of words. He drew a picture of you. I have not sent it to you, because I cannot, but I have it. I will show it to you when you come back. He got the eyes a little wrong but most of it he got right. I do not know how he got any of it right. He has never seen you. I think he drew what I remember, from the things I have said. I did not say much.

Ezra is my friend. He is Nigerian American. He plays classical guitar. He wrote a piece of music with me — I mean, I helped him. I hummed scales that Maman-Bozorg used to hum, and he put them on the guitar. It was strange and beautiful. I will tell you all about it when you come back.

Jamal is my friend. He is a poet. He is quiet. He is the kind of person you can sit next to for an hour and not speak and still feel that you have had a conversation.

There is a girl named Coco. She was unkind to me. Then one day she was not unkind to me anymore. I do not know what to call what we have. We are not friends. But we are not enemies, either. I am watching her. She is doing the work. I am respecting the work.

I read a poet this year. A woman, Iranian. Maman said you read her to her once, on a balcony, before I was born. I have been reading her, in Farsi and in English. The English is a door. The Farsi is the room.

I planted three tomato plants on the roof of the school last week. I whispered to them in Farsi. I told them to grow. I told them they were home. I do not know if that is a thing you are supposed to say to tomato plants, but I said it.

Maman has started drawing again. I do not know if I told you, but she had not drawn anything since we left. She started again last month. She bought a black sketchbook. The sketches are not finished. But they are real.

Kian is well. He is tall now. He lost both his front teeth this year. He looks funny when he smiles. He misses you. He does not always say so. But sometimes he will stop, in the middle of something — a game, a drawing — and he will just stop, and he will look into the middle of the room, and I know he is thinking about you. Then he comes back. He is seven. He is a strong boy. He will be strong when he is fifteen, too. We will be strong.

I have not cried much, lately. I thought I would cry more. I think the crying is in me still and has not finished coming out. But I am not worried. It will come out when it wants to.

I love you, Baba. I know that is a simple sentence. I know you know it. I am writing it down because writing it down is a way of staying in it.

I will plant gardens wherever I go. I am planting them. I am starting.

I am fourteen. You are far away. I am here. I know who I am.

Your daughter,

Rana.

She read the letter back. She did not change anything. She folded it. She put it in an envelope. She did not address the envelope. She put the envelope in the back of her black notebook.

She had not sent it. She did not need to. The writing was the thing.

She closed the notebook. She stood up. She went to look out the window.

Down on the sidewalk, a woman was walking a small dog. A man was carrying groceries. A girl Rana did not know, maybe nine years old, was riding a bicycle that was slightly too big for her, wobbling but managing. The sun was warm. The sun was the kind of sun you got at the very end of May, when the year tips forward into summer and the light starts to feel, for the first time since November, as if it has something to give you.

Rana stood at the window.

She thought about her father, in the room she could not picture. She thought about him looking at a wall she would never see. She thought about him reading, as he had said he did, when he could. She sent him, silently, from her window, everything she had written in the letter. She sent it through the air. She did not know if it arrived. She thought, in her own peculiar way, that it might. Words that were felt as hard as she was feeling these words were not only words. They were also small living things, with wings of their own, that could cross oceans in ways postal systems could not.

She turned from the window. She went to find Kian. She sat on his floor and helped him color a picture of a dragon. The dragon was green and red and had a mouth that was much too big for the rest of him. It was an excellent dragon. She told Kian so. He beamed.

The evening came. Her mother came home. They ate. They did the dishes. They went to bed.

The summer began.

On the first Saturday of June, Rana rode the bus with her mother to the office building where her mother's cleaning company had the night contract. It was not Rana's first time being there — her mother had taken her, twice, in the fall, when the schedule had been unavoidable and there had been no one else to watch her. But now Rana was there as an employee. She had filled out a form. She had been given a small name tag that said her name with one of the letters wrong; she did not bother to correct it. She had been given a pair of rubber gloves and an apron and a lanyard with a key on it. She looked at herself briefly in the glass door of the building before they went in. She looked like her mother, in her mother's uniform, and the resemblance was the strangest and most moving thing she had noticed about herself in months.

Rana did not do it well, on that first Saturday. She left streaks on two desks. She forgot to refill the paper towels in one of the bathrooms. Her mother told her, gently, without making her feel stupid, and Rana learned, and by the third hour she had gotten the hang of the vacuum, and by the fifth hour she was pushing the cart without bumping the walls, and by the time they left the building at eleven at night, she was tired in a way she had not been tired before, a tired that was her body tired and not her head. It was a strange clean tiredness. It was the tiredness of having done a thing with her hands.

On the bus home, her mother said, "You worked hard tonight."

"I did not do it well."

"You did it well enough for the first night. Nobody does it well on the first night."

"I want to do it better next week."

"You will."

They rode in silence for a few stops.

"Maman," Rana said.

"Yes."

"I am sorry that you do this work."

Her mother looked at her.

"Do not be sorry. I am not sorry."

"You are an architect."

"I am an architect who is cleaning offices. Both things are true. Neither one makes the other not true."

"But you should be drawing buildings."

"I should be doing what I am doing. I am keeping my children fed. I am keeping my children in a good school. I am keeping my husband's children alive and strong while he is away. That is the work I have been given to do, right now, and I am doing it. The drawing is coming back. Slowly. It will come. But if it did not — if I never drew another building for the rest of my life — I would still have done the work that mattered. The work that mattered was raising you and Kian."

Rana did not say anything. Her eyes filled, a little. She turned to the window.

"Do not be sorry for your mother, azizam," her mother said, more quietly. "Your mother is fine. Your mother is doing what she came here to do."

They got off the bus two blocks from home. They walked slowly. The air was warm. The summer night had a smell, Rana was beginning to learn, that was particular to this city, that was not the smell of summer nights in Tehran. It was a greener smell, a wetter smell. It was not better or worse. It was its own.

When they got home, Kian was asleep on the couch with a book on his chest, because he had been waiting up for them and had not made it. Her mother carried him to bed. Rana picked up the book, marked his page with a napkin from the kitchen, and put it on his nightstand.

She opened her notebook.

Summer, Day One.

Tonight I worked with my mother. I was tired. I was also, in a strange way, proud. I do not know exactly why I was proud. I think because for the first time I had the same kind of tiredness she has every day. For one night I knew what her tiredness was made of. I will not always have this kind of tiredness in my life. She says I will do other things. She says I will go to university. She says I will have work that uses my mind. Maybe. I hope so. But tonight I had her work, and I carried her tired, and it was a thing I was glad to carry.

She closed the notebook. She lay down. She fell asleep before she could turn out the light.

In the morning, she woke. The light came through the window. She got up. She made tea for her mother, who was still asleep. She left the cup on the small table by the bed, the way her mother left it for her in the mornings, and she went to the kitchen and poured cereal for Kian, who was watching cartoons on the small television with the sound low, his socked feet on the floor, his hair standing up in the back.

The summer began.

THE END

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

The Bahai Faith, founded in Persia in the nineteenth century, is a religion that teaches the oneness of God, the oneness of religion, and the oneness of humanity. Its founder, Bahaullah, and his son and appointed successor, Abdul-Baha, taught that all people are members of a single human family, and that the earth is, as Bahaullah wrote, but one country.

Since its origins, the Bahai community in Iran has been subject to recurring persecution. Bahais have been denied access to higher education, expelled from public employment, had their cemeteries destroyed, and, particularly in recent decades, been imprisoned on charges related to nothing but the practice of their faith. This persecution is ongoing. It has been documented by human rights organizations, by the United Nations, and by journalists. Many Bahai families have been separated for years, some for decades. Many children grow up with one parent, or both, in prison.

Rana Mehdizadeh is a fictional character. She does not exist. But she stands in for many real young people whose lives have been shaped by a persecution they did not choose. Their names are in reports the rest of us do not often read. Their stories are mostly not told in novels. I hope this book, in its small way, helps to tell one.

Crimson Ark Publishing is honored to publish this book for young readers. It is a work of fiction. The love it depicts, the grief, the friendship, the faith, the stubborn planting of small green things in hard soil, is meant to be real.