Page 25

Nayim absconds from the picnic without telling Mr. Tahir, which I don’t hear the end of for the whole bus ride back. But when he doesn’t show up to work the next day or the following or the one after that, even our gruff boss starts worrying.

“His phone is disconnected,” Mr. Tahir tells us after making a tenth attempt at contact. “The imam says he suddenly decided he had to go back home.”

He ran away without me. The fact that he could disappear from my life after insisting we were meant to be together sends me reeling through a cycle of emotions—from despair to anger to disdain and back again. Still, I can’t help missing him whenever I go to the pass-through window at Chai Ho and don’t find him there.

And I can’t help wondering if he’s okay.

After three days of my moping around and shooting constant, fretful glances at my phone, hoping to hear that he’s not dead in a ditch somewhere, my friends reach their breaking point.

On Tuesday night, as I steel myself to walk home alone at half past five, Ximena pops up with her arms crossed like a bouncer’s at the entrance to Chai Ho.

Her presence startles me, since Dani has been lamenting how hard it’s been to pin her down for most of the summer. When I risk a peek over my shoulder, I find the Tahir girls hovering behind me, Dalia with a duffel bag over her arm, Dani with both of hers outstretched like a zombie who’s found premium brains on sale.

I gulp at the three of them. “What’s going on?”

“We’re kidnapping you,” Dalia says cheerily.

“We thought it was time for another epic sleepover at la casa de Tahirs,” Dani adds, then pauses, deliberating over her words. “Or is it de los Tahirs ?”

Ximena glares. “You promised you’d practice your articles, babe.”

“I will, I will!” Dani grins. “I’ll knock the socks off your abuelita one day with my Spanish, I swear. Can’t say the same about Creole yet, though.”

I groan. While I’ve always loved visiting the Tahirs since I was a kid, because they grew up in an actual house that their parents owned , and I’m relieved Dani and Ximena seem to have made up, the last thing I want right now is to watch them bicker like an old married couple when my own love story is a joke.

Nayim has vanished off the face of the planet. Although Harun hasn’t ghosted me outright, he’s been standoffish since the night of our fake-up. I tried to broach the topic of the dinner to apologize, but he dodges the subject every time I bring it up.

I’m not good at statistics, but I’m 98 percent sure I’ve betrayed him to the point of ruining our friendship for good. That, or he didn’t mean what he said about being friends in the first place.

Either way, sorrow twinges in my chest every time I send him a math meme or ask how Rabeardranath Tagore and his cousins are doing, only to get a monosyllabic response. Should losing a friend I’ve had for a month hurt so much?

“There’s too much going on right now,” I tell the friends I still have.

“Which is exactly why you need a sleepover,” Ximena argues.

I shake my head. “Look, I appreciate you going out of your way to put this together, but it’s super last-minute. My mom will expect me home for dinner—”

“We already told her,” Dalia singsongs, giving the bag a jostle. “She let me go over and pack your pj’s, khul balish, and toothbrush during my break. I even snagged your copy of To All the Boys , in case you want to complain about the changes while we marathon the series.”

“So stop doth protesting too much, lady,” says Dani, utterly unashamed of her terrible ye olde English grammar. “You have zero excuses.”

My eyes grow round, then abruptly brim with tears. All this time, I’ve been afraid of them abandoning me for college, yet here they are, considering every possible way to accommodate me so I have a good time.

“Oh, Zar,” Dalia says.

“If you don’t wanna go, you don’t have to,” a panicky Ximena adds.

“No, I want to,” I blubber. “I just—I love you three so much.”

“We love you, too,” they chorus, moving to squish me into a group hug.

That’s when Mr. Tahir lumbers out of his office, sees us, and sighs. “This is going to become a ‘thing,’ isn’t it?” We nod in tandem. “Will you ladies be requiring a ride, then?”

Still gripping each other, we nod a second time.

I’m glad I relented to the slumber party, because it ends up being just what the doctor ordered, the perfect prescription for my bruised and battered heart.

Mrs. Tahir is on her way out the door to meet her husband after his car pulls into the driveway of their cookie-cutter house, but stops in her tracks upon noticing me and Ximena exiting with her daughters. Her round face lights up as I salaam her.

“Waalaikumsalam!” she exclaims. “Oh, I haven’t seen you in ages, Zahra jaan. How have you been? Did you forget about your Hajar Auntie?”

A mix of shame and amusement prompts me to smile at her sheepishly. “No, Auntie. I’ve been busy since graduation.”

All six of us are congregating on the front porch, no doubt looking strange to the neighbors, but the probability of being watched doesn’t stop Mrs. Tahir from extending a hand to pat my head the way she used to when I was a kid.

I’ve always liked her. The polar opposite of her stern husband, she would let her daughters, Ximena, and me do whatever we wanted during our childhood sleepovers, providing a steady supply of Pakistani snacks to fuel us. Not a regular auntie, but a cool auntie.

Her attention turns to Ximena next and she tuts, “What about you? Daniya has been moping endlessly for weeks because you bhooted her.”

“Ghosted, Ammu,” Dalia corrects, while Dani goes as red as her currently crimson-dyed hair and yelps, “Ammu! Don’t tell her that!”

“My bad, Mrs. Tahir,” Ximena replies, rubbing her neck.

Ignoring her daughter’s indignation, Mrs. Tahir muses, “Perhaps I should stay and make my famous nihari. You loved it last time you came over.”

Her husband groans. “Meri jaan, I see them every day. Too much, in fact!”

“Well, I don’t!” she retorts.

“You were the one who asked for these date nights,” he fumes. “Why don’t you come see them at the shop, where I don’t have to make a reservation?”

Before they can begin full-on arguing, I interrupt, “Thank you, Auntie, but I promise I’ll come back another night. Mena too, right?” Ximena bobs her head. “You should go.”

Mrs. Tahir frowns, but reluctantly succumbs when Dani says, “Ammu, we already ordered a bunch of pizza. The Domino’s guy will be here in like thirty minutes.”

Dalia tugs on the strap of my duffel bag. “And since Zahra and Mena are staying the night, you can make nihari for them tomorrow for breakfast.”

“Now that that’s settled, can we please leave?” Mr. Tahir asks.

“Ji, ji, calm down.” Mrs. Tahir yanks me into one last bone-crushing hug, then does the same for the rest of the girls. “Khuda hafiz! We’ll be back soon.”

Mr. Tahir mouths, Good job , but even his undying appreciation is no match for his strict brown dad schtick. Before he returns to the car with Mrs. Tahir, he tells Dalia, “Make sure there’s no funny business.” He looks directly at Dani and her girlfriend at the last two words.

A beat of silence passes, before the Tahir girls whine, “They’re so embarrassing!” while Ximena and I exchange an awkward shrug.

We pile into the house behind the twins. It’s not Emon-huge by any means, a cozy two-story that always smells of spices and herbs, currently decorated with leftover moon-and-star-shaped lights, lanterns, and glittery hanging signs that read EID MUBARAK .

The twins have their own small bedrooms upstairs, which become relatively large when you open the door connecting them, but Dalia drops my bag on the carpet in front of the TV and says, “Cool if we camp out here? There’s more space.”

“Sure.” I glance around for the closest closet, where I know their parents store extra blankets and pillows. “What can I do to help?”

She grins and pushes me onto the couch. “You can sit back, relax”—the remote magically materializes in my hand—“and enjoy five straight hours of To All the Boys .”

I hurry into the bathroom and change. When I return to the living room, everyone else is dressed in their pj’s too, and Dalia has her hair tumbling in loose waves down her back, sitting on the couch. Her sister and Ximena, meanwhile, are snuggled up on the love seat, whispering to each other as an atmospheric Taylor Swift song plays from Ximena’s phone.

Dalia pats her lap. “Let me braid your hair.”

It’s a demand, but such a sweetly phrased one that I can’t help plopping onto the carpet in front of her. Within the next few minutes, Lana Condor’s face fills the screen, and my copy of the book with all its dog-eared pages and Post-it notes is lying by my side.

Soon, the pizza arrives, and I’m stuffed full of food and contentment, but the more the trilogy continues, and the rifts between Lara Jean and Peter grow harder and harder to surpass, the more difficult it becomes to ignore the throb in my chest.

It’s as the series comes to an end that the first tear drops.

Despite my attempts to muffle errant sniffles into my upraised knees, eagle-eyed Dalia notices the tremor in my shoulders and says, “Zar, what’s wrong?”

That summons Ximena and Dani over to us at once, while Dalia kneels too.

I shake my head as I dig my palms into my eyes, scooting away to put some space between us. “No, please, don’t let me spoil tonight. I feel like I’m always crying lately, and I don’t know why. It’s so cringey.”

The Tahir girls trade a helpless glance from either side of me on the carpet, while Ximena digs her fingers into the cotton of her shorts, still standing over us. She’s the one who breaks the silence first, with a heated, “No offense, but that’s bullshit, Zar.”

“Mena, what?” Dani gasps, her sister equally stunned.

Ximena’s brown eyes blaze at us. “We’ve got to stop pretending everything’s all right all the time. It isn’t, and it’s okay that it isn’t.”

“Mena…,” I whisper.

Her harsh tone takes me aback. I recall how she implied at the furniture store that I was being shortsighted, mourning something I couldn’t have rather than appreciating what I do.

When I tense, she softens and sets a hand on my knee. Her skin is smudged with paint and charcoal in a few stubborn spots, a comforting and familiar sight. “We’re your best friends, Zahra. If you can’t be real with us, who can you talk to? If the reason you’re sad now is because of what you told me downtown, then Dani and Dalia deserve to know too.”

The twins gaze at me pleadingly.

I know they won’t push me if I refuse to explain, but in that moment, I realize how right Ximena is. They want to know, they want to help, and it isn’t fair that I’ve been building this wall between us without giving them a chance to find a ladder.

“Ever since we started getting our college acceptances, I’ve been scared,” I tell them. “Maybe even before that.”

Maybe since Baba died.

“Scared of what, Zar?” Dalia broaches gently.

I take a deep breath, then divulge every insecurity that’s been eating away at me since spring. “Of… losing you. All of you. You have all these adventures waiting for you in college, while I’ll keep living the same sorry life. I’m terrified you’ll make better friends when you’re there. I’m terrified to be without you.”

Quiet follows. I take a quick breath in and hold it.

I can’t look at them, because I’m afraid to see how selfish they think I am reflected in their expressions. While they’re planning slumber parties to cheer me up, I’m resentful of the opportunities they have.

Except that isn’t so.

I am happy for them. I’m just tired of being sad for myself all the damn time, and so desperately scared of letting anyone else slip away.

Dalia hugs me first, bowling me over onto the floor like a kingpin. “Zar, you could never lose us. Maybe we can’t be around all the time, but you’re stuck with us for life, no matter where any of us might go, so please, please, please stop torturing yourself with something that won’t happen.”

“Yeah, what she said,” Dani adds, squirming into my other side, her fiery hair splayed around us on the cushy carpet. “It’s true that I can’t wait to go to college. I’ve daydreamed about Dalia and me having our own dorm room for years. But those dreams have always included you, Zahra, college or otherwise.” She levels a dead-serious look at me. “Hell, you could decide to sell hyperrealistic unicorn figurines instead of going to college, and I’d support the crap out of you.”

“Um, I might have a question or two first,” Dalia says, “but me too.”

A hysteric giggle bubbles up my chest, at odds with the rivulets of teardrops that continue to glimmer down my cheeks. My friends are somewhat teary-eyed as well.

Tugging them both closer, I murmur, “Thank you. Love you.” Only then do I notice Ximena loitering above us, rubbing one of her biceps while frowning at our pile of gangly limbs. I flash her a smile. “You too, Men. Come here.”

She wriggles between Dani and me right away, burying her nose in my neck. Her breath tickles when she says, “I love you all, too, but…”

Dani props herself up on one elbow. “But?”

Ximena turns to lie on her back, staring up at the ceiling. “But I don’t think I want all that anymore. College. I meant what I told you at the furniture store, Zahra. There are other options out there, and… I think I want to explore them.”

“What does that mean?” Dani asks, curling to face her.

Ximena swallows and licks her lips. “I’m not sure yet.”

Another long stretch of silence follows, where none of us are quite sure how to react, until Dalia says, softly, “I know it’s scary, but things are changing. That’s why we’re having this sleepover in the first place, isn’t it? One last hurrah before they do?” One by one, the rest of us nod. “Then maybe… it’s okay not to know everything, and just have a good time with each other, like we first planned? Even if only for tonight?”

Netflix choosing that moment to loudly blare the opening of the next show on the twins’ queue makes our decision for us.

We finish the rest of the now-cold pizza and cheesy bread, squeal over brown girls in ball gowns on the Kate Sharma season of Bridgerton , and stream an episode of some Marvel show Dani’s been dying to watch, before the other girls succumb to exhaustion sometime close to two a.m.

Dalia dozes off with her head pillowed on her arms on a couch cushion. Ximena and Dani aren’t far behind, snoring on the love seat, the unanswered questions between them temporarily forgotten. Ximena’s head rests on Dani’s shoulder, while Dani’s cheek flattens Ximena’s curls. Poor Mena had been too drowsy to even remember her silk cap.

They’ll all have cricks in their necks tomorrow, but I don’t have the heart to wake them. Smiling tenderly, I tiptoe over to the hall closet and grab three spare quilts, draping one over Dani and Ximena and another over Dalia, who snuggles into it at once. The last one I wrap around myself like a cape.

I’m not sleepy yet, though. In fact, I’ve been struggling to sleep since Eid, which means Nanu hasn’t had to tempt me out of bed with breakfast to do Fajr prayers for the first time in ever . Sadly, try as I might, none of my prayers have come true yet.

Cross-legged on the bottom step of the stairs so I don’t disturb anyone else in the house, I rifle through Dalia’s travel bag to see what else she’s packed. My groping fingers tense when I feel the spirals of the notebook I wrote in that night with Nayim after work. I take it out and open it to a blank page.

Dalia must have swiped it from my desk before she left, figuring I might want something to write in, since she’s also tossed in a few of my most glittery gel pens. But I haven’t so much as looked at it since the night of the disastrous dinner with Nayim and my family. Our breakup and Professor Liu’s radio silence haven’t helped.

The pads of my fingertips brush over the page. It would be a shame to tarnish it when none of my thoughts make sense, when I don’t even know if my so-called muse has left the country, if he’s okay, if I’ll ever see him again.

But it’s not Nayim I miss like a lung as I trace the lines of the paper.

Harun…

Sweet, earnest, dorky Harun, who has been such a good friend to me ever since we met, even when I made it difficult for him.

Harun, who still replies, instead of deserting me entirely.

Ximena’s wisdom returns to me, and I can’t deny the truth in it any longer: We’ve got to stop pretending everything’s all right all the time.

I’m so sick and tired of pretending.

Before I can talk myself out of it, I retrieve my phone and press the FaceTime button, ensuring that the volume is too low to bother my slumbering friends.

It’s only when he answers that I admit to myself how desperately I longed to see him, and how sad I was at the prospect that he wouldn’t want to see me.

I drink in the sight of Harun.

His expression is guarded when he mutters, “What’s up?” but I spy telltale signs of sleeplessness in the bruises beneath his eyes and his—admittedly adorable—rumpled curls.

“Are you okay?”

His pupils dart away from the screen. “Fine. Why?”

“Harun…” A lump rises in my throat. Before I can stop myself, I whisper, “I hate that you’re looking at me like this again.”

Harun scowls. “Like what? This is my face.”

I shake my head. “Once upon a time, I would have bought that, but now I know you enough to know I hurt you.” When he doesn’t answer, jaw clenching, I continue, “I never should have used something you told me in confidence. I’m so sorry if it caused problems between you and your family.”

“It didn’t,” Harun grits out, then droops when I flinch, dropping his forehead onto his knees. I can see Rab’s empty terrarium behind him. “My parents were upset at first, but after we got a chance to talk, they were touched that Lily and I broke up because I chose a college close to them. It helped that I wasn’t still seeing Lily.” His voice is muffled, devoid of accusation, but remorse makes me swallow nevertheless. “It’s just… I just thought you cared about me. I didn’t think you’d throw me under the bus the first chance you got.”

“Harun, no,” I exclaim. “Of course, I care about you! I—”

His voice grows so quiet, I almost don’t hear it. “I get why you did it….” He lifts his head enough that his sorrowful eyes bore into me, glittering like polished ebony save for the blue glow of the screen. “If you’re happy now, I’m glad for you, but it kind of sucks to always be the one tossed aside.”

The weight of my betrayal hits me fully.

Harun has had a wall around his heart since we met, but through sheer chance, luck, and circumstance, I managed to worm myself through a crack. Made him laugh. Made him trust me with fears he couldn’t share with anyone else. Made him privy to my own.

Only to double-cross him.

To use him like a pawn in my game against Amma, while berating her for doing the same to me. I’m such a hypocrite, but what’s worse, a bad friend.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper again. “I’m so, so sorry. And I know you don’t have to forgive me, but I miss you so much. I miss us.”

There are tears beading in my lashes, but I blink them away, not wanting him to pretend things are okay simply because he wants me to feel better, regardless of his own pain.

Harun’s eyes grow round. “Really?”

His blatant disbelief is a punch to the gut. I bob my head with a frantic nod. “I know neither of us wanted to be set up, but I didn’t lie when I said our dates were some of the most fun I’ve had in years. I almost wish we could keep doing it.”

Maybe it would be best if we said goodbye now, because Harun deserves better, but I don’t want to let him go.

So, instead, I need to do better.

Be better, for him.

Harun is quiet as he processes this new information, pupils flicking in the direction of something out of my line of vision. I take the opportunity to observe every detail, my pulse thrumming for reasons beyond his answer.

His lower lip is plump and full as he chews on it, the glare of the phone screen in the dimness casting the fringe of his lashes in stark relief over his sculpted cheekbones. When his attention returns to me, it pierces right through me.

“I miss you, too, and I’m sorry,” he admits, tentatively hopeful. “I never should have said what I did about you and your writing. Whatever happens with college, you’re the smartest person I’ve ever known. Almost scarily smart, Zar.”

Pure, sunshiny delight courses through me, and I can’t keep the ear-to-ear grin off my face. “Then… maybe we can do something together soon?”

Harun hesitates. “We’d have to sneak around. I don’t want to come between you and your mother again. Not if everything’s finally cool with you and Nayim.”

I do my best to keep a straight face, but the truth is, I don’t want to hear Nayim’s name on Harun’s lips so soon after I’ve been waxing poetic over the shape of them. Don’t want the reminder of the boy who’d jilted me to taint my reconciliation with Harun.

If Nayim comes back tomorrow, I don’t know how I’ll feel. No one knows better than me how slow time can be to erase scars left by someone you’d gifted a piece of your heart to, but I meant what I told him in the castle. The Nayim I fell for isn’t the Nayim I met then.

And now, part of me resents him for being the reason Harun and I fell out.

“This is pretty embarrassing, considering the lengths I went to at your folks’ Eid party,” I admit, eyes trained on the bottom of my screen to avoid Harun’s, “but there is no me and Nayim anymore. He wasn’t who I thought he was, and I… I hate that I let him come between us.”

A beat goes by.

I forcibly meet his gaze, reminding myself that Harun has never judged me before. Even so, the bashful smile that alights like a sunrise across his face shoots a funny thrill through my chest. “Okay. That’s… okay. That’s good. Maybe we can do something Thursday?”

I beam. “I can’t wait!”

“Me neither…”

We’re content to sit in the dark, smiling goofily, until Harun suddenly yelps. “Ow, Rab!”

He must have dropped his phone because the world suddenly tilts on its axis. I hear the soft thump of the device hitting his sheets and find myself looking up at Harun rather than face-to-face with him.

When he raises his palm to cover his earlobe, I notice that his bearded dragon has scrambled its way up his shoulder to take a chomp out of it.

A laugh escapes me, so loud I have to slap a hand against my mouth. “Has he been crawling around this whole time?”

“He was helping me build a model plane,” Harun grumbles, rubbing his red earlobe between the fingertips of one hand while holding the unrepentant culprit in the other. “Guess he got tired of waiting for bedtime.”

I laugh again, soft and fond. “You’re cute, Harun Emon.”

“What?” comes his garbled reply. “Um. Well. Anyway… good night!”

He hangs up.

Warmth saturates my chest, and I don’t bother attributing it to my phone or quilt for once. I crane my neck to grin up at the ceiling. That not-lizard has grown on me. He isn’t the only one.

Even though I’m not ready to start writing tonight, for the first time since Nayim left, sleep drags at my eyelids. Wandering over to Dalia, I give in to its spell with a muffled yawn, wishing Harun an equally peaceful slumber.