Page 26

Wednesday finds me a nervous wreck.

I bite my nails to nubs until Amma thwaps them with a spoon and frets, “Boys won’t like you if you don’t have pretty hands. Meera’s daughter gets manicures to make hers stylish and French .”

Normally, I would: (A) tell her I don’t care what boys think of me, (B) remind her we can’t afford manicures, (C) attempt to explain how French tips work, and (D) ask why she’s already plotting how to catch the eye of a new guy.

But I’m thrown by how much I’m looking forward to seeing Harun.

Leaving Amma, Nanu, and a coloring Resna in the kitchen, I drag myself over to the couch, where Arif is playing a Nintendo Switch his friend lent him, and plop next to him. Grunting, he budges over to give me more space. I grab a pillow and bury my face in it.

For the next minute, the only sounds in the room are the pings from his game and my sighs, until Arif mutters, “Why don’t you text him?”

I peek up at him over the pillow. “Who?”

“I can’t keep track anymore,” he counters dryly.

Glaring, I give him a good whack with the pillow but leave him to his game. He’s not entirely wrong. Harun and I left off in a good place last night, and he even texted me a good morning selfie with a grumpy Rabeardranath, so it wouldn’t be wrong if I checked in, would it?

After much internal debate, I settle on asking, What should I wear tomorrow? in a surreptitious effort to excavate clues about the location of our not-date.

Of course, his answer is as cryptic as ever: Something comfy.

Then I’ll come in sweatpants and bunny slippers, I threaten.

I was imagining more along the line of sneakers, he replies, so you don’t face-plant.

My mind spins with the possibilities of a destination where I’ll need sturdy shoes to avoid falling. Before it can catch up to my fingertips, I type back, Psh, I’ll be fine. You’d catch me, wouldn’t you?

His ellipses disappear and my eyes grow huge.

Shit! Why’d I say that?

But then he responds, I would. Kinda comes with the territory of being with a princess.

My mouth goes dry. Is he flirting, poking fun, or being polite?

I can’t think of a retort beyond, Much appreciated, my knight in robot armor.

Our current truce feels too fragile to survive my knowing what he meant, so the topic turns to how I might sneak out to meet him.

After we scheme, I toss my phone aside.

Comfy, huh?

Thursday night, an hour before sunset, I hurry home to freshen up and get dressed.

Dalia texts to let me know she’s outside, since I told Amma I’d be hanging out with the twins after work.

Dalia drives me beyond Paterson’s city limits to a leafy copse in aptly named Woodland Park. There’s a playground next to the parking lot. Harun perches on the hood of his BMW at the far end of it, beneath the shade of a tall tree, frowning at his phone until the Mini Cooper stops beside him.

His cheeks half dimple as he grins. “You staged your escape.”

It’s hardly the first time he’s smiled at me, but I swallow the sudden flutter in my stomach before I return it. Although I can sense Dalia smirking, I ignore her to clamber out of the car.

It’s not a big deal, and less about Harun being attractive than it is about his resting broody face. If the sun were eclipsed every day, you’d want to see it when it shone too, wouldn’t you?

“Perk of being a poor brown girl,” I quip. “Your mom can’t worry half as much as her friends when you spend most of the day out of the house working anyway.”

“I’m just glad to see you.” His eyes darken with some unreadable emotion as he appraises my outfit. “No sweatpants or slippers?”

“They’re in the laundry,” I deadpan.

“Too bad,” he muses to himself. “You’d be cute in bunny slippers….” His head shoots up the second the words sink in. Both of us flush in the awkward silence that follows, until Dalia coughs to remind us of her presence. We whip toward her like two guilty kids caught with our sticky fingers in the mishti batta. Harun sputters when she snaps a picture of him. “Wait, what are you doing with that?”

“Safety reasons,” she chirps, then turns to me. “You trust him, and I trust you, but you’ve never been alone together, right?” Aside from that time when Sammi left early, and in the car, I suppose that’s true. I nod. “Thought so. Share your location with me in case.”

“Yes, Mom…”

Dalia scrunches up her nose, but the clever rejoinder never comes. Instead she leans in to give me a hug, whispering, “Have fun. But not too much fun.”

“Yes, Mom,” I say again, this time with more affection.

As she moves to enter her car, Harun blurts, “You can stay. Um, if you want. And Zahra wants.” His voice softens when his gaze flicks to me. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

“That’s sweet,” Dalia says, “but I need to go home and pray before I let Paul Hollywood stare reproachfully into the depths of my soul while I’m trying to re-create this week’s GBBO technical challenge.”

I nod to let her know I’ll be fine. “Nadiya’s cooler.”

“Fair,” Dalia concedes.

Harun peers between us. “I have no idea what that is, but it sounds scary.”

Dalia smiles beatifically. “So am I. Don’t forget.”

Blowing one last kiss at me and an I know where you live squint at Harun, she drives off. I watch her go, feeling insurmountably grateful. Dalia, my beautiful, protective friend, has often told me that she wants to focus on herself until she graduates from college, but when she does seek out love, she’ll do it the traditional way, which a lot of modern Muslims call halal dating.

It’s similar to what Harun and I were supposed to be doing, with chaperones and the chastest of contact until we agreed to a formal commitment. Now I’m sneaking around with a boy again, but Dalia doesn’t judge me for doing things my own way.

It means a lot when so many others harbor nothing but judgment for me.

I move to the front passenger seat of Harun’s BMW and click on the belt. After a beat, he says, “I mean it. I can take you home if you’re not comfortable.”

I am , though. I feel safe with him. I always have.

Not to mention, I’m dying to find out what he has planned. Rather than lay my heart bare, however, I shake my head. “Nope. I was promised an adventure and an adventure I will get. Besides, Amma would hound me until I confessed all my sins if I came home early. She’ll think my friends and I are fighting.”

We start driving.

As we travel toward the highway, I ask Harun what he’s been up to since we “broke up,” and he hesitantly admits he’d been helping his father plan a surprise party for Pushpita Khala’s birthday, then frowns at my wolfish grin. “What?”

“No, it’s just, you’re legitimately precious,” I reply. “Mama’s boy.”

He scowls. “Stop calling me that. You’re lucky it’s over between us or you’d have been the one she force-fed sugar-free, gluten-free cake while my dad took a bunch of embarrassing photos to post on Facebook.”

“Note to self,” I say as I pretend to type into my phone, “make a Facebook just to add Pushpita Khala on it.”

Regardless of his insistence that he didn’t enjoy it, his veritable pout only confirms that he’d do almost anything to make the people he loves happy. I do my best not to laugh at his ruffled feathers, until he cracks a tiny smile.

The rest of the drive is like Harun himself: unexpected and quiet, but enjoyable. I watch New York City slowly come to life across the Hudson River. Once we reach the George Washington Bridge, Harun appears to come alive as well, spouting off facts about its history and construction.

Perhaps it’s a trick of the lights strung on the arches of the bridge, or those flickering in the many windows of the city’s skyscrapers, but Harun practically glows beside me, dark brown irises sparkling like the night sky flecked with stars.

When he catches me staring, he cuts himself off. “Sorry. Was I talking too much? I get overenthusiastic about engineering sometimes.”

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him excited about anything other than Rabeardranath Tagore. I shake my head. “Don’t apologize. I like this side of you.”

His eyes snap toward me, then back to the road. “You don’t have to pretend.”

Something about the smallness of his voice fires up my protective instincts. Have others made him feel like his interests were boring before? Or is it because our relationship has been built on so many lies and little hurts? “I’m not. I feel like you know so much about me because I’m always the one yammering on and on when we meet up.”

“I like listening to you,” he says. “And you’re surprisingly good at saying a lot while sharing very little, general.”

Ignoring the bubbly warmth his words cascade through me, I continue, “Did you always want to be an engineer, or was it something your parents pushed you into choosing?”

“If it were at all up to my mother, I’d be a doctor,” he says. “I think that’s why she keeps telling people I’m studying biomedical engineering, so she can brag that I’m both .”

“That does sound like Pushpita Khala Logic.”

His eyes flick toward me again. “I guess I do like engineering a lot, for the same reason that I like Rab and swimming. It isn’t… complicated.”

I pull a face. “I beg to differ. I barely passed algebra, and I’d sink like a stone if we went to the beach.”

Although I’m joking, Harun gnaws on his full bottom lip, fingers tightening on the steering wheel. “I was never… good with words, the way you are. In fact, I felt pretty damn bad with them when I first started private school. The other kids thought it was hilarious to fake Apu accents anytime the teacher called on me or my cousin. Shaad never let it bother him. I quickly learned it was better to keep my mouth shut.”

“Harun…”

Not for the first time, the urge to hunt down and throw my shoe at some prissy private school kids assaults me.

He frowns at the road ahead, the glass-beaded tasbih around the rearview mirror casting shadows across his lenses. “It was awful for a while, and I couldn’t even tell my parents. How could I when they worked so hard to get me in? But then I joined robotics. Everything else kind of fell into place. Math makes sense . There’s only one answer. When I’m doing calculations, I don’t think about anything else. It’s the same way I feel when I’m underwater. There’s no judgment for once. Is that weird?”

I think of all the voices I’ve been battling with in my own head.

Amma’s and the aunties’, with so many rules for being a good Bangladeshi, Muslim girl. I think about their group chats, worrying about what secrets they know. My characters’, fighting with me over every word. Professor Liu’s, utterly silent. My friends’ and the fear of losing them. Nayim’s, brimming with such disappointment.

An endless list of impossible choices.

My head shakes instinctively. “It isn’t weird. Writing is like that for me. Thank you for trusting me.”

Harun considers me through his periphery, as if he’s gauging how honest I am. I sit up straight and peer back, hoping to convey that I mean every word. At last his shoulders sag, and his voice grows so soft, I almost don’t hear it over the whir of traffic.

“Can I show you one more thing?”

The fact that he still thinks to ask sends affection rippling through me. Before I can talk myself out of it, I extend my arm until it brushes his next to the gear shift. “Please.”

Swallowing audibly, he refocuses on the road, but his arm doesn’t move away from mine. Moments later, we’re parking the BMW in a ridiculously expensive garage. Harun shyly offering me a hand distracts me from the exorbitant prices, the stately city hall building at our rear, the roar of cars all around us, and the distant squeal of the subway below.

The Brooklyn Bridge arcs grandly above us.

My pulse thumps against his palm as he escorts me up a stairway to a cordoned-off pedestrian walk. Behind us, people mill out of the subway entrance, but though some sidestep us impatiently, Harun and I continue our stroll at a leisurely pace.

Cars zip by on either side of us on the busy highway roads, but it isn’t until we reach the wooden planks that feed into the bridge that I realize how far up we are. The boards below our feet creak and wobble as tourists jostle and skateboards zoom past. I cling to Harun’s arm, mindful of every step. No wonder he wanted me to wear sturdy shoes.

Then we stride onto Brooklyn Bridge proper and vertigo swoops through my belly. I’m suddenly hyperaware of the fact that only a thin wooden layer and a wide railing separate me from a violent death beneath a hundred oncoming wheels. It’s narrower and less metallic than I would have pictured too. One well-placed push from a stranger is all it would take.

But when I turn to Harun, he’s glowing again, the bulbs studding the cables of the bridge shimmering across his black hair and eyes through his glasses.

“This is my favorite place in the whole world,” he says, guiding me over to a large patio where my legs grow steady once more, surrounded by walls and windows on every side.

I follow his gaze and gasp.

We can see everything .

Clusters of skyscrapers. The Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. The glass triangles that comprise One World Trade Center. Beneath our feet, the cars, and even farther below, boats sailing across the East River. The Statue of Liberty raising a torch to the blushing sky on Liberty Island.

Other bridges pierce the balmy mist that wisps around us. Harun points them all out to me: “The blue-gray that gets lost in the storm clouds when it rains is the Manhattan Bridge. You can see the train lines from there. And that almost pink one? That’s the Williamsburg Bridge. But the Brooklyn Bridge is my favorite.”

When he’s like this, it makes no sense to me, what he said about not being good with words. Gently, I ask, “Why?”

He regales me with the history of the bridge. How it’s one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. How its original architect died before its completion from an injury. How his son took over but was forced to watch the completion of the bridge from afar after contracting caisson disease, unprepared for the atmosphere. How his wife finished the project and was the first to walk the bridge.

I wince. “Sounds kinda Macbethian.”

“That Shakespeare play?” His brows furrow. “How?”

“Well, it’s called the cursed play, and this place sounds pretty damn cursed if it practically wiped out an entire family,” I reply, casting an uneasy glance around us and recalling that I didn’t have a chance to do Maghrib prayers before leaving with him.

Harun chuckles. “I mean, yeah, I guess you could see it that way. Me… I think it’s a monument to the Roeblings’ dedication to helping people cross the river. Once it was built, rumors started spreading that the bridge would collapse, but it’s been standing over a century now. P. T. Barnum even sent a whole circus’s worth of elephants across it a year after its completion to test the rumors, and it never once shook.”

I sneak glimpses between him and the rosy sky. The setting sun glints off the steel and glass of the skyscrapers, refracting pink and red and iridescent light across the profile of his face. The arc of his cheekbone cuts a sharp line down to his jaw, but with his contented smile and the wind running invisible fingers through his hair, he feels approachable.

My fingers twitch on the railing. Our arms are touching again. All at once, his skin feels warm and electric against mine.

I glance back out the window.

It’s quite possibly the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

Although we’re surrounded by other tourists snapping pictures and cycling across the bridge, I feel closer to Harun than ever before. There’s definitely a metaphor in here somewhere.

“Thank you for bringing me to your favorite place,” I tell him.

“It’s even nicer in winter,” he replies. “I like walking around the botanical garden nearby after visiting the bridge. I remember what you said about your world feeling small, but this is our world too. It’s right at our doorstep if you’re willing to go. Maybe we could come back?”

My head whips toward him. He’s looking pointedly at the shifting river below, but the sky isn’t the only thing that’s gone red. What does it mean that he wants to come back with me, so long after our facade has ended? After he goes to college?

Does he mean as friends? Do friends hold hands so often? Do they hang on every word the other speaks? Do they plan special outings like this? I don’t think I can lie to myself anymore, even if I’m not yet ready to speak it aloud.

Harun has become one of my best friends, but he’s something else, too. I feel things for him that I don’t with Ximena or the Tahir girls.

Heart pounding at this revelation, I manage a faint, “Sure. I’d like that. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” He dimples, and my stomach does another flip. “But I can tell I’ve talked about bridges for too long. I promise that’s not all I had planned for tonight. Ready?”

I nod.

Fingers intertwined, we complete our trek across the bridge and find ourselves at the park on the other side, lush with trees and flowers. Bees and butterflies flutter in the air. We buy food from a Halal Guys cart and walk until we reach a stretch of lawn overlooking a pier, teeming with people sitting on picnic blankets, waiting for a large projector to play a movie.

SAbrINA , reads the poster, portraying a black-and-white image of Audrey Hepburn, with one man gazing at her yearningly while another kisses her cheek.

“It’s a romance,” Harun says. “I thought you might like it.”

A teeny-tiny part of me squirms at the love triangle depicted on the poster—haha, universe, I get it—but the consideration he’s put into all this fragments my resolve.

“I’m sure I will.”