I opened the front door and stepped inside.
“Assalamu alaikum, Baba, we’re?—”
The slap came out of nowhere.
One second I was greeting my father like I did every day, and the next my head was snapping to the side, my cheek exploding with pain, my vision going white at the edges. I stumbled backward, crashing into Zahara, who caught me before I hit the floor.
“BABA!” Zahara screamed, but before she could say anything else, his hand connected with her face too. The sound was like a gunshot in the quiet house. She fell against the wall, her hijab slipping, her hand pressed to her cheek in shock.
I’d never seen our father like this.
Shamir Ali was a strict man. A devout man. A man who ran his household with an iron fist disguised as religious authority. He had rules for everything—what we wore, what we ate, who we spoke to, where we went, how we prayed. And yes, he’d disciplined us before. A slap here, a belt there, whatever he deemed necessary to keep his daughters in line.
But this was different.
This was rage.
“You think I’m stupid?” His voice was low. Controlled. Somehow more terrifying than if he’d been screaming. “You think I don’t know what my own daughters do behind my back?”
My heart stopped. Actually stopped, frozen in my chest like a dead thing.
He knew.
Oh God, he knew.
“Baba, please—” Zahara started.
“SILENCE.” He stepped toward us, and we both shrank back against the door. “Brother Tariq saw you. At the mall. With those corner boys. The ones always coming in to my store sniffin’ around you. What you think I didn’t know?”
Brother Tariq. Of course. That nosy, self-righteous snitch who worked at the halal butcher shop two blocks away. He must have seen us at the food court. Must have run straight to our father like the good little soldier he was.
“Take them off.” Baba’s voice cut through my thoughts. “Take off the hijabs.”
Neither of us moved.
“NOW.”
His hand shot out and grabbed Zahara’s hijab, ripping it off her head. Her hair spilled out—long and dark and pressed straight, nothing like the natural curls she was supposed to have. And underneath the hijab, her outfit was revealed—tight jeans, a fitted shirt that showed the curve of her breasts, hoop earrings she’d hidden in her bra.
She looked like a regular teenage girl. Which, to our father, was the worst thing she could possibly be.
He turned to me next, and I didn’t fight when he snatched my hijab away. What was the point? He already knew. He’d already seen Zahara. My outfit was almost identical—jeans, a V-neck shirt, a thin chain necklace with a heart pendant that Stephon had given me for my birthday.
Baba looked at us—his daughters, his flesh and blood, standing in his foyer dressed like the around the way girls he’d spent our whole lives telling us not to become—and something in his face shifted. The rage was still there, but underneath it was something worse.
Disgust.
“KIM!” His voice boomed through the house. “FATIMA! KHADIJA! Get in here. NOW.”
I heard movement upstairs. Footsteps. Doors opening. Our father had three wives—our mother had been his first, but she’d died giving birth to us. Kim was wife number two, Fatima was wife number three, and Khadija was the youngest, wife number four. They all lived in this house with their children, all under Baba’s rule, all complicit in maintaining his version of order.
They filed into the foyer one by one, their faces carefully blank. Behind them came the other children—our half-siblings, ranging in age from five to fourteen. Mehar was there, only twelve years old but already wearing that pinched expression that came from growing up in this house. She looked at me and Zahara with something like pity in her eyes.
“Look at them.” Baba gestured toward us like we were exhibits in a museum. “Look at what they’ve become. Sneaking out. Meeting boys. Dressing like whores.”
I flinched at the word. Zahara grabbed my hand.
“I need to know.” Baba’s voice dropped, and somehow that was worse than the yelling. “I need to know if they’ve been defiled.”
