“Hey. Stop.” I pushed at his arm to get his attention. “Why are you laughing?”
He shook his head, wiped tears from his eyes. “I’m just—” He shrugged, shook his head again, his shoulders still shaking with silent laughter. “Just, damn, Shadi. Wow.”
“What?”
“I’m just glad you said it and not me.” He took a sharp breath, held it, let it go as he stared into the distance. “Man, my mom is going to love that. You don’t even know the shit my parents have had to deal with.”
“I can only imagine.”
“Well, you’d be the first to try. People never want to admit we have problems like that in our own communities.” He sighed, shook his head, jumped to his feet. “All right, we should go. We’re going to be late.”
I realized then that I didn’t even know what time it was. It had been too long since I’d spent my lunch break focused on anything but the fractures in my heart, and when I got to my feet, I felt a little lighter.
Noah and I tossed our plates, walked back to campus. I told him the name of our mosque. Gave him a phone number his mom could call. We were nearly back at school when I remembered—
“Oh, hey, I’ll be there this weekend, actually. My sister andI volunteer on Saturday nights to help people learn how to use computers, set up email addresses, that sort of thing. If your parents want to stop by, I can introduce them to some people.”
Noah raised his eyebrows. “Saturday night computer classes at the mosque. Nice.”
My smiles were coming more easily now. “We have a lot of refugees in our community,” I explained. “People who fled Afghanistan, ran for their lives from the Taliban. There are a few people at our mosque whose entire families were beheaded by Saddam Hussein. Most of them came here with nothing, and they need help getting started again.”
“Jesus,” he said, sobering quickly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Their stories are insane.”
“Insane how?”
A sharp breeze stole into my jacket then, and I struggled, for a moment, to pull the zipper closed.
“I don’t know,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets. “Like, you know what a burqa is? Those gross tent things the Taliban forces women to wear in Afghanistan?”
He nodded.
“Well, apparently they’re really good for hiding people. Imagine disguising your entire family—men, women, children—in those burqas, and running for your life through the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, hoping at every turn not to be found out and executed.”
“Holy shit.” We’d come to an abrupt stop at an intersection. Noah turned to look at me, his eyes wide. “You actuallyknow people who did that? Went through that?”
“Yeah,” I said, hitting the button for the crosswalk. “They go to our mosque.”
“That’s... crazy.”
Noah’s solemn tone—and his proceeding silence—made me aware, a beat too late, of the dark tension I’d just carried into the conversation. We were still waiting at the crosswalk, quietly watching the seconds tick down until the light would change.
I tried to salvage the moment.
“Hey,” I said, pasting a smile on my face, “you’re welcome to join us on Saturday night. We might even order pizza.”
Noah laughed, raised his eyebrows at me. “That’s quite an offer.”
“It’s also worth noting,” I said, “that it will be extremely boring.”
“Amazing.” He shook his head slowly, his smile growing impossibly wider. “I mean, I’m going to pass? But thanks.”
“Honestly, if you’d said yes I would’ve judged you.”
He laughed.
Noah and I had classes in different directions, so we split up when we got back to the campus parking lot. He was already several feet away when he turned back and shouted, “Hey, I’ll find you at lunch tomorrow.” He pointed at me. “I’ll even bring my own newspaper.”
