Both of Yusuf’s parents were people of faith. His dad needed something to tether himself to while his work as a Peacekeeper for the UN bounced him all over the world and, inshallah, he would go wherever God sent him because that was His will. In some new tiny apartment, Yusuf’s mom would quote the Quran to him as far back as he could remember, between kisses on his forehead. I trust in Him, and in Him shall all the trusters put their trust, she told Yusuf. He saw her trust challenged and heard her on the phone with her sisters and her mother. Doctors. School counselors. He won’t look at me. He won’t let me hug him. He barely talks. Something is different about him and I’m not sure how to help. Learning—the order he found in math and science—was the only thing that grabbed his interest. How, inshallah or not, one equation could describe how both a ball that he kicked at recess flew through the air and how the universe expands. His parents enrolled him in a school for gifted kids and got him tutors and fought to place their little egghead on the high school math team. His parents, who—back in Egypt where they’d all been born—had heard of this cousin’s cousin or that friend’s friend caught in a police raid at some suspected gay gathering. Even though he had told them he was gay before he left for university at sixteen, they trusted that it was just another problem they didn’t yet know the answer to. As much as he wasn’t interested in their verses and you should speak to this therapist or that imam, a rift widened between them.

He honestly didn’t get it. He never argued faith. In the game of telephone that was their family and the Muslim community in East London, he called his younger cousin Salma, who heard from her mom, who heard from her sister, who heard from Yusuf’s mom about the gay thing.

“They’re bothered by how unbothered you are,” his cousin Salma had told him on the phone, always his human-to-Yusuf translator. “Like, you don’t care that they’re so torn up about you being gay.”

“They’re right. I don’t care.”

“Duh. You shouldn’t. They’ll stop being weird soon enough.” She’d popped her chewing gum. “Besides, you’re at uni. You can, like, shag every boy you want. You still buying me vodka, or what?”

While Yusuf talked and picked at his knuckles, I thought about other peoples’ faith in capital-G God and Kaori’s faith in science in the face of the Envisioner’s impossibility. Really, I didn’t care about any of that. I was just thankful for whatever brought me to that room with him. But at the same time, here we are.

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