The stars were thick in the sky, a web of eternity. I had only ever seen the sky like this when Jehad and I were young and our father would take the family for weeks to camp in the desert. The whole country would set up tents for the winter. How did I forget those days? How many times did we do that as a family? Such wonderful memories of my father, even better than the Windex rainbow on glass and Fattooma song. No. This isn’t the sort of place my father went on his long nights away. Not possible.

The Persian Gulf air moving in and out of my lungs was salty, dry, and cold. The same air in and out of his lungs as he moved in and out of me. Something sharp, maybe a rock or a shell, dug into my back under the blanket with every thrust he made. I had to pee again. The stars were watching me, daring me to move. But I didn’t. I endured and waited, because that’s what girls do. Even bad girls like me. We endure and wait, and cater to the whims of men, because sometimes our lives are at stake … until we get even.

I peed where I lay on the blanket and felt the warm wetness between my thighs. “You’re worth every penny,” he said. “Can I get you anything?”

He nudged me. “Are you okay?” Exhaustion pressed on my chest and held me down. He nudged me again, and I closed my eyes to the stars.

When I opened them again, I was on my stomach, lying on a hard surface, the voices of men and women talking around me. I saw the bare legs of a woman whose painted blue toes I recognized as Fifi’s. The lights were bright in the room and I tried to turn over, but someone held me down. Fifi crouched to meet my face. “It’s okay, a big shard of glass was stuck in your back from the beach. There’s a doctor here fixing you up,” she said. Then she whispered, “Didn’t you feel it? Anyway, we couldn’t take you to a hospital because … you know.”

I slept at Um Buraq’s house. Sharp pain would shoot through me when I tried to move my arm on the side where muscles in my back had been sliced by the glass. In the morning I cleaned myself up in the bathtub as best as I could with one arm. Deepa helped me wash my hair without getting the bandage wet. The other girls had left, and it was just Um Buraq and me.

“You caused quite a ruckus last night. You should be more careful next time,” she said, pushing a tray of fried eggs and labneh in front of me while she pawed leftover matchboos. The traditional Kuwaiti dish of saffron rice cooked with raisins and nuts, topped with golden chicken and spicy tomato sauce, was typically an afternoon or evening meal, but she would eat it at any time of the day or night.