I also spoke regularly with Sabah. She and her family had been among the masses who fled with whatever they could when Saddam invaded. I went to see her before they left. Her mother let me in, but Sabah had locked herself in her bedroom. So much separated me from her and from the person I was before we drifted apart, but she mattered to me, and I didn’t want to lose our friendship forever in the chaos of political upheaval.

I sat against the wall and spoke to her through the door. “I don’t blame you for being mad at me. I haven’t been a good friend,” I said. That was all it took for the door to swing open. She hugged me, and we went into her room, where she had been packing a small suitcase. “Mother said to take only what I absolutely have to. She said we’ll come back when this is over, but my father reminded us what happened in Palestine, so we’re taking things we can’t do without.”

“You can’t live without that?” I asked, pointing to the stuffed toy in her suitcase.

Sabah blushed. “It was a present.”

“From a boy?” Much had happened in her life too.

She filled me in on the details of how they’d met, their late-night phone calls when her parents slept, the love letters. I envied her innocence and shared in her happiness too. We talked for a while, getting caught up as I helped her pack. Then she asked if I was still friends with Um Buraq.

“Yeah, why?”

She looked away, but I pressed her to explain.

“I defended you a lot over the past few months,” she said.

“Defended me from what?”

She sat me down. “People talk. Look. People say things about Um Buraq. That she goes to late-night parties and things like that.” Sabah hesitated. “Some people said she was taking you with her.”

I remember that moment well. I wasn’t upset with Sabah for confronting me with my reputation. I don’t think she would have participated in such harmful gossip. But the hurt and bitterness taking root in me tightened my throat and made my belly cramp. As I look back from the Cube, that physical expression of my humiliation was a kind of hinge between the tenderness of the girl who still craved acceptance and the hardened woman who was much older than Sabah, jaded and maybe wiser—more like Um Buraq.

“As if I give a shit what people say,” I said.

Sabah and I promised to stay in touch no matter where we ended up.

I kept my promise and made regular calls to her in Jordan, even though Mama worried about the cost of long-distance calls. The Iraqi occupation put us in an economic bubble. Utility companies were barely functional, and money had no value. It was just paper. In this strange new order, I thought we could afford to “waste calls,” especially since I was wearing expensive Chanel lipstick. I had saved the receipt showing I had twelve hundred British pounds worth of lipstick. Perhaps as proof of my worth.