Hannah kicks the ball a little with the boys, but Fadi would rather pick it up and throw it, which makes Fouad mad. He scolds his brother in Arabic, and Hannah tries to calm him, but he doesn’t understand what she’s saying. When Hannah’s father and Lamees arrive a few minutes later, Lamees is practically jogging, her face covered.

“Where is your abayah?” Lamees says. Though out of breath, she has the fire of anger in her voice.

“It slipped off.”

“Time to go,” Hannah’s father says.

“I should find it.”

“We’ll buy you another.”

SOCIAL LIFE

After Taif, Hannah tells her father, “I need to meet someone my age.” It’s not that she wants friends so she can stay here forever, more that she can’t learn about this place completely through her father’s male eyes or in the living rooms of her relatives.

He arranges for her to go shopping that week with Summer, his best friend’s daughter, whose mother, he tells her—as though it were a formula for friendship—is American. The younger girl shows up with an extra abayah and scarf draped over her arm. “My mom told me to lend these to you,” she says.

Summer wears a striped Benetton sweater and faded jeans under her abayah. She slides into the back seat of her father’s Nissan SUV and Hannah follows. Summer sits toward the middle, leaning between the front seats to give her driver, Nasser, directions. She adjusts her headscarf, pulling the ends wide and exposing her short Winona Ryder haircut before wrapping the scarf tightly over her hair.

“What music do you like?” she says.

Hannah brings the Fine Young Cannibals tape out of her purse, where she stashed it and forgot about it.

“I stole it.”

“Ha!” Summer takes the tape and shifts forward so she can reach the dashboard and put it into the tape deck. Nasser doesn’t seem to notice as he zips in and out of lanes like a race car driver. Hannah wishes she could lay her hands on the steering wheel, but she’s not sure she could drive crazy enough to not get run over.

Over the music, Summer tells Hannah she spent her last two years of high school in Ohio and a year at a small college in the States. She decided to come home when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

“Why’d you come back with a war going on?”

“Pot, kettle, or whatever.” Summer grabs the front seats as Nasser speeds through a red light. “Hang on to your headscarves! We’re going to a party! Don’t worry. Nasser won’t tell your dad.”