From Canada, Bandar had smuggled a dozen little bottles of alcohol, hiding them in a pair of tube socks stuffed in his shoes. Muneer half admired his brother’s gumption and half considered him an enormous fool. If the customs agents had caught Bandar, they would have thrown him in jail. To drink the gulp-size quantities of rum and schnapps, Bandar, Muneer, Jameel, and two of Bandar’s buddies had driven to the desert outside the city after the last prayer of the day. They veered off-road and drove for five minutes into the desert, keeping the glare of the streetlights in their rearview so they wouldn’t lose their way. The sky was so stacked with stars Muneer felt sure he could count the seven heavens. They spread a blanket on the ground in the beam of the headlights, kicked their shoes off, and swigged two bottles each. It was enough to coat his tongue and warm his cheeks, not enough to get drunk on. Bandar claimed the last two bottles, and at the end of the evening seemed the tipsiest. He’d brought a shisha to mask the smell of alcohol. They smoked for nearly an hour and took turns breathing in one another’s faces to test how well the ruse was working. The smoke tickled their faces. By the end of the night laughter gurgled in their bellies like the water bubbling in the shisha.

It was the only time Muneer ever drank alcohol, the only time he was ever tempted.

A few nights later, Muneer and Bandar were hanging out with Jameel at their father’s dress shop downtown in the Balad. Bandar talked about America as though he’d been there before, as though he were an expert on New York and Chicago and Los Angeles.

“Come with me,” he said.

Muneer looked up from the newsmagazine he was reading. Bandar swiped it and hid it behind his back when Muneer reached for it.

“We’ll study together,” Bandar said. His eyebrows lifted on the word study, as if to say, “We will do nothing of the sort.”

Muneer grabbed the newspaper his father had left on a stool by the door. He shared his father’s obsession with other countries’ politics and war, but in the two years since he’d graduated high school, working in his father’s shop, he’d started to yearn for more than talking about the news. He didn’t want to read the newspapers or listen to BBC Arabic anymore. He wanted to hold a microphone to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s face. He wanted to be banging on a typewriter.

“America,” said Jameel. He ate watermelon seeds out of a small metal bowl. In front of the shop, their dads sat on overturned buckets passing the nozzle of a shisha back and forth.

“You can both come,” Bandar said.