“I should have gone to Egypt. English is too much for me.”

“You’re blessed to learn anything you can. You should have written for me while you were here—why didn’t I think of it?”

Muneer knew his mother never would have let him go off and write stories while there was so much to do after his father’s death.

“In the future, God willing,” he said, and left it at that.

There were no other young men in the courtyard—it was a bunch of uncles gossiping. Muneer wandered back to the gate and read the paper.

When the door to the villa swung open to reveal Saeedah, bareheaded and smiling, he knew he would have been disappointed if she hadn’t come down. She was framed in the entryway in a calf-length, pleated opal-white dress that was cinched at the waist like an Egyptian film star’s dress. Her face was round as a moon, the kind of face poets loved, well-fed with honey-colored eyes. Her hair was flipped from her shoulders to her ears, teased up in the back. Her lips shone with rouge. Almost as tall as he was, she stared straight into his face.

He pulled the ends of his shimagh under his chin and turned his eyes down. He was being disingenuous, and she knew it. “Go round the back,” she said.

As though she had nothing to fear.

If her father found out, Muneer’s chances of an apprenticeship might evaporate. But he couldn’t say no. He left the gate intending to go home and leave her disappointed. But his feet were connected to his heart more directly than his head, and they did as she said. He leaned against the villa’s back wall and had nearly reached the paper’s back cover when she appeared.

He never learned how she slipped from the villa, around the back of the yard, and out the back gate. But there she was, swooshing her skirts with her hands, seeming pleased that his eyes stayed on her. He folded the paper three times again and tried to stuff it in his pocket, but it was too big, so he tossed it into the street—what other option did he have?—the whole time studying her.

“Anyone famous die today?”

“That’s not why a person reads the paper. It’s not a film magazine.”

She swished the hem of her dress dramatically. “Do you want to kiss me, like in an Egyptian film?”

“Wow,” he said, the American word feeling like carbonation in his mouth. “You’ve never seen an Egyptian film.”

A laugh gurgled in her throat and her fingers fluttered mothlike to his cheek. “Yes, I have. Last summer, in Cairo. And once at the American compound here.”

He shrank from her, eyes on his sandals, blood pumping.