Ever since she arrived in Jidda less than a week ago, leaving Cleveland a month and a half into the fall semester at the art institute, she’s felt restless, listless, rudderless. She’s questioned whether it was a good idea. She needs to grab onto something.

It’s not that she expected to feel instantly at home. She’s moved too much with her mother to think she’d settle into a new place, like putting on a spiffy new outfit and loving how she looked in the mirror, how the clothes made her feel. No, she’d known she would need time to acclimate to this place her parents “came from.”

The cassette tape is solid in Hannah’s hand. She slips it under her abayah and into her jeans pocket. Keeping her hands hidden under the black robe—which she can’t get used to wearing, but is useful for shoplifting—she pats the little rectangle. It feels like a piece of home.

The whole tape shop feels familiar, with its smell of plastic, though the tapes are not the same as the ones in the United States; they are cheap and black-marketed, in thick, soft, unfamiliar packaging with typos on the song lists. The shop is darker and smaller than the Sam Goody in Ohio, too. Instead of carpet, her footsteps land on black and white tiles, mottled like birds’ eggs. But the place is full of music she recognizes. FYC and the Smiths and Kate Bush.

To take that familiarity out of the shop with her, she is absconding with a buck or two worth of merchandise. So what?

She feels her femaleness constantly here in Jidda, in a way she occasionally does in America. For example, though she isn’t the only woman in the shop, she’s the one woman alone. The one person alone. Two teenage girls with fuchsia lipstick and teased, frosted bangs poking out from under their black headscarves brush past her and giggle. Two young men in jeans and knockoff-looking Levi’s T-shirts hold hands in the M section. She’s curious: Are they Arab or Indian? Are they gay? Up at the cash register, a group of American soldiers in desert camouflage and brown combat boots negotiates with the shopkeeper.

One soldier has mirrored sunglasses, a crooked smile, and a black crew cut. Later, at an underground party up the coast, Erasure in the background, she’ll learn his name is Zee. Surrounded by drunk and flirty European and Arab expat high schoolers, and a few Saudis thrown in—pretending, like her, not to be Saudi—she’ll tell him, “I had a feeling I’d see you again. I had a feeling we would meet one day soon.”