We stood in a long line between the chairs, the boys in their white suits on the right, and the girls looking like brides in white dresses on the left. We started walking, two by two, toward the altar, where the priest would give us Christ’s body in a white Eucharist wafer dipped in red wine. After that, we would return to our seats in the front row, hands clasped and eyes lowered, suffused with humble awe.

At my side at the end of the line stood Celine in her thick glasses and her short black hair. Beautiful Rita, meanwhile, stood in the front with her chestnut hair, beside beautiful Ibrahim, the two of them resembling gossamer angels who might rise into the air at any moment. That’s how the order went from start to finish: most beautiful to least, which meant I was second-to-last, with no one behind me except Fadi, big and fat as a drum.

After the mass was over, the families rushed forward to congratulate their children. They stood together for the professional photographer who had been hired to take pictures to commemorate the occasion, and then went off to the buffet that had been prepared in honor of the ceremony. I was afraid the photographer would see me, so I edged away whenever I saw him prowling about. Given that my fears are usually realized, he eventually did catch me standing in the corner. Determined not to lose the fee of an additional photograph on account of some naughty boy slipping away, he grabbed my hand and paraded me in front of the assembled families, asking whose son I was. There was not a father or mother he didn’t ask, and they all denied me. Thus, it was discovered that I was there as an orphan, with no family or support.

In the end, I bit his hand and ran away, cursing him, cursing my father, cursing Thurayya, cursing Sa’id, and cursing the entire universe. I roamed the streets, furiously kicking everything in my path before breaking down in sobs. When I got home, I screamed in Thurayya’s face—the first time I’d ever done anything like that. “Why did my father have to die instead of you?” I said. We were forbidden to say he had committed suicide, or so much as utter that word in her presence. All she did was raise her hand and slap me as hard as she could. Then she punished me further by confining me to my room; I was allowed out only to go to school.

Today, when I think about what made her send me to First Communion alone, I can find no excuse for her. And whenever I come across the photo of my brother at his First Communion, smiling that smile that seemed to embody the purity of his heart—eyes raised to the sky just as the photographer no doubt had asked him to do—and alongside that photograph another of him standing between his parents; whenever I see those photographs, the same bitterness wells up inside me that made me run away from the school, swearing, crying, and cursing the Messiah who needed all those elaborate preparations in order to enter my heart …