“And made a few friends along the way, didn’t you?” Antonia replied glibly.

Tilly slurped her tea loudly, her brightened eyelids fluttering over the rim as she ignored her daughter’s comment.

“I know my home. I can find everything. You go alone, you will come back with nothing,” I warned. Antonia paced the living room, one hand on her hip.

“Fine,” she said. “But we’ll need to move carefully so we’re not noticed. Do you think you can do that?”

As planned, Antonia purchased a blue chadori from the market. Tilly ran her fingers over the mesh window and draped the supple fabric over her arm.

“Nia, do you remember the costume I wore in that production of The Glass Menagerie?”

“How could I forget? I sat through twenty-four performances,” Antonia said dryly.

“Twenty-four sold-out performances,” Tilly corrected.

The following day I wore one of the dresses Antonia had bought for me from the same secondhand shop my mother used to frequent. Antonia pulled her hair back, then loosened it and retied it. In the cover story I’d devised, Antonia would play the part of an Afghan woman too modest to show her face in public or speak to strange men. Since I was a child, I would speak for her.

“It’s a marvelous plan, Nia,” Tilly said, nodding her head in approval. “One that requires a bit of performance even in the absence of dialogue. Girls, forget you’re acting. Be who you say you are and you’ll have the audience wrapped around your dainty little fingers.”

“Are you okay?” Antonia asked me. I tensed, realizing fear was a contagion and that Nia and I were at risk of infecting each other with it. I stood and put my hand on the doorknob, hoping bravery was just as transmissible.

Tilly squeezed us both and kissed our cheeks. She stood in the doorway to see us off.

“You’ll both be spectacular!” she said, as if we were headed off to our first day of school.

I kept my gaze up but my head lowered. At the end of Chicken Street, Antonia whispered to me to slow down. My foot had been healing rapidly, and I was moving faster than Antonia could. As I watched her feet catch on the long hem of the chadori, I was reminded of a joke my mother had once made.

The longer the chadori, the less likely people are to trip and fall, she said. I had looked confused. Not the woman wearing the chadori, she clarified, but the perverted men who gawk at women’s ankles.