“I honestly don’t know. But I don’t think abandoning it in a public place is the solution. We need to figure out who owns it or whatever.”

Marwan’s bag buzzed on the bench seat beside him. He opened it and the device spoke clearly, “I can hear you.”

He and Eden swapped a nervous look. Of course it could.

It said, “I don’t like it here.”

“Should we go?” Eden asked Marwan.

The device buzzed and shouted: “I am about to make a scene.”

“Why?” Eden said. “Don’t make a scene. What kind of scene?”

“You are trying to get rid of me again,” it said.

“It’s not like that,” Eden said, even though it very much was.

Water rained down on them from sprinklers on the ceiling.

Marwan zipped his bag closed, and he and Eden ran for the door along with everyone else.

Eden

EDEN

“Wait, this is your house?” she said when they stopped. Her mother was home and had agreed to let her go on her “coffee date” so long as she came home for the afternoon for some mother-daughter bonding. Marwan had said his parents were running the Egypt table at a multicultural day at his sisters’ school, so he’d suggested they come here to regroup.

“Yeah, why?” Marwan said, keys in his hand.

“What’s up with the solar panels?” Eden asked.

“Um?” Marwan said slowly. “They’re solar panels.”

“But why are they built up on big posts like that?”

He shrugged. “They said we could put them on the roof flat or like that, and my parents decided to do it like that. It’s a green roof. There’s a garden where my dad grows herbs and stuff for the restaurant.”

“For real?” Eden asked. It’s what she’d hoped and imagined. Or at least what her father had.

“Come on,” Marwan said. “I can show you.”

Her father had been sort of obsessed with the solar panels. They were a crazy obtrusive sort of eyesore since they were built up on this massive metal structure, and her father was always saying things like, “They won’t get anything back on that investment like ever,” and “There had to have been a better way to do it,” and “I hope it at least looks nice from up there, or that they have a garden where they enjoy adult beverages on nice evenings.”

It was weird to know who lived there now and not be able to tell him.

The front door opened into a living room with wall-to-wall shag carpet. A large modern painting of—was it a bird or a queen with one large eye?—hung on the wall behind the couch. A kitchen peeked out from the far back corner, but they went instead up a long skinny flight of stairs.