When I told Samira I wanted to go back, she lit a cigarette and studied me coolly. “I don’t think you would,” she finally said. I loved her Lebanese accent, so airy and crisp and glittering with French words, unlike my guttural village dialect, probably the ugliest sound in the world. We always spoke to each other in Arabic, and I tried to memorize her diction and practice later at home as I read from my mother’s Bible, the only book in Arabic she’d brought with her.

“Of course I would. It’s our home. I haven’t seen it in six years.”

“You would miss life here, without a doubt. You’d miss your freedom.”

“Freedom?” I snorted. “Please. I’m afraid to ask you for a smoke because my parents might smell it on me. Back home, I could run all over the village and not come home till dawn, and my mother at least knew I was safe. Here, she screams at me if I’m not home exactly twenty minutes after she knows my class ends!” I lay back on her floor pillow, and tuned her radio to the news station. “That’s why my class schedule, as she knows it, is not exactly accurate.”

She just stared at me quietly, blowing smoke elegantly, until I felt prompted to continue. “Why do you think I’m taking summer classes? I’ll suffocate in that house until September comes back around.”

We listened to the news broadcast for a while. The hostilities intensified. Street battles took place every day in Jerusalem, and Nasser’s speeches became more and more belligerent as he called for Arab unity and war on Israel. “When the Arabs win, we’ll go back to Jerusalem without a doubt,” I said firmly. “My parents agree on that—we’re only here temporarily, although Baba wants me to rush to finish my degree so I can get a job as soon as we go back.”

Samira tapped her ash on a small dish. “I hope I never go back. Lebanon is changing for the worse, according to my mother. It’s becoming … well, never mind.”

On the subway ride home, I thought about her last words furiously. Lebanon was changing, she meant, because the Palestinians who had fled or been expelled in 1948 had landed there. We would have joined them in 1963, if my mother’s brother hadn’t sent us money on a regular basis from Guatemala, where he’d fled in 1948, or if the French priest in a nearby Christian village had not helped us and several other families get to France and then to America. But those who hadn’t known people like Uncle Hannah and Père Phillipe had gone to the Western bank of the river or up to Lebanon, or even south toward the Sinai. And they had no money, had salvaged so little from their lives. So of course, people like Samira’s family probably had had their comfortable lives disrupted by our tragedy down south.

Even now, as I sat staring blankly at the pages of Money magazine, I was startled by the wave of resentment that washed over me, drowning out the soft waves of Abu Nabeel’s music, making my heart beat a pace faster. My head started to hurt, and I saw the oval pattern of Siham’s coffee cup swirling before my eyes. I think that this feeling will always be with me, like my accent. Though gentler and softer than either Huda’s or Layla’s, it would never quite disappear, no matter how hard I focused. It would surface only occasionally, when I encountered difficult words like “Robitussin” or “chameleon” or “salmon,” or when I became agitated, watching friends in our circle try to rise above us.