“Why does she have to come?” I don’t like Fattin. I’ve met her and her mother before and they don’t seem like the kind of women I could befriend easily or talk to comfortably. I think Fattin feels the same about me.

He leaned against the balcony rail, twisting his fingers around the ironwork. “Because it’s not proper, Aliyah. You know that.”

Funny what he thinks is proper. When I visited Ramallah last year with my father and first met Kareem, he had no problem taking me out to cafés and to dinner all over the city. Now that we are “talking,” he suddenly frets about social conventions that probably exist only in his mind. I think I hate the word “proper” more than any other.

I was silent during the taxi ride, not listening to Kareem and Fattin as they talked to each other across my body, which sat between them like an ineffective barrier. I’d always been gifted with the talent to block out everything around me (my mother insists that is why a car once ran over my foot when I was a child, because I heard neither its honks from several feet away nor her shrieks from our stoop). And so I let them chat happily while I slipped into my own world, remembering my own trip to Jerusalem last week.

My fingers flipped back, back, until I landed upon July 23rd.

Today, I strolled around Jerusalem alone, breathing in its history and observing its modernity, like people selling traditional sesame bread along with bottles of Diet Coke. I bought some flat loaves of sesame, and the boy who sold them at his cart resembled Kareem—the same, big dark eyes and intense squint, and the wrinkle between his brows. He caught me staring and winked brazenly. I laughed and continued on my way, feeling like a young Benjamin Franklin, newly landed, walking through Philadelphia with his loaves of bread and pondering his virtues.

I dodged hordes of tourists and eager, teenaged salespeople who wore Hilfiger sneakers and pushed carts filled with scarves, crates of live chickens, and piles of vegetables. Finally, I arrived at the Haram al-Sharif: I know that the men worshipped in Al-Aqsa Mosque and women in the Dome of the Rock, but I still hesitated to enter the Dome. An older woman wearing a blue dress and a hijab passed by and, noticing the crucifix around my neck, took my arm. “Come in, come in.” I smiled at her and shook my head, but she took a scarf out of her dress pocket and handed it to me. “Our God is the same. Welcome and see.” She showed me how to wrap it around my hair, tucking in every strand. It was not nearly as long and flowing as hers, but it would suffice. We took our shoes off at the door and I insisted on observing from the back. She nodded. “I will go now. I have a lot to pray for. My son was martyred last year and my daughter just lost her job.” Before I could summon up enough Arabic to offer her my sympathies, she was gone, weaving her way among the throng of women.