“Rola,” her mother interjected quickly, “why don’t you serve the tea? Last time Hanan did it, she served the little kids before the guests!”

“I went around the room from right to left,” Hanan exclaimed in her own defense, but the knowing smile that her mother and Rola shared was enough. “Fine, go ahead. I actually have to be somewhere anyway.” She walked out of the kitchen, out of the house, though before the door closed, she heard her mother say, “That’s how she is, my American daughter—if she doesn’t like something, she leaves. Too busy for us stupid Arabs. She thinks she hurts us by doing that.”

“It’s not you I’m thinking about!” she wanted to scream, but closed her lips and walked the six blocks to the used bookstore on South Street where she usually went to hang out. She flipped open her cell phone and called her friend John, who agreed to meet her in a few minutes. Hanan realized that the tone of her voice had probably freaked him out, because John never went anywhere at the last minute. She grabbed a paperback off the shelf and settled into a chair to read.

Peter, the burly, red-haired owner, nodded at her from behind the counter. “Just want to tell you the boys are on the prowl.” He owned three cats that often roamed the bookstore, including a fat Persian that had made the store semi-famous in this part of the city. Once Hanan had pulled a heavy book off the shelf and found the cat curled up in the small, cozy space between the volumes, protected by a fortress of pages and words.

“No problem. I actually don’t mind the company,” she replied and opened the book she’d snatched. It was a collection of T. S. Eliot’s poems, and she automatically flipped through until she found “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—her favorite poem, especially when she was in a self-pitying mood.

At that moment, Peter’s fat Persian snuggled up next to her. She stroked his back, wondering what was taking John so long. He ambled in twenty minutes later, looking pensive and haggard as usual. He saw her on the couch and, running his hand through his thick hair, immediately asked, “Coffee?”

The South Street Café was just a block away, and they settled at a corner table with their white mugs of hot coffee. Hanan listened to his woes about the slow process of writing his doctoral dissertation in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. When he’d finished telling her about uncaring thesis advisors and classmates who sabotaged each other’s research, Hanan announced, “I think my mom gave birth to the wrong daughter.”

He offered appropriately timed grunts as she shared her story, then asked, “But she’ll be gone soon, right?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know when. I don’t know why she came now, when she has no clue if she’ll be accepted into a program yet. She’s waiting for decisions from Stanford, Penn, and some other Ivy League big-wigs.”