“My mom said she won’t let me hang anymore with you if you say stuff like that,” Aliyah added.

“You tell her what I say?” I shook my head, angrily, pulling my Madonna tape out of Nadia’s portable cassette player. They got on my nerves sometimes—they were all proper and dainty, like brown-haired Barbies in pink ruffled gowns, even though their dads didn’t make that much more than mine. Like they didn’t curse in their heads? I was just more honest because I let it out of my mouth. I started to leave, bracing myself to face the blast of waterguns, but Nadia stopped me and told us all to just forget it.

“Let’s get back to practice,” she said. And we did. She’s like that—always smoothing things over, lightly, easily. Aliyah pulled on a strand of my hair and Reema pretended to tickle me—all signs of making up.

I didn’t want to fight anyway. I liked the Palestinian girls in our neighborhood, and they were the only friends I was allowed to see after school anyway. Mama had stopped trusting anyone who was American, anyone who could possibly be a criminal. “At least with the other Arab kids you are safe because their families watch out for you,” she said. She had started to spend more time with their mothers too, going with me to visit. The moms played cards and drank coffee while we watched TV, listened to Bon Jovi, and choreographed our dances. Mama seemed happier when we left than when we arrived, smiling to herself as we walked home, sometimes even stopping to let me buy Twizzlers at Dino’s Candy “Shoppe”—my favorite store because of the weird spelling and because Mrs. Dino, who slumped behind the counter, glued to her stool and scratching her scruffy mustache, let me sample the jellyfish candies whenever I came in.

“Siham’s friends are nice—I’m glad we got to know them,” Mama said once on the way home. “It feels good to have your own people around you.”

“Are you still scared, Mama?” I asked her, pulling apart the red braids of my candy.

“We have to always be scared, Hanan,” she replied.

“I hate you,” I said inside my head, wanting to scream it to the whole neighborhood, so loud that Mrs. Dino would fall right off her stool, because my mother wanted me to feel as helpless as she did.

The day before Thanksgiving, Mama sent Baba to the Colonial Village grocery store to buy a fresh turkey. She had invited Reema’s, Nadia’s, and Aliyah’s families—a total of about eighteen people, including us—for dinner. She had never cooked a turkey before, but Aunt Siham loaned her the recipe and her turkey roasting pan.