There is just me and my brother following them out, hurrying down the stairs, Kamal tripping on his Nike slides, me careful not to bang the rolling wheels. We take only what our arms can hold, as if stripping down to the essence of ourselves. I’ve done this before: in Pakistan, when Abu disappeared. Turning myself light, thin as a shadow that can slip through a door crack, the seams of night, the corners of a neighbor’s eyes.

We pull open the front door into a muggy evening. I feel like I’m some kind of story in the newspaper. That smudge at the edge before you turn the page.

I keep thinking: This is not us.

Part 2: Manhattan, NYC

Chapter Eight

We’re lucky.

They keep Kamal and me together at the shelter, in a narrow room that just barely fits a bunk bed and two thin metal lockers, where we stuff most of our belongings. I let Kamal sleep on top, to make it like an adventure. I tell him about the train I once took, from Karachi to Lahore, how it had three bunks that swung down from the wall, each one with a curtain that pulled shut. In the morning, when we stopped at a station, there was a rattling cart outside, and a man handed us milky chai through the window. I loved that trip so much that Ammi used to play a train game with me—she’d line up the dining chairs in a row and then we’d pack a little zippered bag with clothes, a midday meal of parathas and potatoes and pistachio shortbread. I sat in the front seat, my stuffed monkey on my lap, and she would sit behind, pointing out the imaginary sights. See the wheat fields, she’d say. See the sunflowers bending toward us, like sunny faces! I loved my mother most then, for she made me see the world as a place to name and conquer.

“Can we go on a trip?” Kamal asks.

“Yes,” I tell him. “Very soon.”

Soon he is melting-soft with drowsiness and I climb back down to my bed. But I can’t sleep. I lie there, rigid on the thin mattress, alert to strange sounds: a steel door slamming. Footsteps. Children crying. The low calming voice of a grown-up. We are somewhere in Manhattan—I figured out that much from the drive—and in my mind I’m trying to sort out all the bus and train routes we’ll have to take for school. And how I’m going to get people to see we don’t belong here.

I wake to a gray light and someone is knocking on the door, telling us to wash up, because breakfast is downstairs in half an hour.

“Wait!” I call.

The woman pops her head in. She looks tired, impatient.