“Describe him, please!”

“Oh, I see, my child.” Abu Salwan leans forward and looks in my eyes. “This ifreet was disguised,” he says in a quiet voice. The alley is quiet now too. “It was long, longer than a man’s foot. It was thin as a child’s wrist, black as the night ... and with as many legs as all of the villagers together.”

Fawziyya and I look at each other and then at Abu Salwan, who wears a sneaky smile. “This is not the ifreet we know, Abu Salwan.”

“I told you, my girls, this ifreet was disguised to look like some sort of creature.” His voice is a whisper now. “And it seems that the ifreet has come to visit us.”

He points to a spot not three feet from where we are sitting, where a giant millipede wanders across the floor.

Screams break the silence of the night, followed by the deep laugh of a man who knows stories as well as he knows the desert and its creatures.

PART THREE

PART THREE

26 KHADIJA Sleeping Over

26KHADIJASleeping Over

Patsy asked me to a slumber party, and when I asked Ma she refused.

“You are not going to sleep anywhere outside this family until the day you are married.”

I didn’t argue. I knew that was what she was going to say. And even if she had said yes, Baba would probably have hit me just for asking.

When I told Patsy, she laughed. “How are you ever going to have sex with a boy if you always have to sleep at home?”

I felt funny, like she was laughing at me. I had never thought about sex with a boy before I got married. I know that American girls do that, and probably even my cousin Soraya, but that’s different.

Baba yells so much, mostly at the boys. He only gets mad at me if he’s been drinking or when I do something really bad—like the time he caught me with my brother and my cousin Tariq in the closet lighting matches. It wasn’t even one of those big closets, but I guess we were so small we all fit nice and cozy. We were pretending that we were in the woods having a campfire.

When Baba found us, he yelled, “You are the shame of this family, trying to burn the house around you. Your mothers would have been better off if they had goats instead of you children!”

He got Muhammad first and hit him all over with his belt, and then Tariq. Both of them were screaming. Then he hit me with the belt and I screamed and cried for hours.

He yells at Ma a lot too. Ma just stands there and mutters words I don’t understand. I feel sorry for her.