Her mom came home after we had been there for an hour and she had a huge bucket of fried chicken. I was excited because we never get to eat food from outside.

Patsy has a little brother who is six, like Hamdan. He took one look at his mother and screamed, “Again? We have to eat fried rats again?”

“Shut up, Mickey.”

He’s named after the singer Mick Jagger.

I told Ma that Patsy had a little brother who was named after a rock musician and she gasped.

“Swear to God,” I told her.

“This is the problem with America! Instead of naming their children after family or prophets or heroes, they name them after rock stars. Who would believe such a thing?”

I laughed, but she didn’t find it funny.

“Do they drink beer in front of you?”

“Who?”

“Batzy’s parents.”

“No.”

My mother was silent. I knew what she was thinking. I knew she was remembering Jennifer, the other American friend I had.

Jennifer lived down the street and went to the same school. Everything in her house was hippie-style, including her tiny bedroom that didn’t have a door, just dangling pink beads. She was very nice, but she had an older brother who drank beer at all hours of the day and looked at nasty magazines. The first time I went over there to play, she showed me a stack of them. All of them had naked ladies with huge breasts and I knew that I shouldn’t be looking at them.

Jennifer and I played normal games too, but her feet smelled a lot and Ma encouraged us to play outside whenever we were at our house. One day Jennifer wore boots and the stink was so bad that Ma made her leave the shoes outside.

“Deadly. Doesn’t she bathe?” Ma said in Arabic while Jennifer was sitting next to me. I pretended not to hear.

When Ma left the room, Jennifer showed me two of her brother’s magazines that she had brought over.

I was looking through one of them, and on one page, there were nine small pictures of a blond woman with large lips. In the first picture she wore a white, man’s shirt and black pants. In the next picture she wore the same shirt, no pants, and high-heeled black shoes. In the third picture she wore the black pants from the first picture, suspenders, and nothing else. The combination continued until she was naked, except for her high heels and a bow tie, and was resting one foot on a black chair.

For some reason this picture fascinated me, which is why I didn’t notice when Ma came in the room. Suddenly she was in front of me.

“What is that?”

Before I could answer, she grabbed it, and after a couple of seconds she screamed curses like I have never heard, and half of which I could not understand.