She shook her head. “Definitely from the apartments. The house they crashed into, wasn’t that near you, Kacy?”

Without thinking, I said, “Two houses before Windswept. The car smashed right into the garage. It really scared Rahmia.”

“Rahmia?” One side of Sandy’s mouth pulled up in a half sneer.

The air conditioning suddenly seemed colder. “My neighbor, the homeowner. She was walking her dog, and when she got home, the police were there and the car, but the kids were gone.”

“Was it a terrorist thing?” That would be where Sandy’s mind went. As soon as she heard an Arabic name, she’d stopped worrying about the juvenile delinquents and moved straight to blaming the victim. I knew way too much about that game.

“Or a hate crime?” Elizabeth added.

I could feel my agitation rising, as if all the trauma of the whisper campaign against me were starting up against Rahmia. “How? It’s just kids who stole a car. I think it was the road, the way it bends around. They lost control.”

Sandy’s lips pressed together, like it was a flimsy cover story and she for one wouldn’t buy it.

And that made me keep talking. If only I could make her see Rahmia’s round face, her fear, the way she lavished love on Bibi. But I feared Sandy wouldn’t look beyond Rahmia’s hijab. “She’s really nice. I’ve seen her walking her son to school.”

Maybe Elizabeth thought she could defuse racism with logic. “There are always kids setting off fireworks on the playground or spray-painting the bridge. Plus, almost sixty percent of our neighbors are East Asian, and I haven’t heard about any problems. This was just a random accident.”

“That’s right, you both live in the new section of Bluebonnet.” Sandy’s nose pinched like she could smell the nouveau riche stink on those of us relegated to the melting pot of this lush planned community. “I just think there might be more to the story. You can’t tell about those people, can you?”

Heat rose in my face, and before I could check the words, I said, “Oh, I can tell a lot about some people, bitch.”

Sandy gasped, and my hand flew to my mouth. Elizabeth’s hands were still, the women next to me stopped talking, the whole table was staring.

I grabbed my purse and strode to the door, barely keeping it under a run. The tables closest to the door didn’t spare me a glance, they hadn’t heard what I said, but I wasn’t kidding myself. Anyone who hadn’t heard me firsthand would hear it secondhand from Sandy. And this wasn’t a swear-out-loud kind of place. Instead of making Sandy look bad, I’d made myself look worse. Vulgar, young, déclassé.