Nancy offered to show me around the main lodge. As she led me down a long corridor I was both surprised and annoyed by how unclinical the place felt. The carpeted floor was covered in redundant shaggy rugs. There were houseplants and skylights overhead that brought in lots of sunlight. There were paintings of dull-colored landscapes alongside motivational posters with random nouns like Persistence and Teamwork scrawled beneath droplets of water. I could’ve easily been at a friend’s summer cottage or a bed-and-breakfast. The warm home-style feel seemed suspicious—white walls and the smell of ammonia inspire trust. I followed Nancy to her personal office, which appeared to double as a bookstore, the shelves lined with books by authors whose names I recognized from the website, price tags dangling off of their spines. She directed me to a wooden desk at the front of the room, pulled out a file, and proceeded to read off the medications that I’d listed in my pre-screening questionnaire. “I’ll need the Adderall and Xanax from you now,” she said, the smile never disappearing from her face. I rummaged through my bag and handed her two green-tinted rows, both with seven separate compartments marked by letters, four pills in every slot, enough of each med to last a month. “You’ll need to give me your cell phone, too,” she said, and then looked down at my pocket, where white wires poked out. “And your mp3 player.”

I asked where she planned to put them, how she would remember that they were mine. “What if someone else checks out before me and pretends they’re theirs?”

•

One summer a few years earlier, I’d stood against a fence outside the Israeli customs office at the Allenby Bridge, on the way to Nablus, my parents’ hometown. Depending on the political climate, some of our summer trips were worse than others when it came to crossing the Allenby, the main entry point into the West Bank for Palestinians living in the diaspora. In the late 1980s, during the intifada, it had been a consistently hellish process; the holding room a swarm of families all kept waiting for hours with no water or air-conditioning in desert heat.

Though the intifada had long since ended, that particular summer had been an especially bad one for crossing, even for American citizens, which is how I would usually enter the West Bank. As an American. I’d tuck my Jordanian passport away, along with any visual sign of my Palestinian heritage. I would sport my Asics Tigers, flaunt my Hanes V-neck. I’d flash my American passport. Nationality is partly a matter of convenience.