The World Exists for You and Me

Even at one a.m., the McDonald’s on the first floor of the Children’s Hospital was pretty happening. Neither Sakina nor I had anything to do with the hospital, but there wasn’t much else open on campus at that time, and Sakina was obsessed with Mickey Dee’s apple pies: an ultra-processed treat she could never have with her boyfriend. He was a fastidious Muslim who had declared a personal boycott against McDonald’s ever since they were in the news for serving a Muslim customer a burger with bacon, allegedly on purpose. Sakina didn’t care. She had even eaten bacon once, at Philly Diner, something she had of course never mentioned to him.

While we stood in line, Sakina looked around at the tables where frazzled families and tired, bovine hospital workers sucked on straws and languidly fed greasy fries into their mouths.

“We’ll eat outside. Then we can have some ciggies at the same time,” she declared.

I had long ceased to protest that “ciggies” sounded lame. Sakina was the arbiter of what was lame and what was cool, and if she said “ciggies,” then “ciggies” was cool. I don’t know why she thought she had this authority, but I accepted it, and that made it real.

People say first impressions are lasting, but nothing could be less true for Sakina. My first impression of her was so ludicrous, I can hardly believe I thought it.

Sakina had been sitting in the lounge of our college dorm, quietly flipping through a course catalogue. Despite the summer heat, she wore long pants and was wrapped in a large pashmina shawl that emphasized rather than hid her chubbiness. Massive gold earrings weighed down her earlobes. She was dark-haired and olive-skinned, with almond-shaped eyes and long eyelashes, but she wore no makeup. Our eyes had met and she had given me a very tentative smile.

Demure, I had thought. Ladylike. Feels dumpy and so has poor self-esteem. Probably the über-sheltered daughter of some conservative, upper-class Iranian or Pakistani family: a nerdy, shy princess. I should be kind to her; she’s probably anxious and too shy to try to make friends on her own.

“No, you little piece of shit, it’s MY Mickey Dee’s,” Sakina screeched, then crumpled up an empty apple-pie box and threw it towards the “little piece of shit,” an overfed squirrel that had dared come within ten feet of the large metal trash can that Sakina had appropriated for use as a table and ashtray.

“You really shouldn’t be littering,” I said, glancing at the crumpled box that now lay in the shadows on the ground near the squirrel.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said, then finished off her second apple pie and licked her sticky fingers. “Let the squirrel pick it up.” She arched an eyebrow at me, as if challenging me not to argue.

I sighed—only with Sakina was I ever cast as “the responsible one”—then stepped out of the harsh yellow light from the McDonald’s sign and into the darkness to pick up the box. The squirrel scurried away.

“Why are you such a loser,” Sakina asked, fed up, as I threw the box into the opening at the side of the trashcan.

“I’m not a loser. I’m just not a spoiled, prissy princess like you who expects her servants to pick up after her.”

She snorted a laugh, then picked up the pack of Marlboros from the top of the trashcan and lit one. “I finally managed to take a dump at VP.”

I closed my eyes briefly and let out a sigh. “You know, you don’t need to tell me whenever you take a dump.”

“But you’re my bestieeee,” she gushed, then leaned over and pecked me on the cheek.

I rolled my eyes, but inside, I was warm with pleasure. As much as I pretended to be exasperated by Sakina, I’d never had as much fun in my life as with her, and it made me feel special that this force-of-nature, international could-be socialite had picked me for her bestie.

“H and I had another fight just before he left for Karachi,” she said as she blew out a cloud of smoke. H was Hamza, her boyfriend since high school, with whom she’d contrived to go to the same college. “The love of my life,” she said in an ironic tone of voice whenever she described their epic arguments, but it was clear she believed it.

“What did you fight about?”

“Oh, all the usual,” she said, flittering her fingers as if to suggest some floating irritants. “He doesn’t want me to wear sleeveless tops. And he claimed he smelled cigarettes on me once. I denied everything, of course.”

“What?” I stared. “No sleeveless tops?”

She smirked, pleased at my reaction. “Yeah, he’s a bit of an ultra like that. Oh, and he doesn’t like that I spend so much time with you. He says you’re a bad influence on me, and that I should hang out with the paki girls at the Muslim Student Association instead.” She rolled her eyes. “As if. They’re all fundos in hijabs.”

“I’m a bad influence on you?” I repeated, not understanding.

“It’s ‘cause you’re white. He figures you’re promiscuous and smoke pot and whatnot.”

I didn’t know whether to be amused or offended. “Well, did you disabuse him of that notion? Like, point out that I’m a virgin, whereas you guys are fucking like rabbits?” Given that the gaggle of American-born Indian girls in our suite disavowed premarital sex with affected shock and blushes, Sakina’s and Hamza’s blatant disregard for this convention had delighted me. Hamza, apparently, justified it by arguing they were effectively already husband and wife.

“I did, but he says it doesn’t make any difference.” She shrugged, then smirked. “And we did have some great post-fight sex just before he left. His neighbor even pounded on the wall. Of course, I just moaned louder.”

A week later, Hamza came back from Karachi, and for some time, Sakina barely made an appearance in our dorm suite. Hamza’s floor shook with their newly resumed arguing, the walls of his room doing little to muffle his deep bass or her cutting falsetto. Then I went upstairs one day to hear an altogether different kind of screaming—and pounding. I recognized one of Hamza’s neighbors in the hallway and opened my mouth to make a joke about how at least the wild sex was an improvement over the arguing, but on seeing his expression of prolonged suffering, I hurried downstairs again without saying anything.

The next time I saw Sakina, she was walking with Hamza and looked strangely like the first time I had seen her: wrapped in a massive, loose Kashmiri shawl, demurely quiet.

“Jessica,” Hamza said when he saw me, smiling broadly, but I was wary, remembering what Sakina had said about him disliking me.

“Hey, what are you guys up to?” I asked.

“Just heading out to Kabobeesh,” Hamza said. “Would you like to join?”

It seemed a trap, somehow. I didn’t trust him. I glanced at Sakina, who stood a little behind him. Unnoticed by Hamza, she made a face with the quickest of eye-rolls in his direction. I took this as a warning. Hamza did have his fun moments—even I had seen them—but he also had a certain mood of righteous, controlled anger, during which he would subject his victim of choice to a cross-examination of their life choices in nasty, pointed questions, delivered in a chillingly courteous dead-pan. I had already seen him absolutely destroy one of our neighbours, a clueless sorority rusher, in this manner.

“Thanks, but I gotta finish my math homework,” I said, shaking my head.

“Suit yourself. Let’s go, wifey.”

As they passed me, Sakina gave me a half-smile and winked; I must’ve made the right choice. Later that evening, she entered my room carrying a laptop, a cardboard carrier with two paper cups, and a paper bag.

“I told H we were doing homework together.” She spoke in a low voice as if he might hear us. “Here—I brought some Starbs.”

I opened the cup she handed me, revealing a swirl of whipped cream and the aroma of cinnamon. “Aw, my favorite!”

“I know,” Sakina said, looking pleased with herself. “Got some of that lemon loaf cake and cookies, too. I’ll start my diet next week,” she added breezily; Sakina was a yo-yo dieter, either gorging on fast food or going on fruit-juice fasts, both with equal enthusiasm. “Wanna watch a Bollywood movie? Or some porn?”

We giggled, and quietly, I forgave Hamza. If he made Sakina happy, I couldn’t begrudge either of them.

They broke up for the last time at the end of our freshman year. When the relations between their respective families soured, Hamza’s parents arranged for him to be engaged to someone else, and he gave Sakina an ultimatum: elope immediately or break up. She lost her nerve in front of the mosque. There were weeks of screaming and pleading and accusations, then Hamza told his parents he agreed to their choice of a fiancée, and it was all over. Hamza went to Pakistan for an engagement party—a nikah, effectively a legal marriage—with a girl he had never met, provoking a storm of gossip and horrified delight in their community. Sakina’s parents, who had always opposed the match, felt vindicated; they thought Hamza and his family were far too conservative and had told Sakina she’d be miserable if she married him. I suspected they were right, and deep down, I suspected Sakina did, too.

Left behind on campus, Sakina cried till she had no tears left, then she rented a room in the same off-campus house where I was staying. When she arrived, she was puffy-eyed but full of plans.

“I want to get shit-faced, and go to New York, and do crack, and go to like a gay club or something. And I’ll lose weight and get really fucking hot and then I want to fuck around.”

“Are you sure you want to do crack,” I asked, laughing. “That’s the stuff homeless people do that’ll really fuck you up.”

“Oh. No, that’s not it. I meant weed.”

“Also, you’re already really fucking hot,” I said.

She preened. “I know. But thanks.” She leaned over from where she sat on the bed and pecked me on the cheek, then, losing her balance, threw her arms around me, causing us both to fall over. We lay on the bed, semi-entangled and laughing, and silently, I blessed the break-up. With Hamza, Sakina had been fabulous—funny, unpredictable, utterly nonconforming to expectations—but only to the extent allowed by his disapproving gaze and after their big fights, when they weren’t on speaking terms and she was temporarily released from his influence.

Without him, there would be no limit to what she could be.

Our budget was limited, but we managed a NY trip thanks to the Chinatown bus and to Laila, one of Sakina’s friends from high school. Laila was a student at NYU and had her own apartment. “Her parents are loaded; she’s basically a princess.” Sakina smiled. “Not quite as much a princess as I am, but still.”

“I can never reconcile that you are basically a princess, yet you still insist on eating the Taco Bell dollar menu.”

“My ‘rents don’t want me to end up like those spoiled kids who don’t know how to make a cup of coffee or do laundry on their own, so they’re only giving me limited pocket money. Also, the Taco Bell dollar menu is fucking delicious, so stop hating on it.”

I’d gathered that Sakina’s standard of living growing up had been regal, with a house like a palace and maids and gardeners and chauffeurs whom she bribed to let her sneak out of the house for her assignations with Hamza. Living like a regular mortal suited her surprisingly well, however; she was right at home with Philly’s sketchy public transport, despite never having taken a bus before in her life, and of course, she adored cheap fast food. This was one of the contradictions I loved about her.

“I want Chinese orange chicken,” she announced as the bus approached New York’s Chinatown. “That shit is like cocaine. And fried rice. We’ll get takeout and bring to Laila’s.”

Laila was a well-groomed waif who eyed the plastic bags of takeout we set down on her coffee table dubiously. She only picked at a small paper plate of fried rice, but when Sakina fished out a bottle of vodka from her backpack, she lit up.

“Nice! How did you get that?”

“I got a senior in my finance seminar to buy it for me,” Sakina said. “Jessica’s got ciggies, too.”

On cue, I fished out two unopened packs of Marlboro lights from my backpack.

Laila clapped her hands together. “Guess we are partying tonight!” She had a distinct South Asian accent with a posh British twist to it, making it sound like she was welcoming us to a ladies’ afternoon tea at a colonial bungalow rather than vodka shots at her New York studio.

“Damn right,” Sakina said. “Let’s get some music going. Where are the cups?”

Sakina had climbed up on Laila’s dining table and was dancing and singing along at the top of her voice while Laila and I sat on the couch, swaying to the music, the smoke from our Marlboro lights curling in the dim light. I couldn’t judge if Sakina was a good dancer, and she certainly was no singer, but it was a pleasure to watch her—she danced with such abandon, such a complete lack of self-consciousness.

“AIN’T NO HOLLABACK GIIIIRL,” Sakina shouted, striking a pose.

THUNK!

Laila and I jumped as someone banged on the wall behind us.

“Sakina, I think those are the neighbors—maybe we should dial it down a bit,” I said, my voice lowered, immediately cowering at the thought of having been a nuisance.

Without skipping a beat, Sakina responded, “Maybe they should go FUCK THEMSELVES!” She raised her voice to a shout at the last, cupping her hands around her mouth in the direction of the wall.

Laila and I exchanged a glance, simultaneously horrified and delighted at Sakina’s unapologetic, aggressive determination to please herself. I went through life with a sense of shame, feeling as if I ought to apologize anytime I did something for myself or enjoyed something; as if I had overstepped over some line, taken up more space than I ought to. But Sakina seemed to take for granted that the world existed for her, not as something she needed to earn, but as something she had already been given.

“SHUT UP!” someone yelled, muffled by the wall.

“YOU SHUT UP!” Sakina yelled back, temporarily pausing in her undulations. She began dancing again but soon stopped. “Man, I lost my mojo. Screw this; let’s go out. Let’s go clubbing.”

“Yeah! Let’s do it!” I jumped up from the couch. Part of me wanted to stay indoors and watch a movie and drink hot chocolate and sleep, but that was the apologetic, apprehensive part. The rest of me wanted to go nuts, to out-party and out-sing and out-drink even Sakina, and was dying to go to a club—my first club. Besides, that way we’d no longer be bothering Laila’s neighbors.

Sakina got down from the table, grabbed the bottle of vodka, and poured each of us nearly half a cup.

Laila and I laughed. “Sakina, that’s too much.”

“It’s just enough. Drink, bitches!”

We drank.

The Chinatown bus broke down on our way back to Philly. I had been too hungover and nauseated to nap, so I noticed immediately when the bus began dropping speed. When it was crawling along the highway at thirty miles an hour, I elbowed Sakina awake. It was a while before the bus driver admitted something was wrong; he didn’t speak English. Sakina and I snickered as a man with dreads and tattooed arms shouted, “You’re going to get us all killed, man!”

“Such drama,” Sakina whispered, delighted.

The drama soon got old, however. The bus pulled in at a rest stop and we were all made to get off the bus and told to bring our luggage. The bus driver was on the phone, shouting in Chinese, for a long time, then aggressively ignored all questions. Finally, he spoke to a Chinese lady who had been sitting in front of us, her lap loaded with bags of food.

“Another bus is coming,” she translated.

There was an audible sigh of relief. Then the man with the dreads asked, “When?”

“I don’t know. He said it’ll be leaving from Philly.”

“Shit. That means it’s at least an hour away.”

Two hours later, there was still no sign of it. I had gotten over my hangover and was craving a cigarette, but Laila and I had finished both packs the night before. Sakina had gotten a milkshake at the depressing gas-station shop, but once she finished it, she got bored and her mood was foul.

“This isn’t acceptable. I need to be back at Penn this evening to prepare for my classes.”

“I thought you said you were just going to chill and do a hair mask tonight?”

She glared at me. “They’re not mutually exclusive, Jessica.” She dug in her purse and extracted her ticket stub for the bus. “Good; there’s a phone number. I’m going to call them,” she said with the tone of a general preparing for an attack.

I didn’t think she was going to get anywhere, so I wandered off in search of cigarettes. Across the parking lot, I spotted a woman in a velvet tracksuit smoking. By the time I reached her, she had put out the cigarette and was crouching down on the ground. She arranged her hard-looking backpack on the curb, lay down with her head on the backpack, and closed her eyes as if to go to sleep.

Laila had lent us a mattress but told us we’d need to bring our own pillows; I hurriedly extracted mine from my backpack, crouched down, and tapped the woman gently on the shoulder. She opened her eyes.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ll lend you this pillow until we get back to Philly in exchange for two cigarettes.”

She didn’t say anything, but raised her head, slowly turned, and extracted two cigarettes from her backpack. Trade completed, I got up again and hurried over to where Sakina was standing, shouting into her phone about how she would call someone’s manager. Finally, she took the phone into her palm and mashed at it to hang up.

Before she could proceed to whomever the next target for her rage was, I waved to get her attention. “Hey, I managed to trade us some ciggies.” I held up my loot and smiled victoriously.

“Don’t say ‘ciggies’, it sounds fucking lame,” she said. “And I don’t want any anyways. Didn’t you smoke enough yesterday?”

“Fine,” I said, turning away, disgusted with Sakina and annoyed with myself for assuming, stupidly, that I was exempt from her ire. Normally, I would’ve had more tolerance for her moods, but my own patience had worn thin after a full weekend together, and her arbitrary changes in judgement exhausted and angered me.

I found a spot near the woman to whom I had lent my pillow, extracted The Code of the Woosters from my backpack, lit one of the cigarettes, and began to read. The brief euphoria from the nicotine and the harmless British upper-class hijinks soon put me in a good mood again. Sakina could sulk and rage on her own.

I was fully engrossed in the book and had just begun to smoke the second of the cigarettes when Sakina crouched down next to me.

“Hey,” she said.

“What ho,” I responded.

She raised her eyebrows at the greeting, then looked at the book. “What are you reading?”

“P. G. Wodehouse.”

“Who’s that?”

“He was a British writer who wrote a ton of hilarious novels about the British upper class in the early twentieth century. Have you seen Jeeves and Wooster? That’s him. And the English is fabulous. Pip pip!”

Sakina’s face shifted from uncomprehending to disgusted. “God, you’re such a nerd.”

With that, I lost my good humor again. “Thanks,” I said, sarcastically, then took a deep drag of the cigarette and returned my attention to the novel.

Sakina didn’t move, though. After a few minutes of unpleasant silence during which I’d been failing to get back into the story, she asked, “How are you so chill?”

I looked at her. “Why wouldn’t I be? There’s nothing we can do about the bus except to wait for the other one. We only paid, like, ten bucks, so it’s not like we can expect much. And I don’t really have much to complain about. It’s warm out, I have a great novel to read, I got some ciggies, and”—I looked at her pointedly—“my bestie is here. Not bad, right?”

“Guess not,” she muttered. Suddenly, she laughed, then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

I rolled my eyes, still irritated, not ready to forgive so easily. But she scooted over and put an arm around my shoulder.

“I’m sorry I was pissy,” she said, then squeezed up against me. “I love you, bestie. I’m glad I’m here with you and nobody else.”

I forgave her.

Sakina and Hamza never spoke again after their final rupture, and mercifully, he left to do a year of study-abroad the semester after the breakup. When he returned at the beginning of our junior year, though, the sight of him awoke a seething resentment in Sakina.

“I saw him at Wawa. I saw him,” she repeated, her voice full of outrage. “Him and his fucking flunkies. They’re some freshman FOB losers. Usman and Tareem. I found them on Facebook.”

“FOB” meant “fresh off the boat,” a pejorative term used for immigrants with funny accents and poor fashion sense. Sakina, of course, had been fresh off the boat our freshman year, but she now asserted she had successfully Americanized herself.

“Did you say anything to each other?” I asked.

“Are you crazy? Of course not. We acted like we didn’t know each other.”

“But…isn’t that alright, then? Or did you want to talk to him?”

“Of course I don’t want fucking to talk to him,” she snapped. “I just…” She scrunched up her face and gave a disgusted shudder. “I just hate that he is there.”

“But now you’ve seen each other; the worst is over, and you’ve established that you will pretend as if you don’t know each other if you see each other again. That isn’t so bad, is it? Hey, let’s go to the Gallery tomorrow. We can get some hot going-out clothes, the type that would’ve given H a fit, and then go to the Italian market and get Pat’s and Gino’s and some cannoli, and in the evening we can go dancing and get shitfaced.”

“And I can hook up with some hot white dude,” Sakina said. “HA! H would just die. Great plan, bestie.”

Unfortunately, like Sakina, Hamza couldn’t quite let go, not now that they were back in the same city again.

I was sitting cross-legged on my bed reading when Sakina threw the door open, then slammed it shut behind her. “The fucker is spying on me!”

“How do you know he’s spying on you? Did you see him?”

“Not him,” Sakina said, flopping onto the bed next to me. “One of those freshman fundos, Usman, kept popping up everywhere. I asked Nisha who asked Akshay who asked Faizan who said that H had been paying this Usman fucker to trail me and report who I was seeing.”

“That’s fucked up,” I said, aghast. “You should go to the police.”

“He’s obsessed with my sex life. He’s probably hoping to find out who I’m fucking.”

“Why does he care? Isn’t he happily married?”

“No, that’s over. It was some village girl who could barely read. Everyone talked about it and thought his parents had gone mad, but after me, they didn’t give a shit about background anymore and just wanted someone guaranteed to be nice and submissive. Well, that didn’t work out.” She let out a short laugh. “Apparently they were miserable together, and eventually she had enough and went back to whatever bumblefuck place she’d come from.”

“But…does he want to get back together with you?” I was dumbfounded that someone would pay a freshman to stalk his ex, especially after so much time had passed. Hamza had even gotten married in the interim, for crying out loud.

“HA! No, I highly doubt that. His fundo ass probably thinks he owns any woman he has ever interacted with. They’ve been gossiping like little girls about us, you know. Apparently we’re both ‘whores.’”

The appellation didn’t surprise me, despite its inaccuracy, but it still stung, and it made me uncomfortable to be referred to thusly by someone who Sakina qualified as a “fundo” and who wouldn’t balk at hiring a stalker.

Sakina rolled over, ending up with her face to the wall, then raised an open hand and banged her flat palm against it repeatedly. “Gooood, why is he such a piece of shiiiiit,” she bleated.

“Shhh, I have neighbors,” I hissed.

She squirmed in the limited space of my single bed until her face ended up facing my knee and the book that I held in my lap, my thumb functioning as a bookmark.

“What are you reading?”

I tensed, as I always did at this question. At best, Sakina was merely nonplussed by the things I chose to read; at worst, she was openly disparaging, and that felt like being mentally kicked by her. Not talking about the things I loved to her, unless she shared them, was my best strategy.

“It’s a biography of E.F. Benson,” I said.

“Who the fuck is E.F. Benson?”

I rolled my eyes, knowing she couldn’t see me, trying to feel angry instead of hurt. “Does it matter? It’s a writer I like.”

“Is it for class or are you reading that, like, for pleasure?” She had raised her face, supporting it on her palms, and was looking up at me now.

I shrugged. “Both, I suppose? By the way, I’ve decided to apply to grad school after college. To study English literature,” I added, unable to keep a belligerent note out of my voice. Sakina was hell-bent on getting a job as some sort of consultant immediately after graduating. She might’ve appreciated the value of med school or law school, but otherwise, she neither understood nor respected higher academia; for her, education was a tool for succeeding in “the real world,” but no more.

But Sakina’s response was underwhelming. She was silent for a moment, then said, “Huh. Guess that suits you.”

She rolled out of my bed, got on her feet again, and sighed theatrically. “Well, princess needs to go do her homework. Ta-ta.” She gave a little wave, her fingers fluttering, then she was gone.

Somehow, her airy indifference felt even worse than an expletive-laden dismissal would have. I looked at the door she had just closed behind her and wished I had something heavy to throw at it, but the only thing at hand was the E.F. Benson biography, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of damaging a book just to ease my temper. Instead, I clutched it hard to my chest, turned to the wall, and closed my eyes, feeling my eyelids prickle with hot, angry tears. I loved Sakina, but sometimes it felt as if I needed a mental ring fence to protect the other things I loved from her.

“It is war.”

I was in one of the small study rooms in Van Pelt when Sakina entered making this announcement. She smacked down a newspaper in front of me. It was the Daily Pennsylvanian, the free student newspaper, and it was opened to the last pages with the gossip columns and personal ads and letters.

“That.” She pointed to the middle of the page, then took two steps back and crossed her arms, as if she would be contaminated by being too close to the newspaper.

“To the FOB with the massive tits who treated us to an interpretive dance of ‘Don’t Phunk With My Heart’ on the Pi Kapp bar counter last Saturday: Thanks, we didn’t need to see that. PS. Please put those away. Signed, a blinded party-goer.”

Sakina and I had, in fact, been to a party at Pi Kappa Phi the preceding weekend, and Sakina had been wearing a very décolleté spaghetti-strap top. I didn’t have breasts big enough to muster any cleavage worth the name and was always mesmerized when Sakina chose to reveal hers, large and jiggling and round with a Y in the middle, just like breasts in cartoons.

“Your boobs looked great,” I said. “No doubt some scrawny sorority girl wrote this out of jealousy.” I laughed. “Hell, I kind of understand her, whoever she is.”

Sakina roughly grabbed the paper from me and flung it into a corner, then pointed at it where it lay in a crumbled heap. “That,” she said, jabbing her finger at it, “that is Hamza’s work. Him and his freshman flunkies. That Usman guy works at DP.”

I looked at it, then shrugged helplessly. “Even if it is… So what?”

“So what? So what? Jessica, they basically called me a fat FOB, and in the fucking newspaper. Everyone will see it.”

I opened my mouth to argue, to say that most students didn’t read the Daily Pennsylvanian as religiously as she did and didn’t go beyond the front-page headlines, that no one had called her fat, that she did have massive tits and that they were glorious, but then I saw her face, the fear and hurt just underneath the surface rage, and I stayed silent. Even if her facts were wrong, her feelings were very much real, and arguing wouldn’t make her feel better.

Sakina, perhaps sensing that I was weakening, calmly picked up the newspaper, smoothing it out. “It’s not just me, you know. Hamza and Usman and Tareem are talking about both of us, saying you’re a whore and spreading nasty rumors about how you’ve sucked the dick of this guy or that.”

That didn’t so much awaken any raging desire for revenge in my chest as just a wish that Sakina hadn’t told me. Nevertheless, I said, “Those pieces of shit.”

“Those tiny-dicked fucking twats,” Sakina responded immediately and with considerably more heat.

Her insult made me laugh, and a tension in the room I hadn’t been aware of dissipated. We took turns insulting them a few times, alternating between extreme crudeness and South-Asian English expressions that were almost quaint.

“Donkey-fuckers.”

“Timepieces.”

“Sons-of-owls.”

“Dung-for-brains dickheads.”

“Villagers.”

It was Sakina who came up with “villagers,” and she said it with such contempt and finality that it made us both burst out laughing.

“Let’s get some wings and beer,” I said, “and we can plan our revenge.”

“Sounds like a fucking plan,” Sakina said. “And let’s get some vodka. Princess is going to need some shots to get over the shock.”

We returned to Sakina’s dorm room armed with a six-pack of Heineken, a bottle of Absolut, a dozen fried chicken wings, and a box of waffle fries. As our fingers got greasier and our stomachs fuller, our schemes became more elaborate and more concrete. Then, when the evening had turned into night and we had done enough shots that Sakina ought to have forgotten any shock she had received altogether, the schemes degenerated into the gory and the illegal as we tried to top each other’s ideas, giggling and drunk and half-awake.

“Baseball bat to his car window,” I slurred.

“He doesn’t ‘ave a car here,” Sakina said. “Baseball bat to his dorm room.”

“Not bad,” I said. “We’d have to get in, though. Baseball bat to his door?”

“Meh,” Sakina said. “Shit outside his door?”

I snorted. “Write something on his door…in shit?” I was enjoying myself immensely. I didn’t actually have any wish to exact revenge on Hamza, but I loved when Sakina and I were on the same wavelength like this.

“Gross,” Sakina said, then she sat up excitedly. “Oh! Ooh!”

“What?”

“Write something in blood on his door,” she said, clapping her hands together.

I was unimpressed. “Where’d we get the blood, though? I’m sure as hell not volunteering.”

Sakina thought for a moment. “A slaughterhouse, or something?”

“Ooh,” I said. “True. Like, chicken blood or something.”

“YES!” Sakina shouted. “Ooh, and how about this; a chicken head? Like, laid out in front of his door?”

“Brilliant,” I said, slowly clapping my hands and lowering my eyelids in an exaggerated display of admiration, as if she were a poet composing a ghazal. “Genius.”

“You will help me, bestie?”

“Always, bestie. It’s you and me against the world,” I slurred as solemnly as I could, feeling warm and fuzzy at the thought.

“How about chicken feet?” Sakina said, her mind returning to avian body parts.

And thus we went on until two or three in the morning when we fell asleep, drunken and exhausted but at peace, Sakina having expended all her rage, both of us having laughed ourselves into a stupor. Squeezed up against Sakina in her twin bed, I threw an arm around her waist and used my last ounce of energy to give her a listless hug.

The next day, I woke up before Sakina and limply made my way back to my own room to shower and nurse my hangover before class. I was too busy fighting incipient nausea to retain anything from my morning math lecture, but every once in a while, I’d think of something funny Sakina had said the prior night, or one of our hare-brained schemes, and laugh to myself. By afternoon, after about a gallon of water, a grilled cheese sandwich, and a nap in a study room, I was myself again, and I went to my seminar on modern American poetry and thought of nothing but Emily Dickinson.

On my way back, though, Sakina texted—we knew each other’s schedules as well as our own—and told me to meet her behind the McNeil building. I changed direction to comply, and just as I turned from Locust Walk, I saw her striding toward me, toting a plastic bag.

“There you are,” she said. “I just got back from the Italian Market. Here, take this.”

“Italian Market?” I repeat, confused as to what she would be doing there. I took the bag she held out to me automatically. “What is this?” I looked into the bag and almost dropped it when I glimpsed something that looked like blood and flesh wrapped in plastic. “Whoa!”

Sakina snickered. “Indeed.”

“Sakina, what—what is this?”

“Two chicken heads and a lot of chicken blood. And maybe some chicken feet, too.” She scrunched up her nose with disgust as she indicated the bag she was holding. “I got them at the butcher’s. I thought about getting a headless chicken to go along, but they were kinda expensive, and frankly, that’d be a waste of a good chicken. This should do the trick, though.”

“Sakina, are you—what—is this about any of the things we were talking about last night?” I stammered, shaken that we operated on such wildly different planes, afraid of what would happen if I were incapable of joining hers. None of that had been serious, right?

Right?

“Of course it is,” she said, impatient. “No time like the present; I don’t want to wait. I figured we’ll do it tonight. Actually, we probably need to, because we have nowhere to store this stuff and I sure as hell don’t want curdling chicken blood in my room.”

“But we were just…just joking around,” I said, faintly, wanting to believe it. “We can’t actually do that.”

Her face turned livid. “Joking around? Joking around?” She stepped closer to me, lowering her voice into a hiss. “I was not joking around. I’m as fucking serious as can be. And you promised you would help me.”

“But this is illegal.” My stomach turned as I thought of the ways in which it might be illegal. Hamza was a practicing Muslim; it wasn’t as if it were pig’s blood we’d be smearing on his door, but even so… “You know, this could be classified as a hate crime, especially for me. That’s…not good, dude.”

“Damn right it would be a hate crime,” Sakina said. “I hate him.”

“No, I mean…”

“Are you my fucking bestie or are you not?”

“Of course I am,” I said, helpless. “But we can’t…”

She cut me off. “That settles it, then.” She grabbed the bag back from me, then motioned with her head in the direction of our dorm. “Come on.”

At three a.m., we padded out of the dorm dressed in dark sweats and sneakers. I carried the plastic bag from the butcher, and Sakina carried two paintbrushes, purchased the prior afternoon at the Penn Bookstore, in the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie.

Outside, it was dark and cold and empty. Spruce Street, normally full of cars and students laden with books or takeout bags in the day, or loud, drunk students on their way home from parties on weekends and nights, was deserted. We crossed it in silence and took the path behind Huntsman, so dark I could barely see where I put my feet.

When we reached Locust Walk, I glimpsed a bright light far away, and stopped when I realized what it was: the Van Pelt Library. Many of the biggest classes had midterms this week and the library had temporarily extended its hours to be open twenty-four seven. Right at that moment, there would be students in Van Pelt, memorizing organic chemistry reactions or writing papers or slumbering in their carrells or, like me, taking a break to wander the stacks and look for things to read just for pleasure.

“What are you doing? Come on!”

Sakina was standing at the bottom of the footbridge toward the high-rises, the opposite direction of Van Pelt. She had an annoyed, questioning expression on her face, and when I met her eyes, she indicated the direction of the bridge with her free hand, as if the reason I had stopped was that I had forgotten the way.

My feet refused to move.

My conscience, my common sense, my sense of self-protection—these ultimately wouldn’t have stood a chance against Sakina, and I would’ve committed crimes in her zeal for retribution against a wrong I didn’t even believe in. But the thought of Van Pelt stopped me. I saw myself sitting in an armchair in the corner of the Middle East Studies room, browsing grad school curricula or reading Wodehouse novels and sipping a cinnamon dolce latte, and I wanted it so much that my chest ached.

Then it hit me that if we were caught, I might never get to go there again.

A wave of pain and nausea went through me, and I closed my eyes as I waited for it to subside. When I opened them again, I let my gaze rest at Sakina.

“We’re not doing this,” I said.

Sakina took two steps toward me and fixed me with her stare. “We are doing this, and if you bail out on me, I am never, ever speaking to you again,” she said in a staccato, each word articulated sharply.

I looked at Sakina, taking her all in: her hard expression, her beautiful eyes, her huge chest under the Penn sweatshirt, her hot pink sneakers. I had so admired her self-assurance. It had always amazed me—still amazed me—that no matter how shittily she acted, she never doubted that she was worthy of respect and love and admiration. But on the flip side, the world belonging to her left only crumbs for the rest of us, and apparently, being the center of the universe did not allow one to be kind.

“Well?” she said.

I had adored her, but those fluorescent lamps in Van Pelt were a beacon of everything that was warm and safe and good and true in the world, and they called to me. I knew what I was going to do. Tears rose to my eyes. I reached out a hand towards her, but she jerked away before I could touch her.

“I love you,” I said, quietly.

“Fuck you,” she said, understanding it was a goodbye.

I nodded, even though the words hurt, then turned and walked away. I wished she would go with me, or at least call me back, but I knew she wouldn’t.

The light of Van Pelt beckoned.

Our lives disengaged so completely, so quietly, and so smoothly, it was as if we had never known each other. It’s surprising how little you may see of someone living in the same building when you aren’t actively looking for each other. On the rare occasions when I saw her in Wawa or on Spruce Street, it was just a glimpse of her glossy hair as she turned away—or I would see her before she had spotted me, and then I’d be the one to turn away and leave. At the end of the school year, I moved out of the dorm, and then I no longer saw her at all.

I threw myself into reading and studying, made a couple of new friends in my literature seminars, and lived such an ascetically wholesome life of books and study sessions and sleeping at reasonable hours—no more dancing on tables or two a.m. vodka shots—that even Hamza would not have found fault with me. I was fulfilled, even if I sometimes missed Sakina so much it felt like my heart was bleeding.

At the end of senior year, a couple of weeks before graduation, I was queuing at the Williams Hall café with another student, Helen, during a break in a long seminar.

“Can’t believe we’re leaving Penn so soon,” she said, then sighed. “Like, some people are really excited for it, but I’m kind of scared.”

“See, I couldn’t bear the thought of it, so I decided to stay on for grad school.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot you were going for a PhD! Which department?”

“English literature—I can’t wait.” The queue moved forward. “A medium peach latte, please,” I said to the student at the register. After I paid, I took a step to the side and waited for Helen to complete her order. That’s when I caught sight of Sakina.

She was standing behind the drink pick-up area, a paper cup already in her hand, and looking straight at me. I looked back, surprised and not particularly pleased at seeing her. Then it occurred to me that it might be the last time we ever saw each other, and I summoned up the memory of my love for her and gave her a smile of goodwill. After a moment, she smiled back. It was a tentative, careful smile I had not seen on her before. Then Helen nudged me to move out of the way of the people ordering, and when I looked back, Sakina was gone.

A week later, I returned to my room after class to find a paper gift bag hanging on the door. A card in the shape of a mortarboard hung from the bag’s handle.

“Congrats on getting into grad school. Miss you.”

There was no signature, only a scrawled phone number, but I knew that handwriting. I reached into the bag and extracted a fluorescent yellow box. I stared at it for a second, then began to laugh. It was a box of Peeps, the marshmallow chicks that appear in the supermarkets around Easter.

I turned the box back and forth in my hand, contemplating the pointy-beaked marshmallows. Then I took the card and the gift bag and stuffed them into the trash. I’d eat the Peeps, though, while doing my reading for class.