Summer went on, slow, unending. Juliet did not call me after the barbecue, which I didn't mind as much as I should have. I was enjoying spending time with Hyun before he visited his extended relatives in Korea, and Ayah had left for a summer camp for college, and would then immediately go to Somalia for a cousin's wedding. Juliet and Royce, their drama, their affair, the whole fever dream of a barbecue felt as distant as another country. A breath of another world, full of desire and heat, brushing against me for only an instant. Whatever brief infatuation I had for Juliet was already ebbing away, but who was to say it wouldn't come back? I hated her, I wanted her, I wanted to be her. I wanted to be Royce too—Royce, who had seemed so unperturbed under the glow of the bathroom light when I walked out. Laughing, even, like he found me terribly interesting.
I turned seventeen. Hyun had come over for my birthday, and we played video games and ate cake and drove around, and I remember sticking my hand out of the window of his car, feeling the summer air. A part of me had already started missing that carelessness, of celebrating birthdays and basking in the laziness of a summer vacation, even while I was living it. Hyun left three days after my birthday, and then I was alone.
My father brought up college, and made the inevitable comparison of me with my cousins, my relatives, who had gone to Ivy leagues. Who already had plans and offers. Without Hyun or Ayah, I didn't have the option of using them as an excuse to escape conversation. Royce and Juliet had never felt that distant, when I was sitting at the table with my father and mother, iftar ready to be eaten, my father turning sterner and sterner as the days went on. After we broke our fast, and after our prayers, I would sit in the living room and stare at my hands folded on my lap, fighting the heat behind my eyes as my father told me, again and again, how disappointed he was in me. How horrible my attention span was, how stupid and unintelligent I was, how I seemed to be only good at things that didn't matter—reading books and playing video games—and how I would have done better if I put in half as much effort into Math and Physics as I did into gaping at my laptop. He wouldn't even yell at me—that was the worst part. There was no anger in his voice. Just disappointment. Disgust. Contempt. As if he'd only just realized how much of a failure I was in his eyes.
I wondered if Royce ever had to do this.
Ramadan went on. Then the last two weeks rolled around, and then we were driving twenty minutes to the nearest mosque for the Taraweeh prayers. My mother and father in the front seat, me in the back. Tense, silent, awkward. The year before—hell, even a few months before that particular Ramadan—it wouldn't have been the case. My father would have been talking, and my mother would have been making jokes, and my sister would have been on call, laughing and listening. Small problems, in retrospect, but how huge the question of my future seemed to me. How abstract, how distant and how close it felt, all at once.
And then we arrived at the mosque. I prayed, away from my father, and away from my mother too, and I pressed my forehead against the perfumed carpet and prayed to Allah. I prayed for something, anything, to make the terrible anxiety pulsating in me go away. I prayed for my future to sort itself out. I prayed that my father wouldn't look at me with so much disdain, the expression that was so rare before becoming more frequent now whenever he looked at me, like I was a moron. I prayed for Hyun to come back, for Ayah's cousin's wedding to fall apart so she'd have to return. Something. Anything.
After Taraweeh, my father—as usual—hung around the other middle aged men that frequented the mosque, while my mother chatted up other mothers and aunties, and I made polite conversation, like a good child, with both groups before wandering off. There were children running around and chasing each other in the men's section of the masjid, and the only people my age were a group of guys who went to a different school than I did, and whom I didn't have much in common with. They saw me, and waved, and I waved back, and I resolutely made my way to the parking lot where I was planning to stand next to the car and use my phone and wait until my parents were finally ready to leave.
