Driving by Starlight by Anat Deracine

Author:Anat Deracine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

13

RAMADAN

There is a saying in Najd that a woman who has half a man’s heart has twice her sister’s share. My future as a lawyer was probably doomed, but I still knew all the permutations and combinations of the law—how it took two women to bear witness but only one man, and that women usually got half their brothers’ inheritance, except in special circumstances where we got double, and those I had bookmarked by folding pages in our textbook.

When the law stated that a man could marry four women and have a few concubines besides through misyar marriages, a boy was not just well within his rights to love two girls, he was practically a saint for choosing only two. Still, by the time Ramadan slid into place in November with that first aching prayer, I hated myself for hungering after the boy my best friend loved, and I hated Ahmed for pouring oil on a flame we could not satisfy.

To see the waxing crescent moon, no thicker than a human hair, was supposed to signal the month of purity, and to know that you had begun it by betraying your best friend for a crime you were committing yourself was to realize that, in the end, Ramadan was about punishment. That maybe, if you spent a month starving and suffering, God could forgive you.

And there was that fact. That I was committing the same crime. There was no way to make myself believe that it was different because I had no father to catch me and no future to lose. Ahmed and I hadn’t gone further than a few casual touches, but I had fallen in a different, deeper kind of love.

These days the scent of petrol instantly sent a surge of adrenaline through me. I’d been out with Ahmed only a few times, but each time it had been three hours of being on high alert, looking out for the police and listening to my heart pound in my chest as our car drifted down the empty lanes. Once, we’d gone all the way to the refinery, where hundred-foot flames blazed into the pitch-black sky. When I got home that night, I didn’t so much fall asleep as collapse into blissful and boneless nonexistence.

I knew now what Mishail meant when she’d said, I’m finally alive after being buried underground for sixteen years. Fear made us feel alive, and we were intoxicated with rebellion and hunger and our determination not to engage in any zina, at least during the holy month. Ahmed and I spent every minute of our time together straining against our attraction, which made it only stronger. Sometimes I could feel him shift an inch toward me in the passenger’s seat, and the car would swerve in response. If he was driving, and I’d made him smile, I’d wish he could keep looking at me like that even if it meant we’d die in a crash.

I wasn’t going to be missed at home. My mother was busy catering to daily ifthar events because of Ramadan, and she assumed I was staying with Mishail.

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