Somehow, I dragged myself upstairs.

I locked myself in the bathroom and tugged off my scarf, stripped off my clothes, stepped into a scalding shower. I stood under the water until my legs could no longer hold my weight, sat down on the shower floor until my head grew heavy. I pressed my forehead to the tile, the rough grout abrading my skin. I breathed deep, inhaling water. Closed my eyes.

Dear God, I thought. Help me.

My tears made no sound.

I didn’t know how long I spent there, my body poorly heated by a weak showerhead, didn’t know how long I’d been crying. I’d gone back in time, turned into a fetus, laid there on the shower floor like an infant unclaimed. Soundless sobs wracked my body, tore open my chest. I did not know what to do with all this pain. I did not know whether I wanted to be born.

I was startled suddenly by a sharp knock at the door.

Another knock—no, a heavy pounding—and I was upright so fast I nearly slipped in the tub. My mind had grown accustomed to panic and went there easily now, with little encouragement. My heart was racing, my eyes felt swollen. I scrubbed violently at my face, made a concerted effort to remain calm. When I felt ready, I turned off the water.

“Yes?”

“You’ve been in there for like two hours,” my sister said. “I need to use the bathroom.” I marveled at the exaggeration. Then, distracted, I wondered when she’d arrived home, what time it was, whether my mother was back from work.

“You can use the other bathroom,” I said, clinging to the plastic shower curtain. “I’m almost done.”

“Let me in,” she said. “I don’t want to keep shouting.”

That was unusual for Shayda.

Gingerly, I stepped out of the shower, grabbed a fresh towel, and unlocked the bathroom door. I’d just jumped back into the tub and pulled the shower curtain closed when I heard the door rattle and swing open.

“Okay get out, right now,” my sister said sharply.

“I’m about to,” I said, hastily wrapping the towel around my body. “Why? What’s going on?”

“Hassan’s mom is here.”

“So?” I said. And then: “Oh.”

“Yes. Exactly. So get your lazy ass out of the shower and come make tea.”

I frowned, about to argue, then changed my mind. I realized that, in her own weird way, Shayda was asking for my help. She wanted me around for support during a stressful situation.

I was touched.

I felt it in truth, like a finger of heat pressed to my chest. But when she left half a second later, slamming the door so hard I felt the shower rod shake, I was decidedly less enthused. Still, it was something.

Shayda really seemed to despise me most days.

It was easy to dismiss our strained relationship with a shrug and a platitude about how she and I were just different, but I knew it was more complicated than that. We’d never been very close, but our paths had only recently split in earnest, and only because we couldn’t agree on a single matter of great importance.

I blamed my father, unequivocally, for Mehdi’s death.

Shayda did not.

I’d been stunned by her position on the matter. I’d never before had cause to know, in detail, our many differences, hadn’t reason to ask Shayda what she considered most important in life, faith, family. I’d never known exactly how she felt about dogma, or our parents, or even how harshly she’d judged our brother’s life. But when Mehdi died, the four of us left behind were forced to tear ourselves open, to examine the innards that made us tick. Death demanded we question the privately held, still-forming philosophies that shaped our hearts. We studied one another’s weak flesh and festering minds in the harsh, unflattering light of a midday sun, and when the moon rose, we’d found ourselves alone on different quadrants of the earth. I stood as far away from my sister as my mother did from my father, and I’d spent the last year trying and failing to bridge those distances.

The trouble was, I was often the only one making the effort.

I tiptoed to my bedroom in a towel, combed my fingers through damp, clean hair. The bandage on my chin had come off in the shower, and I was happy to discover the wound beginning to heal. Gingerly, I touched the cut with the tips of my fingers, tapping at the pain as I slid open my closet door, studied the contents within.

Unlike me, Shayda was eager to get married.

She’d fought with my mom over this, insisting it was something she wanted. She’d already picked out the guy, had accepted his hand, had a five-year plan. Shayda was nineteen, in her second year at the junior college, but she was going to transfer to a local university soon, and she wanted to be engaged for the next couple of years. Her plan was to get married just after graduation. She did not want to have children, not ever. She just wanted the husband.

This plan struck most non-Muslim people as either stupid or bizarre, but within many religious communities, it wasn’t uncommon. A lot of people got married relatively young, or at least got engaged young. They’d get engaged for a couple of years, spend time together with the express purpose of marriage, then get married. There were happy and unhappy couples. Divorce was not taboo; we had plenty of that, too. Which—not for the first time—made me wonder about my own parents.

A single knock on my bedroom door was my only warning before Shayda barged into my room, looking overheated.

“Why aren’t you dressed?” And then, taking a long look at me: “Why are your eyes all red and puffy?”

I startled, glanced in the mirror. “Oh,” I said. “Allergies?”

“You don’t have allergies.”

“Maybe I do.” I tried to laugh. “Is it really bad?”

“Whatever, I don’t care,” she said, distracted. “Just get dressed, please. I can’t go down there without you.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because,” she said. She narrowed her eyes, pinwheeled her arms like I should understand.

I did not.

And then she shook her head, shook her head like she was talking to an idiot. “I don’t want to look too eager, okay? I’m trying to be—” She waved her hand around, searching for the right word.

“Nonchalant?”

“What? Why can’t you talk like a normal person?”

“I do talk like a nor—”

“God, I don’t care, okay?” She cut me off. “I don’t care. How do I look?”

I took a deep breath and thought of my mother, my mother, my mother. And then, carefully, I processed the scene in front of me.

Shayda was wearing a dress—long and frilly and glittery—with a shiny hijab to match. She looked nice, but extremely overdressed, a truth I wasn’t sure I should impart. I didn’t know how to tell her that it didn’t matter how many people accompanied her as she descended the stairs; her outfit screamed the truth.

She looked too eager.

“You look really nice,” I said instead.

She rolled her eyes and shot me a look so scathing it scared me a little. “Forget it, I’ll go without you.”

She was already at the door, turning the handle, when I said:

“What is your problem?” I could no longer keep the anger out of my voice. “I just told you that you look really nice. Why is that a bad thing?”