Chapter Two The Way They Saw Me.

When we finally pulled up to the house, Malik and Khalil were sitting out on the front porch. I leaned over Amir and honked the horn twice, which in our summer language meant, Come help with the bags, stat.

Khalil was eighteen now. He'd just had a birthday. He was taller than last summer, if you can believe it. His hair was cut short around his ears and as dark as ever. Unlike Malik’s , whose hair had gotten longer, so he looked a little shaggy but in a good waylike a 1970s tennis player. When he was younger, it was curly yellow, almost platinum in the summer. Malik hated his curls. For a while, Khalil had him convinced that crusts made your hair curly, so Malik had stopped eating sandwich crusts, and Malik would polish them off. As Malik got older, though, his hair was less and less curly and more wavy. I missed his curls. Leila called him her little angel, and he used to look like one, with his rosy cheeks and yellow curls. He still had the rosy cheeks.

Malik made a megaphone with his hands and yelled, "Amir-o!" 

I sat in the car and watched Amir amble up to them and hug the way guys do. The air smelled salty and wet, like it might rain seawater any second. I pretended to be tying the laces on my sneakers, but really I just wanted a moment to look at them, at thehouse for a little while, in private. The house large and gray and white, and it looked like most every other house on the road, but better. It looked just the way I thought a beach house should look. It looked like home.

My mother got out of the car then too. "Hey, boys. Where's your mother?" she called out.

"Hey, Freyah. She's taking a nap," Malik called back. Usually she came flying out of the house the second our car pulled up.

My mother walked over to them in about three strides, and she hugged them both, tightly. Mymother's hug was as firm and solid as her handshake. She disappeared into the house with her sunglasses perched on the top of her head.

I got out of the car and slung my bag over my shoulder. They didn't even notice me walk up at first. But then they did. They really did. Khalil gave me a quick glance-over the way boys do at the mall. He had never looked at me like that before in my whole life. Not once. I could feel my flush from the car return. Malik, on the other hand, did a double take. He looked at me like he didn't even recognize mne. All of this happened in the span of about three seconds, but it felt much, much longer.

Khalil hugged me first, but a faraway kind of hug, careful not to get too close. He'd just gotten a haircut, and the skin around the nape of his neck looked pink and new, like a baby's. He smelled like the ocean. He smelled like Khalil. "I liked you better with glasses,"he said, his lips close to my ear.

That stung. I shoved him away and said, Well, too bad. My contacts are here to stay." He smiled at me, and that smile- he just gets in. His smile did it every time. "I think you got a few new ones," he said, tapping me on the nose. He knew how self-conscious I was about my freckles and he still teased me every time.

Then Malik grabbed me next, and he almost lifted me into the air. “Zarah's all growed up,"he crowed.

I laughed. “Put me down," I told him. "You smell like BO,"

Malik laughed loudly. "Same old Zarah," he

said, but he was staring at me like he wasn't quite sure who I was. He cocked his head and said, "Something looks different about you, Zarah."

I braced myself for the punch line. “What? I got

contacts."I wasn't completely used to myself without glasses either. My best friend Lira had been trying to convince me to get contacts since the sixth grade, and I'd finally listened. 

He smiled. “It's not that. You just look different."

I went back to the car then, and the boys followed me. We unloaded the car quickly, and as soon as we were done, I picked up my suitcase and my book bag and headed straight for my old bedroom. My room was Leila’s from when she was a child. It had faded calico wallpaper and a white bedroom set. There was a music box I loved. When you opened it, there was a twirling ballerina that danced to the theme song from Romeo and Juliet, the old-timey version. I kept my jewelry in it. Everything about my room old and faded, but I loved that about it. It felt like there might be secrets in the walls, in the four-poster bed, especially in that music box. who I was. He cocked his head and said, 

Seeing Khalil again, having him look at me that way, I felt like I needed a second to breathe. I grabbed the stuffed polar bear on my dresser and hugged him close to my chest -his name was Junior Mint, Junior for short. I sat down with Junior on my twin bed. My heart was beating so loudly I could hear it. Everything was the same but not. They had looked at me like I was a real girl, not just somebody's little sister.