So I said yes, it was true. And she looked suddenly angrier.
“Why?” I said.
“Why what?” Her eyes flashed, big and wide and electric with feeling. She was wearing a leather hood, and the lights of a nearby chandelier glinted off the diamond piercing near her bottom lip. I couldn’t stop staring at her mouth. Her lips were slightly parted. Full. Soft.
I forced myself to look up. “What?”
She narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“I thought— I’m sorry, what are we talking about?”
She turned away, but not before I saw the look of disbelief on her face. There might’ve been outrage, too. And then, lightning fast, she spun back around. “Are you just pretending to be dumb all the time? Or do you always talk like you’re drunk?”
I froze. Pain and confusion swirled in my head. Pain from the insult, and confusion from— Yeah, I had no idea what was happening.
“What?” I said again. “I don’t talk like I’m drunk.”
“You’re looking at me like you’re drunk.”
Shit, she was pretty.
“I’m not drunk,” I said. Stupidly. And then I shook my head and remembered to be angry—she’d just insulted me, after all—and I said, “Anyway, you’re the one who came after me, remember? You started this conversation. And I don’t know why you’re so mad— Hell, I don’t even know why you care. It’s not my fault that I can be invisible. It just happened to me.”
And then she shoved her hood back from her face and her hair shook out, dark and silky and heavy, and she said something I didn’t hear because my brain was freaking out, like, should I tell her that I can see her hair? Does she know that I can see her hair? Did she mean for me to see her hair? Would she freak out, right now, if I told her that I could see her hair? But then, also, just in case I wasn’t supposed to be seeing her hair right now, I didn’t want to tell her that I could see her hair because I was afraid she’d cover it up again, and, if I was being honest, I was really enjoying the view.
She snapped her fingers in my face.
I blinked. “What?” And then, realizing I’d overused that word tonight, I added a “Hmm?”
“You’re not listening to me.”
“I can see your hair,” I said, and pointed.
She took a deep, irritated breath. She seemed impatient. “I don’t always cover my hair, you know.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said dumbly. “I did not know that.”
“I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. It’s illegal, remember?”
I frowned. “Then why have you been covering your hair? And why’d you give me such a hard time about it?”
She unhooked the hood from around her shoulders and crossed her arms. Her hair was long. Dark. Her eyes were deep. They were a light, honey color, bright against her brown skin. She was so beautiful it was scaring me.
“I know a lot of women who lost the right to dress like that under The Reestablishment. There was a huge Muslim population in Asia, did you know that?”
She doesn’t wait for me to respond.
“I had to watch, quietly, as my own father sent down the decrees to have the women stripped. Soldiers paraded them into the streets and tore the clothing from their bodies. Ripped the scarves from their heads and publicly shamed them. It was violent and inhumane, and I was forced to bear witness. I was eleven years old,” she whispered. “I hated it. I hated my father for doing it. For making me watch. So I try to honor those women, when I can. For me, it’s a symbol of resistance.”
“Huh.”
Nazeera sighed. She looked frustrated, but then—she laughed. It wasn’t a funny laugh, it was more like a sound of disbelief, but I thought of it as progress. “I just told you something really important to me,” she said, “and all you can say is huh?”
I thought about it. And then, carefully:
“No?”
And somehow, for some unknowable reason, she smiled. She rolled her eyes as she did it, but her face lit up and she looked suddenly younger—sweeter—and I couldn’t stop staring at her. I didn’t know what I’d done to earn that look on her face. I’d probably done nothing to earn it. She was probably laughing at me.
I didn’t care.
“I, uh, think that’s really cool,” I said, remembering to say something. To acknowledge the importance of what she’d shared with me.
“You think what’s cool?” She raised an eyebrow.