Florence laughed and shook her head. “Really, really no.”
“Here, I take picture,” the man said, holding out his hands for a phone. Florence opened her hands uselessly. “I don’t have one.” The man turned to Nick.
“It’s in my pocket,” he said. The man reached his hands into the pockets of the tunic—they were just slits, designed so that you could reach through to the pocket of your pants.
“Oh, cool!” Nick exclaimed to Florence, “they’re slits!” Florence began laughing again.
The shopkeeper took a dark, blurry picture of them, looking at each other in a fit of hilarity. Afterward, once Nick had struggled out of the tunic, and unwrapped the turban, he held up the blue kaftan he’d picked out first and asked the shopkeeper, “How much?”
“For the beautiful lady? I do 200 dirhams.”
“No, that’s okay,” Florence said to Nick. “You don’t have to buy that for me.”
“We have to buy something.”
“No we don’t, I’m sure he does this fifty times a day.” But Nick was already pulling out the money. He offered the salesman 150 dirhams, which was accepted with a nod, then handed her the wrinkled plastic shopping bag containing her new kaftan.
“Thank you,” she said, embarrassed.
“Don’t be too grateful. I only bought it for you so I can borrow it.”
Florence rolled her eyes, trying not to show how pleased she was. But Nick was already wrist deep in a basket of beans at the stall next door.
Florence wandered over to a fishmonger and watched him skin and debone a silver fish with quick, expert flicks of his knife. It reminded her of Helen hacking away at the chicken during her cooking lesson. The man tossed the cleaned fish, no longer a fish but simply fish, into a pile. A fly pounced on it and began to knead the flesh with its furry, thread-like arms and delicate elbows.
Florence wandered deeper into the souk. The wares here were similar to the ones she’d seen in Marrakesh, a mix of the picturesque and the practical.
Suddenly she felt a hand on her arm, and she spun around. A small, wrinkled man was pulling at her shirt toward a stall of silver jewelry. “Amethyst,” he whispered. “Very good quality. Very beautiful.” She pulled her arm back.
“No, thank you.”
He took another step toward her. “Only fake that way. Here, is real.”
“No,” she said more harshly. She walked quickly away from him, turning down a small alley leading off the main artery, where it was even darker. A few men sat huddled on small stools, drinking from steaming cups. They glanced up at her, then away, disinterested. She ran her hand along a row of bright leather slippers. They emitted a warm, dank smell like a wet animal. Her heart was beating quickly, though she couldn’t say why.
Suddenly she felt his hand on her again, spinning her around. She jerked away violently and turned to face him.
“Florence!”
She took a step backward and stumbled on the uneven ground. She regarded the face in front of her, the oversize teeth, the bright pink polo shirt, the dry, flat-ironed hair.
“Whitney?”
It was her old friend from Florida, staring at her in wide-eyed amazement. They paused awkwardly before leaning in to hug one another. Whitney had been five-eleven since seventh grade, and Florence had to stand on tiptoes to wrap her arms around her. She hadn’t seen Whitney since high school graduation and they’d probably exchanged only a couple dozen messages since. After Florence had moved to New York, she’d stopped responding altogether. Whitney’s smile didn’t seem to be hiding a grudge, but perhaps it had just been momentarily set aside in the serendipity of this encounter.
“Oh my gosh!” Whitney exclaimed. “How crazy is this!?”
“What are you doing here?”
Whitney suddenly gasped. “What happened?” she asked, gesturing to Florence’s cast and face, which was still discolored from the bruising. “Are you okay?”
“I was in a fender bender. It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“What are you doing here?” Florence asked again with a slight edge to her voice. She had felt so threatened by her recent encounters with Idrissi and Greta, even the man selling amethyst, that she was now primed for alarm. She had to remind herself that Whitney was just Whitney. The same girl who’d belted out the theme song from High School Musical at the talent show four years in a row. From the sudden vantage point of someone who’d known her as a child, Florence saw her current self with a brief flash of horror. But it passed as quickly as it had come.
“I’m on vacation with a college friend,” Whitney said. “We just got to Semat this morning. We’ve been in the Atlas Mountains for a few days.”
Whitney had worked hard in high school, but she had never been as good a student as Florence, and it still stuck in her craw that Whitney’s father—Florence’s dentist—had paid full tuition at Emory while Florence had been shunted off to UF like everyone else.
“What are you doing here?” Whitney asked.
“Working, sort of.”
“Really? What do you do?”
“I’m—well, it’s a long story. I’m doing research.”
“How cool! Are you still in publishing?”
“Yes, pretty much.”
“That’s so great. I’m really happy for you. You always loved books.”
Florence had noticed that people who didn’t feel the way she did about literature—that it was, as much as biology or physics, one of life’s organizing principles—regarded it as little more than a collection of physical objects: books. Did they think the power of music could be whittled down to the look and feel of a violin string? In fact, Florence did love books—the smell of the binding, the roughness of the pages—but they were nothing compared to the magnitude of what was inside them.
“What about you?” Florence asked. “What are you up to these days?”
“I’m a project manager at Verizon in Tampa. I tried Atlanta for a while, but I missed the beach and my family. And Verizon is just, like, the best place to work.”
Florence remembered that Whitney’s great social failing in high school had been her unchecked enthusiasm at a time of life when most people they knew would have gnawed an arm off before expressing any form of eagerness, about anything.
Whitney suddenly closed her eyes and took a deep breath through her nose. She reached out and took Florence’s hands. She had always been a toucher. “Actually, Florence, can I just say? I feel like this is fate, running into you here, because there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for months.”
Florence couldn’t imagine what Whitney could possibly have to say to her after six years of little to no contact.
“Trevor and I are seeing each other,” she said all in a rush.
Florence struggled to keep a smile from her face. “That’s great, Whitney. I don’t mind. Really. We dated a long time ago. It feels like another lifetime, back when we were very different people.”
Whitney exhaled loudly. “Oh my gosh, I’m so relieved. We’ve both been feeling wracked by guilt.” Florence could believe it of Whitney, but she doubted that Trevor, whose two great passions when she’d known him had been Minecraft and Ayn Rand, felt much remorse.