I.

The day after River Phoenix died—or was it, the day after they had heard that River Phoenix had died, which might have been weeks later, in this world before the internet, where few people had Sky News on satellite and the ex-pats waited weeks for a stale copy of Newsweek to arrive in the diplomatic pouch— the tenth-grade girls all wore black armbands to school, like they were in some nineteenth century French novel. Well, not Mounia, because no one had called her, but most of the sophomore girls wore black armbands to school. 

Nora shifted uncomfortably in her seat, pretending to study her workbook, as if she couldn’t hear the kids at the next table. 

“Some American actor,” Youssef, a kid who was half Moroccan and half British, whispered to the girl who had asked. 

“He was in the last Indiana Jones,” offered up an Iraqi boy at full volume.  

“I saw that,” Mounia hissed defensively. She was a studious Moroccan girl, whose parents were so strict that she was never allowed to go to the movie nights at the Marine House where the kids from the American School paid twenty dirhams for popcorn and sat on the floor and watched semi-recent releases projected onto a wall, and certainly not the sleepovers, where rumor had it, boys were allowed. 

“Well,” the Iraqi boy continued, “He played the—

“La la la, tatahadath bi l’Arabia!” The Classical Arabic teacher was looming over their table, scowling. 

Most of the kids wearing armbands didn’t even know who River Phoenix was, but Jolie had sat at the telephone in the lavish sitting room of her house, adorned with leather poufs and kilims, and called them: Nora, the twins Katie and Megan, Laila; even Alex was let in on it. Jolie broke the news to them in a somber tone, as if she were family of the deceased. She imparted the instructions for the armbands they were to sport at school the following day. Dutifully, Nora cut up an old black t-shirt to make hers. 

Of course, the armbands were Jolie’s idea,  most things were. Jolie had older siblings in college, so from her they heard about bands like The Pixies and Primus, The Specials and The The. Through Jolie, the kids at the American School in Rabat, Morocco were introduced to music they would never have caught wind of from their fleeting exposure to European MTV, sometimes watched for an hour one afternoon when they were at the Saudi kid’s house, working on a group project. None of the Americans had satellite, but Jolie had a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine, which came through the diplomatic pouch a month behind schedule. She did not lend these out—one had to come to her house to visit the issue. 

Nora did not remember ever touching the magazine. She sat on Jolie’s bed, flipping through Sassy, while Jolie sprawled on her belly on the carpet, reading reviews of the latest PJ Harvey album, her red patent leather boots crossed behind her, while Jane’s Addiction spun in the CD player. 

Jolie was the arbiter of cool for their teenage ex-pat community. The new American twins who had turned up at the start of tenth grade were not cool: their house was a single story; their parents were affiliated with some NGO, not the Embassy or USAID; and they didn’t even have a maid. The older French and Moroccan girls who flew to Paris for long weekends to shop, but who, being in eleventh grade, completely ignored Jolie and Nora, were cool. Nora walked behind them on the pebbled path that led from the lockers to the computer lab, trying to imitate the majesty of their self-assured gait. 

When Nora first arrived at the American School in the ninth grade, Jolie had been her sherpa: this kid was royalty, the acknowledged bastard of the king, that kid’s dad was clearly in the CIA, this teacher was a secret lesbian living with the librarian. And by the way, the Red Hot Chili Peppers are not cool, so you might want to ditch that shirt. Nora spent that year ingratiating herself to Jolie, cultivating the friendship—but not too eagerly. Nora got straight A’s and was smart, and Jolie’s options for girlfriends—the  kind who were allowed to spend the night—were limited, so Nora was let into the fold.  

Nora and her little brother Yassine spent most weekends at Jolie’s house in those early, innocent days. Yas was a friend of Jolie’s little sister, Maude. They were in eighth grade, and her parents must have thought it was harmless, so Yas was allowed to spend the night, too. (Maude was their fourth child, and they were tired.) 

The four of them stayed up until the wee hours in the basement room that was their hangout, several floors removed from Jolie and Maude’s sleeping parents, watching VHS tapes they borrowed from the American Embassy’s little video library in the commissary (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Working Girl, The Lawnmower Man), sneaking up from the basement to the kitchen to make and eat raw cookie dough in the middle of the night, leaving a giant mess for Fatima, the cook, to clean up in the morning. 

When Nora and Yas returned home, sometimes after a triple-feature,  spending hours in the dark like salamanders, their father would scoff and say to Nora in English, “Stop talking like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like Jolie.” Jolie had a weird, unidentifiable accent—she said from living her life in so many different posts around the world—and it left its stamp on Nora’s speech. 

Now, Jolie was planning a River Phoenix memorial film festival at her house for the weekend: a wider group would be invited. Brian, an aspiring filmmaker and the son of American missionaries and Khalifa, the beautiful Kuwaiti, whom Nora had first seen standing on his skateboard  by the guardhouse near the school gates; and Alex, the athletic French-Canadian girl whom Jolie only sometimes deigned to include. What was the point in inviting Mounia? She wouldn’t be able to come. 

Nora took the bus home with Jolie that day. Yas and Maude were staying late for a soccer game, but Jolie wanted Nora to help her set up for the party that evening. They would go to the commissary to get snacks and borrow movies. The American school was K through 12, and there were children of all ages on the little blue and white bus that was really hardly more than a large van. Nora’s father usually picked her and Yas up from school, so a bus ride home was a novelty: it reminded her of life back in D.C., except that the backs of the seats had little metal ashtrays built into them. The bus wound its way through neighborhoods, dropping kids off directly in front of their houses, all of them walled. You could never see the face of someone’s house, like you could in the States. 

Jolie chattered about the different movies that the commissary owned that featured River Phoenix, and which ones they should get. They didn’t have My Own Private Idaho, but they did have A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, Running on Empty, The Mosquito Coast, Stand By Me, and a new copy of Sneakers, that they had watched the week it came in. Jolie had forced them to watch The Mosquito Coast at a previous slumber party, and Nora knew that this crowd wasn’t going to be up for it. Jolie said they should wait and see what was actually in. Probably a lot of people were taking out River Phoenix movies right now. 

At one stop, a boy got off the bus and instead of a maid in a housecoat and head kerchief greeting the children, his mother was waiting for him outside the gate. As the bus lumbered on its way, Jolie said, “Ugh, Mrs. Good. She’s the president of the PTA and such a busybody. You know she almost forced us to get uniforms in eighth grade? I would rather die.”

The bus was almost empty now and a chuckle roiled up from the back seat. Nora whipped around. It was Nate, the only American senior at the high school, and one of the most beautiful boys Nora had ever seen in real life. 

“Hey, Cheeseball.”

She blushed deeply. Some of the boys had heard her speaking Arabic to her father and said their dialect sounded like they were crunching cheeseballs. The nickname stuck. Nate was not as good looking as Johnny Depp, but better looking than Christian Slater, and maybe tied with the late River Phoenix. He wasn’t the best at French and had been in Nora’s French class her freshman year, when he was a Junior. 

One glorious day, the students sat around the classroom, but their teacher never showed up. They had spent the period goofing off, watching the clock as it grew later and later, and still, no teacher appeared. The next day there was a sub. The kids heard that the French woman’s Moroccan husband had beaten her badly. A married woman needed a note from her husband to leave the country with their children. She had thrown the kids in the trunk of the car and driven all the way to Tangiers, where she smuggled them out of the country, taking the ferry into Spain, and  drove back home to her family in France. Ever after, if a teacher was more than five minutes late to class, the students held out hope that she, too, might have legged it to Europe without telling anyone.  

“Hey, Jolie,” Nate said from the back of the bus, “How’s your sister?” He meant Jolie’s older sister, Gabrielle, who was off at college.  The way he asked about her  made Nora glad that she didn’t have a sister because she never wanted anyone as gorgeous as Nate to ask, “How’s your sister?” in that dreamy, desirous tone to her, ever. 

But Jolie was unfazed, “She’s good, but she’s not coming back for Christmas this year.” There were  three of them left on the bus. Nate had a cigarette tucked behind his ear. The driver looked in the rearview mirror and said yella to Nate. 

Nate said to Nora, “He lets me smoke after the little kids are off.” He lit up the cigarette and held it out the open window. “Do you want one, Cheese?” He was looking at Nora, but Jolie said firmly, “No thanks,” as if for both of them.

“What kind are they?” 

Jolie hated it when Nora smoked, but the idea of smoking on the school bus was thrilling and seemed worth risking Jolie’s wrath. 

“Kools,” Nate exhaled.

“We’re going to be at my house in two minutes,” Jolie said. 

“No, I guess not,” smiled Nora. 

The bus came to a halt and Nate got off, slipping the driver 10 dirhams as he passed him, and stepping onto his skateboard in one fluid motion as he got off the bottom step. Nora watched his lean figure skate, cigarette in hand, around the bend in the road. Being dropped off a few blocks from his house was probably also part of his arrangement with the bus driver, so he could finish his smoke before arriving home. 

Approaching Jolie’s house, Nora noticed again a little tiled sign by the green front gate that read “Le Rayon Vert.” She had often wondered what it meant but she had never asked, and when Nora asked Jolie about it then, she said: “It’s like ‘the green light, or the green ray of light,’” 

“No, I know what it means,” Nora said defensively. Jolie had gone to kindergarten in Paris, and she was a real pill about French. “But I mean, why is it there?”

“Oh, it’s the name of the house,” Jolie said, “Like ‘Tara’ in Gone with the Wind.” 

Jolie’s parents were still at work, and dropping their backpacks in the foyer, Jolie called through the empty house in her perfect accent, asking Fatima to make them crêpes. After their snack, the girls would walk to the Embassy, which although it was just a few blocks away, was an odyssey. They needed this fortification  of white sugar, jam, and thin sheets of pastry. Like all young girls living in Morocco, they had been told to ignore any comments they inadvertently solicited on the street. By tenth grade, Nora had learned how to look into a crowd of faces without making eye-contact with anyone. Meeting a man’s gaze was as good as a come-on. And being out alone after dark was an invitation to be raped. Any woman out after dark was a prostitute, and abusing a prostitute was legal.  Or that’s what their fathers told them.  The seniors joked about picking up hookers, having their way with them, and kicking them out of the car without paying. Nora tried not to picture these women, duped by teens out of their earnings, roughly kicked out of a Range Rover that sped off into the night. 

In the bright light of day, Jolie and Nora could scuttle swiftly to the tall, white-

washed walls of the Embassy, show their cartes d’identité to the armed guards at the gate, and make their way to the little commissary that stood apart on the grounds. If they left by the back gate of Jolie’s house, down past the sloping lawn where the badminton set was tethered, it was only two blocks rather than four or five. Still, on returning, they had to walk the extra loop around to the front of the large house, and wait for the guardian to open the gate. There was almost always  danger to be navigated. Sometimes a stray dog, but mostly unwelcome overtures from men. 

Coming upon a group of young men was the worst, and once, the girls were actually surrounded. The men were making kissing noises and saying things they couldn’t understand. Nora, stuck in the middle, felt as though she were isolated in a ring of viral capsids, her cellular constitution at risk for reprogramming by outside RNA. Nora and Jolie kept walking, arms linked, gazes fixed on the horizon with the circle of men rotating around them until they were close enough to the Marine House that they could see the vestibule, and the girls broke out into a run. In view of the US military, the men dispersed quickly. 

“She’s an American citizen,” Jolie said pointedly to the Embassy guard now, handing over their identification. 

In the bright, fluorescent-lit commissary they put Tollhouse chocolate chips and bagels and jars of pizza sauce into the small shopping cart. In the video room, they secured the only copies of Stand by Me and Sneakers. A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon was checked out, and Nora was glad of this; she remembered seeing it at a sleepover in middle-school, and it was pretty raunchy. She didn’t want to sit there, embarrassed, next to boys with their secret hard-ons. 

That was the way they “partied” in Rabat, Morocco in 1993: with Fanta and Maltesers, and the thrilling fear that your knee might brush up against someone else’s, in the dark. Nothing was ever as simple again, but nor was it as scary. 

II.

It was a long December and a lot of things happened in quick succession:

Nora got the only care package she ever received from her best friend, Omayya, who lived in D.C. and swore in her letters that she had mailed several packages previously. Nora believed her: the local mail was unreliable– a package intended for Nora’s October birthday showed up in time for Christmas. In it were a jar of blue hair dye that Omayya had bought in Dupont Circle; a new package of Nora’s favorite and hard to find mint Chapstick; a thin, worn plaid shirt with a rust and navy-blue pattern (bought at a thrift store for two dollars, the note said); and one Virginia Slim Light Cigarette (non-menthol) that Omayya must have stealthily lifted from her dad’s pack. In fact, there was no smoking age in Morocco, and even Yas, age 13, was regularly buying cigarettes from the little épiceries that sold gum, soap, and other sundries. Still, Nora appreciated Omayya’s effort.

She had been Nora’s only friend in third grade, during a painful stint when her father had taken a visiting professor job at American University. Dropped suddenly into an American public elementary school, Nora had found the Lebanese girl and grasped onto her with the desperation of someone clinging to a life raft. When a group of boys had started a game at recess of pulling ponytails, Omayya snuck a pair of kitchen shears into her backpack. In the school bathroom, they sawed through each other’s hair—Nora could still feel the pull of the stainless-steel blades slicing through the cable of Omayya’s thick, black braid and see the coils of her own hair falling into the porcelain sink. For the rest of the year, they rocked bowl cuts, looking like two small wayward Beatles. Their mothers were furious, but no one pulled their ponytails again. 

Nora knew she was never going to use the blue hair dye that came in Omayya’s care package: She didn’t need to invite any extra attention on the street. But Yas seemed interested in it. 

Though it was still winter, the American School was working toward completion of construction on the pool, and swimming lessons were to become a regular part of the P.E. curriculum after the new year. There was an assembly about it, and much was made of the fact that the high school girls would be allowed to opt out of swimming when they had their periods. Nora was sitting next to Mounia, who took an avid interest in the subject. 

“Why can’t we just use tampons those days?” Nora said to her. 

Mounia looked at her as if she were stupid. “We can’t use tampons,” she hissed conspiratorially: “They can break you.” Nora recalled  how painful it had been to use tampons when she had first gotten her period, how in the bathroom stall one popped inside her, decidedly unfestive, like a dud of a Christmas cracker. Ever after, the application was painless. Nora realized now, from Mounia’s comment, that this tampon business had to do with the hymen and blood searched for on wedding night sheets.

Nora started hanging out with the boys when Jolie’s family went to Gibraltar for the two weeks of Christmas vacation,  Brian and Khalifa and Youssef, in the long days when there was no school. The boys would skate over to her house, and then they took taxis to a café near the school where they would sit for hours, talking about movies and books and gossiping, drinking cappuccinos and eating éclairs and filling the room with cigarette smoke. They spoke a kind of café-au-lait of Arabic and English, dusted with French. Jokes begun in English would often end with a punchline delivered in Arabic. Brian asked them to translate the jokes, but the humor was rarely conveyed. 

But they also spoke of serious matters.  That December a senior girl had been attacked while jogging in the Hyatt Hotel park. It was a shady grove filled with eucalyptus trees, and the school bussed them there a couple of times a month to run the course for P.E. No one seemed to have any details about how it happened, or when. Had she gone alone? Was she wearing shorts? Would she file a police report? This was a country where the police got off duty at 9 pm and after that, a red traffic light had no meaning. They all knew the alleged victim, a sweet, dark-haired white girl from South Africa. It filled Nora with a red-hot fury, and now, she smoked on the street corners, in the company of the young men from her class, sometimes meeting the gaze of passersby, daring them silently: say something to me now, tell me not to smoke, call me pretty, try to touch my hair. 

The word hijab didn’t exist in their vernacular: Nora didn’t remember ever hearing it in the States until after 9/11, when she found herself defending the rights of women to cover their hair. In high school, when the girls walked to the neighborhood café on their lunch hour to buy cheese sandwiches, their hennaed hair shone redly in the sun. None of them wore the foular, which was a term borrowed from the French, for scarf: their maids did, but only in the street. 

Brian was not known to be a trustworthy source, but as he escorted Nora back to her house in a cab one day, he told her that the story had taken a dark but satisfying turn: A bunch of the boys had staked out the park and had the girl from their school point out her assailant. They had grabbed him, forced him into their car, driven him out to Temara, the beach, beaten him to within an inch of his life, and left him for dead. Nora seriously doubted that any of this was true. He swore her to secrecy, and she assumed this was more to protect himself from being caught in a lie. But it seemed to make him happy to tell it. 

Jolie’s family swept back into town shortly before New Year’s Eve, and her parents were going to have a big party. Any adult party meant that teachers and students and the wider ex-pat community would be in attendance. For the first time in a long time, Nora put some thought into what she would wear: a black baby-doll dress, with the plaid shirt Omayya had sent, worn open over it, and her combat boots. On the street, Nora always dressed modestly: long sleeves, long pants, no matter how hot it got, but tonight she could show her legs; they were just going straight to the “Rayon Vert,” after all. 

“Do you want me to dye your hair blue before the party tonight?” she asked her little brother, Yas. 

“Yeah-ah,” he said, like: Duh, of course he did.

“We’re going to have to bleach it first,” she said, reading the back of the label, “So you better ask mom.”

While Yas was downstairs seeking parental permission for this act of teenage rebellion, Nora stole into her mother’s bathroom and located her jar of crème bleach. They used up the whole thing, globbing and smearing it onto Yas’s scalp. She dyed her own faint mustache and the few stray hairs that made a triangle between her thick dark eyebrows. And then they sat there, stinking, feeling their skin burning slightly, looking at each other in the mirror and trying to feel punk. 

Yas said, “What if it comes out like, white, white, and you have this dumbass looking Colonel Sanders mustache?”

“Then I’ll take mom’s sugar wax and take it off.”  

They let it sit for seven minutes and then ten, and then a full fifteen, until they were worried welts were rising. 

“Oh, shit,” she said, looking at the orangey color of his hair. “Don’t look yet, don’t look, let me make it blue first.” Smearing on the manic panic, she was careful to avoid his ears. “Now, stay here. I’m sneaking out for a cigarette.” She left him sitting there, on the closed toilet, a small towel draped over his shoulders, his hair thick with blue goop and an accidental Elvis curl in the front. Nora opened her balcony door and stepped over the railing onto the flat, chalk white roof. 

Although the jar had promised a shocking, electric blue, the effect was more of a teal. 

When they walked into the party, Maude and some other eighth grade girls shrieked and ran over to surround Yas and touch his hair and fawn all over him. “You look like a rockstar,” someone said to him. And he did. Nora admired her handiwork.

She could see Yas smiling his embarrassed, crooked smile. Jolie’s older brother, David, was home from college and she heard him say to someone he was standing next to, “Wow, they’ve got Grunge kids here in Morocco.” Maybe it wasn’t meant as a compliment, but of course, they took it as one. They huffed and rolled their eyes as they repeated this to each other: “He called us ‘grunge kids,’ can you believe that guy?” But they were secretly pleased and recounted the barb to each other and late arrivals in feigned annoyance all night.

Really, the American kids weren’t any different than the French ex-pats  who bought saucisson and pâté from the Provençal merchant known affectionately as “The Pork Lady,” the only place one could buy pig flesh in Rabat. The émigrés imported wines from Bordeaux, and they started little cafes like the one that Nora and Brian and Khalifa and Youssef had haunted that December, places that sold Napoleons and the little cream puffs that looked like nuns, and espresso drinks rather than mint tea. Like the French, the American kids were building a little cultural compound within the former colony. 

After Christmas, the sophomore class had a new addition: “Zee” was curvy, bawdy, loud, and cursed like a sailor. Her parents were both Moroccan, but she had grown up in a lower-class London neighborhood. When men said things to the girls on the street, she yelled at them fluently in Moroccan Arabic, telling them that they should be ashamed of themselves, and that they should also go home and fuck their mothers. Zee tried to teach Nora how to at least say, “For shame!” to yell at the men who leered and made kissing noises or lewd gestures, but the one-time Nora tried it, the guy nearly fell over laughing, so she decided that the option of talking back, which Zee carried so well, was off the table for her. 

Zee, a nickname short for Zayneb, was an observant Muslim, but she was also on the pill. Her parents let her go to nightclubs, and she had the best clubbing clothes out of all the teenagers, which she poured herself into while straightening her hair, listening to Bjork’s album Debut as the girls got ready to sneak out to dance at a disco. And though Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol, Zayneb was not above being bought a vodka and cranberry by a handsome stranger. Nora didn’t know whether Zee was a virgin or not, but she made sex jokes constantly—mostly among the girls at a slumber party— pretending to fellate a Cornetto, that kind of thing. 

As the mild winter bent toward spring, Nora was hanging out more with the American twins Megan and Katie because Jolie had thrown her over for Zee. The twins’ parents were lax—their mother had grown up living in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, hanging by the pool with Janis Joplin when she was a little kid, so she either didn’t notice or didn’t care when girls ostensibly sleeping over snuck out, jumped into an SUV driven by their classmates’ chauffeur, and headed for Amnesia, the one main, well-named, discothèque in Rabat. Maybe Nora was a lightweight, or maybe someone put something in her drink, but she had little memory of one evening, in particular. She remembered a Moroccan senior shepherding her to the lunch-counter and forcing her to eat a cheeseburger. And, later through the rumor mill at school, she heard that she had passed out in the VIP section of the club and had been felt up by an American junior. 

In Miss Hall’s history class, they weren’t taught about the colonial occupations of Morocco. They weren’t told about the competing interests of Spain and France in the colony, and the nationalists’ struggle for independence after the war, and the desert peoples’ steadfast resistance to outside intervention. They were learning about Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. And as a result, Nora didn’t see the similitude between what she was feeling and the place she was living. Every moment of every day was a battle to keep herself from being invaded by foreign influence, not in the form of armies but ideology, the gross boners of old men, the prying hands of teenagers, the internalization of misogyny, the hatred of herself and her body, the insistence that this was cool or chic or proper, and this other thing was not. And also, I mean, it’s a minor point, but the Cranberries’s song “Linger” had been stuck in her head for months. 

Then one day, walking out of school towards where she would meet her dad, Nora saw Khalifa teaching Yas how to ollie on his skateboard. He was the kindest boy at the school, always looking out for the little kids. And she called him that night and said, “I think we should do it. I think we should lose our virginity to each other.” She had never even really been properly kissed. 

On Sundays, the servants were off, and her parents always took a long drive out to the beach, and she told Yas that he had to go with them. 

“Why?”

“I’m having a boy over.”

“Ugh,” said Yas. 

“Just go with them. Please. I’ll give you anything.”

He thought for a moment. 

“I want the Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt you got for Christmas. And the rest of the blue hair dye.” His hair had faded by then to a turquoise pastel. 

“The shirt’s too big for you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Fine. But keep them out. Tell them you want to get lunch at that place they like.”

“You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?” 

“No, Khalifa’s coming over, that’s all.”

“Oh. Khalifa’s cool.”

“Yeah. He’s nice.”

As the appointed time for their rendez-vous approached, Nora was nervous so she took a lukewarm Heineken out of the pantry (her parents would notice one missing from the fridge) and downed half of it and poured the rest down the sink. But then she worried she would taste like beer, so she ate a teaspoon of honey. When Khalifa’s driver dropped him off, she marched him down to the basement of her house, where there was a small hammam. She turned on the hot water to make clouds of steam and told him to take off his clothes. There was really nothing remotely sexy about any of it. 

“Can you put on the condom?”

“Well, I can’t… yet. You kind of have to be… ready,” he said, apologetically. They stood naked in the cavernous hammam with its arched ceiling. They kissed and laid down on the floor and then it was happening and she was surprised at the sounds that she was making, intuitively, like the sounds that women made in the movies, but then again maybe that was just the result of him compressing down onto her torso rhythmically, almost as if she were a bellows, with the air passing through her lungs to a beat in time, and then after a while, it was over. 

“What is it that you taste like?” he said, in his distinctive syntax, probably a feature of translating from Arabic to English in his head, while they were hurriedly getting dressed. 

“Oh, I drank a beer, and then I ate some honey.”

In making this calculation that she wanted to lose her virginity, and to do it on her own terms, Nora failed to consider how absolutely insane it would seem to other people. The rumor mill didn’t really start grinding at full pace until it was clear to the busybodies and know-it-alls, to the teachers, and parents, the bored housewives living in a diplomatic post where there was no television— with little entertainment other than school plays, the occasional movie at the Marine house, and gossip— that she and Khalifa were not even going out, as they said back then.  

“It was a queer thing to do,” it was reported to her that one of the adults had said. That sentence had one meaning in the nineties, and it has another meaning now. But maybe they were both true. 

It was early April, but the school year already had that winding-down feeling. The students were being prepared for exams; end of the year dances, planned; the senior trip was already scheduled. One evening the phone rang at Nora’s house and it was Megan (of Megan and Katie, the twins).

“Nora, I have to tell you something.”

“Ok.”

“I’m doing the calligraphy for the certificates for the Honor Society induction for tomorrow’s assembly, and…” she paused. “There isn’t one for you.”

Nora’s heart dropped into her stomach. “What do you mean?” 

Nora had straight A’s, and a stellar record of extra-curricular activities: she was in yearbook and almost every school play. And she did volunteer work, like cleaning up old overgrown gardens with the Boy Scout troop and selling things at bake sales at the soccer games.

“Yeah, well, our mom looked into it, and I guess, they’re withholding this from you… on the basis of moral character.”

This was the work of Mrs. Good, the president of the PTA. Nora was at the top of the class, and everyone would know what this meant. Instead of being on display at the stocks, she would be, distinctly, not on the stage: Pilloried by exclusion. 

She felt a burning sensation in her chest. Was it shame, or just rage? For a period of 24 hours, the lyrics of a popular REM song that seemed especially apt replaced the Cranberries’ tune that had haunted her for months. 

Nora sat in the auditorium the next day and watched her classmates come up to get their certificates, one by one. She was sitting next to Brian, who was also being excluded, perhaps because people knew that he was supplying most of the high-school with hashish, and he had been caught shop-lifting a pack of batteries from Marjane, on a dare. They sat together, slumped a bit in their seats in kind of a rebellious posture, chins out. With each student that crossed the stage and picked up their certificates— the Moroccan kids, Youssef and Mounia and Zayneb; and the other American kids, Jolie the queen bee and the twins Megan and Katie and Laila the only Black American, a military brat; and the others, Alex the athletic French-Canadian and the kids from the Gulf states, like sweet Khalifa— Nora felt the rage transforming into something else: a kind of strength, an unbreakable resolve. From here on out, she would give less of a fuck about what other people thought of her. And maybe that’s what growing up is. 

The next day was a Saturday, and there was a dance at the school that night. The eighth graders were invited to attend in anticipation of them moving up into high-school, and Yas was excited about it. He was wearing the Smashing Pumpkins shirt he got out of their exchange. Getting ready in her bathroom, Nora pulled her eyeliner all the way out past her eyes, like Cleopatra, ringing both the top and lower lids, like the Moroccan women did with the kohl they kept in little blue bottles. She was thinking of the Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum and the Syrian singer Asmahan. Thereafter, this look became her armor, almost like a mask, a style she adopted whenever she needed to feel powerful. 

When she walked onto the dim, crowded dance floor of the auditorium where just yesterday, she had been publicly flogged, all she could hear was wailing. Most of it was coming from Jolie, who was collapsed into Maude’s arms, her mouth emitting a sound like a siren. Something was sweeping through the room, which was crowded with 8th through 12th graders, and there was a buzz of whispers and gasps and shouts and then crying. Nora watched it wash over the room as if it were a wave sweeping across the lawn of spectators at the soccer field: eyes widening, lips curling, the crumpling faces of children, only some of them American or half American, but all of them raised, at least partly, in this American school, in the company of Americans, who let’s be honest, tend to dominate every conversation they’re in.

The news was that Kurt Cobain was dead. 

The girls were bawling and even the boys’ shoulders were shaking with hidden sobs, and the DJ was playing fucking “Linger” by the Cranberries. 

“How did he die?” Nora asked Mr. Shelly, the drama coach, as the two of them stood on the periphery, surveying this battlefield: like Antietam, so few were spared. 

“Overdose. Or suicide. I’m not sure we know. Either way, there’s probably a lesson in there for you kids.”

Nora had the strangest sensation, watching these teenagers in Morocco doing their best impression of teenagers in the U.S. in their mail order Converse and their Thrasher tees and their chokers and their striped tights and their flannel, sobbing into each other’s arms in the auditorium over the news of a dead American rockstar. 

“It’s okay to feel sad,” Mr. Shelly said, patting her on the shoulder. 

But she didn’t. She felt the way you do in the shower after a haircut, when the shampoo goes further than it used to, and you run your hands over your new, short hair. It was not just like a weight had been lifted, but more like the relief that comes from realizing that suddenly there is a lot less of you, and it didn’t even hurt.