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immediately. He pressed his lips together and was silent for a moment. He was looking at the floor and lifted his chin to look at her, his head angled as if he were looking under a door. “I haven’t seen my dad since I was too young to remember. My mum told  me he died, he loved me…” he waved his hand at the empty garage. “I eventually realized she was hiding something, ‘cause she’d be arguing on the phone and crying and stuff when I was supposed to be asleep. I found her phone book with just this number on one of the pages, no name, but I knew it was his ‘cause she had doodled boxes all over that page. Just these thick lined boxes, like she’d gone over the outlines again and again, almost through the paper. I memorized that number, still know it now, although I only called it once. I pretended to be sick from school the next day, knew she had to leave me so that she could go to work. When I dialed, before I even spoke, there was like this angry silence on the other end, and then this woman’s voice, telling me to fuck off, I wasn’t getting him back, he was with her now. She thought it was my mum.” His voice was tight, and the last words barely made it out.
    “ Oh…” said Amal, “That must have been…” She felt a trite word come to her mouth and stopped.
    “I recognized his secretary’s voice. All I could think of was those tan tights she would wear whenever I visited his office, how they wrinkled around her ankles, like elephant skin. I don’t even remember her face anymore, but I can still see that. I’m getting nasty , aren’t I?” he asked. His brown face seemed tinged with gray, and there was a slight sneer on his lips.
    She shook her head.
    “I was so angry, I wanted to blame my mum, I was a real shit to her for a while, there’s no excuse for that, but all I could see was that something was taken away from me. I’m 22 now, and I still feel like it was taken away. It’s pathetic really,” he said, not looking at her, “like I’m waiting for him to come home with some shiny red toy train, or something. Anyway, Professor Chaudry, Mirza Uncle… he doesn’t really ask, but he seems to need us, right?” Now he was nodding vigorously at her, and she found herself nodding back.
    “I’m glad you want to be here,” she said, “because I can’t do this on my own.”
    “Nah,” he said, grinning as he held the suitcase in front of him, as if it were a dog on a leash. The suitcase was not that heavy, she realized, and she understood that he did not want to step too close to her in that quiet garage, using the suitcase like a safety barrier between their bodies as he walked past her out of the garage. He looked behind him as he left, but he was not trying to catch her eye as he said “He knew what he was doing when he asked you here. He got that right.”
     
     
    The mountaineers among Rehan’s friends had plenty of advice about the tent when they finally arrived for the seminar. The first 30 minutes were spent discussing wind direction and insulation. Mirza Uncle was nodding and looking over at Rehan to make sure he was taking this all in. Rehan was calling her over, beckoning towards the kitchen window with a long thin arm. She knew he could not see her in the darkness of the house, but he must have known she would be standing there and she felt strangely cheered by that small act of faith.
    There were seven students in all, including Rehan. The only girl was Vanessa, one of the mountaineers, and she smiled as Amal came to stand at the back of the al-fresco class. Sven towered over them all, even from his low vantage point on the side of the suitcase, his wide back and shoulders seemed to dominate the space. There were two men whose names Amal did not catch, and Kiran, Jason and Saad. Kiran and Jason were studiously making notes as the professor spoke. Saad saw her and inhaled deeply with his eyes closed and then stuck up his thumb at her. She smiled, but Mirza Uncle was