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reading assignments, copying them, and taking notes in classes I missed. I had more pressing matters on my mind. I was thirteen; I had just met Aziz.
    Parvaneh, too, celebrated her thirteenth birthday that year. It was around then that a strain of deception that must have lain dormant began to yawn and stretch and shake itself awake. She studied hard and excelled in her grades, so she could someday move out and free herself from that witch. Not only that, but she spread out her colorful wings and transformed herself into a caring butterfly, attending to loving, motherly details: spit-cleaned a stain on my father’s shoe, scolded him for losing weight, remembered to buy my mother a birthday gift, and visited her at home when she was out of sorts to shampoo and blow dry her hair.
    Having adopted my parents as her own, she played the role of the obedient daughter. I, on the other hand, possessed the required intelligence, courage, and temerity to keep alive our family name and multiply my inherited wealth. I admired our differences. We complemented each other.
    As she became older, Butterfly’s body refused to grow round and voluptuous. I pulled down her bathing suit once to see for myself what her breasts looked like—those tiny buttons with no sway to them. At that moment, as young as I was, I comprehended the lure of a pair of arrogant, well-rounded breasts like mine.
    That year, her aunt went to the bazaar and bought an extra-large, white kerchief, marched straight to the synagogue of our chief rabbi, Eshagh the Henna Beard, and demanded that he sign all four corners of the cloth with a black marker, to make sure his signature would not wash off or the kerchief be replaced for another. That, to my great horror, was the nuptial cloth Butterfly was expected to use on her wedding night to display her blood to her in-laws as proof of her virginity.
    I hurried home from school that day and snuggled in Madar’s comforting scent of talcum and violets. My words tripped over each other in my haste to tell her what I heard from Parvaneh and ask whether it was true that brides had to show a bloody piece of cloth the morning after their wedding. That was before Madar’s inexplicable tantrum and before she turned her back on Baba, leaving me confused and angry. But that day, her silvery pallor heightened in the pearly mist that crept in from the window, she touched my lips with one manicured finger. “Yes, it’s true, Soraya. It’s an appalling custom. But you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. I’ll never force you.”
    â€œWhat if my future mother-in-law demands it? This bloody thing? Will you shut her up?”
    â€œThat’s up to your father.” She moved closer to me and wrapped her silk shawl about our shoulders as if to buffer us from the shock of what was to come.
    What came was Aunt Tala’s increasingly abusive behavior.
    She framed and hung the nuptial cloth from a hook on the wall that faced Parvaneh’s bed. Her aunt not only forbade her to remove the frame until her wedding day, but also demanded that she stand in front of it every night and repeat aloud that her virginity was her honor and that she’d guard it with her very last breath.
    The first night Parvaneh braved the framed nuptial cloth, her aunt stood guard, legs apart, arms resting against the doorjamb like a bat about to take flight.
    Butterfly tried to repeat the words Aunt Tala ordered her to recite, but the rabbi’s ominous, spidery signatures threatened from all four corners and, as if a bird was stuck in her throat, nothing but croaking sounds came out.
    Butterfly sank into a well of grief. I should have left her alone there, allowed her to drown in her black moods. But I did not. I held her hand and tried to teach her what I knew well. How to ignore her aunt and find her own way of snuggling into her own skin. She misunderstood.
    She grew her fingernails long and painted them