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going to do if they give you one in the army?”
    “I’m not going to go to the army. I’m going to go back to Canada before then.” She knows better than to tell Lana that she’s a pacifist, or that she doesn’t support the Israeli army, or that her mom promised her she’d never have to join. When she first arrived she had said these things to Talia and Talia had stared at her in shock. She’s been calling her “Little Arafat” ever since.
    “When I first moved here I wanted to go back so badly,” Lana says. “I cried every day. But you get used to it. Then you start to love it and you don’t want to leave.”
    But I don’t want to get used to it, Lily wants to say. “Whatever,” she says instead, stretching her arm to grab the photos, but Lana moves her hand again. She waves the photos over her head, while Lily watches her, waiting. Finally, Lily gets hold of Lana’s wrists and pins her down to the bed, kneeling, hovering over Lana’s body. “Gotcha,” she says.
    Lana laughs, letting her hand unclench, and the photos scatter on the bed. Lily releases Lana’s wrists, and Lana reaches over and moves Lily’s hair from her face. “You’re like a boy,” she says. “With this hair.”
    Lily laughs shortly. “No, I’m not.”
    Lana tucks a strand of Lily’s hair behind an ear. “A pretty boy,” she says.
    Lily doesn’t know where she’s supposed to look. In her search she meets Lana’s eyes briefly and sees in them something like curiosity.
    “Have you ever even kissed someone?” Lana says.
    “No.”
    It all happens fast. Lana perches herself on her elbows and plants a kiss on Lily’s lips. Lily feels like a wave has just lifted heroff her feet and dropped her back to the ground. Lana leans back on the mattress. “Well, now you have.”
    Lily collects the photos, jumps off the bed and puts them back in the box, hides the box back in the closet. Her fingers are shaking. Her lips taste like lipstick: cherry gum and wax.
    “Don’t look so shocked.” Lana laughs. “It’s no big deal.”
    Lily doesn’t see Lana for the next few days, and she wonders if something has changed. She tries calling Lana from downstairs but Lana doesn’t answer. Lana has never invited her in.
    The days are getting hotter, stickier. Lily didn’t think it was possible. She starts taking two or three short cold showers a day, grateful for the tile floors, which Ruthie washes with a bucket of ice water twice a week. Ruthie has bought her a standing fan that she sleeps with now; its whooshing sound reminds Lily of rain. Every evening when Lily sits with her aunt after dinner and watches the tail end of the evening news, the weather forecast is the same. The long country, shaped like a wonky ice cream cone—blue dots like beads on a string on its east side—is littered with smiley suns. Her favourite part of the weather forecast is when the newscaster lists the height of the waves.
    On the weekend, Lily sees Lana talking to Tzion on the sidewalk. Tzion has one flip-flopped foot against the barricade. Lily walks over and says hi, and Lana looks up tiredly. She’s smoking a cigarette.
    “I didn’t know you smoked,” Lily says.
    “So what?” Lana hands Tzion the cigarette.
    “Lana,” he says, pleading. “Wait.”
    “Can we go to your place?” Lana says to Lily, sliding her arm through Lily’s. “Watch a movie or something?”
    “You shouldn’t be hanging out with that girl so much,” Talia says to Lily later that day as the two of them share watermelon slices in the kitchen. “Her family is fucked.”
    Lily looks up. “What do you mean?”
    “They’re messed up.” Talia spits a seed onto the plate. “Her dad is a drunk and her mom … People saw her walking around with Eli from the grocery store.”
    “So?”
    “These Russian chicks, they come here and take all the men. Israeli men love blondes. The couple next door divorced and two weeks later he moves in with some Natasha.”
    “She’s a