Desert Boys Read Free

suspected, to the timing of it all—that this author happened to be someone whose life was perpendicular to mine, and that, if I were to read her book, I’d learn something about myself at that intersection.
    She’d written the memoir, strangely, in the third person. It began: “For the first sixteen years of her life, Adila Atef spoke with a throaty, confident voice.” By the time I reached the epilogue, I’d forgotten the book was not, in fact, a novel. The veracity of the story was re-revealed to me in those final pages, where the author converted to the first person:
    Contrary to the beliefs of many—friends included—I wrote this book in the third person not for its therapeutic or distancing effects, but because it represents more accurately the way in which I remember these events unfolding, more like a film than a diary. The I can’t exist in more than one place at a time, and I am here, now. Who, then, was that other Adila?
    Nowhere in her story was the experience of the girl I’d been aware of in high school. She and the author were not, I accepted, one and the same.
    *   *   *
    Of hundreds of girls at Antelope Valley High, only one wore a headscarf.
    She was two years ahead of Karinger, Kush, and Watts, and so they rarely crossed paths. The only reason they knew of her was because, after the terrorist attacks, she’d been harassed in the main quad at lunch, and the local media came to produce a special report. Peter Thorpe, local newscaster, along with a microphone-tethered cameraman, interviewed students on campus. He asked questions some in the community later agreed were loaded, including whether or not this girl’s wearing a headscarf to school was in any way disrespectful, “considering the circumstances.”
    Kush and Watts—along with about fifty other kids—vied for a spot in the shot’s background, making faces and flipping the camera the bird. By the time they realized Karinger was being interviewed, Kush and Watts had missed the entire conversation.
    â€œHe took my name, age, and class,” Karinger said when he rejoined his friends. “I’ll be on TV at seven o’clock tomorrow night.”
    And so they made plans to watch the special at Karinger’s place, a brand-new two-story tract home on the west side of town. His mother, Linda, had won the house in a lottery, one of a thousand she entered every year. She, along with Roxanne—Karinger’s twelve-year-old sister—joined Kush and Watts in front of the TV, between multiple roaming cats. The three boys sat on the center couch. Linda took the love seat, and Roxanne, stomach and elbows down, lay flat on the carpet in front of them, chin on her hands. She wore a pair of little denim shorts, fraying at the ends. More than once, Kush caught Watts following the thin white lines of her legs to their meeting place.
    The show started. Peter Thorpe spoke to the camera, live in-studio, against a green-screened photograph of three women in burqas. Kush looked to see that everyone’s attention was on the screen. When it was, he studied the bottoms of Roxanne’s big toes, which were only slightly larger than paintballs. His own sister, Jean, had just moved away for college, and he rarely saw her. He rarely saw any girls—definitely not the bottoms of their toes—so he studied Roxanne’s with the unsexed air of a paleontologist.
    The segment shifted to an exterior shot of the high school. A voice-over informed the viewers that he (Thorpe) had recently had the opportunity to speak directly with students. One after the other, kids began making their on-screen claims. (“I have Trigonometry with her, but she never really says anything”; “She seems nice enough, but you never know”; “I’m sure it’s hard for her to be the only one, but her being here is hard for everyone else, too, you know?”)
    Finally