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dying for the crispy hot falafel and chewy manakish Teta’s cook would let me eat fresh from the oven, and baklava so sweet it hurt a little. I hadn’t really known it until the move, but Mom’s cooking skills were crap. I guess she wasn’t really up to cooking at that point anyway. That first year was mostly crying for her.
    But I think I missed the intangibles even more. I missed being cool. I missed being around people who didn’t tell me I smelled like skunk spice, whatever that even meant. It felt like I’d been kidnapped from the predictable calm of my Jordanian private school and delivered into a foreign war zone: Lincoln Middle. Here nothing was certain, except the fact that I had no allies. Predators were ruthless. Anything could happen.
    And outside the chain-link fence of Lincoln, I missed being smiled at. Ten-almost-eleven is old enough to feel the uneasy stares of grown-ups you don’t even know. It’s old enough to understand that you make people uncomfortable.
    I thought I’d learned English at my school in Jordan, but I guess that was British English, and the garbled Kentucky drawl around me sounded nothing like it. Just breaking up the flow of foreign sounds into words required brain-aching levels of concentration. And I, apparently, sounded like Harry Potter on crack—again, whatever that meant.
    So I practiced. Southern-speak made my cheeks and tongue ache, but I did it. Every night I’d lie in bed and say things properly, drill the words that I’d been teased most recently for first. Ha not hello . Deyesk not desk . Bayethrum not loo . Never loo , unless I wanted to be stuffed into one during recess again.
    Accent turned out to be nothing, though, because that at least I could change. My new names, however, may as well have been tattooed on me. Iraqi boy. Sand nigger. Saddam. Terrorist.
    My parents should’ve warned me. Or somebody should’ve warned them. Now I see how it had to happen, but at ten, how was I supposed to guess that my classmates were going to hate me no matter what? Their dads and uncles and brothers had been in Iraq killing and being killed by people that looked like me. And not just looked like me, but talked like me and prayed like me. Hating me was practically their patriotic duty.
    At first I tried to correct false assumptions one at a time, but I learned pretty quickly that talking back only ended in getting shoved against my locker or leveled by a kick to the back of the knee. It didn’t matter how firmly I insisted my name wasn’t Saddam and that we weren’t even Iraqi, because my real name, Mohammed Ibrahim Hussein, was bad enough. And after a few attempts at trying to explain we were less-than-devout mainstream Muslims, barely likely to go to mosque, let alone to suicide-bomb the local Kroger, I gave up. My brown skin, my accent, my stinky lunches, my too-dressy khakis shorts and lame button-up polos—I was worthy of a shunning.
    It hurt. But it made sense too. Ostracizing the weird one is what ten-year-olds do best. I’d seen it done back in Amman to the kid with the small head and the lisp. Maybe I’d even joined in. Maybe I deserved this.
    After that first month of school in Kentucky, when I realized how bad it was going to be, I just wanted it to be summer so I could float around in our swimming pool in peace without having to field angry questions about why my soggy falafel looked like dog crap and why my God wanted me to hijack airplanes and kill people.
    I just wanted to be left alone.
    And then I went and did the unthinkable: I pissed myself.
    You can’t piss yourself. Not in Amman, not in Elizabethtown, not anywhere. It’s the unpardonable sin, trumped only by crapping yourself, which I thankfully did not do.
    We were on a field trip to the Louisville Science Center, and I’d been too nervous to ask an adult where the bathroom was. I figured I could hold it. All day. At ten I was clearly not aware of my physical limitations. By the time I realized