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talking in code, and Liyana said, “Huh?”
    “We are starting over.” Her mother’s voice was so thin and wavery, it scared her.
    She was usually so upbeat about things. Liyana and Rafik teased her about being the general of the Optimist’s Army.
Positive thoughts, ho! Forward march!
Liyana thought her words turned up at the ends, like elf shoes. “Look for the Silver Lining”was her mother’s favorite song. She made Liyana and Rafik memorize it. Their mother wouldn’t even let them say things like “bad weather.” She wouldn’t look at a newspaper till afternoon because she didn’t want bad news setting the tone for the day. Peachy Helen, on the other hand, crouched over the newspaper on her kitchen table, moaning over kidnappings, hijackings, and hurricanes as if each one were personal. “I can’t stop thinking about Sarah’s mother,” Peachy said once.
    “Who’s Sarah?”
    “The girl who drowned in Colorado.”
    This was some poor person Peachy and the Abbouds had never
met
.
    Liyana’s mother placed her American hand over Liyana’s half-half one on the keyboard. “Go to bed. You’re going to need all the sleep you can get.”

    On their last night in St. Louis, the neighborhood gave the Abboud family a going-away party in their front yard. The F OR S ALE sign on the house had a red S OLD slapped across it. Liyana licked custard from a cream puff and stared at their familiar, rumpled neighbors in their summer clothes. They’d be around all summer and Liyana’s family would not. She eavesdropped on everybody—eavesdroppingwas her specialty. Talk about camp and favorite teachers and the opening of the neighborhood swimming pool made her feel wistful.
    She tried to remember the exact sensation of Jackson’s kiss, but it was dissolving in her mind. She wished she had thought to invite him to this. But he might not have come, and that would have been worse. Claire dropped a small velvet ring box into Liyana’s hand at the last minute and ran home crying. A tightly folded note tucked under a silver friendship ring said, “I will never
ever
forget you.”

C IVILIZED
    I vote for the cat sleeping in the sun.
    When the weary passengers finally boarded the giant jet at Kennedy Airport and it lifted off the runway, her mother clutched Liyana’s wrist hard. “Oh my,” she whispered. She closed her eyes.
    Liyana pressed her face to the window and looked down. Every little light of New York City was a period at the end of a sentence. A dusty silver sheen in the sky capped the city as it shrank behind them. The airplane dipped and shivered. Liyana had only flown short flights to Kansas City and Chicago before. She had never flown across an ocean.
    After they reached their transatlantic altitude, Poppy took pillows and fuzzy blue blankets down from the overhead bins. Flight attendants moved up the aisles handing out bedtime cups of water. Rafik already had his head tipped off to one side, eyes shuttered, and mouth slightly open. Liyana couldn’t believe it. He could sleep anywhere, even with his life changing in the middle of a stormy sky. Liyana couldn’t imagine sleeping now. Shepressed the button over her seat so a sharp circle of light fell onto her lap. She wrote in her notebook,
“Do overnight pilots drink coffee? Do they take turns napping? A new chapter begins in the dark.”

    Even her teachers back home had been nicer to her when they knew she was leaving. “Why don’t you tell us about where you’re going?” Mr. Hathaway, her history teacher, had said the last week of school. He had never liked Liyana since the day she let Claire, who sat behind her, French-braid her hair in class. “Of course we all
know
about Jerusalem—it’s such a big part of religious history and constantly in the news—but why do you think people have had so much trouble acting
civilized
over there?”
    Civilized
was his favorite word. Once when Mr. Hathaway said people were and animals weren’t, Liyana raised