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“Anything,” I replied, taken aback by how unrestrained this hijabi was.

“When I imagine you, can I imagine that you’re going to marry me? See, I have this issue: I can sin only with a guy that I can imagine I’ll marry one day. So if I’m imagining sinning with you, I have to be able to imagine being married to you as well.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Anis and I communicated regularly from that day forward. To my surprise, within a couple of weeks she told me that she and the guy she’d been going to marry had called things off, and now she wanted to give me the honor of being the first guy she went down on. That was an offer I couldn’t refuse. In fact, I got in my trusty Ford Ranger—my parents had kept the truck for me while I was in New York—and drove overnight to go see her.

“I couldn’t get us a hotel room,” she said, getting into the car as if we’d already been introduced. “They wouldn’t take cash!”

“We’ll find a quiet parking lot,” I replied, turning onto the main street of the rural town.

I stole glances at her while I drove. She was more beautiful than her online picture suggested. She was dainty and light-skinned, and her eyes were immensely sad. She wore Dior heels, a maroon hijab, a long black skirt, and a tight white blouse through which I could see the contours of her lacy black bra. I liked the way she wore her hijab; she wrapped it in whirls rather than safety-pinning the flaps the ugly way the Syrians and Malaysians did. At a traffic light I reached out and touched the texture of the scarf.

“Do you like it?” she asked. “I got it when I went to Mecca.”

“Very nice.”

“I’d like to give you a gift.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a little cloth bag.

“What is it?”

She unfurled the cloth and I saw that it concealed a miniature Quran.

“I want you to have it. Look, it’s even embroidered in gold and has silver calligraphy.”

I didn’t want to take it. It just didn’t seem right that she should give me something so special when we’d just met. But I suspected that giving me the Quran cast a veil of sacredness over the obscenity we were about to engage in. Perhaps it made her feel better about her impending sin.

I smiled. “I like it,” I said. “Put it in the glove compartment and I’ll take a closer look later.”

We drove around until we got to a park with a lake. Leaving the car, we took a walk around the water, stopping now and then to touch each other, and sitting on a bench to kiss. When we returned to our places in the car, I tilted her body back and reached over to unbutton her blouse. She undid her hijab, letting a splash of auburn hair fall across my face. I squeezed her tresses between my fingers, wrapped the strands around my palms, and inhaled her Vidal Sassoon.

The rest of the day we made prostrations upon each other’s skin. In case someone was passing by, I drew the hijab over our bodies.

“A man and a woman are like a covering for one another,” she said, repeating a verse from the Quran.

3

Persuading girls to abandon the strictures of Islam, while it brought a wry smile to the corner of my mouth in the middle of a boring class, was not ultimately satisfying. I couldn’t boast or gloat about it to anyone. I couldn’t celebrate my success. The secrecy ruined it. What was the point of having power over another human being if it couldn’t be publicized?

So I decided to break it off with Anis. We’d met only once more since our first delicious encounter and sometimes talked on the phone. Looking for an easy way out, I told her that I was going to leave school and run away with Yemenese Sufis in order to work on the state of my nafs, or carnal self. She thought I was just making excuses, but I insisted, saying, “I really need to work on my Islam, maybe do some spiritual tazkiyah, or purification; maybe evaluate my aqidas, my creeds.” Those were Arabic terms, and I pronounced them like the pious did. Anis became quiet. She and I both knew it: she had been defeated by guttural inflection. She cried on the phone, declared her hope that I would never find love, and then hung up on me, leaving me