Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye Page A

turned a corner and everything changed.
    “You keep getting me in trouble,” Liyana’s friend Sylvie sighed on one of their lunchtime walks from school to the
falafel
stand. That morning Liyana had urged Sylvie to defy the “directress” who ordered her to remove a tortoise-shell clip from her hair. Liyana whispered, “This is getting ridiculous! Say no!” and Sylvie peeped, “No” in a thin voice that caused her to get a detention note. She would have to stay after school.
    Sylvie pointed to the Armenian man with giant keys dangling from his belt who locked the door of the Armenian Quarter every night at 10 P.M. He opened it again at 6 A.M.
    Sylvie said, “Last week, I was running up the street fast from a movie at the British Library. This man saw me coming, but the time on the clock was 10:01 and he locked the door right before I reached it. He would not let me come in! I had to walk to the house of my aunt in the new city to sleep—a long walk in the dark! My mother was so mad. Shesaid I can’t go to movies anymore.”
    Liyana marched up to the man and asked, “Why do you need to keep that door locked, anyway? No one
else’s
neighborhood is locked.”
    He stared at her as if she were a thief digging for secrets. “Security,” he said gruffly, and turned away. She hated that word. Now Sylvie was embarrassed and walking back to school early without her. Maybe it was an excuse. She still had some leftover homework to do.
    Just outside the Quarter’s huge door, on the path to Jaffa Gate, sat the Sandrouni family’s famous ceramics shop. Poppy had pointed it out to Liyana as a landmark. The Sandrounis painted beautiful tiles, lamps, and bowls with blue interiors, and scenes of Jerusalem—domes, towers, and pointy trees.
    Liyana, feeling suddenly bereft without her friend, saw a crowd of tourists heading in there, so she turned and followed them, as if she were part of their group. No one noticed her.
    The tourists began buying like crazy. They pointed and flipped credit cards, speaking a language Liyana couldn’t identify—Danish? Dutch?
    Liyana’s eyes fell upon a small, shapely green lamp, exactly the color of the green grass she missed back home in the United States—who ever thought about grass when you had it? Whoever thought about missing a
color
? The lamp would be perfect for reading in bed.
    Then she looked at the price tag. She couldn’t understand it because the writing was so fancy, like calligraphy. She motioned to a boy standing behind the counter with his arms folded, near the reams of tissue paper and stacks of cardboard boxes. He raised his eyebrows and walked over to her.
    He smelled like cinnamon. Liyana thought he might be one or two years older than she was.
    “Excuse me, how much does this cost? Can you read it?”
    He stared at her school uniform, speaking English smoothly. “You are not—with them?”
    He pointed to the group.
    “I am not!”
    “You are—with who?”
    Then she felt like Crispin Crispian in that old children’s book by Margaret Wise Brown, the dog who belonged to himself.
    “I am with myself.”
    He smiled broadly. “I am also with myself,” he said. “I like to be with—myself.”
    His hair rolled back cleanly as a wave at the beach.
    “You do?”
    “Almost always.”
    “You don’t get tired of your own self?”
    “Never.”
    “You don’t get lonely for other people?”
    He looked around the crowded shop. “How could I? Other people are everywhere.”
    They both laughed.
    “Do you go to school?” Liyana asked him.
    “Of course,” he grinned. “I am a—scholar. I do my homework every day. But right now—I am—eating lunch.”
    “So am I!” she said. “I am eating lunch, too.”
    Neither of them had any food.
    “By the way,” he said, “I can’t read this tag either.”
    He called over a member of the Sandrouni family, who quoted something equaling about sixty-five American dollars. Too much! Liyana still had to translate prices