He had never sat in a chair like this before, a chair that let him swing from side to side, a chair with an axis on which he could rotate like a globe. Round and round, a world on wheels. He always thought sitting meant keeping still, and he avoided it when he could, but with this chair he could sit and spin, sit and swerve, sit and scoot across the floor. When he first sat down, he wheeled halfway to the door, but Miss Malti flashed him a reprimanding look, and he ground his feet into the carpet, determined not to let them budge. But it was too hard to resist the chair, and within seconds, he found his torso swaying on top of the cushion, his knees gliding back and forth as though he were skating in place.

His pants still felt loose, even with his shirt tucked in and a belt tied around his waist. An hour earlier, Miss Malti had handed him a shopping bag with some clothes in it and waited for him outside the boys’ bathroom at school. The bathroom was empty, but he entered a stall anyway, a cloister of epithets and conquests scratched into metal. The secret language of boys, the things they whispered to each other when no one else was around. When he emerged, Miss Malti examined the impression the clothes made on him. His dignity seemed caught up in his pants, which slipped off his narrow hips like a hula hoop gradually winding its way down. The cuffs dragged along the linoleum floor, and he bent over to roll them up. Malti intervened with a belt, a length of braided leather that resembled the way she wore her hair sometimes. As he wove it around his waist, she clipped the tag from his shirt, light blue with a collar. The chemical scent of new fabric obscured the odors of adolescence.

“Close the top button,” she instructed him. He obeyed, straining to pass the stiff button through the hole.

“Now get into these shoes,” she chided. “Hurry up!”

Her car was parked in front of the school, a neoclassical building with Corinthian columns heralding its entrance. It stood imperiously on a hill atop a leafy neighborhood, and as he beheld it from the street, he was surprised it was a school and not a courthouse or a museum. The maple trees on the front lawn had started to shed, sprinkling the surrounding streets with vermilion and gold leaves. Fall. He had learned this word from his English teacher. The leaves fall to the earth. The earth falls into winter. Fall. Three months of decay before the darkness set in. It was already dark enough, he thought.

Malti unlocked the doors to her black Volvo, and he slid into the passenger’s seat. The car was an older model, but it was classy, with shiny hubcaps and leather seats inside. When he rode with her, he was almost a grownup. He imagined how it would feel to drive the car, to push down on the accelerator and listen to the roar of the engine as the car launched forward. It was as if the engine were filled with the fastest runners from East Africa. His foot was the starting gun of a race, and he could see the runners’ protracted thigh muscles tensing as his finger edged toward the trigger. Their combined force would pull him and Malti along, and she might reach for his arm to brace herself against the speed. One day he would ask her to let him drive. But not today. Today was not a day for asking questions.

The traffic was heavy as they approached downtown. They stalled at a red light and Malti asked him if he was hungry. She reached in the glove box, pulling out two shiny green bricks. Granola bars. Those dry, grainy cakes: Malti’s routine response to hunger. She probably didn’t know that back home, this was animal fodder. He used to feed grain like this to his grandfather’s lumpy cows in Garissa. He broke off a piece and began chewing, working up enough saliva to eventually swallow a coarse morsel. She turned to face him.

“Everything is going to be fine. Just answer her questions. Tell her whatever she wants to know.”

As Malti spoke, he paid close attention to her mouth, following its movements. He didn’t say anything, just stared at her lips, pink and full, wondering if they would open again, what shapes they would make, whether they would reveal her teeth, her tongue.

“Mohammed, do you understand? You can trust this woman. She is going to help you.”

He sensed a microscopic crack in her voice, a hint of uncertainty. He indicated the light, which had switched to green. Just as the car behind them began honking, Malti drove forward into the tangle of tall buildings. They climbed a steep hill, and she turned into a garage, a cave that spiraled underground, beneath the traffic and the people walking and working. In the wispy orange glow he noticed that the line between her cheek and jaw was drawn. From this angle, her nose appeared sharper than it really was. Her thick lashes weighed on her eyes, large and almost black. He recalled the Indians he saw in Nairobi. There was one, a woman who sold cauliflower outside the market his uncle took him to. She had the same kohl-lined eyes as Malti, the same wavy hair and tawny skin. But Malti was more beautiful.

The office was on the fourth floor of an old building. No elevator. Mohammed bounded up the stairs, two at a time. He thought he heard music playing in the stairwell, a synthesizer beat behind an electric guitar. But it might have been in his head. It might have been an artifact from the night before, when he had stayed up too late watching music videos. He waited for Malti to meet him at the top. For the first time that day, he realized she was wearing a dress, a loose-fitting black gown that looked almost like the abaya his mother and sister wore, except that it fell just above her knees. Her bare knees, brown and bony and haram. Everything about her was haram. The way she dressed, exposed her hair, spoke to men without humility, looking directly into their eyes, shaking their hands. He watched her do it at the agency and a sense of shame stirred in him. He wondered what the men thought of her, if they felt as ashamed as he did. He imagined her drinking wine and dancing in a club like she was on the set of a Bollywood movie. Like she was Kareena Kapoor, bracelets sliding down her wrists.

The other woman was different. A glass shard with features so delicate they almost disappeared. Thin nose, thin lips, and thin hair cut bluntly at her chin. She told Mohammed to call her Anna, squinting her light-colored eyes and conferring a half smile before leading him and Malti down a narrow carpeted hallway. His shoulder grazed the framed photos along the wall. The giants of social justice – Mandela, King, and Gandhi. Anna ushered them inside a room, eaten up by a large wooden table in the center. As Malti and Anna spoke, he balanced himself on the swivel chair. The small arrow on the wall clock pointed at three and the large one at seven. He was still puzzled by the arrows, which one was for the hour and which one for the minute. Why this old-fashioned way of telling time? Especially in a place where time was so important, where everything was on the dot. Soccer practice was at 3:15. Not 3:00 or 3:30. He would miss it today, but Malti had informed the coach, who stopped him in the hall earlier that afternoon. “Hang in there,” the coach said. What was he supposed to hang, and where? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t have time for confusion, so he smiled and hurried to his last class. He had learned that smiles went a long way in this city, where few people seemed to do it.

Now the white woman was directing her attention at him. In age she was probably the same as Malti, maybe a little older. But he could never be sure with women here. The passage of time did not saddle them with wrinkles and rolls. Instead it polished them, and they gleamed with well-moisturized skin and toned arms. He wondered if the woman was married. Maybe to a man like his soccer coach, compact with wide shoulders and a deep voice.

“Mohammed, will you answer some questions for me?” she asked, flipping to a new page in her notebook.

He nodded as she scribbled something down, her long, white fingers holding a long, black pen. And then the panic snuck up on him, a pickpocket snatching his confidence like it was a wad of bills tucked carelessly in his pants. A ringing filled his head, and he tried to shake it loose, but it continued. Ring. Ring. Ring. He knew what it was, where it was coming from. That night, when everyone was asleep except for him. He thought it might go away after the first time. But it picked up, a thumb pressing down on the doorbell outside, again and again. He considered escaping through a window, running through the back streets until he found his way to the water. He would climb up the side of one of those huge ships he saw docked near the market where rich people bought fish. He would grasp onto it, a fugitive barnacle en route to the open sea.

But he didn’t escape that night. He didn’t move until he heard his mother get up and answer the door. Men’s voices occupied the apartment and his mother called for him. Mohammed. Mohammed.

“Mohammed, are you ready?”

His spine stiffened and he inclined forward in the chair. He searched her face for God, for the merciful God he almost believed in. But He wasn’t there. He had abandoned Mohammed again, thrown him to the beasts that stalked him across the planet. Wherever he went, the beasts followed. They pursued him through heat and cold, dry and wet. They passed immigration and customs and had settled into the bushes behind the Section 8 housing complex where he lived. And now his only hope, his only weapon, was this white lawyer named Anna, who didn’t even know how to smile.