Excerpt from Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

For some that summer, the next thirty days would be filled with prayers and reflections and recitations. Bodies and minds would be purified. But for the rest of us, it would be thirty days of waiting for the sun to set so we could eat and drink without incurring the judgment of all the collective mothers and grandmothers and aunties of Bay Ridge, who with one wagging finger and one cluck of the tongue could banish us into a prison of guilt.

The waiting. Every Ramadan, people waited for Lina to change. To be struck with the spirit of Islam, to ditch her cutoffs and halter tops for a nice, modest abaya. To hang out after prayers with the good Muslim girls at the Starbucks on 3rd instead of drinking with the Mexicans in Sunset Park. And every Ramadan, Lina waited for people to go ahead and give up on her.

Baba waited for Mama to mellow, to hang up her abayas, put down her Qur'an, and become once again the quietly irreverent girl he had married.

Mama waited for us, her husband and daughters, to believe as we ought to.

They both waited for Sami, their boy, their firstborn, to come back to them.

I waited for something without a name. A jolt, a tingling, a filling up.

Ordinarily, I didn't care much about Ramadan. But that summer, with our high-­school graduation only days away, it felt momentous. Suddenly the things around me—­tables, books, clouds—­were imbued with meaning that I was supposed to be able to decipher but couldn't. In September, I would go to college, and I was sure that by then I would be different. I would push and the world would stumble in response.

Lying next to Lina that first morning, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the woman I was destined to become. I saw a glimmer of my own future arm, thinner, with a figure-­eight tattoo curling around my wrist. I smiled to myself, but then I realized that I had stolen this wrist off the girl who served us pizza yesterday after school. It was her tattoo, her skin, her body. I had plagiarized my own imaginings of myself. So, eyes closed, I kept waiting for knowledge to strike me like an arrow in the heart.

These are the normal kinds of waiting that fill the long, dry-­mouthed days of Ramadan. But this Ramadan, this particularly long and hot Ramadan, there was another kind of waiting that we all shared. It kept everyone in Bay Ridge strung together on a long, tenuous thread, knocking into one another like prayer beads.

We were waiting for the men with dogs to return.

Outside, Abu Jamal's café sat abandoned, wrapped in yellow police tape. Across the street, Baba led a calf around the corner, to the alley behind his butcher shop, where he would drag a very sharp knife across the skin of its throat while muttering verses from the Qur'an. Someone from one of the mosques had brought it to him, because there's no better way to kick off the holy month than with a sacrificial slaughter. He'd have to do it quickly and quietly and be sure to mop up all the blood afterward; otherwise, the Health Department would be back with another citation.

We could hear the calf mewing gently. Lina leaned out the window and called down to Baba. "Baba," she said, "don't do it!"

Baba smiled up at her and called back, "Close your eyes, ya Lina, look away." And as he said it, he moved his own hand over the calf's eyes so it wouldn't have to see what was coming next.

It was seven hours into the first day of Ramadan, and we were as hungry as shit. Our girl Reina kept offering us sticks of Juicy Fruit gum because our stomachs were rumbling so loudly.

"Nah, homie," Lina said, pushing the pack back toward Reina.

"Not even gum?" Reina asked.

"Not even water," I said.

Lina and I had been friends with Reina since elementary school, but every year she still asked all the same questions. We were chilling on a bench near the playground in Owl's Head Park. Lina kept shifting around, pulling one leg up to her chest and stretching the other out across the sidewalk, trying on different poses for the boys at the basketball courts, like some kind of mannequin. We were graduating from Fort Hamilton High School in two days, but classes for the seniors had already finished, and everyone was out, clustered around various benches, listening to music on their phones, a cacophony of tinny techno beats and muffled rappers. We were listening to Ol' Dirty Bastard on Lina's phone, because she was going through what she called her "OG" phase.

Excerpted from Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad. Copyright © 2023 by Aisha Abdel Gawad. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.