“Are you a virgin?”
She lied and said that she wasn’t.
Just so they’d let her marry a friend of hers.
She didn’t love him, but they’re friends.
He understands her situation,
And wants to help her move out of her parents’ house.

All girls are born with something and it’s taken by their husbands.
You were destined to get married since the day you were born.
This thing you have, he is going to take it today.

Unlike most girls, I never had any expectations or dreams about my wedding night. Nor did I exert any effort to think of what would happen once I was alone with my husband—whom I hardly knew—for the first time.

I always thought that a girl who was a virgin
Would look different from a girl who wasn’t.
For a long time, I wondered what the difference might be.

It was an ordinary day in the life of a 16-year-old girl in high school, going out with friends for lunch and a movie. My phone rang; it was Hassan, my cousin.

Everyone knew that these pictures were fake and fabricated and that she didn’t do anything.

But their reaction was that they wanted to kill her.

I invented something called “The red lines”,
And I imagined them drawn on my body.
So that I could mark the boundaries that shouldn’t be crossed.

I remember I went to visit my aunt the morning after her wedding.
Everyone was in the bedroom talking about it.
Everyone would enter and look at the great wonder.

When I was little
My mother told me that a girl’s private parts are called a box of pearls
When I got older and we learned about reproduction
I asked my mother
and she told me the same thing that our teacher Mr. Mahmoud told me

Growing up, I was taught that girls were responsible for preserving their honor.
I, as a man, have nothing to do with it.
My mother never brought up the word “honor” around me or my brother.