UAE

Tas is eight years old when Dad announces the family is moving to Abu Dhabi. Goodbye Arlington. Goodbye best friend. Goodbye bike. Nobody got a vote. Especially not Tas.

Now the weekend lands on a Friday, school starts on a Sunday, and the bathroom has a secret water hose that ambushed him once and will never be spoken of again. He is the new kid in a school with students from over 80 countries, armed with exactly one Arabic word. He keeps getting it wrong. There is no polite way to thank a lunch lady with “Shakira.”

All he has left of home is a tin under his bed and a best friend nine time zones away.

Then a whistle blows, a coach points, and Tas lands on a team with four strangers who have no idea how much he needs them.

Tas is back for Year Two in Abu Dhabi, and something strange has happened. He knows things. Which hallway smells like shawarma. How to count dirhams without checking twice. What the lunch lady means when she calls him habibi. For the first time in his life, he is not the lost one.

Then a new kid arrives from Canada and eats lunch alone for three days, holding his tray the way Tas held his last year. Tas knows that move. He invented that move. His big brother is suddenly wearing headphones everywhere, his little sister is counting every cat in the neighbourhood, and Dad’s work phone keeps winning at the dinner
table.

Between a watermelon jack-o-lantern, a shawarma Christmas, and a girl who draws a star on his seat, Abu Dhabi is finally starting to feel like home. Which is usually when the grown-ups start talking behind closed doors.