Opening
These chapters braid an origin tragedy with present-tense crisis. As Sal’s side hustle spirals and Noor’s panic boils into rage, a flashback reframes Toufiq’s alcoholism as rooted in grief—not weakness—tightening the emotional vise on every choice they make.
What Happens
Chapter 21: Nice Side Hustle
Salahudin Malik confronts Noor Riaz about hanging up on him. She blames anxiety over college rejections, while Sal’s burner buzzes nonstop—he’s now dealing for his classmate Art to keep the motel afloat. When Jamie Jensen asks to buy a month’s worth of Adderall, Sal refuses, drawing a moral line. Jamie, furious, threatens to tell Noor about Sal’s dealing.
Driving Noor later, Sal tries to reach the truth beneath her deflections. She half-jokes about “impure thoughts,” then drowns the moment with Coldplay’s “Shiver,” a song about invisibility that matches the silence between them. Back at the motel, the lights are off and Toufiq Malik is missing. Ashlee McCann waits, admits she knows he’s dealing, and begs for painkillers. Thinking of her young daughter, Sal hates himself for it—but sells her two pills and vows to quit once the debt is paid.
Chapter 22: July, Then
In Pakistan, Misbah Malik answers the door to a police inspector. Junaid and his wife, Nargis, are dead: she returned late, stepped onto a live electrical wire on the veranda, and he died trying to save her. One accident births a legacy of sorrow.
Misbah must tell Toufiq. He collapses, sobbing—“Because I couldn’t save them”—and that night drinks for the first time, the start of a consuming pattern. The chapter roots his alcoholism in devastating Grief and Loss, recasting him not as a simple failure but a man crushed by guilt.
Chapter 23: Great Passions
In English class, Noor’s F earns Jamie’s smirk. Across the room, she and Sal share a charged look until Jamie cuts in with a crude jab. The room falls silent just as Noor tells him to “go to hell.” Mrs. Michaels, the teacher, quietly assigns Noor to read the chorus in Euripides’ Medea aloud.
Noor reads: “great passions grow into monsters…” The words strike something raw, and her breath snags. Sal pulls the fire alarm, shepherds her out, and tells Mrs. Michaels he smelled gas. The teacher plays along, later offering Noor a chance to make up her grade and gently asking about home. Noor shields herself with evasions.
Chapter 24: You and Me Both
Sal takes the heat for the alarm but doesn’t regret it. Art tries to bond over their “business” and even suggests watching Breaking Bad; Sal insists this is temporary. Art, blunt, says Toufiq won’t change and teases Sal’s obvious feelings for Noor—who sees them talking and grows wary.
At Thurber’s, the old hangout, the air turns almost romantic. Sal’s burner vibrates—Ashlee, across the room and painfully thin—and he ignores it. Noor admits six rejections and fears UCLA is her last shot. Sal squeezes her hand and murmurs, “I love you too much to—” meaning more than friendship. Noor blushes but tests the fragile trust: “You tell me your secrets… and I’ll tell you mine.” The weight of Secrets and Lies—his dealing, his father’s drinking—makes Sal pull back, and the moment closes.
Chapter 25: Rage
They arrive at the motel to find Imam Shafiq’s car outside. Sal panics and begs Noor to distract the imam while he hides his father’s bottles. Noor argues the imam should see the truth so Toufiq can get help; Khadija, the imam’s wife, overhears and assures them her husband is here to help, not judge. Sal doubles down on secrecy, and Noor leaves, stung.
Crossing the desert, Noor feels an emotion flood her—bigger than anger, thicker than air. She catalogues the wounds: her uncle Shaukat Riaz, Toufiq’s drinking, Jamie’s cruelty, even Misbah for leaving. She names it: rage. She screams into the emptiness, then forces it back down. Misbah’s dying instruction—Forgive—offers no map. Who? How?
Character Development
These chapters tip private pain into public crisis, forcing characters toward choices they can’t undo.
- Salahudin: Dives deeper into dealing out of desperation yet keeps a moral line, refusing Jamie. His love for Noor drives bold action—pulling the alarm—but shame about his family and crime keeps him silent at Thurber’s.
- Noor: External pressures and internal trauma break the surface in class, then crest into a desert scream. She begins to name her core conflict—Forgiveness and Rage—but doesn’t yet know how to live with it.
- Toufiq: The flashback reframes him as a man gutted by loss, his addiction a response to guilt he cannot metabolize.
- Misbah: Becomes the family’s quiet backbone in catastrophe; her single word—Forgive—echoes as challenge and compass.
- Jamie: Sharpens as an antagonist, wielding cruelty and threats to control others.
- Ashlee: Embodies the human cost of addiction, deepening Sal’s guilt and fear that he’s fueling harm.
Themes & Symbols
Secrets and love pull in opposite directions. Sal and Noor yearn toward each other, but fear and shame make them hide. The result is isolation that magnifies pain: secrets metastasize, just as Medea warns. Sal’s rule-breaking rescue is a love-borne attempt to interrupt Noor’s spiral, but at Thurber’s the demand for honesty proves harder than affection alone.
Family wounds ripple across generations. A single, senseless accident seeds lifelong trauma, showing how Abuse and Intergenerational Trauma takes root not only in violence but in unresolved grief. Addiction follows as coping and curse, intertwining Toufiq’s drinking with Sal’s choices in the illicit economy—two faces of Addiction and its Consequences. At the same time, the tenderness between Sal and Noor—acts of care, not just words—pushes their bond from friendship into fragile Love and Friendship that demands truth to survive.
Symbols
- Medea: The chorus’ warning about passions becoming “monsters” mirrors Noor’s panic and Sal’s secret-keeping. Classical tragedy becomes a mirror for modern teenage silence and betrayal.
- The Fire Alarm: Sal’s transgression is both literal escape hatch and metaphorical siren—a noisy rupture of quiet suffering, a bid to make help unavoidable.
Key Quotes
“great passions grow into monsters in the dark of the mind; but if you share them with loving friends they remain human, they can be endured.”
Read by Noor at her breaking point, the line crystallizes the novel’s argument about secrecy. It explains why Noor panics and why Sal’s impulse—connection, not discipline—saves her in the moment.
“Because I couldn’t save them.”
Toufiq’s grief spills into a confession of helplessness. The sentence anchors his alcoholism in guilt, complicating judgment with empathy and tracing a line from past tragedy to present harm.
“I love you too much to—”
Sal’s unfinished confession exposes both tenderness and terror. Love pushes him toward honesty, but shame clamps down; the dash marks the precise place where secrets fracture intimacy.
“You tell me your secrets… And I’ll tell you mine.”
Noor offers a bridge that requires mutual risk. The bargain frames their central obstacle: without shared truth, their bond stalls, and the monsters grow.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Placing Misbah’s flashback amid the present creates painful dramatic irony: we understand Toufiq’s wound while Sal and Noor keep reacting to its symptoms. The result is a tightened web of cause and effect—grief begets addiction, addiction begets secrecy, secrecy begets harm. Sal and Noor’s relationship edges into romance, but the price of love is truth, and neither is ready to pay. Noor’s scream marks a turning point; she stops minimizing her pain and starts naming it. From here, the story moves from endurance to confrontation, raising the stakes for every lie they keep and every help they refuse.