A Florida girl faces the sudden realities of her new life in New York City during the pandemic.
Dec. 11, 2023 | Story by Luena Rodriguez-Feo Vileira | Graphics by Matthew Cupelli
Editor’s note: This story contains mentions of suicide and self-harm.
At an ungodly 7:30 a.m., Noor Sukkar logged into Advanced Placement chemistry, her first subject of the school day and the last she’d ever label promising when delivered via online lecture.
Through slow blinks, she missed a line of the lesson. When she asked to return to the slide, her professor, unyielding, told her to get the notes from a friend.
Noor hesitated before unmuting her mic.
“I have no friends here to get notes from.”
This was not the New-York life she’d envisioned before moving to the state in the summer of 2020, with her mother and younger sister, Naya. New York City shined especially brightly then, in their tourist-colored imaginations.
We pictured what we saw in movies, Noor mused during dinner with me, squeezing me between 6-hour work shifts and a 17-credit class schedule to recount her “fever dream” experience in The City That Never Sleeps. “We were living in la-la-land.”
Rocking a loose gray tee and navy flannel pants, as she chowed down on her Chipotle bowl, Noor’s look danced between casual comfort and an unapologetic, “Yes, these are my pajamas.”
The outfit echoed her de facto uniform throughout junior year of high school, even as the New York chill bit through the coats of bustling pedestrians. Noor attended school from her bedroom, fully online thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That winter, she didn’t leave the house for weeks on end. Her laptop screen swallowed the day, the city whole.
The Palestinian-Jordanian teen was originally raised in South Florida, with a childhood that blended elementary-school mosques and American Eagle short-shorts.
In February 2020, when Noor was 15, her mom announced the family’s move to New York, deciding to temporarily relocate her daughters while she completed her Ph.D. residency. Noor believed she’d return after a year to the Floridian backdrop of her formative memories, painted in beach days and plate-passing Eid al-Fitr celebrations.
Instead, an added 365 days, 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes trickled by before Noor left New York, consuming the entirety of her senior year. While planted there, she plunged into increasingly adult-world pressures: college applications, regular shifts hostessing and her sister’s near suicide.
Noor walks through Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan on Nov. 1, 2020. Photo courtesy of Noor Sukkar.
But even memories of that first year in NYC — the one anticipated for months in her calendar and announced giddily to friends she thought she’d walk the graduation stage with in Florida — felt the stabbing pang of hindsight.
Noor and her family arrived in July, with no permanent address, and spent their first two weeks living out of an Airbnb. Her mother soon secured a two-bed apartment in Midwood, in the quiet recesses of south Brooklyn. Noor helped split the living room with a divider, constructing makeshift walls for her sister to have a bedroom.
Still, for those first few months, New York’s magic lingered in the air, not yet overpowered by the emerging virus. That summer, Brooklyn’s COVID-19 cases averaged about 100 a week, among the lowest rates recorded ever since in the borough of over 2.5 million people.
Noor and Naya, who’d previously succumbed to the distance of their three-year age gap, took on city-wide explorations together. Noor described days of donning their most fashion-forward outfits, filming TikToks and grabbing life-changing boba tea in Times Square.
Noor’s early Instagram followers absorbed the city’s elusive wonder through her rainbow of initial posts: the flushed green leaves of Central Park trees, the sharp silver curves of The New York Times building sign — photos since pushed to the bottom of her page.
Before sundown, she’d return to her Midwood complex, apartments she recognized as gentrified in an area of poverty.
“We found out we were very lucky to have a washer and dryer in our apartment,” she explained.
Immigrant enclaves populated the neighborhood, housing Turks and Uzbeks and Russian Jews. To Noor, every 15-minute radius introduced a radically different cultural scene. Its air chimed a melody of sharp consonants and stretched vowels in languages she didn’t know.
Her new, 11th-grade campus, James Madison High School, was a 10-minute walk away, garnering her mom’s approval while the family’s white BMW collected dust comfortably in Florida.
At James Madison, three out of every four students classified as economically disadvantaged. During first-day icebreakers, teachers asked how many hours per week the employed students worked, to adapt their course loads. And for missing assignments, late-night shifts were an acceptable excuse.
“Our spoiled Florida asses had no business being there,” Noor said.
The city’s public schools began in late September, hybridized with an attend-in-person-if-you-want-to model. But within eight weeks of opening, all students went fully online, mandated by the city’s climbing 3% positive test rate.
On an unassuming Monday, 4,000 James Madison students morphed into grayed out Zoom boxes, stripping their casual mannerisms and cafeteria conversations from Noor’s notice. Lost were the bookbag-strapped crowds she’d meander through and the assigned-seat friendships she’d grow from jokes whispered in class.
Instead, her school schedule percolated through hours she spent sprawled in bed, submerged in a viscous stream of courses until 3:30 p.m. After school, she and Naya spent three more hours home alone, waiting for their mom to get off work during the week and letting a collection of empty water bottles litter their rooms throughout the day.
“Fun became walking down to the grocery store and getting Takis,” Noor deadpanned.
Her friend group back home remained tight, bonded through classes in person, clubs and parties. They savored time as a delicious milestone, donning crowns on Step Up Day in a school tradition for juniors, embracing their anticipation for a senior year glimmering on the horizon. In Noor’s absence, new moments and newer memories sated their hunger.
“They still kept in touch with me, but I wasn’t there,” she told me. “I wasn’t there.”
Designating high school a social wasteland, Noor searched for the seeds of community in other spaces. She joined the Muslim Community Network, a New-York-based education and service group and chatted in Zoom meetings with its youth members every Tuesday. Everyone’s cameras stayed on.
Her and Naya’s activities outside, though, grew rarer in the sunlight-scare winter, jeopardized by the uncompromising chill and the dangers of an earlier night. The sisters stopped frequenting the train to Times Square. Noor added vitamin-D pills to her sheltered routine.
Their quarantined conditions finally defrosted with the season’s change. In March 2021, they attended a service project at a local school park, hosted by the Muslim Community Network. Double-masked, it was the members’ first in-person meetup.
The park featured a combination of cement courts and slender trees, blending visitors from ages two to 20. The open air hummed with indistinct chatter. To Noor and Naya, the tangle of trike-pedaling toddlers and runaway basketballs bottled a pre-pandemic paradise.
“This is when we finally got introduced to civilization,” Noor said.
She guided me through the scene further: the accelerated frequency of their returns to the park, their sudden chain of friendships with park regulars. Before I could ask, she showed a photo of then-13-year-old Naya posing on the court, wearing a lime green floral cardigan and a wide smile. With thick waves of hair and equally dark eyebrows, she was Noor’s spitting image.
But, Noor’s next words dripped with a strained articulation, surfacing through steady pauses.
“This was the start of the end.”
As Noor, then 16, bonded with 12-year-olds quick to call her “bestie,” the younger Naya befriended men who were 19. While Noor picked up a restaurant job, Naya visited the park more often, brandishing low-cut shirts and staying by herself.
Piecing together the downhill timeline, Noor, whose mind then was cluttered with shift schedules and Common App essay prompts, worked backward. Hours before a college interview in fall, she recalled, a familiar girl from the park confessed: “Your sister smokes weed.”
Noor had discovered her sister was self-harming just months before, in May, on a day marked by its sickly coincidence with Eid al-Fitr.
Naya fell into both activities through the park’s men and the collection of girls hanging around them, like her, not yet old enough to be high school freshmen. By the time Noor knew, Naya wasn’t fazed by getting caught high in her Muslim household or even by the Fentanyl laced in the park’s blunts.
“You’d be scared to send her to walk outside because she could stand in front of a crosswalk and not care if a car hit her,” Noor said.
Wrestling her worry with hope, the girls’ mom decided they’d stay in New York another year; the tremor of sudden change might weaken her daughter’s feeble grip on life, she feared.
School resumed in person senior year, but an employed Noor now left class after noon. She buried herself in work shifts and labeled her responsibilities, financial support for her household and emotional support for Naya, “damage control.”
She’d tangoed with her little sister’s death, she said. She no longer cared about making friends.
Noor and her sister, Naya, pose on a pier together on Eid al-Fitr, May 13, 2021. That day, Noor and her mother learned Naya was self-harming. Photo courtesy of Noor Sukkar.
Instead, Noor savored soft freedoms, in cupcakes purchased before therapy sessions and strolls through SoHo on her way home, in her independence in an impermanent city. Her family returned to South Florida in the summer of 2022.
Naya’s been taking antidepressants since just before we came back, Noor added thoughtfully.
“She chose to live.”
As we walked from Chipotle, I considered the PJ-clad brunette marching next to me, driven by an energy drink, an upcoming exam and a sister still recovering. I traced our hour-long conversation’s beginnings.
“I microdosed on New York,” Noor told me. “I got a taste of life there and completely dissected myself out of it.”