Guarding the secrets

To her friends and teachers, sixteen-year-old Tina Isa was a bright, bubbly American girl, working at a fast-food restaurant to earn money for college and dating a shy, poetic senior. But at home there were secrets that scared the honor student. Her parents and older sisters were constantly on the attack - she had humiliated them by assimilating into American culture instead of conforming to the traditional Muslim values dutifully followed in their native West Bank village. Furious, Tina's father beat her so savagely that she told friends - and left notes in her schoolbooks - that if anything…