“You know why women can always tell when men lie?” the famous Turkish comedian Cem Yilmaz once asked.

“Because they’re professionals,” he answered. “We men, we’re amateurs! Women have been lying their whole lives.”

As a 17-year-old schoolgirl living in Turkey, Gamze could relate. It was the story of her life anyway. Living with her family in Maltepe, a district on the Asian side of the city, Gamze was the youngest of three children. Her brothers were both in their mid-twenties, had jobs and already married and left home.

Every day after school, instead of going immediately home, she would text her mother and fabricate: she had to attend a study group, or go to the library, when in fact she was meeting friends at one of the bars near Taksim – things like that.

As in many families, the daughter Gamze was expected to be home after school. The parents didn’t like their daughter running around. Not that her parents were overly strict; compared to families in the east, for example, you could say they were quite lenient. For instance, they would have liked her to wear a headscarf, but they respected her decision not to wear one; and even though her mother was constantly reproaching her, Gamze got away with wearing a green Army jacket, black jeans and even combat boots, which matched her closely cropped, boyish hair style.

During their afternoon sojourns to Taksim, since neither Gamze nor her friends had much money, they could usually only afford to buy one round of beer. That was enough for most of them anyway, especially Gamze, who was petite, high-spirited; one beer made her float for hours. They mostly liked to smoke nargile anyway. The beer was just to clear the smoke-taste from their mouths, and because having the beer made them look older.

Actually, Gamze was fairly mature for her age. She took her studies seriously, at least those that interested her, such as art and English literature (she had read many classics in the original, and her teachers had praised the lengthy, well-thought-out essays she had written). Also, she was experienced sexually, unlike a lot of girls her age. She’d had several boyfriends (and even a girlfriend), and regarded sex with an attitude that, again, was surprisingly mature for a girl her age in a Muslim country. For instance, she thought with some disbelief and even scorn, when she listened to her girlfriends’ melodramatic tales of suffering, of wanting “to be with” their boyfriends, but having to wait until marriage. Gamze thought it an absurd sacrifice: Why do they torture themselves? she thought.

She was in this frame of mind one afternoon when she walked into a bar on Barlar Sokak, in Kadikoy. It was national youth day, so she had the day off from school. Having time on her hands, she had decided to see if she could get a beer. The barman at this particular place was laid-back enough that he brought a pint of Efes without asking to see her ID.

She sat in the back at a table. The place was deserted, except for an older man, a foreigner, who was reading a book. Gamze caught the title, The Journal of Andre Gide. She’d heard of the name but hadn’t read any of his work.

Presently, the foreigner looked up and smiled at her.

“Şerefe,” he said, raising his glass. Gamze liked his smile, returned it, and raised her glass as well. After a few passing remarks, in which she learned he was a Czech living in Istanbul, the Czech man invited her to sit at his table. They were the only people in the whole bar, and he reasoned sensibly that it didn’t make sense for them to keep shouting at each other from across the room.

So Gamze went over and joined him. For the next hour or so, they discussed her studies, why he was in Istanbul (he was a freelance journalist), and they talked about books, literature and writing. Gamze was charmed by the older man’s attention, and by the fact that he was from Prague. She was fascinated by Kundera and had read “Unbearable Lightness of Being” several times. Perhaps on that lonely afternoon in the bar, she fancied the visitor as Tomas and herself as his naïve Tereza, who knows?

At any rate, they drank beer together and talked. Sometime later, the Czech paid the tab, and invited her to join him for a walk. It was a lovely spring afternoon, and they found themselves strolling the backstreets near Bahariye Street, where the Czech lived. He invited her up to his apartment, where they spent the rest of the afternoon.

Later, Gamze left somewhat hurriedly, seeing the time. She had to get home. Her mother was preparing dinner when she arrived, and asked where she’d been all day. “Nowhere really,” Gamze said absently. “I went to a park and read for a while.”

“Have you been smoking again?” the mother asked, suspiciously, smelling her daughter’s hair. “Bah! I can smell smoke! And drinking too!”

They had an argument, which had been brewing for some time. Her mother had an inkling of what her daughter was up to, she had a strong feeling, especially when she did the laundry and smelled smoke in her clothes. Mothers often as not instruct their daughters on the art of deception, but take umbrage when their daughters begin to apply these skills, especially on their mothers.

Well, not today! the mother thought. She knew that some of the other parents let this kind of thing go on, let their children run around like – like, what? Like animals, or rock stars or something! Well, her daughter was to be no Rock Star. She wouldn’t have it, not in her house, not anytime soon.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” the mother said. “I’ve tried to be lenient, to give you your space, but you just seem bent on doing whatever you want! You may think you can fool me, but believe me, I know!” The result of the argument was expected, on both sides: Gamze was “grounded,” until the end of the term, that she would report straight home after school, no excuses. Also, she would stop wearing those “trashy, homeless-person clothes” and start dressing properly.

Gamze went up to her room, slammed the door and threw herself onto her bed. Her phone beeped. It was a message from the Czech, saying he looked forward to seeing her again. Sorry, I left so quickly, she texted back. Could they meet again tomorrow, he texted? Not tomorrow, she said. She had to go to school, and after, she had to be at home. She found herself confiding in the Czech, perhaps because he was older and a yabancı; she told him her parents had grounded her.

###

When the protests started in Gezi Park, Gamze followed them the same way everybody did. She followed updates on Twitter, and watched the evening news with her parents. The images of the police firing tear gas pellets, and the crowds pushing back, were disturbing, electrifying. She was struck by how many of the protesters were young people, many of them wearing masks to protect their faces from the tear gas. All the faces in the crowd were rushing toward something, urgently, angrily. It seemed they were communicating some important message, and Gamze thought she knew what it was.

Fueled in part by the protests, but also by her own internal disquiet, Gamze decided to run way. One morning, she packed her bag as if going to school. But instead she got a bus to Kadikoy, then took the ferry boat over to Besiktas, where she walked up the hill to Taksim Square.

At that moment, the situation up the hill near Taksim wasn’t too bad. The protests usually began in the evening. She surveyed the streets, where random materials – rubbish, bricks, stones – had been erected either as barriers or as monuments of rebellion, Gamze couldn’t decide which. Nearby, in the park she could see in the park all the tents set up, a make-shift camp, for the demonstrators. There was a “Revolution Market,” a sign above the tent advertised, in which free food was served on paper plates for hungry protesters. In another tent, there was a free bookshop, and still another tent offered free medical attention for anyone injured in clashes with police.

All around in the park, there were banners and posters, denouncing the government and calling for protection of the park, which was reportedly going to be converted into a shopping center. Still more signs: as Gamze took them in on her walk, she observed, they were devoted to other causes, such as the Turkish Communist Party, anti-globalization and the environment. It felt something like a wholesale activists’ convention, or dissent trade fair.

The demonstrators, who were mostly students but really of all ages, looked beat, sleepy, a bit dirty. Gamze liked them, she felt at home. The country’s leader had dismissed them as a pack of “çapulcu,” or “low life peasants,” especially since there had been some looting, an inevitable side effect of mass protests. Feeling marginalized, the demonstrators had ironically co-opted the term and made it their own. “Every day I am çapulling,” became something of a catch phrase, an ideal, for these young Turks.

Overwhelmed by her surroundings, Gamze sat under a tree, and looked around. She took photos on her mobile of some of the people. There was a man with a big, grey-streaked beard whose face she liked; a young teenaged couple who were sleeping on the ground; a guitarist who belted out angry songs on a worn acoustic guitar. Later, a woman representing a worker’s union gave a big speech, and people gathered round and shouted encouragement, applauded.

Night came, and the protests began in the nearby Taksim Square. Later reports estimated there were tens of thousands. The police set up blockades all over, to prevent more people from coming. All the ferryboats were cancelled; access to Taksim was virtually off limits. The smell of tear gas burned the nostrils, choked the throats and smeared the eyes of not only the demonstrators, but of the residents living in and around the district. The strong winds from the Black Sea carried the toxic gas down the hill into Beşiktaş, and other neighborhoods.

Presently, a young woman, who worked for CNN, with a cameraman in tow, buzzed around trying to drum up interviews. Most of the demonstrators regarded the CNN crew with resentment and hostility, some even openly accusing them of being agents for the CIA.

“Are you a student?” the reporter asked, perhaps finding Gamze less threatening.

“Yes,” Gamze said shyly.

“University?”

“No, high school.”

“High school! Aren’t your parents worried about you being here?”

“They don’t know I’m here.”

“Why did you come here? Are you supporting the demonstrators?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Why was she supporting the protesters? Gamze didn’t really have political reasons; she was not political. It was personal, or something.

“Where are you from?” the reporter asked. “Do you live here in Istanbul?”

“Gezi Park is my home,” Gamze said, smiling. And it was true; it felt like that anyway.

Nearby, the wreckage of a tractor the demonstrators had set fire to earlier sat smoldering, the streetlights reflecting on the helmets of the police. There was a feeling of riotous disorder in line with her own rebellion, the chaos in her heart.

“Gezi Park is my home,” she said again.

The reporter, who appeared to be in her early twenties, nodded symphathetically.

“Well, be careful,” she said. “And good luck.”

“Thank you.”

###

The demonstrations went on through the night. There were some arrests. Police managed to chase the protesters from the main square; they sought refuge in the park. Sometime near dawn, things began to quiet down. Gamze, who had been up all night, snapping photos and watching the action, fell asleep, feeling strangely calm and exalted. For the first time, she felt truly part of something, a force larger than herself. She had been right in what she said to the reporter. She felt home here, among these people.

Suddenly, her two older brothers arrived. How they had tracked her down was anyone’s guess. They woke Gamze, and told her she had to come home. Their mother was worried sick, her father was furious, etc.

“Why would you do something like this?” the oldest brother asked. “I mean, why? How could you just run away and not tell anybody where you were going? Don’t you realize how selfish you are being?”

Gamze listened, without resistance. After all, they did have a point. Perhaps she still felt a powerful sense of calm, euphoria, that she didn’t want to let dissipate in the dawn by raising a stupid argument.

She complied, almost lamb-like, as her brothers guided her away from the square, shaking their heads, neither of them speaking. Gamze turned and looked back once, taking in the park, the sleeping protesters, and secretly waved farewell. Something in her had changed, or perhaps not. She still wasn’t sure: She needed time to process all of the things she had seen.

She knew would be grounded for a very long time; that much was for sure. Most likely, her parents would take her stay to their country house all summer, away from the “corrupting influences” of the city. It would be a very long and boring summer.

Still, somehow, it was worth it, getting caught, she knew not why.

###

James Tressler is a writer and teacher. He lives in Istanbul.