Love from a to Z

by S. K. Ali

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  To the best of good peoples, my parents.

  And to other good peoples, Anu and Haju, without whom this book could not be.

  This is a love story.

  You’ve been warned.

  MARVEL: TWO SATURDAYS IN MARCH

  ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, March 14, fourteen-year-old Adam Chen went to the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha.

  A thirteenth-century drawing of a tree caught his gaze. It wasn’t particularly striking or artistic. He didn’t know why this tree caused him to stride forward as if magnetized. (When he thinks about it now, his guess is thus: Trees were kind of missing in the landscape he found himself in at the time, and so he was hungry for them.)

  Once he got close, he was rewarded with the name of the manuscript that housed this simple tree sketch: The Marvels of Creation and the Oddities of Existence.

  He stood there thinking about this grand title for a long moment.

  Then something clicked in his mind: Maybe that’s what living is—recognizing the marvels and oddities around you.

  From that day, he vowed to record the marvels he knew to be true and the oddities he wished weren’t.

  Adam, being Adam, found himself marveling more than ruminating on the weird bits of existing.

  We pick up his Marvels and Oddities journal on March 7, four years after that Saturday at the Museum of Islamic Art.

  Eighteen now, Adam is a freshman in college, but it’s important to know that he has stopped going to classes two months ago.

  He has decided to live.

  • • •

  On the very late evening of Saturday, March 11, sixteen-year-old Zayneb Malik clicked on a link in her desperation to finish a project. She’d promised a Muslim Clothing Through the Ages poster for the Islamic History Fair at the mosque, and it was due in nine hours, give or take a few hours of sleep.

  Perhaps it was because of the late hour, but the link was oddly intriguing to a girl looking for thirteenth-century hijab styles: Al-Qazwini’s Catalogue of Life as It Existed in the Islamic World, 1275 AD.

  The link opened to an ancient book.

  The Marvels of Creation and the Oddities of Existence.

  A description of the book followed, but Zayneb could not read on.

  “Marvels” and “oddities” perfectly described the reality of her life right then.

  The next day, after returning from the history fair (and taking a nap), she began a journal and kept it going for the next two years, recording the wonders and thorns in the garden of her life.

  Zayneb, being Zayneb, focused on the latter. She dedicated her journal entries to pruning the prickly overgrowth that stifled her young life.

  By the time we meet her at eighteen, she’s become an expert gardener, ready to shear the world.

  She’s also just been suspended from school.

  A NOTE TO UNDERSTANDING THE STORY ABOUT TO UNFOLD

  OTHER PEOPLE’S PRIVATE JOURNALS ARE tricky things. It feels strange to read them.

  And if you do get to read one—say, if a diary were to fling open and stick to the window of the stalled subway car opposite your stalled subway car, and you had highly trained vision that allowed you to read tiny, tilted, cursive writing—even then, while devouring the details of a stranger’s life, you would be overwhelmed with guilt.

  You may even look around to see if there are witnesses to your peering-and-gulping reading behavior.

  In this case, rest assured that you are free to enjoy the thoughts of Adam and Zayneb shamelessly. They have donated their diaries in the cause of . . . yes, love . . . on three conditions. One, that I cut out two incidents (the first involving a stranger’s coffee cup, misplaced, that they both drank from by accident, and the second something I cannot write about here without quaking).

  The other conditions are that I change their names and that I rewrite their entries in narrative form.

  Done. Done. Done.

  ZAYNEB

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 6

  ODDITY: HATERS

  I HATE HATEFUL PEOPLE.*

  Exhibit A: The woman seated beside me on the plane.

  She swore under her breath when she saw me. Hijabi me.

  Muslim me, on an airplane.

  She lifted her carry-on suitcase and slammed it into the overhead bin so hard, I was sure she damaged the wheels on it.

  Then she rolled her eyes and whisper-swore again when I took a long moment to get up from my aisle seat to let her in.

  My lap had been full. I’d had my Marvels and Oddities journal, a pen, my phone, headphones, and the food I’d bought right before boarding—a saran-wrapped breakfast sandwich and coffee. I had to gather these and, while clutching them to me, slide out.

  After Hateful Woman got into her seat, her actions were executed in staccato, each orchestrated to let me know she was mad at my presence. Setting her purse down on the floor, slam, snapping the seat pocket in front of her to punch her newspaper in, pow, pulling her seat belt strap from under her, yank.

  “I’m going to need to get up to go to the bathroom quite a bit, you know,” she growled at me.

  Nice to meet you, too.

  “Okay,” I said, smiling my smile of deadly politeness. I’d recently learned that smiling calm-evilly in the face of haters, well, stranger haters, gets them more inflamed.

  “You’ve got to be ready to move out of the way faster than that,” she said.

  I tilted my head and blinked at her sweater-set self. “Okay.”

  “Shit. Bitch.” She pretended it was because she couldn’t find her seat-belt slot.

  “Okay,” I said again, popping headphones on and scrolling on my phone to find the right selection. I turned up the volume and drew the left earphone away from my ear a bit as if adjusting it.

  A bit of Arabic, a traveling dua, filled the space between Hateful Woman and me.

  She stared. I smiled.

  • • •

  *I know, I know. I hate hateful people was so ironic.

  But I was born this way. Angry.

  When my siblings and I were young, my parents had this thing where they liked to sum each of us three kids up by the way we had entered the world.

  “Sadia had an actual smile on her face. Such a happy baby! Mansoor was calm, serene. And our youngest, Zayneb? She screamed nonstop for hours. A ball of anger!” Dad/Mom would say, laughing when they got to the punch line: me. When I was way younger, I’d get angry at this, their one-dimensional descriptions of us, their reducing us to these simple caricatures, their using me as a punch line. My face would redden, and I’d leave the room, puffing. They’d follow, trying to douse me with excuses for their thoughtlessness.

  After a while they learned to follow up the punch line with descriptions of my positive qualities. “But Zayneb is the most generous of our kids! Did you know she’s been sponsoring an orphan abroad with her allowance since she was six? He’s two years older than her, and she’s been taking care of him!” They’d beam at preteen me, at my newly developed guarded expression.

  Then, two years ago, when Mom and Dad had stopped this rudeness, I began not to care that they’d called me an angry baby.

  Because by then I’d discovered this about myself: I get angry for the right reasons.

  So I embraced
my anger. I was the angry one.

  Though, Marvels and Oddities, the right reasons got me suspended from school yesterday.

  • • •

  Exhibit B: The prime villain of the hater squad, Mr. Fencer.

  I’ve written a lot about Mr. Fencer in here. But I’ve never given him a whole section in my oddities entries. I guess it’s because oddities are like the nagging parts of life, things that you can sort of escape.

  Fencer is inescapable. Every senior has to take at least one of his classes at our small school.

  And he is evil personified.

  Yesterday, in social science, he rubbed his hands together before passing out his carefully chosen handout:

  GIRL BURIED ALIVE IN HONOR KILLING

  Police in Gazra have discovered the body of a sixteen-year-old girl apparently buried alive for talking to boys. Her father and grandfather have been charged with the crime, having admitted that they had been upset at the girl for being friendly with several boys in the village. Her lungs and stomach were filled with soil, indicating that, at the time of burial, she was still alive.

  I stopped reading. I knew what Fencer was doing. He was adding fuel to the fire he’d kindled since the semester started in February.

  “You’re going to use this article to do an analysis with the graphic organizer I modeled last class. Assignment due Wednesday, before break, no extensions. Questions?”

  He stared right at me, the only Muslim in class.

  He had parked himself in a corner of the room, on top of an empty desk, in order to get the best view of the class, a look of perverse satisfaction on his face. Like he was tun-tun-da-ing us.

  From glancing around at the other students, I saw that it was working pretty well. Mouths hanging open, sighs, frowns, shifting in seats.

  I turned the handout over to begin a note to Kavi.

  Mike’s hand shot up, already homing in to ace this one. “Sir, do we compare American culture and this particular culture?”

  His laptop was open, an iPad beside it. My bet was that Mike was going to start the analysis as soon as Fencer answered him.

  “Well, technically you can do any culture you’re familiar with. But you must do this culture, Turkish—or actually Islamic—as the comparing culture.”

  I raised my hand. “Islam isn’t a culture. It’s a religion.”

  “A religion that permeates every aspect of one’s living, right?” His legs began swinging. Excited. “Like art and architecture, for example.”

  “Well . . . yeah, some people call it a way of life.”

  “I define that as culture. A mode of living.”

  “But in this case, this buried girl is not an example of Islamic culture. You’re stretching again.” I made sure not to add “sir.” Ever.

  Never.

  “Anyone else want to answer that? People keeping up with notes can look back a couple of classes. When we did that extensive chart comparing women’s rights around the world.”

  Mike’s hand shot up. He had his iPad up in the other hand for everyone to see. Its brain held his brain, so no one else bothered to flip through their own notes. “Sir, we came to the conclusion, with the chart, that certain countries were weaker at upholding women’s rights.”

  “And was there something that these countries had in common? Come on, people. Someone other than Mike?”

  “They were all Muslim?” said Noemi, a girl with long blond bangs covering her eyes. She was staring at Fencer with an expression at the intersection of Practiced Boredom and Mild Curiosity, Freshly Piqued. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  Fencer jumped off the desk and awarded us with his you-got-it stance: hands on his corduroy hips, legs apart, face beaming. “Yes, or, to put it more precisely, you can say that it looks like the majority of those countries follow Islam. Anything else? Zee-naab?”

  He deliberately mispronounced it that way. I’d told him it was Zay-nub many times. Even writing it phonetically on worksheets for him: ZAY-NUB.

  I now bent down over the sheet of paper on my desk and pressed hard with my pen. Fencer is not going to be here. I’m going to make sure of it.

  The dream: get Fencer fired.

  The reality: raise my hand, challenge his BS, get my words twisted, sulk, and, to finish off, pen my anger on a piece of paper.

  When Fencer went to the projector, I tossed the note to Kavi behind me. She added something and passed it back to me.

  #EatThemAlive.

  I smiled. She was talking about the online movement our friend Ayaan had recently joined, #EatThemAlive. Its primary function is to take down your regular neighborhood-variety racists and supremacists through Internet sleuthing. But Ayaan is in student council, so she does everything underground. Her way is to collect receipts quietly until she has enough to dismantle someone in a foolproof, methodical manner.

  She’d told me she had some stuff on Fencer. Though she hadn’t shown me anything.

  But at this moment, I let the glee light me up inside—Ayaan has stuff—which meant we’d be taking Fencer down soon. I’d already told her I wanted a part in it.

  Fencer is not going to be here. I’m going to make sure of it.

  I stared at Kavi’s words underneath mine. #EatThemAlive.

  A doodle of a pair of hands holding a fork and a knife would go well on either side of Kavi’s contribution. She’d appreciate my attempt at art, her forte.

  I began drawing a sharp-looking butter knife with exaggerated jagged edges and a slender, spiky tip.

  A hand clasped the paper from my desk and yanked so hard, my pen trailed ink off it onto my desk.

  I looked up at Fencer, my eyes wide, brain registering what I’d just drawn.

  A knife. A fierce-looking one.

  “Zee-naab, office. Now.” He had the calm face of someone who already knew they’d won before the game had started. “I’ll be there in five with this threat of yours.”

  • • •

  It was easy for Principal Kerr to suspend me. It was a two-step process.

  1. After repeatedly asking Why would you do something like this? and getting nothing out of me, Kerr called Mom. She promptly left the travel agency where she works.

  2. Holding up my “threatening” note, Kerr outlined, for Mom’s benefit, what I’d done, while I stayed mute, staring so hard at Fencer’s shoes, willing two holes to be burned in them, that he shifted uncomfortably a few times.

  Kerr repeated “Eat them alive?” two times, the second time in a higher-pitched voice, and I pictured Kavi’s face, dark hair parted at the side, thin brown arms crisscrossed over textbooks affixed to her chest, her lips doing that barely there smile she does.

  I saw her by my locker, waiting for me at lunch, as she’d done almost every day for the past few years.

  I’d never give her away.

  “Miss Malik, do you realize this could be considered expulsion worthy? A threat, with a weapon, directed at a teacher?” Kerr stared at me.

  The anger inside me got switched, without my permission, and traded places with worry.

  I want to go to UChicago in the fall. That’s where my sister, Sadia, goes, and she promised to move out of her dorm so we could get a place together.

  I wilted in the chair beside Mom. She glanced at me, worry flitting her own eyes, so I shot her a pained look: Say something.

  But she was a people pleaser, so she nodded at Kerr, almost groveling-like.

  My stomach clenched. Mom wasn’t going to help me out.

  I dropped my gaze and saw Fencer’s dark brown loafers again.

  The sight stilled the tears that had begun pooling. I blinked them away and concentrated on boring more holes in Fencer’s shoes.

  But maybe Kerr saw my wet eyes. Because suddenly she cleared her throat, and when she next spoke, her voice was calmer.

  “The only reason we’ve decided to give Miss Malik a week’s suspension instead—which will go into her records, by the way—is due to her exemplary academic recor
d over the years. I’ll see this as a terrible, terrible decision she’s made. Mr. Fencer agrees with me on this.” Her voice hardened again. “But give me one more thing to make me reconsider, Miss Malik, and we may be seeing your college future at stake. I will not hesitate to make that so.”

  Beside Mom, Fencer sighed as if he were pondering college-less me.

  Anger welled and churned inside.

  Eat them alive.

  I’m going to get him. I’m going to get Fencer.

  • • •

  As soon as we got in the car and she turned the ignition, Mom began. “I never thought we’d have this sort of trouble with you, Zayneb. A threat against your teacher? A knife?”

  “It wasn’t a threat! It was about getting him fired. And the knife was a butter knife. I was just about to draw the fork.” I frowned at the front of Alexander Porter High with its ugly green double doors.

  “We didn’t bring you up like this. I’m ashamed.” Mom’s voice was small, which meant it was going to be the crying kind of lecture.

  “You didn’t say anything!” I turned to her. “Nothing about what he’s doing! You acted like it was my fault!”

  “I can’t prove anything about your teacher. Every time Dad and I offered to talk to him before, you said no.” With the car stopped where the entrance of the school parking lot met the road, she glanced at me, mouth trembling slightly. “Can’t you just graduate in peace?”

  “You mean, Shut up, Zayneb! Don’t make a scene, Zayneb!” I put my hand on the door handle. “Can I get out? I’ll just walk home like I always do.”

  She let me.

  • • •

  Ayaan had alerted me to Fencer before I entered his class this semester. There are only a few Muslims at Alexander Porter High, so we’ve gotten into this looking-out-for-each-other thing.

  She told me Fencer was an Islamophobe. That she’d had two classes with him—one in junior year and one first semester of this year—and, somehow, he brought an uncanny number of topics and discussions around to how Islam and Muslims were ruining the world.