You Must Be Layla

by Yassmin Abdel-Magied

  I guess I am kind of making new friends too, like Ethan …

  Yeh, sure it was mostly about the homework, but Layla couldn’t help it that every time a notification popped up with his name, her heart jumped a little. She pictured his secret smile, his curly red hair, the freckles on his nose … Oh dear. She definitely had a crush on Ethan. Rahhhhh. Liking Ethan was different to liking boys at the Islamic School too. At the Islamic School everyone was Muslim, so the idea of having a ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ wasn’t really an option. The kids at MMGS weren’t Muslim, so she didn’t know the rules, but it’s not like she wanted a boyfriend or anything … did she?

  But it probably didn’t even matter. Ethan wasn’t the kind of boy who would fall for a girl like Layla anyway. This thought was in the bottom of her heart, so even though she got excited every time he messaged her, part of her knew that it was only ever going to be fantasy. Cute white guys didn’t like dark-skinned Muslim girls. That just wasn’t how the world worked.

  Layla made a mental note to ask Dina what to do when she saw her next. Dina knew how to handle situations like this. Despite the fact that neither of them had any romantic experience, Dina was definitely the one who seemed to be wiser in this arena. She just exuded worldly wisdom. And she was beautiful.

  I wonder if she’ll be at the mosque tonight?

  It was Sunday, the last day of her official suspension. She shot her bestie a message.

  Layla

  Hey, u@mosque tonight?

  Dina

  Nah, I’m not praying atm. Y, r u?

  Layla

  Me neither, bt wana talk2u. Reckon u culd come thru anyway?

  Dina

  //sigh// kkkkkkk bt only cos I <3 u!

  Muslim women don’t pray when they’re on their period, and it was that time of the month for both of them, meaning they didn’t need to go to mosque. But Layla didn’t want to wait.

  ‘BABA!’ Layla yelled from her bedroom. ‘Wait for me before you go to the mosque today!’

  ‘Tayyib yallah, I’m leaving in five minutes!’ her father bellowed back.

  Layla jumped off the top bunk, quickly threw on her black abaya and hijab, and ran out of the room.

  ‘Can we come too?’ the twins yelled after her as she whisked past.

  ‘If you are, come now!’ she called, and laughed as the heard them falling over themselves to put on their jalabeeyas in time. They weren’t even praying every day yet, but a trip to the mosque meant catching up with friends and a bit of fun, so they loved joining in.

  At the mosque, Dina and Layla huddled together at the back of the women’s section, barefooted and cross-legged, whispering as the Imam led the prayer over the loudspeakers.

  ‘Laylaaaa, what was so urgent? See, this is why you should be at ISB still. We wouldn’t have to meet at the mosque like this if you were still at school! What’s so special about this new place anyway? OMG come back, and then you can meet Bushra. She’s new, from Turkey, she’s really cool …’

  ‘Oh Dina, I don’t wanna hear about Bushra,’ Layla kissed her teeth, annoyed. This new girl was killing her vibe. ‘Anyway. Enough about what’s-her-face–’

  ‘Bushra!’

  ‘Bush-whatever. Anyway–’

  ‘Yo, you don’t have to be so mean, you’re the one who left me all alone at ISB.’

  ‘All right, all right!’ Layla’s voice was getting louder, and someone shushed them. ‘Listen. You know I’ll always be here for you, D. You know that, right?’

  Dina nodded her head in a circular way, (a little like a dolphin, Layla thought). ‘Yeh, I do know, Laylz, but I just miss you a lot. And I know you have these dreams of becoming, like, a world-famous adventurer, but I just wish you could do that and still stay at ISB.’

  Sigh. This was a much longer conversation that wouldn’t be solved now. ‘I know you feel that way, D. But there’s something more important that I wanted to talk to you about. It’s a boyyyyyy …’

  Dina’s eyes lit up as Layla knew they would. ‘OMG. TELL. ME. EVERYTHING!’ Dina demanded, and Layla did.

  As the prayers finished up and the aunties began chatting, Layla and Dina got to work. They whispered furiously, dissecting every conversation, every look, every Instagram post they could find, even his tumblr account (they went in deep!).

  It wasn’t stalking – it was research.

  ‘It’s tricky, Laylz. Has he even had a gf before? There are no pics of chicks, I can’t even tell his type,’ Dina sighed. ‘He’s cute and all, but you know how it is. He’s not Muslim. I don’t really know what to tell you.’

  Layla did know. Marrying outside the Muslim community wasn’t really a thing, and neither really was having a boyfriend or girlfriend. The most she could do was really have a crush on him and be satisfied with that.

  ‘Sigh.’ Layla said it instead of actually sighing. ‘I guess you’re right. I’ll just enjoy his company, you know.’

  Dina gave her best friend a side hug, and they leaned against each other and the wall of the mosque, legs outstretched in front of them, toes enjoying the cool air. As the congregation’s chatter swirled around them, Layla breathed in deeply, resigning herself to the way things were.

  Back at home, later that evening, Layla’s phone pinged. It was Snapchat and a blurry video of Ethan appeared.

  You’re coming back to school tomorrow, yeh? he asked.

  Layla snapped a photo of her laptop back. Yeh, she wrote on the photo.

  Excited? He shot back.

  Layla snapped a photo of her face scrunched up and her tongue sticking out, then switched off the phone.

  On one hand, she was excited to be going back to school. She was getting bored of being at home. She felt like her brain was dying a little bit when it wasn’t working and learning new things – like her little grey cells were rotting away.

  On the other hand, she wasn’t looking forward to being in the same school grounds as Peter and his brother. A shiver ran through her as she thought about seeing the bully again, and her stomach clenched up.

  Ya Allah, help me handle this! she silently prayed.

  She couldn’t afford to pick another fight with him – or anyone else – but she knew it was going to take all her strength to resist headbutting his smarmy face again.

  Gah. Either way, Layla was nervous about going back tomorrow, perhaps even more nervous than her first day of school. How were people going to treat her? How was she supposed to act? Should she be all hard and smart-arse, or pretend that nothing happened and that all was cool? Maybe she should just lie low and try not to cause any fuss. That seemed sensible. Layla nodded to herself. It’s a shame she didn’t really have much of a track record in being sensible.

  Layla remembered one of her dad’s favourite sayings: al-ba9al bala kashal … oh wait, no, that was a saying about onions. What was it again?

  Oh yeh. Al-jamel biyimshy, wa-al-kilab bitanba7. The camel or jamel walks while the dogs keep barking. Baba had explained to her many times that if the camel has somewhere to go, then it doesn’t get distracted by barking dogs as it walks past them.

  Remember to be like the camel, Layla told herself. Channel the jamel (hey, it rhymes!). Channel the jamel. You have places to be, gurl.

  And she drifted off to sleep, dreaming of camels, cool as custard, sauntering past packs of snarling, barking German shepherds.

  Channel the jamel …

  CHAPTER 9

  THE next morning, Layla repeated her new mantra as she prepared for her first day back at school.

  Channel the jamel. Focus on what you need to do, and don’t pay attention to barking dogs.

  Layla hoped that if she repeated it enough times, it might sink in! In the car on the way to school, she stared out the window, muttering the mantra to herself. Her eyes moved rapidly left to right as she watched the world pass her by. As they dropped the twins and Ozzie off at ISB, Layla thought back to the days she’d spent at the small community school. How much simpler things had be
en then: it was chaotic, but it was like a second home.

  Mama and Baba had tried to get her and Ozzie into other schools, but they had arrived in Australia in the middle of the year, so many schools weren’t taking any new students, especially the ones that had a good reputation. The Husseins weren’t here to play: they wanted their kids to get the best educations possible, so they wanted them to go to the best school. Unfortunately, they lived too far away from many of the top-ranked schools to be in the ‘catchment area’. Fadia and Kareem really tried: they had driven from school to school, Layla bopping up and down in the child seat in the back of their 1996 blue Toyota Corolla, next to Ozzie playing on his hand-me-down Nokia 3220 phone. At every school, the Sudanese parents tried to convince the principals to find space for their kids.

  ‘Ozair and Layla are very smart,’ they would explain. ‘We’ve been teaching them at home. Both of them will slip right in and won’t be behind at all.’ They pleaded, but alas, no luck at all. It didn’t help that the pair looked so out of place on the Brisbane streets.

  Fadia was in a toub, the traditional Sudanese dress, hands painted in black henna patterns and wrists dripping in the 23-carat gold bracelets that were gifts at her wedding. It was customary for Sudanese women to wear all their finery when out visiting or wanting to impress, so to wear all your gold and your best toub was normal to Fadia. But it was quite unusual to the Brisbane born and bred men who were principals of these high-achieving public schools. The startled and bewildered looks she received as she sauntered into office after office never changed. Her tall, black body would be loosely wrapped in a long red and gold sheet of cloth, sequins glinting and shimmering with every step. Fadia’s toub of choice, that of a wealthy, educated mother, would have sent all the right signals to school principals in Sudan – here, it only sent messages of confusion.

  It didn’t help that Layla’s father, in his crisp white jalabeeya, the traditional outfit of a Sudani man, looked to the average Australian like he was wearing a loose white dress. The pair of them appeared to have been lifted straight out of the latest National Geographic magazine feature on ‘Africa’.

  Was that racism? Mama thought so, and often talked about it at the dinner table. Baba’s views were different. He said they’d been new arrivals so needed to fit in. It wasn’t the white men’s fault they didn’t like the jalabeeya, and since he was in their country, he would change his outfit to make them feel more comfortable. Kareem started wearing Western suits and very soon after found a job as a medical machinery technician.

  Fadia never really adjusted to this, and although she settled in quite quickly into the public hospital as a doctor, she continued to keep up Sudanese appearances, reapplying henna every month and finding out about the latest toub fashion through her family WhatsApp group. ‘These Australians need to know who we are and where we are from,’ Mama would often say. After all, they were the ones who hired her and begged her to move to this far away continent. Fadia was a pretty good doctor, and Brisbane had a shortage of those, so the public hospital spent a long time convincing her to move with the family to the Land Down Under. If they wanted her here, Fadia would say, they would have to have her on her own terms. Also, all the doctors in Sudan wore a toub, so why couldn’t she?

  But, aren’t we also ‘these Australians’? Layla would sometimes think, when Fadia went on one of her rants, although she’d never say it aloud. She didn’t really know where she was from. Sudan? Brisbane? Australia? Sometimes she felt like she was so different she must really be from, like, Jupiter or something. She yearned for a time or place where she didn’t have to question so much. But she wasn’t sure that place existed, certainly not in Brisbane.

  Luckily for Layla all those years ago, the last school that had been on the list for her parents to visit was a small community school that had opened that year called the Islamic School of Brisbane. As soon as they pulled up in front of the school, hot and sweaty in that Toyota Corolla with no air conditioning, Fadia knew it was the right place. There were other parents in the carpark, dropping their kids off at school, everyone wearing different types of clothing from around the world. There were outfits from India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Fiji; parents from Egypt and Algeria, Nigeria and Serbia. Nobody stared at the two Sudanese parents that arrived with their afro-haired children skipping between them. Nobody questioned their presence as they walked up the cement path to the demountable with the small billboard in front of it announcing ‘OFFICE’. Nobody asked Fadia and Kareem where they were from or asked them to repeat their names ten times. Here, they were people, just like everyone else. Here, their weirdness and difference were normal. Here, Fadia felt safe.

  ‘We will bring them here,’ she had said to Kareem, in a tone that indicated the decision was made. Fadia knew Kareem preferred the schools with the white Australian kids because he wanted his kids to fit in and have a more ‘Aussie’ accent, but Fadia wasn’t convinced it was a good idea. She didn’t want Layla growing up among kids who would see her as different and would bully her because of it. She wanted her daughter to feel like she was safe and belonged. Fadia and Kareem came to a compromise – the kids would go to the Islamic School for primary, and they would reassess when they started secondary. Inshallah. So, Layla went straight into Year 1 and Ozzie started Year 4. Ultimately, Ozzie decided he wanted to stay at the ISB. Layla had thought she did, until she’d met Adam.

  She blinked, then looked around, realising they had reached the gates of the school. Baba was sitting in the driver’s seat, scrolling through emails on his iPhone.

  ‘Aywa? You’re awake now?’ he asked Layla, not looking up from the screen.

  Layla scrambled, spluttering. How long had she been sitting there, just staring out the window?

  ‘We’ve been here for over five minutes,’ Baba explained, anticipating her question. ‘You weren’t responding to anything I was saying.’

  Layla let out a squeak.

  ‘AHH sorry, Baba! I gotta go!’ she called out, as she wiggled her enormous backpack on and opened the car door. Her foot caught her long skirt, and she tripped out of the car, falling forward, the momentum of her large backpack causing her to lose balance faster than she could accommodate for. Her hands hit the cement first, then her knees buckled, grazing themselves on the cement through her skirt. Layla looked up; she was right at the front of the school, again, having hit the pavement.

  Janey Mack! If only Dina was here.

  Dina would have thrown out a hand to get Layla up off the ground, helped her dust her knees off and then cracked a joke, making them both laugh for days.

  But Dina wasn’t here, and Layla was – on hands and knees on the ground, students walking past, pointing, sniggering, snapping. Layla’s maroon hijabied head fell, and she looked down at the concrete, taking a keen interest in the black spots of bubble gum that had yet to be pressure-washed clean off the path. What a way to come back to school. Could she never win?

  Her eyes watered. Was it the fall, the embarrassment, or the angle of her head? Layla wasn’t sure, but this was no time for scientific inquiry. Pushing herself up off her knees, she dusted the skirt down, turned around to close the car door (her father was talking on the phone now and had missed the whole thing!), straightened her shoulders and turned to walk through the gates of the school.

  You got this, a voice piped up in her head. You. Got. This. CHANNEL. THE. JAMEL!

  Whether the voice was real or not, didn’t matter. Layla smiled to herself, the smirk giving her a little extra pop in her step.

  Yeh, she did. She GOT this.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE rest of the morning passed without incident, and Layla started to relax. Seb and Ethan were being really nice to her and people had stopped staring at her as she walked past classrooms. The maths teacher seemed impressed by the effort Layla had put into the homework that Ethan had passed on. Layla might be a smart-arse, but at least she was still smart.

  When the bell rang for morning tea, Layla
’s heart started to beat a little faster. Was she going to have to see Peter again? She shot Dina a quick Snap.

  Layla

  Deeeee I’m worried about seeing Peter again.

  It’s morning tea time.

  Dina

  DW too much Lay. Just channel your inner warrior.

  He’s probs more scared of you than you are of him ha!

  Channel your inner warrior, Layla told herself as she packed up her books and followed the boys out. The warrior, the jamel, there was a lot to be channelling right now.

  ‘You cool with hanging out with us today again, Laylz?’ Seb asked. ‘Don’t worry about Peter, hey. He’s a bit loose, but he won’t do anything without his brother there.’

  ‘Yeh, all right. I mean, are you guys cool with still being my mate? I mean, I am the new girl and, you know, after everything that happened with Peter, I don’t want to get youse into trouble.’

  ‘Nah, don’t worry. You’re cool to hang with us.’

  Layla sighed with relief, then remembered to ask: ‘Oh, BTW, did any of you have a copy of the video that Leesa took of the fight?’ If Layla could get her hands on that video, maybe she could show the principal that Peter did push her and she wasn’t the only one at fault.

  ‘Nah, no idea, mate, sorry. Maybe ask some of the girls who take the bus? They might know her better. We don’t hang out with girls, dunno if you noticed? Maybe you can be our token, and help us get in with the other girls in class, you know? Be our spy!’

  Seb laughed, so Layla laughed along with them, though she noticed Ethan was quiet, facing away from the group and looking down. Of course, they’d expect me to help chat to the other girls. Layla sighed. If she was ‘one of the boys’, that came with the territory, she supposed. But did that mean she wasn’t considered one of the girls worthy of being liked? Layla sighed again, and Ethan heard.