by Zanib Mian
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
Text copyright © 2019 by Zanib Mian
Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Nasaya Mafaridik
First published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton, 2019
First American edition, 2020
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
Ebook ISBN 9780593109229
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © 2019 by Nasaya Mafaridik - Cover design by Suki Boynton
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This book is dedicated to all the children who ever felt that being different is a negative thing.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
IntroductionMe
Esa
Maryam
Mom
Dad
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
About the Authors
CHAPTER 1
There was a big puddle of spit on my little brother’s forehead.
It was mine. But, , he was still sleeping.
Let me tell you what happened: I had been in my bed, attempting to have a good night’s sleep, when suddenly I was being chased through the playground by a teacher who had
out of his ears and for fingernails!
It was a dream. A dream, of course. When I woke up, I was extremely happy that I wasn’t about to be a monster’s dinner. I breathed slowly to get my heartbeat back to normal, instead of like it was on a
I remembered that my mom told me to spit toward my shoulder three times if I have a nightmare. That’s supposed to get rid of , who is the uglyhead who causes bad dreams.
I wanted to get rid of Shaytan! So I conjured up a bucketful of spit in my mouth and it out over my left shoulder.
I just hoped it would dry before morning so nobody would know I’d spat on my little brother by accident.
I put my head back on the pillow for an eighth of a second, but then I heard a really loud and really annoying sound.
(See? VERY loud and VERY annoying.)
It was Esa. I guess he’d noticed the spit ball after all and wasn’t impressed.
Mom appeared at the door to our room in her pajamas, looking all bleary-eyed.
She said, “What’s the matter, Esa?”
Esa was still busy wailing, so I said, “Spit ball.”
“Not again, Omar!”
I covered my head with the pillow.
Then Dad came in saying that it would be nice if we could have
in the week where poor Esa isn’t woken up by my
I asked him what that means for the time. He rolled his eyes for the time.
I heard my big sister, Maryam, growling in her room. (She definitely doesn’t like mornings very much.)
Mom said it was almost Fajr time anyway. I wondered if Allah was going to give me a reward for waking them up for Fajr.
CHAPTER 2
The reason I had been having bad dreams, especially bad dreams about teachers, was because I was going to be starting at a new school. This made me feel like there were
and some of them were sneaking up and squeezing my heart. I don’t like things to change. It would be so much more convenient and better for everybody if things always just stayed the same.
Take my pajamas, for example. They are utterly comfortable pajamas, which have somehow molded their shape to my body and become my second skin. A weird second skin that I can take off and put on, like some kind of cool human lizard. My mom tried to throw them away and make me wear crispy pajamas that
This is change. It’s super annoying.
One big, fat, huge change had already happened to me. We had to move, which is the reason I had to start at a new school. All this happened because Mom got her
When she told me, I couldn’t help wondering what she meant exactly by
Did it mean that adults have super-boring dreams all about jobs? If that was true, I wasn’t looking forward to being an adult, because at the moment I dream about fun stuff, like being on a
that turns into a Sometimes, they’re even better than movies! Well, apart from the scary ones that make me feel really lucky when I wake up and realize they’re not for real.
So, anyway, the job that Mom must have dreamed about all the time was too far from where we lived before, so we had to move.
The moving bit was
because Dad said I couldn’t put all the 1,267 important things from my room in the boxes to take to the new house. He didn’t actually count my things, but he likes to say exact numbers when he is talking so he can sound smart. He said I had to choose the ones I love most and give the rest to charity.
Why didn’t he understand that
But then he said he would be very proud of me if I could choose, because I would have done better than Mom, who had already packed lots of what Dad called “boxes of hoarded goods.” I like Dad being proud of me (especially because it normally means
for breakfast), so I chose 56 things to take with me. I counted them really carefully so I could be precise when Dad asked (and also make sure that nobody sneakily gave anything away without me noticing).
The good news was that the new house was super, super cool. When we first saw it, Maryam and I ran straight into the backyard and whooped, because it was at least twice the size of our old one. We planned out where we could put a soccer net and Esa’s swing set, and Maryam did loads of cartwheels to prove just how massive it was.
That was the first time we saw the little old lady who lives next door. She peeped over her fence and said, “Humph.” And she put her nose higher in the air as if she was smelling something there that she didn’t like.
CHAPTER 3
School was going to start on Monday. Only two more sleeps before I had to walk into a brand-new classroom with everyone watching and a teacher who might or might not be an
Saturday is always m
osque day. My mom had decided that for the first few weeks after moving we would visit a different mosque every Saturday and pray Dhuhr there, to see what our new neighborhood was like. Dad normally works on Saturdays, so it was just me, Maryam, Esa and Mom.
My mom is a and works out all sorts of different ways of fighting cancer for the cancer research people. But sometimes Esa’s cuteness makes her lose her smartness.
They don’t work on me, so when Esa wanted to buy a whistle from the gas station on the way to the mosque, I knew it wasn’t a good idea. But Mom went right ahead and bought it for him, saying, “Because you’ve been such a good boy this morning!” and giving him a
on the top of his head. I knew it was gooey because she actually still kisses me like that, even though I’ve forbidden her to do it in front of my friends.
In the mosque, everyone prays together with the imam leading. It’s supposed to be . Just after the prayer began, Esa decided to move from his place. I was praying in between Mom and Maryam. Neither of them moved. I wasn’t sure if they’d even noticed that he’d gotten up.
Now, Esa is annoying sometimes, but he IS my little brother, and I worry about him, so I quickly sneaked a look behind us. He was sitting at the back with
on his face. I turned back around and kept on praying. Then we went into Rukhu. That’s when your hands are on your knees. Silence from Esa. Then we went into Sujood. That’s when your nose and forehead are on the ground.
And then . . .
The loud noise of a whistle broke through the silence, followed by Esa’s voice: “One, two, three, four, five!” Then again:
And then the counting. It wouldn’t stop.
I couldn’t help myself. How could I? I
right in the middle of my prayer. I put my hand over my mouth. I bit my tongue and I even pinched myself really hard, but I couldn’t help it! I didn’t have to wonder if Mom had heard. People on all floors of the mosque must have heard.
When the prayer finished, Mom and Maryam were a bright shade of pink. It looked as if their skin had suddenly decided to
And they were looking everywhere except up at people’s faces like they usually do when they greet people after prayers. Mom was motioning angrily to Esa to come to her. Luckily, a few people came and patted Esa’s head, which made Mom’s skin return to its normal color.
As we were leaving, an old lady with a walking stick and brown abaya waddled over and said:
CHAPTER 4
Sunday passed pretty quickly, because Sundays are science days. Dad calls them
in one of those big voices, like it’s the most fun you could ever have on a Sunday. Why? Because my dad is also a scientist, and I think he and my mom only had us three kids so that they could create more scientists or something.
I actually like science, so I don’t mind. We always do fun things, like making slime, creating fizzy eruptions and making things go
There are four things that pretty much seem to happen on every Science Sunday:
1. Mom wants everything done precisely. She’s obsessive about it but pretends that she’s not, because Science Sundays are supposed to be fun and not bossy. She ends up saying things like, “Just one milliliter more, my sweetheart,” through gritted teeth. And, “Are you sure you stirred that correctly, sunshine?”
2. Dad laughs at just how strict Mom gets about the preciseness. And he kisses her head and says that’s why she’s the best scientist in the world. And she kisses his hand and smiles like she’s the luckiest woman in the world
3. Maryam drops important parts of the experiment on the floor.
4. Esa steps on the important parts of the experiment that Maryam drops on the floor. This is because he has and in his shoes and and he can’t stay still
That Sunday, we did tornadoes in bottles, which is
You should try it sometime.
You connect two bottles with a little pipe and you whirl the top bottle, which makes the water go down to the bottom bottle and sends air up, making a tornado.
We all set the things up together, on the kitchen table.
My brain was thinking about telling Maryam to pass the bottles and pipes, but my mouth hadn’t caught up with my brain yet and got things muddled up, so it came out as,
Maryam giggled. “Bipes?”
“I mean the bottles and pipes.” I giggled, too. “But I like it. I wish it was a real word.”
“If it was a real word, then it would just be normal and you wouldn’t like it anymore,” said Maryam.
“That’s so true,” I said.
Mom and Dad were bending over laughing in the corner of the kitchen. When we asked them what was so funny, they said that in the Arabic language, there’s no “p” sound, so a pipe would end up being called a “bibe.”
Then Maryam, who was showing off Googling with her smartphone, said that actually bipes are a type of
thing that look like they’re inside out.
Eventually, we got on with the experiment.
“Oh yeah, tornado in a bottle!” said Dad. Sometimes he gets really cheesy and excited, and Maryam and I look at each other and roll our eyes. (But we kind of like it, really.)
“You can put glitter or food coloring in the bottle, too, to see the tornado better,” said Mom, so Maryam and Esa both reached for the glitter, and Maryam dropped the bottle on the floor, sending glitter flying
“Right on schedule,” said Dad with a peal of laughter. Mom hugged Maryam and kissed her, also giggling uncontrollably. I could see that Maryam wasn’t taking it well.
She shrugged Mom off and stomped toward the stairs. “Science is so lame anyway.”
She does extra-grumpy things like that a lot at the moment. Although it’s not like she’s grumpy—sometimes she’s the nice Maryam, too. It’s weird. Dad says it’s teenage hormones.
CHAPTER 5
When I woke up on Monday morning, I felt like my lungs were pushing air out of me and not taking any back in, and my stomach was a making it impossible for me to get out of bed.
REASONS I WAS NERVOUS
what if nobody likes me?
what if the work is harder than at my last school?
what if nobody wants to be my friend?
what if the teacher is an alien?
Maryam poked her head around the door and said, “Hurry up,, and stop pretending to be sick.”
I wasn’t.
I wondered how her lungs felt. She was acting pretty Maryam-like, so her lungs seemed to be normal.
Then Dad appeared at the door, too, and gave her one of his silly looks, which made his face look like he knew a secret. He came in and tickled me and threw me over his right shoulder, then carried me downstairs and plunked me down in front of a bowl of porridge. Now, I know what you might be thinking . . .
But actually, when you put hazelnut spread into your bowl of porridge, it tastes very
(Though I’m only allowed one spoonful of the hazelnut spread.)
I ate slowly, because of the rock in my tummy. Mom said it would be okay and the teacher would make sure I made friends.
I washed up and went to my room. There was no uniform at this school, so I was allowed to wear what I wanted.
I looked for my and finally pulled it out from the space between my bed and my bedside table. Then I looked for my
They were exactly where I had left them—on the floor next to the bookshelf. They had a stain on them from when Esa threw a barbecue chicken wing at me.
I put them on anyway.
When I went downstairs, my mom went
I mean, she took one look at me and flew off the handle. She said she couldn’t believe it. That’s all she said actually. She said it five times.
Dad said calmly, “Son, I think Allah has given you clean clothes to wear. So go and put them on, please, or we
’ll be late.”
Then he me onto his shoulder again and helped me take out some clothes from my dresser. I put them on
and ran down the stairs. I flew out of the front door toward the car, where Mom was waiting with an angry look on her face.
CHAPTER 6
The thought of getting into the car made my tummy feel like there were
hopping around in it, just waiting to leap up my throat. So I took a deep breath and imagined a better way to get to school . . .
I could see him there now, just hovering beside our car and looking at me with a smile. He made me feel better. About everything. The dragon bowed his head and flung open the car door for me, which made me laugh out loud.
“What’s so funny, Omar?” Mom asked, one hand still on the handle of the car door.
But I just shook my head and buttoned my lips. My mom really understands about how I imagine things, so there was no point explaining—I guess it’s the kind of thing grown-ups forget how to do.
So I just stared at the dragon’s blue and green shimmery scales and long swooping tail. As I strapped myself in, I wondered what it would be like to ride him to school, instead of driving.
