by Zanib Mian
He looked at me with his almond-shaped eyes and let out a puff of steam from his tiny nostrils.
I imagined him riding alongside us all the way to school. When we got out and walked to the gate, I made him breathe out a huge plume of steam, and in my head I said,
as if I was a or something. I thought that was a good name for him because steam is made from water and H2O is the chemical name for water (that’s the kind of science-y thing my parents to talk about).
So, there I was. The new kid in the class. I was petrified and my lungs were still doing that funny thing. I made them feel better by imagining H2O being silly at the window. He
Then he put in each of his nostrils and blew it out.
The teacher, who was called Mrs. Hutchinson, introduced me to the class. She was what my mom would call a pear-shaped person. I liked her hair from the first time I saw her, and later learned that the springy auburn curls reacted to her mood and told the story of her day. When she was happy, those curls were happy. They would bounce merrily out of her head like
When she was tired, they would flop down lazily on her cheeks. And when she was angry, they looked more like the twisty metal part of a drill. Sometimes, when she was angry, I would imagine a drill-headed Mrs. Hutchinson making a big hole in the wall quite easily.
She asked me to sit down next to a redheaded kid called . Charlie had lots of freckles all over his face, and thick-rimmed glasses. I thought he looked cool, so I smiled at him. He smiled back at me. He was missing one of his front teeth.
Charlie told me the school was . The lessons were . The playground was when it wasn’t wet. And Mrs. Hutchinson’s class was mostly filled with kids. Except for Daniel. (I decided that “” was Charlie’s favorite word.)
“Daniel is the one who you have to look out for, ? Just stay out of his way.”
“,” I said.
I thought about all the times my mom had told me to stay away from something, which seemed to make me drawn toward it like a
instead. Like when open Maryam’s secret box, because I was told I wasn’t allowed to, and when I did, a gazillion teeny, tiny beads came pouring out, all over her bedroom floor, just as she walked in.
CHAPTER 7
I thought I was going to get through the day without any
Until lunchtime, that is.
Daniel bounded up to Charlie and me and said, “The new kid and the weird kid sitting together. How
He said “nice” in a different way than when people normally say it. I wondered if it was sarcasm, but my sarcasm detector isn’t very good. I can get confused when people say things all
I tried to figure out if Daniel wasn’t actually as bad as Charlie had warned and he did think it was nice that we were sitting together, or if he was being mean, because it obviously wasn’t very nice of him to call Charlie
Anyway, Mom and Dad say to always think about things before blurting them out.
I could feel Charlie trying to think of what to say, too. He was taking air into his lungs really deeply, as if he was preparing to say something, and then opening his mouth and closing it again, but nothing came out.
I think we were both silent for a super-long time, which seemed to make Daniel very angry. He shouted,
before walking away.
When he was gone, Charlie said, “See? He’s always horrible to me.”
“Why?” I asked. “Did you two have a fight about something?”
“No. He just hates me for no reason. I think he hates the whole class, but he hates me the most.”
Charlie looked so sad, and so small, I couldn’t help putting my arm around him, which made Charlie look at me and smile his
When Mom picked me up later, I told her all about my new friend. I saw her breathe a “phew.” I guess she was worried about how good or not good my first day would be since I was so nervous. I also told her that I liked Mrs. Hutchinson and her
Mom told me about her day, too. It sounded like she’d had a great time at her dream job, poking at
with fancy equipment. And on the way home she’d passed a chocolate shop, so she bought some for our neighbor to say hello properly. Thankfully, she had bought one of those fancy adult chocolate boxes with lots of dark chocolates in it, which are so yuck that I didn’t wish the box was for me instead, which I normally do when we have to give chocolate to other people.
“I thought we could pop over when we get home!”
“OK,” I said slowly, remembering how grumpy the neighbor had been last time I saw her.
We picked up Maryam and the
who always comes home from preschool with half his lunch on his shirt. Mom had to clean Esa up before we popped over next door, because she’s embarrassed to have messy kids.
She even said to me, “Wait. Let me hair your run through my fingers.”
Mom says things the wrong way around when she’s hurrying.
“You mean run your fingers through his hair,” said Maryam, because she likes to correct people.
“Yes, yes, that,” said Mom, and she marched us all over and took a deep breath and rang the doorbell.
We waited.
We waited some more.
So I reached forward and rapped on the door, really loud, a few times.
“Why did you do that?” Mom hissed like a quiet, angry snake.
“What?” I shrugged. “Maybe the doorbell isn’t working?”
“Well, it’s rude,” hissed snake-Mom, and just then the door opened quietly and eerily, like in horror movies.
There stood an old lady. Quite a short one. With lots of white hair and one of those cardigans that all old ladies wear. My grandma has one.
We all said “Hi” pretty much together, except Esa, who said,
like he had been taught to say to our nani.
The old lady was really weird, because she just stood there without reacting. She didn’t say hello. She just stared.
Mom explained that we were the new neighbors.
The old lady stared.
Mom said, “We just thought we’d come over to introduce ourselves.”
The old lady stared.
Maryam gave me a secret whack on the arm, which was meant to say:
I gave her a secret whack back, which was meant to say:
Then Mom asked the creepy, rude next-door neighbor what her name was.
Just when we thought she wouldn’t say anything, she blurted out, “Rogers,” then slammed the door.
I glanced up at Mom. She looked like one of those helium balloons that hardly has any helium left in it at all.
CHAPTER 8
For a few mornings, as we left for school, my mom asked me if I had done my duas. My mom is absolutely
with having a routine that we stick to every morning—a bit like it’s one of her science experiments.
My parents do their duas whenever they think of something they want to talk to Allah about. I sometimes wonder if other people see a Muslim’s lips moving and think they’re
or just talking to themselves, when actually they’re just doing one of their duas.
There are duas for everything:
Basically, anything you can think of.
I used to forget them sometimes, but now I was making sure I did them as soon as I woke up. Especially the prayer for
because Daniel was getting meaner every day and I felt like I needed all the help I could get.
He had started to follow Charlie and me around the playground at recess. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything, but he would do lots of staring and make grunting noises, as if he was having some really mean thoughts. And once,
Then he started laughing like mad because it made Charlie jump.
Minus Daniel, school was getting to be quite all right, especially since Charlie and me were becoming super–best frie
nds. We laughed at all the same things, and we even wished for all the same things, like getting an Xbox and more screen time to go with it. That was starting to make up for how much I missed my friends back at my old school. I was still a bit worried that they might be forgetting about me, but Dad said we could all get together in the summer.
Mrs. Hutchinson was really nice, too. Every time she saw me in the mornings, or when she walked past my desk, she checked on me and gave me a
Not all the lessons were fun, obviously, but whenever we did something creative, she got really enthusiastic and her curls were happy and bouncy. It made me wonder if maybe she could imagine things the way I did, or if she was just like all the other adults.
One afternoon, when we were doing an art lesson about Picasso, Mrs. Hutchinson was so excited about how he made everything abstract that her curls started dancing with joy. She asked us to paint self-portraits just like his. Charlie and I were having loads of fun giving ourselves colorful triangle noses and weird-shaped eyes, when Daniel walked past our desk and sent the dirty water cup tumbling onto my painting.
“Oops, clumsy me . . .”
There he was again with the upside-down talking. It definitely wasn’t an oops moment, it was a
Charlie’s mouth dropped open in surprise and my heart took a little dip, as if it was falling into a different and less comfy place in my chest.
It seemed like Charlie could tell exactly how I was feeling. Because he leaned in to whisper, “He’s just a big
head. I bet you can paint a new one even better!” And he gave me the biggest toothy grin I’d seen yet.
I imagined what Picasso looked like. I wondered if he looked like some of his paintings, all out of shape, but happy. Happier than all the other paintings from those old days. And then I thought,
So I took my paintbrush, I grabbed it like it was alive and like it was the first time I ever held a paintbrush, and I painted.
When Mrs. Hutchinson saw my work, her curls almost rose to the ceiling.
“Omar, Omar,” she said.
“Yes, Mrs. Hutchinson.”
“It’s . . . wow. It’s brilliant!”
Daniel’s face was red. Like the beets my dad will never eat. He passed me a note.
It said:
When Mom came to pick me up, he stared at us both as if we were someone’s old
that he had accidentally touched under the desk. I almost pointed him out to her, but then I remembered how relieved she’d been that I thought school was OK, and I kept quiet.
Sometimes, though, I think my mom magically knows when somebody in her family needs cheering up, because that evening she announced she was making biryani.
It’s hard to make and Mom says scientists with full-time jobs don’t have the time to make it every week, like I had asked her to.
Mom always opens the French doors to the patio when she is cooking, no matter how cold it is outside, because she can’t stand the house smelling like food. Homes are meant to smell like nothing, she says,
and not even weird, artificial air fresheners. And since the door was open, I stood there with my giant bubble kit to see if I could really make a bubble bigger than me, like it said on the box.
I could see our next-door neighbor, the horrible Mrs. Rogers. She was outside, poking around at her weeds with one wrinkly hand and holding her phone with the other.
After a few minutes, we heard her say loudly:
“Oh, I’m with her on this one,” joked Dad, who hates it when the smell of frying onion and garlic gets into his clothes.
“I know, I knowwwww. We don’t want to give her another reason not to like us!” said Mom. Then she held Dad’s arm, like she does when she is going to tell him a really good idea.
I know it gets really stinky when the biryani is cooking, but It’s worth it! I couldn’t believe that Mom was being so nice after the way Mrs. Rogers treated us when we took her those chocolates. Why did she deserve some of our delicious dinner?
And to make it worse, Mom and Dad made Maryam and me take it over to her house. She took forever to open the door, as usual. And when she finally did and we tried to give her the container, she just said, “Spicy food??? No thank you!” as she closed the door.
“Sheeeeeeesh,” said Maryam. “You’d think we were trying to poison her.”
CHAPTER 9
Mom and Dad were so happy that I was doing well at school that they said I could invite Charlie over. They obviously didn’t know the bit about me not actually doing well at school because Daniel made most days bad. Well, depending on how much he felt like a big, huge grump that day, he sometimes made them bad.
I wondered why he was worse on some days and I imagined him walking to school and slipping on
If you’ve ever seen a rotten apple, you’ll know that they’re really slimy and soft and can make you fall right down if you ever step on one, even more than a banana peel. So, the more rotten apples he slipped on, the worse he felt, and the more mean he was. That could be it.
Charlie was mega excited about coming over. I asked him if he wanted to have pizza and he said yes, which is what I knew he would say, because every kid loves pizza. (Unless they’re allergic to cheese, like my cousin Faiza, who does lots of farts and gets really bad tummy aches if she eats it.)
Charlie told me all about the flavors that he hates tasting in food, but luckily none of them are on pizzas:
Charlie was very polite to my mom and dad when he came over. He said extra pleases and thank-yous. And he smiled an extra lot.
“I’ve been hearing so much about you, Charlie,” said Mom.
“Oh, thank you,” said Charlie.
“It’s so nice to have you over, and you can come anytime you want,” said Dad.
I imagined them as blocks of cheese, the holey kind that they draw in cartoons but which I’ve never actually tasted.
Maryam decided to hang out near us and show off like she always does. The weird thing about it was that Charlie actually her.
She even came with us to play soccer in the backyard. She used to play soccer normally, but recently she’s started giggling a lot and celebrating with loud
It’s super annoying. Charlie didn’t seem to mind, though. He laughed right along with her, the way he does with me, but not really with many other people in the class.
All this laughing made Mrs. Rogers come into her backyard to investigate. She must have been on the phone, because she was talking to the person called John again.
She said it very loudly.
“I mean really, why can’t they play quietly like good children? I can’t take this much ridiculous noise.”
We all looked at each other, suddenly silent. We couldn’t see her face over the fence, just the top of her white hair. And then we burst out laughing and ran inside to eat our pizza.
CHAPTER 10
At school, it was getting harder and harder to avoid
One lunchtime, he came over and put a handful of sand all over my food. My stomach clenched and I got a lump in my throat. I didn’t want to cry in front of him, but I was really hungry, and that sandwich, from last night’s leftover chicken, was really tasty and my mouth had really been looking forward to it.
I quickly imagined H2O swooping down from the clouds to hover right behind Daniel. I made H2O pull a totally unimpressed face and blow steam all over Daniel’s head. And Daniel had no clue.
That made me laugh and through my giggles I said loudly,
A few people around us started laughing, too. Sarah and Ellie—girls from our class—were sitting at the lunch table next to ours, and they were giggling like crazy.
Daniel stood there towering over me with his fists closed tight. His face was redder than his T-shirt, and he was together tightly. I pictured him as a Rottweiler dog, baring his sharp teeth, ready for a fight.
At this point I realized that being smart with a bully wasn’t very smart at all. Charlie must have realized this, too, because he had been sensible enough not to laugh and now he looked like a frightened little lamb.
I quickly muttered the
dua under my breath.
Then there was a loud growling sound and Daniel was launching his head toward my stomach. I don’t know how, but I managed to throw myself onto the floor out of his way. It was all very fast. Daniel’s head went into my empty chair, with his huge body following. The force sent the chair flying into the girls behind us, followed by a
body that ended up on top of Sarah.
I probably don’t need to tell you that Daniel was in He spent one hour in Mr. Barnes’s class as punishment. Mr. Barnes has a mustache. A big one. It looks like it could come alive on his face like a
At the end of the day, Daniel was back. He still looked angry. As we lined up to leave the classroom, he stood behind me and breathed down my neck.
“Don’t think I don’t know the worst thing about you. I saw your mom the other day, looking like a witch, in black. You better go back to your country before we kick you all out.”
I didn’t say a word. I just gulped.
How could anyone think my mom looked like a witch? If I’d been braver, I’d have told Daniel he was stupid not to be able to tell the difference.
