Suhail smiled at me, and I beamed back like a dope before sensing the gentle withdrawal of his hand from where I was still involuntarily gripping him. Rather than humiliate me (which I expected), Suhail carried on like normal, sharing the textbook and cooperating on the lab experiment, which was to build a functioning camera obscura.
The next Thursday, on the day of our unit quiz, he came to class with a note on folded-up graph paper. Suhail slipped it to me as he took his seat. Mr. Kindi handed out old Pee Chee folders as anti-cheat partitions, and my paramour disappeared behind the scribbled-over illustrations of young Americans playing basketball. Worried Mr. Kindi would think I was cheating, I managed to keep myself from opening the note in class. Suhail hadn’t looked or even smiled at me like he usually did when he came into the room. I was certain it would contain either a cease-and-desist-looking-at-me-that-way order, or it would be a polite hint that maybe I ought to start using a different deodorant. By the time I escaped to a stall in the bathroom, my stomach was in such a nervous knot I was almost sick. I unfolded the note. I read what it said. I read it again. I panicked.
It said, in carefully practiced ballpoint, I like you.
The Gulf is an inhospitable place for young lovers. This much I knew from experience, tagging along with Faraj. The subterfuge involved gave even the most chaste relationship a contraband quality. But back then I had only been a kid—a mute, harmless, indifferent witness to my uncle’s transgressions. Now, as I found myself falling in love for the first time under Faraj’s watchful stewardship, I had some new thoughts about the way these things worked.
It must have taken tremendous courage for Suhail to write the note, and it was written with what I believed to be a certain effortless poetry. “I like you,” I repeated to myself. How could I resist? The weekend was a long and belabored process of drafting and redrafting a reply. What began as a fifteen-page panegyric I managed to whittle down to a trim five. Whatever unnamed urge had compelled me to run away from home was now driving me to run toward Suhail. Abstractly, I guess I understood that falling in love here might be the worst possible thing I could do. But when I lay awake and pined in my bunk bed, listening to my seven snoring aunts and cousins, I just didn’t care.
Once we had established our status of reciprocated like, we were swept away and spent every break together. We kept a steady correspondence in carefully folded and sneakily exchanged notes. Although we were obviously interested in each other as bodies, there was a long period of telling that first went down. I say telling because it was similar to what therapy is meant to be like. I poured the entirety of me onto him in an eruption of memories and music and bile and half-baked ideas about what to do with my life, and in return was excited by his preferences and knowledge and ambitious plans for his promising future in planetary physics. We had a slew of unexpected things in common, including our love of Al Amira Yakout, dislike of Fonzies puff chips, and reverence for Dune and Carl Sagan. I gave him a mixtape of my favorite star-themed Bowie, Beck, and some appropriately angsty Fiona Apple. He burned me CDs of old Laiwa folk songs and taught me to how to strum his oud, which was the closest thing to a guitar in Doha.
Although we were intensely secretive, everybody knew. Suhail endured all kinds of harassment from the boys. “Qatari guys have dirty minds and big mouths, I’m just saying,” Noor warned me. But Suhail obviously had neither of those things. He was the one who helped me navigate the dos and don’ts of the system. And I knew that the other Qatari kids respected Suhail for that, and therefore, whatever they might have thought about me, they wouldn’t talk.
Whatever surplus energy I had after the transitioning from school to home and back was spent trying to outwit my uncle in order to slip away and see Suhail. Ironically, the double-bluff drop-off, the Family Day fake-out, and other Gulf classics of tactical creeping I had learned from Faraj himself. I put all of his inadvertent lessons to good use during the course of the year. And like his and Kholoud’s ill-fated relationship, Suhail’s and mine was clumsy and innocent and completely unequal to the spy levels of deception we employed to see each other.
When I had enrolled myself in the American school, Baba—who was still living in Abu Dhabi—swore Faraj and Falak to secrecy about the fact that my school was integrated. Although it was impossible to stop idle chat about the American girl, the one who danced, the one who fought with boys, the one who had crash-landed out of the sky and now expected acceptance, he still wanted to avoid as much gossip about me as he could. So as my male guardian in Doha, Faraj had an extra stake in ensuring that my honor remained intact. He had preemptively started to apply many of the same rules that had constrained his girlfriends, like Kholoud, to me. At least I knew where he got it from when he locked the door to the roof and took the key. This hypocrisy made me confrontational at the beginning and two-faced by the end. I let my anger at his hypocrisy simmer down and applied it instead to productive means of escape. However, Faraj had me checkmated for a while without even trying. The sheer volume of people in the house ensured that my phone calls were screened. I was only allowed to go to the mall with a chaperone. And Faraj cut into our after-school loitering by arriving on the dot every day and parking the humiliating garumba in a spot where he had a good vantage into the high school hallway.
Faraj did not do this because he suspected me of wrongdoing. But being sixteen and therefore equipped with an overblown sense of injustice, I was sure he was doing it on purpose. Now I understand that his reasons were twofold: The first, if misplaced, desire was to protect me from what appeared to him to be an unsafe environment. This concern was fair enough. Within our tribe, the awkwardness of my placeless situation was treated gently and sometimes (much to my annoyance) with pity. Comparatively little was expected of me, and as is often the case with those who have little to lose, they gave me everything—including the benefit of their doubt. But now I had entered into a hypercritical, ultrasensitive caste where the impartial rules of larger society would apply to me. If I were to misstep, however naive the fumble might be, the honor of my family would be at risk. The second of Faraj’s reasons was less noble. With all this normalized socialization going on between boys and girls, Faraj was unable to keep his eyes in his head. I knew he meant well, but it was just embarrassing.
While the school days whizzed by in a fugue of touch-and-go contact with Suhail, my nights in our beit shaabi were gratingly slow. I mooched around the house, slumping from room to room and sighing. In the evenings I’d squeeze myself into a spot in the crammed sala, where I’d stare into the middle distance while my aunts and great-aunts reminisced about the old days. They exclaimed to Allah for forgiveness as they cackled at dirty jokes, which I was beginning to understand. Wool looped around their toes, my eldest aunts wove colored muzzles and straps to sell to moderns in the city who kept camels for show. But as I wafted around the house waiting for a chance to call Suhail, my mooning didn’t escape entirely unnoticed.
Falak had inherited an old desktop PC from a university friend, and she now spent most of the day on the Internet trawling for pictures of exotic travel destinations and studio portraiture of fat babies. Her predilection for stockpiling screensavers didn’t bother me in itself; in fact, I enjoyed watching her places-I’d-like-to-go slideshow. But with only one dial-up landline in the house, her Internet habit and my need for the phone rapidly escalated into a major point of contention between us. Desperate to call Suhail, there was more than one occasion when I snagged the phone cord under the door accidentally-on-purpose. I’d thread the cord as far as it would go, taking it off into a corner like a hungry animal. Often I’d hide out in the stairwell to the roof, where the winter blankets and mattresses offered some soundproofing. Meanwhile, Suhail’s and my epistles had reached fever pitch, and I had started to run out of places to hide them. The locked drawer in my desk was full and there was nowhere else that could guarantee safety from Falak’s prying eyes or the hands of my younger cousins, who had free roam of the house while I was
gone during the day. I bought a lockbox from the dukkan and Suhail kept his letters in the glove compartment of his Land Cruiser. We knew that one dropped note in the hallway could lead directly to our expulsion, public humiliation, and the wrath of his parents, my family, and both our tribes, in a worst-case scenario.
When we had run out of room for our letters, and with Falak’s Internet appetite only growing, Suhail went out and bought me my first phone. It was a Nokia 3210. Sleek graphite cover with laser-green display. If ever there was a fetishized, beloved object, that phone was it. I kept it on silent so no one knew I had it, and whenever the little display strobed on and off, my heart flickered with excitement. At the time, it was still uncommon for girls in our family to have mobile phones. The excuse within our household had been that obviously the only thing a girl could possibly need a mobile for was to talk secretly to a boy. Although this was obviously true in my case, I still think the argument is ridiculous. After all, men were the ones who spent long hours calling random numbers until they struck gold with bored and anonymous girls willing to chat.
It was only a matter of time before Falak found out about my mobile and, for that matter, about Suhail. I came home one day to find a note on my bed. It read:
I know what you have been doing. You don’t want to know what will happen if I tell anybody. These are my last words to you until you stop.
It took me a moment to register what her words meant and what exactly she was threatening me with. The note had been written aggressively, with the pen pressed hard onto the page and each letter beginning from the bottom rather than the top, the way Arabic natives write in foreign alphabets. It reminded me of the day Ma read my diary, Falak’s tense penmanship making me flash back to Ma’s clenched teeth. I felt guilty and betrayed at once. In response, I left a letter on her bed. It read simply, It isn’t what you think. Falak climbed down the rungs of her bunk and, without reading it, wadded my note up and tossed it onto the floor before flicking the lights out on me.
After that, Falak continued to conspicuously ignore me. Now everyone in the house knew something was wrong, although I was grateful that at least Falak did not let on exactly what.
Suhail and I were both spooked after getting caught. We took a hiatus over the winter break, during which time we both made plans for the coming year. I was still pining, even though we had three classes together and lunches. He finished his college applications early and went to visit Cairo while I printed out an application to NYU and went camping with our family.
The whole house decided to go to a relative’s camp somewhere north of Al-Hasa for the winter holiday. As we drove out toward the border, we passed the ever-expanding U.S. air base; the littlest kids packed themselves tight through the open sunroof so they could watch the F-16s and big cargo planes zoom overhead. Every time another jet boomed above us they whooped and ducked, and I thought briefly of Gramma’s house and the sonic claps that used to rattle us back then.
When we got to camp, I staked a place in Uncle Mohamed’s old Suburban where I could shelter from the wind, and filled a whole notebook with drafts of a personal essay for my application. In the evening I sat with Umi Safya and showed her the photos of smiling freshmen in the NYU prospective student pamphlet. We looked at a map of New York, and while we paged through the possibilities of a future, she asked me, “How many hours is it to drive to this place?” Considering her thorough knowledge of navigation by stars and ability to tell by the smell of the wind if clouds bore rain, her geographic innocence of where New York was came as a bit of a shock. But it shouldn’t have been. Why would she ever need to know where the Big Apple was? Anything west of Jeddah was still of no interest to her.
The numbered forms asked a lot of questions I didn’t know the answer to. For example, the space for permanent home address flummoxed me; I didn’t know whether to apply as a Qatari or an American, and the declaration-of-ethnicity section was dispiriting. On official documentation throughout high school in Puyallup, I had always checked the box for “Other,” and when asked to “please specify,” scribbled in “Klingon.” No one ever seemed to notice, and so it became habit, the paperwork processed along with that of my peers who had boxes to check for “Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Asian-American,” “Native Hawaiian,” “Samoan-American,” and “Other Pacific Islander.” But this application was serious; the selection of box might determine everything. I finished the sentence “I identify” with “Other,” and left the “please specify” line blank.
Like it did for every “other” kid in the world raised on American media, New York had always glowed distantly in my mind as the place to go. I knew nothing about it, knew no one there, and had no money to make it. But that didn’t matter; I still considered it the Mecca for me. When questioned about my choice by Ma and Baba, I said they just wouldn’t understand. The city existed for me (and I presume most other people who’ve never been there) as a mashup of pop culture sedimented in layers by the decade, a place where the streets were always wet and the lights were extra bright. The city in my head was essentially a cartoon. It had the cityscape of Gotham from Batman: The Animated Series, everyone talked like the kids in Kids, and, with the songs of An American Tale drilled deeply into my head, I couldn’t separate the Statue of Liberty from a French pigeon in spats singing “Never Say Never.” Even though I knew my chances of getting into NYU were slim, I filled out the application. When we returned to Doha from the desert, I double-checked all the papers, slipped them into a manila envelope, kissed and sealed it, and gave it to Faraj to mail for me from the main post office and hoped for the best. Although we had drifted apart as I spent more time avoiding him than tagging along, Faraj was still my main link to the outside world.
After winter break, Suhail and I decided we had to see each other. I disguised it as a “feminine errand” in which I had to run to the Al-Rehab Ladies Saloon. The “saloon” was like a grown-up clubhouse and bore a large warning, “No Men Allowed.” The windows were papered over with posters of relaxing European women. It always looked kind of threatening to me. Like a meth lab with a no-trespassing sign put up by some paranoid hillbillies. I disappeared behind the face of a smiling woman enjoying a mud mask, the cucumbers over her eyes making her look like a mantis. I waited for Faraj to drive off and then turned into the saloon. Somewhere beyond the entrance lobby there were multiple hair dryers blowing. The main room was designed like a sala, with cushions lining the walls and magazines like Sayidaty and Snob al Hasna stacked in the corners. A hefty Jordanian woman sat immobile in the middle of the room, her ankles propped up on tissue boxes while she waited for elaborate trails of fresh henna to dry. She watched me cross the room to where her baby was splashing around like a little bird in a Pedispa foot massager. I didn’t look back at her as I slipped silently out the back door of the saloon and then up into Suhail’s waiting Land Cruiser.
I hunkered down low, as flat as I could, and felt him pull out onto the main road. “Hi!” I whispered from behind his seat. Suhail reached his hand back around the armrest for me to hold. His palms were sweaty. We drove across town to an empty compound Suhail had scouted. Ever since the early days of oil expatriation in the region, there have been compounds, and ever since there have been compounds they have been havens from the normal rules. In there, we’d be safe.
The New World Compound was full of empty, unlocked houses. They were rowed, all white angles of stucco and sunlight, waiting in anticipation for international oil employees to fill them up with their families. The small, picturesque streets were empty and had names like Bogota Boulevard and Austin Avenue. Some of the roads, like the houses, were still unfinished, smooth pavement cutting off into the rocky dust. Suhail parked his truck in a hidden area. We got out and passed together on foot through the ghost town, looking like skittish survivors of some rapture-style apocalypse, half expecting zombie security guards to leap out at any moment. Suhail led me to a villa at the far end of the compound. The front was covered in tatty tar
p that blew in the wind like a shroud, and we stepped underneath it to peek in the front picture window. Even though it was brand new, the villa had the feeling of a ruin. It was the same spooky quality of a nuclear test house—still as a tomb, the pool empty, air clogged with suspense like a noxious fume.
Suhail and I sat together on the floor of the dining room. I asked him about his trip to Egypt over winter break: Had he gone to the pyramids? Seen any celebrities? Made it to the street where they made ouds? But he was bursting with some other news and was having a hard time keeping it down.
“What’s up with you?” I asked.
“Guess!” he challenged me, bouncing up and down.
He reminded me of a little kid waiting for someone to open a present. It was infectious.
“Just tell me!”
“MIT!” he squealed.
I clapped and yelped my excitement for him. In a fit of joy he kissed me.
As it turned out, since Suhail had applied early he’d been given advance placement into the astrophysics course he had wanted. Better still, it was close to New York City. The sun angled through the window and across the empty space like a helicopter searchlight. And like the clock striking midnight, I was reminded that I didn’t have long before I had to be back at the front door of the beauty “saloon,” where Faraj would pick me up. “It’s fate!” Suhail said over his shoulder as I slithered out and to the back door of the beauty parlor. “Now I just know you’re going to get into NYU.” I, however, was less certain.
After we’d established the corner house at the empty compound as our hideout, Suhail and I became bolder and snuck away to it more often. We minimized phone conversations and note-passing, as those things could be intercepted. I’d plant the seeds of an excuse with Faraj weeks in advance, and then Suhail and I would run through our plot briefly on the phone: pickup spots, drop-off locations, back roads to take. My relationship with Suhail replays in my mind more like a heist montage than the soft-focus meadow-frolic young love is supposed to be. The tension that led up to every carefully arranged meeting made every moment intense: the glimpse of one another from across a crowded intersection, a peck briefly stolen in the hall between classes, playing home in our empty house, pretending to swim in our empty pool.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth Page 16
