“And when he does turn, we’re going to be the ones in trouble. I’m not taking any chances.”
“Come on.” Abdullah was grinning. “You’re telling me you’ve never done this before?”
“It may surprise you to know that I haven’t,” I said truthfully.
As reckless as I was under most circumstances, I did not want to kiss every guy I went out with on these dates. Half the guys I’d gone out with had been far too worried about the religious police showing up to catch us red-handed, while the other half had been far too intimidated by me and never attempted more than a timid kiss on the hand or the cheek.
Abdullah was an exception in many ways. For one: I genuinely enjoyed his company. He was intelligent. He made me laugh. And he smelled nice too. Which was why, when he leaned in to kiss me, I let him.
There were times when we talked when Abdullah would mention Farhan’s name. “Rizvi and I did this,” or “Rizvi and I did that,” or “Rizvi’s such a loser sometimes, I don’t even know why I’m friends with him.” I listened closely to these little stories—bits and pieces of information about a boy I had only, as of yet, seen in pictures or from a distance during school functions. Those were the nights I would imagine Rizvi’s lips on mine instead of Abdullah’s—a wisp of curiosity that fluttered through my brain when I was falling asleep—a thought I managed to squash before it bloomed into heat. I instantly felt guilty afterward, sometimes even refusing to go out with Abdullah when he texted me a week later, making an excuse of a doctor’s appointment or a test.
The beauty about Abdullah was that he never followed up on my lies or asked additional questions. Cool. Next week then, he always wrote back in reply. It was almost as if he expected me to have a part of myself that I kept private the way he kept parts of his own life a mystery, evading any questions that might have anything to do with his family or childhood.
“Some things are too messed up to explain,” he said, and I agreed.
It made perfect sense for us to be together; to meet up each Thursday to talk, smoke, and sometimes kiss; to lose ourselves in random conversations about school or movies or music for an hour and forget who we really were.
Mishal
The stars were bright the night Layla called.
They pricked the sky like diamonds, like the gems studding the expensive abaya Father’s second wife wore to a cousin’s wedding last weekend, with a matching scarf and niqab.
“It cost me two thousand riyals,” Jawahir had said when the women at the party asked her about it. As if she was the one who had earned the money for it, as if it wasn’t Father’s platinum credit card that she used every time she went to a mall—a card that I knew he had never offered to Mother or to Abdullah and me, even for basic household expenses, let alone frivolous shopping sprees for designer clothes.
“Witch,” Abdullah had called her when I told him.
“Money-hungry, gold-digging witch,” I had corrected, making him laugh.
Cursing Jawahir together was the closest Abdullah and I ever came to expressing affection these days, our concentrated hate for her temporarily allowing us to forget the anger we collectively held against Father for ignoring our existence, against Mother for turning into a zombie, and mostly against each other for growing up and changing—in Abdullah’s case, changing so much that there were days we couldn’t even look at each other, let alone talk.
“Mishal?” Layla’s voice crackled over the telephone line. She grumbled to herself and then I heard her moving to a room where the reception was clearer. “Mishal, you got my text, didn’t you?” She emphasized the got, shouted it for good measure to show me how angry she was.
As for the text—of course I’d gotten it. She knew I’d gotten it. I knew she’d seen the little check mark under the image she’d sent me, right next to Read 8:45 p.m. Right after which I shut off my phone.
Minutes later, Layla had called me on my landline, demanding explanations in that nagging, mother-hen way of hers. In hindsight, I should have known she would do that. Things like shutting off phones and ignoring texts and e-mails did not affect Layla Sharif when she wanted to get hold of someone. It was probably why we were such good friends.
“Are you sure it was them?” I asked, even though the picture she’d texted was clear enough.
“Positive! I wouldn’t lie to you about such a thing. They were in Abdullah’s car. My brother saw the license plate number when he was driving past the Corniche this afternoon. And it was her. It had to be. Who else do we know who has a penchant for sneaking out with boys and smoking?”
I stared out my bedroom window. Across the compound where Abdullah parked his car, the neighborhood mosque glowed, its spires outlined with tubes of neon-green light. Speakers circled the main minaret on four sides, crackling slightly, the way they did moments before the muezzin sounded the call for prayer. To the left of our compound, in the garden where I’d once played as a child, everything was dark. In the daytime, you could see an old tire hanging from a neem tree, still held in place by the rope Father had bound to the branches eleven years before, when I was five years old and Abdullah, six. Orange-and-blue nylon, now faded and worn, forming what I used to think of as rope henna—strange, braided designs imprinted on my palms after a long day of swinging.
“Higher,” I remembered calling out to Abdullah the day the swing was set up. “Higher, ya akhi.” Akhi, a word that the dictionary defined as my brother but that, for me, also stood for playmate and best friend.
Abdullah would push the tire as hard as he could before climbing onto it at the last moment and then using his feet as leverage so we could both swing together. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so buoyant or laughing so hard, ever feeling so close to another person the way I had that night with my brother, my arms wrapped tight around his waist, my ear pressed to his heart, hearing it beat hard through his rib cage.
My brother had always held me during our parents’ fights in those early years, whispering that it would be okay, that we would be okay, until the day he turned eight, when Father enrolled him in soccer lessons at a local club. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, Abdullah had a whole bunch of new friends. Friends he spent hours with outside the house, friends he sometimes brought over to play in his room, never allowing me to see them. He became irritable whenever I tried to join in. “No girls allowed,” he’d say, refusing to unlock the door despite my repeated knocks and pleas. The days his friends did not come over, he took to tripping me in the corridors of our house, laughing at my confusion, sneering at the way I cried out in pain. “My friends are right,” he had said. “Girls are silly crybabies.”
Though Mother made him apologize for his behavior later, I knew that this was only the beginning—the first crack in a relationship that I had once thought unbreakable, a shade of gray in a photograph that, until then, had always appeared black and white.
“Mishal.” Layla’s voice penetrated my thoughts. “Mishal, are you okay?”
“Y-yes,” I managed to say. “I’m fine, Layla. I have to go now, okay? Will talk to you tomorrow.”
I put down the phone.
* * *
I encountered my brother’s friends again when I was fourteen, when the Qur’an Studies teacher my father had appointed for me called in sick and I was forced to stay up in my room, counting the stars on my ceiling, while Abdullah watched television in the downstairs living room with a group of guys he’d invited from the academy.
They were older boys from classes X and XI—fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds who, for the most part, I’d always been hidden from, because Abdullah never wanted them to see me, even though he never told me why.
“They’re good guys,” he said, “but sometimes they can get a little rowdy. If at any point you get nervous, remember to lock your door.”
The way Abdullah had begun to lock his door the previous year, after I found the porn magazine hidden under his mattress. The one he read between the pages of a comic book or a newspaper, think
ing he could fool me the way he did our mother, not expecting me to sneak in when he was at school, to have a look at the kind of magazine that I had, till then, only heard about at school from the other girls, but never seen.
It had been a shock when I first saw her. The woman spread out across a large, glossy centerfold, her legs stretched in a split, in nearly perfect symmetry. I may have been a teenager, now officially surrounded by girls openly giggling about boys in the classroom during breaks or drooling over posters of bare-chested Bollywood heroes. But in matters of nudity, I was little better than an eight-year-old, my knowledge limited to what I saw of myself in the mirror and the Barbie dolls Mother bought for me as a child—plastic women with painted faces, nipple-free breasts, and hairless vaginas—women I strove to make modest by dressing them in maxi-length dresses I made myself out of old hankies and scarves, women whose shiny hair I braided like my own, a single plait that fell to their waists, and then covered with my handmade scarves.
“Miniature Mishals,” Abdullah had called these dolls, sometimes ripping off the scarves I’d so painstakingly wrapped around their hair, or lifting up the skirts of the dresses so he could peek underneath. In those days, these were the only times that we fought—my screams would even bring Mother out of her musical reverie to scold the both of us. Abdullah would then run out of my room in disgust and Mother would hug me and say, “Stop being silly.”
The woman I saw in Abdullah’s magazine, however, had nipples the way I did, though hers were considerably larger and pierced through with silver rings. A thin strip of black hair ran down her crotch; the hair on her head was dyed blond. The shock I felt at seeing her nude wasn’t as great as the shock of finding her in my brother’s room.
I remembered the look he’d given me once when I bent over to pick up a pencil in the living room, the way his gaze had lingered on my legs and butt even after I’d straightened. It was only when his gaze reached my face that he started and stepped back. We both went red—I, for reasons I did not know back then—and then Abdullah had simply frowned at me, which made me feel as if I’d done something wrong.
I flipped through more pages, ignoring the text and focusing on the pictures—all of them women, all of them naked. I spent so long in Abdullah’s room that I didn’t hear him come back from school or enter until he was towering right over me, his shadow censoring my view of the page.
He seized me by the arm and threw me out the door. “If you tell Mother about this I will screw you so bad, you will not know what hit you.”
“Like you screw those girls, you mean!” I shouted, even though I didn’t know what I meant in throwing his threat back at him.
Then Abdullah leaned forward and grabbed hold of my arms. His thumbs dug into the sides of my breasts; I could feel his nails through my clothes. His teeth were gritted, his mouth so close to my face that I could smell the potato chips on his breath.
“Stop it! You’re hurting me!”
“Children?” A voice floated toward us from the other end of the hallway. “Children, what is it? Why are you fighting?”
I do not know what Abdullah would have done had Mother not suddenly emerged from her room. He released me as suddenly as he’d caught me. “I do not want you inside my room again. If you do that, I will show you what I can do.”
Out of fear, then, rose an emotion that I would carry always in reaction to Abdullah’s threat: an anger that made me shove him with both hands against the closed door. There was surprise on his face—he had, I realized, not expected me to hit back—then wariness, a look he would always give me when we were alone together after that, before he stalked off into his room.
In the weeks and months that followed, I began to look up terms in the dictionary—intercourse, sex, masturbate. From the girls at school, I learned the slang words—the forbidden four-letter ones they scribbled on the doors of toilet stalls—and looked those up as well, putting new meaning to the words my brother used on the phone with his friends.
By the time I was fourteen, I had a rough idea of what happened between a man and woman when they had sex. We learned about reproduction in biology, saw crude drawings of the male and female organs in our textbook. At school a girl brought in The Diary of a Young Girl and showed us a chapter where Anne Frank described her own body in detail. I had learned enough to giggle at these descriptions, to hide my own prudishness in front of the other girls.
It was the year Father instructed the family driver to give Abdullah driving lessons in his car—a brand-new GMC that Abdullah was expected to chauffeur me and Mother around in once he got his driving permit. Father’s visits to our home also decreased that year as he spent more and more time managing his new electronics store in Bahrain. Now, in Father’s absence, Abdullah was officially the man of our house and our legal guardian—the one who would be allowed to sign papers permitting me or even Mother to travel anywhere outside the Kingdom, even though he was fifteen and Mother forty.
Forbidding me to see his friends was the first of Abdullah’s many dictums, though that never really bothered me that much. I had heard plenty about these boys at school, and had no inclination to see them or to let them see me. What bothered me was Abdullah’s refusal to allow me to accompany him and Father on our family’s first ever pilgrimage, our first ever Hajj, to the holy city of Makkah the following month, even though Jawahir and her sons were allowed to go.
“You cannot!” Abdullah had insisted when I complained. “You’re fourteen years old, Mishal. You have your whole life ahead of you. Besides, if we both go, who will take care of Mother?”
“We could take Mother with us! I promise I’ll take care of her!”
“Mother is not capable of going at this time and you know it.” Abdullah’s eyes softened slightly when he saw the anger on my face. “Look, I’ll tell Father to take you with him next year, okay?”
Rationally, I knew my brother was right. While the pilgrimage was one of the five pillars of Islam and obligatory for Muslims, it needed to be undertaken only once during a lifetime, health and finances permitting. Abdullah also had a point about Mother’s depression, which often got worse after spending time with either Father or Jawahir, even with her medication. There was no way she would be able to manage the five days of the Hajj with both of them and their kids.
A part of me couldn’t help wondering if these were the only reasons or if there was more behind Abdullah’s refusal to take me along. By now, my brother and I had reached a truce of sorts, which we maintained by staying out of each other’s way. He did not want me around him, which should have been more relief than it was offense, I had told myself.
The evening Abdullah’s friends came over, I was still thinking about the Hajj. About the luxury Makkah Clock Royal Tower hotel, where my father had booked a suite with a view of the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba. I thought about how once they got there, Jawahir would fawn over Abdullah as if he was her son. How they would pretend to be one big happy family—like my mother and I didn’t exist.
I emptied my bag. Books fell out onto the bedspread, along with a few pencil shavings and a folded piece of paper. I unfolded it again and stared at it. The result of the Class IX aptitude test had come the week before, hours before Mother had one of her fights with Father over the phone and locked herself in her room.
The test suggested that I had a good grasp of body language and human interactions. Psychology or counseling was one of the recommended career paths—one that instantly made me the butt of an Abdullah joke. “You?” Abdullah had said with a laugh. “A psychologist? Those poor, poor patients!”
I leaned out my bedroom window now, the way I sometimes did when left alone, bending my waist as far as my upper body would go without losing my balance and somersaulting two stories down onto the paved driveway, where the cars were parked.
Normally I would have been watching the sky. I always loved watching the sunsets in Jeddah. Sometimes the sky turned orange or pink or violet and soaked everything—the iron gate
s and white outer walls of our villa, the potted palms at the entrance, the driveway—in a single pastel shade. It was like seeing the world through different-colored lenses, depending on the day.
Years before, when the weather wasn’t too hot or humid, my parents, Abdullah, and I had spent hours in our small garden. While my parents talked over pitchers of nonalcoholic Saudi champagne made with oranges, apples, and mint or rose-flavored Rooh Afza, Abdullah and I often sneaked away to the back, where the gardener kept his ladder, and climbed up to peek at the world outside the villa’s walls. We both stood there, precariously balanced, Abdullah always one rung below me, and pointed out familiar sights to each other. The tall minaret of the masjid we went to every Friday with Father and Mother. The brightly painted walls of Al-Fajr Elementary School. The Indian and Somali construction workers on the steps of the building next to it, their hard hats and blue coveralls coated with dust, cigarettes glowing between their fingertips. Back then, I did not know that once Father left, our visits to the masjid as a family would stop as well. I did not know that Al-Fajr Elementary would reject Abdullah’s school application, sending my father into a rage.
“Qala Academy?” He had bristled at Mother’s suggestion. “That school for Indians?”
Mother had said Father did not mean to be that insensitive. “It’s family pressure and disapproval. It can take a toll on him, you know,” she had told us both.
Going down memory lane added to the storm broiling inside me. To distract myself, I examined the cars parked in the driveway. Abdullah’s GMC was there, of course, along with a shiny black car I’d seen there once before. I squinted my eyes against the setting sun, trying to make out the logo on the car’s hood.
The owner of the black car was a friend of Abdullah’s, I knew. A boy slightly taller than my brother, with black hair and hazel eyes. A month earlier, he had been standing outside next to his car, smoking a cigarette. He had looked up. I’d sprung back like a jack-in-the-box, guilty by instinct, even though I was sure he hadn’t seen me.
A Girl Like That Page 6
