Saints and Misfits

by S. K. Ali

  I fall asleep and have to be nudged awake, truthfully this time, after she parks the car on Dad’s circular driveway.

  I run up to the front door thinking about baby Luke, my laddoo. Dad opens it with a smile, his arms out for a hug.

  He’s wearing his weekend outfit of crisp button-down shirt and khakis. The way you know it’s leisure wear is that the shirt collars are lifted up, not curled over a tie.

  His wife, Linda, holding the laddoo, is coming down the massive staircase. She hugs me, hands over Luke, and directs the maid to take my backpack to the basement. Linda’s another one who has a constant smile on, a high, gummy one. I smile back at her out of habit. And because of the laddoo.

  He’s seriously chubby, with a dense roundness that’s solid and real. His eyes take a while to register me, but once they do, he giggles and scratches my face in boisterous greeting. Linda tells me that Logan is already asleep.

  I sit, bouncing Luke on my knees, in the formal living room while Dad and Linda listen to Muhammad’s elaborate introduction of Sarah.

  I learn quite a few things listening to him. Firstly, Sarah wants to do her PhD. Secondly, my brother’s choosy about what he says. Like, he never tells Dad about Sarah’s Islamicity. About how she moved to Eastspring and took over the mosque’s youth committee. How she quotes Qur’an and sayings of the Prophet in a cheery voice whenever she can, like in the middle of conversations, like when you least expect it. He never tells Dad that as a daughter-in-law she’ll be a thorn in his secular side.

  Instead, he tells Dad about her career aspirations and how she doesn’t want kids until she’s become a professor. He makes her seem like a totally modern gal.

  Sarah sits with her legs crossed, holding a glass of water with two hands, listening and occasionally interjecting to downplay the hype.

  The laddoo screws up his face and throws up on me as Dad begins asking questions about Sarah’s parents.

  “Here, let me take him. You get cleaned up,” Linda says, scooping up the laddoo and thrusting a box of tissues at me. “It’s my fault. I should have told you he’d just eaten.”

  I stand up, blotting at the mess on the front of my shirt. “It’s okay. It’s lucky I brought extra clothes.”

  “Why don’t you get cleaned up in the bathroom downstairs? Your friends are already there.”

  She takes the laddoo back upstairs. I open the door to the basement, hoping I don’t reek too much of baby vomit. Stepping onto the dark landing, I feel for the light switch, but they turn on a second after the door closes behind me.

  He puts a finger to his lips and his other hand out to still me, but I flinch.

  He slips the hand to the doorknob, holding it tight.

  “I just want to talk to you,” he whispers. “Just talk.”

  And not attack me?

  “Why are you avoiding me?” he asks. “I can tell, you know.”

  I look down, thinking of my stupidity in slipping my phone into my backpack pocket before I fell asleep in the car. Now it’s downstairs.

  I don’t even want to give him my gaze.

  “That thing before, what I did, I’ll admit it, it was a mistake,” he says, voice low. “But you admit something too. You wanted me, before you got this thing for Jeremy. Which is so wrong. A non-Muslim guy. Admit it.”

  I back into the wall and then realize my mistake too late. It gives him the idea to step closer and prop one hand up against the wall, blocking me from the stairs.

  “Showing off your hair to him?” he says. “He’s playing you. He wanted us, me and you, set up, not you and him. He got caught up in it, he told me.”

  I want to scream because he’s now less than a foot away from me. But everything is twisted in me—what he’s saying, what he did before, what my dad would think of me. What Muhammad would do. I can’t even find my voice among my emotions.

  “You’re playing with fire, this thing with Jeremy,” he says, coming closer, lowering his head. “You think it’s so easy to do what you want?”

  He draws his hand away from the doorknob and—

  The door opens and Nuah is on the other side. Farooq turns to him, taking a step back, and I flee down the stairs.

  “Is everything okay?” Nuah calls. “Bro, why are you here? You said you were going down to get water.”

  I run to the nearest open door and close it, my heart hammering like it’s fled down hundreds of flights of stairs. Leaning my forehead against the door, I work on stilling my breathing. That only results in me sobbing, shoulders quaking.

  “I can tell you’re not crying because we got trashed at the Quiz Bowl, in front of our own supportive home-state audience,” a voice says.

  I turn and see Sausun, lounging in a tank top and huge track pants with a laptop on her flat stomach, on one of the twin beds in the room. Her hair is glossy black and hangs to her waist. There are candy wrappers littered around her on the bed.

  I open the door to go. The last person I need to see right now is a know-it-all grim reaper.

  “Wait it out in here,” Sausun calls. “You want Sarah to pounce on you? Or Aliya to laugh at you?”

  “Sarah’s going to her cousin’s,” I say. “And Aliya’s an early sleeper.”

  “I heard her shuffling around right before you got in here,” Sausun says, selecting a piece of candy from a bulging paper bag that says SWEET NOTHIN’ on it. “Just lie on that bed and calm down a bit. I won’t be nosy. I’m YouTubing anyway.”

  I look at the other bed. It’s up against the wall opposite the door, and I’ll be able to turn away from Sausun, so I get in.

  It’s like Nuah was waiting outside the door, how he opened it as soon as Farooq let go of the knob. What if he hadn’t? What was Farooq planning on doing? Why couldn’t I stop him? The last question is pounding in my head, threatening to send me over the edge into losing control of my emotions again, so I dig my face into the pillow, trying to force myself to think of something else.

  As I’m clearing my mind, quieting it, I become aware of the sounds coming from Sausun’s computer. She’s shrieking with laughter at times. The girl must be crazy, I decide, before turning over and arching myself to peek at her screen.

  It shows two girls in niqab, vlogging, accompanied by really simple, ugly white doodles and words scratched on top of almost every image. It’s not easy to take my eyes off of the YouTubers’ antics, which include going to a haunted roller-coaster-ride attendant to ask for a job haunting the place. The words I’m afraid to see their resumes float above the attendant’s head.

  “Who’s being nosy now?” Sausun says, not taking her eyes off the screen. She holds out a small, clear bag of licorice candy.

  I lean over, take the bag, and pick out a couple of pieces, hanging off the bed, a strange compulsion forcing me to stare at the screen.

  “Who are they?” I ask, chewing slowly. “They’re weird.”

  “They’re the Niqabi Ninjas,” Sausun says. “You’ve never heard of them?”

  I shake my head as the Niqabi Ninjas hand out big smiley stickers at some corner in New York. Only a few people take them, and those who don’t get a sad-faced doodle drawn, digitally, on the back of their heads as they get away.

  “Why are they doing this?” I say. “Are they making fun of people?”

  “They want people to not be scared of niqabis, girls who cover their faces,” Sausun says. “So they try to lighten people up. Give them another image of niqabi girls.”

  She sits up and slides off the bed, holding the laptop high. Placing it on the carpet, she pats a spot beside her and puts the candy bag between us.

  We watch the back episodes of the vlogging Niqabi Ninjas. I eat candy and slowly, bit by bit, tell her about Farooq.

  Sausun listens without once looking at me, just lowering the volume on the vlogs and handing me a big red jawbreaker when I break down again. I take the candy and roll it around in my hands until it mixes with my tears and runs red over my palms. That gets me to stop crying.<
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  I throw the jawbreaker into the fake soil of a fake tropical plant by the window and turn my blubbery self to Sausun.

  She clicks off YouTube and closes her laptop.

  “Are you looking at me for some easy solution?” she asks, rustling in the bag until she finds a pack of bubble gum. “Because you do know there’s a reason you’re hiding here crying about it, right?”

  I nod, even though I have no clue as to why I’m hiding here crying about it. That’s what I can’t figure out, why it feels so hard to scream it.

  She unwraps a cube of gum, flicks it into her mouth, and says, “Although, you can do what I do when I get mad at things I can’t change. Burn the suckers.”

  She rips off a portion of the candy bag and hands it to me. “To wipe your hands on.”

  I comply. “What do you mean ‘burn the suckers’?”

  “I read it somewhere. You write the thing out that you can’t deal with, the unmentionable, write what you want to do and then burn the pages. Slowly.” She smacks her gum. “I fed a fireplace once with seventeen pages about a man who needed to be mutilated. I described the torture lovingly.”

  “Why’d he need to be mutilated?” I say.

  “Because he married my sister and then married two other women on different continents without telling her,” she says. “My sister doesn’t roll like that. He knew that beforehand.”

  “Did she leave him?” I ask. “I hope she left him.”

  “No, she’s in Saudi,” she says. “He left her there. With a baby and a huge empty house. She’s part Saudi so she’s bound by their laws. Can’t leave without the deadbeat.”

  “So why’s he an unmentionable?” I say. “Tell the world about the bastard!”

  She looks at me and blows a bubble. It becomes quite large, menacingly so, before it pops. She picks it off her face and rolls it into a ripped piece of the candy bag.

  “You have no idea about the world, do you?” she says. “I mean, I could ask you, Why’d you keep quiet about your thing? Tell the world about the bastard yourself.”

  I don’t like her dismissive tone. It’s too close to the Sausun I know, so I get up off the floor, stretch, and go to the door, opening it cautiously. My backpack’s at the foot of the stairs, and the light from the room is enough to reveal no one waiting to pounce. I grab my bag and bolt back into the room. I decide to stay in here tonight, bunking with Sausun, rather than be in a room by myself, with Farooq merely two staircases away. I’d never attempt to stay in my bedroom, on the same floor where the guys are sleeping.

  I plunk on my chosen bed and take my laptop out. No new picture postings on Facebook. Only a bunch of messages from Fizz that I don’t touch.

  I’m so glad she didn’t come to Chicago.

  Sausun takes her blanket off and spreads it on the floor. “Prayer?”

  Nodding, I close my laptop and rummage through my backpack for my pajamas.

  I change and make wudu in the en suite bathroom, cleaning myself slowly, thinking about talking to Allah. When I get back to the room, Sausun’s in her black gown and scarf.

  We perform the night prayer in unison, with Sausun leading. She stays a long time with her forehead on the ground, the time we can say our personal prayers to God, so after I finish mine, I add one for her sister in Saudi Arabia.

  After prayer, Sausun gets into bed and watches me for a while as I put away my laptop, before turning over to face the wall on her side of the room.

  “I’ll trade places with you on the drive back to Eastspring tomorrow,” she says. “If you want, that is.”

  My shoulders and neck instantly relax, surprising me. I didn’t know I was wound up until I go slack with relief on hearing her words.

  “Thanks,” I say, looking at her back with an immense sense of gratitude I haven’t felt toward anyone in a long time. “And I’m taking your advice. I’m going to write it out.”

  She turns back to me and says, “Yeah, but that’s the least you can do. The meekest thing. If that perv had tried to hurt me, believe me, I wouldn’t be just writing it out.”

  I stay quiet because my idea is to actually write it out, online, and not burn it. No one would know who wrote it. No one in my world. To post it would feel like some sort of justice. Like posting details of a crime on a wanted poster.

  It isn’t my fault no criminal would ever get caught.

  MISFITS

  I stay in the basement, rewatching the funnier Niqabi Ninjas episodes, while Sausun does her gig upstairs at breakfast, convincing Aliya and her carpool crew that she needs to leave right away so they need to leave right away, now that she’s officially part of their lot. When she comes down to get her bag, she flips up her niqab and gives me a grim smile.

  “It worked,” she says. “But Farooq knows. He wouldn’t look me in the face, the perv.”

  “Um, hello? That’s because you have no face?” I say, elation flickering in me at the news I will be nowhere near the monster for the rest of the day.

  “And, also, Nuah is coming with you guys,” she says, ignoring my giddiness and letting her face covering drop again. “He switched too.”

  I slide my legs off the bed and watch her gather her things and pick up candy litter. It’s weird that I’d told her something I don’t even allow myself to think much about. Is it true, what someone said, that it’s a million times easier to tell a stranger your deepest secret than a person who cares for you? Like those confessions people write on postcards and mail to that guy who collects them. Mine would be short and blunt. It would tell all but not reveal all. My best friend’s adored cousin tried to rape me and now thinks it’s a mistake but still wants me to admit I wanted him in the first place.

  But really, I’d told Sausun way more than my anonymous postcard. So maybe she isn’t exactly some stranger. Maybe I’d sensed she actually does care.

  I mean, this is not the Sausun I thought I knew. Well, sort of knew. At the mosque, it was always a salaam wave from afar. Fizz thought she was too intense, so we kept our distance.

  “You staying down here till we leave?” Sausun heads to the door. “Aliya will start making noises if you don’t come up to say salaam—you know that.”

  “Tell her I have girl problems,” I say, feigning cramps.

  “Meanwhile, you have douche-bag-guy problems.” Sausun pauses in the doorway to look at me. “You know, when I first saw you around the mosque, I thought you were the lone rebel type, with your artsy clothes and stuff.”

  “And?” I say, holding back what I’m about to do, which is give her a good-bye hug.

  “And you’re just not,” she says. “You’re weak.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Who wants to be a lone rebel anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Sausun says. “All I know is that sometimes I wonder if I’ll get presented with someone kicking up dirt in my life like in yours. Or like what’s happening to my sister. Because, you know what I’d do? I’d grind the guy into the ground. Enjoy every moment of it.”

  I don’t say anything. She waves salaam without looking at me and exits.

  Maybe she’s some stranger after all.

  • • •

  After hearing them leave, and giving myself an extra half hour in case they needed to come back to get something, I emerge from my self-banishment in the basement to find an empty breakfast room full of breakfast. It’s crazy stocked with everything from waffles to mini Spanish omelets to samosas and halal sausages, kept hot in those silver warmers. I pile a plate and sit down to eat at the empty table.

  A burst of laughter enters from somewhere to the right and above. It’s Muhammad’s snorts and someone else’s hoots mixed with Dad’s big belly laugh. I get up, balancing my plate carefully as I negotiate the winding staircase. I follow the noise to Dad’s study/entertainment room.

  “There she is,” Dad says, opening his arms wide.

  I set my plate on a sideboard and go over to hug him. Nuah and Muhammad are sprawled across the two huge leather
megasofas, laughing again at something on the screen behind me. To his credit, Nuah gets up and kicks Muhammad’s legs off to join him, which gives me a spot on the now vacant sofa. I turn to get my plate and take it over.

  It’s me. They’re laughing at me, BD. Before divorce, when I was young and naive.

  An eight-year-old me is blown up on the home theater screen, holding up my nose piglike at the camera while pointing at thirteen-year-old Muhammad eating a huge bag of chips. The camera then follows me upstairs, in our old house, to show the viewers my neat room in contrast to Muhammad’s mess. I’m doing a little jig in my room when Muhammad sticks his head in and says, “But what about this?” He bounds in and opens my closet. Things spill onto the floor—clothes, stuffed animals, school artwork, junk. Kid-me growls, picks up a pink stuffed octopus, and attacks Muhammad with it. “Don’t. Touch. My. Closet!” Muhammad stands still in a yoga tree pose while getting whacked. “I am peace. Peace is me,” he chants over and over as I pick up more weapons to deal with him.

  I search Dad with a questioning look. Why is he showing this stuff? To Nuah? Who’s enjoying it way too much?

  “Remember?” Dad says. “How we used to film the Janna Yusuf Show every Sunday? This episode we called ‘Clean vs. Muhammad.’ Sometimes I still put it on and watch it. The boys love it. If they weren’t at swimming, they’d be in here laughing with us, even little Luke.”

  I’m not laughing, Dad, I want to say. Then a thought crosses my mind.

  “Did you show this to anyone else?” I ask.

  “Some of your other friends saw some before they left. Your friend Farooq practically camped in here last night, watching DVD after DVD with me,” Dad says proudly. “You’re a hoot to watch, sweetie.”

  I pick up my plate and walk out, mumbling something about getting more food.

  I go back down to the basement.

  • • •

  I wait for Sarah on the porch steps, the lone rebel way, with a packed backpack at my side and an iPhone plugged into my brain, pumping in the right playlist for this moment in time. Angry, sad, punch-him-where-it-hurts-most-but-don’t-’cause-you-don’t-want-to-touch-him, only-crush-his-dirty-little-heart playlist.