A Girl Like That(11)

I looked at Farhan Rizvi’s photo again. Blood rose to my cheeks and I was suddenly angry with him for reminding me of these things. For ogling me first and then chasing after the head girl. For flashing me his perfect smile: a crumb of affection for a lovesick little girl. Pain flickered deep inside my chest. I snapped the yearbook shut and tossed it aside.

*

The first time I smoked a cigarette, it felt like I’d swallowed a piece of burning coal. Asfiya, the girl who’d offered it to me on the academy roof, did not seem surprised by my coughing fit.

“It happens,” she said in a gravelly voice. “You’ll get used to it, though.”

It was the longest thing she had said to me since I’d started coming up here, halfway through Class IX. Neither of us had planned that first meeting. In those days, I would skip Phys Ed and sneak off to a quiet stairwell on the second floor, where I read a novel I had borrowed from the school library. One day, however, instead of going to the stairwell again, I’d climbed up to the top floor of the academy, a roof terrace that acted as storage for broken desks and blackboards, and a water tank with white paint chipping off its sides. Atop the water tank sat Asfiya—a senior I knew only by her first name mostly because everyone kept saying she was a bad student and a smoker. A smoker! You’d think she was Satan incarnate, the way the girls in my class spoke about her.

She had been blowing smoke rings into the air, one short puff after another, squiggly white circles that rose toward the blue sky before dissipating into nothing. I had expected her to stop when she saw me, maybe even yell, but she hadn’t done either of those things. We had stared at each other for a long moment until I pointed to the base of the water tank and asked: “Can I sit here?”

Asfiya had shrugged and simply said, “Whatever.”

As the weeks went on, it became a sort of ritual—me sitting at the base of the water tank and reading, her sitting on top and smoking, both of us with a bird’s-eye view of three of the four whitewashed buildings that made up the enclosed Qala Academy girls’-section complex, and parts of the neighborhood that lay beyond—shadowy apartment buildings with their clotheslines and dusty satellite dishes, the crescent tip of a mosque glinting in the sunlight. On windy days, I didn’t read and Asfiya didn’t smoke. We simply sat together, enjoying the respite from the moist Jeddah heat, and watched the grounds below, where girls played volleyball, basketball, and cricket, their voices high and thin from down there, the sort of voices I imagined dolls would have if they ever came to life.

“Is it interesting?” Asfiya asked me a few days after she gave me my first cigarette. “That book you’re reading?”

I looked up. “It’s pretty good. Animals making up their own rules. Running a farm. The pigs are kind of creepy though.”

“Hmm, I guess. Not much of an animal person myself.”

I stared out into the distance, my vision blurring slightly in the heat. “I had a kitten once,” I said. “I found him here in the academy four years ago, in the second-floor corridor. His mom had died.”

The dead cat was a pile of ribs draped with dirty white-gray fur, its back pressed against the freshly painted wall. “Call the maid,” the headmistress had said. As if the body was a stubborn piece of chewed gum to be scraped off the speckled marble tiles. It was then that I’d seen something move out of the corner of my eye. The kitten stared up at me with wide lamp-yellow eyes and shrank behind its mother’s body. I slowly reached out to touch it. Tiny claws dug into my hands. The kitten wailed and tried to get free. My head had spun from the combined smells of fresh paint and dead cat. “It’s okay,” I had told the kitten. “My mother is dead too.”

“Did it have a name?” Asfiya said, interrupting my reverie.

“Fali.”

Masa was the one who had helped me come up with the name. Masi had hated Fali from the very beginning—she called him an Unwanted Expense. “Does money grow on trees?” she had snarled at me, her nostrils flaring. “Who is going to pay for the animal’s food?” When I pointed out that she could take the money from the bank account my father left me, she slapped me for “being impertinent.”

“Calm down, jaanu.” Masa always called Masi his jaanu, or his life, during her temper tantrums. “What is the harm in a few tins of cat food? We can easily afford it with my new raise.”

Since Masi did not really have a good excuse in the face of Masa’s reasonable explanation, she switched tracks from cat food costs to household cleanliness. She started off small at first—with complaints about Fali shedding on the sofa and coughing up fur balls. Typical Masi mumbles and grumbles that I’d trained myself to ignore over the years. Then, one afternoon, when I was doing my Science homework, she snapped.

“Bringing in allergies and feces in our house!” she shouted at Fali, as if he could understand what she was saying. “Who is going to clean this?” She caught Fali by his scruff, threw him out of the apartment, and slammed the door shut.

Then she locked me in my room, kicking and screaming, until Masa came home from work. “Have you seen the way this girl answers back to me?” she demanded. “And the way she fights and pulls at my arms? Acts like a bloody woman wrestler!”

I flew out as soon as Masa unlocked the door. We found Fali lying in a pile of garbage outside the building. Stiff. Bloody.