A Girl Like That(15)
“Sorry, dear,” Khan Madam had said when I asked if the school library kept these books, “but these aren’t usually on our prescribed teaching lists.” Her eyes twinkled like dark gems and for a moment I did not see the pouches underneath. “Why don’t you borrow them from one of the girls?”
It was a nice idea, except that most girls would not lend me a broken pencil. My reputation as a smoker and my general unfriendliness often preceded everything I’d ever done in school, good or bad. At one point, some girl had been blunt enough to tell me straight up, “My mother wouldn’t like it if I was friends with someone like you.”
“I want to borrow your book. It doesn’t make us friends.”
Alisha Babu, who eventually lent me her own copy of The Hunger Games, told me that most of my classmates found me intimidating. “If you were a little friendlier, people would begin to like you more. You’d see that the rest of us aren’t so bad.”
But I knew better. I could see the sly curiosity beneath their offers of friendship. I’d seen women like the Dog Lady in action at the colony, women who were experts at such backbiting friendliness. First they would ask questions about your life. Really? Tell me more! Then they would tell everyone else. Do you know what she did? I would never have imagined it! They would first giggle about you and then criticize you and later converge on you as a pack. You know there are things about yourself that you should change. We’re telling you this because we care.
The Dog Lady was part of the reason Masi was so neurotic. My aunt depended on her for advice even here in Jeddah, sometimes making long-distance calls to Mumbai for up to thirty minutes. “What do you think, Persis?” I had heard her often ask. “Do you think I did the right thing?”
I wondered if Masi knew how ridiculous she sounded when she spoke like that, how weak. You couldn’t win anyone’s approval by trying to fit in or even by doing what they expected you to do, I wanted to tell her. I had learned as much when I was seven.
It was easier, much easier to say nothing. To skip Phys Ed and go up to the water tank to smoke in silence, to think instead of talk. Talking, I’d learned from observing these girls and the Dog Lady, only led to revelation of secrets. Secrets that could open up again like a barely healed wound under a bandage and bleed through the white surface.
Class XI wasn’t Class II. We were sixteen now and other things were going on apart from rivalries over being a teacher’s pet or student of the year. Boys had entered the picture. Not only celebrities, but real ones, mostly captains and vice-captains from the boys’ section in Sharafiyah. Many of the girls didn’t get to see them up close, let alone go out on dates with them (unless you counted texting each other from different stores at the same mall), which made those who did automatically become objects of envy and derision.
“Slut,” Mishal had called a girl for going out with Farhan Rizvi in Class X. “Wore a scarf around her neck like a muffler to hide the marks he’d made on her skin.”
“That’s gross,” her friend Layla Sharif had replied before bursting into giggles. “But I don’t blame her. He’s so hot.”
That Farhan Rizvi had been appointed head boy this year added to his hotness. The title allowed most girls to overlook the many rumors that had been floating around about him ever since he had broken up with the head girl: that he was drifting down highways in his black BMW, partying with Saudi boys from a local college, changing girlfriends like pairs of socks.
“That face.” Another girl sighed. “Oh my God, I swear it has grown better looking every year.”
A face that I still could not look at without remembering that day at the fair, without feeling the old sting of rejection.
However, not everyone in our classroom was susceptible to Farhan Rizvi’s charms. Mishal Al-Abdulaziz hated him, often bringing us rumors of his wild escapades, some of the stories so far-fetched that I wondered if she spent her free time making them up.
“You should have seen the way he and his friends were behaving at the fair this year,” Mishal said the week we returned to school after the holidays. “Getting together in groups of six or seven and cornering three or four girls in a stall to dry hump them. I swear! I’m not lying! It was disgusting, really, the way they were going about it—and those girls were giggling, encouraging their cheap behavior!”
I rolled my eyes, wondering if Mishal even knew what dry humping meant. The fair was certainly one of the few times the boys and girls from the academy could see one another without the interference of the religious police, but it was still a public place, with stall owners, teachers, and parents milling about. Poking a girl on Facebook or throwing her your number in the mall was one thing, but the idea of a boy—or a group of boys—attempting something like that in such a chaperone-heavy location was so ludicrous that even Mishal’s friends had burst out laughing.
Mishal may have talked about penises and vaginas with the detached inflections of a college biology teacher, but everyone knew she would jump a mile if a boy so much as winked at her. She would probably have blown a fuse if she’d found out about me dating her brother, Abdullah, a boy whose advances I had initially ignored, mostly because I knew who he was related to.
Tall, handsome Abdullah, with his broad shoulders and curly black hair. Abdullah, who glared at boys for eyeing his sister, but had no problem eyeing girls himself, which was quite evident when I finally met him face-to-face this past summer at the school fair.