A Girl Like That(17)
Which made him laugh again.
A year ago, Mishal had tried to get me in trouble by reporting to our sadistic Physics teacher that I carried cigarettes in my backpack. It had been a close call. It was sheer luck that I’d run through my last pack that morning and thrown it away before I entered the classroom; luck that my breath smelled of mint and not tobacco when the teacher made me open my mouth and sniffed like a rabid bloodhound. After that, I never carried cigarettes on my person, usually stashing them in little nooks and crannies at school—in that space behind the ladder at the water tank on the terrace.
By the time I was sixteen, however, it was boys like Abdullah who would help me skip school, who offered me their own cigarettes and smoked with me in their cars, parked in a deserted lot by the Corniche on Thursday afternoons.
Only Abdullah became a lot more than a guy I simply went out with for cigarettes or food—and that became evident when he kissed me on our third date—a light, pleasing dance of lips and tongues that made me forget for a few moments that we were in a public place.
“What’s the matter?” he asked when I pushed him away. “I thought you liked me.”
I laughed, gently tracing his frown away with a finger. “I do like you. But maybe we should not keep doing this here.”
I gestured toward the railing in the distance, where a lone man stood, staring at the sunlight glittering on the waves.
Abdullah rolled his eyes. “He’s so far, Zarin. He’s not even turned this way.”
“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.