A Girl Like That(18)
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, thinking 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.”