A Girl Like That(21)
It didn’t.
Though a week later, Abdullah was gone from home again, returning at five in the morning, a couple of hours before I had to get ready for school.
“How can you stay friends with such guys?” I demanded, rising from the sofa the moment he entered. “You know what they’re like, how they harassed me.”
“What do you mean? You know I was at a friend’s house after the Qur’an Club meeting. I spent the night there.”
“What friend?” I demanded, but Abdullah didn’t answer. “I’m not a fool, Abdullah. You were out with those guys again.”
Abdullah stared at me for a moment and then sighed. “Look … Mishal, I’m really tired right now, okay? Can we talk about this later?”
“But I—”
“They’re my friends, okay!” Abdullah snapped. “My real friends. Besides, you should’ve listened when I told you to stay in your room.”
“What do you mean? I was in my—”
“Rizvi saw you, he said. He saw you when you leaned out the window—in your nightgown, your hair uncovered. What do you think he was going to do?” Abdullah’s eyes made a harsh, unforgiving perusal of my floor-length housecoat and lingered on the scarf draped over my breasts. “Have you learned nothing about men and the necessity of a proper hijab? Or did you want his attention?”
My face burned. “No!”
As sick as Abdullah’s words made me, he wasn’t saying anything that I hadn’t heard before from teachers at school or from my Qur’an Studies tutor at home. They had told us about women who forgot their place, who sought out a man’s attention by intentionally wearing abayas that revealed the curves of their bodies, by accentuating their eyes with makeup even while wearing a niqab. I remembered the way I had leaned out my window. Had my posture revealed the shape of my body in a way that was alluring to the boy in the black car? Wanton, even? Had he seen in it a form of invitation?
Abdullah raised a finger and quietly wiped a tear from my cheek. I slapped it away, disgusted with him and myself.
“Please, Mishal.” His voice was soft now, almost consoling. “Please try to understand. A woman’s honor is like a tightly wrapped sweet. If you unwrap a sweet and leave it lying around, you expose it to everything out there. If, by accident, it falls into the dirt—tell me, Mishal, will anyone want to eat it?”
“Stop it,” I whispered.
But he persisted: “Don’t you remember what happened to Reem?”
Of course I did. Everyone knew what had happened to our cousin. Sweet, innocent Reem, with her big brown eyes and shy smile. Who seemed to have the perfect arranged marriage when she fell in love with the man she was engaged to—until she slept with her fiancé a week before the wedding ceremony. It wasn’t her fault, the fiancé claimed when he broke off the wedding. But many who knew the truth had blamed Reem for it. He had been surprised, I’d overheard our aunts whispering over a family gathering. Suspicious that she had enjoyed the experience instead of suffering through it like a proper virgin.
“That was wrong, what happened with Reem,” I said. “It shouldn’t have happened that way!”
“It would not have happened if she had remembered her place like a proper Muslim girl,” Abdullah said. “You’re not a child anymore, Mishal. One day, it will be your turn to get married. I won’t always be there to protect you.”
If that’s the case, you probably shouldn’t protect me, I thought angrily. Unlike Reem or most of my other cousins, for me marriage had never been enticing. It was one of those “realities of life” I chose to ignore—mostly because I knew that my prospects were limited to creepy grooms nearly twice or thrice my age. Dark-skinned half-Saudi girls weren’t prize commodities on the marriage market, Jawahir reminded me every time I saw her at a family gathering. “At least you still have your youth on your side,” she always said. Even Mother seemed to agree, sometimes emerging from her little musical bubble to ask me if I had used the skin-whitening creams she’d ordered for me from India, creams that I’d dumped in the trash after they’d either made me break out or had no effect on my pigmentation.
“Why are you blaming me for this?” I asked Abdullah. “Isn’t your friend—as a boy—responsible for lowering his gaze if he ever comes across a girl in an immodest state of dress? Have you both forgotten that part of the Qur’an?”
Abdullah’s face turned pink, a sure sign he was losing his temper. “I don’t have time for this nonsense,” he said before leaving the room.
Though the black car continued appearing in our driveway now and then, its owner never ventured up to my room again. From time to time, I heard stories of it parked in other driveways, outside other apartment buildings, but mostly I saw it parked in the shade of the eucalyptus trees outside the Qala Academy’s girls’-section compound.
I saw the boy who had spoken to me from behind my bedroom door—his navy-blue Academy blazer tossed over a shoulder, a hand tucked into the pocket of the jeans he would swap for the navy pants of the school uniform when classes began at the boys’ section, miles away in the district of Sharafiyah.
There were moments when, on seeing the car, I would pull the top of my scarf forward so that nothing of my face showed when I passed it. But Farhan Rizvi never seemed to notice me. Often, he simply sat in his car, head leaned back, his shades reflecting the green of the leaves overhead, until a girl slyly detached herself from the crowds of abaya-clad girls pouring out of the school buses and, instead of following them into the gates, casually walked toward the eucalyptus trees, to the passenger seat of the black car.