A Girl Like That(22)
After the incident at my house, I made it a point to keep track of the girls who went to sit in that car, though I did not always see them. My blog on Tumblr grew incredibly useful in this regard.
Created on a boring Friday afternoon after Jummah prayers, the blog was something I initially used as a space to anonymously rant about school stuff—mostly complaints about the Class IX finals at Qala Academy, which I likened to the head crushers used in the Spanish Inquisition, and passive-aggressive Internet memes complaining about English teachers who wanted to know the symbolism behind blue curtains in a book.
Later I began posting gossip as well. Not much. Just tidbits that I heard around school.
PRINCIPAL AND BIO TEACHER IN CLINCH IN GIRLS’ SECTION!
Okay. So maybe they were only hugging, but you know what hugging eventually leads to, right?
The reason behind the hug? The Bio teacher was crying because a few girls were making fun of her and Princi was being your typical knight in shining armor.
Note to teachers: Your students are not mean. Really we aren’t. But if you try to walk like a runway model in a school corridor AND have a butt like a certain Kardashian, you are asking to be mocked.
POSTED 4 MINUTES AGO BY BLUENIQAB, 2 NOTES
#sorry not sorry #but shouldn’t our teachers set better examples? #QA gossip
No one was more surprised than I was when my little blog began to get followers. My first inbox message had come from our very own head girl, Nadia Durrani, who demanded I delete the gossip I’d posted about her and some guy she’d hooked up with over the summer (the fourth one over the course of two months). She made a number of ridiculous and hilarious threats, claiming to have wasta with someone high up at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, who would, in her words: Shut down ur stupid blog, track ur IP, and put u in jail.
Why? I wrote back, making sure her question and my response were visible to every blog follower. Did you hook up with him as well?
I added a GIF file to the post—the image of a cartoon cat rolling on the floor laughing its furry behind off. Underneath I wrote: I’m scared, Nadia. Really scared. Maybe you should tell your contact about that. Maybe he can do you a favor and ban Tumblr and every other blogging platform for you as well.
The fight finally ended with Nadia deleting her Tumblr account and me gaining another fifty followers, many of whom wrote to congratulate me:
Way to go, blue! That’s telling her!
rofl this made my day thanks
nadia is such a hypocrite. pretending to be a good and honorable head girl when she’s screwed most of the senior boys in QA. good on you for calling her out, blueniqab.
And on and on.
It was easily the most fun I’d ever had online.
No one—not even Layla—knew who BlueNiqab was. Anonymity was key to running a blog that blabbed other people’s secrets, and I trusted no one with mine. If a teacher found out I was behind the whole thing, I would be in big trouble.
I knew that things were going well for the blog when even the nerds of our class began talking about the gossip I’d posted there instead of the next Math test, and a steady stream of tips, asks, fan mail, and hate mail began trickling into my inbox.
By Class XI—the blog’s third year running—most of the gossip usually came to me hours, sometimes even minutes, after the incident happened. Most of my tippers were girls, and it made sense that they would seek and disseminate information about boys like Farhan Rizvi.
Stories began circulating about girls going off with Rizvi to an abandoned warehouse near Madinah Road, stories that I often verified by snooping through the texts on my brother’s cell phone.
On the rare occasion that my brother called his friends over to our house, I would sneak out of my room and hide behind the wall near the staircase to eavesdrop, often picking up things that most girls at school would, under normal circumstances, have learned about only weeks or months after the incident.
To my surprise, no one mentioned Zarin Wadia, who by then was acquiring quite a reputation. Insubordination in the classroom, smoking cigarettes, skipping classes for hours on end to see a boy, only to return in the afternoon in time to board the school bus back home. Our English teacher’s little pet. A girl who seemed to have no concept of boundaries.
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Which was why when in Class XI, instead of hearing more rumors about Rizvi as I expected, I was shocked to hear rumors about my brother.
Abdullah and Zarin. Zarin and Abdullah. Seen by Layla’s brother at the Corniche in a maroon GMC two weeks ago, laughing and smoking.
“Hey, Mishal,” Layla teased during break. “If you’re not careful, you and Zarin may become relatives soon.”
“Yeah.” I slammed my lunch box on our shared desk. “Right.”
“Whoa, relax.” Layla raised her eyebrows. “You know I’m pulling your leg. In any case, I think they may have already broken up. She hasn’t skipped a class since my brother last saw them.”
“I…” I forced myself to lower my voice. “I can’t believe Abdullah would go out with someone like that.”
“I know, right?” Layla rolled her eyes. “But let’s be reasonable. Abdullah doesn’t go to school with her or know her as well as we do. Maybe he even likes her for some reason.”
Of course he liked her. Zarin Wadia with her perfect body, with that fair skin prized by every matriarch I’d ever come across at Jawahir’s parties. Though Abdullah hadn’t told me that he was dating Zarin (he never told me anything about the girls he went out with), I had seen him smiling to himself when he thought no one was looking, the way his face lit up each time the phone rang on a Wednesday night, how it fell when he found out it wasn’t her, but one of his friends.