A Girl Like That(24)



I fled.

Ten minutes later, the maid went into the kitchen, fully dressed, to cook dinner before my mother and sister came home.

Abba emerged, wearing a pair of striped pajamas and a dark blue robe. “Farhan.”

I looked up from the television, stood reluctantly, and walked over to where he was standing. Standing and swallowing, as if the words in his mouth were all wrong.

He smiled at me and put a hand on my shoulder. “There’s no need to be afraid.”

He took my limp hand in his and pressed a note into my palm. Fifty riyals. New and crisp like the press on his shirt. Fifty falafel sandwiches from the school canteen. Half a Nintendo Game Boy. A twelve-year-old’s temporary silence.

“It will be our little secret,” he said. I looked up and saw something different in his eyes—fear, where there previously had been none. I put the note in my pocket, feeling strange about this sudden shift in the tectonic plates, the sickness in my belly mingling with a sense of power.

“Yes, Abba.”

AGE 15

DATE #9

“This is the special place you were talking about?” Nadia glared at the warehouse’s faded, hand-painted sign (Al Hanood it read now, the y long gone), the rusty gates, the cigarette butts littering the unpaved lot. “Why couldn’t we have parked at the Corniche?”

Ants were crawling up the broken wall, up my pants it felt like, when a red T-shirt flashed behind one of the concrete holes, lookout points for Abdullah and Bilal the Charsi, who I had told it would be done by today—scoring a home run with head girl Nadia Durrani, also called Double Dome Durrani because of her fantastic breasts.

“Yeah,” Abdullah had said when I told him about my plan. “Right.”

He’d given me the same reaction at the beginning of the year, when I’d scored Date #1 with Nadia, and then asked if I was on drugs. Bilal, who had once been Nadia’s neighbor and spent most of his free time stalking her when he wasn’t selling cigarettes and twenty-riyal weed joints behind the municipal garbage bin outside the academy’s boys’ section, didn’t believe me either.

“She likes Arabs, mostly. Syrians. Falasteenis. Black guys. White guys,” Bilal said with a shrug. “Most of them end up at the parking lot of the old Hanoody warehouse on Madinah Road. No offense, Farhan, my man—you may be one of my best customers, but I’ve never seen Nadia go for an Indian or Pakistani yet. And especially not a horny fifteen-year-old schoolboy.”

But not all horny fifteen-year-old Indians or Pakistanis had access to their father’s black Beamer whenever they liked, and that’s what Abdullah and Bilal had been pissed off by, even though they didn’t admit it.

Nadia had liked the look of my car, especially the black tint on its windows. “This is nice.” She had skimmed a finger lightly over the glass. “But are you even old enough to drive?”

“Officially, no. Unofficially, yes,” I had replied, forcing a bravado I did not feel. “Dad works for the Interior Ministry. He’s almost always traveling outside Jeddah on business. I’ve been chauffeuring my mom and sis around for about six months now.”

Nadia had scanned me from head to toe, her gaze lingering briefly on the bulge between the front pockets of my jeans. I felt myself go red and cursed myself for not keeping it under control. But, somehow, it worked.

“Okay,” she’d said with a slight smile. “I’ll see you this Wednesday, after school.”

It had taken nine more Wednesdays over the course of five months to get to the warehouse stage. Five months of e-mails and secret telephone calls. Two hundred and fifty-four riyals and seventy-five halalas’ worth of CDs and coffees at private five-star restaurants where we would not be seen by anyone from home or school, or by a muttawa. These dates usually ended at a deserted part of the Jeddah Corniche with a hurried lip-lock that Nadia refused to take further. “No, no, it’s too risky,” she would say, or “I see someone coming,” or “What’s the rush, big boy? We have plenty of time.”

“She’s sucking you dry,” Bilal had told me. “And not in the way she should.”

“You gotta take initiative, man,” Abdullah had said. “From the looks of it, Nadia needs a guy with a bit of aggression.”

My heartbeat accelerated now as Nadia’s head turned toward the warehouse wall.

“I know this place is gross,” I said quickly. “But this is way better than having that waiter at the Sofitel police our every move, isn’t it?”

“Whatever.” Nadia grimaced. She turned away from the wall. “It’s too late to go anywhere else now with your car nearly on empty.”

I switched off the AC, rolled down the window, and lit up. The red T-shirt had disappeared from sight. So far, so good.

“This week sucked!” Nadia grumbled. “First we got hammered at school over the Class XII boards like they’re a matter of life and death. And then yesterday my bratty sister stirred—yes, stirred—the wand of my eighty-riyal mascara in a pot of talcum powder. Like it was a prop she’d use playing house! When I told her off, she went crying to Mom, who acted like I was at fault for screaming at her seven-year-old angel. And on top of that, there’s that English exam next week. God, I’m so gonna fail that…”

Sweat beaded the back of my neck. Twenty minutes left before she had to get back home. Enough time, in Bilal’s opinion, to hit three bases, maybe even score a home run. “The hotter the girl, the fatter her attitude,” Bilal had said. “Don’t let her sit on your head and dictate terms. Be a man. Under no circumstance must you let on that you’re dying for her.”

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