A Girl Like That(33)

She pried my fingers off. “Okay. Got it. No need to get touchy-feely.”

For a moment I kept driving. Next to me, she whistled. Some English song, probably. A tune I did not know.

Do you have a boyfriend? I wanted to ask her. Instead, what came out of my mouth was: “You go to school, right?”

“Qala Academy.”

“How was your day?”

“Boring.”

“Why?”

“What why? School’s school. Boring.”

“So nothing happened? Nothing at all?”

“Well, I got caught smoking on the terrace. Thank God it was only our English teacher. She loves me because I’m so good at the subject. I sobbed a little bit and she promised not to tell anyone. Just got away with a scolding.”

The car jerked to a stop at the signal. “You smoke?”

She smirked. A patch of light slanted across her face, shimmered lightly on her pink lips. “She sounded scandalized too. She’d never seen me smoking before this.”

I glanced at my own reflection in the rearview mirror—my hooked nose, my sweaty forehead, my thick, hairy eyebrows. From this angle I almost looked like a tough guy. Or maybe a demon from Hindu mythology. It was probably the reason Zarin had called me Bakasura in the first place. I wondered if she would be impressed if I told her about the time my friends and I had smoked a beedi outside our school in Mumbai, though I would have had to leave out the parts about how disgusting I found the cheap hand-rolled cigarette and how upset Mamma had been when she smelled the smoke on my clothes, making me promise never to do it again.

“When did you start smoking?” I asked instead.

“When I was fourteen,” Zarin said. “I used to skip classes sometimes and go up to the academy roof and climb the ladder to sit on the water tank with my bag.”

She smiled slightly, a real one, I noticed. “It’s quite nice in the afternoons, especially on the breezy days. You can see the whole school from up there, and the grounds. Sometimes in the afternoon, if you time it right, you can even hear the prayers from the mosque. Anyway, there was this girl called Asfiya there too, one of the seniors. She was the one who gave me my first cig. Most of the time, though, I sat with her for the company. It made me think I wasn’t quite as alone.”

She uncrossed her legs and placed her feet on the floor. The silence between us stretched and I began to get the feeling that she had grown a little uncomfortable after making that revelation. I wanted to take Zarin to the Al-Hamra Corniche—the fancier part of the city, with giant malls, hotels, and restaurants, where at night you could see the Jeddah Fountain: a white jet of water against the black sky. But being around Zarin made me so nervous that I was sure I would forget where I was going. So instead of turning onto Palestine Street like I’d originally planned, I cut into a familiar inner lane behind Madinah Road, sticking to the comfort of one of the few areas I knew well thanks to having lived there for about a month now. There weren’t any malls in this area, but the apartment buildings were clean and well maintained. Instinctively, I took the route back to my house and parked across the street, in my usual spot, under a bent palm tree.

“That’s where I live.” I pointed out a small brown building. “Right over the barbershop sign.”

Zarin leaned forward. She wasn’t looking at the building. Her eyes were peering into the distance, as if she was remembering something she had forgotten. “Isn’t this the area of the old Hanoody warehouse?”

I frowned, trying to remember. The Arabic signs in Jeddah were still a challenge for me, but I knew most buildings in my area.

“There is some sort of warehouse a few kilometers away from here,” I said. “But I think it’s abandoned. No one goes there.”

Now, this wasn’t exactly true. There were times when I would see a car parked there, a group of guys leaning against the doors and talking. Sometimes there would be a single car with no passengers in sight. I felt strangely uncomfortable thinking about the warehouse, even more so because of the gleam that had come into Zarin’s eyes when she heard me talk about it.

“Take me there,” she commanded.

“It’s abandoned!”

“Fine.” She shrugged. “Then I’m going to go to that convenience store and get a pack of cigarettes.”

“Wha—wait!” I called out when she began opening the door. “What do you think you’re doing? No one’s going to sell you cigarettes!”

“Why? Because I’m too young?” She smirked in a way that told me this hadn’t stopped her before. “Of course, if you’re so worried, we could always go to the warehouse.”

A pair of bespectacled eyes floated across my face. Zarin’s aunt, furious at finding out Zarin had been smoking. Even more so when she found out that I was the one who’d taken Zarin to the store where she bought the cigarettes. She might not let you see Zarin again, I told myself. Though in reality I was more worried about Zarin not wanting to see me if I didn’t take her to the warehouse.

I turned on the engine once more. “We aren’t stopping there,” I said firmly. “I’ve seen police cars around that area. If they see us together, they will ask questions.”

Zarin said nothing. She simply sighed and looked out the window again. Sand feathered the road leading to the warehouse. The buildings in this area were few and far between, their paint yellowing and veined with cracks, the backs of old air conditioners protruding from their walls. Even though the windows were dark, I had the strangest sense of being watched, a feeling I partly attributed to how quiet it was here compared to the bustling center of the city.