A Girl Like That(44)
“You have enough nicotine in your system.” I pulled out a can of Vimto from my bag and popped it open. “Here. Have this instead. And maybe, once you’re in a better mood, you will tell me why you’re acting crankier than usual.”
Zarin sighed, but accepted the soda after a moment. She stared out the window—in the direction of an Arab family spread out on a mat under one of those abstract art sculptures that acted as landmarks at the Corniche and on Jeddah roads. Jeddah, with its giant globe and giant gold fist; with monuments of cars bursting out of a block of concrete and four hanging stained-glass lanterns that lit up at night in glowing colors. A city of sudden and surprising art, mostly abstract. Zarin’s favorite was a sculpture of a boat made with Arabic calligraphy.
However, that day, I knew she wasn’t thinking about sculptures. “Come and pick me up after school,” she’d told me over the phone that morning. And, fool that I was, I didn’t even think of asking why, although I had to shuffle shifts at work, irritating Hamza so much that he threatened to cut my next paycheck.
“Look, Zarin, you have to tell me what is wrong now. I am in trouble at work because of you.”
“You were in trouble before that anyway.”
She was referring to the time when a group of boys at the deli had stuck a note on my back with the Arabic word for dog written on it in bold letters.
“Kalb.” Zarin had pulled off the note when she’d come to the deli for a pack of sliced turkey. “Kaaf, laam, and ba. See?”
She had tried to teach me the Lahm b’Ajin logo as well—pillars of Arabic letters in green over a background of sunny yellow stitched onto the left pocket of my apron; letters, if one looked at them from a distance, that took on the shape of a farmhouse and a silo. “Laam, ha, meem, ba, ain, jeem, ya, noon,” Zarin had said. “Repeat after me; it’s not so hard.”
The letters had swirled in my mind: the loops and slashes indecipherable from each other, joining to form meaningless squiggles. “I’m glad you told me what this means, Zarin, but I’m pretty sure it was a harmless prank. I don’t see why I have to learn this. What is the point?”
“The point? Are you serious? The point is you have to know this stuff! Knowledge is power, Porus. You can control people if you know their language. You can shut them up. I can teach you some swear words too, you know.”
She’d spewed out a series of words and phrases that made my ears heat up.
“Thanks, but I don’t think my boss would like that very much.”
“Oooooh, look at you blushing. Is it because I’m a girl?”
Now, inside my car, she sipped a bit of the soda—so delicate and ladylike that I could almost believe she was one. “Besides, if you were in trouble at work, you shouldn’t have come. I didn’t force you. I could’ve called someone else.”
Which was exactly what I was afraid of when it came to her: her absolute carelessness about who she went out with. Even when I told her about her GMC-driving boyfriend, about how I’d seen him hanging around Bilal, a boy with a reputation so bad that my boss had banned him from entering our store. “He’s a druggie,” I’d told her about Bilal. “He has some wasta high up with the authorities, which is why he hasn’t been arrested yet.”
She looked at me now and somehow sensed what I was thinking. “Abdullah isn’t a druggie,” she insisted, referring to the GMC boy by name for the first time. “He smokes and he is a jerk, but he doesn’t do drugs. In any case, I broke up with him, so you shouldn’t really worry about it anymore.”
On any other day, the news would have had me doing cartwheels. But there was a look on Zarin’s face that was so dejected it did little to lighten my heart. In the distance, the twin chimneys of the Jeddah desalination plant smoked plumes of gray into the orange sky. I stared out at them for a long moment, an odd prickling sensation at the back of my throat. “You broke up with him?” I asked finally. “When? I mean, what happened?”
She shrugged. “We were fighting anyway and then I found out that he was talking smack about me behind my back. When I confronted him about it over the phone last week, he didn’t even try to deny it. Got flustered and started harping about how I was leading him on and how much money he’d already spent on me, like I owed him or something. The pig.”
I said nothing. I had wondered for a long time if they’d gone further than kissing or touching, she and this Abdullah guy. Such things happened here, in hotel rooms, or in cars. “Fast-fast” the boys at the deli called those encounters. Even faster now with Skype and FaceTime added to the mix. “Boys and girls these days have no shame,” my boss lamented.
More than that, though, I wondered if she had liked Abdullah. Loved him, even.
“They don’t exist in real life,” Zarin said after a pause. “Guys like Shirin’s Farhad. Guys who do whatever they can unconditionally for some girl. Well, maybe your dad. But he was an exception. In real life, no guy would ever race after pickpockets, dig tunnels through mountains for a girl he barely knows. Heck, he wouldn’t even care if she was getting murdered. No one does anything in this world without some kind of expectation.”
She rolled down the window farther and tossed the half-finished Vimto out of it. It hit the tarmac with a clang and then rolled across the concrete until it fell over the edge into the water, leaving behind a puddle of grape-colored liquid.