A Girl Like That(50)
“Have you ever considered that those stories may be rumors?” I asked angrily. “That they may have no basis in fact? Look, Porus, if you’re still angry about that kiss we had—”
“I’m not talking about that.” He gave me a disgusted look. “I’m trying to tell you that there’s no smoke without fire. I did not like your ex-boyfriend, but at least that guy had some scruples. Farhan Rizvi has none.”
“You don’t even know him!”
“And you don’t know how he was watching you at the deli. He’s not a good guy. Mark my words on this.”
How was he watching me? I would have asked if he hadn’t been so angry. Was it the way he had watched me at the fair all those years ago? Moments before head girl Durrani came waltzing in? The thought stirred me more than I would have liked to admit.
“No way,” Rizvi said, when I told him about the incident at the fair. “I would have remembered you for sure.”
It was a line, I knew. One he probably fed every other girl. I dealt with it by taking a drag of my cigarette and blowing smoke in his face. “That’ll teach you to forget me,” I said as he coughed.
My anger dissipated when I watched his eyes darken, the pupils dilating ever so slightly. A smile hovered on his face before he launched himself at me, the kisses deep and rough, the way I liked them. It scared me—this sexual pull he seemed to have on me—how it grew harder and harder to deny him from doing things that I would never have allowed Abdullah or any other guy to do.
“Stop!” I gasped out. I tugged at his fingers, removing them from where they’d been rubbing up against my underwear. “This is … It’s our second date, Farhan.”
His eyes hardened for a split second, but it happened so fast that I thought it was my imagination. He shook his head and laughed. “Chill, Zarin. You’re like a little cat at times. So skittish and ready to pounce. You need to relax a little more.”
Days later, there was a new rumor flying in school about him. About how he had gotten a Class IX girl pregnant several months before and how she’d had to be flown to India to get an abortion. The news had come from Mishal, who claimed to have read it on an online blog and then spread it across the classroom before the girl’s cousin, Maha Chowdhury, had any chance to do damage control. “It was a basic gallbladder operation!” she sputtered at Mishal. “You know how bad Jeddah water is! It gives you stones!”
“It g-gives y-you s-s-stones!” Mishal had mimicked back, which made most of her friends burst out laughing. “If it was that basic, it would’ve been cheaper to have the operation done here in Jeddah. Why fly to India for it?” The rest of the girls either watched in silence or went on with eating their lunch. No one interfered. It was the way things worked at Qala Academy, or at least in our classroom, when Mishal decided to sink her claws into someone.
“Stop it, Mishal,” I’d said when Maha burst into tears. I also told Mishal in no uncertain terms what she could do with herself and her rumors.
It was perhaps Mishal’s good fortune and my bad one that Khan Madam entered the class at that very moment to fetch her missing spectacles and heard my last sentence. I was made to kneel outside the classroom for the rest of the day with my arms in the air for “talking like a foul-mouthed ruffian!”
*
The trouble with rumors was that they had the tendency to stick. To coat over your logic like tea stains on teeth. What was even more troublesome was that there had been times in the past when they turned out to be accurate. Like the time Mishal told everyone about Chandni Chillarwalla running away from home to avoid getting engaged to a guy her parents wanted her to marry. Chandni herself confirmed the rumor a year later in a truth or dare game during a free period. The one about the head girl’s multiple boyfriends also appeared to be true. I had seen it for myself, long before, when I was in Class IX—Nadia slipping away from the line of girls trooping in through the school gates and into a strange car. Even the story Mishal had spread about me going out with that Syrian guy way back when had been true, though I never knew where she’d gotten that info from.
Of course, rumors often had a way of floating into the boys’ section. Here, they got screwed up to the point of ridiculousness. For instance, according to Farhan Rizvi, Chandni Chillarwalla did not run away to her friend’s house, but tried to elope with a secret boyfriend. Head girl Durrani not only had multiple boyfriends, but had also participated in a sex tape with a creepy guy from Qala Academy. As for me? I had gone out with two Syrian guys at the same time. And my cigarettes contained weed, not tobacco.
I laughed when Rizvi told me about this on our third date—in his e-mail he’d called it a late picnic lunch, which had turned out to be a large tray of barbecued chicken and French fries inside his car at the old Hanoody warehouse near Porus’s apartment building.
“Who told you this?” I tossed a chicken bone back into the tray. “I mean, weed? Seriously?”
Rizvi simply shrugged in response and laughed. His lips glistened with grease from the chicken. A bit of barbecue sauce clung to the edge of his mouth. If it had been Abdullah, I would have maybe raised a finger, playfully flicked the reddish-brown speck from the spot and put it on my tongue. With Rizvi, however, I didn’t. Something in his expression warned me against it, or maybe it was the rumors again, crawling insectlike under my skin.