A Girl Like That(56)
Post-Rizvi, nightmares—especially those involving my mother—had become more frequent. In my dreams, my mother hummed softly the way she had on my fourth birthday, her fingers brushing the smooth marble wall of our apartment building in Jeddah. My mother, singing, deaf to my cries while I crawled naked in the stairwell after her, trying to evade the voices I could hear behind me—voices that laughed at me and called out my name.
Almost a week after the incident, I saw Rizvi inside the girls’ school, lounging against the wall outside the ground-floor auditorium, where he’d come to pick up Asma after our Physics mock exam. His hair was neatly combed and his head boy blazer was buttoned and pressed. His nose, I noticed with some satisfaction, was still in a splint. My heart tightened at the thought of Porus doing this. Going all Farhad over me even though I didn’t deserve it.
“Hey,” Rizvi called out to me, as if we were old friends or perhaps more. “How was your exam?”
Bile rose to my throat. I had fully intended to duck my head and walk away as quickly as possible, but the audacity with which he addressed me left me stunned for an instant, incapable of movement.
A few feet behind him, I noticed several girls from my class huddled together. They were staring at us and whispering among themselves, their post-exam discussions clearly forgotten. Mishal didn’t take part in the conversation. She had grown somewhat silent after Abdullah and I had broken up, completely ignoring me now that I was no longer associated with her brother. Sometimes, however, when I turned around, I would catch her watching me with a strange expression on her face. It was the way she was watching me now. Like I was a train wreck waiting to happen—a thing she couldn’t take her eyes off, even though the thought of it sickened her.
Without taking my eyes off Mishal, I unzipped my bag and pulled them out: a pair of knitting needles that glinted silver in the afternoon light, needles that I had carried with me ever since the incident in Rizvi’s car.
“Stay away from me,” I told him. It was as if another person had taken over me: a girl whose voice was cold and hard, one who could steadily hold something long and sharp inches away from a boy’s shocked eyes, even though everything else inside her was shaking. “If you come any closer, I’ll poke your eyes out.”
Rizvi’s mouth hardened. He forced a laugh. He raised his hands and slowly began to back away. “Chill, baby,” he said in a voice that would make its way back to the eavesdropping girls. “I wanted to say hello.”
“There’s no need to,” I said equally loudly. “I’ve already said good-bye.”
I stalked off, ignoring the girls who were now gawking at me with a mix of awe and resentment. Voices broke out behind me.
“Wha … Did she?”
“Why was she threatening him?”
“Wait a minute … Is she crying?”
Someone from the crowd called out my name. I broke into a run, scattering groups of girls, racing until I reached the very end of the long corridor and threw open the door to the girls’ bathroom. Ignoring the startled glance of a small Class IX girl brushing her hair in front of the mirror, I locked myself in a stall. Here, in a musty cubicle of four gray walls, surrounded by the sounds of ripping toilet paper, flushes, and running water, I finally allowed myself to convulse. To slide down the door with burning eyes, my cries muffled by the top of my backpack.
Porus
“I don’t know,” I heard my mother whisper over the phone in the living room. “He hasn’t told me a thing. Not one thing, Khorshed dear.”
Not one thing, despite her constant prodding. “What happened that day?” “You must tell me what happened, Porus. I am your mother!” “I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
What they really wanted to know was if something bad had happened. Something that would necessitate an abortion or marrying Zarin off as soon as possible.
“It was a debate,” I lied over and over again. “I’ve already told you this.”
But in truth, I did not know. Did not know for sure what had happened in the blank space of time between Khorshed Aunty’s panicked phone call to me at the deli and finding Zarin outside that warehouse, lying dazed in the black car, her white salwar scrunched around her ankles, Rizvi lying on top of her, his pants unzipped.
I saw him again, a week later, when I went to pick up Zarin from school, white tape holding the bridge of his nose, his lower lip still swollen. I wondered if the police had caught him lurking around the warehouse, if they had found any trace of the drug he used on Zarin. Though maybe he got rid of the evidence and they had to let him go.
It happened sometimes, my boss, Hamza, said. And it wasn’t always the police’s fault. “I have a friend. He’s a policeman, yeah? So many times he wants to keep a boy in jail. Alcohol—even drugs! But the boy’s father knows someone high up in the ministry and then khallas. Charges dropped! It’s about wasta, my friend. About who you know.”
My gut told me that the bad stuff had already happened, even though a week later Zarin told me she didn’t think anything had.
“What do you mean you don’t think anything happened?”
“Nothing that matters, okay?” she snarled. Her eyes were red and there were smudges under them. “I’m not exactly experienced in these matters, but I do believe there is supposed to be blood if something did. And there wasn’t.” Her hands shook in the split second before she fisted them. “No blood, no bruising. So you’re not saying a word. Not to anyone!”