A Girl Like That(66)



“I do not know what is wrong with you because you won’t tell me.” Masa’s voice had been curt, cold. “But I am not going to have you sitting around the house like this. You must go back to school. Get back into the routine of doing normal things.”

I’d agreed because of how stressed Masa had looked. After she’d finally agreed to take the medicine Masa had given her, Masi had slept for nearly a whole day, her guttural snores breaking the silence inside the apartment. Masa, who had taken the day off work, had spent most of it in front of the television, staring at the blank screen. He did not speak to me, except to announce lunch and dinner and later in the evening to tell me that I was going back to school the next day.

Alisha’s smile slipped off her face. “Luckily you didn’t miss much. They were revising old stuff for the last two days.”

My fingers tightened into fists. “Good.”

“Yeah.” There was a pause. “Zarin, I’ve been meaning to ask you.” She bit her lip and I knew then that this had been planned, that my classmates had probably recruited her to do the dirty work and ask the question no one else had bothered, or perhaps dared, to ask. “Those rumors.” Her voice was so soft that it was nearly breathless. “Are they really true?”

Rumors scribbled on bathroom walls and social media feeds and forwarded repeatedly over e-mails. Rumors that had random boys calling me at home and sending me messages, filling up my inbox with lewd pictures and propositions. I was surprised they hadn’t discovered my cell number yet, but then I had never given the number to Rizvi and, for some reason, Abdullah had not leaked the information to his friends.

“I don’t want to talk about this.” I tried to move around Alisha, but she held out an arm to stop me.

“Please, Zarin. Some of us have been talking about this and we want to help you. We are really concerned about what is happening and—”

“If you really were trying to help me, you would mind your business instead of discussing this nonsense over and over again,” I said sharply. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you gossiping with the rest of them and then going silent when I enter the classroom. You say you are concerned about me, but what you really want is fodder for your silly little debates with Layla and Mishal.”

Alisha went pale. A shadow fell between us.

“Leave it.” Layla put a hand on the other girl’s arm. She gave me a disgusted glance. “Leave her alone.”

I watched them turn around and walk back into the classroom in silence. I did not feel guilty about speaking the way I had to Alisha, for piercing through her fake sympathy. At the end of the day, she was like the rest of them, digging around for a fresh piece of gossip.

I could feel the other girls staring at me as I walked to my desk in the back.

The legs of my chair scraped the floor. I was about to sit down when I heard a giggle. Instinctively I looked at the chair. Someone had made a crude drawing of a penis inches away from a girl’s mouth and taped it to the wooden seat. Hisses, muffled laughs when I ripped the picture off the chair and crumpled it into a ball, stuffing it into the deepest recesses of my bag.

“What’s the joke?” the Math teacher roared from the front. “Behave yourself, Layla Sharif, or I will throw you out of this classroom!”

I did not look at them. Instead, I opened my school planner and studied the words I’d scribbled last week—the topic Khan Madam had assigned us for our oral exams. It was a formal introduction that would have us speaking about ourselves for a minute or less—without the aid of a paper or cue cards—an exercise that Khan Madam said would be useful when we were older and giving job interviews. Be truthful about yourself and your accomplishments; do not make up stories, the instructions said. However, you may talk about something you wish to accomplish in your life and how you plan to go about the same.

A simple assignment that on any other day I would have breezed through without any preparation. Now I struggled with it, writing out sentences, scratching them out, ignoring the Math teacher, who was going through the problems that had come up during the mock exams last week. By the time the bell rang for English period, I had a page full of black marks and the following words: Zarin Wadia. Age sixteen. Student. The truth, without any embellishments. The truth that I could bear to relay on paper.

Khan Madam smiled when my turn came. “Okay, Zarin,” she said. “Time to tell the class a little bit about yourself.”

I left the paper on the desk and slowly made my way to the front of the room. A trick to making speeches, Khan Madam had told us once, was to find your focal point. That one member in the audience who seemed to be listening—“sympathetically,” Khan Madam called it. A listener whose opinions were malleable, whose judgment could be persuaded to match yours. Today, however, the faces were blank and hostile, none of them standing out to me. Sympathy was out of the question.

“My name is Zarin Wadia,” I said. “Who am I? Well, that’s an interesting question.”

My eyes fell on Mishal. She was leaning forward, her elbows on her desk, staring at me with her sharp eyes, almost as if she was curious about what I had to say.

“When I was seven years old, I pretended that I was a different person,” I said, remembering our fight on the playground. “Someone who had a different sort of life. It was a silly thing to do, I know this now, but the trouble then was that I did not know where I came from. Our roots are often a source of pride for us; mine were a constant source of shame. Shame was an emotion I didn’t quite understand back then. Oh, I felt it, the way every child feels it. Some people hide, some people fight to cover up their shame. I was always the kind of person who fought. But recent events in my life have made me go into hiding and it hasn’t been easy.”

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