A Girl Like That(7)

I sat on my bed and opened my Physics textbook. My friend, Abdullah called her, as if I was the only one who’d known her, as if she was a complete stranger to him.

“Mishal?”

“I’m studying!” I shouted back. “I have a test tomorrow!”

He fell silent. The days when he and I would run into each other’s rooms without knocking and drag the other out to watch something we’d seen on TV were long gone. In those days, Father lived with us on the weekends, playing games with Abdullah and me, sometimes even coaxing Mother to join us.

Of the two of us, Abdullah resembled Mother the most, with his wide mouth, his fair skin tanned by the Jeddah sun, and the black hair that curled around his head. Mother’s hair, on the other hand, was long; in her days as a student of classical music in India, she had often left it loose. “It was the first thing people noticed about me,” she said. “My hair, which hung to my hips.”

Hair that she had, after marrying my Saudi father, to tie up in braids and cover with scarves, never to be seen again by other men. “I didn’t mind,” she said when I asked her about it. “Your father married me against the wishes of his family, you know. They didn’t want him marrying a woman who wasn’t Saudi, even if she was a Muslim. I was very lucky.”

In the room next to mine, I heard the faint hum of Mother’s old CD player: a classical song I recognized from my childhood. When she was younger, my mother had played the sarangi, a stringed boxlike instrument that she’d brought with her from Lucknow to Jeddah after marriage. An instrument that she did not relinquish even after marrying my father, much to the general disapproval of his family. “I’ve already given up far too much,” she said.

She turned to her instrument more and more after Father married Jawahir, often growing frustrated by the lack of interest Abdullah and I showed in her music, not understanding that it was an alien language we both resented, a language that, to us, had had some mysterious hand in separating our parents into two houses. “Feel it, Mishal!” she would cry out in those days, often taking my hand and placing it over my heart. “Here, Mishal. Feel the music here.”

She noticed neither my grades nor Abdullah’s prolonged absences from home, a fact that Abdullah took full advantage of once Father bought him his first car, a GMC that he drove around in with his friends, sometimes not returning for two or three days.

At school, girls were often surprised to find out that Abdullah was my brother, which to me wasn’t that surprising. While my brother had inherited my mother’s looks, I had inherited my father’s, my skin as dark as his even though I did my best to keep out of the sun, my eyes large and protruding in a face that was much too long and thin.

“Your brother is so hot!” my classmates would gush whenever they got the chance. They hoped I would play matchmaker to their Bollywood dreams and give them a happy ending with a guy they’d stalked on Facebook and at the annual school fair that brought the boys and girls of Qala Academy out of their segregated buildings and into the enormous boys’-section parking lot.

Unlike the academy’s girls’ section in Aziziyah, where the courtyard was enclosed by four white buildings, leaving the school buses to line up outside the gates, the boys’ section’s parking lot remained open to the public and functioned as a soccer field during the school year. On fair days, it was the only plot of land the school administration considered large (and therefore safe) enough to accommodate hormonal males and females at the same time without pissing off the parents or the religious police.

“He snorts Pepsi through his nose,” I would tell some of these giggly girls, most times getting the grossed-out reaction I’d been hoping for—a yuck! or an eww! followed by an end to an irritating conversation. My brother chose his own girls, as far as I knew from snooping through his texts or from eavesdropping on the conversations he had with the friends he sometimes invited over to our house. He had a preference, I wanted to tell them, for blondes with big boobs.

The girls, of course, did not know this. They did not know of the magazine I’d come across in Abdullah’s room when I was thirteen, or what he’d told me when he saw me flipping through it, part fascinated, part horrified.

Instead, they called me names behind my back. Some even called me jealous, thinking that my feelings for Abdullah were more than sisterly: “She probably wants to keep him to herself.”

But no one had the courage to say those words to my face. Not only were they intimidated by my sharp tongue, they wanted my friendship for the information I provided to them—the gossip, the scandals, the stories I knew about everyone in school.

Except for Zarin, of course. The only girl Abdullah had ever asked me about, probably because she’d completely ignored him at the school fair when she was fifteen. The girl everyone in school would now discuss for ages for being found with a boy—evidence, they would call it, for the rumors that had been circulating around her. Zarin, a girl as scandalous in death as she had been in life, the memory of her etched into my skin like the bite she’d marked me with when we were both seven, in the courtyard behind the school bookstore.

My hand automatically went to my arm and rubbed at it even though the marks had long since faded.

The fight had begun with an innocent question spurred by that morning’s Social Studies lesson: “What are you? Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Jew?”