Cold Calls

by Charles Benoit

  Shelly listened as they talked about her as if she wasn’t there. After what she went through at her last school, she was used to it. When they finished, she smiled at them and said, “We’ve got three days. Less than that. Then everyone learns the one thing we don’t want them to know. Now, unless you’ve got a better idea, this is where we start.”

  Three hours later, they walked out of the library. Eric was smiling when he said, “Well, that was a waste of time.”

  “No, we just didn’t solve it today, that’s all. We’ll try again tomorrow. I’m sure we’ll figure it out.”

  “I like your attitude,” Fatima said.

  Shelly smiled. “Thanks.”

  “I think you’re crazy, and I think we’re totally screwed, but I still like your attitude.”

  Eric thumped one of the rubber bands that held the rolled-up sheets of newsprint. “What should I do with this stuff?”

  “There’s no way I could bring that home,” Fatima said. “Way too many questions.” She waved at a silver SUV in the parking lot. “There’s my mom. Same time tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “I’ve got nothing else to do.”

  Fatima jogged out and climbed into the passenger seat, leaning over to kiss her mother on the cheek as the SUV drove away.

  “How much you wanna bet her horrible secret is that she held some guy’s hand?”

  “That’s a stereotype,” Shelly said. “Just because she’s a Muslim doesn’t mean it’s like that.”

  “Fine. How much you wanna bet?”

  “I’m a good Catholic girl. The only gambling I’m allowed to do is bingo. Come on, walk me over to the bus stop.”

  “I can give you a ride home.”

  “Thanks, but I like the bus,” Shelly said, starting down the sidewalk. “That’s where I do my best thinking.”

  He fell in step next to her, slowing his pace to match her shorter legs. “You think we’re going to figure out who it is?”

  “Honestly? No. Fatima’s right, we’re screwed.”

  “So why bother?”

  She shrugged. “What else are we supposed to do? Roll over and wait for it without even trying to save ourselves?”

  “It’s an option.”

  “I’d rather fail trying than succeed at not trying.”

  “That made no sense.”

  “Most things don’t,” she said. “Especially this. I’m telling you, it’s totally pissing me off. Don’t laugh—I’m serious.” She glanced over at him. “Tell me you’re not pissed.”

  “Definitely.”

  “And scared?”

  He hummed, then said, “A little, I guess.”

  “That’s it? Just a little?”

  “What do you want me to say? That I think about it all the time? That I’m up all night, puking ’cuz I’m so afraid of what could happen next?”

  “I would if I were you.”

  “You worry about yourself,” he said, balancing the rolled-up paper on the end of a finger. “I’m doing just fine.”

  She watched him as they walked, his hand steady, his eyes wide, the tip of his tongue poking out between his lips as he concentrated on keeping the paper upright. It was an act—she was sure of it—but he was playing it off pretty good. Shelly checked her phone. The number twenty-four bus was three minutes away. Just enough time. She closed her phone and said, “Has she seen it?”

  He kept his focus on the paper. “Who?”

  “Your girlfriend.”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Okay, your ex-girlfriend. Has she seen it?”

  The paper wobbled. “Has she seen what?”

  “The naked picture you took of her.”

  His finger twitched, and the paper tube dropped sideways. He grabbed for it with his left hand and missed. It bounced around on the sidewalk, and he stooped to pick it up. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Really? We’re gonna have to do this? You pretending you don’t know what I mean and me having to keep saying it?”

  Eric whacked the paper against a light pole. The roll bent a bit, a sooty scuff below a rubber band to mark where it hit.

  “It wasn’t hard to figure out,” Shelly said. “You said it was a picture, and it was on your phone, so odds are it was you who took it. And when Fatima asked if the caller was there when the picture was taken? You had that look guys get when they’re talking about sex.”

  He shook his head. “That’s just stupid.”

  “Trust me—girls know. When you’re with your friends and some cheerleader walks down the hall? We see the look you get.”

  “I don’t get some look—”

  “Not just you,” she said. “All guys. And that’s the look you had on your face when Fatima was asking you about the picture. Now, if it was a picture of you having sex with another guy—”

  “What?”

  “—you wouldn’t have smirked like that. That’s because you’re not openly gay—”

  “I’m not gay at all!”

  “—and if it was a picture of you and another guy having sex—”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “—you wouldn’t have shown any emotion, since you’d be trying to hide how you really felt. But you had that sex look, so I figure it was you and a girl.”

  “This is insane.”

  “And you have to be able to see her face in the picture. Or a tattoo. Something that would make her easy to identify. Oh, and it’s not just any girl. It’s somebody you care about. If it was only some quick hookup, you wouldn’t be so worried about the picture getting out. If it did, you’d be like, ‘Yeah, I hit it, no big deal.’”

  “No. I’m not like that.”

  “Sure you’re not,” Shelly said, digging through her backpack for her bus pass. “Anyway, that’s how I figured that the caller has a picture of your ex-girlfriend naked.” She looked up at him and smiled. “Right?”

  He started to say something, stopped, started again, then looked away.

  “At least that explains why you were so willing to dump mac and cheese on some kid,” Shelly said. “If I had a boyfriend and he took a naked picture of me and that picture got out? His life would be over. I mean it. I would destroy him.”

  “Gee, thanks. That makes me feel better.”

  “It was a shitty thing to do, you know.”

  “I’m not disagreeing,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, you’re not the only one around here who wants to crawl under a rock and disappear.”

  “Whatever it is you got, it can’t be worse than mine.”

  She laughed at that.

  Eric tapped her arm with the paper roll. “You wanna swap problems? I’d rather have to deal with your secret than mine.”

  “I seriously doubt that.”

  “Oh, I get it now,” he said, slapping his forehead. “You’re pregnant.”

  “I’m a virgin,” she said. “And that’s no big secret.” She laughed again and turned away as the number twenty-four bus pulled toward the curb.

  “Wait, I still want to swap,” Eric said, raising his voice to be heard over the bus’s hissing air brakes and clattering door. “Unless, of course, if you killed somebody.”

  Halfway into the bus, Shelly stopped, leaned back, and glared at him, her smile gone, her face hard, her dark brown eyes, black now, staring into his.

  Then she stepped inside, the doors snapped shut, and the bus pulled away.

  Eric’s mouth hung open as he stood alone on the sidewalk, the paper tube slipping from his fingers.

  Seventeen

  THE RULE IN THE EL-RAFIE HOUSE WAS THAT WHEN YOU got home from school, you sat at the kitchen table and did your homework until it was time for dinner or prayers, whichever came first. That night it would be dinner.

  Fatima sat in her father’s chair at the head of the table. At the other end, Haytham was busy solving for X, and halfway between them—and taking up the most room—Alya worked on col
oring inside the lines. At the stove, her mother stirred the pot of pasta sauce, overloaded with onions like everything she made.

  Fatima flipped the pages of her history book, the centuries flying by, her mind miles away. She had a full week to complete the work her teachers had sent home for her to do while she was suspended. It would take a couple of hours, tops, to get it all done. There was no need to rush.

  Besides, after Thursday, what happened in school wouldn’t matter much anymore. Fatima plopped her chin in her hand and looked around the room.

  There was Haytham, his hair a mess, pushing his glasses up his nose again and again.

  And Alya, her little fingers balled up around the busted crayon.

  Her mother, hijab off, her hair pulled back into a long black ponytail.

  And any minute now, the door opening, her father coming in, saying what he said every day he came home to find his family waiting.

  Alhamdillah.

  Thanks be to God.

  Right at that moment, it was all still the same.

  Like it had been for years.

  Like she always thought it would be, forever.

  She missed it already.

  She looked down at the textbook—notes in pen and pencil, squirreled between lines, in the whitespace around charts, across maps and over pictures of kings, presidents, wars, and ruins. Like every book she owned.

  It had started back in preschool, where she earned huge gold stars for her neat letters, mastering the whole alphabet before the rest of the class was up to E. Then the words came, and sentences, the ideas getting longer and more complex, her handwriting becoming more precise, the praise more addicting. By third grade, she didn’t need to be reminded to write things down, and she never lost points for not writing enough. She earned check-pluses in computer class, touch-typing coming easy, but given the option, it was always pen and paper over a keyboard. Around sixth grade, it became obsessive. No thought was too small to record, no space too tiny for more notes. At the end of every school year her parents would get a bill for the textbooks that she’d ruined, but the straight A’s and high-honor-roll certificates covered the cost, her peculiar habit a small price to pay for success.

  Then she went one book too far.

  Her mother rapped the wooden spoon against the edge of the pot. “You two, clean up your things, then go wash your hands. Fatima, stir this while I strain the spaghetti.”

  “It’ll be fine, Mom,” Fatima said. “Just let it simmer a bit.”

  “Suddenly you know how to cook? Come, stir,” her mother said, holding out the spoon.

  Fatima sighed with dramatic flair and took her place at the stove. Her brother and sister cleared the table, then raced down the hall to the bathroom.

  “So, tell me about your day,” her mother said, as if it was any old day and not the first day of the only suspension an El-Rafie had ever earned since before the time of the Prophet.

  “I did some research for my earth science project. It’s on soil erosion?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me? You need to speak properly if you expect people to take you seriously.”

  “My most excellent project, it is on the glorious process that geologists call soil erosion,” Fatima said, nailing the clipped tones of her mother’s accent.

  “Don’t get smart, young lady.”

  Fatima faked a smile and let it go.

  Then her mother said, “That girl and boy with you at the library. Who were they?”

  “I told you. They were in the tolerance-awareness program with me. Eric and Shelly.”

  “Quite a coincidence that you were all at the library at the same time.”

  Good point, Fatima thought, but said, “Not really. Their parents told them the same thing you and Dad told me. This isn’t a vacation: it’s punishment.”

  A cloud of steam rose up from the sink as her mother emptied the pot of spaghetti into the strainer. “What did they do at the library?”

  “School stuff, I guess. I didn’t ask.”

  “You be careful around them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean.”

  “Oh, please,” Fatima said, laughing. “They’re not evil or anything.”

  “Yes, I forgot. The best children get suspended most.”

  “Mom, they made a mistake, that’s all. Just like me.”

  “No,” her mother said, shaking the strainer. “Not just like you. They can afford to make mistakes. They can afford to get suspended. It’s not the same for you.”

  Because you’re a Muslim. It was assumed—always and with everything—the reality that shaped all other realities, the ultimate answer to any question.

  Why can’t I?

  Why should I?

  Why do I have to?

  Because you’re a Muslim.

  Simple, clear, comforting, and true.

  For as long as Fatima could remember, it had been enough.

  Then it wasn’t.

  “People see your name, see your hijab, they assume the worst. Wallah,” her mother said, eyes heavenward, her hand on her heart. “It is so, always.”

  Not always, Fatima thought. Sometimes, maybe even often, but not always.

  Her mother set the strainer in the sink and leaned against her daughter, her arm slipping around her tiny waist. Fatima felt the squeeze, heard the choked-back sigh, and kept her eyes on the spoon as she stirred the sauce.

  “Oh, habibti.”

  My baby.

  She knew there would be tears in her mother’s eyes, and she knew what would happen if she saw them. Fatima kept stirring.

  “Why, habibti? Why?”

  A tighter squeeze.

  “Calling that poor girl names like that . . .”

  Another choppy sigh.

  “Your father and I, we try our best . . .”

  Fatima sniffed, rubbing the back of her hand against her nose.

  “Is this the way we raised you, to treat people like that?”

  Fatima swallowed hard, whispered, “No, Mom.”

  “Oh, habibti. Why?”

  Fatima thought—

  I had no choice.

  Because if I didn’t, you and Daddy and Aunty Nisreen and Aunty Heba, Aunty Rehma and Uncle Ahmed, all the El-Rafies and all the Lobads, all the people at the Islamic Center, the families back in Egypt and the ones in London, everyone whose name and email address I had handwritten—compulsively, ridiculously—in the Hello Kitty address book you bought for me when I was twelve, all of you would know what none of you can know.

  What she said, in a voice so low her mother didn’t hear, was, “I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  The front door opened and a deep, laughing voice said, “Alhamdillah.” Haytham and Alya raced down the hall and through the kitchen to be the first to hug Daddy.

  “Promise me this,” her mother said, giving her one last squeeze. “Promise me you’ll never shame your family again.”

  Fatima closed her eyes. “I promise,” she said, knowing it was already broken.

  Eighteen

  EYES ON THE SCREEN, ERIC HEADED THE CORNER KICK from Ronaldo into the goal, putting Real Madrid up by three against Chelsea with ten minutes left to play, saying, “And—again—the crowd goes wild.”

  Through the headset, Duane said, “That’s because the refs didn’t call the offsides. Again.”

  “Spoken like a true loser.”

  “I do my winning on a real team,” Duane said.

  “Hilarious.”

  “What? Too soon?”

  The screen showed the goal again in slow motion.

  “Not too soon to bury you,” Eric said.

  The players were gathering at midfield for the restart when Eric heard the kitchen phone ring and, a moment later, his mother shouting his name, saying it was for him. Before, he wouldn’t have bothered, let his mom take a message. But that was before. “Gotta go,” he said as he logged out, then ran down the stairs.

  “Hey, E-ma
n. How’s it hanging?”

  Garrett.

  April’s brother.

  That was one call he wasn’t expecting.

  “Hey,” Eric said. “’Zup?”

  “Need a hand moving some furniture. You busy?”

  Later, when Eric thought about it, he realized it made no sense. Garrett lived in the dorm and it already had furniture. And if he needed help lifting stuff, there were plenty of guys there—guys who were much bigger than a high school junior. And Garrett knew a lot of big guys. But that was later, and when Garrett backed his Toyota out of the driveway, Eric wedged between two of those big guys in the back seat, he didn’t think anything about it.

  Garrett shouted a thanks-dude over the pounding music, and Eric shouted a no-problem, then nobody said anything as they made their way out of the subdivision, onto one street, then another, then a highway, then an off-ramp and another street, eventually turning onto a county road that led away from town. The front yards got bigger the farther they went, the houses set farther from the road, the standard-size suburban homes replaced by McMansions, then older farmhouses, then trailer parks, then lone trailers and low ranch houses every mile or so. They’d been on the road twenty minutes when Garrett turned off the music.

  “So, Eric, how’s soccer going?”

  It wasn’t.

  The coach had been there when the principal had suspended him, letting Eric know just how disappointed he was, telling Eric how he’d let the whole team down, how he’d tarnished the image of every athlete at the school. He talked about second chances, sure, and how next season Eric could start fresh, earn his way back to first string where he belonged, but that for this season he’d have to cheer his former teammates on from the stands. Three years ago, Garrett had been the team captain, and he kept in touch with the coach, so Eric was sure he knew all the details.

  “I got kicked off the team.”

  “Bummer,” said the big guy to his left.

  “Yeah, bummer,” said the one on the right.

  “Sorry to hear that,” Garrett said, not sounding sorry at all. “You staying in shape? Running, hitting the gym, that kind of stuff?”

  “It’s only been a couple of days.”

  “You’d be surprised at how fast you’ll get outta shape if you don’t keep at it,” Garrett said. “My advice is to set yourself up a training regimen. Do something every day, like you were still on the team. Weights, cardio. Mix it up. And stretching. Don’t forget to stretch.”