“It’s not tarty, Simone. Do you think I’d let you walk out tarty? Hello? Are we forgetting that you’re being dressed by a girl who basically only needs to put sunblock on her hands and face?”
Simone groans in defeat.
“OK, OK. I’m just not used to wearing fitted tops.”
“You’ll look fabulous, stop stressing.”
“Simone! Stop fidgeting! The mascara’s smudging.”
“High heels, but not too high. Accentuates the calves.”
“I thought I was wearing pants?”
“So you’ll feel good knowing that your calves are accentuated. Dress for how it makes you feel as well as how it makes you look.”
“Amal, if you don’t shut up with the cheesy lines and stop making Simone fidget and twist in her chair I’m going to stick this mascara wand up your nose.”
That night Simone sends me a text message: WE KISSED.
45
I receive my exam results just as Ramadan ends and our three-day festival, Eid al-Fitr (Festival of Breaking the Fast), begins.
I get an A grade average for my exam results and send my parents into a dabke around the dinner table. My dad wants to photocopy my marks and put them in a photo frame. Excuse me? Maybe in another lifetime. I’m excited but there are some things that are beyond daggy.
The first day of Eid al-Fitr falls on a Tuesday in the last week of school. I’ve been granted permission to take the day off. I wake up early with Mum and Dad and pray the fajr. We don’t go back to sleep. We read the Koran together in our pyjamas for an hour and then we watch the sunrise from our veranda over cups of sweet mint tea. We have a couple of hours until we go to the mosque for the Eid prayers. We don’t have a mosque in our area but ever since I can remember we’ve attended the one in Preston. It’s the first mosque in Victoria and I’ve grown up listening to the sermons of the Imam there, who was one of the original founding members. He’s my all-time favourite. He has the most peaceful, gentle personality and a wicked sense of humour. Whenever I listen to him I feel uplifted and inspired.
My mum cooks up a massive breakfast for us while my dad rushes out to buy freshly baked bread. We then sit and devour falafals, scrambled eggs and minced meat with homous. After a month of tasting food only after sunset, it feels strange to be eating breakfast again. I always feel a little sad and nostalgic at Eid breakfast. Ramadan sure is hard but I really do love the whole atmosphere of it.
We’re running late to prayers because it takes me a while to get ready. I ironed my hijab but then it got static-infected and the shape wasn’t working and I was getting a migraine until Mum found the non-static spray and fixed the emergency before I committed hari-kari with the safety pin.
So now my dad is driving like a maniac as he tries to find parking in the street in which the mosque is located. My mum is lecturing him about speeding and how wrong it is to disobey traffic laws and endanger other people’s lives and does he really think that he can face God after ignoring the zebra stripes after the roundabout?
My dad eventually manages an appalling parallel park and we then power-walk to the mosque, getting stopped every five metres by friends wrapping us in huge hugs and greetings of peace and Kola Sana Winta Bikhair, “May every year bring you happiness”, or else the condensed version of “Happy Eid” (for Aussie-born Muslims like me who can’t pronounce Arabic to save their lives).
My dad gives us both a kiss and joins the men, and my mum and I join the women. We take a seat on the carpet, and ladies with donation buckets walk through the lines. After enduring a month’s reminder of what it means to be hungry and thirsty, everybody is quick to open their purses.
I notice Leila and her mum in the middle row and Mum and I move to sit beside them. It’s the first time we’ve seen Leila’s mum since she came to our house.
I know people don’t change overnight. I know that separating your upbringng from who you are is like trying to separate flour from butter in a cake. But there’s something different in Leila’s mum today; when she sees me she embraces me warmly, kissing me on the cheek and saying, “Eid Mubarak”, (another version of Happy Eid).
Then the call to prayer starts to sound through the loudspeakers, preparing us for the communal prayer where we thank God for the food we have after a month of fasting and pray for those without. It’s a haunting, beautiful reminder that the time has come to stand humble before God and I get goosepimples listening to it.
I glance over at Leila and her mum and I just know that they feel the same way.
All the stuff I said at the start of semester, about not caring about pimples, my body image, etc. It was all crap with a capital C. I wake up this morning, the last day of school, with a pus-filled zit the size of a golf ball in the worst geographical position possible: at the bottom tip of my right nostril. Consequently, I look like I have a piece of snot hanging from my nose. Just as I’m busting the pimple my mum walks in and proceeds to lecture me about facial scarring and leaving the pimple to dry out in its own time. I scream at her that she’s (a) ruining my life; (b) completely out of tune with the kingdom of teenagers; and (c) clearly intent on making me a social outcast for the rest of my school life. She gives me a what-can-I-do-with-my-rude-ignorant-daughter shrug and storms out of the bathroom, leaving me in peace to carry out my zit-removal operation.
I mean, who is she kidding? Theoretically I guess I do have a greater sense of my own individuality now. Even so, I’m not willing to commit social suicide by exiting the house, on the last day of Year Eleven, with a zit resembling a snot attached to my face for the entire school population to write up in our year book.
Fat lot of good all my efforts do. In home room I get the following comments: You need a tissue; When you chuck a sneeze, it’s nice to wipe up please; Woah! we need an aerial shot of that thing; Does it have a name?
The last two comments come from Adam. So I just pucker up and blow him a kiss. He can’t help but grin. The moment truly deserves a theme song.
At lunch time Adam, Eileen and I proceed to grill Simone and Josh about their date. But they both just blush and giggle and go into let’s-gaze-into-each-other’s-eyes mode. One thing Simone does tell us in between classes is that she’s quit smoking. Josh hates the smell on her. He also realized why she was doing it when he took her for pizza after the movie and she wanted to light up to avoid the garlic bread. Apparently he went ballistic and spent the rest of the night telling her how gorgeous she was the way she is. Eileen and I just about do cartwheels around the lockers.
So Josh and Simone are now a couple and as much as Eileen and I are thrilled for them, they’re in their own world and there are no visiting visas for us at this fresh stage. As for us single babes (self-esteem begins from within), we spend the rest of lunch time yelling at Adam to stop taking photos of us with his mobile phone. So far he’s taken three of my zit, a couple of Eileen’s eyelashes and one of his teeth (he had a bit of lettuce stuck and didn’t believe us so we told him to take a photo and see for himself). A pretty good tool if you don’t have a mirror handy.
During the day Ms Walsh approaches me and offers me belated congratulations for my best speaker award. OK, so I’m a nerd deep down, craving the approval of the big-shot principal, because for some reason my stomach goes all gooey and fuzzy. “You’ve made this educational institution proud,” she says.
“Well you never can quite predict what being institutionalized can do to a person,” I say, sticking my foot well and truly down my larynx.
For a second she looks at me suspiciously. But then she does something I’ve never seen her do before: she gives me a sincere and warm smile. “Rebuttal always was your good point,” she says. “Enjoy your holidays, Amal.”
I’m left standing in a dumbfounded trance.
After school, we all go to Timezone in the city and spend a month’s supply of pocket money trying to beat each other
at Daytona. It feels like the happiest of times. Even though Simone is still reading diet magazines. Even though I can get paranoid and oversensitive about how people react to my hijab. Even though Leila’s brother is a creep and she’s had a rough time. There are just moments captured in your life when you don’t seem to care about the “even thoughs”.
Things have changed for the better for Leila. She’s allowed to go out with us now and her mum is slowly relaxing. She’s even started taking an interest in what Leila’s learning at school. Leila brought home the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice for an English assignment and her mother watched it with her. Apparently she was very impressed with Mrs Bennet’s matchmaking skills.
I’m looking forward to the holidays. I’m looking forward to summer days and nights with Simone and Eileen. I’m looking forward to conversations with Adam. I’m looking forward to visiting Mrs Vaselli and watching her eyes rumba and salsa as she tells me the latest news about her son. I’m looking forward to watching Josh go completely ga-ga over Simone whenever she walks into the room. I’m looking forward to feasts with Aunt Cassandra and Uncle Tariq, daggy DVD nights with my parents, dreaming and laughing and going out and gossiping with Leila and Yasmeen.
Some people might find this ironic, but when I think about it, it’s mainly been the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie. To be a hyphenated Australian.
It’s been the “wogs”, the “nappy heads”, the “foreigners” the “persons of Middle Eastern appearance”, the Asians, the “oppressed” women, the Greek Orthodox pensioner chain-smoker, the “salami eaters”, the “ethnics”, the narrow-minded and the educated, the fair-dinkum wannabes, the principal with hairy ears who showed me that I am a colourful adjective. It’s their stories and confrontations and pains and joys which have empowered me to know myself, challenged me to embrace my identity as a young Australian-Palestinian-Muslim girl.
Anyway, I’ve decided I’m through with identity. The next chapter in my life isn’t going to so much as mention the word. Instead, I’ve decided I’ll write a new list. I’ve done To Wear or Not To Wear. I’ve had To Go To Court or Work In A Lab. I’m going traditional now. Straight to the source, right from the horse’s mouth.
To Be or Not To Be.
But you know what? This time I don’t need a list. I don’t even need to think about it. Because something tells me that I already know which side is going to win this one.
RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH is the author of the YA novels Does My Head Look Big in This?, Ten Things I Hate About Me, and Where the Streets Had a Name.
Her books are published around the world and she regularly gives talks and workshops at schools and writers’ festivals. Randa lives in Sydney, Australia, where she lives with her husband and their two children.
randaabdelfattah.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to Sheila Drummond for all her effort, enthusiasm and smiles! And I am grateful to Marion Lloyd for all her support, and for so faithfully understanding why I wrote this book.
Scholastic Children’s Books
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First published in Australia by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd, 2005
First published in the UK by Marion Lloyd Books, 2006
This electronic edition published by Scholastic Ltd, 2014
Text copyright © Randa Abdel-Fattah, 2005
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eISBN 978 1407 14812 0
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Does My Head Look Big in This? Page 25