Not the Girls You're Looking For

by Aminah Mae Safi

Lulu waited for an answer. Frogs hidden in the grass around the pool croaked in a vibrating, syncopated rhythm. A slow, heavy breeze blew through humid air. Better than nothing, but still sticky and frizz-inducing. A whispering, slithering sensation crawled up Lulu’s spine. She ought not to have confessed to him. She ought to have stayed hidden. She stared at the pool until her gaze went fuzzy and wide. Her vision transformed into a blur of blue and white light.

  “You’re different.”

  The pool snapped into focus. She turned to James. Keen, wide eyes watched her.

  Lulu took a deep breath, because Emma would have told her to take a deep breath. Emma Walker was always reminding Lulu to take deep breaths. But the deep breaths weren’t helping, and she wasn’t going to play this game and lose in public. She stood up, gripping the back of the nearest chair to steady herself. “Oh, what. Am I not like the other girls?”

  “That’s not what I said.” James frowned.

  Good. Lulu was snatching the conversation out from under him. He didn’t know it yet, but from watching his face, he sensed it. Lulu backed away from him. “Isn’t it?”

  James stood. He stared for a long moment. “You’re twisting my words.”

  He didn’t know the half of what she was capable of twisting. Lulu took one more step back. She could picture Emma’s disappointment, Audrey’s judgment, and Lo’s joy at the plan forming in her mind. “You said I was different. Not like the other girls. Not like everyone else you saw in there, including my best friends. Different. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes. No.” James took a step toward her, between her and the edge of the deep end. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Explain it to me, then. Since I’m too stupid to understand.” Lulu smiled so she could bare her teeth.

  James crossed his arms. “You know? I don’t think I will.”

  And that was it—Lulu’s cue.

  Lulu took two steps forward and she shoved James hard. Somehow he didn’t expect it. And then everything happened in slow motion. Lulu watched as he lost his balance and flailed once—no, twice—then splashed into the pool behind him. She smirked.

  Oops.

  Lulu watched for James to come up for air, but she didn’t see him. It was the deep end, after all. Maybe he had to swim to the surface. But she didn’t see any bubbles anymore. Lulu waited a beat. And another. He couldn’t have hit his head. The pool was too deep here, at least eight feet. She’d only been trying to push him away. Not harm him. She couldn’t kill a boy. Not tonight. And not this one.

  He still hadn’t come up for air, though.

  Lulu swallowed. She hadn’t marked the time when she’d pushed him in. Not that she remembered the difference between a normal amount of time or a not-normal amount of time to be submerged in a pool. That slithering down her spine made a tight grip on her breath, made her fingers tingle, made her head spin. There was only one thing left to do.

  Lulu dove in.

  She saw James at the bottom of the pool—his limbs sprawled out and his head down. Lulu grabbed for him and swam to the surface, kicking with all her might. She gasped when she reached the top. He was much heavier than she could have anticipated. Dead weight. Except he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead. It was not possible for him to be dead. No one was dead. Except the already dead people, wherever they were.

  Treading water in the middle of the pool, Lulu didn’t know what to do. He hadn’t gasped at the top. She didn’t see any blood—so maybe he hadn’t hit his head. Everything was fine. Tonight was going swimmingly. Lulu choked on a laugh. Chlorinated water burned through her nostrils.

  Why, oh why, hadn’t she paid attention the day they did CPR training. All she remembered was laughing as Lo licked the mannequin in front of the class. It had seemed terribly funny at the time. Not so, anymore. Lulu swam for the closest edge, the oversized boy filling her arms. Lulu didn’t know how she was going to hoist him over the tile ledge onto the concrete.

  That’s when James’s head snapped up and he looked straight at her. “Never be a lifeguard. I would’ve been dead sixty seconds ago.”

  Lulu had heard the expression “seeing red” before. But she’d never before had red flicker into the edges of her vision. Never known that her rage could light through her in that way. She scrambled out of the pool. James followed. He was laughing. She’d nearly killed him and he was laughing. Lulu put her hands on her knees. She almost vomited. She took two deep breaths. The nausea dissipated a little. One more deep breath and she found her footing again.

  “You!” she screamed. She tried to think of all the curses she knew in all the languages she knew them. But her mind blanked. All she could get out was, “You!”

  He was laughing harder now. Lulu didn’t think; she started swinging.

  “How. Dare. You.” She was punching wildly, but effectively. “I am going to kill you. Murder you. I thought I had killed you.”

  James had, by this point, put his arms up to cover his face. “Ouch! It was only a joke.”

  He backed away, making space between them. Lulu didn’t give chase. She stood there sopping wet and breathing heavy, her hands balled into fists.

  “Fair’s fair. You pushed me into the pool,” James said.

  “And there’s no way you did anything to deserve that!” Lulu’s voice echoed into the night.

  James remained silent on that point. The sound of dripping reverberated across the lawn. Lulu looked down. She was all wet. This was going to be difficult to explain. Particularly to Audrey’s mother. To any mother.

  Lulu did what she could given the situation: she gave him the finger. Then she stalked away with as much grace as she could muster. She could hear the sad sloshing against the pavement as she walked. It did not feel dignified. At least she hadn’t stuck out her tongue. That would have brought shame onto the family. She was her mother’s daughter; there were standards to be upheld. Lulu dripped her way through the house, grabbing her purse in the kitchen and heading out the door. Everybody stared. Lulu didn’t blame them. She held her chin high, though. At least she didn’t need to text Audrey to meet by the car. Rumor had worked faster than data service.

  Once Audrey caught sight of Lulu, she screeched, the disbelief raw on her throat. “You had better hope my mother is asleep.”

  Lulu’s hopes came to nothing. Mrs. Bachmann was wide-awake for the girls’ entrance. The night did not get any better from there.

  2

  Sins of Omission

  Sealy Hall was situated on the edge of a Houston neighborhood filled with stately homes, long winding driveways, and expansive manicured lawns. The kind of place where homeowners were routinely complimented on landscaping that they refused to do themselves. The school itself was a local institution—storied cloisters, a quadrangle, a chapel, and a dining hall—the real deal. An aging public school even sat catty-corner, perfectly situated to offset Sealy Hall’s institutional authority. That was a joke Lulu regularly told herself: she’d been institutionalized. She was being shaped into the spitting image of success.

  And voluntarily, too.

  She didn’t have the requisite last name, but she was being taught the rest. Many would be resentful of this. But Lulu knew her options in this world. She was the daughter of an immigrant and a Louisiana woman. Blending wasn’t a party trick. Blending was survival. Lulu took what Sealy Hall had to offer, with her eyes and hands open wide.

  The dining hall—not a cafeteria—sat at the bottom of the student center—an expansive space filled with intimate round tables. To foster discussion and camaraderie, that’s what the pamphlet said. The perfect size for gossip, was more of Lulu’s experience with the layout.

  “And then, I swear to God, I saw her give him a hickey. He’s going to have a purple mark on his neck for at least a week.” Lo—and nobody dared to call Dolores Campo Lola or, shudder to think, Lolita—sat cross-legged in her chair. Lo habitually took up more space than her body required.

  “We saw it all happen Saturday ni
ght. We don’t need a blow by blow.” Lulu stole a french fry off Audrey’s plate and ignored the resulting grimace.

  Lo, however, was a hurricane. She could not be stopped; she could only be weathered. She pushed her hands through her hair, deliberately mussing her tousled mane. “It’s not a blow, Lulu. It’s a suck. That causes capillary bruising. It’s just physics plus biology.”

  “Literally. How fascinating.” Lulu tried to take another fry but was blocked by Audrey’s strategically placed elbows.

  “Lulu’s just upset because she made out with Brian Connor this weekend.” Audrey’s eyes lit up with an inaudible laugh.

  One pilfered fry and Audrey had turned traitor. To think Lulu had taken the fall for her this weekend. Lulu took a deep breath. She hadn’t cared that night, not really, and she wouldn’t care now. Or at least, she cared in a different way than most people would anticipate. So she lied without ever actually lying. Her mother would call that a sin of omission.

  Lulu snorted. “Whatever.”

  Lo arched an eyebrow. “Whatever?”

  Emma Walker—two chairs over from Lulu—quietly watched her two friends. Her eyes flitted back and forth, taking in the scene. That was how Emma gauged threat levels.

  “It was an accident.” Lulu hoped a shrug might shake Lo off. It didn’t.

  “Then you’re kind of accident-prone, Daphne.” Satisfaction slid across Lo’s face.

  Lulu didn’t hesitate. “It’s danger-prone. If you’re referencing Scooby-Doo. It’s ‘Danger-Prone Daphne.’”

  That was as close to a “fuck you” as Lulu could get while they were still moderately supervised by the faculty. Lo knew it too, because her eyes narrowed and her chin tilted down. She was ready for a fight. Excellent. So was Lulu.

  “Why’d you do it anyways?” Emma asked, in a soft tone that still managed to carry across the table. She didn’t have to speak loudly to be heard, somehow, even among this group.

  Of all the friends, Emma Walker blended into the background the best. She took easy refuge in the shade of their personalities. Her romanticism—fed on a diet of fairy tales, Disney princesses, and Molly Ringwald movies—was of the incurable variety. And she stayed in the safe, comfortable groups of girls she had always known whenever they went out. Or stayed in. Or just sat in the dining hall for lunch. She was a creature of careful habits. She composed perfect bites of her lunch, cutting her cafeteria pizza into neat little squares.

  “He was there. I was there. It just happened, you know?” Lulu shrugged. A safe truth.

  Lo laughed, dry and full of pretention. “God. Lulu. You mess.”

  Lulu glared. “Better than constantly taking someone’s sloppy seconds.”

  Audrey gasped. Emma held her breath.

  Lo, however, laughed again. “Touché. At least I’m not the one who got grounded for falling into a pool.”

  “I did not fall,” said Lulu. “I pushed a boy in. He looked like he was drowning. I tried to save his life. I definitely did not fall into a pool.”

  “You still fell for his wily ways,” said Lo.

  “Like you could tell the difference between a fake drowning and a real drowning.” Lulu rolled her eyes.

  “Maybe.” Lo turned away from Lulu’s incredulity. “And anyway, you getting grounded is the worst because there’s a battle of the bands this week. It’s gonna be epic, y’all.”

  Lo leaned back magnificently, but as the front legs of her chair kicked out, the back of it ran into an unsuspecting freshman girl. Lo, of course, landed back on her feet. The poor girl, however, toppled over with a near-comedic finesse—arms akimbo, legs sprawled, the remains of a cornbread muffin flying. For a moment the area around the table went as silent as any room Lulu walked into the day after she’d had a particularly notable hook-up.

  Emma was the first to reach out. “Are you okay?”

  “It’s fine.” The girl, still plopped on the floor, began by straightening out her bangs. “I’m fine.”

  “Of course it’s not fine. Lo’s an absolute brute.” Emma tsked.

  “Hey!” cried Lo, but she was ignored.

  “She legit has no sense of where she is in space at all. Ever.” Emma reached her hand out farther.

  This time the girl took it. She got to her feet and straightened her skirt. The corners of her mouth had turned up into a hint of a smile. “Thanks.”

  Emma smiled, bright and earnest. “Anytime.”

  The girl walked off, meeting back up with a friend a few paces away. She exited the dining hall, turning around once to meet Emma’s eye.

  Lo tapped her finger against the table. “As I was saying. Before I was interrupted.”

  Lulu and Audrey shared a quick glance. Lo could be so self-important.

  “Nina Holmes told me about the Battle of the Bands.” Lo’s eyes, gleaming with possibility, danced around the table. When they stopped finally, they rested on Lulu. “And you’re going to miss it.”

  Lulu refused to be cowed by this. “Didn’t Nina puke all over the lawn on Saturday?”

  “Yes, but this was before the puking, not after.” Lo slurped her Coke.

  Lulu did her best to stand her ground. “Whatever.”

  Lo didn’t break her focus. This expression—where her eyebrows pushed together and her mouth found a firm line and her eyes locked onto their target—was why so many people would follow Lo anywhere. Or run from her when they saw her headed their way. “Figure it out, Lulu. We’re all going on Thursday. You’re clever enough to get out of anything. Including a grounding.”

  Of that, however, Lulu was not so sure.

  * * *

  If asked, Lulu would have admitted that the purpose of being grounded was inconvenience. Trouble now meant a loss of privilege later. It was, in many ways, the perfect punishment for the sins of instant gratification. But this particular grounding had come at an especially inconvenient time. And the way out was murky.

  The youngest of three, Lulu often went to her father to get her out of trouble. But Ahmed Saad didn’t know she was grounded this time. This was partly because Lulu’s mother, Aimee Saad, was quick to punish but slow to tell. The effects of her own upbringing, no doubt. This was also because Aimee had learned the hard way about Lulu’s persistent commitment to reversing her punishments.

  Desperate and wishful of a distraction, Lulu swiveled back and forth in the desk chair in her room. But Lulu should have been more careful. Once, her grandmother had told her wishes were the province of the jinn and, like gifts from faeries, were not to be trusted or taken so lightly.

  “Lulu, phone,” said her mother, waltzing into Lulu’s room like she owned the place. Considering her name was on the mortgage, she did own the place, but it didn’t soothe Lulu’s injured pride to think about it that way. Her mother laughed, as though the voice on the other end had told a joke, then held out the phone for Lulu to take. Lulu noticed a newspaper in her mother’s other hand.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s your grandmother.”

  “Which grandmother?” It was a petty question, and Lulu knew better than to ask it. But a pit had fallen into Lulu’s stomach. She took back her wish for a distraction. She tried to look busy with a textbook.

  The only reason Aimee’s people had tolerated her unorthodox marriage to a Muslim and an immigrant was the stern-fisted will of Lulu’s other grandmother. Mimi the Matriarch—a Louisiana spitfire if there ever was one—had held her family together, if not always with love then with purpose and determination. It hadn’t quite been kindness. She had refused to acknowledge arguments from either side. To Mimi, family was family. She’d hear of nothing else but mutual toleration. The Saads would be invited and they would stay silent and behave while the Natales fed them a feast of seven fishes and hundreds of insults. When Mimi had died, Aimee’s people had stopped inviting the Saads for Christmas. When Mimi had died, Aimee took off the gold cross she’d worn at her neck since first communion. She had never put it back on again. When Mimi had
died, the rest of the Saads knew not to bring her up unless Aimee did so first.

  Lulu’s mama stared. The laughter was gone now. “The only grandmother you’ve got left, darlin’. Your bibi.”

  Lulu swallowed the guilt collecting in her throat. Her mother didn’t even speak Arabic, and yet Bibi was always making Lulu’s mother laugh. There was a strange camaraderie there she didn’t understand. Lulu took the phone. Her mother turned and left the room, leaving the door open as she went.

  “Hello?”

  “Halloo,” bounced back a thickly accented echo into Lulu’s ear.

  “Hello?” There were times when Lulu could only be relieved at having no obligation to say anything other than hello and good-bye to her father’s mother. She’d already lived through the dark side of a family that perfectly understands one another. Other times, like today, regret that she couldn’t communicate a full sentence with her grandmother overshadowed all of Lulu’s thoughts.

  “Halloo!” Static traipsed across her grandmother’s answer.

  Lulu cradled the phone to her ear with her shoulder. She grabbed a pen and began doodling across her arm. “Bibi?”

  “Hallo, Bibi!” the crackled voice responded, distorted across continents and wires until it ought to have been unintelligible.

  Lulu thought a good deal on the repetitive nature of her phone conversations with her family overseas. She’d narrowed down the potential culprit to any of these: poor transmission, linguistic barrier, or a cultural difference in handling the telephone. Maybe all three. A large piece of her needed a definitive answer. But, truth be told, she’d never asked anyone else if their experience was the same. Anytime she got close, the question sounded so foolish. So she’d stayed silent, waiting to see if she could figure it out on her own.

  “How are you?” Lulu swirled and whirled the pen across her arm, leaving a trail of ink in its wake.

  “Kefiq ya, habibti?” Love and care radiated out of her grandmother’s voice. She had a warm, gruff cadence.

  The pen caught on Lulu’s forearm, skidding across her skin. Lulu set it down. “Zienna, Bibi. Wa anti?”