Not the Girls You're Looking For

by Aminah Mae Safi

  “Not on your breath.”

  “Ah, you see. That’s why I’ve brought backup.” Miriam pulled out a layer of raw onion and a piece of feta cheese that she’d wrapped up in a bit of flatbread.

  Lulu laughed. That, she knew, would obscure the scent well enough. “You’re a professional.”

  “God, you have to be, don’t you?” said Miriam on an exhale.

  “Pretty much.”

  “How was Dina? And Tamra?” More smoke snorted out of Miriam’s nose, like a giggling dragon.

  “The same.” Lulu shrugged it off, but badly. Her voice sharpened slightly as she continued on with what she had earlier maintained she would keep only to herself. “Can you believe it? Tamra actually had the balls to ask me if I would fast? As if I don’t do it every year. As if this whole shindig isn’t supposed to be marking the beginning of Ramadan. As if.”

  “Jesus.” Miriam clucked distastefully. “I mean, I don’t. But Jesus.”

  “I know,” said Lulu.

  “Well.” Miriam picked at her teeth as she appraised Lulu. “I could be like my mom and tell you she’s just jealous of you.” She tipped the cigarette in her fingertips toward Lulu.

  Lulu declined the offer. “You know she’s not, though.”

  “True. But there’s something about someone going that far out of their way to make you miserable.”

  “There is, isn’t there?” said Lulu.

  Miriam’s eyes lit with a humor Lulu understood all too well. “I mean, if she didn’t, I don’t know. I wouldn’t feel special anymore.”

  “God, that’s depressing. Isn’t it?” said Lulu.

  Miriam shrugged. “Maybe.”

  At that moment, they heard a yelling, singsong voice vibrating in the distance. It sounded like it was moving toward them, and rapidly.

  “Oh God, is that your mom?” Lulu eyed Miriam’s still-lit cigarette.

  “Shit. She calling my name? She is, isn’t she? She’s the only one who can make my name sound like one of those goddamn tongue trills. She’s not even Arab.” Miriam hastily stubbed out the cigarette, trying to dig it a small burial hole with her shoe, then popped the whole bread-onion-cheese wrap into her mouth. She chewed, shouting in barely intelligible words back to the voice. “Coming, Mom! I was on the swing!”

  Lulu laughed at the sight of her. She wondered how Miriam would fare at passing off the cigarette smell to Ame Nadia. Lulu had a pang of her own worry at being discovered smelling like smoke. But she knew she too could shrug off the blame of the smell onto the men who smoked, and her mother would be none the wiser. Indeed, Aimee might pity poor Lulu for having to put up with such a stench all around her.

  Lulu’s teetering grew into a full swinging. She pumped her legs faster, pushing her body higher. Swinging gave her the elation of a pilgrim in the Holy Land, allowed through the gates of Mecca and filled with joy. But Lulu lacked any knowledge of the rites she needed to perform—a girl allowed to participate in cotillion but who had never been taught to dance. A stranger in a familiar place. And as she swung herself to the precipice of the swing’s arc, she leaped. Her body soared through the air and she landed on her feet. She always landed on her feet. She couldn’t have thought of another eventuality.

  Lulu went back into the house, her best and most winning smile pasted across her face. She would not be defeated. Not even by her own ire. Not this time, at least.

  5

  Hunger Pangs

  The strange yellow light from the street lamps outside poured through Lulu’s window the next morning. Still half-asleep, she could smell the beginnings of breakfast cooking downstairs, sweet coconut oil mingling with onions and tortillas. The scent was simultaneously intoxicating and nauseating. Lulu’s door cracked open with a slow creak. Aimee’s head peeked in.

  “Coming down, darling?” her mother twanged—Louisiana nasal peppered with twenty years in the Lone Star State. Her own personal accent.

  Lulu grunted, and her mother abandoned the door, leaving it wide open. The light from the hall pulsed in Lulu’s eyes. As she rolled out of bed, she smacked her lips—her mouth tasting stale and unclean. She trudged down the steps, smushing her body into a seat when she reached the table. No god was worth this.

  Her baba, chipper as can be, looked over his newspaper and said, “How’s school, habibti?”

  “No.” Lulu shook her head.

  “Come and get it!” Aimee called, interrupting the tender moment.

  Ahmed got up to grab himself a helping. Lulu sat there, contemplating the existential purpose of her plate.

  Aimee sat down in her usual place and coughed lightly. She didn’t fast, but she ate early-morning breakfast in solidarity. “Food is ready, darling. You ought to go grab some before the eggs are cold. There’s cheese to the side of the burner if you want any.”

  Lulu grabbed her plate and stood up, pausing through her momentary confusion, then walked into the kitchen. She flopped the food onto her plate with the provided spatula. She lumped some cheese on her dish. She sat herself back down, and had to rest her head in her hand before attempting to eat the food in front of her. Her stomach growled and revolted, all at once.

  “What subjects do you have today?” Ahmed Saad was a dauntless man who had survived a dictatorship and a war zone. His daughter’s predawn mood did little to discourage his naturally gregarious morning manner.

  “All of them.” Lulu shoved an enormous bite into her mouth in an attempt to end the conversation. All she wanted was silence and sleep.

  “Do you have tests?” he asked.

  “No.” Lulu continued shoveling food into her mouth in a perfunctory manner—all for a future need of fuel and none for any pleasure. “It’s a quiz.”

  “What quiz?” he asked.

  “History.”

  “What unit do you study?” Again from her baba, because her mother had the good sense to speak as little as possible to Lulu before dawn.

  “I don’t know.” Lulu didn’t want to think about the answer. But she took in her father’s expression, and she had to find a better response than the one she had already given. “Somewhere right after the War of 1812.”

  “Ah, fledgling democracy. Such a fascinating thing.” Her baba spoke in a tone that indicated he teetered on the precipice between at least two different histories. Either way, a lecture was at hand. He was, after all, Professor Saad.

  Lulu held in her groan. Or at least, she hoped she had. “I guess.”

  As a little girl, Lulu had listened to the way her father’s rumbling voice would rise and fall with the triumphs and woes of historical players, as though histories were fairy tales. She’d been taught these stories rather than those of dragon slayers and white knights. This morning, though, Lulu gripped her head to steady the dizzying sensation she was experiencing. She didn’t want to think about US History. Or any history.

  “The birth of American nationalism, to have won ‘The Second War of Independence,’ though, who can really say if they did. More like a three-way draw.” Her father was quite excited. And he was only warming up. His lecture could travel anywhere: the historical significance of the nationalist fervor of the nineteenth century, a desire to correct anyone who called the War for Independence the “American Revolution,” or how most Americans didn’t remember that at one point they had, in fact, gone to war with Canada.

  Lulu had heard each of these enough that her patience with them was, on her best days, thin. She pushed the food on her plate around with her fork. Her stomach clenched with morning hunger sated earlier than anticipated. “I know.”

  “The real losers, though, were all the American Indians who lost their autonomy in this quest for territory, nationalism, and the beginning of feelings of manifest destiny.”

  Lulu took a final bite of her breakfast. “I know.”

  “It’s why the border at Canada is demilitarized.”

  Lulu slumped over herself. This was a battle she wouldn’t win.

  “For heaven’s s
ake, Lulu, sit up. Sometimes you are so dramatic,” Aimee said from across the table.

  Lulu sat back up. Ahmed continued to tuck into his breakfast, apparently undisturbed. The lecture, at least, had been forestalled.

  * * *

  That morning in US History, Lulu learned genocide could earn a president a spot on the currency if framed properly. In English, Lulu learned that the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg were always watching. In physics, she learned that she was constantly pushing up against sound waves. In French, Lulu learned exactly how her hunger could get the better of her.

  A hand slapped down on Lulu’s desk. She jolted. An owlish face hovered above her. Madame Perault was what one would picture in a French teacher—exacting and politely aggressive, with a perfectly tame coiffure and red nails sharpened as though they were talons. Lulu wasn’t intimidated by many people, but Perault frightened her on a primal level.

  “What’s going on?” said Perault in her native French.

  “Pardon, madame?” Lulu swallowed hard, but she didn’t break eye contact.

  “Your book. Where is your book?” Madame Perault maintained her steely, wide-eyed stare. She tapped a single nail across Lulu’s desk. Rat-a-tap-tap.

  Lulu shuddered. Being hungry led to all sorts of carelessness. Not that she could explain that to Perault. “I left it.”

  “And so you think you can leave your book whenever you like? And me, what would happen if I left my materials for class, eh? What kind of class could I teach then? Do not you think it is acceptable to leave your books for class, no?” Perault went on, still in French.

  Unanswerable questions were a strength of the French language and a decided advantage in this world for the native French instructor. Lulu half gurgled a noise as she grappled for the proper word in French to answer a negative question. Still, Lulu maintained eye contact. It was better that way.

  Perault squinted. Desperate, Lulu shook her head.

  Perault’s nail, mercifully, stopped tapping. She stood, then waved her hand in Lulu’s direction. “Alors, partagez avec votre voisin.”

  Lulu sighed as she looked over to her neighbor. Dane Anderson currently sat sprawled across his chair, his leg carelessly intruding into Lulu’s space. Lulu eyed the offending limb with a narrowed gaze. She couldn’t believe he was on track to graduate in the spring. He must have been hanging on by a mere thread. And a year behind his peers in language class. Lucky him, he only needed three years’ credit of French to graduate. Anderson caught Lulu looking and despite her scowl, or maybe because of it, he winked.

  Lulu turned away. Attempting to reclaim her space, she kicked her book bag over, toward his leg. Her bag wobbled instead, toppling back onto her feet after ricocheting off Anderson’s impossibly, annoyingly steady calf. Lulu wanted nothing more than to grunt out her frustrations, but she suppressed the noise before it could escape and draw further attention from Madame Perault.

  “Share with me?” Lulu asked.

  “Sure,” he said, in a way that implied her request hadn’t been for a book at all. Dane stretched out, long and lean. He arched his back against his desk chair, exposing a sliver of stomach and a dusting of hair that Lulu wished she had never seen. Some parts of Dane Anderson’s body ought to come with warning labels. Most parts, honestly. Lulu was too hungry to deal with this sort of visual onslaught. It was cruelly unfair that one kind of fasting made her other appetites that much more gluttonous. Not that she was supposed to entertain any physical appetite, while the sun was up.

  As Perault’s lecture began, Lulu leaned over Dane’s desk. He flicked Lulu’s arm. She ignored it. A few moments later he flicked the spot again. Lulu pulled her shoulder away pointedly. Dane flicked her ear.

  Lulu turned to him, a wide-eyed imitation of Madame Perault’s owlish expression. “Seriously?”

  He grinned. “It was funny.”

  Madame Perault looked up and locked eyes with Lulu. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, madame.” Lulu arranged her face to perfect passivity. “I was showing him about the verbs, madame.”

  Hawk-eyes appraised Lulu, but Perault moved onward, sweeping through the class. Lulu breathed the tiniest sigh of relief before succumbing to her angry thoughts. Whenever Lulu was caught talking to a boy, she was at fault. She tensed her grip around her pen. Next to her, Anderson didn’t look remotely chastised. In fact, judging by his casually crossed arms and the rakish lean to his back, he sat quite satisfied.

  Despite the uncertainty of her safety, Lulu leaned over the book again. She was trying to follow along with Perault’s lecture. Trying and failing. She was nearly as close to Dane as she had been that night in the hallway two weeks ago. Dane Anderson was everything Lulu was supposed to want, and she had enough experience to know better than to try.

  Unfortunately, there was a perverse, inverse relationship between what her head knew and what her body responded to. He was a hot pan and she was curious enough to see what would happen if she touched it. Danger flickered in all-red letters across her mind. She felt herself lean in farther, and she knew she wasn’t getting any better of a look of the text in the book.

  “Get a good eyeful?” he asked, a whisper in her ear.

  Lulu jumped. “Pax, Anderson. French class truce?”

  Dane flicked the edge of her hair. “Peace, I hate the word.”

  Lulu pulled her hair back with a spare rubber band on her wrist. “Please don’t quote Shakespeare. You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “I was quoting John Leguizamo.” Dane pulled at the end of her ponytail. “But I understand. Playing hard to get.”

  Lulu forced her attention forward—on Perault and the lecture at hand. A small bit of folded paper popped onto the top corner of Lulu’s desk. She covered it immediately with her hand. She didn’t need to turn to see who had written her. Neatly, and nearly microscopically, printed across the bit of paper were the words: What up btwn u and Denair?

  Lulu quickly scratched a message on the back of the same paper. Perault turned then, and Lulu made to look like she was taking a grammatical note in her notebook. Perault swept by, continuing her lecture.

  Lulu released a breath she didn’t know she was holding and flicked her response perfectly back onto Dane’s desk. Who?

  Dane tossed his response into Lulu’s lap. Perault’s lecture carried her toward Lulu’s desk, and Lulu was forced to crumple the note into the waistband of her uniform skirt to hide the evidence. Perault, ever keen, sensed rather than saw that misbehavior was afoot. Lulu had to answer several questions perfectly before the teacher would leave her alone.

  Ur heartless. My buddy James. He looked smitten at the bar.

  Anderson couldn’t mean that as a compliment.

  Lulu wrote back on a new bit of paper, in her prettiest, loopiest handwriting. Maybe. Or maybe I’m the smitten kitten.

  Admitting to liking a near stranger she would likely never see again seemed safer than having to go on the defensive about how she handled her physical and not-so-romantic entanglements. Her track record there wasn’t a defendable position, not as a girl. Dane’s was worse, mind you. But it didn’t matter. Dane Anderson had the high ground in the fight because he was a boy, and Lulu was stuck in a muddy, swampy, wide-open field of girlhood. She was easy pickings and they both knew it. And Anderson seemed determined to keep turning their conversation toward an argument so clearly stacked in his favor. Lulu’s resentment of this ran so deeply within her, she almost didn’t notice the feeling.

  Doubtful. Ur not the type.

  That blow landed. Lulu wanted to inflict discomfort, if not pain, right back. Why? You jealous?

  Dane leaned across her book again, and started writing. He blotted it out immediately, then rewrote his retort, but not before Lulu caught a glimpse of the words please and delusional. Lulu frowned, turning her attention away from him. As Lulu kept watch on Perault, Dane ripped out what he wrote. Then, instead of passing it to her, he slid his response under her leg. Lulu jolted from the cont
act. She hunched protectively away from Dane as she retrieved the note. This wasn’t a game she wanted to play anymore.

  Nope. Ur lying.

  In her usual temper, perhaps Lulu might have backed down. But she was seven hours into her first day of fasting. She dug her heels in; she would not lose. The edges of Dane’s mouth pulled up with sardonic pleasure.

  Lulu only knew of one way to wipe the expression off his face. She dropped her next note at his feet. Gimme his info.

  Dane raised an eyebrow, but he quickly fetched the information on his phone. Lulu quietly grabbed the phone out of his hands, then, placing it beside her own phone, began typing.

  Hey it’s Lulu wanna grab some coffee sometime?

  Her indignation still flooding through her, Lulu stared at Dane, flashing him her phone and the message’s recipient. At that, Dane’s face fell slightly. Clicking her phone locked, she taunted him with a smirk.

  That’s when her phone buzzed in her lap. Lulu turned away, giving Dane no chance to see the panic that flooded through her at that moment. She had asked someone she hated on a date to prove Dane Anderson wrong on a point of honor that she couldn’t quite understand anymore. She had, for a moment, a faint hope that she’d be rejected.

  Sure. Tomorrow?

  Lulu thought she might be sick, but that was probably just a hunger pang. She confirmed the appointment. Perault approached then, and Lulu clamped her legs shut to hide the phone in the folds of her skirt. She winced from the pain of the casing jamming into her knee. Perault’s face froze into a hard stare. Lulu prepared herself for what seemed inevitable. Instead Lulu’s essay slapped hard against her desk. Perault moved on to the next paper in the stack. Lulu could have melted into her desk in relief. At least one thing had gone right.

  The bell rang and the room filled with the sound of books, papers, and book bags chattering together as their disgruntled owners slinked out of class.

  “How’d you do that?”

  Lulu looked up to find Dane peering over her shoulder at her grade. Lulu straightened her spine purposefully. “Do what?”