Not the Girls You're Looking For

by Aminah Mae Safi

  “Leila,” he said, his voice a quaking whisper.

  “Yes, Baba.”

  “You will go apologize to Mrs. Salwa.”

  “No,” Lulu said.

  “Lulu. You will,” he said, his evident misery hardening into anger as he spoke.

  “I won’t.”

  Ahmed moved to speak, but Aimee held up her hand. “If you’re incapable of acting like a civilized adult, you will go wait outside by the car until we can leave.”

  Lulu opened her mouth.

  “No, ma’am. I don’t want another word out of you. You either apologize like we said or you go outside and wait. You’ve got two options. Decide.”

  For a moment, Lulu glared. Then she turned and stalked out the front door. Once she got to the car, Lulu kicked the front bumper for good measure. Earlier, when getting dressed, she’d wrapped a scarf around her neck to protect against the chill in the air. She yanked it up to her mouth and screamed into it. She kicked the back tire. She screamed again, her throat raw from the exertion. At least she could feel that. That scratching in the back of her throat. That was more sensation than she’d had all evening. It reminded her she was real, that she was alive. That everything was totally fucked.

  “That bad, huh?” said a voice behind her.

  Lulu whipped around. She knew her parents would follow her out here eventually. But it wasn’t either of them.

  “Mustafa. You scared me. What are you doing here?”

  “Eid party. Same as you.” Mustafa shrugged.

  “If it’s same as me, you’d know you should be shunning me right about now. I’m pretty sure I’ve got social pariah status.”

  “You talking about Tamra’s mom?”

  Lulu sighed. She knew word traveled fast, but somehow, the reality of it was more unpleasant than her imaginings. “Yeah.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure it’ll blow over.” Mustafa hopped up onto the trunk of the car, his long legs firmly planted on the ground.

  “Easy for you to say. I think I might have started World War III in there.” Lulu looked over to the doorway. Her impending sentencing would come through there eventually.

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “Why didn’t you apologize?”

  “I can’t. I couldn’t.” Whatever happened now, she had earned. An apology couldn’t undo what Lulu’s anger had done.

  “No reason to stress over it.” Mustafa patted the trunk beside him. “Won’t do any good now anyways.”

  Lulu was a dog on a lead. She hopped up beside him, her legs dangling against the bumper. “You’re tall.”

  “I like to think everyone else is short.”

  “You would.”

  “Not everyone can be such a perfect human specimen.” Mustafa gestured across his whole body. “You know you used to call me Tofi.”

  Lulu opened her mouth, then shut it.

  “What, no clever retort? Lulu Saad always has a clever retort.”

  “Fresh out of clever retorts at the moment,” said Lulu.

  “Why’s that?”

  Unbidden, the truth came to her lips. “You’re too good-looking. It’s kind of a personal problem.”

  Mustafa stared, then shook his head. He smiled with what he had to say next. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  But Lulu was on a roll, and she couldn’t be stopped now. “No. I don’t think you understand. I’ve seriously had a crush on you since we were about eleven. I mean, look at you.”

  Mustafa barked a laugh. “Who is he?”

  Lulu blinked, startled. “Who is who?”

  “Whoever it is you like.”

  “How do you know I like anyone?”

  “Come on. You wouldn’t say what you’re saying if you didn’t think I was safe from you. You’re more careful than you ever let on. Recent events aside. And even that. I’ll bet you’ve been planning to say that for years.”

  “How—”

  “I’ve known you since you were eight years old. Give me some credit,” said Mustafa.

  Lulu looked him in the eye. He didn’t flinch. He sat there, steadily looking at her right back.

  “Do you think it ever would have worked? You and me?” Lulu asked.

  Mustafa shrugged. “It still could. But not till we’re twenty at least.”

  Lulu laughed at that. “You think you won’t be living at home when you’re twenty?”

  Mustafa laughed in return. “You’re right. Make that thirty.”

  “Not anymore,” said Lulu. “I think I recently made the official unwanted daughter-in-law list.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You could be forgiven in fourteen years.”

  Lulu swatted at him. They laughed, their eyes crinkling and their humor in perfect harmony.

  Lulu reached out, toward him, then stopped. “May I?”

  Mustafa shrugged, leaning back onto the palms of his hands. “Sure. Why not?”

  Lulu touched his face. He had a light shadow across his cheek, though she could tell he must have shaved that morning. He felt like everything she thought he would. She felt nothing—no tingle, no pull. Only a sharp, beautiful jawline covered in stubble.

  Mustafa laughed. “See, Lulu. It’s too late for us. Or not soon enough.”

  Lulu socked him in the arm lightly. “Shut up, Tofi. Just because you’re good-looking doesn’t mean you know everything about everything.”

  Mustafa gave a wide and wicked grin. “I know. But it’s why you’ve been in love with me since you were eleven. You’re not thinking straight.”

  Lulu swatted at him again. “I never said in love with. I said I had a crush.”

  “You were in love with me.” Mustafa waggled his eyebrows.

  “I’m never going to live this down, am I?”

  “Nope.” Mustafa was still smiling as he looked at Lulu. Then he looked up and his face went slack. He hopped off the hood immediately.

  Lulu watched him, refusing to acknowledge that the inevitable had happened.

  “See you around, Lulu.” Then Mustafa turned and said, with a nod, “Professor Ahmed.”

  Lulu watched Mustafa retreat back into the house. Her father coughed. Lulu refused to move.

  “We have made your apologies for you. Mrs. Salwa has been very understanding. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Baba,” Lulu said, mechanically. She continued to stare off into the distance.

  “You cannot behave like this. You cannot do as you say and you want. We are not like the others.”

  “What others?”

  “You’re Arab, Lulu. We don’t talk this way to our family.”

  “She’s not my family. That woman is—”

  “Leila,” Ahmed warned. “She is like family. Here, she is family.”

  “Do you know, Baba? Do you know what she said?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “She called Mom and me a whore.”

  “How did you—”

  “How did I know that? When I haven’t been taught Arabic since I was a little girl? Since you gave up on me?” Lulu lashed. “You pick up words, Baba. Common words. Hot, cold. Bread, chicken. Kisses, good-bye. Oh, and whore.” Lulu laughed a humorless laugh. “Hell, I don’t need them to say it out loud. I’ve learned when they say it with their eyes.”

  “Lulu, habibti. Even if she did, that doesn’t make it good. You cannot call names because you were called names. But that is not what she said. She was repeating a story. She was calling that man—and no, I won’t repeat who it is—who used that word, one without family and honor. It is an old saying.”

  That truth sliced through Lulu like a dirty, blunt knife. Not efficient, but gutting all the same. The wound was not deep, but it would likely fester and grow septic. She bit the inside of her cheek so hard she could taste blood again. So she could cling to that cold, unforgiving rage left inside her.

  “News flash, Baba—we’re not in Baghdad. We’re in America.” Lulu wasn’t yelling, but there was an unstable quality to her words that she c
ouldn’t contain.

  “Hayati,” Ahmed started. She looked up into her father’s eyes, feeling the impending tears, not knowing how much longer she could hold them in. “I came here for you. And I stayed here knowing my children would be American. I could have gone back and started my family there. But I didn’t. I stayed so you could be American.”

  Lulu couldn’t help but be reminded of countless conversations she’d had, over and over again; they played out in her head. Of strangers asking her over and over again, what she was. Like a piece of flora or fauna. Like she was missing her proper taxonomy. That her father had planned this kind of life for her was a new idea for Lulu, and the reality of it took her breath away.

  She shouted, letting the full force of her anger crash over her father. “So you wanted me to fit in nowhere? You wanted me to never be Arab but have people look at me like I’m not actually born here?”

  Lulu was breathing hard. She’d never yelled at her father before. Panic lit through her—a flash of terrified lightning. “You say I need another weapon to fight back. You say I misunderstood. I don’t have any weapons. I was thrown into a conflict without any. I had to find my own. I had to make my own. I had to learn on my own. You never gave me any help there. You gave me books and articles. You keep telling me not to forget I’m Arab. But it’s not just the white people reminding me who I am, Baba. Arabs remind me I’m not one of them, too. They look at me wary-eyed. And maybe they’re right to, considering what I’ve just done. But you’ve never taught me how to deal with that. You wouldn’t even give me the words I need to defend myself. I have old curse words picked up off silly boys. This world may never let me forget I am Arab, but it will also keep me from belonging as one of them. How can I know anything with everything you leave unsaid?”

  Lulu stared at her father and he stared back.

  The sound of a door slamming reverberated through the air. Lulu looked to the source of the sound. Aimee tromped down the pathway from the house, toward where Lulu and her father stood. Ben and Reza were quick on her heels. Aimee unlocked the car. Lulu opened the door and climbed into the middle of the back seat. She crossed her arms. Reza and Ben took their places on either side of her as their mother got in the driver’s seat. Lulu wouldn’t say another word the rest of the drive home.

  18

  And Hell Is Just a Sauna

  On Sunday, Lulu turned on her computer—the one she had inherited from Reza when he’d left for college—and checked her e-mail. A message from one of her paternal cousins sat rather innocuously in her inbox. It was a cheerful missive about the end of Ramadan. School would be starting back up for her little cousin again. Rana asked if Lulu would also be headed back to school, not yet old enough to understand that school holidays did not work the same everywhere in the world. Lulu couldn’t bear looking at it. Not after last night. She deleted it. A moment later, she moved the message back into her in-box.

  A soft knock sounded at Lulu’s door and Reza entered. “Mom said you were up here; I’ve come to say good-bye.”

  Lulu pushed away from her desk, her feet dangling off the edge of a chair that also used to be Reza’s. Neither Ben’s furniture nor his electronics ever lasted long enough to make it into Lulu’s hands.

  Lulu got up. And for a moment, she just stared. “See you.”

  Reza hugged her stiffly. “I’ll be back for Christmas.”

  “Travel safe now.” Lulu’s voice muffled into a generous expanse of shoulder. Her arms were trapped at her sides by the awkward embrace.

  Reza released his hold and walked out the door without another word. For the first time in her life, Lulu had been publicly shameful. And apparently Reza didn’t know how to cope, except with silence.

  “Take care. Love you,” Lulu called after him, but it was no use. Lulu sat back down at her desk. She closed her eyes, attempting to banish Reza’s rejection from her thoughts.

  A loud, demanding knock rattled through her door. “Mom told me to say good-bye to you.” Ben leaned casually against the doorjamb.

  “I’m sure she did.” Lulu waited for another perfunctory farewell, another awkward embrace.

  But Ben continued to lean against her door frame, watching her.

  She rolled her chair away from her desk. “Well, bye. Try not to die on your way back.”

  Ben should have left. But he kept leaning on the door frame, kept his watchful gaze. “Remember that time I put glue in your hair, just to see what would happen?”

  “Yes?” Of all the times for Ben to bring up the time he had glued her hair together, this was a strange one.

  “It got everywhere and ruined your clothes, and then Mom yelled at me because she had to cut your hair, because the peanut butter wasn’t working.” Ben shook his head.

  “I remember,” said Lulu. Reza had been the one to keep Lulu calm, telling her nobody could see the missing chunk of hair anyway. Lulu hadn’t talked to Ben for a month.

  “You forgave me, though.” Ben didn’t break eye contact.

  Lulu took his meaning. “I think there’s a significant difference between gluing your eight-year-old sister’s hair together and effectively calling a bride-to-be a whore.”

  Ben frowned. “Give it time. Glue’s a mess ’cause it’s trying so hard to stick everything together. But you’ll find a way through. You gotta know that.”

  Lulu tensed, ready for a fight. “Am I the mess, or is what I did the mess, Ben?”

  “Both.”

  Lulu turned away, trying to look anywhere else. “Thanks.”

  “I mean, I sure as hell couldn’t do it.”

  “Obviously.” Lulu snorted.

  “Lulu.”

  Lulu turned her chair back to face him. Ben moved from the door and reached out to pull her up and envelop her in his long arms, practically squeezing the air out of her lungs. She tried to resist her own response, but she hugged him back, reciprocating with a life-stealing clutch of her own.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “You can tell me. I know you don’t want to, but you can.”

  “You’ll make fun,” she said.

  “No, I won’t,” said Ben.

  Lulu pulled back and gave him an incredulous look.

  “Okay. I might.” Ben smirked. “But I have to say my stellar advice is worth the risk.”

  “I don’t know how to be so in-between all the time.”

  Ben laughed.

  Lulu huffed. “It’s not funny.” Not when the consequences had been so dire. Audrey had been attacked. Lulu had said unforgivable things. Emma had virtually fallen off the grid.

  “No,” Ben said, still laughing. “It’s hilarious. And you know it. Nobody knows how to be in-between. Nobody knows what they’re doing. We’re all making it up as we go along.”

  She gave him a quelling look.

  “Fine. I’m sorry I laughed.”

  Lulu could still hear the snicker that he stifled, but she tried for one last confession. Maybe if she said it out loud, the thought would stop bouncing around in her head, distracting and destroying her with equal measure. “I fucked up.”

  Ben watched her for a minute. “Not just last night?”

  Lulu nodded. “Not just last night.” She’d fucked up with Anderson, with Audrey—hell, even with James. Every time she replayed the memory from that night in her head it got worse, grew sharper teeth, became more monstrous.

  “Tough break.”

  Lulu had been scared enough admitting to Ben that she’d been a total screw-up all week. His response did nothing to coax further confession out of her. “That’s not advice, Benyamin.”

  “You didn’t ask a question, Leila.” Ben put his hand on his hip, just like their mother would.

  Lulu groaned. “Never mind.”

  Ben took a deep breath, his expression turning at once to seriousness and concern. “Look. You don’t have to be self-sufficient all the time. I mean, you don’t need to be. Like, don’t ask for my help, fine. But ask for someone’s. That’s all I’m
saying. Ask. With a real question.”

  Lulu arched her eyebrows.

  Ben sighed, then pinched the bridge of his nose.

  Lulu swatted at him. “Get out of here.”

  Ben moved to the door, finally.

  “And Ben?”

  He turned around.

  “I’ll think about it,” said Lulu.

  * * *

  Skipping out on the morning scene on Monday appealed to Lulu’s lesser nature. After all, whatever she’d have to withstand, it wouldn’t be good. It couldn’t be. But she’d have to face the crowd and its stares and its rumors and its preconceived conclusions eventually. Better now than later—rip it off, like a Band-Aid. Seeing Lo approach purposefully down the hallway, however, did not provide Lulu with any reassurance on the tenor of the morning gossip. And this time, unfortunately, there wasn’t a sweater on earth that could cover the incident.

  “We gotta talk.” Lo grabbed Lulu lightly by the elbow and steered her toward the bathrooms at the far end of campus. The ones by the art rooms, where a girl only went into to cry alone.

  Lulu’s feet shuffled and squeaked across the thin, synthetic carpeting as they rounded a corner fast. Lulu nearly got whiplash. “Slow down, crazy.”

  Lo came to an abrupt halt. She released Lulu’s arm and looked over both her shoulders. Then she continued her speedy march to the bathrooms. Lulu had to follow. Once the bathroom had been reached and secured, Lo began.

  “We have a problem.” Lo didn’t face the mirrors. She didn’t fix her makeup. She looked Lulu dead in the eye. That’s how serious Lo was.

  “We?” asked Lulu.

  “You didn’t think I’d feed you to the sharks, did you?” Lo took a step back, her whole posture affronted.

  “Wolves,” said Lulu. “I’m pretty sure it’s ‘throw you to the wolves.’”

  Lo took a step forward again. She reached out and put a hand on Lulu’s arm. “Sharks, Lulu-cat. You’re chum. Social chum.”

  “It can’t be that bad,” said Lulu, a sickening stillness washing over her.

  “Worse. Now tell me everything.”

  “I thought you knew.” Lulu crossed her arms.

  “No, I’ve heard. I want to hear it from you,” said Lo. “You’ve been on radio silence since last Saturday. It’s spooky.”