Not the Girls You're Looking For

by Aminah Mae Safi

“Luckily it’s not the only thing I’ve got a talent for.” And then James winked.

  Lulu blinked several times. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I guess you’ll have to wait and find out.”

  It was a long movie.

  * * *

  Lulu fidgeted. She had been fidgeting the entire car ride home. James had spent the whole movie actually watching the movie. Not that she didn’t enjoy the movie. But she was starting to think she had made up the last time they had kissed. She hadn’t even been able to tell anyone about it. Lulu huffed.

  “What’s up?” James’s concentration was maddeningly on the road.

  “Nothing.” Lulu crossed her arms.

  “Doesn’t look like nothing,” he said.

  “It is. Nothing.” Lulu blew a wisp of hair out of her eye.

  “Okay, now I really don’t believe you.”

  Lulu exploded. “Aren’t you interested in me at all?”

  James smirked. Lulu’s eyes narrowed.

  “You son of a bitch.” Lulu swatted at his arm. Then play slapped over his head.

  “Hey, hey,” James said, using his arm to guard his head. “I’m driving.”

  “Fine.” Lulu went back to crossing her arms.

  “You look like someone with experience,” James began.

  “I don’t have that much experience.” Lulu was tired of having to explain this to people. More than some but less than others. Enough to know herself but not enough to know everything. If anyone could know everything.

  James picked up on what she meant. “No, not like that. Experience with attention. I thought it might be nice. For you. To not always get that kind of attention. You know. See a movie, no pretense.”

  They were stopped at a light. For a moment, Lulu stopped along with it. Then she was in motion. She unbuckled her seatbelt and leaped onto James. She grabbed his face in both of her hands. James’s arm went around her waist. Her mouth was on his, greedy. He responded in kind. He gripped the back of her shirt with his fist. Lulu tested her tongue against his lips. He opened, ready. They were locked together like there was no tomorrow, like only the apocalypse could stop them. And even then, only maybe.

  A horn blared behind them. Lulu jumped, falling over onto the e-brake. James yelped.

  “Christ. You’re not safe to be around.” James squirmed out from under her and drove, the light already yellow again.

  Lulu grinned as the tires squealed against the pavement. She buckled herself back in.

  When James pulled up to the curb of Lulu’s house, his breath was still quick and short. “Get out of this car, Lulu, or so help me God, I’m probably going to get shot by your mother.”

  “Why my mother?”

  “She seems more likely to own a gun than your father.”

  Lulu gave him a long stare. “It’s not just my mother, is it?”

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

  Lulu looked James in the eye. A pit welled in her stomach. He looked relieved and frustrated all at once. Lulu would have put money on having a similar expression on her face. This energy between them was fresh, and fragile. Was there anything beyond wanting each other? Was there trust or only two people who caused traffic jams with their lust? Lulu opened the passenger door, needing to put air and distance and space between them. Before she hopped out she gave James a swift, chaste peck on the lips, then leaped from the car.

  “Sweet dreams,” she said, with a purposeful amount of honey in her voice. It was her turn to wink.

  James shook his head. His eyes narrowed, and Lulu would have taken him for being annoyed if the corners of his mouth hadn’t turned upward into an ironic smile. “You’ll get yours, Lulu Saad.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that.” Lulu shut the car door. She could feel her heartbeat in her throat.

  James waited for her to cross the threshold of her home before driving off. The front door to her house slammed shut behind Lulu. She didn’t bother with attempts at noiseless movements. She knew her mother would be waiting up for her on the couch. She always sat up waiting for Lulu, a Diet Dr Pepper in one hand, a magazine in the other, with the television on low in the background.

  The predictability of it comforted Lulu. She enjoyed knowing what she was going to get when she arrived home. She would sit by her mother and watch twenty minutes or half an hour of some procedural drama. These moments gave Lulu her unabashed love of murder mysteries. Watching them felt like a piece of home, no matter where or when she was. Jessica Fletcher, Magnum, P.I., Shawn Spencer, Brenda Leigh Johnson, Sherlock Holmes—they were all to Lulu the image of her and her mother, curled up together, with her mother accidentally wired from caffeine and Lulu warm and fuzzy from her nights out. Her mother could always figure out the murderer. Lulu never could.

  Lulu stepped into the living room. Her mother’s spot was empty. She looked over to the television, but the screen was off, not on mute. No magazine set aside, no Dr Pepper can in sight. The downstairs bathroom looked empty from Lulu’s position, so she was momentarily at a loss to figure out her current situation. She turned slightly on her heels, and there, in his chair, sat her father.

  Ahmed must have noticed the surprise on Lulu’s face, but he didn’t acknowledge it or her disappointment. He was peeling an orange. He offered the slices to her; she declined with a shake of her head. When she had been little, the simple act of sharing an orange had seemed like enough. But now, she couldn’t just share an orange with him. She felt as though she had bungled everything. When Lulu thought of oranges, her heart broke.

  She sat across from her father’s chair, next to where her mother would have been sitting on the couch, had Aimee been the one in the room.

  Lulu opened her mouth to speak, but Ahmed beat her to it. “Mama told me you went out to see a movie. She said it was your favorite.” His tone was purposefully calm, as though he always spoke thusly to his daughter about being out at two o’clock in the morning. His was a steady stream of facts, delivered with an as-yet-to-be-determined judgment.

  Lulu responded in kind. “Yeah, they were showing Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and you know how I love it. It was great, really, to see it up there on the screen like that.” Her father had been the one to introduce her to the Python’s humor some years ago.

  “Yes, I remember,” said Ahmed.

  Lulu knew what came next.

  “My Aimee said you went with a friend. What friend?” There was no mistaking his intent now, as he looked up from his orange, directly into Lulu’s eyes.

  “Oh.” Lulu had been holding her breath, and here she finally exhaled. “Not a friend. A boy. James.”

  “What James?” Ahmed’s eyes squinted.

  “James Denair.” Lulu’s bottom lip sulked forward from her face.

  “Who is this James? At midnight?”

  Lulu wasn’t sure whether her father was muttering to himself or shouting at her. His orange was finished now, and it looked like the last bite had been an unpleasant experience, all sour tang and no refreshing sweetness to balance out the flavor. Lulu was tired, from the hour, from the tension between her and her baba recently, from the number of times she had already had iterations of this discussion in her life. She felt a tiny scream welling up in her throat, one she knew would never get out.

  “Your mama, she knew this?”

  “Yes. She knew.”

  He grimaced. It was an ugly, twisted version of his face. Lulu didn’t know whether she disliked these looks as such because they were so exaggerated or because she had incited them. It was like watching a physical manifestation, a visual hyperbole, of all the disappointments she knew she was forever incurring with him, whether he realized it or not.

  “Well.” He spoke the word of a man who had nothing left to say but desperately wanted to speak.

  “I know, Baba,” said Lulu. “I know.”

  On her way out of the room, she leaned over and kissed his forehead lightly, part apology and part resignation. It bo
re the same kind of respect as the self-flagellation Lulu imagined in an Ashura procession. Lulu turned to leave the room.

  “All right,” said her father, his voice behind her.

  Lulu turned. “What?”

  Ahmed nodded. “It’s all right, habibti.”

  Lulu understood. Her father could have been referring to the dating, or the coming home at two o’clock in the morning. Or the vomiting in the front bushes. But he wasn’t, not really. He wasn’t even talking about the scene she’d caused, the mess she’d made. She was all right. She would be all right.

  “Thank you, Baba. For getting Sheikh Fadi on my side. I know it helped.”

  Ahmed shook his head. “Don’t thank me. He was on your side. He came to me.”

  This was news to Lulu.

  “Thank him, hayati. Thank him and be done with it.” Ahmed got up and kissed Lulu on the forehead as he left the room. “Clean the mess.”

  And on that cryptic note, Lulu slumped onto the couch. Lulu had gotten Emma to talk to her. She’d gotten her involved in the plan. Everything else would have to wait until school on Monday.

  24

  Khalas

  Lulu wasn’t sure how long she had been stuffing candy-coated almonds into tiny boxes. She was sure there was a way to buy them prestuffed into these tiny boxes. Yet here she sat, grabbing almonds with the tips of her fingers and letting them fall into the absurdly small containers. She wondered, briefly, if stuffing the almonds into sachets would be better or worse. It didn’t matter, not really. But Lulu wondered anyway. Wondering about Jordan almonds kept Lulu’s mind off kissing James and making up with Emma and what was going to happen when school started back up in two days. Anticipation made Lulu jumpy. She had a plan, if it would work. She had a friend, if she could see the rest through. She had a start, a beginning. The way was dark, the path was murky, but Lulu could just start to see how to take the next step forward, and the next, and the next.

  Lulu had to hope it would be enough.

  Despite her grumblings, Lulu liked her rhythm at the Alkati house. She got tea from Khala Zeena and dirty looks from Auntie Salwa. They were sincere looks and Lulu—as someone who could feel deeply herself—appreciated their sincerity. Plus the wedding preparations kept her from the long hours at her own house, filled with her brothers’ discomfort and her mother’s disapproval and her father’s bewildering behavior.

  Lulu didn’t even mind Dina’s snide comments. She had, at first. But now, somehow, they felt like comfort. They’d become part of the fabric of this home, of this aspect of her life. Radical acceptance from Dina would have thrown Lulu for a loop. Perhaps, here, she would always be an outsider. But she was also no longer a trespasser. That had been a combination of her own horrible handiwork and their magnanimous forgiveness. Lulu had been forged in this fire. She would neither regret nor begrudge it.

  “Lulu, you’re hogging the sugar,” snipped Dina.

  Lulu passed the sugar. Khala Zeena pinched Lulu’s cheeks with a smile. Lulu gritted through the pain and smiled as best as she could. Who was she to change an expression of love centuries in the making? She wondered idly if she would pinch her own nieces’ and nephews’ cheeks, or surrogate nieces’ and nephews’, as the case currently could be. If the gesture was merely a byproduct of culture and age or if she’d be able to resist the impulse.

  Lulu might never be accepted fully into the homes of these women or admitted comfortably into the fold of Sealy Hall. But Lulu had been given the gift of fluency. Lulu was not French, but she could speak with them. Lulu was not from old WASPish money, but she could converse among them as well. That was what her parents had given her. The gift and the curse to move between people, languages, and cultures. Not to blend so much as to be able to communicate clearly across invisible borders. She was a traveler, a go-between.

  Lulu remembered the day she had first gotten a joke in French. To her that was the ultimate test of fluency—to understand humor. Well, she understood the stiff, cold humor of Sealy Hall—their merciless irony and wit. And she cackled at the near-black humor of the Iraqi immigrants, the choice to laugh at torture and loss rather than to cry about it. They laugh at their troubles rather than sink into them. Why, oh why, she had kept biting her tongue until she tasted blood in her mouth, until all that was left to her was to explode in a spectacular fashion, Lulu suddenly did not understand. It was her one gift in this world. To speak on behalf of strangers and to strangers, at all times. To talk to more than one world, simultaneously. To think in more than one way and to know of many ways to live a life.

  “Lulu, do you have all the boxes?” Dina snapped to make sure she fully interrupted Lulu’s thoughts.

  Lulu passed a large stack from her own pile of flattened gift boxes.

  Khala Zeena patted Lulu’s hand. Zeena took the sugar from Dina and lumped two spoonfuls into Lulu’s tea. They had run out of sugar cubes by now. Lulu said shukran and kept filling bags of almonds. She tried to keep her mind on the task at hand—but it was a mechanical one. The kind that lent itself to wondering about Emma and her girlfriend or reliving the feeling of James’s mouth or replaying all the daily markers of Aimee’s frustration. Then her thoughts bounced back to James’s mouth. He had a distracting mouth and he wasn’t even here. And then forward, to how she could get Lo to talk to her. How Lulu could find her own forgiveness for Audrey. Lulu sighed and the expression went entirely over Khala Zeena’s head. Zeena wasn’t magic, after all. She couldn’t read minds. She just understood more English than she spoke.

  “Lulu, you don’t have to skimp on almonds. We’re not cheap. Inshallah, this is going to be a beautiful wedding. This isn’t like other weddings you might have been to,” said Dina.

  Lulu imagined Dina was implying something about Aimee’s people. Lulu let more almonds drop into the boxes.

  “Not so much, Lulu! You’ll not be able to close them!” said Dina.

  This made Tanya the Bride laugh at the other end of the table. “Give her a rest, DeeDee,” said Tanya. “She’s suffering enough. I mean she’s made like fifteen centerpieces and filled at least a hundred of my party bags. She’s done enough.”

  And here Tanya looked Lulu dead in the eye. “I declare your penance complete. I am a satisfied bride. Khalas.” Tanya wiped her hands against each other to emphasize the point.

  “‘Azzizati,” said Bibi Hookum, Tamra, Tanya, and Dina’s grandmother. Bibi Hookum’s large, wrinkled hands pinched the hollow of Lulu’s cheeks between her index finger and thumb. Then she gave a guttural trill of a cry and clapped a couple of times, bobbing her head back and forth with joy.

  “Ey, Bibi,” said Tanya to her grandmother. Over her grandmother’s head, Tanya winked at Lulu.

  “Tanya the Merciful,” said Lulu.

  Tanya laughed again. “Get out of here, Lu. You’re dismissed.”

  Lulu looked up from her work, slightly alarmed.

  “But if you miss my henna party, I’m taking back all my forgiveness,” said Tanya on a final, magnificent laugh.

  “Thank you.” Lulu stood still for a moment, unwilling to leave.

  “You heard me.” Tanya swatted the air. “Get!”

  Lulu got up, grabbed her bag, and walked toward the door. She waved lamely to the group of women, who clucked and half waved her off. Lulu should have gone straight home. But she didn’t.

  “I’ve got an hour,” she said when she stopped her car in front of James’s house. Her window was rolled down.

  “Cool.” James had a tentative expression on his face. He opened the door and hopped into the passenger seat. “Where to?”

  “Milkshakes?” asked Lulu.

  “Milkshakes,” said James. His expression clarified, and Lulu saw that it was joy.

  Lulu drove. She chatted as she went. She talked about Tanya the Bride and Zeena the Auntie and Dina the Bitch. She talked about hotel ballrooms and Jordan almonds and cutting wedding cakes with enormous saber-length swords. James laughed exactly when he should h
ave and sipped his strawberry milkshake as he listened to the rest. Lulu wondered if that meant his lips would taste like strawberries. But he didn’t try to kiss her. He just listened while she talked and laughed when she told a joke. She didn’t tell him about her plan for Dane, though she felt herself nearly say it at least twenty times. But every time she thought she would, she managed to hold back. She wondered if she was dating him, if she wanted to be. It was strange, this thing, where they were like friends, but not at all.

  Idly, Lulu wondered if Lo would still stare him down. Or if she’d approve. It didn’t matter. Because Lo hadn’t returned one of Lulu’s calls or messages. And Lulu didn’t have a single picture left where they were tagged together. Audrey would likely not approve. But since Audrey’s opinion didn’t matter, Lulu didn’t need it. But then James cracked a joke about the airspeed velocity of swallows, and Lulu couldn’t help but wonder if that would have made Audrey laugh or not. Emma, Lulu decided. She would tell Emma about James.

  “And I can’t figure out anymore if Ben or Rez drives me more crazy,” Lulu said. “Ben thinks he gives the best advice in the world ever, even though he doesn’t, and Rez just stares at me like I’ve grown a third arm out of my head or something.”

  “Why don’t you tell them that?”

  “Nah, Ben sees things the way he sees them, and it won’t do much good to try to change it. And Reza doesn’t seem to be able to compute anything I say anymore.” Lulu turned away, trying to figure out why she was explaining this at all. “I always wanted a sister, you know.”

  “They’re not all they’re cracked up to be,” said James.

  “That’s exactly what my brothers would say, too.”

  “Besides, I’ve heard you talk about your friends. It sounds like you already have sisters. Whether you wanted them or not.” James took a last slurp of his milkshake, then looked at the dash. “Damn. Hour’s up.”

  * * *

  Lulu prayed to God for three simple things: an empty house, time to herself for a good hour, and Coke in the refrigerator. The fridge was nearly devoid of anything, except for an assortment of condiments, a couple of jars of pickles, and one last, shriveled-looking fruit that probably used to be either a lemon or a grapefruit.