“Head for the walls,” I whispered to the others when I got down. “Walk along the boundary until you see the bathrooms to your right. We’ll change there. Don’t all leave at once.”
They spread apart, leaving the rest of the class behind. I felt a small flutter of anxiety, but Mishail was probably right that these three could be trusted not to melt under the pressure. They’d proved themselves when they wore colored socks to school on Valentine’s Day.
All five of us made it to the bathroom without incident, although Bilquis was panting as if she’d been in a fight. We changed in the stalls, squealing, giggling, daring the others to come out first.
Mishail and I shared a stall; she rolled her eyes at their hysterics. I was too nervous in my dress to respond.
“One second,” Mishail said, and adjusted the shoulder strap. “Okay, let’s go.”
I stepped out, and everyone fell silent. Blood rushed to my ears. Just when I was about to run back into the stall and cancel all the plans, Sofia whistled in her frank way and said, “Mash’allah, you have nice legs.”
Mishail’s eyes said, I told you.
“Once we’re out of this bathroom, we’ll need to run,” I said.
“Run?” Bilquis said. “You didn’t say that before. I can’t run.”
I ground my teeth. Girls were always such fools the first time they tried something rebellious. As if they thought all there was to it was having the idea, and they’d be transported daintily through their magical fantasy without being caught.
“At least it’s not like when we had to climb out of my window using the rope ladder,” Mishail said. “Remember that?”
“Or when we had to tie plastic bags on our feet because the storm drains were clogged,” I said. “Look, guys, things don’t always work out as planned. We just have to adapt.”
“You’re both crazy,” Bilquis said, pulling her large, baggy skirt in all directions, as if trying to find something in its folds. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“Come with us or don’t,” I said. “It’s entirely your choice. But we can’t stay here where anyone can find us.”
Bilquis swayed in the entrance of the bathroom while Mishail, Aisha, Sofia, and I dashed to the walls, hiding behind trees when we could. I felt something tickling my legs and shivered, realizing it was the first time since I was a child that my skin had been exposed to the air. Goose bumps appeared where the soft olive dress rested against my thigh, so I pulled the dress down awkwardly.
Aisha appeared at the tree immediately to my right, wearing what appeared to be an extra-large T-shirt over skinny jeans. A wide belt cinched the T-shirt in at her waist. The four of us arrived at the clearing without any other issues. “Even if nothing else happens, we did this!” Sofia said, throwing her hands in the air. She had on a sleeveless hot-pink blouse with a deep V-neck, and I felt simultaneously embarrassed and envious. My breasts were tiny, so small that I could still get away with passing as a boy. It was convenient to run errands, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want Sofia’s or Mishail’s curves.
Mishail pulled out the camera. Without warning, she started singing. Mishail had never been allowed to practice her singing except to recite the Quran, but her voice was so delicate, like the sound of the first rain, that we squealed and clutched one another and started dancing. We were so wild with joy.
Just then, Bilquis appeared.
She was wearing her regular uniform, which should probably have prepared me for the scornful way she laughed and said, “Wallah, Leena, prancing like a frightened horse isn’t the same thing as dancing.”
I turned to her in fury.
“Ignore her,” Sofia said, grabbing my arm. “Miss Too Fat to Run is hardly the authority to comment on your dancing skills.”
“You girls think way too much of yourselves,” Bilquis said. “This is haraam, and I’m going to tell the headmistress before it gets out of control.”
And she stalked off.
Mishail gasped. It yanked me into action.
“Everyone, get changed,” I said. “We can’t wait to get back to the bathrooms. When you’re done, hand over your clothes. No sense in all of us getting in trouble.”
There was no time to waste. I quickly shimmied out of my dress and into my uniform.
“Now,” I said when the other girls hesitated. “The faster you do it, the less chance anyone will see you. Mishy, give me the camera.”
I took Aisha’s T-shirt and nodded in approval as she pulled the drawstring of her uniform skirt around the skinny jeans. For the first time, I felt glad of the baggy, unflattering robes that were our uniform. So much could be hidden under them.
“Run,” Mishail said. “And no matter what, don’t tell anyone anything.”
Aisha and Sofia took off immediately, and Mishail gave me an expectant look.
“Never,” I said. I held out my hand until Mishail dropped the camera into it. I put it in my underwear.
Mishail’s grin was blinding.
We walked back together to the rest of our classmates. The other girls gave us looks that were part fear and part envy, telling me that Bilquis had spread the story beyond just the headmistress. So everyone knew.
Bilquis came to the clearing, looking annoyed instead of triumphant.
“She said she’ll deal with you when we’re back in school,” she said loudly. “Not here.”
Mishail sagged in relief.
“If I were you, I’d be nervous,” Bilquis said. “She looked really angry.”
“If I were you, I’d start learning how to run,” I said.
Nervous titters ripped through the clearing. I pulled Mishail in for a hug. Aisha and Sofia joined us, as did a few others who were no longer worried about showing whose side they were on.
“Hey, Leena,” Mishail said.
“Hm?”
“Don’t sit on the grass.”
I burst into laughter.
A couple of hours later, when the buses were back at the school, the four of us were escorted to the headmistress’s office. I put my palms on my thighs, little finger slightly apart from the rest. The others watched it carefully, as I’d instructed them.
One, I thought, hoping telepathy was real and the others could hear me. We’re in Phase One.
The key to handling Maryam Madam was recognizing the phases of her anger and waiting them out quietly. Mishail was so attuned to it now that she could keep her head down in perfect ladylike surrender while picking up clues just from the headmistress’s voice.
That was anger in the headmistress’s tone now, of course, but with the spice of outrage that always accompanied the discovery phase. It was as if Maryam Madam believed that anyone who broke the rules had some deep ulterior motive. When we were caught for the Valentine’s Day incident, it was ten minutes of But WHY SOCKS? What were you REALLY after? until we entered Phase Two.
“Mishail, what would your father say? What if a man had seen? Why do you girls take such stupid risks for no reason?”
Mishail’s ring finger unfolded from her clenched fist. I did the same thing, indicating that we’d entered the second phase: questions. This, too, required no response. Maryam Madam would eventually arrive at the explanation that she liked the most and express her complete disappointment as she entered Phase Three.
“I’m so disappointed in you girls. You should be ashamed of yourselves. What kind of role models are you to the young women of our country? Is this worth risking your reputation? Your future? I should make you stand in your underwear so the other girls can point and laugh.”
Mishail’s head rose almost imperceptibly. Phase Four was creative punishment, and it signaled the end of the cycle. It was only at this juncture that speaking was of any use. I tried to mimic Mishail’s look of deep penitence. I probably just looked as if I were in pain.
“We’re sorry, ma’am,” I said. “We weren’t thinking.”
“Sorry? I’ll show you sorry. Whose idea was this anyway?”
> I never understood why the headmistress always asked questions that were impossible to answer. Searching for the origin of our ideas was like trying to pull apart salt and water. It was always one of us saying something and the other saying yes, yes and also until even learning to ride a bicycle involved climbing out a window on a rope, and then using it to tie ourselves to one another so one could pull the other along with Rollerblades.
“Last chance. One of you could get punished, or all of you can. So who was it?”
“Me,” we said together, and then dropped our heads immediately to hide our grins.
Maryam Madam pinched her temples. I took advantage of the headmistress’s closed eyes to mouth It’ll be okay to the others. All said and done, Maryam Madam was not so bad. She was practical, and if you listened carefully, she always seemed less annoyed at someone’s having broken the rules than at their getting caught. It was all, what if the police and think of your parents and never anything as preachy as Rehmat Madam’s “A woman without a hijab is like a chair with two legs” or the slogan of Al-Hai’a—A modest woman needs no mirror.
“I’m going to get nothing out of you while you’re all together,” the headmistress said. “You three, go back to class and remain standing for what’s left of the day. I need to talk to Leena alone.”
3
TUFSHAN
The headmistress opened her mouth to continue, but I shook my head, glancing at the shadows moving below the door. Maryam Madam’s eyes rolled upward, as if praying for patience.
“Girls, I know you’re listening on the other side.”
The shadows cleared, but I waited for the footsteps to disappear down the hallway before I reached into my underwear and pulled out the camera. The headmistress drew in a sharp breath.
“You know how dangerous that is, right? If a photo of the minister’s daughter were to get spread around the Internet—I mean, don’t you remember the death threats against Princess Basmah when she was caught without her hijab?”
“That was different! She was smoking. This was just—”
I trailed off at the headmistress’s skeptical look. I really didn’t know what it was that drove me and Mishail to do these mad, dangerous things. Mostly Mishail, but I had to admit it set my blood on fire, too. Maybe it was something of that tufshan my father used to speak of, the strange restlessness that happened to boys from poor families with no wasta, no political connections with which to secure their future. At night they could be heard drifting in stolen cars on Dromedary Lane.
Hormones, my mother had said when I asked what tufshan meant.
Don’t lie to her, my father had said. Tufsh is the way a man moves when he’s drowning. Stuck between fighting and giving up.
I knew the feeling well now. It wasn’t only boys who knew they had been cheated so the thousand grandchildren of this country’s founder would never have to work a day in their lives. If tufshan drove them to vandalism and crime, to us girls, who could not even do those things, it just drove us mad.
I tried to read Maryam Madam’s thoughts. Her silver-streaked hair was tucked neatly into a ponytail. The corners of her eyes were wrinkled and kind. She looked exactly as she had when I saw her for the first time, back in the sixth grade, when she was just a mathematics teacher, the newest member of the school staff.
I would never forget that day. We had been planning how to make sure the new teacher saw things our way. Too often new teachers came in wanting to prove that they could handle the job and screamed themselves hoarse over stupid things like heart-shaped pendants or earphones under the headscarf, starting a war that ended only when we used the ultimate weapon. We mixed red food coloring with Vaseline and dabbed the teacher’s black chair with it to stain her backside when she sat down. It meant public humiliation, threats, tears, and a new teacher, which wasn’t actually good for anybody. So we were thinking of something smaller, just to show her where the line was.
But the minute Maryam Madam walked into the classroom, it fell silent, not because she’d screamed “Shut up!” or “Pin-drop silence!” as other teachers had done, but because she had a way of drawing everyone’s eyes to her, and making all of us want to hear what she had to say. She held a giant protractor, with chalk attached at one end, and wielded it as if it were a sword. She got straight to the lesson, and when I ignored her to play tic-tac-toe with Mishail, she whirled around and threw a piece of chalk that landed between my eyes like a bullet.
“You think I don’t see you,” Maryam Madam said. There was no anger in her voice, just crinkled-eye amusement that was more effective than any whip. “But I know who you are, Leena Hadi. And I know you’re used to having your way around here. I can see you trying to control the class from that corner of the room. You think that because this stuff comes easy for you, you are some kind of VIP? Why don’t you come up here and solve this, then, if you think you can?”
The class had laughed, taking her side. So I stood, held my head up, and solved the problem aloud, adding that because we had an old edition, the answer at the back of the textbook was wrong. I was expecting Maryam Madam to get angry. Instead, her eyes sparkled, and she clapped as if she’d been given the birthday present she’d most wanted. She also seemed to recognize my father on parent-teacher night, because her face lit up at the words Hadi Mutazil as if that name meant something to her. They debated politics for an entire hour while other people’s parents stood off to the side and whispered about it.
“A remarkable woman,” my father had said afterward, as if he couldn’t feel the rage my mother was pouring out underneath her abaya. “It’s a pity about her husband, but I can’t imagine it’s anything but a relief. Especially since she’s now financially independent.”
After the arrest, when I spent my days staring out the window to avoid Mishail’s concerned glances, and my evenings walking around the streets to avoid my mother’s shell-shocked face, it was the headmistress who kept me from the edge of that final cliff. Those rough, chalk-covered hands slapped me, dragged me out of the bathroom by my ears, bandaged my bleeding forearms, and then slapped me again.
“We’re on the same side, Leena,” Maryam Madam had said, rubbing her eyes tiredly. “I promised your father I’d take care of you, but I can’t do it if you’re going to set the world on fire. You think I want to be the enemy here? You think I’d do this if I didn’t love you? I want what’s best for you, and that means making sure you survive your own incredible stupidity.”
The words she used were so close to those horrible ones from Rowdha Yousef that were ruining my life—My Guardian knows what’s best for me—but they felt so different coming from the headmistress. In those days, after the unrest of the Arab Spring, Rowdha petitioned the country’s Majlis to keep the rules in place that prevented women from acting without the support of their male guardians. Rowdha believed women shouldn’t be allowed to drive or even go to the roadside bakhala to buy their own maxi-pads, because if women could take care of themselves, men would stop being respectful. Might even leave.
As if my father had chosen to be dragged away from his family by the mahabith, leaving us so paralyzed.
“What do you want to do?” the headmistress asked now, interrupting my memory.
“I’d like to print out a few copies,” I said. “And then you can delete the digital photos.”
“I’ll give you some time while I lecture the others.”
The headmistress got up and headed out, locking me in for safety. I plugged the camera into her computer. The photos came up immediately, and I blushed. Mishail was a talented photographer, but it was really strange and uncomfortable to see photos of ourselves like this. Sofia’s chest glowed with sweat, as if she were a beach model. Aisha’s photo was probably the most innocent. She looked irritable and hot. One photo caught me entirely by surprise. I was sitting on the grass, looking directly at Mishail, hands clenched at my sides as if gearing up for a fight. I wondered what had been going through my mind that I would look at Mishai
l with such intense anger. As if the universe were marking out the contrast, the next photo was of Mishail, whose gentleness and light eyes made her seem almost like a fairy painted into a field of flowers than a real girl.
These photos had no business being online, where anyone could get to them. We would each get a keepsake printout, and that would have to be enough. Sometimes it was as if Mishail forgot that her father was the minister of the interior, whose department owned Al-Hai’a as well as Saudi Telecom. They spied on all phone and Internet communications in the country. Not only did all our phones have apps that regularly pinged our guardians with our location, our fathers could always request the records to determine if there had been any inappropriate communications. Mishail knew this, so it was almost as if she were asking to be caught.
I was about to get up when I saw the headmistress’s e-mail pop up with a new message. I read the subject line by accident, and then froze in the chair.
I knew I had no business reading the headmistress’s e-mail. I shouldn’t even have registered that subject line, though I’d read it on autopilot. But it said Majlis internship—Deadline for applications Wednesday, October 8.
That was two weeks from today. I had heard about the program, of course. Now that women could finally vote and even be elected to the council, joining the Majlis was the dream of any girl interested in changing the law. Why hadn’t the headmistress mentioned it before?
See, if you were a woman in Saudi Arabia, you dreamed of only three things. To marry a man you loved. To change Saudi Arabia. And to leave Saudi Arabia, at least for a little while. As for leaving, there were only two ways out—a KASP scholarship to a foreign university, which required a guardian’s permission and more influential connections than I had, or being sold into marriage to the highest bidder, also with a guardian’s permission.
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