“Read quietly until page one fifty, and then I’ll ask questions.”
“It’s a shame the textbook doesn’t say anything useful about getting a husband,” Mishail whispered. “It’s just obey this, inherit that.”
Sofia turned slightly in her seat so she could talk to us. “I bet the new girl knows a thing or two about boys. We should ask her if she’s met any. In American schools, girls and boys study together.”
“How does anyone get any studying done?” Mishail asked. “I’m serious!”
“What’s your sun sign, Mishail?” Sofia asked.
“Leo,” Mishail and I said together.
“And Leena’s a Scorpio, no wonder you guys mix so well. Fire and water. I only asked because my sister-in-law is Egyptian. She says there’s a way older than sun signs that works better for girls, to take your name and your mother’s name and use that to find your true soul mate.”
“Will you guys SHUT UP?” Bilquis hissed, covering her ears. “It’s bad enough that you’re into all the haraam things, do you have to corrupt everyone else as well with your stupid stuperstitions?”
Mishail and I burst into quiet laughter. “Stuperstitions!” we whispered together.
“What’s going on there?” Batool Madam asked. “Mishail! Done reading? Please list the requirements for a valid marriage.”
“Consent of the bride and her guardian,” Mishail said, blushing furiously. “The contract with the mahr to be paid to the woman, agreed to by both parties. Two witnesses.”
“And?”
Mishail swallowed but said nothing. I kept my gaze in front of me but started writing on my desk. CHASTITY.
“Eyes up here, don’t look at your book!” Batool Madam said. “No?”
This was usually when she asked, Anyone else? I raised one hand and drummed my fingertips on the table to draw the teacher’s attention. Once I gave the answer, Mishail would be off the hook.
“How about you, new girl? Think you know the answer?”
I gasped softly. It wasn’t fair to do this to anyone on her first day. I raised my hand even higher.
“No, I want Miss Abulkhair to show us what she knows.”
Daria stood up and said in a voice that was completely calm and confident, “In addition to the consent of the woman, preventing a forced marriage, sufficient mahr for her to independently survive a husband’s death or divorce, and a contract witnessed by at least two Muslims, both parties must be chaste.”
It was so silent in the classroom I thought I could hear Batool Madam’s blood draining from her pale face. True, Daria’s Arabic was a little artificial, but her answer was perfect. I felt a wave of triumph pulsing through my fingers and toes. The thought Finally! occurred to me, as if I’d been in some tough battle and someone had come to help me at long last.
“Not bad,” Batool Madam said. “Did you have a good law teacher in your other school?”
“We had a halaqa system,” Daria said. She hesitated, as if about to explain but not until she was asked.
“I’ve heard of that. It’s the one where you sit in a circle or something, yes?”
“Yes,” Daria said. “It’s the same system that they used in Qaraouine. We sat in a circle around our teacher and had a debate, for instance, about whether the silence of a woman counts as consent. Al-Bukhari says it does, but Binti Khudam had her marriage annulled by the prophet because she’d been too shy to refuse.”
There it was again, the absolute silence.
“Peace be upon him,” Daria added hastily, and I grinned. I was really going to like this girl, who knew of Qaraouine, the first university in the world, the one built by a woman but now closed to them, this girl who could manage Batool the Fool as well as I could.
“I see,” Batool Madam said coldly. She scanned Daria from head to toe and said, “Next question. Let’s see. You, in the third row. What are the rules of khula? Mishail, you can sit down now.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. The storm had passed. When Batool Madam was in retreat and licking her wounds, she picked on the girls whose names she didn’t know, the ones who scared easily. I pointed at the word chastity written on my desk, and Mishail began scratching it out as a girl in the third row stammered the rules by which a woman could petition for a divorce as long as she approached the court with an appropriate male relative.
Once Batool Madam left the classroom, we gathered around Daria. We usually had five minutes of peace between classes while teachers switched rooms. It was a simple system; the girls of a class had usually been together since they’d started school at the age of three and had to take all the same subjects. The routine for seniors was intense, with two classes before the zuhr prayer, followed by lunch and three more subjects, taking us almost all the way to the sunset maghreb. Only then did the buses and drivers take us home.
Despite gathering around Daria with intense curiosity, nobody seemed to know what questions to ask the new girl. Mishail spoke first, with a flawlessly casual flick of her headscarf. “What you did today was really cool.”
“It’s nothing,” Daria said, grinning mischievously. “I didn’t know how far to push her, you know? She was so funny, pretending she knew what a halaqa system was, as if sitting around a fire singing songs is the same thing as having a debate.”
I laughed and said, “The easiest way past her is with some piece of information she doesn’t know. It’s like cheese to a rat.”
“I’ll keep that in mind for next time,” Daria said. “I have all sorts of juicy tidbits about zawaj al-misyar.”
I frowned. Decent girls didn’t talk about concubine marriages. Someone behind me drew in a sharp breath.
“Traveler’s marriage? Sometimes known as temporary marriage?” Daria asked. “Oh, it’s too funny. It’s a way for single women to find a convenient guardian, or to, you know, do things, without waiting. Understand?”
Mishail laughed, but I only smiled uncomfortably.
“There’s even a website, where all these Saudi women try to find good men from Yemen or Oman to have a misyar marriage with so they can live in peace, maybe have a little fun.”
“That’s disgusting,” Bilquis said. “Saudi women would never do such shameful things. You’re lying.”
I blinked, unable to decide how I felt. My stomach agreed with Bilquis, which was disgusting in and of itself. My head agreed with Daria. If all you had to do to live in peace was sign a piece of paper, it was a tempting idea.
“I think it’s perfectly reasonable that given a terrible situation, people will do whatever they need to do to survive,” Mishail said, making peace again. “Isn’t that what you always say, Leena? Water will find a way.”
I exhaled slowly, glaring at Mishail in warning. The phrase was “A river carves its own route,” said by Abdullah Al-Hamid, the famous freedom fighter. But it wasn’t safe to talk about him here, in front of Bilquis.
“You would say that,” Bilquis said. “Neither of you are exactly role models for good character, are you? Like father, like daughter.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.
“Teacher’s coming!” Aisha called, and we flew back to our seats.
As the chemistry teacher walked in, Sofia passed Mishail a note. Mishail opened it and placed it in the middle so I could see.
If you guys want to bring the Almighty Bilquis down from her righteous cloud, I’d be happy to help.:-)—D.
“You’re right,” Mishail said, folding the paper up neatly and stuffing it in her bra. “I like her.”
* * *
AT THE TIME, I had fought the strange curdling in my belly as paranoia.
Now, banging my head against the coffee table at home, I wondered how Mishail could have turned into a crazy person in less than forty-eight hours. I closed my eyes, holding the phone to my ear as Mishail went on to podcast an episode of Daria’s biography.
Daria lives in one of those American ARAMCO campuses where they have a swimming pool and no Al-Hai’a.
Daria learned to drive in New York. She once drove the wrong way down a one-way street and had to reverse while a bus came at her!
Daria’s father is out on business trips all the time, so she has her own personal driver from Pakistan!
Daria, Daria, Daria!
And then the call to end them all. Mishail’s voice sounded choked up, and at first, my pulse raced, thinking something had happened, maybe the minister had finally gone too far, but no.
“Daria has kissed a boy before,” Mishail said, sounding as if she might cry for jealousy. “French-kissed. With tongue.”
“Mishy, someone might be listening to this phone call.”
“Are you listening to me? She has experience. And it wasn’t on one of her American vacations, either. It was here. She says the easiest way to meet boys is in Faisaliyah. It’s complicated, but we can do it. We have to.”
“Do you have any idea how insane you sound?” I whispered. “This isn’t like wearing red on Valentine’s Day or listening to music at school. You’re talking expelled, head-shaved-by-police, go-to-jail dangerous. We can’t talk about this on the phone. Think about what your father would say if he heard you.”
“You’re right,” Mishail said, and sniffled. “I hate my life. I hate everything. We’re not even really living, are we? What’s the point of it all? We should just—”
“Okay, stop that,” I said hastily, knowing how this particular thread of conversation ended. Stupid Hunger Games books, which gave Mishail the idea of collective suicide as a form of protest.
“Leena, I think my father wants to marry me off at the end of this year,” Mishail said, crying. “He won’t tell me anything about it, but I hear him with his friends, and my name comes up. Why else would my name come up? He’s going to sell me for my mahr, I know it. And then we’ll never see each other again. If that happens, I’ll—”
“No, you won’t,” I said. The important thing was never to let Mishail finish any of her sentences. It was like using tissues to direct the course of spilled water, building dams as Mishail’s emotions explored all possible outlets. “No matter what happens, I won’t leave you. You hear me?”
“I just have this feeling,” Mishail said, hiccuping now, “that this is the end, you know? Our last year together. You’re going to go to university, and I’m going to end up married to some old buffoon with bad teeth who smells like garlic and stale musk.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. But it was no use.
“You’re laughing, aren’t you? You are!”
“It won’t happen, Mishy. You know as well as I do that if you say no, you can’t be married off against your will. It’s against the law. Just keep saying no, and we’ll be fine. I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you.”
“So you’ll come with us?”
“With who? Where?”
“Faisaliyah!” Mishail said, her voice rising to a whine. “If I can find someone reasonably good before my father settles things, I’ll feel better. I don’t want to feel like I have no options.”
“Mishy, men aren’t teddy bears,” I said, pinching my temples. When you depend on them, they get arrested or leave. “Besides, I have to study.”
“I thought you said you weren’t going to foreign schools.”
“I’m not.”
“Then why do you care? Eighty percent is good enough to get into Princess Nora. You only need the really high scores to go abroad. This is my life, Leena!”
“Okay, okay,” I said, knowing I had to go if only to get Mishail out of inevitable trouble. “I’ll come.”
* * *
THE TRIP TO Faisaliyah was an unmitigated disaster.
Even ordinarily, I hated malls. They were an overstimulating mashup of Swatch, Swarovski, and Starbucks, to the point where even the chlorinated and multicolored water of the marble fountains sounded like the clink of coins. And Faisaliyah—with its air conditioners growling at full blast, the red-carpet treatment women got as they entered, valets opening doors, and chauffeurs sitting in the distance hoping for a glimpse of a high-heeled ankle underneath the train of black silk—just wasn’t my idea of fun. Other girls loved malls, lived for the day they could enter Il Terrazzo, the mixed-gender restaurant at the top of the tower, on the arm of a husband. They practiced their walk at home so they could be seen at the mall, carrying large designer handbags over their black abayas to tease the exiled men, and then demonstrating their style to the women inside.
I didn’t know what I’d expected, but Daria acting as tour guide to the mall Mishail and I had grown up in was not it. And worse was the way Mishail acted around her, as if Daria might know a little bit about boys, but she, Mishail, had all the ancient wisdom of Arab womanhood behind her proclamations of who was “dressed deadly” and who was “just dead.” As if it were a great bedouin secret that nail polish kept stocking tears from running. As if using lemon and glycerin to bleach your skin into fairness were something women of the desert had done for millennia, rather than a stupid fashion trend that came about from watching smuggled American movies with white women in them.
There was no way for all three of us to walk in a row, so Mishail had her arm linked through Daria’s “to make her feel welcome,” leaving me trailing them like a sulky child.
Upon Daria’s insistence, we bought small, perfumed calling cards and sat down at the Starbucks to fill them out.
“Just a name and a phone number or e-mail address. It doesn’t have to be your real name if you’re only looking for fun, and even for serious men, they’ll understand if you explain when you’re ready that you didn’t give your real name.”
I got up to go to the bathroom, mostly to buy some time and avoid explaining that I wasn’t really interested in hunting for boys. Even if I did find a guy I liked, what would be the point? Sooner or later he’d find out about my unfortunate situation and nothing would come of it except humiliation and heartbreak. This whole idea reeked of the kind of danger I had no use for. This wasn’t like climbing onto the roof of the portable cabin at school to see over the ten-foot wall that held us in. At worst, you’d fall and break a bone or two. This kind of adventure could leave you shattered, like the beggar women in the slums of Naseem who trembled and muttered to themselves because their husbands had abandoned them.
When I returned, Mishail said, “Hey, Leena, do you know Bilquis’s phone number?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Daria had a really great idea for how to teach her a lesson.”
“Mishy,” I said, but I knew how this would go. Mishail pouted. I wrote the number on one of the cards. I saw Mishail and Daria exchange glances. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing,” Mishail said.
“Don’t worry,” Daria said, entering the number into her phone. “I’m going to become Bilquis’s new best friend.”
I scowled. I turned to Mishail, expecting to see an explanation or the same suspicion there. What I saw instead unnerved me. Mishail was gazing at Daria with open adoration, as if Daria had constructed all the colored fountains and marble cathedrals of Faisaliyah herself, just to make Mishail smile.
On the way out of the mall, as we headed toward the parking garage where the driver was waiting, Daria said, “Wait a sec.”
We had caught the attention of four young boys who were smoking by a pillar, boys who were clearly waiting to catch a glimpse of any women who might be at the mall. Daria looked left and right, as if she were crossing the street, and then whipped off her headscarf, letting her waist-length hair down for a second. She bundled it back up quickly, jabbed in a pen to hold the knot together, and retied her headscarf, never once looking at the boys, who watched her in silent awe.
We continued to the car. Since I was a step behind Daria and Mishail, I saw that each of them casually let slip a calling card that fluttered to the ground. The two of them never looked back, but I did, and I saw the boys run over to the space the girls had vacated, wrestling one an
other for the cards as if they were gold coins dropped by queens.
7
WASTA
On the eighth of October, Mishail and I were sitting on the ledge outside the second-floor bathroom window, the hiding spot we’d discovered the year before when I finally grew tall enough to climb to it and help Mishail up. The ledge overlooked the brick wall, which was nearly a foot thick. The broken glass that covered it sparkled innocently in the sunshine, as if it weren’t the reason our school was still standing after the riots when so many others were not.
Mishail blew out a stream of soap bubbles. I aimed the pellet gun and shot them down in quick succession.
The pellets were foam darts the size of a pencil eraser, and a bag of a thousand usually got us through an hour, or a single class. The darts landed in the empty lot on the other side of the school wall, far from the road or prying religious eyes.
“You can’t keep claiming you aren’t upset,” Mishail said. “Your aim is always better when you’re angry.”
I said nothing. I could still hear the echoes of Daria’s shriek of joy when she was named one of the two members on the debate team who would compete for the Majlis internship. Mishail had squeezed my hand when her name was announced as the second candidate.
“I didn’t have anything to do with the choice,” she said now. “I know it should be you there, not me. Don’t you think everyone knows that?”
I couldn’t speak. If I tried, I knew I’d start crying. I looked at the bubble blower expectantly. Mishail sighed into the lens, and a large, watery bubble came out of the other side. I narrowed my eyes and shot it.
“It’s not fair,” I said finally. “She’s half American. She can go anywhere anytime.”
“It’s not that simple. Her mother’s American, not her father, so she’s as stuck as we are. They’re not that rich. Besides, you’re not actually angry she was chosen.”
Even I had to admit that Daria would be great at the debate. And what kind of friend would I be if I wasn’t happy that Mishail was getting the opportunity of a lifetime?
“At least Bilquis got put in her place,” Mishail said.
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