I clutched my cold and sweaty hands in my lap to keep them from shaking. I knew that boys stole cars all the time here and that the Camry in particular was the most stolen car in the country, if not the world. But I’d always thought it was the work of thugs in the lower-income district. But, of course, I’d never known any boys, so I really had no way to judge who was or wasn’t a thug. For all I knew, all boys were thugs.
“We’ll take it back when we’re done. Don’t worry. And there’s no damage. My friend Mohammed works at the dealership, so he has master keys. Cars are nothing here.”
I wrapped the checkered headdress more tightly around my face. I was wearing my father’s thin white thobe. For some reason, as the car started, I felt that all my years of dressing up as a man were practice for this moment. Surveillance cameras were on every street corner, and muttaween in their vans pulled up alongside us to inspect the car’s inhabitants, but none of them, even the ones who stared at me for the entire red light, stopped us. Ahmed headed south, past the reach of the police and toward the sprawling suburban districts on the outskirts of the city, where new developments were perpetually expanding into the desert. Sometimes there were construction sites, but more often than not there were simply perfect, freshly laid roads and empty lots. Under Riyadh’s signature golden streetlamps, swarms of locusts cast fluttering shadows on the road as if it were some kind of disco.
The city was starting to hunker down for the upcoming month of Ramadan. When the month of purity and fasting happened to fall in the winter, Riyadh had a buzzing energy to it that it didn’t have in the hot summer months, when people mostly lay down indoors and prayed for the horribleness to end.
There was a group of boys in the distance. Ahmed slowed down the car, as if suddenly feeling hesitant.
“You think they’ll be able to tell?” I asked.
“Not if you don’t talk much.”
“So what is it?”
My heart raced. What was I thinking? I was alone with a boy I barely knew, whom I was trusting simply because he’d known my father. And even if he could be trusted, there was a battalion of men ahead, more than I’d ever seen together in one place.
“What is it?” I asked again.
“If anyone asks, say that you belong to me and you’ll be safe.”
“What does that mean, I belong to you? And safe from what?”
Ahmed tapped his fingers on the steering wheel as if pondering a speech, and I pondered opening the door and jumping out while the car was moving. Coming here was a stupid idea.
“Not like that,” Ahmed said hurriedly. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
That wasn’t very practical or reassuring, but my stupid heart leaped anyway. I peered into the distance to see whether I could at least outrun the group. As if that were any kind of a plan, running back home in the middle of the night. Why had I come? I wanted to know these people who loved my father. I wanted to understand—
Nonsense, said a bitter voice in my head. You wanted to come close to the fire without getting burned. You wanted to show Mishail that you weren’t some innocent who couldn’t handle herself around boys. You wanted to impress her, make her jealous.
I told that voice to shut up. If Mishail was done with me, I was done with her, too. This wasn’t about her at all.
To my immense relief, nobody paid me any notice. The boys simply sat around on the trunks of their cars and shared their frustrations and their cigarettes, here in the open desert away from police and cameras. One of them had a father who beat him. Another had been expelled from school for writing blasphemous poetry. He kept reciting his favorite line, even though I was convinced I had heard it before.
Everything is forbidden, so we can do anything.
“And what about you? What brought you here?” one of them asked me. He’d had his eyes on me for a while, making me glad the headdress covered my face.
I looked at Ahmed to see if he’d shared some story that I’d have to play along with.
“Oh, I see how it is,” the boy said, laughing. “The passive one becomes active.”
His words made no sense to me, but something about the way he’d said it made me realize it was a crude joke. Ahmed rolled his eyes.
“Tell you what, wiran,” the guy said, making a V with his fingers and pointing it at my eyes. “I’ll do a little dance. For your eyes only.”
He slid off the roof of the car he was sitting on and got inside, starting the engine.
“What’s he doing? Why did he call me wiran?”
“Showing off,” Ahmed said, ignoring my other question. “That’s Coca-Cola.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“It’s his nickname because he looks like the bottle. And because his family got rich smuggling it into the country when it was banned.”
Coca-Cola drove his old BMW (also probably stolen) down the road until his rear lights were a small and dusty pair of red eyes. Then the car turned around and headed toward us. Clearly, something important was about to happen, because the boys stopped gossiping and started to pay attention. Some of them stood up expectantly, gazing down the road.
We heard the car before we saw what was happening, the screeching tires sending up a puff of dust. The boys started clapping and screaming and yodeling. The BMW barreled toward us at highway speed, doing a figure eight that nearly grazed a dozen streetlamps before screeching to a halt ten feet in front of us.
I realized one of my hands was covering my mouth while the other was digging into Ahmed’s arm. I let go of him quickly, embarrassed, wiping my hand as if to clean away the crime of having touched a boy.
Coca-Cola got out of the car and headed toward us. He made a lewd sound, and then reached down and turned his hand into a claw. I’d seen men do that in the park, on the bus, and even a few times on the street. Before I’d started dressing as a boy, one of them had reached for me and grabbed a breast for a quick grope when I went to the bakhala to buy milk, saying a cheerful “shukran” afterward as if thanking me for good service.
But this guy’s hand was reaching down, way below my chest.
Ahmed stepped in front of me at the last minute, doubling over in pain when the hand made contact somewhere below his stomach. I blew out a breath in gratitude. I didn’t think I could handle random guys touching me out here.
“Okay, okay,” Coca-Cola said, putting his arms up in surrender. “But you have to admit I’m good. Not as good as Hadi, but who is? It’s just a surprise that you would ever love anybody else.”
I frowned in confusion. What could the guy possibly mean?
But soon the boys were engrossed in a conversation about how to expose a prince’s son who had killed someone in a fight in Manfouha. The police had not arrested him, even though nearly six witnesses were on the street. We thought of ways to blackmail the killer into paying the required diyyat, or blood money, to the victim’s family.
I wondered if there was really a difference between helping the innocent and punishing the guilty. I’d wanted to become a lawyer for the same reason as anybody else. A fire burned deep within me to help the people who deserved happiness find it. And sometimes, as now, that fire also burned to punish those who were undeserving who had found happiness anyway.
“This is really dangerous,” I said to Ahmed.
“I know,” Ahmed said. He swatted impatiently at a locust. He said in English, in a fake American accent, “It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.”
“But why this?” I gestured vaguely at the road to indicate the crazy driving.
“To remind ourselves of the few things that still make life worth living. But why don’t you find out for yourself?” Ahmed asked, dangling keys over my head. I jumped up to grab them, grinning so hard my cheeks hurt.
We got into the Camry. The engine came to life with a hitching wheeze and then a roar, and I gripped the steering wheel as if it were an animal that might bolt. Being in the driver’s seat was different from anything I’
d ever experienced. Raw power flowed through my veins. My skin tingled, and goose bumps rose up on my arms.
“The road’s a straight line, but you probably don’t want to go too fast until you learn how to turn,” Ahmed said. He reached over until he was practically sharing the seat with me and in the darkness used his hand to place my right foot on the brake. I could hardly breathe, completely disoriented by his grip on my ankle.
“And this,” he said softly, as he moved my foot again, “is the accelerator.”
The car roared.
“Not so fast,” he said, laughing. His breath was warm against my leg. I didn’t dare move.
His hand covered mine on the gearshift and moved it out of Park. I was so cautious in applying the accelerator that we inched forward on the gravel with a popping sound, as if we were driving over bubble wrap.
“Yellah,” he said. “Let’s go. We’re alone.”
I shrieked in delight as the car burst into the next gear and accelerated suddenly. I drove down the empty road into the unlit desert until all we could see was disappearing road ahead of the front lights. That was probably the most exhilarating moment of all, being so completely alone in the dark, no sound except our breath and the hum of the engine, nobody watching to tell us about the laws we were breaking.
Eventually, I pulled over to the side and put the car in Park.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. I got out of the car and jumped up and down like a six-year-old. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Ahmed got out of his side and watched me, his grin shining in the moonlight. Without thinking about it, I threw my arms around his neck and said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
Ahmed laughed and hugged me close. Only then did I realize I had never done this, hugged a boy, and this was probably zina, but there was something electric between us. I couldn’t pull away.
It was over almost instantly, and we jumped apart as if we’d been caught.
“Sorry,” we said together. We were both breathing heavily.
“We can’t,” I said, just as he said, “We shouldn’t.”
I was trembling. Feeling reckless and bitter, frightened and furious, I said, “Because of Mishail?”
I saw several emotions cross his face, most of which I couldn’t understand in the dark. My ears burned.
“Mishail is just another girl to me,” he said with a shrug. “She’s a giggly, spoiled child who rebels to get attention. Just like Daria. You’re not like them.”
My heart soared even as my mind filled with doubt. “But this is real,” he said, grabbing my shoulders. “All of us out there? We’re on the same side. We’re working on a plan. And when it’s done, then—”
“Then?” I asked, heart in my throat.
“Then,” he said, like a promise.
We got back in the car. Ahmed taught me how to turn it around until it was pointed at the group. I drove us back, bringing the car to a neat stop exactly where it used to be.
“You’re a natural,” Ahmed said, coming over to my side as we got out. My legs were shaking, and his warm hand clasped the back of my neck in affection. It steadied me. Someone made a whooping noise, as if cheering us on. “Do you see it now? Here we can do anything we want. We’re real men. But there”—he pointed to the city, a shimmering necklace of golden lights in the distance—“we’re just wiran. Ladyboys who do what we’re told.”
In the periphery of my vision, I saw Coca-Cola, the guy who’d “danced” for me, head out into the desert, his arms around another boy. Something about the way they moved made me uneasy.
“What are they doing?” I asked Ahmed.
He didn’t answer; he just gave me a patient smile, as if waiting for me to understand something that was obvious.
“Oh.”
“We can do anything we want,” he said again with a meaningful glance.
13
RAMADAN
There is a saying in Najd that a woman who has half a man’s heart has twice her sister’s share. My future as a lawyer was probably doomed, but I still knew all the permutations and combinations of the law—how it took two women to bear witness but only one man, and that women usually got half their brothers’ inheritance, except in special circumstances where we got double, and those I had bookmarked by folding pages in our textbook.
When the law stated that a man could marry four women and have a few concubines besides through misyar marriages, a boy was not just well within his rights to love two girls, he was practically a saint for choosing only two. Still, by the time Ramadan slid into place in November with that first aching prayer, I hated myself for hungering after the boy my best friend loved, and I hated Ahmed for pouring oil on a flame we could not satisfy.
To see the waxing crescent moon, no thicker than a human hair, was supposed to signal the month of purity, and to know that you had begun it by betraying your best friend for a crime you were committing yourself was to realize that, in the end, Ramadan was about punishment. That maybe, if you spent a month starving and suffering, God could forgive you.
And there was that fact. That I was committing the same crime. There was no way to make myself believe that it was different because I had no father to catch me and no future to lose. Ahmed and I hadn’t gone further than a few casual touches, but I had fallen in a different, deeper kind of love.
These days the scent of petrol instantly sent a surge of adrenaline through me. I’d been out with Ahmed only a few times, but each time it had been three hours of being on high alert, looking out for the police and listening to my heart pound in my chest as our car drifted down the empty lanes. Once, we’d gone all the way to the refinery, where hundred-foot flames blazed into the pitch-black sky. When I got home that night, I didn’t so much fall asleep as collapse into blissful and boneless nonexistence.
I knew now what Mishail meant when she’d said, I’m finally alive after being buried underground for sixteen years. Fear made us feel alive, and we were intoxicated with rebellion and hunger and our determination not to engage in any zina, at least during the holy month. Ahmed and I spent every minute of our time together straining against our attraction, which made it only stronger. Sometimes I could feel him shift an inch toward me in the passenger’s seat, and the car would swerve in response. If he was driving, and I’d made him smile, I’d wish he could keep looking at me like that even if it meant we’d die in a crash.
I wasn’t going to be missed at home. My mother was busy catering to daily ifthar events because of Ramadan, and she assumed I was staying with Mishail. It wasn’t as if she’d been paying enough attention to know that anything had changed.
That everything had changed.
I knew now that I couldn’t trust anyone else to take care of me. And after the things Ahmed said about liking my independent spirit, I didn’t want them to. So I walked to Hossein’s house and said I wanted to work for him. To learn more of the law, maybe earn enough to put myself through university one day.
If I lived that long.
I understood it now, why the boys in Ahmed’s shabab careered down the streets yodeling at the top of their lungs. Why they committed their acts of vandalism, spraying scandalous gossip about clerics as graffiti along the manicured storefronts of Malaz. Most shops didn’t open until sunset, when the day’s fast was broken, so from dawn to dusk the metal shutters let us know that the powerful Imam Ibn Abbas had secretly married his sister, or that the youngest Rashid was addicted to cocaine coming in from Yemen, all with a short link to some site that had a video or a photo as proof but would be online for only a day.
During Ramadan, the city came alive at night, and we were out in the desert until two or three in the morning. The wilder boys, like Coca-Cola, would shout out ideas to defame or assassinate powerful authorities, while the more peaceful ones would recite their favorite poems, reminding us that these were the words others had been jailed for. Died for.
Ahmed sang the first verse fr
om Kashgari’s letter to the prophet Muhammad: “On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.”
There were cheers, and I heard my father’s name among them. I shivered. These verses were filled with so much love for our prophet, and yet the poet had been called an apostate and excommunicated from the Muslim community, the ummah, for his disrespect. It made no sense.
The next verse was spoken by the boy who had gone into the darkness with Coca-Cola that first night. “On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.”
I sang the last verse, eager to show that I was one of them. I knew the words of the rebels, and I was ready to live by them. “On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”
“If you were going to die tomorrow, what would you regret not doing today?” Ahmed asked me as we drove away from the group. I knew the answer he wanted from me, but I wasn’t ready to give it.
“It’s not this world but the next one I’m worried about,” I muttered, feeling a prick of guilt. Driving around and singing forbidden poetry was one thing, breaking only those man-made laws that we thought were stupid. But slandering clerics was a sin, and touching a non-mahram boy was zina that would take you straight to hell. And that was just what we’d already done. As for all the things I wanted to do, Mishail’s words were proving prophetic. It was as if having such heavy gates and veils on our bodies had allowed our minds to wander with complete freedom. The things I dreamed of doing with Ahmed would not just cost me my life but would damn my soul forever in the eyes of God.
I kept seeing him anyway.
As I put on the white thobe that belonged to my father, I noted that I was his height now. I wondered if Ahmed liked me only because I looked so much like him. I knew I was a hypocrite, allowing myself the very same madness I’d denied Mishail. And it was madness, a consuming obsession that drove me to Ahmed night after night. Not an obsession with him, I told myself. It was something more subtle than that. The scars on my forearms were nearly invisible now, but I could still remember what it had felt like, the unbelievable rush of fear, blood, and pain and the bliss that followed it, before the headmistress and her infuriating reasonableness got in the way.
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