by S. K. Ali
And who gets handed the worst of it in a Flannery world? Monsters hiding behind saint masks.
Um, yes.
Mr. Ram interrupts my mind’s dip into that rabbit hole exclusively reserved for Flannery. “Did you decide about Caliban yet? Still believe that he is completely evil?”
“Mr. Ram, he attacked Miranda. That bothers me more than Shakespeare maybe meaning Caliban to be a dark man.”
“So you don’t want to dig deeper, then.” Mr. Ram makes a teepee with his hands. “I did a paper on foreign men in Shakespeare. That was a such a long time ago, so it must be old-fashioned.”
We reach the edge of the sidewalk.
“Your friend is over there with a young man,” Mr. Ram says when we’re in the middle of the road.
Once we’re across, I stop the wheelchair and look up.
Tats and Jeremy.
They’re walking in the middle-school yard, their backs to us, Tats’s ponytailed long hair bouncing with her steps.
MISFITS
I first noticed him in the spring when I took pictures of the track meet for the yearbook. My telephoto lens got the requisite shots of warm-ups and victory fists before it noticed someone packing away audio equipment at the announcer’s table. Windbreaker jacket, a short, no-nonsense haircut, relaxed movements. I took some pictures, ignoring the little voice inside that said Paparazzi! Stalker! over and over as I zoomed in on a remarkable forehead.
(This is going to sound strange, but I found out, through careful study, that good-looking guys always have the right foreheads. High foreheads. Maybe it’s because they balance the jawlines just so. Anyway, foreheads count a lot in my mind.)
Later I find out his name is Jeremy. He’s the guy who runs the lights for our assemblies, the go-to guy for anything technical.
At the spring concert, he came over, asked if I needed assistance setting up my camera. Kneeling to crank my tripod, I looked up, fell hard, and never recovered.
After a month, I developed this uncanny ability to sense his presence before I even saw him. That’s how I became aware that he strolls through the sophomore hallways to get to some of his classes. That’s also how I noticed he’s a good friend of the monster.
This should have stopped me in my tracks. This, and the ways we don’t fit. He’s a senior; I’m a sophomore. He’s white, of Irish background, and I’m brown, a mix of my Egyptian mother and Indian father.
He’s Christian. I’m Muslim. The non-casual-dating kind.
But it didn’t stop in me, the Jeremy fixation.
I told Tats, one of only two people who knows about him, that my brain, muscles, and eyes are starting to hurt from numbingly pretending I don’t notice that he’s less than four feet away from me like twice a day.
Tats told me he’s in her drama club, tech crew. They meet Thursdays after school. (Onstage, not in the middle-school yard.)
MISFIT
At the community center, Mr. Ram and I check in at the front desk with the guy who runs program registration. He nods at me, comes around the counter to kneel by the wheelchair, and reaches his right hand out to do a special handshake that he’s been trying to teach Mr. Ram.
I take another application form for Ms. Kolbinsky and turn to watch them. The guy is guiding Mr. Ram through the motions again, their hands vastly different in size, but close in color. “So, like this, shake, a hand tap, and then you clutch my hand, let go, and high-five, then finger tap with style, and point. You’ll get it, sir, you’ll get it!”
I don’t know the front desk guy’s name, but I call him Shazam! in my head. Shazam!’s been teaching Mr. Ram this handshake for almost two months now, ever since he started working here, but Mr. Ram still can’t get it.
I dubbed him Shazam! because he saunters over periodically to the foyer where Seniors Games Club takes place to shake hands again, deliver one-liners, and just like that—SHAZAM!—light up their faces before he walks back to his post.
Right now Mr. Ram’s face is glowing with the happiness of the handshake. His mouth is open wide in a grin and he’s shaking slightly, but no sound comes out: his Belly-Laugh smile, the gauge of his greatest point of happiness. I wheel him to his friends who are waiting, with chessboards spread, eager to see him.
I seat myself at a corner table and set up my laptop, away from the action.
“So, you related to Mr. Ram?” Shazam! is at the vending machine.
“No. He’s my neighbor.”
“I just thought, because, you know, you bring him here every week.” He pushes buttons with one hand and pulls on his hair, a short Afro, with the other. “That’s nice of you.”
“No, I actually get paid to do it.”
“So it’s not nice of you?” He takes his Gatorade. Now he’s facing me with a wide smile. A necklace of wooden beads hangs on his neck, the pendant disappearing into his white T-shirt.
“Yeah, it is. Because I still like doing it.” I doodle clouds on my agenda. “Is that nice enough?”
“Sure.” He takes a drink and salutes me with the bottle. “See ya—gotta get back to the desk. Might be some late gamers checking in.”
I open my e-mail and read today’s message from Dad: Let go of that which clouds your success scenario. Dispense with the unnecessary.
That’s Dad for you. Every weekday he sends a message out to his mailing list. He thinks because he expanded his business, Lite Indian Desserts (LID), Inc., from a basement operation to national prominence he has the right to give everyone sound bites on success. He thinks he’s the Deepak Chopra of capitalism.
There’s an e-mail from Fizz: Don’t forget my birthday, tomorrow after school, my house! Xoxo, Fizz
I peddle in e-mails because Mom thinks fifteen is too young for my own phone. She’s the only mother who thinks so, according to Fizz.
I get to work editing Amu’s postings on his website. Amu, “uncle” in Arabic, is Mom’s brother and the imam, or prayer leader, of the mosque here in town. While he is smart and all that, his English has not kept up with the times, so he pays me to make it more accessible.
Every Thursday evening, Amu posts answers to questions he gets from the Muslim community on the website Memos from the Mosque. Some of them are downright unbelievable.
Today I’m looking at Dear Imam, is it permissible to eat llamas? And Dear Imam, are we allowed to pray in a barn if there are pigs nearby?
Apparently there are a lot of confused Muslim farmers out there.
Those I zap into the trash bin of oblivion. I filter two good ones and e-mail those to Amu. He’ll work on them for a week and send them back to me by next Thursday.
I look over the answers he’s written to last week’s questions.
Dear Imam, are we allowed to keep hamsters if it’s in a big LARGE cage?
Answer: Thank you for your question. I believe if we should examine your question together we shall find our answer. You herewith mention a cage, but you do not refer to it as merely just that, a cage. No, you specify that it will be a big cage. And you do not even stop there. Quite emphatically, you add on the word LARGE in capital letters. I ask you why are you compelled to do this? Why do you feel it is necessary to be so exceedingly exact (if a bit banal) in your description of the roomy attributes of this said cage? Could it be that your conscience is ethical and you recognize what a merciless action it would be to cage a free creature of ALLAH? This is what He says on the subject in the Qur’an: “There is not a creature on the earth nor anything that flies on wings without its being organized into communities, just like you.” Alas, the cage, no matter how spacious of an abode, would not constitute a community and would be utterly merciless. And Allah knows best.
I trim the grandiloquent excesses on this and the other answer before e-mailing them to Amu.
He e-mails me back immediately. Thank you, Janna. May Allah reward you abundantly. And do not forget to take pictures of the Mosque Open House on Sunday morning. Plenty of non-Muslims will be there so prepare for great inter-fait
h shots! We will use them for our website posting next week. God be with you.
Amu the optimist. The same three non-Muslims show up to our open house every year. They get serenaded as though they’re royalty because we get to post “Mosque Opens Door to Greater Community, and THEY CAME!”
But I don’t want to think about Sunday. The monster will be there, pious and smiling, pretending nothing happened.
Freakily, I know I’ll have to do the same: pretend.
If I don’t, he’ll flood my brain.
But I don’t want him to access any part of me ever again. Not even a flicker of my thoughts.
MISFIT
Mom is home when I get back. She and Muhammad are sitting in the living room with a box of doughnuts on the side table. Odd, as we never get doughnuts, and Mom is never home before six. She has the afternoon shift at the library, sometimes even the evening one.
I say salaams and open the box. Two cherry-filled smothered in powdered sugar, my favorite. Very odd.
“You’re home early.” I take my first cloudy bite.
“I didn’t go to work.” She glances at Muhammad. “Muhammad and I were out shopping.”
“Mom, let’s get it over with.” Muhammad leans forward. He’s on the couch that he sleeps on. A huddle of blankets, towels, and Columbia U. sweatshirts cave in as he moves.
“Janna, sit,” Mom says.
“I have studying to do.” I’m suspicious now. Mom’s not looking at me. She’s shooting glances from the window to the doughnut box to the long-standing game of Risk between her and Muhammad on the coffee table.
“Mom, are you getting married?” I say, smiling. I’ve been privately practicing for the day she tells me. My part in it would be to look ecstatic. I like thinking up inevitable, awful truths and rehearsing my reactions so that I’m not caught off guard.
“No!” she says. “No, not that.”
Muhammad laughs. “It’s even better. Your bro is moving back home.”
He holds up a hand for a high five.
“Why, did Columbia kick you out?”
“Muhammad will be working for a year.” Mom leans forward, her eyes fixed on me. “To save money to continue college.”
Okay. Why are they both staring so hard?
“He’ll need your room.”
“Ha. Funny.” There are only two bedrooms in our apartment. Muhammad was busy away at school when Mom and I moved in, so neither of them belong to him. I shove the rest of the doughnut in my mouth to contain my emotions, jam squishing out the sides.
“He’s changed majors, and it’ll take more time to finish school now. We need you to be open to this.”
I swallow.
“Please, Janna.”
“No.”
“There’s no other option now. We can’t pick up and move suddenly. And he can’t sleep on the couch forever.”
“So you’re going to make me sleep on the couch? How’s that even make sense?”
“No, we’ll rearrange my room so that you can have your own private space in it,” Mom says. “I’m even downsizing my bed so that you can fit yours in. We picked one out today.”
“No. I’m not four years old.”
“We can get privacy screens so that it’s an enclosed space.”
Muhammad puts up a hand again. “I’m paying for those. Man, are they expensive.”
“Mom!” I say, ignoring Muhammad. “You can’t do this to me!”
I run to my room, passing my reflection in the hall mirror. I look like the Joker from Batman, with white powder and bits of cherry smearing the edges of my mouth.
• • •
My room is not a spectacular space done up like a Pottery Barn Teen room. That would be the room Dad’s setting up for me at his house. Here, it’s a secondhand bed by the window, a green dresser found on the curb, and a tiny desk that blocks the door when it opens. The special thing about my space is that it faces Tats’s apartment in the building across.
Which I’m not even sure is special anymore.
I drop into bed and stretch an arm to pull the curtain across. I want dark.
I can’t believe this. Muhammad is supposed to stay at college until he finishes, then start his career and get married and never move back home.
I won’t give in. I won’t accept their arrangements for me. They didn’t even ask my opinion. It’s like when Mom didn’t tell me she and Dad were divorcing.
For the longest time, I thought Mom and I packed up and moved on our own for an extended vacation while Muhammad stayed back to finish his last year of high school and Dad was on an important business trip in Chicago. They broke the news to me right before I turned twelve: Guess what? You had no say in it, but from now on your life will be like this. Our family is divorced.
I’d had no clue they didn’t like each other anymore. I mean, I knew Dad wasn’t home much, and when he was, they didn’t talk a lot. But we still did things together.
There’s life BD and AD—before divorce and after divorce—and in my head, the BD images, while faded at the edges, glow in the middle, like the filter Tats uses on all her Instagram pictures.
BD was after-school snacks with Mom, the kind with smiley faces on them, Dad timing my math facts at the kitchen table, the guest bedroom where Muhammad and I had our respective corners to plot major pillow-fight campaigns. It was me drawing at the coffee table in our sunny family room, sketchbooks spread out, TV on in the background.
I know memory can be selective and nostalgia deceptive, but when the floor goes from underneath, I’d rather fall back than down.
It had to have been a better time than now.
BD is also when I started trying out hijab. Back then, at nine, I wanted to look like Mom. She wore jewel-toned scarves, and wrapping them around my head in front of the mirror was like trying on her heels.
One day I wore a purple one to school because it went with my sweatshirt. When I got home, Amu was visiting. He smiled on seeing me, but Dad frowned.
“She’s young.” I heard Dad from my bedroom; he’d said it with that much force. I padded to the top of the stairs to listen, my fingers playing with the tassels of the scarf around my neck.
“That’s true.” Amu’s voice. “She doesn’t understand it yet.”
“She’s just trying something. Let her be.” Mom.
“You want to turn her into a mini you.” Dad.
“No, Haroon, I want her to choose. And if it’s to be like me, is that so bad?”
Silence.
Later I found out from Muhammad that Amu had been there to counsel Mom and Dad.
Mom had told him about it, but, apparently, I was too young to know that things were going downhill.
• • •
BD was going to the mosque together.
Except when it wasn’t. Dad stopped attending due to working on the weekends. That bothered Mom, but they didn’t fight it out like couples do on TV.
Instead, Mom told me to draw what I’d learned at the mosque to share with Dad when he got home. So he gave me a pile of empty executive agenda planners from work, and every Sunday I went over my sketches with him.
My favorite sketchbook is on the shelf above my desk now: a leather-bound planner that holds the almost-finished biography of the Prophet Muhammad. The seerah, in graphic novel format.
I get off the bed and pull out the planner. I remember the day I started it at Sunday school. We were learning about how, although the Prophet was statuesque and walked nobly, he always, always stopped and stooped to smile at children. I had to draw a picture of that, without showing the Prophet’s face, of course.
The colors I chose to draw with are all super bright and happy. So this proves it: BD was a better time.
I drop the sketchbook on my desk. Besides Tats, Mr. Ram is the only person outside my family who’s seen it in full. He loved it and was always on me to add more. He made it seem like I’d be emulating the greatness of the Mahabharata scribe if I finished it.
Da
d loved it too. Or acted like he loved it. I stopped working on it three years ago, when he married Linda, his administrative assistant.
That was the year I also started wearing hijab full-time.
And weirdly, when Dad first saw me with it, one evening on Skype, Mom had been in the background wearing a black scarf exactly like mine.
So, silence again.
• • •
Muhammad moving home means Mom will go back to telling him everything. I’ll be “too young” to know stuff again, even about my own life.
Mom finds it too easy to exclude me.
No, I’m not giving up my room. I’m waiting this one out.
MISFITS
The next morning, I’m almost at the doors to school when someone beeps from the parking lot. I don’t think it’s for me until I hear a car pull up alongside. Muhammad.
I ponder ignoring him but know that he will make my life immensely worse, so I turn and walk toward the rolled-down window.
“Yes?”
“This is for you.” He dangles a plastic bag out.
“What is it? English starts in five minutes.”
“Look inside.”
I shuffle closer and peer in. A phone. A shiny new one in a shiny new box.
Something I’m not allowed to have until I’m sixteen.
“Mom thought you’d want it earlier. To keep in touch with your friends.”
“I know what a phone is for. And I know what bribery is for too. My room is worth way more.” I leave him to ponder that one.
As I walk to class, Tats waves from the end of the hallway, where she’s ripping off posters for one or another of the many clubs she belongs to. I start to wave back but drop my hand when Jeremy steps out from beside the trophy case. He’s coiling up some wire from the school display monitor and sees my smile, frozen, when I see him so close to Tats. She glances at him, raising her eyebrows at me.
• • •