Saints and Misfits

by S. K. Ali

  In English, as Ms. Keaton reviews rhetorical devices, I’m thinking:

  Tats, how could you?

  Am I not your friend?

  I thought you were into Matt? Or did you realize, like the rest of the world, he’s completely unattainable? And so you decide to help yourself to what you saw in my heart?

  Whatever’s happening between Tats and Jeremy must be developing at drama club.

  The rest of the morning disappears in an intense exam-preparation lecture by Mr. Pape. There’s exactly one school week left before exams, as next Friday is the official designated day off to study, so he tells us that he’s going to cram the history of war into four days. He’s a pacifist, so he spends a lot of time on ethics, standing by the window with one hand on his hip and the other hand ready to tousle his own hair when his speech gets too tragic. I sit in the back and write three different letters to Tats. They contain Amu’s overused favorite words: “unethical” and “merciless.” I tear each one up.

  At lunch, I avoid the cafeteria, where Tats would be waiting at our table, and log on to a computer in the library. Dad’s e-mail says Those who can’t bear to look a bear in the eye are already dead. Stand and look before you fight or flee. It makes winning, and even failing, sweeter.

  I don’t get that one, but I do know the bear is either Tats or Muhammad.

  • • •

  I decide to corner Tats in the locker room after gym, second-to-last period, the only class we share. I’m in an enriched stream, and she’s trying out all the artistic avenues open to her. Which I’m kind of envious of. What would it feel like to want to become only a photographer, I wonder. But that wondering is very rhetorical because no way would I give up my straight-A+ report card to risk a dabble in hobbies.

  Besides being artsy, Tats also has tawny hair. Have you ever seen long tawny hair? It’s like the mane growing on your favorite fairy-tale horse, the kind your seven-year-old self dreamed about, frolicking through that meadow, underneath that rainbow.

  It would be easy for Jeremy to fall for her is what I’m trying to say.

  And me? I’ve got hair. It’s just that since I started hijab, no guy other than Dad or Muhammad or Amu has seen it. So my hair has succumbed to the lack of maintenance that exists when the world doesn’t judge you by it. I wear a celebratory halo of intercultural marriage, free to be, on my head: the tight curls of my Egyptian mother with the blue-black shine of my Indian father, amassed in a tight bun under my scarf.

  Actually, I’d be lying if I said no guy has ever seen it. Tats has taken my pictures after makeover sessions in her bedroom. She said her brother once asked who her hot friend was after he’d accidently seen one of the pics. I pretended to get upset but secretly thought, Really? Someone thinks I’m hot?

  We still do makeover shots occasionally. Then stop for long periods when the guilt gets to me. Or when Saint Sarah leads another session at the mosque on the powers of being free of societal beauty judgment—that my logical mind completely understands.

  It’s hard sometimes to move in obscurity when everyone else around you is so Instagram worthy. Even the person who’s telling you not to care so much about looking great: Saint Sarah.

  But gym class is girls only. I get to go hijabless for a glorious forty minutes. I’m partnered up with Simone, athlete extraordinaire, for our weights unit, so there’s no opportunity to talk to Tats in class. Besides, I’ve been avoiding her bearish eyes until the opportune time in the locker room, pretending I’m really into perfecting my squats.

  After class, people do their hair thing in front of the mirrors while I tuck it all in with one sweep of a scarf and a strategically placed safety pin. I’m always done first. And because Tats has that hair to maintain, she’s usually done last.

  I come out of the bathroom stall where I’ve been practicing my unaffected look and stand by the hand dryers to watch her toss the mane around. I’m readying myself to ask her a composed, nonrhetorical question—Do you like Jeremy too?—when the weirdest thing happens. She turns to me before I speak and takes a deep breath. Her eyes are wide and ingenue-like. If her favorite actress, Audrey Hepburn, had a younger, slightly less delicate-looking sister, Tats would be her, face-wise. Audrey is her favorite actress precisely for that reason.

  “Jan, will you promise not to get mad at me?” she says. “It has to do with Jeremy.”

  I turn to the mirror and look at the ceiling lights through it.

  “It’s exciting news,” she continues. “Just promise me you’ll be all right with it.”

  The only response for that is to pick up my backpack and mumble, “Math class, late,” before exiting the locker room. Before she sees my self-sabotaging, brimming eyes.

  I’ve known Tatyana for a long time, standing by her to fend off stupid boys who’ve called her Tityana since sixth grade, because, somehow, she’s scrawny (not slim but scrawny, as in kiddylike) yet amply endowed, like those things you spin and match up the different body parts of different people. In eighth grade I even put in detention time for a week, unrepentantly, for unscrewing the valve stems on one really uncouth boy’s bike tires myself and then painstakingly deflating them, for her.

  And now I’m fed up with her.

  It’s not like Jeremy’s mine, so why am I so upset?

  Don’t answer that. It’s totally rhetorical.

  • • •

  Enriched math class is all guys except for Soon-Lee and me. That would be okay if it were full of normal dudes. Instead it has people like Robby and Pradeep. Guys who make it a point to remind us we’re the only two females in the class.

  A whisper as I go up to answer a question on the whiteboard: “Look at that. I can’t believe they let the only two girls in school without any booty into this class.”

  A note tossed to Soon-Lee after she works a formula aloud when no one else could solve it: U sure you’re not a guy? Wanna check again?

  And when Soon-Lee and I ignore their taunts: “I think some people are on the rag today.”

  MONSTER

  After school I take the bus to Fizz’s. She opens the door before I ring the bell and grabs the present from my hand as I’m about to yell happy birthday.

  “Salaams. Sh. Get downstairs,” she says. “Everything’s set up.”

  I copy her stealthy walk, following her down the hallway, lowering each foot gingerly before lifting the next one. She lets me go ahead of her at the basement door, then shuts and locks it before scrambling down the stairs.

  Fizz’s younger sisters, Hana and Hadia, the twins, are sprawled on a love seat from the 1970s (pristine from being mummified in plastic wrap for most of its life), watching Project Runway. The oldest sister, Aliya, is cross-legged on the carpeted floor, folding a massive load of laundry. She’s the most domesticated eighteen-year-old I have ever met.

  “Finally!” says one of the twins. She clicks the remote, and the opening notes of Pride and Prejudice, the miniseries, begin to play.

  “My mom’s on the hunt for kitchen maids,” Fizz tells me, ripping open a bag of chips. “She keeps talking about a birthday feast. Which means we’ll be in the kitchen for hours, making something that will be eaten in ten minutes. Like homemade samosas or something.”

  I grab a handful of Cheetos and feed them into my mouth one by one as if I’m operating mastication machinery, contemplating how to tell Fizz about the latest development on the Jeremy front. She’s the second person who knows about him, but only as a major forehead crush. I don’t get into things too much with her because she’s not exactly rah-rah about my liking a non-Muslim guy. Fruitless, she calls it.

  Rambo joins us on the sofa with a far-from-nimble leap from the floor. He peers at the remainder of my chips cupped in my left hand, as if wondering what they are, so perplexed is his expression.

  “Did you see him heave himself? He’s on a never-ending diet and he’s still a lardo,” Fizz says. “Don’t feed him.”

  Rambo tilts his head and looks into my eyes. His
own eyes are blue and soulful. I sneak him one chip that he gratefully accepts before being pushed off the sofa by Fizz.

  “It’s his breed,” Aliya says. “Let him be.”

  “He’s prediabetic,” Fizz says.

  “Because of the stress you give him,” Aliya says, folding Fizz’s pajamas.

  On-screen, Elizabeth Bennet and her older sister, Jane, give each other cuddly compliments.

  There’s a click, followed by footsteps on the stairs. Fizz’s mom, Auntie Fatima, leans her head over the railing. Uncle Aziz, Fizz’s dad, shows up behind her, munching on a samosa.

  “Everybody, upstairs,” Auntie Fatima says.

  Only Aliya makes a move and stacks the folded piles into a laundry basket.

  “FIDDA, HANA, HADIA—and, Janna, sweetie, if you want to—UPSTAIRS NOW!”

  We shuffle to the dining room, where the gargantuan oval oak table is covered with evidence of a mass operation. Tupperware containing various candies are laid out at two, four, eight, and ten o’clock. Twelve o’clock has a box of clear plastic bags and twist ties.

  “We are making loot bags,” Auntie Fatima says. “For your party.”

  Fizz stands still. “What party?”

  “Your birthday party.” Auntie Fatima motions for Aliya to take the head of the table. Hana and Hadia snicker as they head to the gummy bear packs and bubble gum at two and four, respectively.

  “No one told me about a party.”

  Auntie Fatima crosses her arms. “I didn’t want to tell you because you would say no. As the chair of the mosque social committee, I have to be hospitable.”

  Fizz takes a seat in front of happy-face lollipops the size of my palms. “So, who’s coming to my party? Six-year-olds?”

  Aliya raises her eyebrows at Fizz in warning.

  “What is wrong with being a good host? Giving out goody bags? Back home we always welcomed our guests with a treat, no matter how old they were, fifteen or fifty!”

  Auntie Fatima marches around the table clockwise, making a sample bag to show us what we are aiming for: a muddle of cheap, kitschy candy. She tells us she’ll be in the kitchen finishing the storm she’s cooking.

  “No, really, Mom, who’s coming to my party?”

  “Family and friends.”

  I freeze when I hear that. Family means Fizz’s cousin Farooq.

  Farooq the monster.

  • • •

  I dribble candy hearts into the bags passed to me from four o’clock.

  Hana and Hadia get an idea to change the carefully organized composition of the loot bags, to add some pizzazz to the whole thing. Their passive-aggressive mutiny campaign gets limited to making bags with only red-colored candy or smiley lollipops by Aliya; she vetoed and confiscated the patent-pending eerie bags of gummy bears with their heads chopped off and lollipops with smeared smiles.

  “What happened?” Fizz asks after Aliya puts on some music and I scoot my chair over to nine o’clock. “Why do you look so down?”

  I tell her about Tats’s treachery. Tats and Jeremy out together when they should’ve been at drama club.

  “I’m not surprised,” Fizz says. “Some people have no morals.”

  I consider that. I don’t know if that’s even true. “Well, that’s not who she really is. She’s never done anything even close to this before.”

  “Anyway, it’s a gift from Allah, isn’t it?” Fizz watches my face for a reaction. “You can unlike him now. He’s non-Muslim. I told you from the beginning to drop it.”

  I slump. “It’s not easy like that.”

  “Come on, a Muslim guy, a real one, is what you need to focus on.”

  “Sorry, don’t know any.”

  “First, check how much they’ve memorized the Qur’an. That will tell you what they’re like.”

  I stop myself from picturing her cousin. I know that’s who she’s thinking of.

  Instead, I see a husk of corn. An empty one. Because, like Mr. Ram said, that’s what the monster is, just a husk with nothing inside.

  I hate the husk.

  “I know what I need to do,” Fizz says, tapping my shoulder with a happy-face lollipop. “Imma jus gonna hafta find you some hot Muslim guy tomorrow night at the—”

  “Fun-Fun-Fun Islamic Quiz Game,” I say, groaning the words out.

  The Fun-Fun-Fun Islamic Quiz Game is another brainchild of Saint Sarah. She wants the teens at our mosque to compete against other youth groups in our region and be the smartest Muslims or something. She is so nice that she let her five-year-old brother name the competition, as she told us on the flyer.

  I’m laughing, but, really, what if I tell Fizz I don’t want to find some hot Muslim guy?

  • • •

  We finish at five. Auntie Fatima declares that the leftover candy will go to the mosque to be distributed at the Fun-Fun-Fun Islamic Quiz Game.

  The doorbell rings as we put away the Tupperware and box up the remaining candy. It doesn’t stop ringing until almost every girl from the mosque is in the house. And some of their mothers. The monster, who has the whole Qur’an memorized, has been invited to say a few prayers and then disappear upstairs so the girls can “relax.”

  He’s standing in the foyer talking to Uncle Aziz. I scuttle to the kitchen through the dining room and busy myself ladling things into bowls and serving plates.

  “All meat. Not surprising.” Someone tall and slim in a black gown is looking out the sliding doors to the patio, parting the vertical blinds to do so. She turns. It’s Sausun, a sullen girl from study circle. “Like there are no Muslim vegetarians in the world.”

  “There’s okra.” I point a drippy wooden spoon at a pan.

  “Of course there’s okra. Probably covered in oil.” She raises a perfectly sculpted thick eyebrow. Her eyes are hazel, and when paired with those eyebrows, they make a look-at-me combination. But she wears long gowns with Doc Martens boots and severe black scarves on her head, so she’s not exactly a glamour queen. Kind of the opposite actually. “Okra is not edible in my book. Like something forgotten that’s been foraged and forced on us. Like eggplant and mushrooms.”

  “Wow, you’re really antivegetable for a vegetarian.” I open the fridge. “There are potato samosas in here I think. I can reheat them if you want.”

  “No. I come prepared.” She bends down and rifles through a laptop bag on the ground. “My own food. For such predicaments.”

  She holds up a bag of marshmallows with HALAL written on it in red writing. “Halal” means “permitted” in Arabic. Regular marshmallows may have gelatin from pork sources.

  But all marshmallows need some type of gelatin. I make my way to Sausun.

  “Want some?” she asks, dangling the bag. She rips it open.

  “No, I just want to read the ingredients.”

  “It’s halal.”

  “I know, but is it halal from beef gelatin? Or”—I scan the list—“fish gelatin. So that makes you a pescatarian. Because you eat fish, too.”

  “Thanks. For ruining my marshmallows.” She continues shoving them into her mouth while watching me take out the samosas. Auntie Fatima returns from the living room, holding three bouquets of flowers.

  “Oh, thank you, Janna. I’ll heat those.” She trades the samosa plate in my hands for the bouquets.

  I hope she doesn’t tell me to leave the kitchen. To go and enjoy myself.

  Stop and smell the flowers, isn’t that what they tell you to do in stressful situations? Closing my eyes, I bury my face in the blooms and inhale.

  A snort of laughter from the corner of the kitchen greets my attempt at de-stressing. I open my eyes to Sausun’s smirk.

  What a . . . pescatarian.

  Saint Sarah drifts in and kisses Auntie Fatima three times, saying salaam. There’s a silk purple peony pinned at the side of her head, holding up her mauve scarf. It turns to me before she does.

  “Janna! So good to see you.” She comes over for a hug, but I hold up the mess of flowers in fro
nt of my face, with a smile, to indicate my unfortunate busyness.

  She grabs them, bends to take a bottle of water from the case under the kitchen table, and strides to the dining room. She’s back before I can leave. A vase full of flowers decorates the center of the oak table behind her.

  “I wanted to talk to you.” Saint Sarah picks up both my hands and lifts them as if I’m a puppy she is examining. “Will you join our team for the quiz competition? We desperately need your brains.”

  “I have exams,” I say. “Sorry.”

  “I heard you’re working on a graphic novel of the Prophet’s life,” she continues, ignoring me. “So I thought you would be perfect for the seerah questions. There’s a whole category of them.”

  Muhammad is already telling her intimate details about my life? Great.

  I drop my hands. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got three important exams.”

  “Think about it,” Saint Sarah says, smiling.

  “Yeah, think about it,” Sausun calls as I leave. She’s eating samosas, an empty bag of marshmallows stuck under her arm.

  • • •

  I make the mistake of escaping into the family room. The monster is there on his own, fitting wires into the sound system. His back is to the door, so he doesn’t see me. I find Aliya in the hall, arranging guest shoes in neat rows, and ask her to tell Fizz that I’m sorry, but I had to leave because of not feeling well. I actually am sick to my stomach. Aliya goes to get me a plate of food, but I’m already opening the door.

  • • •

  On the bus, I lean my head against the glass window. The scene outside turns from suburbs to city. The scene inside me is one I don’t want to replay, but the remote control is not in my hand. Seeing him at Fizz’s again is like involuntarily pressing play on a personal nightmare.

  MISFITS

  Saturday morning is prime exam-prep time, so I’m in bed studying when Muhammad knocks. He enters looking like a wombat. Not a cute one—one of those perpetually worried ones.

  I don’t know what happened with Saint Sarah’s parents on Wednesday, but I do know that when I went to get a glass of water last night, he was up at three a.m., that special time of night Allah says if anyone has a really urgent prayer they need answered, ask it then. Well, Muhammad was up asking it, praying with this look I’ve never seen on his face. I think he’d call it sincerity, but I’d call it desperation. Uncharacteristically I did feel sorry for him and found myself saying ameen out loud after a particularly long prayer he muttered. He stood, yanked up his prayer rug, and took it into the dining room.