by S. K. Ali
Like me.
We look at the donuts together. And I whisper to Mama, “Don’ut break Eid tradition.”
Cinnamon Swirl Mama laughs, and it’s like a door opens for happiness to step back into the house.
A door opens in me too, and I tumble out unsquished.
Mama lets me fix the scarf on her, and I pin it carefully under her chin. She looks beautiful.
“Why don’t you drink your hot chocolate, sweetie?” she asks. “And have your donut?”
“No, I want to wait for everyone else,” I say. “Do you think it will feel exactly like Eid did before? If I wait for them with a box of donuts? Outside?”
She hugs me all of a sudden. It’s almost as tight as her hugs used to be.
“Eid Mubarak, my precious one,” Mama says into my hair. “Now go outside to wait. Drink your hot chocolate so you can stay warm in the cold air.”
“But they’ll see me. And Esa might get mad that he didn’t get hot chocolate too. Well, I mean warm chocolate,” I say. “He might not even be happy that I got his favorite donut, Powdered Delight. You know how he gets, Mama.”
“I have an idea! I’ll make everyone hot chocolate.” Mama begins walking to the kitchen.
“But, Mama, you can’t!” I follow her. “You’re supposed to rest!”
“Sweetie, I can boil water and stir chocolate powder. And I can see you, and you can see me through the kitchen window. I’ll be right at the stove.”
“But what if you get weak?” I move in front of her and touch her arms. “Like that day? Like last time?”
“I was doing something silly then, darling. I was trying to do the laundry.” She holds my arms. “We’ll keep an eye on each other. Through the window. Okay?”
Her eyes are wide. They’re happy.
So I let her.
I sip the warm chocolate sitting on the porch steps. They’re so wide that Dad says it’s like an extra sofa.
I smile. Now I get it. It’s because we had to cut our living room in half with bookshelves to make a bedroom for Esa and Kareem.
So Dad’s saying the porch is part of our living room now.
We’re lucky to have such a porch.
The bus is coming!
I slurp the last bit of chocolate and tuck the cup behind the porch post. I don’t want Esa to see it.
After picking up the donut box, I turn to wave at Mama, who I can see through the big kitchen window, stirring in front of the stove. Her turquoise-framed face smiles at me.
I don’t think anyone will believe it’s Mama standing there when they get off the bus. Well, maybe sitting there, because I pulled up a chair for her by the stove to rest on in between stirring.
With the donut box in my hand, I go only as far as the spot where our pathway meets the sidewalk.
They get off the bus. Kareem, Noor, Dad holding Esa.
And then more people get off the bus in front of our house.
I lower the box of six donuts.
Our friends: Aunty Zareena and Uncle Fawaz and their daughter, my best mosque friend, Hina. Uncle Ashraf and Aunty Mona and their boys, Kareem’s friends, Talal and Munir. Aunty Hajera with her daughter, Firdows, Esa’s best frenemy. And Mama’s oldest friend, Aunty Rachel, with her daughter, Rebecca, who’s like a sister to Noor.
I lower the box of six donuts even more.
“Why do you look like a vampire, Naddy? Your lips are scary!” Esa says to me when Dad sets him down. “Donuts? I want donuts!”
“Is that Mama?” Noor exclaims. “Why is she in the kitchen?”
“Eid Mubarak, Nadia!” Kareem opens his arms for a hug.
I let him hug me, I let Dad take the box of donuts for Esa, and I smile at Hina when Kareem lets go.
The bus speeds away.
Parked across the street is a black car. A familiar man in dark glasses leans against its hood.
I turn to look at the crosswalk in front of the bus stop.
It is Mr. Laidlaw making his way across to our house. With Joy beside him, holding a big box of donuts.
Enough for everyone!
“I couldn’t believe it when Joy told me your daughter hadn’t picked one of our special Eid donuts,” Mr. Laidlaw tells Dad. “The new Cinnamon Chai donut. We’ve been experimenting for a while and just put out our first batches this week. So of course I had to bring some over.”
“What I can’t believe is that Nadia even went to the bakery on her own. To keep up the tradition.” Dad strokes my hair and smiles. “Come inside, Mr. Laidlaw. You must.”
“I’d like that,” Mr. Laidlaw says, stepping with his cane onto the pathway to our house. Joy has already followed Kareem onto the porch, where Noor’s setting mugs of hot chocolate on the wide railing for our guests, some of whom are already sitting on the porch steps–sofa. Mama isn’t at the kitchen window anymore. She must be sitting with her friends.
Now I know something I never ever want to forget, like I don’t ever want to forget to love purple-black: Special days start when you run toward them.
So I run into the house, to the rest of this most special day.
It’s beige.
Mama always corrects me and calls it “Tuscan Earth toned. With a touch of mauve.”
I prefer just beige. It’s easier.
Papí always takes my side. “Simple is good, querida. I like beige too.”
The point is, I super like the way it looks against my cocoa skin, which I get from Papí’s Caribbean roots. My skin, Papí always says, is dipped in sepia.
“With a touch of ochre!” Mama always adds.
But seriously, whatever the color, I love my scarf.
My hijab.
“Eleven is old enough, Mama,” I say, trying hard not to seem like my goal is to talk her into something. It’s probably not working. I don’t so much roll my eyes as push them around my head in a large circular shape.
Which is totally different.
She walks around the kitchen island, swiping a gentle hand through my coarse hair as she goes. I’ve wanted to wear hijab for so long and have been begging and begging and begging Mama to let me.
The way I figure it, eleven years old is for real old enough. Eight was old enough for some of the other girls I know from masjid, but it wasn’t until I turned eleven last month that Eima Ali gave me my first one as a birthday gift.
I like to think she was sending me a sorta secret message. Get ready—it’s almost time for you.
It’s no-holds-barred now. I wanted to take off running with that beautiful thing wrapped around my head six times the second I was able. But Mama. There was Mama, as always.
“Leila. Patience,” she says. “Let me teach you to put it on before we jump in headfirst.”
“Headfirst? A pun? Mama. Are you making a pun? Are you trying to take over as Silly Mama?”
She makes a face that says, I am large. I contain multitudes. But her job is being Serious Mama. Papí is the one who makes jokes, and he would never allow her to take his throne as family comedian.
“I wasn’t,” she says.
I knew it! “The rules are, you have to stick to Serious Mama.”
“But,” she laughs, “maybe I can be Silly Mama sometimes.”
Papí walks into the den. A moment later, he pulls the scarf from my hands and wraps it around his shoulders like a cape.
“Papí!” I say. Papí is six feet six inches tall. He is a tree. I turn to Mama, hoping maybe she’ll get my scarf down from his very high-up shoulders the way a fireman would rescue a lost cat.
No way I’m getting it down, I know. But I try anyway because that’s just who I am.
Mama only stares at me. “You’re probably right, honey. Best I stick to Serious Mama.”
I let out a growl and take a running leap from the couch onto Papí’s back, Tarzan style!
Papí has me in his arms, turned upside down, and then plopped onto the couch in a quick tornado of movement. But!
The good news!
I got
it. I scurry to the other end of the couch, away from Papí, and cradle my scarf, brushing its softness against my chin.
The look on Mama’s face is unreadable. She’s got her bottom lip tucked in her mouth, and her eyebrows hang just a little lower than usual on her forehead. It’s not sadness—not really.
Is “openness” an emotion?
“Oh, my sweet girl,” she says.
I refold the scarf in my lap. “What?”
She shakes her head and then says on an exhale, “I love the way you love things. Let’s do this, then. Let’s get you in hijab, huh?”
And even though Mama doesn’t like it, even though I know she’ll hiss, “Simmer, Leila,” the way she does, I stand on the couch and can’t help myself—I do a little dance.
With a puff of laughter, Papí sits on the arm of the couch and says, “Well, if you don’t want to wear it on your head, at least now we know it’ll make a good cape.”
Fiiiiiinally, Mama and Eima Ali decide to sit down with me and my beige-mauve scarf. It feels like a secret, the three of us in Papí and Mama’s room, two scarves and a handful of pins laid out.
Mama has an entire drawer dedicated to her scarves. I think it’s kind of like how mine has a special place on my shelf. Only, Mama has dozens. Blue ones and pink ones and silk ones and square ones and long long long ones and ones where the blue blends into the pink like watercolor paint and goes kind of purpley.
“Pick one,” Mama says, and I glance up at her from my spot in front of her low dresser.
“What?”
“If you want to save yours for something special, you can have one of mine and we can teach you using that.” She runs a hand over the top of my head, my chunky thick curls fighting with her fingers.
I like my scarf. I like Mama’s scarves too, but I think putting this first memory onto my beige-mauve scarf would be really cool.
“Mm, can we use mine?”
Eima Ali smiles from her spot on the bed. Mama’s hand squeezes my shoulder.
“Absolutely,” she says.
“You know,” Eima Ali says, “your mama and I used to race sometimes, in the mornings before school or before masjid. Who could get her hijab on the fastest.”
I think Mama and Eima Ali have always been competitive. I’m a little like that now. “Who would win?”
Eima Ali stands proudly. “Me.”
“Yes, your eima would win, but while hers were quickly done, pins clamped all wild and messy, mine always looked the cleanest, neatest,” Serious Mama says. She is a pigeon, chest puffed and proud.
“You took your time so it would look proper,” I say.
Mama nods and goes to sit criss-cross-applesauce on her bed. I join her. “It means different things to different people, but to me, having it look reverent—do you know what reverent means?”
I nod. “It’s when you’re super, like, respectful? And humble.” Yeah.
She continues with the softest smile on her face. “Having it look reverent meant a lot to me. No one else besides Allah and me needed to get that.”
I tilt my chin in understanding.
All of it feels like a thing you could write about. It feels special like that. And I will. Later I’ll sit down and write some big story about the magic of a group of girls putting on hijab and fighting moon monsters and evil space beings.
Eima Ali brushes my hair back.
“You’re not complaining that it hurts, Leila. Now I know your theatrics with me are entirely false,” Mama says.
“No.” I shake my head at Mama. “It’s just that Eima Ali is softer. And she puts a lot of cream in before she brushes.”
Eima Ali turns my head back in the direction she needs it. “Keep still.”
“Mm,” Mama says.
My halo of lightening curls is pinned back under the strictest orders to stay still and not move. And Eima places a thin black scarf around the edges and ties it in back.
“This is to protect your hair. We wear hijab, but that doesn’t mean we forget the value of our hair. We still have to take just as much care.”
Then, standing in front of the long mirror right next to Mama’s perfume table, we start. And it’s the coolest thing ever, pretty much. And I was right. It is a secret. Mama and Eima Ali teach me to wrap diagonal first and how to pin it in safe ways. And their voices are soft and slow the whole time.
Before Mama lets me look at the finished product in the mirror, she says, “There are a lot of ways to show our faith and love to Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala. You pick the ones that are right for who you are right now.”
When I get to see things all finished and in place, I don’t know how to keep my smile from leaping off my face. The way the softness feels around my cheeks, my chin. The way the beige-mauve-but-actually-just-beige looks with my skin.
“Papí!” I yell. And he comes running like there’s a fire, coming to an abrupt stop just inside the doorway.
“Querida,” he says, so quiet I almost don’t hear him even though he’s on his knees in front of me. And I don’t know what it is about having Papí look at me with such pride, but I know right then that there are very few feelings that will ever top this.
He pulls his phone out and snaps a picture of the two of us together. Mama always says I stole Papí’s smile right off his face for my own. She’s right.
Papí, Mama, Eima, and I take so many pictures that we’ve all got sore cheeks by the time we’re done.
I’m not allowed to leave the house in hijab right away.
Every morning I ask, and every morning Papí says, “Give it some time, querida. Mama’s right. Just give it some time before we take off with it.”
Now, with the sun kinda going down and all my homework done, I think it’s probably a good time to ask again. So I do.
Mama glances up at me. “Get comfortable in it, sweet girl. There are a lot of different ways to wear it. Play around with some styles. Give yourself some time, and when you’re ready, we’ll order you some more.” And then she goes back to prepping dinner, chopped onions flying all around the kitchen, ready to be part of dolma qarnoun tonight.
That weekend my best friend, Carmendee, comes over pretty much only so she can have some of the cassava pudding Papí made.
I like Carmen because she’s super funny and because she likes Sailor Moon and cassava pudding and she never falls asleep early when we do sleepovers.
“Can I see?” she says.
“Duh! It’s in my room.”
“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Aimé!” she calls as we hold hands and fast-walk through the house—because Mama’s favorite phrase to yell is “Walking feet!”—and upstairs to my room, where my scarf has a special spot. Right on my shelf, next to my Sailor Moon collection. I’ve got the playing cards, the original dolls, the original and Crystal versions of the DVDs, plus the movies and Funkos, and then of course there’s my manga.
Carmendee sits next to me on the floor in front of my mirror as I put on the hijab, and she helps me put the safety pins in where I tell her they should go.
“Dude, you could totally be the next Tahereh Mafi!” she says, scrolling to Tahereh’s Insta.
Oh, man. I can dream. “Pretty sure I’m too dark to be, like, a mini Tahereh.”
Carmendee laughs. “Oh, my God, ‘too dark’? That’s not even a thing. Your style’s already super good. You dress like a rock star every day at school—even Michaiah said so.”
Michaiah is a sixth grader who basically wears something from Hollister every day at school. No way am I on that level.
I laugh and swipe Carmendee’s words aside—poof!—disappearing them forever. “All my clothes are from the segunda.”
“Mine are too,” Carmendee says. “But my mamí totally picks mine out. So it’s kind of different.”
That’s fair. Mama always lets me do my own thing. Like, to an extent. Mama is still a pretty traditional hijabi with some super-strong Algerian roots, so I don’t leave the house in anything outrageous.
“You should wear it to school tomorrow,” Carmendee says, petting it the way she pets her dog, Taco.
Instead of letting me wear it out, Mama helps me practice putting it on every day until I can do it myself. I only get more and more excited with every try, but I also get the feeling Mama’s preparing herself for when I get to run free with it.
But . . . for Eid, maybe Mama will make an exception. Maybe Mama will let me wear it. I laugh before saying, “Want to do a TikTok to ‘Sucker’? I love the Jonas Brothers.”
We spend the afternoon filming and posting videos and talking about Nick Jonas, and I dance around my room with a little hopeful excitement in my hips.
In the coming days, I make it a goal to see just how many spots in the house I can wear it. In the kitchen. In the bathroom. In the upstairs closet. In the downstairs closet. In the storage shed in the backyard. Even in the garage, where I never go because seriously who even knows what kinds of bugs live in there.
After that, I approach Mama again. She’s on the couch writing down her grocery list for Eid day dinner while Papí does tonight’s dinner dishes in the kitchen.
“Well, now it knows where we live,” I say.
She glances up at me for, like, a second. “What’s that, my girl?”
I shake my scarf at her. “I’ve worn it around, shown it our house and also the backyard, the shed, and the garage. It knows where we live.”
Papí yells, “Like MTV Cribs!” from the kitchen, and Mama snaps her fingers and says, “Jack Aimé, do not encourage her.”
I turn and see him smiling into the bowl he’s drying with a dish towel.
“Like, a baby’s crib?” I ask, confused.
Papí barks out a laugh, and Mama shakes her head.
“Please, Mama? Please can I wear it? I want to wear it Eid day; wouldn’t that be so cool?”
“Salaat. You’ll wear it to salaat, okay?”
I frown. Wear it to masjid? Only inside the masjid? “No, but how ’bout all day, Mama? At school.”
She says quickly, “No. That’s not—I worry. The first time wearing hijab in public spaces can be . . . over-whelming and—”