She clicks off YouTube and closes her laptop.
“Are you looking at me for some easy solution?” she asks, rustling in the bag until she finds a pack of bubble gum. “Because you do know there’s a reason you’re hiding here crying about it, right?”
I nod, even though I have no clue as to why I’m hiding here crying about it. That’s what I can’t figure out, why it feels so hard to scream it.
She unwraps a cube of gum, flicks it into her mouth, and says, “Although, you can do what I do when I get mad at things I can’t change. Burn the suckers.”
She rips off a portion of the candy bag and hands it to me. “To wipe your hands on.”
I comply. “What do you mean ‘burn the suckers’?”
“I read it somewhere. You write the thing out that you can’t deal with, the unmentionable, write what you want to do and then burn the pages. Slowly.” She smacks her gum. “I fed a fireplace once with seventeen pages about a man who needed to be mutilated. I described the torture lovingly.”
“Why’d he need to be mutilated?” I say.
“Because he married my sister and then married two other women on different continents without telling her,” she says. “My sister doesn’t roll like that. He knew that beforehand.”
“Did she leave him?” I ask. “I hope she left him.”
“No, she’s in Saudi,” she says. “He left her there. With a baby and a huge empty house. She’s part Saudi so she’s bound by their laws. Can’t leave without the deadbeat.”
“So why’s he an unmentionable?” I say. “Tell the world about the bastard!”
She looks at me and blows a bubble. It becomes quite large, menacingly so, before it pops. She picks it off her face and rolls it into a ripped piece of the candy bag.
“You have no idea about the world, do you?” she says. “I mean, I could ask you, Why’d you keep quiet about your thing? Tell the world about the bastard yourself.”
I don’t like her dismissive tone. It’s too close to the Sausun I know, so I get up off the floor, stretch, and go to the door, opening it cautiously. My backpack’s at the foot of the stairs, and the light from the room is enough to reveal no one waiting to pounce. I grab my bag and bolt back into the room. I decide to stay in here tonight, bunking with Sausun, rather than be in a room by myself, with Farooq merely two staircases away. I’d never attempt to stay in my bedroom, on the same floor where the guys are sleeping.
I plunk on my chosen bed and take my laptop out. No new picture postings on Facebook. Only a bunch of messages from Fizz that I don’t touch.
I’m so glad she didn’t come to Chicago.
Sausun takes her blanket off and spreads it on the floor. “Prayer?”
Nodding, I close my laptop and rummage through my backpack for my pajamas.
I change and make wudu in the en suite bathroom, cleaning myself slowly, thinking about talking to Allah. When I get back to the room, Sausun’s in her black gown and scarf.
We perform the night prayer in unison, with Sausun leading. She stays a long time with her forehead on the ground, the time we can say our personal prayers to God, so after I finish mine, I add one for her sister in Saudi Arabia.
After prayer, Sausun gets into bed and watches me for a while as I put away my laptop, before turning over to face the wall on her side of the room.
“I’ll trade places with you on the drive back to Eastspring tomorrow,” she says. “If you want, that is.”
My shoulders and neck instantly relax, surprising me. I didn’t know I was wound up until I go slack with relief on hearing her words.
“Thanks,” I say, looking at her back with an immense sense of gratitude I haven’t felt toward anyone in a long time. “And I’m taking your advice. I’m going to write it out.”
She turns back to me and says, “Yeah, but that’s the least you can do. The meekest thing. If that perv had tried to hurt me, believe me, I wouldn’t be just writing it out.”
I stay quiet because my idea is to actually write it out, online, and not burn it. No one would know who wrote it. No one in my world. To post it would feel like some sort of justice. Like posting details of a crime on a wanted poster.
It isn’t my fault no criminal would ever get caught.
MISFITS
I stay in the basement, rewatching the funnier Niqabi Ninjas episodes, while Sausun does her gig upstairs at breakfast, convincing Aliya and her carpool crew that she needs to leave right away so they need to leave right away, now that she’s officially part of their lot. When she comes down to get her bag, she flips up her niqab and gives me a grim smile.
“It worked,” she says. “But Farooq knows. He wouldn’t look me in the face, the perv.”
“Um, hello? That’s because you have no face?” I say, elation flickering in me at the news I will be nowhere near the monster for the rest of the day.
“And, also, Nuah is coming with you guys,” she says, ignoring my giddiness and letting her face covering drop again. “He switched too.”
I slide my legs off the bed and watch her gather her things and pick up candy litter. It’s weird that I’d told her something I don’t even allow myself to think much about. Is it true, what someone said, that it’s a million times easier to tell a stranger your deepest secret than a person who cares for you? Like those confessions people write on postcards and mail to that guy who collects them. Mine would be short and blunt. It would tell all but not reveal all. My best friend’s adored cousin tried to rape me and now thinks it’s a mistake but still wants me to admit I wanted him in the first place.
But really, I’d told Sausun way more than my anonymous postcard. So maybe she isn’t exactly some stranger. Maybe I’d sensed she actually does care.
I mean, this is not the Sausun I thought I knew. Well, sort of knew. At the mosque, it was always a salaam wave from afar. Fizz thought she was too intense, so we kept our distance.
“You staying down here till we leave?” Sausun heads to the door. “Aliya will start making noises if you don’t come up to say salaam—you know that.”
“Tell her I have girl problems,” I say, feigning cramps.
“Meanwhile, you have douche-bag-guy problems.” Sausun pauses in the doorway to look at me. “You know, when I first saw you around the mosque, I thought you were the lone rebel type, with your artsy clothes and stuff.”
“And?” I say, holding back what I’m about to do, which is give her a good-bye hug.
“And you’re just not,” she says. “You’re weak.”
“Okay,” I say. “Who wants to be a lone rebel anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Sausun says. “All I know is that sometimes I wonder if I’ll get presented with someone kicking up dirt in my life like in yours. Or like what’s happening to my sister. Because, you know what I’d do? I’d grind the guy into the ground. Enjoy every moment of it.”
I don’t say anything. She waves salaam without looking at me and exits.
Maybe she’s some stranger after all.