“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.
Dad 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.
? ? ?
In English, as Ms. Keaton reviews rhetorical devices, I’m thinking: Tats, how could you?