Does My Head Look Big in This?

  “You asked for it!” Adam says. He comes and sits next to me, leaving Simone and Josh close together, poring over the magazine.

  “So Adam,” I say, trying to sound calm and wishing I’d had time for the lipgloss. “What’s the real deal with your mission to become the next Einstein? I mean, I know you want to get into med, but you’ve taken it up a notch, don’t you think?”

  He looks at me and shrugs. “Don’t give me the analysing treatment, Amal. There isn’t a deep and dark secret driving my ambition.”

  “Come on. Almost every recess or lunch you haven’t managed a conversation without mentioning molecules and electrons. You should find yourself a reason pretty soon or you’re stuck with ‘nerd’.”

  He rolls his eyes at me. “Why is it that guys cop the nerd label when they study hard but girls don’t?”

  “Nerd is nothing. We’ve got eating disorders, looks, body mass index, hairstyles and dress sense to deal with. We’re beating you guys by a mile.”

  He leans back on his hands. “What do you want to know? That I’m following family tradition? That I nearly drowned when I was a kid and was inspired to live to save lives?”

  I snort in disbelief.

  “I guess I’ve just always known what I want to be.”

  “Lucky you. I still don’t know. Do your parents give you the career advice sessions every night? At my place we don’t get through one dinner without lectures about how my future is in my hands and this one decision will affect the course of my life.”

  “So your parents sit you down and give you long lectures about rising above people’s low expectations and climbing to the top peak of the mountain and all that crap?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He grins, shaking his head. “Boy, that’s intense. I’ve escaped all of that.”

  “Lucky you!”

  “My dad and his partner don’t have time to lecture me, so I’m spared all that crap.”

  “You mean both your dad and your mum leave you alone?”

  “Charlene isn’t my mum.”

  “Where’s your mum?” As soon as the words come out of my mouth I realize how nosy I sound and want to grab them back.

  He doesn’t seem to mind and continues. “She left us when I was seven. She lives in Holland now with her boyfriend.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re not close. She’s got kids and I get a postcard on my birthday.”

  “Right. . . Do you get along with Charlene?”

  “Yeah, it’s cool. They’ve been together for ages.”

  I can’t believe we’re having this intimate conversation and that I’m so relaxed about it. I have to admit that a part of me is freaking out about the fact that I’m sitting on the grass with Adam talking as though we’ve been best friends for ages. Add the whole sexy aura thing happening on his side of the lawn and I could really do with a tranquillizer. But I have to say that given the circumstances, I’m performing pretty well.

  “So you’re the only child?” I ask.

  “Yep.”

  “Me too.”

  “Would you want a sister or brother?”

  “Would have loved either. But Mum couldn’t have another baby.”

  “Charlene doesn’t want kids because she hates nappies and doesn’t want her hips to explode. She’s not really the mothering type anyway. She’ll be in her office working into the night for ever. Like my dad. They’re perfect for each other, really.”

  “Do you get along with your dad?”

  “I guess . . . I’m not close to either of them. At least he doesn’t interfere with anything. He doesn’t nag me with all that bull crap about the ‘wrong crowd’, and studying hard and stuff.”

  “You serious?”

  “Yeah, he knows I’ve tried the drug scene and wasn’t up for it, blah blah blah, so I guess he kind of trusts I can bring myself up alone.”

  My eyes bulge out. “He knows you’ve tried?”

  “Last year. I was smoking pot with some mates at home and he walked in.”

  “I would have been ten feet under by the time the joint burned through.”

  “Nah. He was OK. Did the whole Son, I know you’re experimenting. We’ve all been there before. But don’t go overboard, son. Then he had a meeting to go to and the topic was never mentioned again.”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “My parents used to smoke and once my dad caught me stealing a cigarette from his packet and lighting up in the bathroom. He made me smoke half the packet until I was going to vomit myself into the next week. Pretty sadistic but I’ve never touched one since and he actually quit about a month later. As for drugs? It gives me shivers to even think how they’d react.”

  “Do your parents stick their noses in your life a lot?”

  “Hmm . . . yeah, I guess. I mean, compared to you, you probably think I’m on a leash! But I’ve never felt, strangled or anything. It’s . . . I don’t know . . . I feel independent and I know I’ve got the choice to be whoever I want to be. There are rules and limits, but I don’t feel deprived. Don’t tell them that, of course.”

  He laughs and nods.

  “But take drugs or go to a nightclub or get pissed on the weekend with my mates. That all obviously comes with a death certificate warranty. But I’m not into all of that anyway. Do I sound boring and tame? Probably, hey?”

  I smile shyly and he smiles back.

  “Not at all. I mean, yeah, you’re weird by teenage standards. But weird in a good way. I mean, it’s your life, your liver, your brain cells. It’s weird not to respect choice. Whether you’re choosing to get pissed or go sober, or get high on weed or chocolate, everybody’s gotta make their own choices.”

  “I guess.”

  The bell rings and we all get up and walk to class. Well, the guys walk. I believe Simone and I float.

  13

  Dinner tonight is at Yasmeen’s house and Yasmeen, Aunt Cassandra and I are sitting around the lounge room munching on fish and chips. Yasmeen’s brother, Omar, is glued to the PlayStation and hasn’t managed to string two words together since I arrived.

  Leila, of course, wasn’t allowed to come. Her mum doesn’t approve of Cassandra because Cassandra volunteers at St John Ambulance on weekends and wears “hippie” clothes. This refers to Cassandra’s passion for interesting costume jewellery, dyed skirts and bloodstones. Her hijab is a beanie. She’s got a short bob so it easily fits in underneath.

  Whenever I’m at Yasmeen’s house I love hanging out with her mum. She’s so cool and fun and easy to talk to.

  I lie.

  It’s because of her British accent. I’m a sucker for pom accents, and when she pronounces Arabic words with a pom high note on the end, I’m in seventh heaven. It’s just gorgeous. She is forever saying Inshallah, God willing, or Mashallah, God be praised, even when it doesn’t quite fit.

  I’m telling Aunt Cassandra about what it’s like at school wearing the hijab and she’s giving me a pep talk.

  “Hang in there. Just be an individual and bollocks to the rest of them, Inshallah!”

  She cracks me up.

  “You can get through it. I should know. When—”

  “I became a Muslim,” Yasmeen mocks. Cassandra throws a cushion at her.

  “My parents thought I’d been brainwashed by black magic voodoo! You see, my parents are extremely wealthy and move in ‘high society’, as they like to call it. My father was a banker and his father was a banker, and his father’s father. When I announced to them that I’d enrolled in social studies and not medicine, they were hysterical. The nose ring, spiky hair, feminism and antiwar protests just about put my mother into hospital.”

  “You had a nose ring?” I’m bewildered.

  “It was a requirement in my anti-everything circles. Armpit hair too.”

  “Eww!” Yasmeen
scrunches her face up in disgust.

  “Oh that phase only lasted about three or four months. My mother was taking antidepressants and going to church every day praying for my enlightenment. My father couldn’t look at me without a sherry in his hand. So I took pity and booked in for a wax. Plus,” she pauses, “it was getting rather itchy.”

  “Mum!” Yasmeen wails. “That’s so gross!”

  “It was the Sixties, Yasmeen. The Beatles, free love, revolution. Go exchange a Dolly for a history book, darling. . . Anyway, Amal, when I announced to my parents that I’d converted, and I brought Abdel-Tariq home, they disowned me.”

  “That’s horrible!” I exclaim.

  “In hindsight I can understand the shock they must have felt. I’d been dabbling into different faiths for a while before that and my rejection of Christianity had already hurt them deeply. My parents are very staunch, decent, upright Christians. But I was rebelling. I couldn’t understand how my parents could be so pious and yet be so racist. Africans, Asians, Arabs, Jews, anybody not of Anglo blood was, in their eyes, inferior. It was an unconscious prejudice but it infuriated me. So I became an atheist.”

  “You never told us that!” Yasmeen cries indignantly. “You told us you became an agnostic.”

  “That was later, darling.”

  “Oh.”

  “My atheism lasted one year. I was so unhappy though. I felt so empty. There were no answers, no deeper meanings to my life. Then one day at uni I learnt that a student had been killed in a hit-and-run. To me it was inconceivable that the monster who had left her to die on the side of the road would never be held accountable. Atheism just didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t reconcile it with my instincts about justice. So I became an agnostic.”

  I stare at her, fascinated. She mixes pom with Arabic, has decorated her house with paintings and canvasses with Allah and Prophet Mohamed written in calligraphy, and seems to have dipped into just about every movement and trend.

  As I look from Cassandra to Yasmeen to Omar, who has been absorbed in his PlayStation and hasn’t said one word, I can’t help but wonder how odd it is that some people think there is a “Muslim appearance”. When I first started at McCleans Grammar, I remember one of the teachers did a double-take when she saw my name on the roll: “But you’ve got fair hair and coloured eyes!”

  I wonder, then, what some people say when they learn that Cassandra’s surname is Khan. When they see her blue eyes, pale skin, freckles, blonde eyelashes and light eyebrows underneath her beanie. When they see her arms linked wlth a dark, balding Pakistani. When they’re introduced to her freckle-faced, dark-eyed, white daughter and chocolate-skinned son.

  14

  Adam doesn’t stop nagging me about putting my name down for the debating team. Friday is the last day before the list will be taken down and the teams formed.

  “Adam, get over it will you?” I say in a harassed tone, as he walks beside Eileen and me on our way to class.

  “If you sign up you only have to participate in one debate. It’s not like you’ll be debating in all the rounds.”

  “What’s your obsession with me being on the team?”

  “The only people who have signed up who can actually put a decent performance on are Josh, Kishion and Tracy. Otherwise, we’re stuck with Tia and Claire. Now I know Claire’s just doing it because Tia is, and I have it on good authority that Tia’s only signed up because she’s got the hots for Josh and thinks this will bring them closer together. We need you on board so you can be a smart-arse to good effect for once.”

  “I’m still thinking about it.”

  “You’re such a chicken.”

  “I am not!”

  “Yes you are.” He starts making annoying chicken noises.

  “Grow up, Adam!” I howl, walking off. He follows us, clucking like a demented chook and making me laugh and groan with frustration.

  “Flirt,” Eileen says when we’re finally alone.

  “Flirt? Me? I wasn’t flirting.”

  “You’re loving it,” she says, grinning at me. “He’s practically grovelling and you’re all oh I couldn’t possibly.”

  I stop dead in my tracks. “Don’t tell me that I’m making it obvious that I like him.”

  “Relax. It’s not that. But with the chemistry between you both and your no-boyfriend policy, you might find yourself in dangerous territory.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ve got it all under control.”

  After school, when home room is empty, I march up to the noticeboard and sign up. And then I spend the bus ride home thinking of how I can convince Adam that I haven’t fallen for the oldest trick in the book.

  Adam approaches me the next morning.

  “You signed up?” He grins.

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” I say. “I hate Tia.”

  He gives me a sceptical look and I tell him to go learn a formula.

  On Saturday I’m at my desk at home and I get this craving for a mango, strawberry and pistachio gelato from Lygon Street. So I call Simone and Eileen, but Eileen’s shopping with her mum and Simone’s got things on. So I call Yasmeen. I get Yasmeen going about the mango and strawberry and my dad has dropped me off at her house within half an hour. Then I call Leila’s mum and pull off a story about needing Leila’s opinion about what scarves to buy from a Muslim women’s clothing store in Coburg. I plead with her that I’m still inexperienced and need Leila’s expert advice and what better support than from my Muslim sister? Her mum laps it up and tells us to take Yasmeen along and try to convince her too.

  “We’re evil!” I groan as the three of us board a tram. “We lied! And we used religion!”

  “White lie,” Leila says, shrugging her shoulders. “Let’s not think about it. There are plenty of other things Mum tries to make me feel guilty about.”

  “Yeah! Let’s have fun!” Yasmeen throws her arms around the two of us. “Hey girls, is my hair OK?”

  “Yes, Yasmeen.”

  “Any frizz?”

  “No, Yasmeen.”

  “Is it straight?”

  “We can smell the iron aid from here, Yasmeen.”

  “You would too – I spent two hours on the ironing board last night,” she says.

  “How about my scarf?” I ask.

  “It’s fine,” Leila says.

  “Is the front curve OK? I mean, are there any dents in the shape? Is it too tight? Are my cheeks squashed up so my face looks fat?” I take a mirror out and scrutinize my veil.

  “It’s perfect,” Yasmeen says. “Quit panicking.”

  “You have hair static.”

  “What? Where? Give me the mirror!”

  I smirk at her and she hits me. “Very funny, Amal.”

  It’s a crisp August Melbourne day and I’ve got this strange sense of confidence as I’m on my way to my first trip to Lygon Street wearing hijab.

  We’ve boarded a Sydney Road to City tram and are wedged between an old man dressed in a brown-tweed suit and red tie, and a couple of guys comparing mobile phone tones. I love trams. Everybody seems so authentic and natural. You kind of get to share a short time-out in between the chaos of everybody’s day. And I especially love Sydney Road trams. Watching the street life with the old women with their baggy pantyhose and heaving breasts, clutching their trolley bags filled with discount plastic figurines and two-for-the-price-of-one sock sales. The eyebrow rings, the hijabs, the nuns, the three-piece suits worn by ancient men, the gossiping school kids, the pokie addicts, the families dragging wailing children behind them, laughing kids pressing pedestrian lights and running away.

  We step off the tram at Royal Parade so that we can cut through Melbourne University on our way to Lygon Street. We walk through the grounds, impressing each other with our big statements about the “moral ineptitude” of an exam-based education system, growing bi
g heads over our vocabulary and acting like idiots.

  Yasmeen challenges Leila and me to a race through the lawns, and I manage to slow her down by yelling out that there’s a cute guy staring at her from behind a tree. Then Leila and I spend five minutes convincing her that her hair hasn’t frizzed from her twenty-metre sprint. Then we have to find a toilet so she can apply a serum to her hair. We end up spending fifteen minutes in the toilets, reading all the graffiti on the back of the cubicle doors, fascinated by the university standard of scribbling as compared to our high-school poetry (Tia gives it to the footy team and Claire woz not here). Yasmeen wants to write our names on the back of the door with her eyeliner pencil but I go all ethical on her and tell her it’s wrong to graffiti. So she tries to persuade us to write I’m a Muslim and I’m not oppressed, and I pretend to vomit over the toilet seat, which gives us a reality check that we’ve voluntarily hung out in a block of toilets for quarter of an hour.

  By the time we arrive at Lygon Street, we’re swapping cubicle insults and arguing about whether Big Brother is better than Survivor.

  And then we smell pizza and it’s all over from there. We take one look at each other, nod in perfect harmony, take a seat at Café Roma and order a pizza with the lot, minus ham, pepperoni, salami and bacon. It turns out gelato was a negotiable craving, after all.

  “That’s not the lot,” the waiter says flirtatiously.

  “We’re rather fussy about our pizzas,” Leila says.

  “I’ll say.” He grins, winking at us as he walks back to the kitchen.

  “What a hottie!” Yasmeen exclaims.

  “He plucks his eyebrows,” I say solemnly.

  “No he doesn’t!” Leila cries.

  “Yes he does.”

  “No way!”

  “Yes way.”

  “I’m telling you they’re natural.”

  “I’m telling you they’re not. When he comes up again pay attention: he’s got in-growns and he has a part in the middle the width of the Tullamarine Freeway.”