you don’t want me to see?”
“No,” I said, indignant. I refused to sink to the level of fighting her for my camera, so I let her click through the photos. She wasn’t going to find anything incriminating, anyway. Josh walked into the class, his hair spiked with sweat, and her demeanour instantly changed.
“Great shot of Sadia,” Mariam said to him.
Josh looked confused until she held up the camera to show him. He glanced at me, but I looked away. Jerk.
“Thanks,” Josh said and made a hasty retreat to the back of the room.
“Why are you being like this?” I hissed at her. “Fighting with me over a guy? He’s not worth it, by the way. ”
Mariam glared at me and looked like she wanted to say something else, but didn’t.
For the rest of the afternoon, Mariam and I sat in a prickly silence, both of us too stubborn to talk. And at the end of the day, when Josh walked past my locker and said, “See you,” I ignored him. I didn’t bother to wait for Mariam at the end of the day either. I knew she wouldn’t take the bus with me, and I’d taken as much rejection for one day as I could handle.
Chapter 7
I flashed my bus pass to the driver and walked down the aisle to find a seat. A large woman, propping up her top half with a cane, flicked a glance at my hijab, her wrinkly jowls dangling at her chin. Her small eyes folded into her flesh as her offhand glance turned into a suspicious stare. A little voice told me to stare back at her, but I knew that would be rude. She’s being rude, the voice responded. I tried to silence the voice, like Mom would do. She’d hold her head high and walk past, classy and aloof, passing off the woman’s stare as curiosity, when we both knew it was more than that.
I glanced once at the lady as I sat down, my own curiosity getting the best of me. Maybe it would be better to stand right in front of her, let her stare all she wanted, and talk to her. Maybe if she got to know me, she’d see I’m normal … well, as normal as anyone else. Including her.
Wearing hijab set me apart from other people on the bus; it announced who I was before anything else. People see my hijab and know I’m Muslim. And I’m cool with that, but it was obvious from the way this lady was staring at me that she wasn’t. It made a scream rise up in my throat. You don’t even know me! I wanted to yell at her. Stop staring! I looked out the window beside me as buildings slipped by, praying that the woman would get off at the next stop. But it was me who got off before her. I felt my cheeks get hot as I walked past her, angry that I had to deal with her looks, on top of everything else.
Mom knew something was wrong as soon as I walked into the kitchen after school. Telling her about the lady on the bus was pointless; there was nothing she could do about it. Part of me wanted to tell her about my argument with Mariam, but I’d sworn I wouldn’t tell anyone about her now daily de-jabbing. So instead, I dumped my backpack on the floor and groaned.
“Sadia?” Mom looked at me, puzzled. She was getting dinner started in the kitchen, chopping vegetables on the wooden cutting board. “What’s wrong?”
“I just have a lot of homework.” I sighed. There was a new stack of library books on the counter, which was normal; Mom went to the library all the time, but something about these ones caught my eye.
“Are those books in Arabic?”
Mom nodded. “Remember, I told you about the new Arabic section at the library? I took the bus downtown to check it out.”
“Cool.”
“I had a long talk with the head librarian.” Mom raised an eyebrow secretively.
I turned to her, giving her my full attention. “Really?”
“I’m going to start volunteering there.” She looked up from the cutting board. “They don’t have anyone on site who speaks Arabic.”
“Mom! That’s great!”
She waved a hand at me, like I shouldn’t get too excited. “I worry about my English …” She let her words drift off.
“It’s getting better every day,” I said, switching from Arabic to English. “You just need to keep practising, speak English to us instead of Arabic.” I pulled my homework out of my backpack. Hearing Mom’s good news took some of the sting out of my day. “A new girl started today. Amira Nasser.”
“Where’s she from?”
“Homs.”
“Syria? She’s a refugee?”
“I think so.”
Mom’s face fell, her eyebrows knitted together. “Do you know anything else? Where they’re living? How many people are in their family?” The Syrian population in our city was small, but close-knit. The refugees had added a new dimension to our group of family friends. Conversation at family functions had turned away from politics and the war to what would happen to the refugees. I shook my head no to answer her questions. “Find out, will you? We can invite them over.”
Mom looked up from making dinner as I pulled the camera, tucked inside its black nylon case, out of my backpack.
“Is that the camera?” she asked.
“Yeah. I already took some photos at school.”
“Let me guess, basketball?”
I nodded. “I wish it was warmer out so I could take some of Aazim playing in the driveway.”
“Take one of Aazim studying. That’s where his energy needs to be now.”
I rolled my eyes. Mom was so predictable. Education was the number-one most important thing to my parents. Once they’d decided Aazim was going to be a doctor, Dad had determined I’d be an engineer. If he’d asked me, I’d have told him I wanted to be the next Kia Nurse and play basketball for Team Canada.
“Can I see?” she asked, coming around the counter. She had it out of the pouch before I could say no.
“Here, let me show you,” I said and took it from her before she could turn it on. The first photo was one of Mariam without her head scarf. I held it close to my chest and clicked past the incriminating shot, then passed it to her.
She grinned as I showed her pictures of basketball tryouts and the one of me that Josh had taken. She pressed the arrow button for the next picture, but instead of stopping like my iPhone did, it went back to the beginning. “Is that Mariam?” she asked, leaning closer to the camera. The three of us — me, Amira, and Mariam — looked back from the screen. Two with head scarves, one without.
Mom’s eyebrows shot up. I turned the camera off quickly. Oh boy.
“Why isn’t she in hijab?”
“Don’t say anything to her parents, okay? She’ll never speak to me again.”
“They should know.”
“Not from us.”
Mom
