Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

Lamees didn’t know whether someone had ratted on them or whether it was merely the bad luck that always seemed to chase her. When the news got around, the four girls were thrown into utter chaos, aghast at this unexpected development. And the true disaster was that this wasn’t a question of one or two tapes; it was a matter of sixteen !—found with four of the school’s leading students! What a total scandal—and the possibility hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind!

Lamees gathered up the videos from her classmates, stuck them inside a large paper bag, and asked them all to act normal. She assured them that everything would turn out just fine and that she would handle the whole mess and take care of everything.

During recess, she carried the bulging paper bag into the bathroom to search for a hiding place, but it was a big bag and she couldn’t find a good place to stash it. She worried that any school employee might stumble on it and steal it or take it to the authorities. If that happened, her problem wouldn’t just be a school scandal but—and maybe this was ten times worse—she would have a real issue on her hands with her classmates, none of whom would be particularly happy to have her own tapes seized!

Next, Lamees considered stuffing the bag into the classroom cupboard. But the spot was pretty open to view, not to mention being an obvious place to look. Lamees began to feel desperate. The whole thing was like a dangerous game of hide-and-seek played at a time and in a place that simply were not suitable for playing games at all.

But just then the perfect solution popped into her head. Brilliant! She knocked on the door to the teachers’ lounge and asked to see her favorite teacher, Ms. Hana, who taught chemistry. Ms. Hana appeared in the doorway, full of welcomes for this surprise visit, and boldly Lamees explained her difficult situation. The teacher’s welcoming expression disappeared.

“ Shu badik? ” Ms. Hana wailed. “So what do you want me to do, Lamees? I have my position to think of! It’s impossible! I can’t help you with this!”

“If the principal finds out, I’m screwed !” Lamees wailed back.

“Are you crazy? Bringing films to school. Sixteen of them at once? Shame on you.”

After a great deal more resistance, the teacher took the enormous bag from Lamees, who had not stopped begging for her salvation for a second. She promised Lamees that she would do whatever she could to snatch her good name from the jaws of disaster.

About halfway through the day, some administrators swooped down on Lamees’s class and began to search through all of the students’ schoolbags. They poked into the desk drawers and the cabinet, searching high and low for any prohibited items. Some students hid the music cassettes that they were carrying, or a bottle of perfume, a small photo album or pager (that was in 1996; cell phones weren’t popular yet) in the big pockets of their school uniforms, and stood with their backs plastered to the classroom wall. The eyes of Lamees’s friends followed the inspectresses in terror, in anticipation of their finding their films in Lamees’s bag.

In the last class hour, one of the office girls came into Lamees’s class to tell her that the principal was asking to see her. Lamees lowered her head. So, Ms. Hana, she thought, is this what it has all come to? You go and inform on me, just like that? You chickened! A grown-up teacher is more afraid of the principal than I am!

Lamees strode into the principal’s office fearlessly. The damage was done and feeling afraid was not going to help her. But she did feel mortified. This was not the first time she had been summoned to the principal’s office for bad behavior.

“Sooo, Lamees, what are we going to do with you? It isn’t enough, what you did last week, when you wouldn’t tell me which girl it was who put the red ink on the teacher’s chair in the class?”

Lamees hung her head and smiled in spite of herself when she recalled how their classmate Awrad had dripped a few drops from her red fountain pen refill onto the teacher’s chair between classes. The teacher came in and immediately panicked when she caught sight of the red splotches on the leather seat of her chair. She froze in place for several seconds as the students tried to control their laughter. “Who had the class before this one, girls?” she finally ventured.

They answered in one voice. “Ms. Ni’mat, ma’am.”

She shot out of the room to go in search of her friend Ms. Ni’mat whom the girls all despised. The teacher ran to tell Ms. Ni’mat about the “blood” drops on her beige skirt. It must have been her “time of the month”! When she got back, proud of the favor she did to save her friend from walking around the school with that embarrassing stain on her skirt, the girls’ stomachs were aching from so much laughing.

That day, dragged before the principal, Lamees had responded to her angrily. “Ms. Elham, I told you, I can’t inform on my friends.”

“This is called a negative attitude, Lamees. You have to cooperate with us if you are going to keep up your grades. Why aren’t you like your sister Tamadur?”

After this cruel threat, and the usual provocative remark about her sister, Lamees had to tell her mother about the incident. Dr. Fatin came to school to meet with the principal. Lamees’s mother cautioned the principal in no uncertain terms against speaking to her daughter in such a way ever again. As long as Lamees herself had not been behind the prank, they had no right to make her divulge the secrets of her friends. It would be more appropriate for them to search for the real culprit on their own, instead of trying to force Lamees to be their spy, and lose her self-respect and her classmates’ great affection for her.

It was true that the teachers were always asking her why she was not more like her sister Tamadur, but, in compensation, her friends would ask her why Tamadur wasn’t more like her!

Lamees had been sure that the principal would be easier on her this time around, especially since it had only been a few days since her mother’s last visit. Dr. Fatin had some prestige and weight to throw around at that school, since for the past five years she had been president of the Mothers’ Association—a Saudi version of the PTA. She had worked hard to further the school’s charitable activities, in addition to the fact that her daughters were among the school’s top pupils and were very often selected to represent it in regional academic competitions.

“As you can see, a certain paper bag has reached me,” the principal said to Lamees, sitting in her office. “However, I promised Ms. Hana that I would not punish you, and I am sticking to my promise. All I will do is take the films with me today, and I’ll return them to you after I’ve watched all of them.”

“Watched all of them? Why?”

“To make sure there isn’t any of that sort of film among them.” She winked.

How rude of her! What sort of film was she insinuating? Each tape had the name of the movie written on it. They were the latest American movies and she was sure that Ms. Elham had heard about each one of them. There were Braveheart, The Nutty Professor and a few others that the girls’ brothers got from Dubai or Bahrain or from American compounds in Riyadh where they sell noncensored movies. She wasn’t carrying sex tapes! Maybe Ms. Elham just wanted to watch the movies for fun! But why didn’t she just ask to borrow them in a direct way instead? In any case, Lamees decided that this horrid principal was not going to get the pleasure of watching her films, after all of the misery she inflicted on Lamees every day.

“I’m so sorry. The films aren’t mine. If my friends knew the films had been taken they would skin me alive, as some of them belong to their brothers.”