Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

“Lamees, wallah, I heard the girls saying things about her that are really bad! She lives by herself! Her family is in Qatif* so she can do whatever she wants while she’s in Riyadh for school. She goes out whenever she wants and comes home whenever she feels like it. She visits whoever she wants to, and whoever she wants visits her, too.”

“They’re lying. I went to her place and I saw how tough the security men were over there. They don’t let anyone in, and she can’t leave the place on her own, no way. Her brother has to be there for her to get out.”

“Lamees, whether it’s true or not, why do we need to be involved in this? If everyone is talking about her today, tomorrow they’ll talk about you, and they’ll say you’re a bad girl just like her! What is it with you? From Fadwa the psycho to Sarah the princess to Fatimah the Shiite? And the best friend you ever had is an American rebel that doesn’t worry about what people think!”

Lamees frowned at her sister’s mention of Sarah, the girl from the Saudi royal family who enrolled at their high school for senior year. Lamees had genuinely adored Sarah. The princess bewitched her with her modesty and her high principles—bewitched her in part because Lamees had never expected a princess to be anything but arrogant and pushy. She didn’t care in the least about what the girls said about her relationship with Sarah. They snickered about the fact that Lamees gave the princess wake-up calls every morning. But there was a perfectly good reason for it: Sarah was afraid that, with the huge palace she lived in and the large number of people in it, the servants would forget to wake her up on time. Lamees also used to finish some of Sarah’s homework for her—but not on a regular basis, as certain people claimed. And she only did it when she observed that Sarah was occupied with more important matters, official occasions and family rituals and social duties that Sarah would tell her about in advance. Lamees would invite Sarah to study in her own modest home on the days preceding the exams they had every month, so that Sarah could concentrate on her studying more than she could in the palace. As for the hurtful rumors going around among the girls at school which Tamadur would confront her with—that she was the princess’s servant and would do anything for her—they had no effect—if anything, they brought her closer to her new friend and made her even more anxious to prove her devotion.

With Fatimah, Lamees found herself for the first time friends with a girl so much like her that it was almost uncanny! The closer she got to Fatimah, the more she felt as though she were face to face with a soul mate. As usual, what others said about her didn’t bother her much, except that this time she did worry about how Michelle would feel. Michelle had forgiven her for her relationship with Sarah when she saw the way Sarah dropped her once they graduated. Sarah traveled to America, and she never again spoke to Lamees. At the time, Michelle had felt her own power, witnessing Lamees’s regret, hearing her plea for reconciliation and knowing how badly she wanted to regain the old friendship. But what would Michelle do now, if she felt Lamees had abandoned their friendship a second time? A better solution, as Lamees saw it, was just to hide the relationship from Michelle and the rest of the shillah . Her strategy backfired, though, when Tamadur, who had long been aggravated at what she thought of as her sister’s perverse ways, took it upon herself to inform the girls of everything.

So Michelle now knew the real reason for Lamees’s inexplicable disappearances. For weeks on end Lamees had been hiding behind a host of excuses: that studying medicine was so time-consuming, that the work was so difficult, that she had so much to learn! Now the hurtful truth was out—Lamees had been choosing her new friend’s company over that of her old shillah .

Lamees tried to justify her position to Sadeem, who was far ahead of everyone else in their clique when it came to being understanding, even indulgent, about such things.

“Try to see my side of things, Saddoomah! I love Michelle. All our lives we’ve been friends, and we’ll go on being friends, but she doesn’t have a right to keep me from getting to know other girls! Fatimah’s got a few things Michelle doesn’t have. You love Gamrah, but she has her faults, too, and if you found what she lacks in another girl, you’d get attached to that girl, right?”

“But Lammoosah, after all these years! It isn’t right to dump your lifelong friend just because you suddenly decide her personality is lacking some vital quality that you think you’ve just found in some other girl. That precious something didn’t matter to you before, though, because you lived years without it and you had no problem. Besides, the two of you are supposed to stick together through thick and thin. Suppose you were to get married and your husband turned out to be missing a certain something. Do you go and look for in other guys for what he’s lacking?”

“Yah, maybe! And if he doesn’t like it, then let him go find whatever he’s lacking and spare me the effort!”

“Wow, you’re one tough lady! Okay, look, I have a really serious question that’s bugging me so badly I’m about to burst. It’s about the Shiites.”

“What is it?”

With a twitch to her lips that gave away her mock-solemn expression, Sadeem asked: “Do Shiite men wear Sunni pants under their thobes ?”*

22.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: July 9, 2004

Subject: Michelle Meets Up with Matti

I’m sitting down in my La-Z-Boy with my feet stretched way out, just like I do every weekend when I write down these e-mails. And yes, my hair is fluffed and my lips are painted red…

It was about ten o’clock in the morning when the airplane landed at San Francisco International Airport. This was not Michelle’s first visit to the city, but it was the first time she had been there without her parents and her little brother Meshaal.

She breathed in air saturated with moisture and freedom. People in all shapes and colors, from everywhere in the world, were flowing around her in every direction. No one paid any attention to her Arab-ness, or to the fact that the person standing next to her was African. Everyone was minding his own business.

She made sure her visa was in plain sight. That piece of paper confirmed that she was a student from Saudi Arabia who had come to study at the University of California, San Francisco. The woman in Customs told her she was the prettiest Arab girl she had seen in all her years working at the airport.

After Michelle got through all the necessary official stuff, she searched the faces of the people waiting in the reception area. She caught sight of her cousin Matthew at the edge of the crowd, waving to her, and she started toward him, delighted.

“Hi, Matti!”

“Hi, sweetie! Long time no see!”

Matti gave her a warm hug, asking about her mom and her dad and her brother. Michelle noticed that he was the only one from her uncle’s small family who was there at the airport to meet her.

“Where is everyone else?”

“Dad and Mom are at work and Jamie and Maggie are at school.”

“And you? How come you came to meet me? Don’t you have lectures?”

“My morning lectures today were canceled for the express purpose of coming to meet my darling cousin at the airport. We’re going to spend the day together until everyone else gets home. Then I have to go give a lecture in the evening. You can come with me if you want to, and I can show you around the campus, and you can get a quick look at your room in the dorm. By the way, are you still insisting on living in the dorm instead of at our house?”