Sadia Page 8

  I waited while they packed up their makeup and clothes, giggling and talking about homework and teachers and boys. When they’d left and the door had closed after them, I came out of the stall and walked to the sink. I stared at myself. What would it be like to take off the hijab and expose my hair and neck for everyone to see?

  I could play basketball unencumbered. I could take the bus without anyone staring. I could be like almost everyone else at school.

  But, I couldn’t do it. My hijab was part of me; turning away from it meant denying who I was.

  I needed to face the facts. My best friend was moving beyond me. She was going to places that I couldn’t follow, down a path that I didn’t want to follow. Maybe I just had to let her go.

  When I got to homeroom, I slid into my seat as if I hadn’t just overheard her conversation with Carmina in the washroom. When she nudged me after “O Canada,” while we were supposed to be listening to announcements, I knew what she was going to ask before she pushed the note my way. “Still want to hang out this weekend?” she’d written on the corner of her paper. I stared at it and met her innocent gaze. She looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  She was using me. I wasn’t a friend, I was a means to get where she really wanted to be. The knowledge hurt, like toes pinched tight in shoes. It wouldn’t cripple me, but I wished I didn’t have to feel it. Saying yes was agreeing to her deceit.

  But I did. I took my pencil and drew a smiley face. She grinned back at me.

  I tightened my hijab around my neck. The lunchtime scrimmage had gotten more aggressive because Mr. Letner had warned us that some of the other teams in the tournament played rough. He wanted us to push back and practise like we were going for the jugular. Twice my head scarf had come loose, the ends swinging down and almost unravelling. Sweat beaded across my forehead and I could feel it dripping down my temples. I was on the bench, waiting to be subbed back in. Jillian knew how to use her body, pushing her elbow out just far enough to avoid fouling the other player. I didn’t have her size, but my speed meant I could dart in for a quick pass in the key. It also meant I was in the middle of the action with hands and arms flying. My hijab was becoming a hindrance. I understood why wearing it would be a problem at the tournament.

  Mariam had been friendlier since I’d agreed to “hang out” on the weekend. I wished I could tell her that I knew about her ulterior motive. We were lying to each other, pretending to be something we weren’t anymore.

  Mr. Letner tapped me on the shoulder as Ally ran off. We slapped hands as I went on the court. Everyone was breathing hard, giving their all, and pretending that this wasn’t a practice. We were playing like one of the other teams was with us in the gym. I had the ball and was looking for an opening when Jillian fouled me so hard I went flying and landed on my butt. I lay on the ground, stunned. Mr. Letner didn’t have to blow his whistle for the play to stop. Josh held out his hand to me. “Okay?” he asked as he hauled me up.

  I nodded. One side of my scarf was covering my face. The other side was probably hanging over my shoulder. With a frustrated groan, I marched to the bench and knelt beside Mariam. “Can you fix it?” I asked. She had to be quick because the teams were waiting for me to take the foul shot.

  She put aside her clipboard and smoothed back my hair. “Ew,” she said. “You’re sweaty.” With quick fingers, she pulled the bonnet cap forward and then tightened my scarf. “Done.” I caught sight of Mr. Letner. He was frowning and I could guess why. In a game, my hijab could cost the team if I had to call a time out or get subbed out to fix it.

  “Thanks.” I jumped up and took my spot on the free-throw line. Josh bounced the ball to me. I steadied my nerves. The hoop smiled down at me. Put the ball in the hoop, I told myself. I took a breath, raised the ball over my head, and let it sail in an arc to the basket. It swooshed into the net. As long as I could keep scoring, Mr. Letner would do what he had to, to keep me on the team. “Nice!” Allan said and gave me a quick high-five before we both ran downcourt.

  I sat out the last shift, watching the scrimmage. Mariam shifted closer to me and nudged my elbow. She pointed with her pen to a sketch of a girl wearing a hijab. “Look,” she said. “What do you think?”

  Bending closer, I saw that it wasn’t an ordinary hijab. The scarf wasn’t loose. It wrapped tightly around the head and hung down to cover the neck, fitting close to the body. The outfit underneath was different, too: long pants and a shirt, close fitting but not tight. On top she’d drawn our school basketball jersey, but with a band across the bottom to make it long enough to hit mid-thigh. “Is that a uniform?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Your uniform. I can’t handle watching your scarf fly off anymore. Plus, you look so hot. And not in a good way.”

  I was. Sweat collected at the nape of my neck and trickled down my back.

  “I could sew it out of that breathable athletic fabric. You’d be cooler and look more like the rest of the team. I could use blue for the pants and grey for the shirt.”

  It took a second for her words to register. “You’re going to sew it?”

  Mariam looked at me. I knew she was good at making clothes, but this was a whole uniform. “Isn’t it complicated?”

  “B-but,” I stuttered, confused. “You can sew that well?”

  She pursed her lips and gave me a look filled with attitude. “You’ve seen the stuff I make. What do you think?”

  I had no idea how hard, or how easy, it was to sew what she’d drawn, so I picked a safe option and nodded. I looked at the sketch again. She’d labelled different things on it, like the type of fabric and notes for herself: “Put thumbhole in sleeve” and “drawstring waist.”

  “It’s really good,” I said, trying to cover my surprise at how talented she was.

  “Thanks. I’m going to work on it this weekend. Maybe you can try on a sample on Monday.”

  “If we’re hanging out this weekend …” I let my words drift off.

  “Oh, right! I can take measurements! That’s perfect,” her face lit up, which left me confused. Maybe she wasn’t using me after all.

  Mr. Letner blew his whistle in two short blasts. Game over. Mariam was supposed to be keeping score, but her attention had drifted away from the game and to the sketch. Everyone looked at her for an announcement of who had won. “Fifty-four to fifty-one, for Jillian’s team,” I whispered to her.

  “Fifty-four to fifty-one, for Jillian’s team,” she repeated. Jillian nodded and fist-bumped her teammates. I ran to join the end-of-game lineup and the chorus of “Good game. Good game,” as we snaked past each other.

  “Sorry about the push,” Jillian said to me as we walked to the change room.

  I shrugged it off. “Part of the game.”

  “Yeah. Sometimes I get too into it.”

  “Good thing we’re on the same team for the tournament.”

  Jillian grinned at me and pushed open the door to the change room. It was humid in there, even with only five girls. Our chatter echoed off the walls. I ran the water at the sink until it was at its coldest and then splashed it on my face, not caring about how wet my hijab got. Could Mariam really sew me something more comfortable? Two years ago, Aazim and I had played basketball with abandon in the driveway. Without my hijab, I’d been able to run, shoot, and dribble unencumbered. I said a silent prayer that Mariam was as good a designer as she thought she was.

  When I got home from school, Mom was in the kitchen. She didn’t look up when I walked in but continued to chop an onion so violently that I couldn’t resist asking, “What did it do to you?”

  “Nothing,” she replied tersely, not in the mood for a joke.

  “You okay?”

  She didn’t answer, but it was clear she wasn’t okay. Her mouth was pinched tight and her eyebrows were drawn together in a frown. “Mom?”

  She paused in mid-chop, gripping the knife, trying to keep her emo
tions in check.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “Wasn’t today your first day volunteering at the library?” I asked, clueing in to why she might be upset. “Did something happen?”

  She took a deep breath. “Not at the library. After, when I was waiting for the bus,” Mom said reluctantly. “A man yelled at me to go home from his car window and threw his cigarette at me.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “Are you serious?” One look at her face gave me the answer. “Are you okay? Did you get burned?”

  She shook her head. “It isn’t the first time something like this has happened, it’s just —” she broke off, her voice cracking. “I’d had such a good day. I felt useful. People came in and needed my help, and then when I left the library, excited to share my day with my family, that happened. I was so embarrassed. All the people at the bus stop …” Her voice drifted off.

  My throat got tight as I watched her hold herself together. Was this part of being Muslim? Facing racism and learning to deal with it? Dad would be furious when he found out, but there was nothing he could do. He was as powerless as Mom had been.

  “I was shaking, I was so upset. And then a woman came up to me.” Mom took a shuddering breath. “She said if I wanted to stay in Canada, I should be Canadian and stop dressing like a terrorist.” Her lips trembled and she put a hand to her mouth. She tried to hold the sobs back, but couldn’t.

  I stared at her, shocked that someone could say something so hateful to a person they didn’t know.

  “I wish I’d said something to that woman,” she muttered. “But I was so humiliated, I just walked away. Like a mouse.” She gave up trying to compose herself. She wiped her eyes and got a tissue to blow her nose.

  “What could you have said? She wouldn’t have listened,” I argued.

  “I got tongue-tied. The English words wouldn’t come.” Mom’s expression changed, her face hardened, as she lashed out in virulent Arabic, telling the woman what she could do with her misguided opinion of Muslims.

  I thought about the woman who’d been staring at me on the bus. Maybe I should have said something to her — nothing rude, but if we talked, she’d see I was more than a head scarf. So was Mom.

  I wondered if kids at school harboured racist ideas. No one had said anything to me, but I remembered the looks we got from some people when Mariam and I had started wearing hijab.

  As Mom went back to cooking dinner, I pulled out my phone and typed out a message to Mariam. If there was anyone who would understand what it was like to see my mom crying because of hurtful, racist comments, it was her. I stared at what I’d written, my thumb hovering over the send button. What if it just gave her more reason not to wear her hijab? A few other families at our mosque were telling their daughters not to because they worried about their safety.

  I didn’t want to get into an argument about it with her. And lately, I wasn’t very good at predicting where a conversation would go. I deleted the message and didn’t know what felt worse: watching Mom deal with the hurtful comments, or not being able to tell my best friend about it.

  Chapter 14

  I sat distracted in class as Mr. Letner talked about the global effects of rising water levels. I kept tuning in and out because my mind was on my mom and the incident at the bus stop yesterday. I still hadn’t said anything about it to Mariam. As much as I wanted to, her de-jabbing had put up a wall between us. I could have told the old Mariam, but I didn’t know if the newer, de-jabbed version would want to listen.

  Mr. Letner wrapped up the discussion. “We have some time, does anyone want to show a photo?”

  No one raised their hand right away. When Mom had told Dad about the bus stop after dinner, I’d retreated to my room with the school camera. I knew Dad wouldn’t fly into a rage, but I imagined the simmering anger that he’d feel and didn’t want to be around to see it.

  Upstairs, I’d played around with lighting, angles, and the rule of thirds to get a different perspective of a basketball. The challenge of taking an artistic photo was a good distraction. After trial and error, I’d finally captured the shot I wanted: half the ball was covered in shadow, and the light from my desk lamp illuminated the bumpy surface on the other side.

  “Anyone?” Mr. Letner asked again and scanned the room, waiting. I could feel his eyes on me and wasn’t surprised when he called me up to the front. I showed him where to find the photo, but he accidentally opened a different one in my folder. A photo of the prayer mat at my house popped up. I’d lain down to take the picture, so the carpet stretched out in front. Only the closest swirling pattern of colours and fringed edges were in focus, the rest of it was blurred.

  “Tell us about this, Sadia.”

  “Uh, well, it’s not a basketball,” I said, caught off guard.

  “Sajada.” Amira blurted out the Arabic word for prayer rug.

  I grinned at her and she smiled back. When I’d first come to Canada, everything had been so foreign. Any flash of familiarity had been comforting.

  “It’s called a sajada in Arabic, like Amira said. It’s a prayer rug. We use it five times a day to pray.”

  Mr. Letner nodded at me to continue, but I was self-conscious talking about prayers with the class. I wished I could sit down instead of explaining it.“It gets rolled up after we use it,” I said, noticing how frayed the edges were, threads escaping the binding. “We pray facing Mecca, our holy place,” I explained. I thought I’d look out into the class and see everyone’s eyes glazed over. But they were all paying attention, interested in what I had to say.

  “Why did you choose to photograph it?” Mr. Letner asked.

  I looked at the picture on the Smartboard behind me. I almost took the easy way out and shrugged, but I caught a glimpse of Amira, sitting up straight and straining to make sense of what I was saying in English. And I thought about Mom. If the woman who’d been rude to her had known a little more about Islam, maybe she wouldn’t have stereotyped Mom into being a terrorist. “I wanted to look at it from a different perspective, like you said.”

  “But why take a photo of a prayer mat at all? There are probably lots of things in your house that you could have photographed close up like that.”

  He was right. Why had I chosen the prayer rug? “We brought it from Syria when we moved. I remember it being in our living room in Damascus. I guess it’s like a connection between those two places.”

  A lot of kids didn’t know I was Syrian. Only the ones who had been at my middle school would have remembered. I saw a few of them perk up with curiosity.

  “Any questions?” Mr. Letner asked the class. Some hands went up.

  “Why don’t you pray at school?”

  “I’m supposed to.” I looked out at their curious faces. “Even though we have a room we can use for midday prayers” — I glanced at Mohammed — “it’s hard sometimes to fit it in.”

  “Where’s Mecca?”

  Before I could answer, Allan piped up with: “Why do you wear that thing on your head?”

  Mariam turned around in her seat. “It’s not a thing, Allan. It’s a hijab, a head covering. A woman’s hair must be covered, according to the Qur’an.” Mariam’s voice faded as she spoke. She knew what his next question was going to be.

  “Why don’t you wear yours?” he asked her.

  I bit my lip waiting for her response.

  “It’s a personal choice,” she replied and turned around in her desk.

  “Did you leave before the war?” Riley asked quietly. He looked at me with curiosity, as if he had more questions but was too shy to ask them.

  “Uh, yeah, we did.”

  “So, you weren’t a refugee?”

  I shook my head. “No.” I couldn’t help but glance at Amira.

  Mr. Letner stood up and nodded for me to sit down. I wondered if he w
anted to avoid any more talk of refugees with Amira in the room. “Thank you, Sadia. Anyone else want to show their photos?”

  We spent another thirty minutes looking at photos. Some were of pets and others followed Zander’s theme of childhood toys. Franca’s photo was of her grandmother cooking in the basement of her house. She wore a stained apron over her dress and slippers. The pots on the stove bubbled with tomato sauce; pasta packages and empty cans littered the counter. I could almost smell the meal. “She’s making a lasagna for our whole family, all sixteen of us, and she’s eighty-four!” Franca went on to tell us that her grandpa died when her dad was twelve and her grandma, nonna, had raised five boys on her own, working as a cook at an Italian restaurant. She still lived in the same house. “She’s, like, the most amazing woman ever,” Franca told us. “That’s why I took this photo.”

  “Bet she makes a mean lasagna,” Mr. Letner said.

  “She does!”

  “Who’s next?” Mr. Letner asked. No one raised their hand, but his eyes fell on Josh. “Come on up,” he said. Reluctantly, Josh left his desk and made his way to the front.

  The picture that appeared on the Smartboard was of a man standing at rink level at a hockey game. His arm was raised and he was pointing at someone on the ice. He was yelling, his face red and contorted with anger or frustration, it was hard to tell which.

  “Yeah, so …” Josh shifted nervously, foot to foot.

  “Who’s in the picture?” Mr. Letner prompted him.

  “That’s my dad. He’s watching my brother play hockey.”

  Josh looked at Mr. Letner, who nodded at him to continue. “Tell us why you took the photo.”

  “When you were talking about perspective, it got me thinking about what my brother and I see from the ice when we play. My dad has no idea how insane he looks. I know he loves hockey and ‘crazy hockey dads,’” he held up his fingers in air quotes, “are part of the game, but sometimes, looking over and seeing him like this …” He paused. “It’s embarrassing.” A couple of guys in the class made noises of agreement. “I wish the glass was a mirror so he could see what we see.”