Chapter 4 Asma #6
She hurried through the turnstile, dragging Salma behind her, and rounded the corner to her dorm room.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. What do we do?” Asma asked.
She had visions of officers descending on Ruby’s house.
Her friends knew her parents were strict in a general sense but not like this.
This was psycho. She wasn’t twelve years old and not at the friend’s house where she was supposed to be.
She was nineteen years old and in college, for Chrissake.
The thought of her family’s unique strain of dysfunction coming this close to her personal space, the space she had so carefully created, made her want to die.
“Should we call Mamoo?” Asma asked.
“What’s that going to do?” Salma packed her few things in her backpack.
“What are you doing?” Asma asked.
“I told you this was a bad idea.” Salma took Asma’s hand and pulled at her.
It took Asma a second to understand, and when she did, she started crying. It was all too much. Confusion about Ruby. Gratitude for Salma. Fear of disappointing her parents laced with rage. She was dizzy.
“Let me talk. There’s no need to cry.” They walked outside.
By now, it was 3:00 in the morning.
“Did you eat any of the pizza?” Salma asked.
“What pizza?”
“You know. The pizza that came at the end of the night.”
“What? No, it had pepperoni on it.”
Tiredness crested her like a wave. Asma could have fallen asleep on the bottom stair of the dormitory steps if she wasn’t shaking so hard.
From the cold. From fear of what her father would do.
Salma stood guard, watching over her. “I know it may not seem like it, but I’m doing this for us, Sal. You and me.”
“Why do you keep stroking the back of your neck?”
“Oh, you should feel it. It’s so soft and I don’t know. Like, there’s something really nice about it.”
Salma touched the back of Asma’s neck and rubbed her fingers against the grain of her hair. “Ooh, that is nice.”
“See?”
They sat on the stairs quietly and waited. Asma replayed Ruby saying, “Tell me everything” over and over in her mind.
And then her father rounded the corner from the parking lot. He wore his bedtime salvar kameez—big, black, and billowing—looking like a crow descending upon them. Salma walked toward him, but there was no diverting him. He brushed past Salma and strode to where Asma sat on the stairs.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“We’re fine, Abu. We were here.”
“No. You weren’t. I called, and no one answered.”
“We were on campus, just not in my room. You didn’t have to drive all the way back in. We’re fine. See?” Asma tried soothing him, but she was no good at it.
“I call your room, and then I call the front desk. Are you lying?”
“What are you doing calling the front desk asking for me anyway?”
“Then I call school police.”
“Yeah, I know. They were crawling all over the lobby looking for us like we’d done something wrong!
People are going to be talking about this all week.
Do you know how embarrassing this is?” All of a sudden, she didn’t care about his judgment or if he was disappointed and started getting angry.
When would it be her turn to just get to live without constantly worrying about her parents and their reactions?
“It was nothing, Abu,” Salma said in a calming voice. “We went to dinner with Mamoo and Aunty, and then I came with Asma to rehearsal.”
“That again?”
“What do you mean ‘that again’? You can pretend like I’m not doing this, just like you can pretend I’m not who I am.” Asma’s voice slurred from exhaustion, too tired to have this conversation again. “But that doesn’t make it real.”
“Abu, let’s go home,” Salma said. “We need to call Ami in the morning and tell her you already picked me up.”
“And then what? Where did you go?” he asked. He was not going to be so easily sated.
“We went to a cast party,” Asma said defeatedly.
He narrowed his eyes. “A party. I know it! Do you drink a beer? Is that what you do now? Your sister. You’re responsible for her.”
Asma pointed at Salma. “She’s right there! Does she look hurt to you?”
“This is not how Muslim girls act. If you don’t act right, she can’t either. Can’t you see that? She doesn’t have this same bad seed you do. She knows right from wrong.”
Asma stared back and forth from Salma to her father.
What was he saying? For all her parents’ faults, she could honestly say that she had never felt like they favored one child over the other.
There was no competition between them, not around resources, not around attention; their parents were equally expansive in their lack of emotiveness.
Maybe because it was always the two of them against their parents, the fault lines ran north and south, not east and west. Suddenly, she felt like the lesser child, the one who failed them more, the one they loved less, and to her surprise, it hurt.
She knew this wasn’t Salma’s fault and that she didn’t ask for this, but for the first time, she felt alone, an island.
“How do you not know who you are?” he asked. He sniffed the air like a hound catching a scent and stepped toward her. “Do you smoke?”
Asma laughed. He was grasping for something, anything, on which to crack down.
“Is this funny to you? Besharam!”
Asma willed herself to stand her ground even though every instinct told her to run.
Salma pulled at his arm. “Abu, it’s late. We have a long drive home. Come on.”
Asma pivoted and ran up the stairs, where a group of girls from her floor were watching her. “I know exactly who I am. It’s you who doesn’t.”