Does My Head Look Big in This? (28 page)

Adam:
Heaven forbid! It’s SINFUL! PS: I hate it when people (especially girls) draw stupid smiley faces. There are plenty of words in the thesaurus which express joy. Expand your vocab and stop with the bad art.

Me:

Adam:
Mature.

Me:
Do you think he realizes that the colour of his toupee doesn’t match the colour of the hair fuzz on his ear?

There are two things I’d like to say about our scholarly exchange. First: that I think things are back to normal between us. Second: that I just got busted by Mr Piper.

“Amal Abdel-Hakim!”

His pronunciation of my surname is commendable.

“Er . . . yes, Mr Piper?”

“Hand me that note at once! I will not tolerate students slacking around in my classroom!”

As any wise student knows, if a teacher intercepts a note-exchanging exercise, you should scrunch the paper up in the hope of smudging the pen and making the words illegible. I scrunch like mad.

It doesn’t work. I think the pen is one of those brands that dry upon impact with the paper. Stupid efficient stationery. I hand Mr Piper the note and, in accordance with the first lesson in the Diploma of Education which states that teachers must always revel in humiliating and exposing students, he reads it out loud. Adam is blushing like an overheated solar-power system and gives me a sympathetic look. The rest of the class is sniggering. Simone and Eileen flash me supportive smiles. Mr Piper sighs and rolls his eyes at me.

“Your perception is riveting, Amal,” he says in a bored and sarcastic tone, dropping the note down on my desk. “It’s comforting to know that there are people in my class who have the maturity and intelligence to make derogatory comments about other people’s
external
appearances.”

Now what the hell am I supposed to say to that?

“What do you have to say for yourself?”

Bloody mind-reader.

“I’m really sorry, Mr Piper.”

“Why?”

“Because it was wrong of me to make fun of you.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s, er, insensitive and hypocritical of me.”

“Why?”

“Because I wouldn’t want people to make fun of me either.”

“So your remorse is basically based on the fact that you can identify with me? Mere empathy has prompted you to apologize?”

This is one of those trick questions. I’m sure it is.

“Um. . .”

“That’s what I thought. Don’t let me catch you again or you’ll be slapped with a detention.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tia arrives at school the next morning with a bandage on her arm. Two point five seconds in home room and the whole class is forced to listen to her morbid tale.

“I was assaulted,” she sniffs, wiping her nose with a tissue for dramatic effect.

“How?”

“No way!”

“You poor thing, what happened?”

“Well,” she says, sitting on her desk and crossing her legs modestly. Not. She’s wearing black undies.

“I was at Heat nightclub—”

“But you’re not eighteen yet!” Kristy pipes up. Maybe there was a cushion on the floor beside the cradle after all.

“I have my ways,” she explains in a smug, coy tone. “I was with my sister and her uni friends.”

“Ohh!” Some of the girls and guys are thoroughly impressed.

“So I’m on the podium, dancing with my friends, when this group of
Asians
comes along to dance next to us.”

Eileen starts scribbling furiously in her book, channelling all her anger into her pencil, until the lead snaps.

“We knew they were trouble as soon as we saw them. They just had that look, you know.”

“What look?” Rita asks.

“
That
look,” Tia snaps. “One of them had the nerve to jump up with us on to the podium and started to try to dance real close and dirty with us. We told him to get lost. It was so gross.”

“No!” Claire gasps.

“How dare he!” Rita shrieks.

“This is while you’re on the podium?” Adam asks sceptically.

“Yes,” she snaps. “Harassment can occur anywhere.”

“Hmm.”

She glares at him and turns to her audience, which has grown from Claire and Rita to some other girls and guys who have a love–hate relationship with her (hate her for her looks and bitchiness but would swoon if she said one nice word to them or gave them the slightest bit of attention).

“There he was with his filthy hands on me and so I slapped him away and then I fell off the podium and hurt my elbow!”

“Oh no!”

“You should sue!”

“Sure it wasn’t your heels you tripped over?” Josh mutters to Adam. Tia ignores them.

“Honestly, nightclubs are just infested with trouble-making
gangs
now. I avoid going out to them any more because of the kinds of people who go. It’s like an invasion of—” She darts a look at Eileen but doesn’t continue, knowing her message has been delivered.

“My dad’s right, you know,” she continues smugly. “He predicts Anglo-Australians will be extinct in this country, soon!”

She glances sidelong at us and I demonstrate to the class how quickly the skin can turn from white to volcanic red. I’m about to say something. Eileen is about to say something. Simone and Adam both show signs of saying something. But we don’t have to because Josh speaks up instead.

“Well with the number of people you sleep with you should be capable of fixing that dilemma and populating an entire town.”

Totally crude. Totally offensive. Totally vulgar.

We can’t stop grinning.

34

W
e’re invited to a family friend’s wedding on Friday night. My parents know the bride’s parents from way back when I was still in nappies. We haven’t really kept in contact, but my parents met them at a mutual friend’s house several months ago and got an invitation soon after.

There are about four hundred and fifty guests, and it’s being held at an enormous reception hall overlooking a lake that looks like a flow of sparkling lemonade. There are four singers performing throughout the night and a ten-piece band. There are ten people in the bridal party.

Apparently it’s a small wedding. That’s according to some of the guests who love weddings because it gives them a chance to hog all the food while scanning the hall filled with their family and friends in their mission to detect any backstabbing ammunition. We call them the Wedding Gossipers. They’re notorious for going on wedding crawls, attending one wedding after another, sucking up (or creating) fresh rumours, then regurgitating them.

Tonight’s wedding should make them salivate. The bride is Syrian and the groom is Afghani. Of course, the big mouths are lapping it up, having a field day with their hushed “You didn’t hear it from me, but. . .”

The bride, Amina, met Hosnu when he was in the last year of his temporary protection visa. She’s a migration agent and they met at the asylum seeker centre she works at. It’s all pretty simple from there. They fell in love and got engaged. So the Scandal Scavengers are dribbling with glee:
He’s too handsome for her, proving he only married her for the visa; she’s turning thirty and was well and truly on the descent down the hill; the bride’s family paid for most of the wedding. How shameful, when it’s the man’s responsibility! But I suppose it’s because her parents were just so happy she
finally
found somebody.

It all feels a little Bridget Jones, only Amina isn’t the type to sit around in her pyjamas singing songs about loneliness over a bucket of butter popcorn and slab of chocolate.

Uncle Abdel-Tariq and Aunt Cassandra also know the bride’s family and we’re all seated at the same table. Yasmeen and Omar are here too. After listening to Aunt Cassandra and my mum tell us their wedding-day stories for the billionth time, the MC finally announces that the bride and groom are waiting outside the doors of the reception and asks us all to stand. Then the drums and flute start to go wild and the singer begins in an enthralling, intoxicating voice, which makes my heart bounce around inside me with excitement and anticipation. My mum and Aunt Cassandra are beaming, and my dad and Uncle Abdel-Tariq are sticking tissue into their ears, grinning sheepishly. Tissue plugs are an age-old tradition for them whenever they face over-enthusiastic amplifiers at weddings. My mum and Aunt Cassandra are mortified.

A group of people, mainly extended family members and close friends, stand around the entrance, clapping in rhythm with the music as they wait for the doors to open. The drums beat passionately and I can feel them – thumping inside my skin. Then suddenly the doors open and we all gasp as the bride and groom enter, their faces glowing like two lighthouses.

They move slowly down the red carpet as the band plays around them and the singer performs. People start to dance a Syrian form of the
dabke
,
where you hold hands and move in a circle, stepping and kicking and twisting your feet in complicated but graceful ways. Every time I go to a non-Palestinian wedding and my mum pushes me on to the dance floor and tells me to stop being so shy, I end up looking like the daggy, confused girl. At Palestinian weddings I’m a pro. It’s just that everybody has their own adaptation. The Lebanese have a version, the Syrians, the Turkish. Even within each nationality there are versions of each version so I always perform a standard one step, one kick, which usually gives me a bare minimum pass (it also works at Greek and Jewish weddings).