Ten Things I Hate About Me
RANDA ABDEL-FATTAH
ORCHARD BOOKS / NEW YORK
AN IMPRINT OF SCHOLASTIC INC.
To Deyana, who kicked away in my stomach when I
wrote the first draft and lay in a rocker
under my computer desk when I wrote the second.
AMY, LIZ, AND I
are reminiscing about our vacations as we wait for Mr. Anderson to arrive for homeroom on Monday morning. The summer break is still fresh in our minds and we’re slowly coming to terms with the fact that another school year has begun.
The three of us are lamenting that we can no longer wake up at noon or play video games and watch DVDs until four in the morning, when we overhear Ahmed Latif talking to Danielle Pogroni and Paul Xiang.
“Yeah, they got me with a bottle!” Ahmed says. “I’ve earned a pretty decent scar, huh?” He touches it with pride. “I look tough, don’t I?”
Danielle stares at the scar in awe, reaching out to touch it.
“So what happened?” Paul asks.
Ahmed leans in close to them and, in a hushed tone, says: “The riots.”
“Which riots?” Paul asks with a goofy smile. “The Christmas sales ones?”
“Yeah, man,” Ahmed responds in a wry tone. “I got hit by a bottle at a riot over half-priced socks. I was talking about the
beach
riots. I was with my cousins and some of my friends. We were walking down the boardwalk. We heard a crowd of people chanting. They’re chanting stuff like,
No more Lebs! Wogs go home! Ethnic cleansing!
And there were older people in the crowd too! It wasn’t just kids.”
At this point Amy swings back on her chair and turns her face toward Ahmed. “So how did you get attacked?” she asks.
He turns to us, surprised that he has an audience. He pauses before answering. “Well…I’m known to have a big mouth.”
“Won’t argue you with you there, man,” Paul jokes, slapping him on the shoulder.
“We walked up to some of them and started yelling stuff back.”
“You’re a hero,” Danielle says good-naturedly. “Didn’t you know that things were turning violent?”
“Nah, not then. I lost my cool. I was shouting at them, calling them racists. This old guy was yelling out that his dad fought in the war and he was a straight-up Aussie and that we should go back to our desert caves!”
“He had a point,” Chris Ross says, snickering. “Why don’t you?”
“We’re currently renovating our cave,” Ahmed snaps. “All that desert sand damaged the upholstery.”
Chris shoots Ahmed a nasty sneer but Ahmed ignores him and turns back to Danielle and Paul. “All of a sudden my friends and I were surrounded. Most of the crowd had had too much to drink. But they knew what they were doing. Anyway, I got hit by a bottle. I didn’t even see it coming. It seriously hurt! Man, I was angrier than a constipated giraffe.”
“Well, you kind of brought it on yourself,” Liz says. “I mean,
you
walked up to them.” She glances at me for support but I pretend to be fascinated by an ingrown fingernail.
“
Excuse me?
They were calling us wogs. Giving us crap for being Lebanese. They were telling us to get off
their
turf. Do you think we’re going to sit back and take it? I’ve been going to that beach since I was a kid. It’s mine just as much as theirs.”
Peter Clarkson, the most popular guy in my grade, suddenly joins the conversation. “Man, you ethnics and Asians are always complaining.” For reasons only apparent to him he suddenly assumes the voice of a pitiful heroine in a nineteenth-century novel. “
Oh, help me! I’m a victim of racism. The white people are out to get me.
Get over yourselves!”
Chris bursts out laughing.
“‘You ethnics and Asians?’” Paul murmurs to himself in a tone of disbelief. “Who says that anymore?”
“Don’t call us ethnics. We’re
Aussies,”
Ahmed says furiously.
“Oh, come on! Even our politicians have singled your kind out as troublemakers,” Sam Richards says. “You just refuse to
integrate. Your women wear that funny headgear and most of you don’t speak English.” He looks sheepishly at Danielle, who is sending him death stares. “You’re Italian, you’re OK. You brought us pizza!”
“Oh, thank you so much, Sam,” Danielle says. “I feel honored to be
accepted
by you. Why don’t you piss off?”
Sam sneers at her and Peter sits up tall in his chair and coolly looks Ahmed and Danielle up and down. “I agree with Sam. If you want to be Aussie you have to abandon your culture. And if you’re so oppressed by this country, you can always go back to where you came from.”
“You mean, Guildford?” Paul asks hotly. “Zip code Sydney 2161?”
Ahmed, Danielle, and Paul give Peter, Chris, and Sam disgusted looks and turn their backs on them.
Peter, who is sitting at the desk next to mine, leans across and smiles conspiratorially at me. “The delusions of immigrants,” he whispers, and smirks.
I smile back meekly. That’s what I do when I interact with Peter. I do coy, self-conscious, shy. That is the extent of my repertoire.
I deliberately drop my pen on the floor, leaning down to grab it so that he can’t see the red flush creeping over my face. When I’m sure that I’ve regained my normal pigmentation, I raise my head.
Peter leans over again and says, “What a joke, huh, Jamie? Ahmed probably spends his weekends in a garage making
bombs or training for a terrorist group. I’m glad the riots broke out. My dad told me that it’s been a long time coming. He used to surf those beaches when he was younger. Sure, there were Italians and Greeks but there weren’t too many, so you didn’t notice and it was OK. But now the Lebs have invaded the beaches and it’s not the same.”
I gulp hard and nod halfheartedly, trying to disguise my mortification at his comments.
You see, neither Peter nor anybody else in my class has any idea about my Lebanese-Muslim background. In fact, my real name is Jamilah Towfeek, but I’m known as Jamie when I’m at school because I’m on a mission to de-wog myself.
I attend Guildford High, a run-down, underfunded public school in Sydney’s west. We only have the facilities to make Cup-a-Soup for Home Economics, and rumor has it that our lockers were purchased at a garage sale held by the local prison.
In my school there is clear division among ethnics, whites, nerds, and loners. I don’t mean to say that it’s gang wars or anything like that. In fact, there has only been one alleged incident of racist violence, involving a nail file, a plate of Asian greens, and a bowl of miso soup.
The kids of Anglo-Saxon background are called “skips.” Anybody from the Middle East or Mediterranean is an “ethnic” or a “wog.” Samoans and New Zealanders are “FOBs” (Fresh Off the Boat). There’s also the “Asian” crowd, which makes no distinction between Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, or any of
the other four billion people who happen to come from the largest continent on earth. Computer geeks, sci-fi addicts, acne-riddled individuals, anyone wearing bifocal lenses, and loners are in a category all of their own.
Ever since seventh grade (I’m in tenth grade now), I’ve hidden the fact that I’m of Lebanese-Muslim heritage from everybody at school, to avoid people assuming I fly planes into buildings as a hobby.
Peter leads the cool skip group. He doesn’t walk into class; he glides, collecting the adoration of people around him as he passes. If life was a movie, his eyes would twinkle every time he talked and he’d always be minty fresh. He laps up attention like a puppy at a bowl of water. He entertains: burps songs, spins a tennis ball in class, drives custodians to nervous breakdowns. He can be a bully but most of us laugh at his performances as a pro tective measure. Oh, and most importantly, according to Peter, non-Anglos aren’t real Aussies. They’re imposters. Fraudulent Australians.
Being seen with Peter is a one-way ticket to coolness. Being liked by Peter is the stuff of dreams.
Unlike Danielle and Ahmed, I don’t have the courage to be up-front about who I am. I’d rather not deal with people wondering if I keep a picture of Osama bin Laden in the shape of a love heart under my pillow. Call me crazy, but I’m also not particularly excited about the prospect of having to stand accused every time somebody who happens to be of Lebanese background commits a crime.
So I’ve anglicized my name. And dyed my hair blonde. And I sometimes wear blue contact lenses. Maybe the logic isn’t apparent. But when you have brown hair and brown eyes, avoiding a “Middle Eastern appearance” tag at my school is made easier when you’re hiding behind bleached hair and optical aids.
When I walked into the living room as a blonde my dad glanced at me, choked on his coffee, and started praying aloud to Allah to give him patience. Allah must have been listening because I managed to convince him that the sudden change in my hair color would not mean I’d end up nightclubbing or on the arm of a boyfriend.
The blonde locks have probably helped me in my mission to stay incognito. Nobody at school knows about my background. I’m not popular enough for people to want to probe, and I’m not loser enough for people to think my vagueness is weird. I guess you could say that I don’t make much of an impact. That’s why when Peter started talking to me in homeroom this morning, I soaked up his attention like a doughnut dipped in coffee. The fact that his comments have left me soggy and wilted doesn’t matter. That’s the price you pay when you withdraw to the safety of anonymity.
“Do you think Ahmed was overreacting?” Amy asks Liz and me as we walk to class.
“No way,” I say. “Of course he’d be angry. He was attacked.”
“Sam had a point, though,” Liz says. “Don’t you think?”
Amy shrugs. “I’m not sure I agree with him. I mean, nobody gives Italians a hard time for raising their flags for Italy when soccer is on, or for speaking Italian.”
“Who cares anyway,” Liz says flippantly. “It doesn’t affect us.”
That’s what she thinks.
“I like Sam,” Liz says.
“I figured.” Amy rolls her eyes. “That was the main topic of conversation all break. Every time we went out I had to put up with you replaying your telephone conversations with him.” Noticing my blank expression, she tells Liz to fill me in.
Liz turns to me and grins. “He asked for my number on the last day of school and we’ve been in contact throughout the break. Remember that time we went to Westfield Parramatta, Amy? We counted fifty-three text messages in the space of three hours!”
“Don’t remind me,” Amy groans.
“Or the time you slept over at my place and I made you pause the movie every ten minutes because he kept calling.”
Amy shakes her head and gives Liz a disgusted look.
Although Amy and Liz are my friends, they’re closer to each other and basically tolerate me as something of a third wheel. Whereas Amy and Liz spend hours on the phone and go out on weekends, I rarely see them outside of school. There’s a definite distance between us, and I have to say that it’s deliberate on my part.
I avoid getting too close to Amy or Liz, or anyone else at school for that matter. If I get too close then I run the risk of exposing myself. And I am determined that nobody, not even Amy or Liz, ever gains the slightest clue as to my background and what my family life is like.
Amy and Liz seem to have it all. They’re untouched by stereotypes, racism, or family problems. They’re of Anglo background. They have naturally blonde hair and blue eyes. They don’t have a strict curfew and never seem to have a problem getting permission to go out on the weekend.
I envy them. Sometimes the Jamie in me aches to be a blue-eyed, blonde girl of Caucasian appearance. The yardstick against which all Australians are measured.
The Jamilah in me longs to be respected for who she is, not tolerated and put up with like some bad odor or annoying houseguest. But it takes guts to command that respect and deal with people’s judgments. Being Jamie at school shelters me from confronting all that.
“Sam’s a great guy,” Liz says. “Don’t you think, Jamie?”
“To be honest, he scares me,” I say. “That whole group does.”
“Why?” Amy asks.
“I feel like I have to pass a popularity test to talk to them.”
“Peter was talking to you back in homeroom,” Liz says. “So you can’t be doing too badly.”
“That was a fluke. He usually doesn’t look twice at me.”
We enter the science lab and Sam bounces over.
“Hey, Liz, want to be my partner today? We’re dissecting frogs.”
Liz grins, nods enthusiastically, and walks over to Sam’s lab table.
“So I guess that leaves you and me as partners, then,” Amy says.
A wave of relief floods through me. Because Amy and Liz have always been Siamese twins at school, I’ve always dreaded classes where we have to pair up, as I’m inevitably left looking for someone to join me.
Amy and I walk over to a lab table and start preparing for our dissection assignment. As we’re arranging the equipment I notice Timothy Reynolds leaning against a desk. His arms are folded across his chest, legs lazily stretched out as he surveys the class, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he needs to find a lab partner.
Just then Mr. Govan turns his back from the blackboard and, noticing Timothy, snaps: “This isn’t a cafeteria, Timothy. Find a partner and start your work.”
“I haven’t got a partner,” Timothy says in a casual tone.
I’m struck by his quiet confidence. He’s admitted to the entire class that he’s a loner and it doesn’t seem to have bothered him.
Then again, Timothy’s never been a conformist. He started at Guildford High midway through the last term of last year. He used to live on the North Shore, the affluent side of Sydney. Most kids would loathe spending recess or lunchtime alone or
not having somebody to sit next to in class. It’s bad for the image. But he’s the type who seems to have no problem spending time by himself. He doesn’t discriminate about who he hangs out with either. At school there are certain groups that you wouldn’t dare to be associated with because of the impact on your reputation. For example, the computer geeks, who are known to do little else at lunchtime than sit around eating homemade cheese-and-tomato sandwiches, talking about JavaScripts, and popping their pimples. Timothy, however, has no problem going up to them, slapping a handshake, and discussing hard drives and software.
Maybe people feel intimidated by his “don’t give a crap what people think” attitude. But I, for one, am in awe that somebody can be so confident in themselves that they don’t care who they hang out with or what people whisper behind their back.