Ten Things I Hate About Me (2 page)

And boy, are there whispers. I guess there are different levels of bullying. Timothy doesn’t get beaten up or shoved around. He cops the verbal bullying. Personally, I’d prefer physical assault. One punch and you’re down. But persistent name-calling? That prolongs the hurt. It stretches it out. Each nasty word stretches the rubber band further away until finally, one day, it snaps back at you with maximum impact.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Timothy’s intelligent. Or that he’s not into sports, which seems to be a prerequisite for male coolness at my school. In his first week he mentioned that he liked tropical fish and came into class with
An Almanac of
Tropical Fish,
yellow Post-it notes jutting out of its pages. Peter and his group immediately nicknamed Timothy “Goldfish” and ever since then the name has stuck.

The thing about Timothy is that he seems to handle it well. There have been no reports of counseling sessions with our school psychologist or any Dear Diary incidents. He usually hits back with a sarcastic remark and moves on. Perhaps some of the guys think he can take it and that’s why they always give him a hard time. I just keep on thinking of that rubber band stretching and stretching.

“Is there anybody else who doesn’t have a partner?” Mr. Govan asks the class.

I glance over at Peter, who’s snickering with his friends.

Carlos slowly raises his hand and Mr. Govan tells him to join Timothy. Carlos shuffles over, and Peter cries out, “Losers!” Carlos sticks his middle finger up at him but his face is flushed with self-consciousness. Timothy, on the other hand, seems unperturbed. As I watch him ignoring Peter’s taunts, our eyes meet and, to my surprise, he smiles.

Amy nudges me in the side, looking over at Timothy and giggling. “What’s with the eye contact?”

“No big deal.”

“Do you two have something going on?”

“Get over it, will you? It was a casual smile. His facial muscles twitch and you think he’s proposed to me.”

She laughs. “Just checking!”

It’s not that Amy’s a cruel person. She doesn’t tease Timothy like Peter and the other guys do. Like me, she’s an onlooker. We buy tickets as audience members only. We never volunteer for the show itself. I know that’s not an excuse. In fact, maybe we’re worse.

Our status in the regular crowd is parasitical. It feeds off the uncoolness of others. We can only be semipopular as a measure of those who aren’t. So we naturally try to maintain the status quo, support the system that supports ours. Our complicity is self-serving.

“GEORGE IS HAVING
a big bash at his house this weekend,” Amy tells Liz and me as we walk to our lockers. “And the best part is that his cousin just turned eighteen. You know what that means?”

Everybody’s going to get the chance to lean over a toilet bowl, tongue a stranger, lick Venetian blinds, and give somebody an atomic wedgie.

I pretend to look enthusiastic. There is no way my dad will let me go.

“Sam asked me to go with him,” Liz says excitedly.

“So that’s what you two were whispering about in science,” Amy says. “Are you a couple now?”

“Well he hasn’t officially asked me to be his girlfriend…”

“Is he picking you up or are we going together, like we usually do?”

Liz looks at Amy with a guilty expression on her face.
“Um…he’s going to come by and pick me up with his older brother, who drives. I hope you don’t mind…”

“Not a problem,” Amy says in a voice which clearly indicates that it is. She suddenly starts looking for something in her bag and avoids Liz’s gaze.

“Maybe you and Jamie could go together,” Liz suggests.

Amy slowly looks up from her bag at me.

“Do you want to go?”

“Yeah! Sure! It should be loads of fun!” I make sure to exaggerate my enthusiasm. That way, when I cancel at the last minute due to a sudden case of stomach flu—actually, I’ll make it family commitments this time—she won’t be suspicious. So far I’ve managed to keep everybody in the dark about the fact that my dad’s rules make the Jurassic era seem progressive. It’s too embarrassing. I’m a pro at inventing plausible excuses for last-minute cancellations.

“Great! That’s settled, then!” Liz says happily. “I’ve got to go now. I’m meeting Sam.”

Her eyes go misty when she mentions his name and I can practically see the hairs on her arms braid themselves into little love hearts. She dashes off just as Peter and Chris walk up to us, bouncing a basketball between them.

I try to maintain my composure. Peter always makes me nervous. All that popularity and misdirected ego.

“Are you coming to George’s party on Saturday?” Peter asks us. He casts his eyes over my body. From fake-blonde tip to
school-shoes toe. He checks me out like a customer at a butcher’s sizing up the quality of a piece of meat.

“Yep,” Amy answers.

“What about you, Jamie?”

“I wouldn’t miss it!” I gush. I have that fake enthusiasm thing going on again.

“Then I’ll definitely be going,” Peter says, leaning close and flashing me a playful smile.

Excuse me? Commercial break. Intermission. Something very strange is happening. Peter is flirting with
me.
My bra size hasn’t increased over the break. I haven’t had any collagen injections. And as far as I know my family is still in the lower socioeconomic bracket.

I respond with a goofy smile. As you do when the most popular guy in class is blatantly flirting with you.

I try to ignore Amy’s bewildered look and concentrate on being calm.

“My dad’s pissed off at me,” Chris says. “I ran over his fishing rod with my skateboard. He’s threatened to ground me this weekend.”

He says it without a hint of shame or embarrassment. I stare at him openmouthed.

Noticing my expression, Chris grins at me. “Yeah, my dad’s pretty tough.”

I don’t think anybody needs to know that if my dad busted me at a party with boys and alcohol he’d throw me into a tank with a semitranquilized shark and ask me to reflect on my actions.

“Tough!” Peter exclaims good-naturedly. “Man, your dad’s got you in chains. Remember how he busted us drinking at your place? We got it hard! He made us clean out the garage, mow the lawn,
and
trim the hedges.”

“That’s harsh,” Amy says, demonstrating to me how utterly ignorant she is of the meaning of the word. “So how will you go to the party?”

“Yeah,” Peter adds. “Don’t be a loser. Just come. What are you going to tell everybody? ‘Oh, sorry, guys, I can’t make it because my dad won’t let me’? Man, they’ll roast you alive if you pull that one on them!”

I pretend to find the whole conversation amusing and join in their laughter.

“He’ll get over it,” Chris says, shrugging his shoulders. “And even if he doesn’t, he’s going to the soccer game on Saturday night so he won’t know the difference anyway.”

“Come on, let’s go shoot some hoops,” Peter says. He turns away and then stops and looks back at me. “I’ll see you on the dance floor.” He winks at me and walks away.

“What the…?” Amy says, in a tone that indicates that she is as baffled as I am.

“I wasn’t imagining it, was I?”

“No!”

“Do you think it’s a case of mistaken identity?”

We throw ourselves into a game of speculation. It’s not a low self-esteem thing. I’ve attracted guys before. Blonde hair (I mean bleached), piercing blue eyes (I mean contact lenses).
I’ve had my share of wolf whistles. But the fact is, the situation lacks logic. Peter has status. That’s why his dating is strategic. He will either maintain the status quo or upgrade. Tara Hanson, captain of the eleventh grade tennis team, was an upgrade. Legs to her neck, boobs that defy gravity. She’s loud and assertive and makes a point of being noticed. She wore the pants in the relationship, although, based on schoolyard gossip, wearing clothes didn’t really feature all that much in their partnership.

I represent a downgrade. That’s a simple, indisputable fact. So unless Peter’s knocked his head on concrete, it doesn’t make sense.

“So what will you wear?” Amy asks me.

“I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to see what I can put together.”

There’s a moment’s uncomfortable pause. Parties and weekends and what-to-wear conversations are usually Amy and Liz’s domain. At first they would ask me to go out with them but they eventually gave up after one too many “I’ve got something else to do” excuses. I’ve never had the courage to tell them that my dad has a policy about going out at night. It’s called Never. Subtitle: Not in a Trillion Years.

“How about I come over to your place and we can get ready together?” Amy asks.

Her question zooms into my brain. There is no way I can handle Amy visiting. My background oozes out of every corner of the house. From the paintings with inscriptions from the
Koran hanging on the walls to the Lebanese satellite channel. I once heard Peter and his gang laughing about “ethnic” homes always having veggie gardens in the backyard, a plastic outdoor table and chairs set on the front porch, and a stripped Ford Falcon sitting on four bricks in the front yard. My face burned with shame that day. My dad grows cucumbers, zucchinis, and tomatoes. Our table setting is plastic-bottle green. And Bilal has
two
stripped cars sitting in our driveway.

I have to protect myself. My brain hits the panic button and offers me three options:

1. We’re renovating and most of the electric outlets are out, so we can’t plug in our hair straighteners.
   
2. My sister is studying for an exam and goes insane at the slightest bit of noise.
   
3. My dad is having visitors over.
   

I opt for the outlets excuse. I’m in an emergency situation here. Besides, the prospect of not being able to straighten our hair almost makes Amy shudder with fear.

“Come over to my place, then?” Amy asks, giving me an awkward smile.

“OK, cool, that would be nice.”

It’s deceitful. It’s dishonest. It’s two-faced. It’s all those things, yes.

But most of all, it’s about survival.

I practice my speech on the way home in the bus. Deep down, though, I know it’s of no use. I’m not allowed to go to the movies with my friends at night. I have more chance of waking up a natural blonde than convincing my father to let me go to George’s party.

My mother died of a sudden heart attack when I was nine years old. My father changed instantly. Before my mother’s death, he was fun and carefree. Afterward, he became rigid, overprotective, and paranoid. He worries about what happens and what
could
happen. He wants to control every variable in my life and it drives me crazy.

Last year he drafted his curfew rules. He made me type them and hang them on the fridge door.

While I’m stuck with these Stone Age rules, my brother, Bilal, is allowed a lot more freedom. We’re only about two years apart but he has a curfew of midnight (which he never obeys). I’m doomed to have the social life of a hibernating bear with the kind of shackles I’m in at the moment.

My dad doesn’t really control my older sister, Shereen. She’s twenty-two. If she’s out late at night he knows she’s not dancing her heels off at a nightclub or flirting with a spunky guy. She’s either writing a manifesto on women’s rights, working out a strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or attending a Muslim youth function, getting high on spirituality and charity events. It annoys him, but she doesn’t have any curfew restrictions because she’s usually home early anyway.

1. Jamilah is not allowed to go out after dark. She must be home before sunset.
   
2. Jamilah may go to the movies with her FEMALE friends
   sometimes,
   provided that her brother or sister or family member picks her up from the theater immediately after the movie finishes. No loitering around in the parking lot permitted.
   
3. The movie must be in the daytime.
   
4. Bilal’s friends do not constitute family members.
   
5. Under no circumstances are boys allowed.
   
6. Under no circumstances are boys allowed.
   
7. There will be NO going out until all homework is finished.
   

Signatories:

Witness:

I arrive home after school and enter a family war zone. Shereen and my father are arguing in the living room. Bilal is sprawled on the couch reading a car magazine.

“What’s wrong this time?” I ask, throwing my school bag on the floor and slumping down into an armchair. I’m annoyed because I’ll have to wait until my dad is in a good mood before approaching him about the party.

“Your sister is disgracing us again!” my father cries in Arabic. My father always speaks to us in Arabic.

“Since when is sticking up for what you believe in a disgrace?” she cries, hands on her hips, nostrils flaring as she faces my father.

“I’m watching the news and what do I see? My daughter in front of the camera, screaming about race riots and waving her arms around like somebody has plugged an electrical cable into her ear!”

“I’m sticking up for us, Dad! Don’t you get it? Social apathy and the failure to commit to open political discourse threaten the viability of our democracy!” That’s how Shereen talks. As though she’s memorized her class notes. We generally need a dictionary to make sense of her.

I steal a look at Bilal and we roll our eyes. We’ve become accustomed to Shereen and Dad arguing. My dad thinks Shereen is going to end up with a record because she’s constantly organizing protests and sitting on the steps of Parliament House with her hippie friends who don’t understand that not wearing deodorant breaches United Nations conventions.

“The sooner our community and wider society refrains from radicalizing human-rights activism, the sooner the human race will come to terms with its common humanity and free itself of the bonds of muted rage!”

Bilal and I pretend to stick our fingers down our throats. Shereen darts a menacing look at us and my dad throws his hands in the air in frustration. “When will you abandon all
these protests and just settle down and focus on your studies? These protests achieve nothing! Why do you insist on drawing attention to yourself? We live in tense times, Shereen. You already stand out as it is.”

My dad’s referring to the fact that Shereen wears the hijab. Last year she made the decision to ditch her purple dreadlocks for the veil. My dad was overjoyed at the time. He thought that Shereen had finally settled down.

He was wrong.

She bought bags of material and assorted patchwork. She designed a whole variety of different patterns to sew onto her veils. She has one veil with Yin Yang patches sewn all over it. She bought an embroidery kit and sewed the words
Make Peace Not War
on another veil. Other statements she’s adopted are: