An Infidel in Paradise Read online

  Every First Day, in every new school, Dad would slip a note in my lunch bag. That was our tradition. I always pretended like I didn’t know he was doing it, but all morning, sitting in strange classrooms, surrounded by kids ogling me as if I had six legs and an exoskeleton, I’d think about that note. It didn’t matter what it said. It was always some parent drivel anyway, about what a great kid I was. Seriously, do parents really think we believe that junk? But somehow it helped. Even if I didn’t read it – and sometimes I wouldn’t until I got home – I knew it was there. I knew he was there.

  “How long?” Mandy has the tenacity of a tick. I wonder when she’ll find the note. I don’t know if Dad used to leave notes for her as well. I always thought it was just our thing, but I couldn’t take the chance. I’d like to think I at least had some originality. When it came down to it, though, I spewed the same BS he did all those years. I tried to fake Mom’s handwriting. Like Mom would ever do something like that.

  “Almost there,” I say.

  I’m as desperate to finish this trip as she is, yet dreading our arrival. Suddenly the miles of empty brush give way to the high fortress walls of the school, as startling as a pyramid in the desert. We stop just outside the gates while two guards use a mirror attached to a long rod to check under our van for bombs. We’re cleared through, and the driver pulls into the parking lot and stops. When the doors open, a sudden blast of heat sears my flesh. Lightheaded, I slide across the seat and try to hop down but catch my foot at the last minute. Seconds before my face would have hit the pavement, a firm hand encircles my upper arm and swings me up in a surprisingly graceful maneuver. I land against the chest of my rescuer, my free arm instinctively reaching up to grab his shoulder. All we need are ice skates and it would be a perfect ten.

  I’m about to share this insight when I look up and any intelligible thought evaporates. I’m gawking into the face of a boy who is surely the product of genetic engineering. He is that beautiful.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Sorry,” I mumble, looking into the thickly fringed green eyes of the gorgeous godlike creature while my heart does little cartwheels in my chest.

  “Don’t apologize. It’s not like every day starts with a pretty girl falling into my arms.” He smiles and it’s like being zapped by a Taser, not that I’ve ever been zapped by a Taser, but I’m pretty sure this is what it would feel like. It’s a good thing he’s still holding me because I may just swoon in his arms. And I’d be only half-faking it.

  “Mustapha!” A loud voice shatters our magic moment.

  We both jump and take a few steps back as the beautiful boy drops his hands.

  The girl striding purposefully toward us could be his twin. Tall and slender, she has the same pale olive skin and glittering green eyes. She puts a hand on his arm.

  “Everyone’s been looking for you,” she says to him, completely ignoring me. “You have to see Saalima’s new cell phone. I’m going to ask Daddy to buy me one.” She flicks back a strand of glossy black hair, adjusts her dupatta, which is already draped perfectly around her neck, the ends fluttering down her back, and she eyes him impatiently. She still hasn’t acknowledged my presence.

  “Didn’t your father just buy you a new phone last spring?” He chuckles.

  “That was months ago,” she pouts. “Come on, you have to see it.” She pulls at his arm.

  By this time, I’ve decided I must have become invisible, so I’m startled when he turns back to me.

  “I must go,” he says, “but it was a pleasure. Try to stay on your feet now.” He beams one last heart-stopping smile, but it’s the girl who takes my breath away. She shoots me a look of pure hatred before she escorts him away.

  By now, the other embassy kids are out of the van, and Vince and Michelle are trying to get Mandy to remember the name of her teacher.

  “It’s O’Grady,” I say distractedly, still watching the departure of the god-creature and Angry Girl.

  “Oh, Mandy, you’re so lucky,” gushes Michelle. “She’s, like, the nicest teacher in the whole universe. And I know exactly where her room is. Do you want Vince and me to take you, sweetie?”

  I give Vince a look. Taking Mandy to her class is something we always do together on the First Day. We walk Mandy. Then Vince walks me. It’s another tradition. Lame, but there it is. We pretend it’s solidarity on her behalf, but really we just don’t want to be stranded on our own.

  Vince doesn’t notice me trying to catch his eye. He’s too busy gazing at Michelle like she’s just announced a cure for zits.

  “That would be great, Michelle,” he says before Mandy can respond.

  Mandy turns to me, and for a moment I think she might object, but Michelle grabs her hand and Vince takes the other, which is totally stupid since Mandy’s eight, not three, and they march her away.

  I stand there, not sure whether to follow. It’s pretty obvious they don’t need me and likely they don’t want me. I try to remember the general layout of this huge sprawling campus and head in what I hope is the direction of the upper school.

  I notice them as soon as I enter the upper-school courtyard. They’re surrounded by friends, all local kids like themselves. The god-creature is chatting with a cute chubby boy. His hostile goddess is looking at me. I have the strangest feeling she’s been watching out for me, which I know is totally paranoid. But she is staring at me – and not in a good way. I decide to head over to the fishpond so I can pretend I’m enjoying marine life and not obsessing on her.

  The upper-school classrooms are arranged in a single-storey circle around a large stone courtyard. The pond is in the center, which actually makes it a pretty stupid place to go when my goal is to fade into the scenery, but it’s minutes until the first bell, so I don’t want to wander too far. I sit down on one of the stone benches overlooking the pond and watch trapped fish swimming around in circles.

  I wonder if she’s still watching me. I think I can feel her eyes, but I don’t look up. I rifle through my bag, pull out my sandwich, and break off a piece, feeling a moment of guilt when I’m reminded it’s tuna. I hope the fish won’t be too grossed out by eating one of their own. I drop in a large chunk, which barely hits the surface of the water before the fish are attacking it with the enthusiasm of sharks at an Australian beach party. I guess they’re not squeamish.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I jump. Seriously, the girl moves like a cat. I had no idea she’d come up behind me.

  “I beg your pardon?” I ask. The sun glints off her hair like she’s generating light. Is that real gold threaded through the long tunic of her shalwar kameez?

  “You heard me.” In spite of her words and death-ray eyes, her cultured voice, with its faint British accent, is smoothly melodic.

  I stare at her for a moment, trying to figure out what she wants. Should I apologize for flirting with her boyfriend? I can feel people watching us. I wish I could disappear, or that she would. I look back down at the fish and break off another piece of bread. I don’t get as far as dropping it in before she speaks again.

  “Has it never occurred to you that you should ask before feeding the local wildlife, or do you always do exactly what you want when you’re a guest in another country?”

  Local wildlife? I look from the fish up to her looming over me and back down to the fish. Is she kidding? “Sorry. I, uh, didn’t realize goldfish were a protected species here.”

  “Do you think you’re funny?” Okay, I was being a little sarcastic, but give me a break – wildlife? It occurs to me this girl is not accustomed to having her authority questioned. The sensible thing to do now would be to back down. After all, she’s right. It is her country. As if I need to be reminded.

  “Is there a problem here?” asks a familiar voice.

  I can’t believe I was so focused on the ice princess that I didn’t notice the approach of the god-who-walks-among-us. I look at him through my lashes before turning quickly back to the fish. I wonder if I cou
ld drown myself in less than two feet of water.

  “No problem on my end,” I say when it becomes apparent that completely ignoring them is not going to make them go away. I look up. I notice his eyes are a different color than hers, a much deeper green. I can’t read his expression. I stare back down at my sandwich. There’s still more than half left, which is good because I didn’t bring any lunch money. I finger the crust for a minute before reaching out and dropping the entire thing in the water.

  “Stop that at once!” she shrieks. My heart is racing now. Despite my current behavior, I hate confrontations. “Do you see what she’s doing?” She turns to Mustapha. I wonder if I should expect to be taken out by a bolt of lightning right about now. It certainly seems to be what she’s expecting.

  “It’s just bread, Aisha. I’m sure it won’t hurt them.” His voice is soothing, but I can hear a hint of something else and look up to catch a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. It quickly disappears when I catch his eye, and his face is again impassive.

  “But I told her not to. The fish won’t eat it, and it will become a disgusting mess that someone else will have to clean up.” I look at the fish and, to my chagrin, discover they’re now innocently swimming around as if they didn’t just do a Jaws imitation two minutes ago. My soggy wad of bread floats above them, ignored. Traitors.

  “It’s biodegradable,” I offer.

  “But I told you not to,” she repeats, glaring at me. She’s really stuck on this point. It crosses my mind to tell her I don’t take orders from her, but I pretty much exhausted my supply of bravado when I dumped the bread.

  “She’s new, Aisha. She didn’t know any better.”

  Did he just call me stupid?

  “You saw her. She did it deliberately.”

  This girl definitely has control issues.

  “You’re new, right?” he asks.

  Why won’t they just go away?

  “Actually, I was sitting behind you all last year in biology, didn’t you notice?” Well, what did he expect me to say? With less than two hundred students in the upper school, I’m sure there isn’t a kid in this courtyard who doesn’t know I’m new.

  “I didn’t notice you, and I’m very certain I would have.” He flashes his smile, and I stand up, trying to relieve the adrenaline suddenly coursing through my body. I’m disappointed that, even standing, I’m a couple of inches shorter than the ice princess and I barely reach Mustapha’s shoulder.

  I give him what I hope is a cool look. “Well, I guess I must be new, then.” This is so not the time to flirt. Why do boys never get stuff like that?

  “We should be going to class, Musa.” Finally, the ice princess and I agree on something, but apparently “Musa” has other ideas. He barely acknowledges she’s spoken, continuing to smile at me with a determination that makes me think he has control issues of his own.

  “Don’t let me stop you,” I encourage.

  “No hurry. We always have time to welcome guests.”

  I don’t know if it’s being reminded once again that I’m a guest in this country that I’m supposed to call home, or being treated like a criminal for feeding goldfish, or everything else – Dad leaving, Vince ditching me – but suddenly I’ve had enough. I move to walk past him, but he catches my arm.

  “Mustapha Khan.” He holds out his other hand. The ice princess sighs dramatically, but Mustapha’s expression is unreadable as he waits for me to respond.

  “We don’t have time for this, Musa. Let her go find her friends.” I look into the cold green eyes of the ice princess and wonder what friends she imagines I have on my First Day at a new school. Or if her meaning is simply to remind me that I’m not their friend.

  “How are you enjoying Pakistan?” he asks.

  The question catches me off guard, which it shouldn’t. I’ve been asked variations of it a hundred times in more countries than I can count, and there’s only one answer. Whatever poverty, violence, or hatred you might be confronting on a daily basis, people always want to hear that you found one tiny thing that made their homeland paradise.

  My eyes travel from the hand curled around my arm up to the broad shoulders under a designer polo shirt, the strong chin, perfect teeth, high cheekbones, and intense, darkly fringed eyes. I wonder if this boy has ever lived through a single moment in his life feeling like an outsider. My mind races as I try to come up with a compliment, no matter how insincere, but my arm is hot under his touch and the ice princess clicks her tongue impatiently.

  “Well,” I begin, feeling the familiar anger wakening like a beast inside me, “there’s not a single mall, movie theater, or Caramel Frappuccino within a thousand miles, but there are huge poisonous reptiles, beggars on every street corner, and all the atmosphere of a maximum-security penitentiary. I’m just surprised there’s not more tourism.”

  We stare into each other’s eyes, and, for the first time, I know exactly what he’s thinking. The ice princess has stopped whining. She may have stopped breathing. Even the other kids in the courtyard have quieted down, though I think they’re too far away to hear our conversation. He’s no longer holding out a hand for me to shake, but the other one has tightened. My arm is going numb. I look down at it and back up to his face.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he says dryly.

  Finally, he lets go of my arm and nods to the ice princess, indicating they’re leaving, but he stalks off a pace ahead of her. A few feet away, he stops and turns back.

  “Welcome to our country,” he says, throwing his hands wide in a mocking gesture that belies his words.

  Just then, the bell rings, and I see Mustapha absorbed into a throng of laughing kids. One boy throws his arm around him, while on his other side, the ice princess leans in, saying something that makes him laugh. Suddenly, I feel weak with longing. Like a rat gnawing the inside of my stomach, my loneliness feels like a living thing, powerful and dangerous.

  It’s not that I want Mustapha, particularly. It’s more than that. I want someone who knows me. My friends from Manila, Bangkok, or even Nairobi, just someone I don’t have to explain myself to. It’s like I’m an amnesia victim reawakened every two or three years, each time with my entire history wiped out. I have to constantly recreate myself, with the growing certainty that each time, pieces of me are lost. I become less who I am and more a creation, a holograph, projected onto yet another exotic landscape.

  “Do you know where you’re supposed to be?” Mustapha shouts across the courtyard, breaking into my thoughts. The unexpected kindness of this small gesture brings me close to tears.

  “Almost never,” I shout back, and I make my way to my first class.

  CHAPTER 3

  I follow the crowd into the dimly lit barnlike structure that houses the cafeteria. I swear it looks like one of those cell-block structures from some B-grade prison movie, which is completely appropriate for how I’m feeling about the next forty-five minutes of my life.

  The morning went as well as you might expect, considering it began with pissing off the reigning king and queen of the school. Every freaking teacher made me stand up and introduce myself to the class. The worst was the psychology teacher. No matter how many different ways I told him I didn’t have any “fun and exciting” stories to share about my former life, he kept right on asking.

  I thought about telling him how my dad ditched our family for our former maid and how my normally sane brother had fallen under the spell of a heinous Hip-Hop Barbie. But, in the end, I decided to tell him about my dad’s tragic accident, the one that left him in a vegetative state, hooked up to about a million machines in a hospital in Manila run by nuns, who still wear the old-fashioned black habits and float around with serene faces, talking in soft voices and praying over their patients.

  Of course, the accident never happened. Dad’s living on a beach in Boracay with Zenny, writing, and last I heard, he’s happier than a pig in – well, enough said. But some stories are best left untold.

 
; When my psychology teacher turned white as a sheet and demanded the entire class observe a moment of silence in honor of my dad, I thought that might be the lowest point of my day. But standing here alone, looking around for my brother in a crowd of kids who are all looking right back at me, I’ve decided I’m no longer trying to identify lowest points. I’m sure every one of these kids has heard about what I said this morning to the royal couple. I can only imagine what they’re saying about me.

  The cafeteria is a furnace. The windows along two walls are wide open, presumably to let in the breeze from outside, except that there is no breeze. A row of ceiling fans, fifteen feet up, push around blistering air and the licorice smell of cumin mixed with sweat. My stomach is churning, and I seriously regret layering a tank over my T-shirt as the wetness grows under my arms and across my chest. The loudness of the voices all around me seems purposeful, like the war cries of a hostile nation. If I had to imagine my own personal hell, this would be it.

  I wouldn’t even have come into the cafeteria, but Vince and I always eat together on the First Day. It’s another tradition and one thing that makes moving around a little easier. Vince is always beside me, going through the same stuff.

  But at our old schools, we agreed where to meet ahead of time. I figured we’d discuss it while we were taking Mandy to her classroom this morning, but then that didn’t happen.

  I try to look casual as I stand just inside the doors, scouring the room. The first familiar face I spot is Michelle’s, and there’s Vince right beside her. His table is packed with kids, and everyone is asking him questions. Hip-Hop Barbie is grinning – she doesn’t realize how excruciating it is for him to talk about himself. I can see the pink flush under his tan from here. There’s no space to squeeze in beside him, but I need to find a way to take the attention off him. Although events of the day so far would suggest I’m not the most socially adept kid on the planet, I’ve got mad skills compared to my brother.