Girls of Riyadh

With Fatimah, Lamees found herself for the first time friends with a girl so much like her that it was almost uncanny! The closer she got to Fatimah, the more she felt as though she were face to face with a soul mate. As usual, what others said about her didn’t bother her much, except that this time she did worry about how Michelle would feel. Michelle had forgiven her for her relationship with Sarah when she saw the way Sarah dropped her once they graduated. Sarah traveled to America, and she never again spoke to Lamees. At the time, Michelle had felt her own power, witnessing Lamees’s regret, hearing her plea for reconciliation and knowing how badly she wanted to regain the old friendship. But what would Michelle do now, if she felt Lamees had abandoned their friendship a second time? A better solution, as Lamees saw it, was just to hide the relationship from Michelle and the rest of the shillah. Her strategy backfired, though, when Tamadur, who had long been aggravated at what she thought of as her sister’s perverse ways, took it upon herself to inform the girls of everything.

So Michelle now knew the real reason for Lamees’s inexplicable disappearances. For weeks on end Lamees had been hiding behind a host of excuses: that studying medicine was so time-consuming, that the work was so difficult, that she had so much to learn! Now the hurtful truth was out—Lamees had been choosing her new friend’s company over that of her old shillah.

Lamees tried to justify her position to Sadeem, who was far ahead of everyone else in their clique when it came to being understanding, even indulgent, about such things.

“Try to see my side of things, Saddoomah! I love Michelle. All our lives we’ve been friends, and we’ll go on being friends, but she doesn’t have a right to keep me from getting to know other girls! Fatimah’s got a few things Michelle doesn’t have. You love Gamrah, but she has her faults, too, and if you found what she lacks in another girl, you’d get attached to that girl, right?”

“But Lammoosah, after all these years! It isn’t right to dump your lifelong friend just because you suddenly decide her personality is lacking some vital quality that you think you’ve just found in some other girl. That precious something didn’t matter to you before, though, because you lived years without it and you had no problem. Besides, the two of you are supposed to stick together through thick and thin. Suppose you were to get married and your husband turned out to be missing a certain something. Do you go and look for in other guys for what he’s lacking?”

“Yah, maybe! And if he doesn’t like it, then let him go find whatever he’s lacking and spare me the effort!”

“Wow, you’re one tough lady! Okay, look, I have a really serious question that’s bugging me so badly I’m about to burst. It’s about the Shiites.”

“What is it?”

With a twitch to her lips that gave away her mock-solemn expression, Sadeem asked: “Do Shiite men wear Sunni pants under their thobes?”*

22.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: July 9, 2004

Subject: Michelle Meets Up with Matti

I’m sitting down in my La-Z-Boy with my feet stretched way out, just like I do every weekend when I write down these e-mails. And yes, my hair is fluffed and my lips are painted red…

It was about ten o’clock in the morning when the airplane landed at San Francisco International Airport. This was not Michelle’s first visit to the city, but it was the first time she had been there without her parents and her little brother Meshaal.

She breathed in air saturated with moisture and freedom. People in all shapes and colors, from everywhere in the world, were flowing around her in every direction. No one paid any attention to her Arab-ness, or to the fact that the person standing next to her was African. Everyone was minding his own business.

She made sure her visa was in plain sight. That piece of paper confirmed that she was a student from Saudi Arabia who had come to study at the University of California, San Francisco. The woman in Customs told her she was the prettiest Arab girl she had seen in all her years working at the airport.

After Michelle got through all the necessary official stuff, she searched the faces of the people waiting in the reception area. She caught sight of her cousin Matthew at the edge of the crowd, waving to her, and she started toward him, delighted.

“Hi, Matti!”

“Hi, sweetie! Long time no see!”

Matti gave her a warm hug, asking about her mom and her dad and her brother. Michelle noticed that he was the only one from her uncle’s small family who was there at the airport to meet her.

“Where is everyone else?”

“Dad and Mom are at work and Jamie and Maggie are at school.”

“And you? How come you came to meet me? Don’t you have lectures?”