Falling in Love With English Boys (13 page)

“Swedish medical students,” Elizabeth told me, as if that explained everything.

We were barely through the door when two versions of Elizabeth, in descending size, came at us. “Mum’s working late; Aunt Suha’s on the phone!” the smaller one announced, bouncing up and down. She looked about twelve. “Dad’s talking to her now. The wedding is on!”

“My sister Joanna,” Elizabeth announced as she lifted her bag full of—chocolate, of course—what else?—out of her sister’s reach. “Jo, this is—”

“It was still off until Wednesday,” the taller cut in. She looked twelve, too, but the black Pink shirt made me guess at fifteen or so. “Then his parents gave Shaz a new car . . . well, not a
new
new one, but only a couple of years old, and said they’ll give her a house when she marries Youssif.”

“This is Sarah,” Elizabeth told me. “She’s obsessed with bad telly and the
Eastenders
-like drama of our cousin’s engagement. Sarah—”

“Youssif’s hideous!” Joanna proclaimed.

“A toad!” Sarah agreed.

“He’s rich,” Elizabeth said, “and he might be a perfectly decent bloke—”

“Ewwwww!” they both groaned.

“Fine, he’s a toad all around. She won’t end up marrying him.” To me, Elizabeth explained, “Suha’s my father’s sister. She lives in Jordan, with her aforementioned daughter, who may or may not actually be marrying the rich but wholly unattractive son of a rich but boorish car dealer. It’s an ongoing saga, fast losing its salacious appeal.” She waved the bag like a hypnotist’s watch in front of her sisters. “Now you will both pay attention to me. This is my friend Cat from the States. Do not eat this chocolate in front of her. She’s bargaining with Fate.”

Sarah got the bag. “Hiya!” she said to me. “Fate is an impervious foe.”

“Brilliant!” Joanna announced. Whether to me or the choc, I have no clue.

“To the table!” I heard Mr. Sadiq call from somewhere down a hall.

Their flat looks like ours at home. Lots of books and comfy furniture and not quite enough room for everything in it. There were fashion mags on every flat surface. One gray cat was sleeping on the windowsill. Another one lay on its back, all four paws in the air, on one of the Middle Eastern-looking rugs. Kinda like Andouille does on our rugs. Only I doubt theirs are from IKEA. Theirs glow a little.

Elizabeth pulled me past her sisters. “Come on, then. If Mum’s late at the hospital, Dad’s cooking. So be warned.”

“Warned . . .?” I asked.

“He’s an experimental cook. Tonight’s menu is braised snake.”

Okay, so I’m halfway into what’s obviously the dining room, trying to think of how I can possibly explain that I go into anaphylactic shock if I eat legless reptile—without sounding like the lily-livered American coward that I am—and she lets me actually get to “I . . . er . . . ah” before letting out that killer laugh.

“You really are an eejit, you know.” She sighed, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “We’re probably having some form of pasta pesto.”

I hate Elizabeth. I love Elizabeth.

We had rotini with turnip-green-and-walnut pesto. Mr. Sadiq watched me take my first bite as if I were, in fact, prone to anaphylaxis. It kinda tasted like garlicky turf. How do I know how turf tastes, you ask? Do please recall my brief stint at Taney baseball. (Ten points to whichever of you can find out what happened to Trevor Wilson. Haven’t thought of him since he fell for that ballerina from St. Peter’s and so ended my twelve-year-old aspirations of getting to first base.)

“Delicious,” sez I. Actually, it really was pretty good. Mr. Sadiq beamed. The Junior Sadiqs rolled their eyes in perfect unison, and all was well in the world.

My dad cooks. Kinda. The soon-to-be-stepmonster talked him into taking a series of couples’ cooking classes last year. He went to one. He learned to make stuffed baked potatoes. He makes them stuffed with canned chili. Or tuna. Or their innards mixed with canned soup. He gets a little grumpy when Samantha the STBS asks him to leave her potato unbuttered, unsalted, unstuffed. He stomped out of the kitchen once when I reminded him that I haven’t liked tuna fish since . . . well, since forever, actually.

“There you are, Dad,” Joanna said on hearing about my dad’s culinary prowess. “You could mix potato innards with basil pesto.”

“Or rocket pesto,” Sarah added.

“Or potato pesto, perhaps,” from Elizabeth.

Mr. Sadiq took it all with his familiar dignity. “There will be no sweet for any of you ingrates. And I have made Victoria sponge with—”

“Pesto!” all three girls said together.

“Yes, yes, most amusing.” To me, Mr. Sadiq announced, “A chef I am not, but I like to combine interesting ingredients. I have not entirely left the science professor behind.”

“You were a professor?”

“I was. Chemistry, at a technical college in Baghdad.” He must have noticed my surprise. He smiled, a little sadly. “Ah, yes, I had a career before the shop, a life before London. But then, you could not have known that, and I daresay many of the shopkeepers in your Philadelphia look much as I do.”

He’s right. They do.

“How many Iraqis have you met, Catherine?”

“I don’t know exactly,” I admitted. “Two or three that I know of.”

“And they were teachers? Doctors? Engineers?”

“No,” I admitted. “They were driving taxis.”

“Just so.” Mr. Sadiq nodded. “In this country of opposite sides,” he said, “I am not a good driver.”

He wasn’t talking about driving. As much of a Homer as I felt right then, I knew that. I felt about six inches tall, goils.

Mr. Sadiq didn’t mean to make me feel bad. Or maybe he did, in a nice way. Maybe I deserved it. But the girls barely blinked. “No worries, Yank,” Elizabeth assured me as she carried an armload of plates from the table. “We think all Americans are stone stupid.”

“Complete pilchards,” Joanna agreed cheerfully.

“Self-centered, egomaniacal, earth-destroying bullies,” Elizabeth added with glee.

Sarah grinned. “With crap taste in music.”

“And books.”

“And television.”

“And crisps.”

“And chocolate.”

“Enough!” Mr. Sadiq commanded finally, but with that last, sadly true pronouncement, I could only concede utter defeat and tuck happily, with everyone else, into a seriously excellent sponge cake.

They asked about America. Mine, anyway.

Joanna wanted to know if I’d ever met Miley Cyrus, Kevin Jonas, or Robert Pattinson. She took it pretty well when I said I hadn’t. I didn’t mention that, as he is English, Robert probably lives in London. Elizabeth grilled me about my vast knowledge of Washington, D.C. I told her everything I knew. Like how the Mall looks when it’s full of PO’d librarians protesting funding cuts. Lucky, ain’t it, our class trip to the Smithsonian coincided with that march? Elizabeth need never know we ended up in the middle of things only because we took a wrong turn looking for a Fourbucks. I think I still have the pix of Kelly holding the “Literacy Ain’t Everything” sign she found.

Anyway, when she’s done her duty in the UK, Elizabeth plans to come be civilly disobedient on our shores. Joanna thinks she’s a pilchard (which, as well as being a synonym for “berk,” apparently, turns out to be a sardine—who knew?). Joanna wants to go to Hollywood.

Taking advantage of this geographical clash, Sarah told us all that, not only did
she
want to go to Ipswich, but that she had a
plan
. As in the Ipswich, which would involve a train ride out to the coast with her best friend, and a night spent with the cousin of a friend of one of her posse’s older brothers. Sounded like a good time to me.

Mr. Sadiq’s response? “Not while there is breath in my body.”

Note: he said the same regarding Joanna’s plans to be in the next Jonas Brothers’ video. He’s reliable.

“They’re all going, Dad!” Sarah insisted. “All my mates! Jacinta and Patrice and David and Hamid and Regina and Claire!”

“No.”

“I’ll be an outcast. A pariah!”

“Good word, ‘pariah.’ Your excessively expensive school seems to be living up to its exalted reputation. But still no.”

“Pleeeeease?”

“No.”

“You don’t let me do anything. I might as well be in Baghdad!”

He gave her one of those looks that can stop the mighty Mississippi from flowing. She shut up, but it was a very noisy silence. “Has Jacinta promised her father that she will attain at least B grades in her GCSEs?”

(Elizabeth sez GCSEs are like our final grades and SATs combined; how well you do kinda determines whether you go to Oxford or serve greasy burgers to Oxford students.)

“Well, no . . . ” Sarah admitted.

“
Will
Jacinta attain at least B grades in her GCSEs?”

“No . . . ”

“And attend a university that does not specialize in alcohol consumption and cosmetic application?”

“Yes! Well, no. Probably not.”

“So.” Mr. Sadiq accepted a cup of tea from Joanna. So did I. What was I going to do—decline? Elizabeth smirked at me. “When you have completed your exams, when a parent can enter your bedroom without the aid of a shovel and biohazard waste bin, when I am reasonably certain that your iPod earblooms are not permanently fused to your ears, I shall entertain the possibility of you accompanying your mates to Ipswich. Fair?”

Sarah looked a tiny bit embarrassed, for a tiny second. Then: “All right, then. I won’t go to Ipswich. Can Jacinta and I go the cinema Friday night? There’s a midnight showing of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
. Her mum will drop us off and pick us up.”

“Fine.”

Sarah grinned at Joanna; they both grinned at Elizabeth. Mr. Sadiq smiled into his tea, and that, apparently, was that.

After dinner, Elizabeth and I hung out in her room. It is, of course, infinitely cool. Gold graffiti on the walls (RESISTANCE IS FERTILE, IMAGINE, STOP MAD COWBOY DISEASE), fab clothing everywhere, pictures all over the walls of Elizabeth and Imogen and Consuelo and the other beautiful people who, I guess, are satellites around their tight little solar system.

I wandered over to look at a pic of the trio in front of the London Eye. They’re all holding airplane barf bags. Empty, I assume. “I should take my dad on the Eye when he comes,” I decided. “He likes being at the very top of things.” Yeah, yeah, Keri, I know. I
don’t
. But this is my dad’s visit. Besides, maybe Elizabeth still has the barf bag.

As usual when I thought about Dad’s visit, my stomach did a little jiggle. I still haven’t found the perfect restaurant for my birthday dinner. I like Indian; he doesn’t. He likes
haute cuisine
; I don’t wanna spend my b-day dinner worrying about using the wrong
merde
ing fork. Beyond that, I’m still not sure about the hotel (what does
“Caters to the fine character”
mean, anyway?). And, despite several offhand mentions to the contrary, I’m not completely convinced that he won’t show up with the STBS in tow, rendering all of my concerns moot and plans irrelevant. He can be kinda hard to plan around. (Remember the New York fiasco, Soph? Of course you do. Although, to be fair, you gotta admit that the two of us taking the midnight Chinatown bus back to Philly turned out to be kind of a hoot.) The STBS likes four-star, white-glove, no carb, no character whatsoever. And what she wants, he gives her. The wedding? Prepare for really really expensive rubber chicken.

And back to the regularly scheduled program . . .

Elizabeth pointed to a pic of her with another crazy pretty girl, mugging for the camera in matching Rasta hats. “That’s Shazia when they visited in April.”

I peered more closely and saw the diamond ring on Shazia’s finger. She looked like Elizabeth: bright and confident. “Why is she getting married if the guy’s such a toad?”

Elizabeth shrugged and flopped onto her bed. It’s covered with this gorgeous tapestry that feels like a pashmina and has all these little mirrors sewn into it. I don’t think it’s from IKEA, either. “They want to stay in Jordan. Things are still pretty horrific in Iraq. My uncle’s been in prison there for eight years, my aunt can’t find work, and Shaz can’t shop.” She said the last bit casually. But I know it isn’t. Casual.

I thought of the picture on the wall of the shop. “What did your uncle do?”

“He was caught spying for your lot.”

“Really?”

“No. Jeez, Yank, you really will believe anything.” Elizabeth fished a bra out from under her butt (okay, I might actually trade any possibility of something with Will for the ability to wear something with lace
and
an underwire) and sighed. “Look, Cat, not to cast blame, but it’s a crap life sometimes, being Iraqi. A fluke of geography, really, when you think about it. I mean, all the borders were drawn in 1922 by a Brit. A few miles difference and my grandparents could have been Jordanian. Or Syrian.”

I must have looked confused. “Okay,” she said. “Look at it this way. The Vernons are what? French? English? By ancestry?” I nodded. She got that exactly right. “But they landed in a place some Brits colonized and became pretty French-English people living in America. Americans. Yeah? So we’re Sunni Muslims. Who lived in a place that some Brits colonized and became Sunnis living in Iraq. Iraqis. There are Shiites, too, and no matter what your intrepid Fox News people say, neither is good nor bad nor innocent, and believe me, Yank, no one in Iraq is happy. Get it?”

I got it.

She went on. Her parents saw bad things ahead and left a month before she was born. Her dad’s cousin had a restaurant and sponsored him with a job in it. No one would hire him to teach, so when the chance came up, he bought his own business. Her mom was an anesthesiologist in Baghdad. The English wouldn’t acknowledge her degree and there was no way she could go back to med school. She speaks four languages, so she’s a translator at a hospital in the East End. The uncle stayed in Baghdad. He was arrested for refusing to put his chemistry expertise to . . . noneducational uses. There’s hope he’ll be released, oh, someday, when the good guys, whoever they are, notice he’s still in there.

Elizabeth scooped a green Kate Moss cardi off the floor and put it on. “But I am a bloomin’ English rose, aren’t I? And I have just acquired a bootleg copy of Season Six of
Lost
, including the Unaired Episode. You in?”