Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow (7 page)

No one is in the know on the sad story of Nabil's mouth. It's too nasty. Not even Mme Burlaud knows and especially not Mom. If she finds out, she'll kill me. I've got a grudge against Nabil for stealing my first kiss and downing my package of saltines, but not as much of one as I'd thought I would have. Well, I know what I mean.

Monday,
at Mme Burlaud's, we did something new, like a game. She was showing me these large-format photos, flipping through them pretty fast, and I had to say "like it" or "don't like it."

Most of the time, since it was going so fast, I answered automatically without really having time to think. So for example, I found myself saying "don't like it" to the photo of a little baby. Mme Burlaud, playing like it was by accident, stopped on that photo. Like I hadn't seen it coming, she started talking about my so-called little half brother. Subconsciously, that's why I said: "Don't like it." Now, Mom and me, we know for sure it's a boy. A neighbor from Morocco sent us a letter. To make it even more humiliating, the letter was in French. I had to read it to her.

But seriously, why make something out of nothing? I told Mme Burlaud that the baby had nothing to do with it, that she was just going too fast and I didn't see the photo very well. I made a mistake, that's all ... Well, shit. Nobody's obligated to like babies. Babies cry all the time, they stink and dribble and poop in their diapers ... Plus, the baby in the photo was nasty ugly, like a fat croissant.

And, also, that brat isn't my brother. He's just the son of my father the Beard. It's not the same. Frankly, Mme Burlaud's tripping when she makes out like she's got an answer for everything and pastes that smug grin on her face like Harrison Ford at the end of every Indiana Jones movie. Right now, she's always telling me that I'm growing up and it's normal to have questions. I'm growing up ... Shit, it's time she changed her glasses! I've been five foot two and three quarters a while now, and nothing's changing. Or maybe she meant growing up in my head. It must've been that...

***

To check Sarah's growth, Lila makes black pencil marks on the bedroom door and writes the dates next to them. It's funny, the door's covered in these little lines, one right on top of the other. When Sarah gets a little older, she'll get a kick out of seeing it again. And over at Sarah's there are photos everywhere of her from when she was tiny right up to now.

She's lucky. I don't have a single photo of me before I was three. After that, there are school photos ... It makes me sad to think about, feels kind of like I don't completely exist. Bet if I'd had a dick, I'd have a big fat pile of photo albums, filled with pictures of me.

One day, coming back from the rec center with Sarah, we stopped to say hey to Hamoudi.

"So, princess, you're Sarah?"

"Yes."

"You're really cute in your pink dress, like a fairy..."

"Well you, your teeth aren't so nice, you should ask the tooth fairy to come visit you..."

I kind of let Sarah have it. I told her it wasn't nice to talk like that. But Hamoudi couldn't have cared less. In fact, it made him die laughing. Fine, it's no lie Hamoudi's teeth are kind of busted. But they're not a complete disaster. Anyway, you'd expect it with everything he's smoked over the years...

So, anyway, that scene didn't stop him from being crazy about Sarah. He told me there's nothing more fresh than a kid, because they're sincere, spontaneous, genuine, you know..."They're the most honest thing in our hypocritical and corrupt society." Maybe Hamoudi's right ... He's been really serious these days. Also, he's been looking hard for a job. Or that's what he told me. He has to go straight for a while because dealing is getting dangerous. And like he says, "I'm not seventeen anymore..." When he said that, he had regret in his eyes. "I'm nearly a third of the way through my life, and I've done nothing. Nada..." I told him it wasn't too late and if he was talking like that, maybe it was because he was scared of changing things. Don't know where I got that from. It has to be from watching daytime talk shows with themes like: "He cheated on me and yes it's my business." Still, it's strange Hamoudi's thinking that way because there's always been a fair amount of freedom in his family, he could do whatever he wanted. There was only one thing he couldn't do: cry. Because he's a man and Hamoudi's dad says men don't cry. Maybe that's what did it. People don't realize how important it is to cry.

It's already summer vacation.
This afternoon I saw the Alis leave for Morocco. They've got this big red van and every year they cross France and Spain to get back to the
bled
and spend two months there. I was watching them from my window. They took at least an hour to load up. The kids were all dressed sharp. You could see from their faces how happy and excited they were to be leaving. I envied them. They were taking tons of luggage. Three quarters of those bags must have been full of presents for family, friends, and neighbors. It's always like that. The Mom Ali was even taking a vacuum cleaner. Rowenta's latest model. She'll get major respect over there with that thing.

***

Plus, they're going to see their place all finished. If you ask me, the fact that they built a house back in the
bled
by surviving on rice and pasta every meal so they could send every penny to the builders, and now the mom's taking a vacuum cleaner, it means they're planning on staying there. Bet it didn't even cross the kids' minds. But the parents, they must have been thinking about it ever since the first day they arrived in France. Ever since the day they made the mistake of setting foot in this crappy country they thought would become theirs.

Some people spend their whole lives hoping they'll make it back home. But a lot of them only go back once, in a coffin, shipped by plane like they're an export product or something. Apparently, they find home soil again, but it's definitely not the way they were expecting...

Then again, there are some who do manage to get back. Like the one who used to act the part of my dad. Except he left without his luggage.

Sometimes I try to imagine how I'd be if I were Polish or Russian instead of Moroccan ... Maybe I'd do ice
dancing, but not in those cheapskate local competitions where you win chocolate medals and T-shirts. No, real ice skating, like in the Olympics, with the most beautiful classical music, guys from all over the world who judge your performance like they do at school, and whole stadiums to cheer even if you go splat like a steak. Anyway, the most important thing is to do it with style. It's true that skating is the coolest: dresses covered in sequins, lots of organdy and colors ... The trouble is that because of the outfits, you can always see the girls' underwear. So my mom, it wouldn't make her all that happy that I was ice dancing on TV. And another thing, if I were Russian I'd have a name that was all complicated to pronounce and I'd definitely be blond. I know, they're shitty prejudices. There must be Russian brunettes out there with names that are super simple to pronounce, so simple you'd shout them out for no other reason than the fun of saying such an easy name. I guess there even could be some Russian girls who have never laced up a pair of skates in their life.

So, meanwhile, everybody's taking off and I'm staying in the neighborhood to watch the projects like a guard dog waiting for everyone else to come back from vacation all tan. Even Nabil's disappeared. Maybe he left too, gone to Tunisia with his parents.

Anyway, since school's over, he won't be coming over to help me do my homework or write my papers. Actually, I'm done with papers for the rest of my life, except for on things like blowouts and curlers. Oh yeah, I didn't tell you: At school, they can't let me repeat the year because there aren't enough spots for everybody. And that "everybody" includes me. So they found me a place at the last minute at this technical school not so far from home, where I'll go for a hairdressing certificate. Hamoudi was crazy pissed off when I told him. He told me he was going to pay them a visit and complain, contact the school board, go off on the administration, and other stuff like that ... He said they don't have the right to decide for me. I told him I didn't know what to do anyway, seeing as nobody's ever given me any career counseling. And plus, who knows, I might love hairdressing ... It's true, giving perms to very old ladies who have three hairs on their skull and who pay a fortune to keep up their hair, I'm gonna like it, I can feel it...

There's a girl in the neighborhood who did hairdressing school. She doesn't have enough money to open her own salon but she still wants to be her own boss, so she does hair at home. It works pretty well. When there's a wedding in the neighborhood, everyone calls her. The girls get blowouts, have major work done on their hair, where it's pulled and yanked extra tight so it looks naturally straight. But at the party, after one or two dances, they start sweating and a few curly wisps start to give them away...

Speaking of weddings, there's one happening soon. It's Aziz, our famous businessman from the Sidi Mohamed Market, the stingiest grocer on earth. I'm a little sick he's getting married, because that means it's over for Mom...

Rachida, our neighbor who's also the worst gossip I know, told us Aziz is going to marry a girl from Morocco. I'm starting to see why there're so many single women here. If all these men are getting into import-export ... It's a shame our weddings aren't like in the States where the priest says that famous line: "If anyone here objects to this union, let them speak now or forever hold their peace." And, there's always some supercourageous guy who dares to interrupt
the ceremony because he's been secretly in love with the bride for eight years. So he tells her, and with tears in her eyes, she says she feels the same way. The husband's a good loser—even if he's kind of pissed—and shakes the hand of the supercourageous guy and says: "No hard feelings, old pal!" Then he lends him the tux he rented for a fortune just for the occasion and the gutsy guy marries the girl in place of the good-loser-groom.

Mom could do the same thing at Aziz's wedding. She could tell Aziz he's the most romantic guy in the neighborhood and she's had strong feelings for him for years despite his bald head and his grubby nails. I have got to stop thinking in movies. I know she'd never do that. Plus, the whole neighborhood's going to be at Aziz's wedding and if Mom did that, it'd be too shameful. We call it
hchouma.
Anyway, it's not even for sure that he's inviting us. He's given us so much credit we've never paid back. And no one ever invites us anywhere. Ages after a party people come to see Mom to say they're sorry they forgot about her. No big deal. Mom and me don't give a shit about being part of the jet set.

Sunday morning,
Mom and me, we went to a rummage sale. She was hoping to find some shoes because in her left shoe there's a small hole up by her toe and when it rains or she walks on the grass in the morning her toes get soaked.

We were walking in the aisles between the stands when I heard these girls behind us:

"Check out that girl, dressed even worse than her old lady ... It's like when they were rummaging for stuff to sell they found her too!"

"Yeah, right. For them a rummage sale is like the Galeries Lafayette..."

They lost it laughing. Little mean snickers, all stifled and shit. I looked at Mom. Apparently, she didn't hear a thing. She was concentrating on this old 45 sleeve of Michel Sardou. In the photo, he still had this big head of shag hair. It's like they repatriated all the hairdressers in the eighties, hid them in a cave, and then they only started reappearing at the beginning of the nineties.

So those two bitches who said that right behind our backs, I didn't even turn around to eat them alive or cut their nostrils into teeny bits. No, I made like nothing had happened, like I hadn't heard. I took Mom by the arm. I squeezed it because I was still feeling full of hate and then I felt tears welling up in my eyes and my nose was stinging. I really wanted to cry, but I was trying to keep my cool. I forced myself, because I didn't want to tell Mom the whole story. She'd have felt like it was her fault. And, anyway, she was checking out these bunches of vegetable peelers for one euro, so I didn't want to disturb her. At times like that, I would like to be stronger, to have a protective shell to keep me safe all my life. Then nothing could ever hurt me.

***

The whole neighborhood went to Aziz's wedding. They held it in this big reception room in Livry-Gargan with a real orchestra from Fez that came over just for this occasion. Aziz hired two
négafas,
married women in charge of organizing the party: decorations, clothes, makeup, the bride's jewelry, food, all that kind of stuff. It was a big grand wedding all right. Aziz really put on a show. Anyway, that's what I heard, because, in the end, we weren't invited.

We don't see that social worker Mme DuDoodad anymore because she's on maternity leave. She said she'll be back after her baby's born. It annoyed me when she said that, because it sounded like: "No matter what, in a year you'll still be poor, you'll still need me." Worse, while we're waiting for her to come back, we're stuck with this shady replacement. She's always got her eyes half shut behind these massive bottle-bottom glasses with chunky pink frames. Plus, she talks very slowly in this scary voice, the kind of voice you can imagine saying: "I am Death! Follow me, it's your time!" But, fine, I'm not so bothered by all that. Don't give a shit, to be perfectly honest. The thing that gets me is that with her, I feel like Mom and me, we're just random numbers in her file. She does her job like an automaton. She could be a robot programmed to do this. I'm sure that if you scratched the skin on her back, if you really broke past the epidermis, you'd find an aluminium coating, some screws, and a serial number. I'm calling her Cyborg Services.

This week I'm not going to watch Sarah because her mom's on vacation and the two of them are going to Toulouse to Lila's sister's house. It's hard being separated from people who matter to you...

I'm thinking of Aunt Zohra and Youssef and some other people too...