The Girl Who Fell to Earth (18 page)

After that, Falak continued to conspicuously ignore me. Now everyone in the house knew
something
was wrong, although I was grateful that at least Falak did not let on exactly what.

Suhail and I were both spooked after getting caught. We took a hiatus over the winter break, during which time we both made plans for the coming year. I was still pining, even though we had three classes together and lunches. He finished his college applications early and went to visit Cairo while I printed out an application to NYU and went camping with our family.

The whole house decided to go to a relative's camp somewhere north of Al-Hasa for the winter holiday. As we drove out toward the border, we passed the ever-expanding U.S. air base; the littlest kids packed themselves tight through the open sunroof so they could watch the F-16s and big cargo planes zoom overhead. Every time another jet boomed above us they whooped and ducked, and I thought briefly of Gramma's house and the sonic claps that used to rattle us back then.

When we got to camp, I staked a place in Uncle Mohamed's old Suburban where I could shelter from the wind, and filled a whole notebook with drafts of a personal essay for my application. In the evening I sat with Umi Safya and showed her the photos of smiling freshmen in the NYU prospective student pamphlet. We looked at a map of New York, and while we paged through the possibilities of a future, she asked me, “How many hours is it to drive to this place?” Considering her thorough knowledge of navigation by stars and ability to tell by the smell of the wind if clouds bore rain, her geographic innocence of where New York was came as a bit of a shock. But it shouldn't have been. Why would she ever need to know where the Big Apple was? Anything west of Jeddah was still of no interest to her.

The numbered forms asked a lot of questions I didn't know the answer to. For example, the space for permanent home address flummoxed me; I didn't know whether to apply as a Qatari or an American, and the declaration-of-ethnicity section was dispiriting. On official documentation throughout high school in Puyallup, I had always checked the box for “Other,” and when asked to “please specify,” scribbled in “Klingon.” No one ever seemed to notice, and so it became habit, the paperwork processed along with that of my peers who had boxes to check for “Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Asian-American,” “Native Hawaiian,” “Samoan-American,” and “Other Pacific Islander.” But this application was serious; the selection of box might determine everything. I finished the sentence “I identify” with “Other,” and left the “please specify” line blank.

Like it did for every “other” kid in the world raised on American media, New York had always glowed distantly in my mind as
the
place to go. I knew nothing about it, knew no one there, and had no money to make it. But that didn't matter; I still considered it the Mecca for me. When questioned about my choice by Ma and Baba, I said they just wouldn't understand. The city existed for me (and I presume most other people who've never been there) as a mashup of pop culture sedimented in layers by the decade, a place where the streets were always wet and the lights were extra bright. The city in my head was essentially a cartoon. It had the cityscape of Gotham from
Batman: The Animated Series
, everyone talked like the kids in
Kids
, and, with the songs of
An American Tale
drilled deeply into my head, I couldn't separate the Statue of Liberty from a French pigeon in spats singing “Never Say Never.” Even though I knew my chances of getting into NYU were slim, I filled out the application. When we returned to Doha from the desert, I double-checked all the papers, slipped them into a manila envelope, kissed and sealed it, and gave it to Faraj to mail for me from the main post office and hoped for the best. Although we had drifted apart as I spent more time avoiding him than tagging along, Faraj was still my main link to the outside world.

After winter break, Suhail and I decided we had to see each other. I disguised it as a “feminine errand” in which I had to run to the Al-Rehab Ladies Saloon. The “saloon” was like a grown-up clubhouse and bore a large warning, “No Men Allowed.” The windows were papered over with posters of relaxing European women. It always looked kind of threatening to me. Like a meth lab with a no-trespassing sign put up by some paranoid hillbillies. I disappeared behind the face of a smiling woman enjoying a mud mask, the cucumbers over her eyes making her look like a mantis. I waited for Faraj to drive off and then turned into the saloon. Somewhere beyond the entrance lobby there were multiple hair dryers blowing. The main room was designed like a
sala
, with cushions lining the walls and magazines like
Sayidaty
and
Snob al Hasna
stacked in the corners. A hefty Jordanian woman sat immobile in the middle of the room, her ankles propped up on tissue boxes while she waited for elaborate trails of fresh henna to dry. She watched me cross the room to where her baby was splashing around like a little bird in a Pedispa foot massager. I didn't look back at her as I slipped silently out the back door of the saloon and then up into Suhail's waiting Land Cruiser.

I hunkered down low, as flat as I could, and felt him pull out onto the main road. “Hi!” I whispered from behind his seat. Suhail reached his hand back around the armrest for me to hold. His palms were sweaty. We drove across town to an empty compound Suhail had scouted. Ever since the early days of oil expatriation in the region, there have been compounds, and ever since there have been compounds they have been havens from the normal rules. In there, we'd be safe.

The New World Compound was full of empty, unlocked houses. They were rowed, all white angles of stucco and sunlight, waiting in anticipation for international oil employees to fill them up with their families. The small, picturesque streets were empty and had names like Bogota Boulevard and Austin Avenue. Some of the roads, like the houses, were still unfinished, smooth pavement cutting off into the rocky dust. Suhail parked his truck in a hidden area. We got out and passed together on foot through the ghost town, looking like skittish survivors of some rapture-style apocalypse, half expecting zombie security guards to leap out at any moment. Suhail led me to a villa at the far end of the compound. The front was covered in tatty tarp that blew in the wind like a shroud, and we stepped underneath it to peek in the front picture window. Even though it was brand new, the villa had the feeling of a ruin. It was the same spooky quality of a nuclear test house—still as a tomb, the pool empty, air clogged with suspense like a noxious fume.

Suhail and I sat together on the floor of the dining room. I asked him about his trip to Egypt over winter break: Had he gone to the pyramids? Seen any celebrities? Made it to the street where they made ouds? But he was bursting with some other news and was having a hard time keeping it down.

“What's up with you?” I asked.

“Guess!” he challenged me, bouncing up and down.

He reminded me of a little kid waiting for someone to open a present. It was infectious.

“Just tell me!”

“MIT!” he squealed.

I clapped and yelped my excitement for him. In a fit of joy he kissed me.

As it turned out, since Suhail had applied early he'd been given advance placement into the astrophysics course he had wanted. Better still, it was close to New York City. The sun angled through the window and across the empty space like a helicopter searchlight. And like the clock striking midnight, I was reminded that I didn't have long before I had to be back at the front door of the beauty “saloon,” where Faraj would pick me up. “It's fate!” Suhail said over his shoulder as I slithered out and to the back door of the beauty parlor. “Now I just
know
you're going to get into NYU.” I, however, was less certain.

After we'd established the corner house at the empty compound as our hideout, Suhail and I became bolder and snuck away to it more often. We minimized phone conversations and note-passing, as those things could be intercepted. I'd plant the seeds of an excuse with Faraj weeks in advance, and then Suhail and I would run through our plot briefly on the phone: pickup spots, drop-off locations, back roads to take. My relationship with Suhail replays in my mind more like a heist montage than the soft-focus meadow-frolic young love is supposed to be. The tension that led up to every carefully arranged meeting made every moment intense: the glimpse of one another from across a crowded intersection, a peck briefly stolen in the hall between classes, playing home in our empty house, pretending to swim in our empty pool.

As we approached the end of the year, we were getting lazy about covering our tracks. While Suhail made plans for his big move to America, I started to wonder if I'd ever even get my rejection letter from NYU. I might still be wondering about it today had I not dropped my Nokia down under the seat of Faraj's truck on the way back from school one day. I was rooting around blindly for the handset when I felt a familiar envelope deep under the seat. I didn't need to pull it out to know what it was, and I don't need to tell you that I thought it was the end of the world. Faraj had neglected to send my application.

I hurled myself into the backseat of the truck and blubbed, crying away my big New York dreams of a new career in a new town. But it wasn't the end of the world, not yet, anyway. Things had to get more discouraging first. After my initial meltdown, Ma and Baba each came back to me with plan Bs.

Baba called the house phone first with an idea: “My neighbor lady is very nice. She can teach you Quran lessons. Maybe you come here to Abu Dhabi, improve your Arabic!”

I hung up the phone. I would rather spelunk in a cave full of guano than spend time in that dismal Abu Dhabi government-housing block.

Ma's suggestion was no less bleak: “Well, you know, honey, the military is not a bad option for you. In fact, it would do you some good. Teach you discipline, get you in shape. And if you
did
go to college, they'd pay for it!”

I remembered the type of person who used to go out for JROTC in school in America and shuddered at the thought of flag duty. I wouldn't last two seconds with that bunch of
World of Warcraft
and paintball veterans. After Ma hung up I hurled myself into a pillow and had a screaming fit that scared my little cousins into hiding.

That night I went onto the roof to call Suhail. He pieced together the story through my sobs. I lay on my back watching a little red satellite cross the night, blinking through my tears. He promised he'd come up with another plan B for me too, and said I should arrange to meet him after school the next day. He only had a few weeks before leaving. His father was so proud of the MIT acceptance that he had offered to buy Suhail an apartment and set up a home for him in the States. Knowing this might be our last meeting made things urgent. But the slew of bad news wasn't over yet. The next day the principal called me into his office and informed me that without payment of tuition within the next two weeks, I wouldn't receive my diploma.

That afternoon, Suhail picked me up from a bank of bushes near the beach at the Sheraton. As usual, I lay down flat in the back and we played a game where I guessed our location based on things viewable from my angle. I called them while he drove: “Rainbow!” “Oryx!” “Crazy Signal!” When we got to our secret house I collapsed in his arms, waiting to hear his plan B, hoping it would save me. He knew a guy who knew someone who could get me into a university without my having to apply. There was no deadline—I just had to gather some papers from school, write a letter, and give it all to Suhail.

“You could just go there for a little while so you don't fall behind, and then transfer to NYU once you get accepted next semester.”

“If,” I corrected him. But I already felt better. Just a half hour with Suhail seemed to tap so deeply into my oxytocin levels that I didn't even care where it was I'd be going. “So where is it?” I asked as an afterthought from the back of his car as we drove back.

“Cairo.”

“Cairo,” I repeated to myself. I had no cartoon image of Cairo in my head, unlike New York, but I did have the Egyptian accents of every Arabic-dubbed Disney film to go by. I was just wondering how one would translate the song “There Are No Cats in America” when Suhail slammed on the brakes and I tumbled up over the seat.

“Shit,” he said, glancing into his rearview mirror. I didn't need to turn my head to know.

We'd been caught. Faraj was early, parked by the main entrance of the hotel. It wasn't exactly in flagrante, but to Faraj the circumstantial evidence was enough. “I'm so sorry!” I whispered to Suhail, and scrambled out.

Faraj put me, cop-style, into the backseat and slammed the door, catching my
abaya
with it. He walked around the front of the car and glared back through the headlights at Suhail, scanning his license plate and dialing my father at once. I willed Baba to pick up the phone; he would be able to explain a way out for me. But he wasn't answering his phone. I was on my own.

“It's not what you think!” I shouted at Faraj as we drove off and I wept in the backseat. Kohl striped my cheeks like claw marks and I swallowed back my whimpers while frantically texting Suhail.

“Did you think your uncle is an idiot?”

Faraj wrestled my Nokia out of my hands and threw it out the window. I howled and spun in my seat to look out the back windshield. I saw my little green light forlorn in the darkness of the street. It flashed on and off for a moment—I was sure it was Suhail calling—but then it disappeared under the treads of a big sweet-water truck.

Faraj took his place beside Falak in the silent treatment for the remainder of the semester, while Suhail and I skulked in the hall after school, looking longingly at each other out of Faraj's sight. That month was spent in a sort of mourning period for our imminent separation. As much as it was a time of sorrow over having to part, there were a few miraculous events that made it easier to cope. For one, with Suhail's help I was accepted into the American University in Cairo. No boot camp or Quran lessons after all. I was to start immediately during the summer semester to catch up on my modern standard Arabic. And second—what of the financial hurdles of tuition in Doha and international student rates in Cairo? In short, through the help of certain advocates in the school, my situation caught the attention of a powerful but secret patron who takes education very seriously. A proxy (imagine Mr. Pumblechook in an
abaya
) was sent to Umi Safya's house to confirm the direness of my straits. A week before graduation, I was extracted like Pip Pirrip from my home and given the message that
someone
had great expectations for me. Qatar is in many ways a place where miracles happen, and to that individual, who personally saw to it that I would receive an education—I will
always
be grateful.