The Night Counter (18 page)

“My mother would never break her china,” Dina said. “It’s Limoges.”

“I can’t tell if you’re shitting me or not,” Jamal said, and gave her a decidedly flirtatious sock in the arm. “But it’s sexy. … Whoa, look at the turnout.”

Jamal was swallowed up by thousands of chanters and hundreds of signs surrounding the Westwood Federal Building: R
EAD BETWEEN THE
P
IPELINES
, A
NOTHER
P
ATRIOT FOR
P
EACE
, and R
ESISTANCE
I
S
F
ERTILE
. Dina couldn’t see much more than signs in the swelling crowd. Police maneuvered through the masses, avoiding getting nicked by the signs. Luxury cars drove by and honked approval. Passengers in other cars leaned out and made the peace sign or gave the finger. Dina was swept into a wave of protesters moving to the demonstration’s epicenter.

“No democracy in my name,” a girl with the kind of brown hair that should never be without highlights—but was—shouted into a megaphone, one of many megaphones with a crowd chanting back to its user. After a few more rallying cries, the girl spotted Dina and gave her a smirk as if to say, “What’d you come here for?”

“Support our troops,” the girl chanted into the megaphone, and everyone repeated after her, “Bring them home now.”

Dina hesitated only for a moment when the girl looked at her again. She joined in, using her full cheerleader lungs.

Dina was very pretty and very loud, and so she was used to being watched. But now she wondered whether these badly dressed people were looking at her because they questioned her sincerity. To make sure they— and Jamal—knew she was just as committed to world peace, Dina expelled even deeper from her diaphragm. Miss Sissy, her first and favorite cheerleading coach, had taught her well.

After a few more chants, the girl took a break and stood next to Dina. “You got some set of lungs, sister,” she said. “And I can’t believe that you got here in those shoes.”

“Kinross squad leader senior and junior year.” Dina shrugged. “I’m Dina.”

“Allison,” the girl said. Dina noticed her twang.

They shook hands. “So where are you from?” Dina asked.

“San Diego,” Allison answered. “How about you?”

“Houston,” Dina said. “But you sound like you’re from Dallas.”

“I was born there,” she replied. “My granddad’s in Houston. Harlon’s BBQ rocks. Don’t get stuck in California forever, like me. When you start jonzing for decent barbecue, you’re screwed.”

She patted her stomach and handed Dina the megaphone. “I got to go pee like a pregnant lady, which I most definitely am not—and you got the best pipes around here.”

Dina tried to give the megaphone back, but Allison already had gone off in search of a toilet. Dina looked for someone to hand the megaphone to. Instead she found lots of brown faces, as well as several black and white ones, turned to her for guidance.

With no chanting, the home team’s crowd could lose its cohesive spirit. Every cheerleader knew that.

“P … E … A… C … E,” Dina spelled out into the megaphone, hesitating just a fraction on the first two letters. Then she found the groove she knew so well. She started stomping her feet. “How about, how about, a peace shout. Say P … say E … say A … say C … say E. How about a peace shout.” She clapped to the beat to get the crowd pumped.

“War, hell no, hell no, no hell, hey no war,” she chanted, reading off the signs. She almost lost the beat when she saw Jamal looking at her. When he smiled, she was energized far more than she had been by Kinross’s overtime games, even when she was dating the quarterback.

Dina made up three new chants for the crowd before a Channel 13 reporter in a really great Armani jacket stuck a microphone in her face.

“You’ve got quite a following,” the reporter said. “What message are you sending to Washington today?”

Jamal was making his way toward her. She didn’t want to disappoint him. “Nobody better than the people in Middle East understand what it is to have your land attacked, as we were here on September 11,” she said,
echoing what Jamal had said on KPFK. “Two and a half years later, let’s look at how President Bush—”

Jamal subtly pushed Dina to the side. “What she means is that we don’t really care about human rights in Iraq,” he told the Channel 13 reporter. “A rebel insurgency in Uganda has killed 300,000 people in the last eighteen years, and 1.2 million people have lost their homes. Darfur in Sudan has refugees starving to death by the thousands. Do we care? No. We’re picking our atrocities based on oil.”

The crowd around him clapped and roared. Dina heard a lot of “Way to go, Jamal” and “That dude so rocks.”

“Anytime you need help with the press, just let me know,” Jamal said to Dina. “I would have been here earlier if I had known.”

“It was only Channel 13,” Dina said, surprised that she was so annoyed with him for coming to her rescue.

“Want to come over for dinner?” Jamal asked. “We can watch ourselves on the news. We got a lot of awesome coverage.”

As a general rule she didn’t accept going to a guy’s place on a first date, but … well, he was very committed to human rights. As such, he’d understand her position on sex, she told her better sense.

“Just dinner,” Dina stressed. “And I’m serious.”

“Did I say anything else?” he asked. “’Cause if I did, I’m sorry.”

“No, no, just me being silly,” she apologized, worried that perhaps for once she didn’t have the upper hand with a guy. He kept walking and because she didn’t want him to get too far ahead, she skipped a step ahead of him and turned around. “Slowpoke.” She smiled. He smiled, too, and they kept walking.

Jamal stopped at the 7-Eleven on Wilshire Boulevard.

“You want anything?” he asked.

“Nah.”

“Ah, come on, let me get you something.”

“Oh, all right, big spender,” she said. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

“Right on.” Jamal smiled. He went up to the Indian man at the counter. “I’ll have two lottery tickets.”

When they left the store, he handed her one of the tickets. “Do you know what your chances are of winning?” she asked.

“What the hell,” Jamal said. “I’m not going to get rich doing the right thing, so I might as well try and get lucky tonight.”

Dina put the ticket in her purse and ignored the double entendre.

The walls of Jamal’s apartment were decorated with posters of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Cesar Chavez, and Zapata. Dina did not know all their names, but she recognized them from T-shirts sold at hipster stores on Melrose Avenue. All the remaining space was dedicated to photos of Jamal protesting something: Iraq, Alaska oil drilling, antiabortion measures, capital punishment. There were also photos of him teaching at an Indian tribal school and working at a soup kitchen.

Jamal put out hummus and bread and olives and smiled—no, grinned—at her. She was starving, and so she wolfed down the food, not inspecting the plasticine plates for caked-on leftovers, as Randy had taught her. Jamal reached over and put more olive oil on her plate.

“Better that way,” he explained. “Hey, grab the remote. Let’s see who put us on. Try Channel 7. I talked to them for a long time.”

As soon as Dina turned on the TV, Jamal grabbed the remote from her and flipped through the channels quickly, past car chases, vitamin scares, and Brad Pitt and Anna Nicole Smith updates until he found coverage of the demonstration. Then he got pissed. “Man, ten seconds is all they gave us,” he fumed. “What the hell, they aired a lost puppy story instead. Dogs, man; they care more about dogs than peace.”

Dina got lost in his excitement and let him put his arm around her. “Michael Jackson might have had another nose job?” he yelled at the TV “Where’s the humanity, man?”

THAT NIGHT IN
Houston, Fluffy leaped off Randy’s lap when she squeezed him too hard upon seeing her daughter on CNN with “Arab-American peace activist” typed across her chest. Bud pumped his fist in the air after getting over his own initial shock.

“Go peacemakers,” Bud chanted. “Go peacemakers.”

When Jamal came on, Bud said, “That Palestinian kid next to her has eyes as green as Fluffy’s.”

“How do you know he’s Palestinian?” Randy asked.

“The Masris are a good family. From Nablus,” Bud said, sounding more like an Arab than he ever had since they had moved to Houston. “Hey, sweets, we ought to be recording this.”

“Give me my cat back, Bud,” Randy said, and yanked Fluffy away, ignoring his protesting meow. She turned off the TV.

DINA DID NOT
see herself on TV because by the time CNN, FOX, and MSNBC showed her clip, she had dropped the remote and could only feel Jamal’s warm hands on her breasts. The guy knew how to kiss a girl. She’d never felt herself losing control of the situation. That was what guys did, not she. Oh, God, she could feel herself getting wetter as his hands went down to her stomach.

A Taco Bell commercial on the TV stopped her. Jake was puking on Mexican food right now while she was making out the way only people in her mother’s romance novels did. She pushed Jamal away.

“Watching yourself on TV must really turn you on,” Dina joked.

“It wasn’t the TV,” he said, which was what she had hoped he would say.

“I should go home,” Dina said.

“Okay, I get it. You’re one of those good girl types,” Jamal said. “That’s what bites about Arab chicks, I got to say. Give me a second to deflate here.”

Randy always had attributed Dina’s virginity to a righteous Texas upbringing. But Dina knew from every guy she’d ever gone out with that her virginity made her a minority in Texas. Jake even claimed to have “biological and hormonal anxiety disorders” as a result of respecting her virginity. She had had many chances and temptations to lose it, especially with Jake, but she was just as determined to keep her virginity
until marriage as she had been to become head cheerleader and Phi Beta Kappa. She did assume her marriage would be to Jake, but still she held on to virginity. It was something she alone could control, not Randy or Jake. She decided to not mention either Jake or her virginity to Jamal.

“I guess it’s for the best that we don’t get involved,” Jamal said. “No regrets, then.”

“Regrets?” Dina wondered. “This was just a hookup?”

“No,
habibti
,” Jamal said. “It’s just that I’m off to Islamabad next week.”

“Pakistan?”

“Yeah, they need some relief volunteers for the Afghani camps,” Jamal said. “I’m part of a volunteer organization affiliated with the UN— 1.5 million refugees over there and growing every day.”

Dina wasn’t sure it was the heat from Jamal’s hands on her stomach, which she still felt even though they were no longer there, or what he was telling her—and she hadn’t planned on saying anything—but she said, “Can I come, too?”

“Where?” Jamal said.

“With you.”

“And do what?” Jamal asked. “We can connect when I get back, baby.”

“I’m sure there is something I could do to help.”

“Have your dad write a check.”

“I can write you a check without asking him first,” she said, sneering.

“I may have underestimated you,” he said, and pulled her in for a kiss that it took all her effort to let go of.

“That’s right, you’re a good Arab girl,” he said, and stopped.

She made her way to the door. The lottery ticket fell out of her pocket.

“You almost lost your luck,” he said. She took it from him.

“Listen, I’m sorry,” he continued. “I think it’s great you want to help. But Pakistan is nowhere to start.”

“Do you have somewhere less tragic to start?” Dina said. She was being sarcastic. At least she thought so.

“Not less tragic but maybe more familiar to you,” Jamal said. “The camps in Lebanon. I’ll be there in June with the same organization. Why don’t you join me then?”

THE NEXT WEEK
, Dina registered with the CAMES program at the American University of Beirut, where she told her parents she could do research on Lebanese law. That was the least traumatic explanation she could give them for the trip.

“What about Jake?” Randy fretted on the day Dina was leaving.

Dina didn’t worry about that. Jake loved her, and she loved Jake. She wasn’t going for Jamal but to do good.

A car honked. “My ride’s here,” Dina said.

“I’m scared, sweetheart,” Randy said. “Your dad did a lot of business with a lot of guys who died in the Trade Towers. And your uncle was kidnapped over there.”

“I’m not going to New York,” Dina said. “And Elias’s kidnapping— Mom, the eighties are so over.”

“Just don’t let anyone know you’re American,” Randy said. In all her life she never imagined such a sentence would ever come out of her mouth.

“Just please stop the anxiety thing,” Dina said, and picked up her duffel bag and got into Jake’s BMW. Randy was starting to spook her.

“Don’t drink the water,” Randy called out as they drove away.

She looked at the Louis Vuitton suitcase Dina had refused to take with her, a suitcase she had begged for just last Christmas.

ON THE WAY
to the airport, Jake took his hand off the stick shift and put it on Dina’s knee. “I’m going to miss you, D.”

They were both so sad that they didn’t even laugh, as they usually did, when they passed Bud’s billboard on the I-70: B
UD
B
ITAR AND
A
SSOCIATES
. I
F IT WASN’T A LEGAL HASSLE, WE WOULDN’T LOVE IT
.

“It won’t be forever,” Dina reassured Jake. She hadn’t told him about
Jamal. There really wasn’t anything to tell. Just a few kisses between two people momentarily high on peace. Daily e-mails didn’t count as a relationship. Even when Jamal’s e-mails left her flushed, she remembered that they were mainly about helping her get the paperwork together for the trip. Besides, it was poor etiquette to not to reply to someone’s e-mails. Jake would be busy interning at Bud’s office over the summer. He and Dina would be together back in L.A. in the fall.

“So your dad’s going to let me assist on the Tucker Chicken case,” Jake said. “Did you know they got migrant workers in there working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, no overtime, no days off, not even to have a baby.”