Chapter 6

I never realised the difference a piece of cloth on your head could make. When Salma and I returned to school the following week, the entire school was buzzing with Salma's new look. Without the hijab, she was apparently an entirely different species of human being. Boys gawked at her, girls narrowed their eyes as she passed, and there were at least half a dozen rumors floating around that my sister had either left Islam or was going against our parents because my strict dad was now "out of the picture." People congratulated, scorned, criticised and complimented her decision. I couldn't tell how Salma felt about people's response, because she kept her feelings to herself.

The worst was yet to come, however.

So far, the most supportive was Nadia, who found herself cringing that Monday morning. Our new art assignment was to draw a portrait of our partner and by Allah's supreme mercy and blessing, I was paired up with the Indian beauty. Her mouth had dropped open at this announcement.

"I have to draw your face." She asked, horrified. I could tell she was being sarcastic however, because she was trying hard to fight a smile.

"Your welcome." I leaned back on my chair and dramatically flipped my hair.

Even though I pretended to be all confident about the assignment, I couldn't fathom how I'd be able to just sit there and draw Nadia, in all her beauty and grace. I doubted the most talented artist in the world could do justice to her full lips and high cheekbones and mesmerizing eyes. I felt like I'd swallowed a bucket of butterflies, just thinking about it. However, I was saved from puking up winged insects, when Nadia fixed me with a serious look.

"So, how is your mom taking Salma's...decision.." She asked.

It wasn't often she and I got serious because we were always joking and being playful, so I noticed that Nadia was alternating between glancing up at me and doodling nervously in her artbook. I blinked, surprised to see her so edgy, and gave her a reassuring smile.

"Not too bad." I responded, not entirely lying. My mom could have taken the news worse. "She's not stopping her, I mean. You know how moms can be about these things."

I almost bit my tongue at my last words, because I realised that perhaps Nadia didn't know. She didn't wear the hijab and as far as I knew, never had. Some Muslim families just did not observe the hijab and I should have thought out my words before I spoke them. I felt idiotic. Nadia, meanwhile, had stopped doodling, her pencil clenched between a firm grip.

"Well, I used to." She said, softly.

"Sorry?" I am so, so idiotic today, I realised, as I all but blurted out.

"Well, my mom died when I was 13." She explained, not meeting my eyes. "So I guess I used to know how moms can be about these things."

I could have punched myself in the face and it would have hurt less than hearing that. My eyes widened but Nadia stopped me before I could spill out what would surely have been a painfully, awkward apology.

"It's okay." She assured me. "You didn't know. I haven't even told Salma."

While I am still stinging with embarrassment and sympathy, I don't miss the fact that she revealed this information to me before she did to her best friend. Biting my lip to keep the bubble of happiness in my stomach from sprouting on my face, I lower my head.

"Still." I said. "Sorry for prying."

"It's okay..." Nadia nodded. "I don't mind telling you. You seem like you can keep a secret."

The rest of the art block is spent floating. I filed away the information of Nadia's mom and make a note to avoid similar topics in the future. Since we mostly just joke and fool around, I doubted it would come up again. Salma, who was working with her partner and seated across the room, occasionally looked up and caught my eyes a few times, eyebrows raised in question. We must have looked a sight, Nadia and I, without our usual goofy grins and laughter. I shrugged a shoulder at my sister and addressed the assignment.

"I suppose I should go first." I told Nadia, sharpening my pencil and nodding at the art book. "So all I have to do is stare at you and draw what I see, right?"

"Basically."

"Good." I grinned. "I have lots of experience drawing animals."

"Ugh, we're not doing self portraits, you know."

I faked a shocked gasp and got to work. Even though the art assignment was a deliciously great excuse to stare at Nadia's face, her earlier words still swam through my head. Beginning the outline of her eyes, I wondered what exactly this sarcastic, beautiful girl must have been through. But when I looked up to meet her gaze, nothing could be revealed by her sea green eyes. They were perfectly indecipherable.

- - -

By the end of the next day, I was fuming. I didn't make it a habit to let rumours and baseless lies get to me but when they were about my sister, it was a different story. During lunch, an overly confident boy was telling me how hot my sister looked now that she wasn't wearing the hijab and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from punching his crooked teeth out of his mouth. It didn't help that another girl interjected, some Muslim chick with an enormous insecurity complex going on.

"Yeah, well." She'd scoffed. "I'm sure she can take off more than just the hijab."

I reminded myself that hitting girls was wrong so I imagined her getting run over by a truck. Ian had kept noticeably silent at lunch since I was kinda radiating the devil's aura. He kindly offered me his tuna sandwich. I declined and instead he doodled his science teacher, in all his giant foreheaded glory, in his notebook. He showed me the drawing after he was done and I had to admit, amidst my rage that it was pretty great.

I was in the bathroom after the last class of the day had been dismissed, wondering how Salma could put up with all this bullshit when I was having a hard time. After washing my hands, something written on the bathroom mirror caught my eye. My blood ran cold as I read the words "Call if u wanna netflix and chill" and besides the poorly written message was my sister's number.

I grabbed a fistful of paper towels and hoped to Allah that the complete scum who wrote this hadn't used a Sharpie. It was almost remarkable how crappy the handwriting was and I stopped to wonder if the guy had wrote it with his damn foot. He would have to get used to it, because if I ever found the bastard who'd done this, I'd break his hands first.

Thankfully, he hadn't used Sharpie and after I completed half the janitor's job for him, I angrily made my way to my locker. After grabbing my textbooks and slipping them into my bag, I was prepared to just go home, choke down an Advil and lose myself to the wonderful confinement of sleep. Unfortunately, my day was about to be interrupted with more annoyance.

The sound of lockers slamming and loud, raucous laughter stood before me and freedom. Before I could assess the situation and familiar voice cried out and Cody, who I briefly considered naming Chucky, based upon his resemblance to the small, evil doll, pulled Ian's head back by his hair and shoved it into an open locker.

I stopped, shocked. Ian crumbled pathetically to the floor, and Cody's friends squawked in laughter, kicking the boy's backpack around and causing books and binders to flutter to the floor. Cody leaned down to meet a sniffling, red faced Ian, and grinned cruelly.

"Next time I ask you something," Cody said, smiling sweetly as if he hadn't just crushed a kid's head into a locker. "You do it, okay?"

"How about you get the hell away from him?" I hissed.

Cody turned around slowly and his friends stopped laughing, letting their game of "toss Ian's bag around like basketball" come to a stop. It fell sadly to the floor and Ian, snapped his head up at me, eyes wide with fright and shame.

"The hell you just say?"

"I said." I gritted out, feeling stupidly bold in front of a half a dozen guys, who probably lifted and did drugs and beat up small kittens. "Get the hell away from him."

"Aww." Cody suddenly snickered and turned to Ian. "Looks like your boyfriend is here to save the day."

I'd had a pretty rough day up till then, and I was planning to go home and sleep and perhaps dream about clouds of cotton candy or something, not deal with Cody the Chucky faced killer doll. I narrowed my eyes, my last nerve snapping, and walked up to stick my face in front of his. I pushed him against the locker, my hands grasping his ugly leather jacket. I didn't even think it through, suddenly my hands were moving and my mind was racing and all my dad's warnings against getting into fights flew out the window.

Before I could do anything -- and I admit I planned to knock Cody's shit eating grin off his face -- Ian spoke up, voice desperate.

"No!" He cried. "Don't hit him, Abdullah. You're better than them. Don't resort to violence like they do."

Cody allowed a slow smile to slip onto his face. "Ohh, you should listen to your boyfriend."

I shrugged off of him, letting him go roughly and turned around. His friends smirked at me triumphantly, like they'd won or something but I was just smart enough to get into a fight I wouldn't win. Besides, what Ian had said sort of hit me. I didn't want to break his image of me.

"Ha, you thought you could actually hit me?" Cody snorted. "I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast."

"You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?" I shot back, as I helped Ian off the floor.

"Watch it, terrorist." He snarled. "I'm letting you go because you came to your senses this time. Next time I won't be so thoughtful."

I rolled my eyes so far back my into head that I saw my brain cells combusting in on themselves to comprehend his words. Thoughtful, he said? I scoffed. As if he hadn't just called me a terrorist. I kept my mouth shut and rigidly waited for Cody and his friends to walk away and continue onto whatever homes broke their fragile personalities into the merciless characters that they are today. Ian and I were silently picking up the schoolwork that had fallen out of Ian's bag.

"You are what you eat." Ian whispered, brushing dust off his backpack.

I stared at him before the memory of what Cody had said flooded back to me. I laughed then, for the first time that day. When my surprised laughter came to a stop, I regarded him, and his cut lip.

"We're gonna go to the nurse's office." I told him, and gestured to his mouth. "To get that checked. And then I'm going to ask you why the hell you lied to me."

Perhaps my words came out harsher than I wanted, but frankly, I was tired of people around me getting hurt. First Salma with all the verbal backlash and now Ian. I'd always been the smart kid. There was no point for me other than to sit down, study and get good grades. Maybe even a scholarship. I was raised to keep my head in the books, not sticking it into fights. My dad would sooner shoot awake from his coma then see me put down my textbooks.

But I put them aside. Textbooks be damned. Education wasn't more important than helping out a friend.

Ian made a poor excuse to the nurse, while I sat down in her office as she looked over the kid. He mumbled something about walking into a door, and I wondered if that could even result in a busted lip, but the nurse just eyed him suspiciously, cleaned him up and slathered ointment all over his lips. Ian stopped before me on the way out and mumbled something.

"What?" I asked.

He sighed and spoke up. "Can I come over to your place? My mom is at home and I want to wait until she goes to work before I go home."

I assumed he didn't want to show up at home with his battle wound. I'd met his mother only once but I could see her the type to raise hell over a small cut. If I had to be the one to save Ian from the fate of an overly worried mother who made soup and read bedtime stories and tucked in her child because he got a small cut, then so be it.

I sighed and nodded, and we headed out the school. As we stopped at the bus station, Ian called his mother and told him he'd be at my house. I could practically hear her excited squeal from her end. She chattered on about how happy she was that her son was making friends and Ian rolled his eyes throughout the whole thing. As I watched him, I wouldn't have thought he'd been shoved in a locker just half an hour before.

When his mom finally hung up, I raised an eyebrow. "Ian, why did you lie to me?"

"I'm sorry." He hung his head. "I didn't know how to just say "oh, by the way, Cody and his friends sometimes steal my lunch and kick me and push me into lockers" without sounding pathetic."

"It's not pathetic to ask for help." I said, softly. "You know, I've been bullied before. In freshman year, too."

Ian looked up at me in surprise over my confession. "You've been bullied?"

"Well, yeah." I scoffed. "If you haven't noticed, I'm a complete nerd."

"Well, yeah, but you're a cool nerd."

"What the heck is a cool nerd?"

"You!"

I laughed and shook my head. "Trust me, I'm not a cool nerd."

"Well, I think you are." He crossed his arms. "The way you jumped on Cody and stopped him from bothering me today was pretty cool."

We fell into a silence, and I stretched, trying to catch sight of our bus. The sky was cloudy, and looked ready to spill the contents of the ocean upon us. I hoped we'd get home dry.

"Thanks for sticking up for me." He said, eyes glued on the sidewalk.

The bus arrived, as the first raindrops splattered onto the pavement. We hopped on, and sat down. I leaned my head on the glass and thought about back to freshman year when everyday was hell and every time I caught sight of the people who picked on me, I would be reduced to a whimpering mess. I glanced over at Ian and wondered how he could go through each day and still smile and laugh like it was no big deal. Maybe, inside, it was.

"What will you do?" He asked, suddenly. "Now that you know."

I was quiet for a moment before I heaved a sigh. "Honestly? It's not up to me. It's up to you. I can't change anything unless you want it to change. Do you want it to change?"

"Yes." He nodded and then I saw it, the desperation, the hope.

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If you or someone you know is getting bullied, please talk to someone (even me, I'm here for you all) I promise you, you are loved and we are ready to help!

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