A Girl Like That(6)
I felt Zarin’s fingers tighten around my hand.
“I’m not letting you go,” I said.
Mishal
The day after she died, I called the number again.
“Hello?” The woman at the other end had a voice hoarse from crying.
I did not speak. Did not breathe. It was something I’d learned to do during those blank calls, in the early practice sessions years ago—before Caller ID became nearly as commonplace as a Happy Meal—when I would prank Father’s second wife, Jawahir, who by her very existence had turned my mother into a basket case.
The number I’d dialed now did not appear to have Caller ID. Or if it did, Zarin Wadia had never confronted me about it—never bothered asking about the blank calls I had made to her in the past. A silence that in itself seemed uncharacteristic of her. Zarin had been a loner, but she had never exactly been quiet about the things that pissed her off. I knew that firsthand.
“… trailer … accident … highway…” My left ear tuned into the words floating faintly up the stairs to my room; Abdullah was watching the news again on Channel 2.
My right ear, however, was still focused on the woman over the phone, whose breaths were growing quicker now, impatient. I could almost feel them on my skin.
“Who is this?” Her voice was louder. “What do you want?”
Deviant, they called her at school, I wanted to say. A girl who stood out the day she first came to the academy. A square peg in a round hole.
I wanted to tell the woman about that time in Class II. The time we found out about Zarin lying about having parents. How her face had turned red like a poppy when I confronted her. Shame, shame, my friends and I had chanted whenever she’d stepped out on the playground after that. Shame, shame, poppy shame.
I wanted to tell the woman about that time in Class IX, when I first smelled the cigarettes on her. When she stuck her tongue out and blew a raspberry, spraying my face with her spit. “I’ll report you for this,” I told her. And I had. Though by then, she hadn’t seemed to care.
My fingers brushed the name and number scribbled on the photocopied page of the class phone list. Careless strokes, uneven in weight, some characters darker than others. She put a dash through her sevens and through the Z in her name. The same number, year after year, ever since she first showed up in Class II with her short hair and weird brown leggings, no new cell number added, even though I knew that she’d started carrying around an ancient flip phone sometime last year.
I wrapped the phone cord tight around my fingers.
It was nothing, I wanted to tell the woman. Just a bunch of girls saying crappy things, sharing crappy pictures on Facebook and Twitter. Stuff like this happened all the time at school. Zarin knew that. She had to have known that! She used to laugh at the rumors before. Pea brained, she used to call anyone who believed them. How could we have known that she would try to run away?
I opened my mouth to speak.
“Mishal?” Abdullah called up to me. “Where are you?”
I hung up instantly, heart pounding. I cursed my brother for his voice—that loud Sports Captain voice he used to bark marching orders to the Qala Academy boys during Sports Day presentations—a voice that must surely have penetrated the woman’s ear on the other end of the phone as it had mine.
“Come down here!” he shouted. “They’re showing the news about your friend.”
The same news they’d announced this morning at a special assembly held on the school grounds. The headmistress made a speech, the teachers dabbed at their eyes with the edges of their saris or dupattas, prayers were recited, and everyone observed the obligatory Two Minutes of Silence for the Dead. Seconds after the assembly was complete, however, everyone around me burst into whispers about the details.
Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un! Ya Allah, what a tragedy!
Tragedy, my foot. It was probably her fault, with all those cigarettes she smoked. One of them probably set the car on fire!
How can you say such things about someone who died?
What? What are you guys talking about? The headmistress said it was a crash in the assembly. Like the wheel came off the car she was in or some—
Forget about that—was she with that deli boy again?
On my Tumblr account, random anonymous tippers were going wild with even more theories, forcing me to post the following message when I got back home from school:
You have been asking a lot of questions about a certain Class XI student (you all know who she was). I understand that you have your own theories and honestly I appreciate the asks and tips you guys send me. But I am NO LONGER going to post anything else about this person on Tumblr as I don’t think it’s fair to her or her family.
POSTED 2 HOURS AGO BY BLUENIQAB, 45 NOTES
#seriously #anonymous #ily #but let’s not speak ill of the dead okay #blue’s announcements #QA gossip
On Zarin’s Facebook page (one she rarely used, from the looks of her twelve-person friend list) there was a lone status update dating back to October 13, 2010: so this is facebook? looks boring. She hadn’t even bothered putting up a profile picture. Her timeline, set to Public, had a slew of messages: some from our classmates, but most from strangers, their sentiments ranging from Ding dong, the witch is dead to May your soul rest in peace. My own message, one I’d typed out and erased several times before hitting Enter, had been a short R.I.P. and nothing else.