Not the Girls You're Looking For Read online

  The Arabic phrases that Lulu knew mostly related to food, and she could, in fact, only speak a little Arabic. Every once in a while, Lulu remembered how to tell someone if she was hot or cold. She knew a choice selection of curse words picked up from the other Arab American boys who were, to her, something between friends and cousins. Her brothers had taught her how to say “eat shit.” And there was one word that she only heard in whispers; it came with knowing looks and expectant glances. Lulu pretended never to know it, not even to hear it. She buried that word in a place she hoped she could never find again.

  This knowledge base, apparently, had been enough to satisfy a grandmother who lived thousands of miles away. Lulu hadn’t stopped waiting for the day when it wouldn’t be enough. Lulu could overhear her grandmother repeating Lulu’s words to the room at large. She wondered how many relatives surrounded the phone call. Lulu’s chest went tight.

  “Alhamdulillah, hayati,” crackled Bibi through the receiver. “Hathe amtich, hathe amtich.”

  The phone was passed around, relative to relative—aunt to cousin to uncle to cousin again. Each time Lulu had a nearly identical conversation as the one before, with each phrase and each question repeated like a glitch in a video game. Depending on the new speaker, the language of the conversation jolted from English to Arabic and back again, with Lulu attempting her best Arabic, while her relatives with an actual mastery of English shamed her.

  “Hallo, Lulu!” A small, breathless voice had taken charge of the phone. This was Lulu’s baby cousin, Rana.

  The Saads didn’t have many girls. They were rare to the family, and therefore all the more precious. There wasn’t a girl born into the Saads or one of its tributaries that did not take advantage of this. That’s why Rana could grab the phone right out from the hands of her older cousin.

  “Hello, Rana,” said Lulu.

  Rana’s breath was still catching up with her words. She must have run across the room to take the phone. “I’m going to e-mail you.”

  Lulu laughed. “All right.”

  “Good!” said Rana. “Oh, here is Bibi.”

  Lulu barely had time to recover from the tempo switch.

  “Halloo, Bibi!” Lulu’s grandmother was back on the line.

  Thank goodness Rana had warned her before handing over the phone. Truthfully, Lulu couldn’t always tell when the phone switched over between speakers. In her mind they were all disembodied voices. Not that she hadn’t been shown pictures of her relatives, but the voices were separate from the faces, which in turn were entirely separate from the family histories related by her father.

  The only person who stuck out in her memory as complete—a face, a voice, and a story—was her grandfather, and that was only because she had the glimmer of a memory of having met him as a tiny child. The story of that was a famous one, told so often that Lulu was sick of hearing it.

  “Ahibich, ‘azizati. Ahibich,” said Bibi.

  “Miss you,” said Lulu. “Love you.”

  “Ma‘asalama ‘oyooni. Ma‘asalama.”

  “Alaykum Masalam, Bibi.” Lulu heard the phone click shut. That was it. Lulu set the phone down next to her in the chair. But that wasn’t enough. She took it and buried it under her leg. The plastic bit into her thighs. Uncomfortable, yes, but at least she didn’t have to keep looking at the phone. It was as though the device had grown eyes and was watching her. She didn’t want to be seen.

  Not a moment later, her mother popped back into the room.

  “Your father left this for you.” She handed Lulu a folded section of newspaper. From the stilted, direct movements she used, she still hadn’t forgiven Lulu for bringing up Mimi. She would, eventually. She always did. “He set it by your place at breakfast, but you left it.”

  Lulu stared blankly for a moment. Recognition dawned as the headline came into focus. Lulu could only see the words Iraqi and art collection, but they were enough. Lulu reached out to take the paper. “Thanks.”

  Her mother leaned down. Lulu roughly kissed her on the cheek—more velocity than affection. Then Lulu bent her head over the newspaper. The door to her bedroom clicked shut.

  Once alone, Lulu set down the article. It could wait. She placed it atop a stack of similar articles, all patiently awaiting her attention. She told herself she’d get to them. And she meant it, too. She looked out the window. The sun would set soon. Time would keep going on with or without her.

  Lulu reached for the phone under her leg. She had a quick call to make.

  * * *

  Liza Pazornik—a senior girl of the ambitious variety—had not gotten to be editor in chief of The Sealy Examiner by sitting on her laurels or by being gullible. But she played into Lulu’s plan beautifully, if unwittingly.

  Having just lost the cell-phone connection with Lulu—a staff member—giving her a good story tip, Liza called back at the landline number listed in her copy of the school directory. Lulu’s dad picked up. Liza informed him she had a possible newspaper assignment for Lulu. He passed the call along gladly.

  Lulu took the call from Liza with as much surprise as she could muster. She suppressed the triumph that ran through her. She walked out of the room as she normally would have, had the call been truly unexpected.

  She’d have to play this as cool as humanly possible.

  A couple of minutes later, Lulu reentered the living room. She held her hand over the phone mic. She cleared her throat, a notch louder than necessary but not suspiciously so. Her mom looked up. Her father kept his eyes on his opened newspaper.

  “Baba? I’ve got a newspaper assignment,” Lulu said. “A last-minute one.”

  Ahmed turned the page with a crinkling swish. He must have been one of the only people left who read a real newspaper anymore. Said he only liked the news if it got his hands dirty. Aimee froze—she had been working through a stack of papers from where she sat on the couch.

  Lulu didn’t flinch. “I need to cover this Battle of the Bands tonight.”

  Aimee’s face went rigid.

  “For school,” Lulu emphasized, trying not to gulp. She kept a tight hold of the phone. Yes, she had called Liza with the hot tip for the story about covering the Battle of the Bands. And yes, she had purposefully hung up so that Liza would have to call the house line rather than Lulu’s cell. But those weren’t details her parents needed to know.

  Ahmed turned a page in his newspaper. Without looking up, he said, “Of course, habibti.”

  Aimee coughed. “Honey, do you really think she should go out on a school night?”

  Ahmed put down his paper and appraised his youngest. “Where do you need to go?”

  He had no softness to his voice. His tones were all consonants, clipped and hit hard. To his credit, he’d grown up speaking a dialect of Arabic that necessitated the use of such sounds. But the annunciation did not lend itself well to English, not when attempting kindness or sympathy. English, unlike Arabic, was not a poetic language. English had been cobbled together by too many unknown parents, too many unsure users. English lacked the single word that differentiated an attacking lion from one at rest. Nor did English have the capacity to relay the succinct, linguistic separation of a maternal uncle from a paternal one. English was not a thoughtful language. Ahmed was kind, though his English was not.

  “Between Montrose and downtown,” said Lulu.

  As Ahmed looked at Lulu, sweat built up in her armpits. She hailed from a nice enclave inside a much larger city. Sometimes that made getting out a little tricky. She was headed to the less savory edge of the arts district. “I can call Audrey, see if I can take her, so I won’t be driving alone,” Lulu added. That had been part of her plan all along, but it sounded better if she suggested it as a solution to her father’s hesitations rather than as her own particular desire.

  “Okay. You’ll be back,” he said.

  “Yes.” Lulu preferred to start out in agreement.

  “Nine thirty.” He nodded once.

  “Yes, but, Baba, the ban
d goes on at nine.” Lulu tried to keep the wheedling out of her voice.

  For a long moment, the only things in the room that moved were Aimee’s eyes, which ping-ponged between Lulu and Ahmed.

  “All right. Ten thirty,” Ahmed said with finality. “And don’t forget to take your mobile phone.”

  Lulu crossed the room, leaning over to give her father an unnecessary squeeze. He accepted it heartily. As Lulu looked back over at her mother, she made sure her smile was wiped clean off her face. If there was one thing Aimee hated, it was one parent overruling the other in front of one of the children.

  Of course, Lulu knew this.

  That thought caught in the back of Lulu’s throat for a moment. She swallowed it. Lulu took her hand off the phone and put it back to her ear. “Liza? I can do it.”

  Ahmed continued smiling behind his paper, as though he had done a good deed. Aimee gave Lulu a long, hard stare, straightening her work papers into a neat stack on the coffee table. There was an unsettling quietness to the movement. Winding up her mother had yet to pan out as a good idea. Aimee wouldn’t forget.

  But it was Thursday and Lulu had gotten out of her punishment. She wouldn’t let the lingering image of Aimee’s promising grimace invade her joy. Instead, Lulu stayed on the phone with Liza as she walked out of the room. After they’d run down the necessary information, Lulu went and grabbed her phone off her mother’s desk. She texted only one word to Audrey—Jailbreak.

  3

  Somebody’s Yoda

  Her shoes riding shotgun, Lulu curled her bare feet around the gas and clutch pedals. Warm, humid air invaded the car through the open windows. She inhaled the sweet, wet air deeply. The back of her thighs were slicked up with sweat against her vinyl seats, but she didn’t mind. Lulu loved to drive. She loved the single-purposed focus she had when she sat behind the wheel. So few things in her life gave Lulu that clearheadedness. That driving barefoot was illegal in the state of Texas only heightened the thrill.

  Houston itself was not a beautiful city. It was a resilient one. If Austin was the crown jewel of Texas, and San Antonio was its tourist trap, and Dallas was where bankers and stereotypes made dividends, then Houston was the begrudging East Texas swamp that nobody wanted to acknowledge as mattering. But Houston did matter. The kind of swampy city that withstands mosquitoes and floodplains and hurricanes—not unlike New Orleans or Versailles. Except not a quarter so architecturally fine. Not a third so bent on flashing itself for the crowd. No. Houston was built on oil and energy, on rolling up your sleeves and doing the kind of work that was necessary, if not actually good.

  Lulu honked twice as she pulled up to Audrey’s driveway, taunting Mrs. Bachmann with her conspicuous display of freedom. She only did it half on purpose.

  “What’s up, slut?” Audrey slid into the car, shoving the shoes onto the floorboard and turning up the radio all in one fluid move.

  Lulu cringed, but said nothing. Audrey was already talking a mile a minute. Thanks to the volume of the radio, Lulu could barely hear Audrey over the sound of the bass thumping.

  “I thought you were going to be grounded until Halloween at least,” Audrey finished.

  “No thanks to you.” Lulu waited a moment, then ticked the volume back down a few notches.

  “Next time, if I’m the one taking a drunken swim, feel free to lay the blame at my doorstep,” said Audrey.

  “It wasn’t a swim!”

  “Of course not.” Audrey turned the radio back up.

  All things considered, she was taking Lulu’s accusations startlingly well. Lulu turned the volume back down. “You’re in a bubbly mood.”

  “I swiped my sister’s ID on my way out. Sucker.” Audrey smiled an irreverent smile. There was a clear, secretive pleasure written across her face.

  “I mean, really, who’s going to believe we’re twenty-two? Or that you look anything like your sister? You two barely pass as cousins.” Lulu went on unnecessarily. “No one, that’s who. Besides, they’re letting sixteen and up in for this gig.”

  “It’s a matter of principle.” Audrey crossed her arms.

  When it came to Audrey and her sister, everything was a matter of principle. Lulu shrugged. What Lulu knew of sisters, apart from Audrey, she had taken from fiction. Lulu suspected that Audrey found her sister to be a Mary Bennet—priggish and pedantic—while Audrey’s sister probably thought of Audrey as a Lydia Bennet—thoughtless and selfish. Or maybe they were Amy and Jo March, and this was all about a burned manuscript and an heiress of a boy. Lulu found the idea of sisters fascinating, but her only vocabulary for the relationship was borrowed. She did the best she could to follow, given the circumstance.

  Audrey turned the radio back up. Lulu flicked Audrey’s fingers, like swatting a fly, and turned the radio down. Audrey sighed. After waiting a beat, she raised the radio volume in one grand, sweeping effort. “So where to first?”

  “Emma’s, then Lo’s.” Lulu punched off the radio with her knuckles. Her ears vibrated from the aftermath of that decibel level. “Then I’m thinking tacos. We haven’t had tacos in forever.”

  “Two weeks. Yes, that was forever ago.” Audrey used as much condescension as she had in her. And Audrey had been bred to hold plenty of condescension.

  Lulu laughed. Her freshly won freedom made her gracious enough not to hold a grudge. She had taken the blame for the night of the pool incident, getting Audrey off nearly scot-free. But Audrey would do the same for her, even if Audrey knew the world to be a certain way. A way that didn’t hold water, but still.

  Lulu made an unprotected left turn, and Audrey swooped in to turn the radio back up. Lulu paid these antics no further attention. They constantly danced around like this, attracting each other with what ought to repel. The two girls chatted and laughed until they became four. How any of them could hear one another, over each other, or the music, or the wind coming into the car as it sped along, was anyone’s guess.

  * * *

  The venue for the Battle of the Bands was going for a kind of cool, industrial loft look. It was on the edge of downtown without being in downtown. It was near the gay bars without being one itself. Almost in the arts district, but not quite. It was hopelessly in between, desperately on the edge. And tonight it was too full of a hopeful, underage crowd to achieve its most basic, casually cool aim. The bathroom echoed this attempt at a hipster vibe—concrete littered with fliers. Plus a faint odor of vomit that would never wash out.

  Lulu rubbed her shoulder. She had been dragged—literally—into the bathroom by Lo. A sophomore girl at one of the sinks was attempting to wash off the UNDERAGE that had been inked across her hand. After a brief tussle with the venue-provided soap, the girl finally gave up hope and shuffled out of the bathroom, defeated. Lo watched her sad exit with narrowed eyes.

  Lo muttered her disdain under her breath. A stall opened up, and Lo pulled Lulu in with her. She whipped out a travel-sized bottle of makeup remover and grabbed for Lulu’s hand. But Lulu yanked away.

  “Dude, no.” Lulu’s voice was stern, probably louder than it needed to be. “My mom knows where I am and what I’m doing. She’ll be expecting a hand mark.”

  “That’s no fun.” Lo ostentatiously pushed her hands through her hair, which still looked perfectly tousled despite the humidity. As always.

  Lulu’s own hair looked like it had gotten into a tussle with a badly behaved house cat. She didn’t know how Lo did it. Nobody did.

  Lo took the bottle of makeup remover and tilted it toward a wad of toilet paper, which she in turn put to work against her own hand. The ink across her hand dissolved quickly. There wasn’t a single red mark left over to show visible evidence of scrubbing. Lo was a pro.

  “I can’t believe she tried scrubbing. With the soap!” Lo’s voice was a harsh whisper. “And like right at the sinks, in front of everyone. You can see that sink from outside. What an amateur!”

  Lulu shrugged. “You could adopt her. Teach her your ways.”

  “I
don’t babysit.” Lo wiped the residue of the makeup remover with an individually packaged face wipe. Lo was also thorough.

  “It wouldn’t be babysitting. You’d, like, be her Yoda. Everyone wants to be somebody’s Yoda,” said Lulu.

  Lo gave Lulu a scathing look. Lulu knew where this was going.

  Lo threw the makeup wipe away in the tampon bin. “No. Everyone does not. You’re such a freak.”

  “Seriously?” Lulu could have sidestepped the ages-old argument, but Lulu didn’t particularly enjoy avoiding a fight with Lo. They were verbal sparring partners. They learned from each other, honed their individual arguments so that when they faced real opponents, these others didn’t stand a chance.

  Lo squatted down to pee. “Seriously. Why the hell would you be Yoda, when you could be Boba Fett. The man survives the sarlacc’s pit. He’s got the, like, sickest helmet, ever. He’s a bounty hunter; he’s definitely in it for the money. And he doesn’t waffle like Han does.”

  “Waffle?” Lulu’s voice echoed well beyond their stall. “You call turning to the aid of the rebellion, being the sole reason Luke can safely blow up the Death Star, waffling?”

  Lo pulled her skirt back down and flushed. “Boba Fett knows what he wants. And he gets it. Including Han.”

  “Who he could’ve killed, but didn’t. What do you say to that?” Lulu put her hand on her hip, partially blocking the stall door.

  “That says, that even when a fellow runner turns, Boba still has a code he lives by. That’s what I say to that.” Lo sniffed, fully satisfied that her point had ground this argument to a halt.

  “Anyways.” Lo tapped her upper thigh, a metallic sound tingling slightly. “Find me if you need me. I always bring backup.” She pushed Lulu out of the way to open the stall to the door, majestically exiting as though everyone’s eyes would be on her. And to further Lulu’s annoyance, they all were.

  Squeezing out of the bathroom and into a hallway, Lulu shuffled by a girl who was crouched on the floor, crying. The girl’s makeup drizzled down her face, and Lulu couldn’t believe someone was already having such a horrible time. She looked a little bit like Nina Holmes. But Lo yanked Lulu onward before she could be sure. Lulu yanked back. Lo gave up then, abandoning Lulu to the crowd. Lulu passed a couple kissing. The two boys were of a similar height, similarly sized shoulders—one fair and the other dark. They made a cute couple. Then again, Lulu was disposed to like mixed couples, being the product of one herself.