Skunk Girl

My freshman year was the year that everything really changed. When I started high school, not only was I the lowest of the low in a literal sense, but I had the looks to match. I was overweight and still had braces. In the summer between eight and ninth grades, my hips became too round and my thighs too mushy. Parts of my body jiggled when poked. The one thing that stayed small were my breasts-A cup and so far apart I had to squeeze them together with force to get any cleavage. Not that I was allowed to show cleavage anyway.

My friends had a much better freshman year than I did. High school is easy for bubbly redheads like Helena. Back then, she had braces on her teeth, but everyone thought they looked super cute on her. Helena was recruited by practically every extracurricular club. She can’t do a split to save her life but still got onto the cheerleading team, and when she quit after first practice because physical exercise isn’t really her thing, the cheerleaders told her she would be dearly missed. Bridget joined yearbook and, of course, the ski club, which was full of athletic boys with names like Josh and Carl who said hello to her in the hall, raising her cool quotient by at least two degrees. I debated joining yearbook too, but decided I didn’t want to joint a club whose sole purpose was to memorialize the awkwardness of our lives, and joined the Volunteer Society and the French club instead.

I’ve always been one of the youngest people in my year, which means that by the time I experience a rite of passage, everyone else is already acting blase about it. Almost all of the girls in my class got their period in eight grade and seemed to know so much more about life because they could debate which brands of pads were more absorbent. I, of course, didn’t get my period until the first week of freshman year. It happened in the middle of French class. Finally, i thought, je suis a woman.

When I got home and told my mother, instead of congratulating me or crying like my friends’ mothers had, she informed me I could not longer sleep over at my friends’ houses.

“But that’s not fair!” I had been sleeping over at my friends’ houses for years. “I can’t sleep over because I got my period?” My mother had her back to me, and if she did hear me, she pretended she didn’t. “I don’t understand.”

My mother turned to face me, her lips pressed together tightly. Whenever my mother becomes upset, she makes her lips disappear. Then she wrapped her hand around the onion she had been peeling and waved it in the air. Sometimes, when she’s trying to make a point she thinks may be contested, she’ll make a fist around something and shake it, dictator-style, as if my social life were some banana republic she has complete control over. “Because your American friends will start doing things you’re not allowed to do.”

“If I was a boy would you do the same thing?”

“It’s not the same thing. Girls can get pregnant. But yes, I would. Nina you know things are different for you. You’re a Pakistani Muslim girl.”

“So what?” I said, even though further discussion was futile. There was nothing I could say, no arguments I could make, that would trump the fist followed by the Pakistani Muslim girl statement. I could have cried for days or banged my head against the wall, but it would have been no use.

The good Pakistani Muslim girl my mother wants me to be does things like the following: speaks fluent Urdu, fasts during Ramadan, wears shalwar kameez, enjoys going to boring parties with other Pakistani families where the kids sit in the basement watching movies while the aunties and uncles talk and laugh upstairs. But sometime in middle school, I began to want to do all of the things that good Pakistani Muslim girls didn’t do, like wear short skirts and flirt with boys. Sometimes I would imagine what the Pakistani Muslim girl my mother was referring to must look like. She had long black hair and eyeliner in a thin perfect line across her lids and was always smiling. But in her head I was sure she was thinking, God, I am so bored I just want to stab myself in the chest and end by miserable life.

I’ve never been to Pakistan. Even though my parents have talked about going almost every year, we’ve never gone. Except for my mother’s only sister Nasreen Khala, and her family, all of our relatives have moved elsewhere, to Canada and Dubai and England, and at least once a year these relatives will come visit us, varies aunts and uncles and cousins. On the first day of the visit they make weird faces at me as I stumble over my Urdu and then give up and speak English, and after that I try to speak to them as little as possible.

Nasreen Khala is the worst. Every time I answer her questions she looks down at me, double chin and all, and shakes her head slightly like she feels sorry for me because I am so Americanized. this is one of Nasreen Khala’s favorite words; she uses it a lot when she visits. “Children here are becoming so Americanized” and pronounce  it “um-ree-can-ized.” I could say, “Yeah, well, you’re fat and have BO,” but of course I never do. I would get into a lot of trouble for not respecting my elders and it would just give Nasreem Khala even more proof that I was umreecanized.

Thankfully, most of the relatives who come to visit never stay for more that a few days, since there’s nothing to do in Deer Hook. At some point during their visit we pile into the minivan early in the morning with coolers packed with sodas and quart-sized Ziploc bags full of snacks-samosas and padoras and chewra– and make the long drive to Niagara Falls. I usually have to sit on the floor in the back with the little kids. We admire the falls and take a million pictures and go on the boat ride and then drive all the way back home, and within the next day or two my relatives leave and I can open my mouth and speak again without feeling nervous.