A Bad Apple

Standing in the middle of the hallway at the Girls’ College in Adailiya, facing each other, Hayat and I are fighting. Our voices rise and our hands wave in the air. She says, “You’re comfortable being a victim!”

“How could you say such a thing?”

“I have to be honest with you.”

“To be honest with me?”

“Yes.”

“You, in your perfect world, without any problems?”

“I say what I see!”

“Who are you to judge?”

“I’m the only person in the world who has the right to tell you something like this.”

I sighed. Tears escaped from my eyes. I wiped at them with the sleeve of my abaya while gazing enviously at her light-blue shirt. I love your shirt and I hate my abaya.

“I know how hard life at your brother’s house is,” Hayat says, “but I also know that you can fight, and you don’t.”

When Hayat speaks you feel the world is speaking through her.

“I’m still . . .”

“It’s not enough! We always meet at your school. I always come to you. You’re too much of a coward to disobey him.”

She can see the life in me drying up and slipping away, and she demands more from me. Saqr, who always senses her insistent voice when it erupts from within me, has repeated to me many times that she’s “a bad influence,” without sufficient facts or evidence or proof. Looking at my face was enough to establish suspicion. Hayat supplies me with will. One follows their friend’s religion, as the hadith says, and Hayat was a bad apple. Bad apples make all the apples rotten.

“You don’t come over to my house anymore. Is being with me somehow disgraceful? Have you become like them?”

Whenever Hayat asked me to come over to her house I made excuses, because Saqr didn’t approve. He’d say, I’m not comfortable with Hayat or how she’s been raised. She’d say to me, I’ll come over to your house. So I’d say, Saqr won’t allow it. It was a lie; I didn’t want her to see the basement and lose what dignity I had left.

“If you can sneak out at night to bury flowers, why don’t you use that time to sit with me in a café? What’s stopping you?”

Ever since he found out that she studies “foreigner” literature, as he called it, Saqr won’t allow me to go shopping with Hayat or go to a café with her, even if her family is there. He kept saying that she will ruin my morals. Hayat was a bad apple.

“I’m holding on to our friendship with all my strength, but you don’t make it easy.”

Hayat was the struggle and the hand that always reached out with a flower or song. She was constantly besieging me with questions: Who would know if you went to a morning poetry reading? A photography exhibition? If we went shopping together? How would he find out? If he found out what could he do? He can’t turn back time and take away your fun.

“Your chains aren’t that tight, you can slip out of them sometimes. If you can get an extra inch, then do it. And if you don’t, shame on you.”

She always said that I overestimated his power. That’s easy for you to say, I would answer defensively.

Hayat studies English literature without anyone accusing her of trying to be a Westerner or of being bewitched by the unbelievers. She reads Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens without being forced to tear off the book covers and hide the pages under the pillows. At Hayat’s house, a person can love life without being accused of having been taken in by a world that is not worth the wing on a gnat before God. At Hayat’s house, the world is sweet and fresh.

“I didn’t create this vast distance between us.”

“Neither did I.”

Before my parents died, I could barely make out the differences between her life and mine. We bought the same things, from the same stores. We loved the same things, the same colors. We tried to eliminate as many differences as possible in the hope that we would become one. The strict rules we invented to protect this friendship required, for example, that we come to school with a ponytail on Saturday, a French braid on Sunday. That our favorite color was pink. That we buy the same schoolbag for the semester, along with other things to make us more alike. That was well before my parents died. The difference—after all that—hurt.

“You like your new friends more than me. They don’t have older brothers like Saqr.”

After we started college Hayat made other friends. Who could blame her? Did I dare? I was a friend from a faraway college and harsh disappointments. I was a real burden. And as for her, she had Shaymaa and Rawiya and Zaynab, friends who could go to the movies with her, go over to her house. They could go shopping with her and sit in cafés with her and go to all kinds of social events—parties, weddings, birthdays . . . All the fruits forbidden to me in the name of keeping me in that hell he called my paradise.

“That’s not true.”

“Yes it is.”

“Lately all I see is me running after you. Do something for me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Come with me tomorrow.”

I sniffed, wiping my tears with the edge of my abaya. “Where?”

“To a poetry reading. In Kaifan. 12:30 p.m. I’ll come pick you up.”

Hayat’s a bad apple? Maybe I should be a bad apple, so I don’t get eaten up.