Isabella was the daughter of diplomats, half British and half Malay, with shiny brown hair and bangs that framed her freckled face. She was by far the prettiest girl in school, and maybe the nicest, too. She resisted all the cliques that everyone else had arranged themselves into. She thought I was a good soccer player, and she liked the poem I wrote in English class about an ostrich. But like Justin and Michael, she didn’t even see me as a part of the equation. But that was that; she had made her decision, and it wasn’t me.
The Amman Baccalaureate School was selective and expensive. The kids at the school were merciless. They made fun of me for hanging out with the boys. I longed to go back to Yuri, Michael, Justin, and Isabella. At the school, girls could either wear a skirt or skirts or pants, and pants were better for that. One day, not long after I started wearing a skirt, a group of boys kept turning around in class, looking at me and then collapsing into laughter into laughter.
Jumana’s father was Palestinian; her mother, American, American. She was the most pretty and popular seventh grader at the Baccalaureate School in Jordan. “My mom knows your mom. She said I should be friends with you because you don’t have any,” she said. “I don’t need any friends.” She led me around the playground with her friends, every one of them with a ponytail and perfectly pleated skirt. “It felt like all the blood in my veins had been replaced with electricity,” she says.
Jumana, a friend at middle school in Jordan, has been a constant presence in her life since she moved to Jordan. She invited her friend to her house to watch a movie and play basketball with her brother. The friendship quickly blossomed into a friendship and she became a popular girl at school. She asked her friend, Adam, to come over to see her again, but he didn’t want to be mean to her. Adam says he was so close to her that he didn’t want to make fun of her.
The relationship with Jumana ended as soon as we got back to Amman, I called her and asked her to come over to Fahed’s house tomorrow. The extra attention I got for being Riyad Mufleh’s granddaughter didn’t last too long. It was my cousin who told me Talal had a crush on me, then some girls from my class said the whole thing blew over. The next week at school, I found Adam at our usual spot, but decided to avoid him until the issue blew over.
Arab middle schoolgirl writes about her courtship with a 13-year-old prince. Her parents didn’t want her to date him, but they encouraged her to be nice to him. By the end of the year, she says she was infatuated with his sister, who rode horses and didn’t try to hide her British accent. The girls at school cornered her, asking questions about what she was like in private, what we talked about when we were together. She kept count and stuck it out for forty-three days (I kept count).
There isn’t a word that means “gay” in Arabic. There were no gay characters on TV, and not in books either. Romeo and Pip loved Juliet, Pip loved Estella, Clark Kent loved Lois Lane. Talal told everyone at school that he was the one who broke it off. He could keep his secret, and I would keep mine. It was the 1980s; there was no internet, no Google. How those things would have changed my life. Given me some way to know what I was and that I wasn’t alone. Instead, I was like a stone stuck in the middle of a rushing current.