Ten Things I Hate About Me by Randa Abdel-Fattah Page A

without Mr. Delerio noticing. We board the bus later and I take a seat beside Amy. Liz passes us on her way to the back row and pauses.
    “We got away with it!” she whispers and winks.
    “Congratulations,” Amy says in a tight voice.
    Liz looks as though she’s going to say something, but then offers us a flippant smile and walks away to join Sam.
    I’m staring out the window when I hear Nicholas Kastani cry out, “Give it back!”
    I turn around and see Peter holding Nicholas’s MP3 player. He has the headphones over his ears and is laughing hysterically.
    “What is this? Greek music?”
    “Congratulations, genius,” Nicholas says. “Got a problem with it?”
    “It sounds like the guy’s coughing his words.” Peter starts gargling out pretend song words. “You Greeks should stick to running fruit shops.”
    “That’s enough, Peter,” the bus driver yells out.
    Chris, Sam, and several other kids laugh loudly. Ahmed, Paul, and Danielle yell out abuse at Peter.
    “At least my ancestors weren’t convicts,” Nicholas says, snatching his MP3 player out of Peter’s hands.
    I glance over at Liz. She’s cuddled up in Sam’s arms, smiling as she watches Peter in action. I wonder if she realizes how much she’s compromising by being with Sam. I wonder if I would do the same if I had the chance to be with Peter.

11
    “WHAT’S IT LIKE living without a mom?” Amy asks me today.
    I’m caught off guard by her question. Until now, my mother has been an off-limits topic. I can’t imagine why she’s suddenly presumed I’m willing to talk about her.
    “It’s hard…” I say, focusing my eyes on the floor and not her face. Then I turn to her and give her a clenched smile. “I really don’t want to talk about it, if you don’t mind.”
    She’s taken aback but then smiles at me awkwardly. “Fine…no problem.”
    She doesn’t press the topic and we revert to more familiar ground: celebrities, school gossip, and music. Once again I’ve insured that the train tracks keep on running parallel.
    I really don’t like to talk about my mother. I think about her all the time but I’ve never been comfortable opening up to anybody—including my family—about how I’ve felt since she died. My dad always says prayers for her. If her name ismentioned, he always asks Allah to rest her soul and grant her paradise.
    The day of her death replays in my mind over and over. She picked us up from school. Bilal and I were in the backyard playing soccer. Shereen was in her bedroom listening to music. Mom was hanging the laundry on the clothesline. She came inside. She told us to be careful not to ruin Dad’s vegetable garden. She sat in the armchair. She called out to us to telephone Dad. She felt pain in her chest. She was tired. She closed her eyes. Bilal and I thought she was just whining about the housework. She told us again: “Call Baba.” So Shereen called.
    She opened her eyes. She looked at us. She said: “It hurts.” She was a pious woman. She said: “I declare that there is only one God and that Mohammed is His last Prophet.” She closed her eyes. And she never opened them again.
    She was born in Beirut and died in Australia. If she had never boarded that plane in 1974, would she have lived longer? What would God’s plan for her have been? From the moment of her birth God had her heading for that armchair. Some guy in a factory manufactured it with professional care. He put it together, nail-gunned the upholstery over it, wrapped it in plastic, and shipped it off for sale. Nobody knew it would land in our living room and hold my mother in her dying moments. It tore her from our lives. I slashed it with a knife when we returned from the funeral.
    My father grieves through memory. He is constantly reminiscing about his life with my mother. We can be eating dinner and he’ll remember eating the same dish with her and go off on a tangent about an outing or conversation they shared. A smell can send him into