Not another teen book

Scenes from an Arab girl trying to make a connection

In writing about the immigrant experience of Arab women, Toronto writer Christine Estima follows a family from the 19th century, moving from the Middle East to Montreal to Toronto, to the 21st century, and the family’s rich history and experiences. This is Estima’s debut book, informed by her own mixed Lebanese, Syrian and Portuguese heritage. Here, an excerpt from “Fairview Mall,” one of the stories in “The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society.”

When I came back from swimming lessons Bita called to ask if I’d like to join her at the mall. It was a hot Canada Day, school was out, and her mom could drive us.

“Do you want to go see a movie at the Cineplex upstairs?” I asked. “Maybe Pocahontas.”

“Let’s just go shopping,” she said.

I’d never been shopping without my mom.

I knew Fairview Mall pretty well. The rapper Snow grew up in the townhouses behind it. I spent a lot of time in the Coles and the WHSmith bookstores that sat side by side on the upper level. Saw a couple movies with my mom and sister when we first moved to Toronto from Montreal, like “Heart and Souls” starring Robert Downey Jr. and “Speed” with Keanu Reeves. My homeroom teacher was friends with Keanu; he was from Toronto, too.

My mother’s husband, who was not my father, left the year before. Since then, my sister, Arshia, had become distant. He was her father. She rolled her eyes in this fantastically cool way and spent all her time in her room doing sit-ups and not eating. That summer she worked as a salesgirl at the Limité store on the ground floor of the mall. She came home wearing the nicest skorts and oneshoulder numbers.

Bita’s mom picked me up in their Ford station wagon. It smelled like wet dog; a pine air freshener from the gas station hung off the rear-view mirror. Bita was in the backseat wearing a tight tee that had 55 in fat glitter emblazoned across the chest. A metal-studded leather belt held up her men’s Levi’s. Liquid eyeliner gave her a cateye. I wore a frumpy T-shirt I had quickly pulled out of the dryer that said Blue Jays 1993 Champions in bright blue and bicycle shorts from Sears. I couldn’t figure out why Bita had called me. She’d never really hung out with me that much at school. She knew I was being bullied. When Craig or Justin called me hairy, she smirked.

Bita’s mom dropped us off in front of the food court entrance. Sitting under the skylight at the tables bolted to the linoleum floor facing the elevators to the upstairs Cineplex was a group of people Bita approached.

“Azurée,” she introduced me, “this is Behzad, Charbal, Behrad, Kiana, Pooyah, and Ariel.”

I’ll never remember their names, I thought. I sat down tentatively, as Bita, a shining beacon of Persian popularity, sat comfortably. I watched as she laughed and flirted with the tableful of mall rats like my sister did with the guys in her grade. Bita brought a vial of lip gloss out of her purse, dipped her pinky in, and smeared it delicately across her lips. I didn’t even have a purse.

She ripped off a TTC student ticket for me — “So you can get home later” — and I stared at it like she’d just given me the key to Narnia. Bita was, like, living a whole other life. She had this hidden life of her own making, never once letting on that she had this crew outside of school. Her version of seventeen was definitely a step above mine.

The music coming from the nearby It! Store blasted Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” followed by “I Wish” by Skee-Lo.

We never went shopping that day.

The next day after swim class, Mom noticed when Bita called again.

“We go to school together,” I explained, as I pinned my bangs that I’d cut myself diagonally with a barrette and smoothed the ends behind my ear with gel. “And her mom is driving us.”

Mom didn’t object. I knew she wouldn’t. Her divorce made her a bit meek. Sometimes I hated her for that.

“Drop in to give your sister some food at work,” she said, handing me a frozen container of Sito’s kousa and kibbeh.

I balked. My sister wouldn’t want me to drop in. She hated being around me. I shoved the plastic bag inside my Club Monaco tote, still wet from my bathing suit and smelling of chlorine.

Before Bita’s mom honked her horn out front, I snuck into the laundry room and swapped out my T-shirt for one of my sister’s: a crop top from Stitches with fat horizontal green, white, and black stripes. I looked like a flag with no country.

When we got to the mall, I dumped the lunch in the bin.

The weather grew hotter and hotter, but I wasn’t riding my bike every day like last summer. I spent less and less time outdoors. Summer, but no tan. Summer, but no beach. Summer, but no rollerblading. No sitting in front of Mac’s Milk and sucking on a cherry Popsicle, breaking it in two — one half for me and one for my sister. No trips to Canada’s Wonderland to ride the Minebuster or Jet Scream coasters. No father figure buying funnel cakes and no Mom packing a picnic of toasted tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise and black olives.

On every street, patios were blaring Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” or the club hit “Memories” by Netzwerk. I failed my lifeguard test at the pool, so I stopped swimming. Movies were selling out at the upstairs Cineplex, but I never saw “Braveheart” or “First Knight” or “Clueless.”

But I did hang out at the food court. Almost everyone was Persian, like Bita, and disappointed when I told them I was Lebanese. Despite hours spent in the food court, not much was eaten.

Behrad took me to the baby changing room and tried to kiss me. I’d never kissed a boy outside of a dare back in Québec, and I think the guys sensed it. Behrad was tall, a bit pudgy in the middle, but he had a fiveo’clock shadow every hour of the day and wore black turtlenecks with white jeans. He looked like a Parasuco model. All the boys I knew at school had smelly, shaggy hair and sang Adam Sandler songs from “SNL” just so they could make the fart noises in unison.

Everyone stood outside the baby changing room, listening. I wouldn’t let him kiss me, but I wanted to brag to my sister. He was twenty and I was seventeen. My sister was always telling me I was a waste of skin. But look at my crew, and the boys who like me. He got frustrated when I kept pushing him off me with a nervous laugh, so he made silly smooching and groaning noises close to the door.

Back at the food court, Ariel, the one white girl in the group, who was chubby like me, asked me to tell her everything. She took pleasure in twenty-yearold Pooyah telling her how beautiful she was. She was sixteen.

“We didn’t kiss,” I said. She laughed. “Whatever.” When Behrad’s friend Sina tried to touch my leg later, I swatted at him like his hand was a hissing gnat.

“Slut,” he muttered under his breath.

Bita stopped going to the mall — her mom grounded her for sneaking away at night to make out with a seventeen-year-old guy who had his own car. Bita said her brother caught her in the act in the Mac’s Milk parking lot.

So Ariel started calling me. We never said anything on the phone except “See you at the mall at three?” “Okay.”

Every day it was the same. She never asked me about Montreal. She didn’t know about my mother’s divorce. She didn’t know my real dad lived overseas. And I never felt compelled to tell her.

I got black platform boots. Black jeans. Men’s Levi’s 501s.

Tight tops from Stitches for $9.99. Dark lip liner with a nude lip colour. Sometimes I’d put glittery eyeshadow from the ’70s that I found in my mom’s makeup kit over the lipstick to create a matte look, and I got a lot of compliments on it. But the eyeshadow tasted like chemicals and stuck to my teeth. I stopped going to Coles or WHSmith. I never tried to retake my lifeguard test. I plucked my Arab eyebrows within an inch of their life.