Out of Nowhere (31 page)

Here’s the thing that really sucked: they’d almost got me believing their story. They’d almost convinced me, despite everything I knew and
felt
about Saeed, that maybe, deep down, he couldn’t be trusted.

Myla and I beat it out of there pretty soon after he turned up. Even the cops didn’t seem to want to hang around when Mrs. Bashir lit into her son. You didn’t need to speak Somali to get her drift, jumping up from the couch and throwing her arms around him when he stepped reluctantly into the living room. Her cries of relief quickly switching to something more like hysterical anger. The universal language of worried, pissed-off moms. No translator required.

I waited until the next day, Sunday, to call him. Did he want to go out, get something to eat? I’d pick him up?

We went to McDonald’s. He loves Big Macs.

It was the same McDonald’s I’d gone to with Donnie the night of the rock. I thought about that as we carried our plastic trays and bags of food to a table. Donnie with his wrinkled flannel shirt that had bits of wood chips sticking to it. He’d partied most of the night, stacked wood all day, then sat here with me to plot more action. Made you wonder: was he incapable of sitting still, or was he afraid to sit still? Was all his restless bouncing from thing to thing beyond his control, or was it a way to keep from thinking too much? Feeling too much? It’s hard to think when there’s a lot of background noise; easy to think when you’re alone and it’s quiet.

He was going to have plenty of quiet time on his hands now. I’d stopped by the hospital on my way to pick up Saeed. They’d moved him out of the intensive care unit, but no one could tell him when he’d get sprung from the hospital.

Saeed seemed tired. He had sunken half-moons beneath his eyes. He told me he’d slept on somebody’s couch the night before, and when the power went out it had gotten cold. He hadn’t known, until he arrived home, that everyone had been worried
about him. He was sorry about that. He was sorry that Myla had had to drive his sister around looking for him.

We’d taken about a dozen ketchup packets, and squirted most of them over our fries. Saeed also got a big Coke. I got a shake.

“Did Samira tell you what happened at the hospital?” I began.

He nodded. He looked out the window.

“How your friend? Don?” he asked.

“Bad,” I said. “I mean, he’ll live. But he’s pretty hurt.”

“He drinking,” Saeed said. Not a question.

“Yeah. He won’t be drinking now. Not for a looong time.” I took a big swig of shake. It was so cold it made the back of my head hurt.

“In Islam, is
haram
. Forbidden. To drink,” he said seriously.

“Not a bad rule,” I said.

“Is good rule,” he said.

I took another pull on the shake.

“Samira didn’t break any rules,” I told him, redirecting the conversational ball.

“Tom. In Islam, there is many, many rules—”

“Samira didn’t break any rules,” I repeated, a bit more slowly.

He sighed. He didn’t seem very interested in his food.

“Samira is a nice girl. She’s smart. She works hard. You know she’s a good kid, Saeed. You know.”

He looked me frankly in the eyes.

“Yes, I know this, Tom.”

“I broke a rule, Saeed. Not her. Okay? She was worried about you, and she was crying, and I … felt bad for her. Like I felt bad for Donnie’s mother. Same thing.”

“Somali girls is different, Tom,” he said quietly.

I threw myself back in the plastic chair. I was hitting a wall here. A glass wall, and I couldn’t figure out how to bust through and make him
hear
me.

“I get that, okay? I know I screwed up. But there is nothing going on between me and your sister, and that picture is a lie. I mean … the picture isn’t a lie. It happened. I hugged her. But the posts and the captions? Total lies. That’s my old girlfriend, Cherisse, making that stuff up.”

“I think she not nice girl,” he said.

I laughed.

“That’s one way to put it.” I wasn’t gonna get into all the other choice adjectives I could’ve used to describe Cherisse. “That’s why I’m not seeing her anymore. I’m going out with Myla now.”

He looked at me skeptically.

“Samira say that. I think, Tom, you with lot of girls.”

“I only go out with one girl at a time. I’m a serial monogamist.” He frowned. Of course he didn’t know what that meant. And why was I making jokes at that point? I think I just wanted to erase the closed, shut-down expression on his face. It was so not the guy I knew.

Saeed pushed his food to one side and leaned forward. His hands on the table formed this little teepee as he spoke.

“Is good that Samira smart. Is good that she work hard. I know these things, Tom, of my sister. But for Somali peoples is one most important thing. And that is religion.”

I nodded.

“Okay. I get that. So …?”

“In Islam, it say woman must not show hair, or the skin, to man outside family. Woman must not touch man outside family.”

“She didn’t. I did. And for the record: she ran.” He nodded gravely.

“Samira say that. I believe, Tom. My sister is … true. But in picture, Tom, she don’t run. And picture is what peoples see.”

And a picture’s worth a thousand words, stupid. In spite of what I know about my sister, and what I know about you, my friend, the world and its pictures tell a different story
.

“What are we gonna do?” I asked him.
About everything. About your sister. About soccer. About this. Misunderstanding, wide as the ocean
.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Is bad. I get message from Ibrahim. He say, ‘What your sister do, Saeed?’ I says to him: ‘Nothing! You know Samira! You know Tom!’ But is just me says that. We have no father. No family here. My mother? She cries and she says she wish we had uncle. Or somebody.” He unwrapped one of the Big Macs. It smelled of onions and special sauce.

“Just keep telling the truth,” I suggested.

Saeed looked me in the eye. He raised one brow skeptically.

“Hmph,” he said, biting into his sandwich. One little
hmph
, which pretty much summed up how well he thought the truth stacked up against what people wanted to believe.

Cherisse didn’t look too happy to see me.

When you hear your name called over the loudspeaker, asking you to report to the main office, you never know what’s up. Sometimes it’s good news, like you left your lunch at home and your mother just dropped it off. But usually … not. A buddy of mine, last year? He got called down in the middle of class to find a cop waiting for him.

“Christopher LeVoie?” they’d asked when he walked in.

“Uh, no, I’m Christian LeVoie,” he explained. They let him go back to class while the main office secretary hunted down Christopher, who, it turned out, had been reported speeding by one of the bus drivers.

So yeah, nobody likes to get called down to the office, so when the conference room door swung open and Cherisse walked in, she wore this expression like she was ready to face the lion in the den. But then she saw me, and her jaw dropped.

I think she would’ve been happier to find a couple of cops. Or a lion.

“Good morning, Miss Ouellette,” Mr. Cockrell said. He was there, too. Along with Mrs. Swift, Mr. Haley (Cherisse’s guidance counselor), Coach, and some black guy named Mr. Aden. I wasn’t sure why he’d been invited. He was slim, dressed like a teacher. Light-skinned, with a long horse face and a thin nose.

“Please, have a seat.” Mr. Cockrell said, gesturing to the empty chair across the table from me.

Cherisse slipped into it without a word.

The girl’s a pro. She knew better than to speak before they asked her a direct question.

A red flush had started at her neck and slowly crept up her cheeks. I glared at her, watching it spread, but amazingly, she could look everywhere in the room except at me. Mr. Cockrell began.

“Cherisse, we have heard a very disturbing report this morning from Tom. He says you’ve been cyberbullying another girl at Chamberlain High School.”

Cherisse’s big, blue, darkly rimmed eyes widened.

“I don’t even know what that is,” she said.

I heard Coach snort.

“It means bullying on the Internet,” Mr. Cockrell explained. “Or on the phone.”

Cherisse shrugged.

“I haven’t bullied anyone. I don’t know what Tommy is talking about.”

There was a cell phone on the table before Mr. Cockrell. Mine. He flipped it open and pointed the screen at Cherisse. Right there on the display was the photo she’d taken of me and Samira, with the caption she’d texted to all her contacts:
Somali slut
.

“This is Tom’s phone. This is a message you sent to Tom
on …” He looked at the date and time. “Saturday at one-thirty in the afternoon.”

She shrugged again.

“So? Is there a law against me sending a photo to my boyfriend? I didn’t send it to
her
. I don’t even know who that girl is! It’s just a joke!”

“I’m
not
your boyfriend” flew out of my mouth. Which wasn’t helpful. Cherisse finally looked at me.

Drop dead
, the big blues said in no uncertain terms.

“Tommy and I are in a fight,” she said evenly. “I sent him that picture to make him mad. That’s all.”

“Then why did practically every other kid in this school get it?” I demanded.

She shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Did you send it?”

I looked around the table, incredulous. The adults were listening carefully to her.

“Are you really that stupid?” I said.

“Tom,” Mr. Cockrell said warningly. “Let’s keep this civil.”

“Every person who got that text can read where it came from, and it came from you,” I continued. I looked around the table. “You guys know how that works, right?”

Before Cherisse came in, I had had to walk them through Facebook as well as basic texting. They’d had no idea you could simultaneously send a message to every contact on your phone. And include a photo. Only Mrs. Swift has her own Facebook page.

Only the Aden guy seemed to understand Facebook. He had no questions about texting.

“Great. Prove it,” she said. “Bring in all their phones. And by
the way, how is it bullying someone if you don’t even know who they are? I mean, do you people know who the girl in the picture is? You can’t even see her face!”

“We don’t know who she is, nor will Tom tell us,” Mrs. Swift explained. “We wanted her in here as well, but he’s afraid that if you learn her identity, you’ll go after her more viciously.”

“I haven’t gone after her at all! I don’t know her!” Cherisse exclaimed.

Mr. Aden spoke.

“I am wondering, Miss Ouellette, if you do not know this girl, why you identify her as Somali?” His accent reminded me of Saeed’s.

“Well, because she’s wearing that head thing,” Cherisse said. “They all wear it. The Somali girls.”

Mr. Aden nodded thoughtfully.

“Most of them do. Some do not. Also, many Sudanese girls wear
hijab
. But you do not write
Sudanese slut
.”

Cherisse rolled her eyes.

“Sudanese, Somali, whatev,” she said. “I don’t know her. All right?”

Mr. Aden leaned back in his chair and glanced at Mr. Cockrell, who reached behind him and picked up a slim laptop. He opened it, gave it a few swift keystrokes, then turned it to face Cherisse. Her Facebook profile was displayed. With the photo and all the comments, which now numbered 108. I had opened it for them before they called her down.

“You seem very interested in discovering the identity of this girl,” Mr. Cockrell said. “And very interested in encouraging cruel, obscene statements about her.”

She sighed.

“Like I said, Tom and I are in a fight. I was jealous, okay? Yeah, I’d like to know who she is. But I don’t. Is it my fault that other people are mean?”

“We are not in a fight!” I fumed. “We are not in anything. There is no ‘we.’ ”

“If this isn’t a fight, then I sure don’t want to be around when you two do get angry with each other,” Mr. Haley commented dryly. The adults laughed, even Coach. Unbelievable.

“Well,” Mr. Cockrell said, “the bottom line is that the remarks are incendiary. They enter the realm of hate speech, and I’m afraid they could lead to some real trouble. Now, Cherisse, even if that wasn’t your intention, you see where it’s led, don’t you?”

Cherisse nodded.

“What do we think needs to happen here?” Mr. Cockrell asked.

“You want me to take down the post? Fine,” Cherisse said. She grabbed hold of the laptop and began to pull it toward her. But this Mr. Aden guy, who sat alongside her, took hold of it himself.

“One moment,” he said. He rummaged in a battered brown briefcase at his feet and pulled out a thumb drive.

“Before the young lady deletes her post, I would like to make a screen capture.” He looked at Mr. Cockrell, who nodded.

As Mr. Aden saved Cherisse’s wall post—it took a while because he scrolled through all the comments and saved them, too—Mrs. Swift spoke up.

“What about the phone messages?” she said. “Even if you erase the Facebook post, those messages are still out there, and every
person who received them could resend that picture to someone else, who can then send it to someone else …”

“There’s no way to delete texts that have already been sent,” I explained to her. “Nice job.” I directed my last comment at Cherisse.

“It was just a joke!” she repeated. “It’s not my fault if other people are mean!”

“So what’s
your
excuse?” Coach said angrily to her. “You know, every day I ask my boys to step up. To set an example. To be tolerant of others and work hard to be a community. I’m pretty damn proud of what they’ve accomplished; it hasn’t been easy. So it pisses the hell out of me that that this sort of mean-girl crap, directed at someone you only identify as ‘Somali,’ could undo everything we’ve worked for. Pardon my language, folks. But this is bullying. Racial bullying, if you ask me.”

Everybody started speaking at once. Mr. Haley couldn’t seem to get his head around either the bullying concept—“How can you bully someone you don’t know?”—or global texting. Mrs. Swift wanted to figure out how to kill the image on the phone. Mr. Cockrell was asking Coach if he thought Cherisse should be suspended, because if so, there were very clear procedures. Mr. Aden seemed very preoccupied with copying all the comments on the Facebook post.