"Mother Mary wore a head covering. Shouldn't you be striving toward holiness like her?" Rabia said, pushing me toward her room.

"Yeah, but dude, it's over a hundred outside. And I'm not even Muslim. Isn't this considered offensive or something?" I picked up a perfume bottle and smelled it. "Oh, I wear Clinique too…" I trailed off. Her dresser was littered with Rollo wrappers and hairclips and eyeshadow dust.

"Don't worry about it." She took the bottle from me and put it back in its place. The rosy liquid sloshed around inside before finally settling. Sometimes my stomach feels like that. "You're so pale you could pass for an Arab."

I couldn't argue with that. I gingerly changed out of my heathen short-shorts and tank top and into borrowed long sleeves and jeans and put on the headband thing that goes underneath a hijab, whatever those are called. Rabia got to work fastening the scarf on. Her name translates to "anger" in Spanish and it suddenly seemed very fitting with the way she was sticking pins into my head. Do they believe in voodoo dolls in the Middle East?

"Where do you get these things anyway?" I touched a few of the tassels on the end of the scarf as she fastened it around my scalp. It had glitter thread woven in.

"This one's from Forever 21, but you know, wherever you buy scarves and stuff. Target, Wet Seal…Jordan."  Her words slipped out muffled between the pins in her mouth.

Rabia and I have been friends since the third grade, with the degree of closeness looking a little like a line graph of the national deficit. Lately we have been heading into the Obama administration. She lives in the old Prosperity Bank building with her parents and five little brothers and sisters. The kids at school used to always ask if she found leftover money in the vault, if that's any indicator of what type of town we were raised in.

She wrestled with the last pin. "And…all done." She turned me around to look at me and smiled. "You look good! Almost like a real Arab."

I smiled. We had been getting ready to go to Lake Jackson, the nearest city at thirty miles away, to mail back a car part, a replacement oil pan that I ended up not needing. Earlier we had tried to stuff it in the Fed-Ex drop-off box in front of Pizza Hut but had no luck.

"Um, we should probably take your car…" She glanced across the street at her parents' gas station.

"Yeah, I don't think they're going to go for this." My car let out a feeble "meep" as I clicked the "unlock" button on my key. I really need to change the batteries in that thing. You literally have to stand next to it for it to work.

During our last year in high school Rabia got a white boyfriend and started lying to her parents a lot. Her foundation cracked at the worry lines on her face and her mascara got a little too heavy. They fought all the time, her and her boyfriend I mean, but they would always somehow work it out through whatever sexually frustrated Muslim kids and their convert friends do when they can't actually have sex; wallah, wallah, they'd say, and the whole cycle would start over again. One night her parents caught them sitting side by side and watching a movie, her hair still covered and both of them sitting a foot apart, and her dad punched him in the face. Since then she's been bugged. She keeps ripping out the tracking devices in her car and they just keep hiding them better. Even her cellphone, which she had long since gotten rid of, had been bugged.

"Let's go by Buc-ee's." I climbed in and started the ignition. She was already seated on the passenger side. "I need gas and it'll be fun to scare the rednecks. Terrorists and all that." We were on the highway now.

"What? You know how pissed my parents would be if they knew we were supporting the enemy?" She grabbed my cellphone in my lap and started clicking through something on the screen. I looked at her. "Ooh, who's this texting, your future husband?" she said in an overly-exaggerated Arabian accent.

"No, what, give me that," I said, glaring at her and reached for my phone. "And if they didn't charge so much, maybe I could afford their gas."

Her parents moved out of the dinky gas station with the broken yellow STOP-N-GO sign a few years ago and into a bigger, fancier gas station next door that was meant to take on Buc-ees. They didn't really pose a serious threat since Beaver is from the area and the Buc is THE place to be getting your gas and supporting America, but they liked to think they did. Actually, everyone that remembers him from high school says he was a jerk. But both of us were employed by her parents and were expected to buy their gas.

We pulled up and I got out. Rabia rolled down her window.

"Rabia, look at that guy," I motioned at him with one hand as I slid my debit card through the reader with the other. "He looks so weirded out." He was walking across the lot and back to his truck and kept nervously looking in our direction.

"This feels so traitorous," she hissed, sticking her head out the window and looking around, eyes wide.

"Yeah, well, I have to get the full experience, don't I? This thing is actually really comfortable. Wish my bangs could hang out, though. It's a little breezy without them. Man,  being in this, people really stare at you, don't they?" I selected my fuel grade.

"You stop noticing after awhile." She was fiddling with my phone again, probably texting her boyfriend or close guy friend or whatever you want to call him.

"Yeah… I just had no idea it was this bad still." The pump clicked and I got back into the car.

The her being bugged thing had started to creep into and infect our work lives. The phone at work is tapped and nobody is allowed to have cell phones, even if they're off. Her parents asked me the other day where my phone was. I told them that I leave it at home and didn't think much of it, but when I got home I saw that I had two missed calls from their house, as if they were trying to catch me with it on at work. If you go into the back of the store, you can see all of the camera's running at once. There must be about thirty little screens on the monitor, and the zoom works so well that you can see people sitting inside their cars in the parking lot, picking their nose or putting on makeup, having a conversation. They don't know they're being watched. You can also see straight into Rabia's house across the street, through the window and into the living room, where her mom sits on the couch and watches Turkish soap operas, talking on the phone to her sisters back in Jordan. I guess those conversations are recorded too.

We were almost there now. You measure distance out here by the different landmarks you pass. Silos, cow pastures. Flashing yellow lights in the middle of nowhere.

"I bought this German car because they killed the Jews!" I joked in a fake Arabian accent, breaking the silence.

That got her and we couldn't stop laughing. We talked about a lot of things, but mostly her parents.

"You know, I'm thinking of taking this off." She motioned at her hijab. "I feel like I started wearing it for the wrong reasons. But I'm afraid if I took it off, my little sisters would judge me. They're so young and started wearing it out of devotion and I wear it for that, but also for political reasons."

"Like what?" I said.

"After the dispute between Palestine and Israel got publicized, I wanted to be able to physically show my support. I feel like I have to be a different person when I wear it, though, like I'm a face for the entire Muslim community." She shifted back in her seat. "I mean, we're the only ones down here, just about. The only Middle Easterners, at least. I feel like if I smile and am nice to people, they'll realize that we're not all bad."

"Yeah, but you shouldn't feel responsible for the whole county's opinions about Muslims. I mean, you can do what you can and be nice to people in your own way, but you can't change a bunch of redneck's opinions about Islam when they're associating it mostly with how people look." We were almost to Office Max. I shrugged. "Just don't let it stress you out. It's a personal choice and it shouldn't have to do with convincing anybody of anything."

"Yeah…okay."

I pulled into a parking space and we got out.

"I don't know how you don't wither and die under all these layers," I said, stretching my arms into the air. The flying bird print near the bottom of the shirt was starting to stick to my stomach with sweat. I peeled it up. "Really. Especially during Ramadan, I don't know how you make it without water."

"Faith, Sarah, faith!" she said, imitating her mother. She reached into the back seat. "Now let us go mail this anthrax package to Crawford Ranch."


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very rough as in, very, very rough. tenses are off, but i'll fix those in the morning. justin helped me a little today, picking out some things, so i tried to go back and flesh it all out a bit more. iuno what's wrong with me today, i just did not have my heart in this but hopefully it's not the worst thing we read in class tomorrow. let me know what you think since i'll have time to work on it some more tomorrow afternoon. thanks.