No True Believers - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rabiah York Lumbard is an award-winning author of the picture book, The Conference of the Birds. After embracing Islam at the age of eighteen, she earned a BA in Religious Studies from George Washington University and is currently completing her MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University. No True Believers is Rabiah's deeply-personal debut novel which draws on her own experience as an America Muslim at home and abroad. She lives in Doha with her husband and their three daughters. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook, or visit her at rabiahyorklumbard.com.

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1

We never see the world exactly as it is. We see it through whatever lens we choose. I never understood the difference until that sunny Thursday afternoon, the last day of April, when I stood face to face with Mariam in her driveway. In that moment the world became clear in all its stark ugliness. I was losing my best friend. Mariam Muhammad: my soul sister, lifelong neighbor, and general co-conspirator in all things. 

My eyes fell to the driveway. It was ridiculous; even the pavement made me want to cry. We’d played hopscotch here. And there was no use spinning it as “Oh, she’ll come back to Arlington all the time.” We knew better, both of us. Seeing each other from now on would involve passports and expensive airfares, clearances and checkpoints. Also, eight time zones. The truth was that she wasn’t moving. She was fleeing. She and her whole family were now refugees--off to Dubai, the new Promised Land--an escape from Mason Terrace, a cul-de-sac so ridiculously safe and suburban that local real estate sites featured it to prove the entire neighborhood’s safety and suburban-ness.

Comical, if it weren’t so depressingly false.

When I looked up, Mariam was smiling, of course. Mariam the brave. Mariam the good. Cheery in the face of stress and sorrow. I lurched forward to hug her, the bright side of the Salma-Mariam moon. We were a unit in that way: visible yet detached, maybe a bit mysterious (we hoped)? Yes, we’d stay in touch. Through Twitter or WhatsApp or whatever. “Even old-fashioned letters!” she’d said. Mariam wouldn’t let me slide, even though videoconferencing was illegal in the UAE. Which didn’t help diminish the sudden and intense loneliness. Our moon would be all darkness now. 

How am I going to survive the rest of senior year at Franklin without you?

“It’s going to be okay, Salma,” Mariam whispered in my ear.

I stepped away, wiping my eyes. “Can’t you just stay through till the weekend, till the grand fundraiser? I was thinking of raiding the mosque’s funds. Pay off your parents’ mortgage or at least get y’all a ticket for later in the month. I’ve never celebrated an Eid without you.” 

“Yeah, pretty sure stealing from the masjid won’t go over too well with the Lord of the worlds,” she joked, trying to snap me out of my funk. “Besides, if you wanted me to stay that badly, you should have hacked into Air Emirates. Gotten us cheaper tickets.” 

If you only knew, I thought miserably. 

“Hey, look at it this way. Now you get to spend more time with Amir.” Mariam gave my hand a final squeeze. “And that brother is way too cute for you to be so sad.” 

She was right about that, at least.

Amir and I began several months ago at one of Vanessa Richman’s legendary “Hey, my parents are out of town” parties. We were packed in the basement with thirty other kids from Franklin, mostly Vanessa’s friends, though I’d brought a couple of mine: the usual twosome, Lisa and Kerry. Or as they jokingly referred to themselves, “Dora and Boots.” 

Lisa de la Pena happened to be my physical therapist’s daughter, but she had recently become my go-to party pal. Kerry Morrison, a willowy redhead with a Southern cowgirl style, was basically Lisa’s Mariam: like Mariam and me, they were a unit, BFFs since toddlerhood. The self-made Dora the Explorer nickname came in middle school. Apparently Kerry had come up with it after some idiots had bullied Lisa for being Latinx and accused her of being an “illegal.” (According to Lisa, Kerry was also unafraid to use her cowboy boots for “butt-whoopings” of bullying idiots, though I’d never seen her be anything but likeably goofy.) 

Mariam’s parents had a sixth sense about parties and road trips and generally all things “haram”--so as far as Mariam was concerned, Vanessa’s place was never an option. But Lisa and Kerry were always game. 

Point being: It’s always better to arrive with a posse. And Lisa and Kerry were in fine form that night. Maybe that’s why I was already feeling more comfortable than usual. Plus, after months of hounding, I’d finally convinced Vanessa to screen Fight Club for the obligatory 72-inch surround-sound feature presentation. I’d claimed I had a shameless crush on Edward Norton. Which wasn’t false. (He always looks so lost and vulnerable.) But the secret truth was that I’d wanted to share with Vanessa--a less judgmental friend than Mariam, I admit--this treasure I’d only recently discovered on the more secure chatrooms. Fight Club was the cult classic every hardcore anonymous online activist revered. 

As it turned out, Vanessa had been hiding a hidden agenda of her own. 

“I know a boy who loves that movie as much as you,” she’d told me the moment I arrived. 

In typical Vanessa fashion, she refused to say who. But I forgot all about this mysterious boy once the movie started. Ten minutes in, the keg suddenly arrived. At first I thought it was a shared aversion to cheap beer; Amir ended up being the only other warm body to remain in the basement. We’d always been a part of the same social scene, the circles of friends that orbited around Vanessa. But I would have never pegged him as a fellow Fight Club fan. He didn’t exactly give off that vibe. He gave off the opposite, in fact--a hippie-hipster musician, with an old-school guitar pick and feather dangling from a slim black cord around his neck. Then again, I, of all people, should have known how deceiving looks could be . . . and his looks are fine. 

I couldn’t help but sneak glances. He kept tucking loose strands of that thick, dark hair behind his ears. And he was definitely a Fight Club fan. He was whispering the lines. 

Eventually I stopped paying attention to the movie. 

I didn’t care how obvious I was being, staring at him. I couldn’t get over it. I couldn’t believe this boy I’d known but not known was a kindred spirit. But how kindred? Message-wise, the film was timeless. Take the general social commentary and apply it to Snapchat: As outward tastes are being engineered, so, too, our inward bigotries. Bam! Mind blown. 

I wanted to test Amir. Test his knowledge. I scooched down the couch, just a tad, to better hear him. 

He murmured another line. Perfectly. 

I made a point to whisper the next line with him. 

He did the same. All of a sudden we were in a quote-for-quote competition. He inched toward me, too. Soon it felt like we weren’t even at Vanessa’s at all, like there wasn’t a party upstairs. I started to laugh. 

“What’s so funny?” he asked me. 

“That you know every line of this movie.” 

He turned with a smile and leaned even closer, as if he were letting me in on a secret. “It’s not the movie. It’s Edward Norton. I love that guy.” 

In that moment I was so Amir-struck that I almost forgot that we were speaking. I nodded mutely and stared back into his dark eyes . . . vulnerable maybe, but not lost. Then we turned back to the screen and sat snuggled against each other like that right up until the crucial scene where the two main characters, Tyler Durden (Norton) and Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) hold hands and watch their world collapse. “You met me at a very strange time in my life,” says Tyler Durden.

I turned to Amir. Without warning, he leaned...