The Badboy, the Catfish & Me

Six

"Your dad really says 'kiddo'? That's so White," Salah said, putting the sticker Ameena gave her on her wrist. I had finished telling her and Ameena the next morning at homeroom about how lax my dad was compared to my mom.

Ameena looked at me for my reaction, handing me a sticker, too.

"Well, he is." I copied Salah and put it on my wrist. It was easy for me to blend in with Salah's Bangladeshi and Ameena's Pakistani looks—wearing a hijab was enough to cover up my dad's whiteness, which would've made me fit in with the rest of the school. And my lighter skin tone matched Ameena's, and she was Pakistani. "My mom says it sometimes, too."

"How is your last name Muhammad, then?" Ameena asked, her brows raised slightly. It was a little hard to take her seriously at the moment—she had a flower sticker on each of her cheeks. "Shouldn't it be something like...Smith?"

I grasped the front of my stool, feeling a sort of pressure in my chest. Was it happiness? Relief? I always preferred to talk about school or listen to Salah or Ameena talk about their lives, but last night's adventuring with Valentino made me open up to the two—similar to how my relationship with him was finally scratching beyond the surface of classmates because of Tireya.

"Well, my mom's parents chose my last name. They didn't want me to have my dad's last name, which is Stonewell. That's what my mom said, anyway."

"Half-white, half-brown—" Salah stopped to think, "you're the O.G. chocolate milk."

My lips curled into a smile at this.

"What do you call your parents?" Ameena asked. "Mom and Dad?"

"No. I call my mom "mama" since my dad's family is from Texas, and that's common there. And I call my dad "baba" because that's how my mom says dad in Bengali. I guess it's like our last effort to keep as much culture in the house since we don't do anything else. My mom didn't teach me Bengali, so I don't," I added, my lips pressed into a thin line in a hint of regret. "I only know some words here and there."

"Oh, everyone in my family knows how to speak Urdu fluently," Ameena said.

"I've seen a lot of pictures from when my mom was younger wearing traditional clothing. But I don't know anything about that part of her life at all...." My voice trailed off. "Maybe I'm too White, and she's raising me without the culture because of it."

"No way." The annoyance in Salah's words startled me. "Whatever the reason, don't think that, Inaya. My younger siblings can't speak much Bangla, and they're a hundred percent brown."

"Really?" my eyes widened. "They don't speak it either?"

Salah nodded and quickly texted something on her phone before focusing on me again. "Maybe it's time we accept that people can still be a part of a culture even though they can't speak the language," she said. "I mean, it's pretty normal for immigrant and interracial kids."

Coming from Salah, who shared my mom's Bengali culture, made my chest swell with happiness.

"Yeah, you're right!" I laughed. "Do you say your Bengali or Bangladeshi?"

"Huh." Salah twisted her lips in thought. "Well, the British cut Bengal into two countries, so Bengali is the ethnicity, and Bangladeshi is the nationality. The other nationality is Indian. Girl, we learned this in history class."

I bit my lip, red-faced. "I just wanted to hear it from a Bangladeshi person, not a textbook," I mumbled.

"You must have your dad's eyes," Ameena said. "Yours are lighter than ours."

Salah leaned closer to look, squinting her eyes and placing a hand on her chin in exaggeration.

I opened my mouth to say something but stopped when I noticed Valentino walking over to sit in his seat. I felt a blush creep up my neck—thankfully covered under my hijab.