She started a blog that no one read. She scrapped it and began a new one, which she called Pumpkinface. “I’m going to continue blogging as usual the last one didn’t go that well sooo I’m going to concentrate my efforts on this one hahahahahaahahaha sorry I just realized that … nope I’ve forgotten.…. . buuuuut I’ve been thinking that I should blog more sooo I’m going to blog exactly what I’m thinking about unless I forget it because that can happen, my cousin calls me goldfish brain because I forget things so quickly.” No one read that blog either.
Cliques formed quickly among the girls in the class, and these set the agenda for what and who was cool and trendy, what was noteworthy and what ridiculous, who was classy and who was not.
Leila did not fit into any gang. On rare occasions, like when they had group homework, she did go to other pupils’ homes. Then they would have to keep the dog locked up if they had one, because Leila could not be near dogs, it was haram, a word the rest of the class learned early on. Haram = not allowed. Halal = allowed. Leila knew a lot, because she went to Koran school, and she was also in some Muslim organization or other in Oslo together with her sister. She carried a little red book in her bag with hadith sayings and stories about Muhammad. So passed the first year of lower secondary school.
Then summer came. While the rest of the class returned slightly more tanned and slightly taller than before, Leila had changed completely. The summer vacation she had spent with her extended family in Somaliland had led to her discarding the green trousers and red sweaters, and she turned up at school in a long skirt. Soon she began wearing a long cape and a matching hijab in colors blending with the autumn around.
“Why do you wear that?” a girl asked.
“It was given to me,” she replied.
The congregation bought it for her, the girl told her classmates.
Those who knew Leila’s sister, Ayan, had noticed a similar change. Everything was dark, plain, and dull. In autumn, Leila wore athletic shoes in muted tones; in winter, she switched to hiking boots, like the boys in the class wore, except that hers were in fake leather. Not exactly the nicest type either, the girls agreed.
In cooking class, she was excused from making anything containing pork and exempted from eating meat that was not halal. The pupils in her group always made two desserts if the one on the menu contained gelatin. The stiffener was made from the skin, bones, and tissue of pig, which was not halal, the class learned.
One time the group she was in received good marks for their work and the boy sitting next to her raised his hand for a high five. Leila stared fixedly at him. He understood. Of course, palm against palm was haram.
On another occasion a boy who had forgotten his pencil case asked to borrow a pen. She said, “All right, but then I can’t ever use it again.”
He did not quite understand. Before she tossed it to him, she said, “Just keep it. I can’t touch anything you’ve handled.”
Another time a classmate, overjoyed at something, had hugged the person closest to him—who happened to be Leila—and she had broken free and shouted, “Don’t ever do that again!”
“Oh, sorry, I’m really sorry…” he stammered. He had not meant to offend her.
“If a boy touches me here,” Leila pointed, “it is like getting a nail through my arm. If someone hugs me, it is like getting ten nails through my head.”
When the bell rang, she had to make it to her next class early to avoid the throng, so as not to risk bumping into a boy.
She no longer took part in extracurricular activities. Although she turned up for gym class, she refused to take part in ball games where there was a chance of her being tackled by a boy. She also rejected swimming, as she could not show herself in that state of undress, and dance and gymnastics, as they were haram.
So passed the second year of lower secondary school.
On the first day of their final year, her classmates returned more tanned and with sun-bleached hair. Leila arrived in a niqab.
Some of the boys laughed. When she went to the back of the classroom to pray, they took photos of her. “She’s not right in the head,” one said. They started calling her the Phantom Blot.
Nobody had seen her praying at school the year before. Now she was preoccupied with respecting prayer times and wore an alarm clock on a belt that vibrated when it was time to pray. If it went off during class, she put her hand up and asked permission to go out.
The teachers were uncertain how to tackle this newfound piety: Some allowed her to leave the room when she asked, while others did not. The school’s attitude was that it was important to accommodate diversity. After a while she was designated a place to pray, a supply closet in the corridor. She was loaned a key to unlock the door and came back when she was finished. Sometimes she just went to the back of the classroom, faced Mecca, rolled out her prayer mat, kneeled, and mumbled her supplications. She followed the clock slavishly and interrupted both pupil presentations and tests in order to pray.
If music was played, she would leave the classroom. If a film was shown, she went out too. When they were role-playing, she declined to participate because she could not pretend to be someone other than who she was. That was also haram. She deleted the account she’d set up as Leila on Facebook and established a new profile, calling herself Bintu Sadiq—Sadiq’s daughter—and posted exclusively religious texts.
A staff meeting was held. The principal was very much in favor of inclusivity: “That has always been our focus
