Free I Love I Hate I Miss My Sister by Amelie Sarn Page A

our elbows on the dining table.
    “Is this all because of your head scarf?” Mom asked.
    “Yes, Mom.”
    “Then you have to remove it, Sohane. You have to remove this scarf. You’ll have all the time you want to wear it later on. Lots of women wait until they get married. You know that.”
    “I’m not sure I want to get married, Mom,” I answered, rolling my eyes, trying to lighten the mood. Djelila laughed.
    “This is not funny!” Mom scolded us. “It’s very serious. What will you do if they expel you, tell me?”
    I sighed. “There are other ways, Mom. Correspondence courses, for instance.”
    I had thought about it all afternoon, in the library.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Long-distance teaching. You receive your courses by mail and you work from home—”
    “Is it as good as real school?”
    Mom stopped going to school when she finished tenth grade, after she had repeated it twice, if not three times. She’s never talked much about that period of her life, only to tell us not to follow in her footsteps. “Education is your best friend, girls. Don’t forget it,” she always said.
    “It’s exactly the same,” Djelila answered for me. “The only difference is that you don’t see the teachers. You receive the courses by mail, you send them your homework, they grade it, and they send it back to you marked up.”
    “And you can get your diploma this way?”
    I smiled. “Yes, Mom. I can get my diploma.”
    “Well, I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be simpler to continue at Racine?”
    “They don’t want me there anymore, Mom.”
    Dad came home at that moment. Right away he noticed that something was wrong: Djelila, Mom, and I were talking around the dining table, which seldom happened.
    “What is going on?” he asked as he took off his jacket.
    Mom shot me a look, which said it all: You tell him. I don’t have the courage .
    “I went to school with a head scarf this morning, and the teachers don’t want me in their classes anymore,” I explained. “They’re talking about having me expelled.”
    Dad didn’t seem to understand. “Your scarf?”
    “Yes, I decided to cover my head,” I told him.
    Dad frowned. “So they want to expel you for that? You? One of their best students?”
    Dad is unwavering in his beliefs that Djelila is the most beautiful girl on earth and that I’m the most intelligent one.
    I sighed. “I’m not the best student at school, Dad.”
    “Are you telling me that they have a lot of students with grades as good as yours?”
    “That’s not the issue, Dad. They’re talking about expelling me.”
    “Because you wore a scarf on your head? They can’t kick you out because you cover your head, Sohane, it’s impossible! Not because of a head scarf! What’s wrong with your scarf, anyway?”
    “They don’t want any religious symbols in school. There’s a law—and it includes head scarves.”
    “What business is it of theirs? You’re not trying to convert your classmates to Islam, are you?”
    I shook my head.
    “So do they have a problem because you’re Arab?”
    “I’m not Arab, Dad. I’m French. And so are you!”
    I had no idea how he would react to the situation, but his temper surprised me. Dad had never seemed compelled to follow the teachings of the Koran. He prayed, like Mom, like me, like Djelila. And until last year, he observed Ramadan, talked sometimes about making the pilgrimage to Mecca, and went to the mosque as often as possible, but he had never asked Mom to cover her head.
    “Your uncle Ahmed is right,” Dad muttered. “The French don’t want us anymore. They were very happy to have us in the past to fill the ranks of their armies and to do cheap labor, but now they don’t want our children.”
    Mom disappeared into the kitchen.
    “They called a while ago to ask you and Mom to come to school tomorrow and meet with the school advisor and the principal.”
    “What for?”
    “They want to explain why I’m not allowed to wear a head