I, The Divine

~ ~ ~

Nineteen seventy-three was a strange year. I cut my hair short, which drove my stepmother crazy. The Lebanese army went nuts and started bombing the PLO, a harbinger of things to come. I left those wacky Carmelite nuns and entered an American-bankrolled school where I was the only girl in the whole class. I also met Fadi, who changed my life forever.

I had always been a little odd, which people blamed on my mother, but she was not at fault. My sisters were normal. People could not blame my father. My half-sisters turned out to be more normal than normal. Except for being gay, my little brother was probably the most normal of us all. I was the strange one.

When I was little, we had a nanny from the Seychelles named Violet. I remember her showing us a picture of her family — her parents and all her sisters. I pointed out a white girl in the picture and asked Violet who she was. She said that was her sister. Surprised, I asked how that could be. She said, “My mother went astray.” That sentence stuck with me. I had always thought my mother “went astray” when conceiving me.

I was different, but not nearly in Fadi’s league. We met my first day in class. I arrived ready for battle in jeans and sweatshirt, prepared to fight any boy who dared make fun of me. Fadi did. When I sat behind him, he turned and whispered, “If you’re a lesbian, I know just the right bar for you.” My mouth dropped. The boys were supposed to be the crème de la crème. How had this boy slipped through?

He was disarming. His face had a combination of mischief and innocence that to this day I find attractive. He was not handsome, but an unearthly intelligence shone in his eyes. Years later they would dull, and after the gendarmes beat him senseless, an eye patch would cover one of them. He became a shell of his former self, a walking shadow. I try to remember him as he was at fourteen, the boy who turned my world upside down.