Brilliant by Denise Roig Page A

gold colour, but stay raw. Then Rodriguez laugh and laugh and take me into bed and love me like he use to.
    â€œYou cry.” Paulina shake me.
    â€œRodriguez,” I say. Bed on top blocks ceiling, can see nothing.
    â€œSex good?” say Paulina and laugh big.
    I hurt for that man, that boy. And then Carmela come and Emeline and new quiet one, Daisy. They smile and smile and come close so we all under top bed like tent.
    â€œI make coffee,” say Carmela and slap my cheek.
    > <
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    Eiman likes the ones with rubies on the heel. They go all the way down, a dozen on each four-inch spike. “I want those,” she says, pointing. I say, no, too much bling, and she gives me her sour Victoria Beckham face. We’re not looking at the same magazine. I have
Seventeen
; she has
Vogue
. Because she is five years older, she gets the serious fashion magazine. Now that she’s getting married to our cousin, Salman, she is the only female in the household anyone cares about. My nanny listens to her more than me.
    â€œIt’s going to her head,” I say to Mother. “She’s acting like a sheikha.” What I mean is bitch, but Mother won’t tolerate that language from us, though she uses the word plenty with the maids.
    Mother has come down earlier than usual to the breakfast room. Now that she’s decided to get her degree (“Art history, what is art history?” my father said. “Why do you need to know this?”), her hours are more like ours, school hours. Her
abaya
is open over the size zero jeans she bought in London, her hair up in a sequin clip, face already perfectly made up. No one believes she is almost forty.
    She claps her hands. “Fatima, why are you standing around looking like an idiot?” Fatima, tiny in her pink headscarf and blue uniform, slippers quickly out of the room. Mother turns back to the table, sizing us up. I slump lower over my magazine. “Sit up straight!” she thumps Eiman on the back.
    â€œHey!” growls Eiman. “I’m the good daughter, remember? I’m the one you love.” And she gives me a get-even look.
    â€œI love all my children, you know that,” says Mother.
    â€œEven Rashid?” I ask.
    â€œEven Rashid.” She sighs, thinking maybe how our little brother still wets his bed though he is ten, how he’s made four nannies quit. She snaps her fingers and Sami, one of the drivers, comes into the breakfast room.
    â€œMadame?” he says.
    Mother looks at her watch. “Al Zaabi Bakery at 10:00 a.m. Pick up the
maamoul
. Tell them we pay next week.” She waves him away. “I wish these people spoke better Arabic. You’d think after twenty years, thirty years, they would learn.”
    She’s been saying this for as long as I can remember, even about Sami, who speaks fine Arabic. And it’s only gotten worse, with all of us — me, Eiman, Rashid, Hassan and Sultan — speaking English not just to our nannies, but to each other. “Our language is dying!” Mother likes to say, looking tragic.
    But the preservation of Arabic is not at the top of her agenda this morning. Ellen, her professor at the university, is coming over for a tutoring session.
    â€œI didn’t know professors made house calls,” says Eiman, flipping through pages of
Vogue
ads. She’s preparing her exams for a degree in business at Al Ain University. She can’t wait to move out. Of course, marriage will take care of that too.
    â€œYour father talked to the president of the university,” Mother says, picking up a small corner of unbuttered toast and frowning at it.
    â€œSo you don’t even have to show up for class?” I ask. I’ve already caused a few disturbances among my friends. “A degree is useless if we don’t earn it,” I keep telling them. “For sure it’s useless out
there
.” But most of them don’t care. They’ll get