But Tina Hakim Baba sure knows. You should see her room. She must have every women’s magazine ever printed. They are in order on shelves all around her room, which, by the way, is huge and pink, much like the rest of her apartment, which takes up the entire top floor of her building. You hit PH on the elevator buttons, and the elevator opens in the Hakim Babas’ marble foyer, which really does have a fountain, only you’re not supposed to throw pennies in it, I found out.
And then there’s just room after room after room. They have a maid, a cook, a nanny, and a driver, all of whom live in. So you can imagine how many rooms there are, on top of the fact that Tina has three little sisters and a baby brother, and all ofthem have their own rooms, too.
Tina’s room has its own 37-inch TV with a Sony PlayStation. I can see now that I have been living a life of monastic simplicity compared to Tina.
Some people have all the luck.
Anyway, Tina is a lot different at home than she is at school. At home, she’s totally bubbly and outgoing. Her parents are pretty nice, too. Mr. Hakim Baba is really funny. He had a heart attack last year and isn’t allowed to eat practically anything but vegetables and rice. He has to lose twenty more pounds. He kept pinching my arm and going, "How do you stay so skinny?" I told him about my strict vegetarianism, and he went, "Oh," and shuddered really hard. The Hakim Babas’ cook has orders to prepare only vegetarian meals, which was good for me. We had couscous and vegetable goulash. It was all quite delicious.
Mrs. Hakim Baba is beautiful, but in a different way than my mom. Mrs. Hakim Baba is British and very blond. I think she’s pretty bored, living here in America and not having a job and all. Mrs. Hakim Baba used to be a model, but she quit when she got married. Now she doesn’t get to meet all the interesting people she used to meet when she was modeling. She once stayed in the same hotel as Prince Charles and Princess Diana. She says they slept in separate bedrooms. And that was on their honeymoon!
No wonder things didn’t work out between them.
Mrs. Hakim Baba is as tall as me, which makes her about five inches taller than Mr. Hakim Baba. But I don’t think Mr. Hakim Baba minds.
Tina’s little sisters and brother are really cute. After we messed around with the fashion magazines, looking up hairstyles, we tried some of them out on Tina’s sisters. They looked pretty funny. Then we put butterfly clips in Tina’s little brother’s hair and gave him a French manicure like mine, and he got very excited and changed into his Batman suit and ran around the apartment, screaming. I thought it was cute, but Mr. and Mrs. Hakim Baba didn’t think so. They made the nanny put little Bobby Hakim Baba to bed right after dinner.
Then Tina showed me her dress for tomorrow. It’s a Nicole Miller. It’s so pretty, like sea foam. Tina Hakim Baba looks much more like a princess than I ever could.
Then it was time forLilly Tells It Like It Is, which comes on on Friday nights at nine. This was the episode dedicated to exposing the unjust racism at Ho’s Deli. It was filmed before Lilly called off the boycott due to lack of interest. It was a very hard-hitting piece of television news journalism, and I can say that without bragging, since I wasn’t involved in its creation. IfLilly Tells It Like It Is ever went network, I bet it would be as highly rated as60 Minutes.
At the end, Lilly came on and did a segment she must have shot the night before, with a tripod in her bedroom. She sat on her bed and said that racism is a powerful force of evil that all of us must work to combat. She said that even though paying five cents more for a bag of gingko biloba rings might not seem like much to some of us, victims of real racism, like the Armenians and the Rwandans and the Ugandans and the Bosnians, would recognize that that five cents was only the first step on the road to genocide. Lilly went on to say that because of her daring stand against the Hos there was a little bit more justice on the side of right today.
I don’t know about that, but I did sort of start to miss her when she waggled her feet, in their furry bear claw slippers, into the camera as a tribute to Norman. Tina is a fun friend and everything, but I’ve known Lilly since kindergarten. It’s kind of hard to forget that.
We stayed up really late reading Tina’s teenage love novels. I swear, there wasn’t a single one where the boy broke up with a snotty girl and started going out with the heroine right away. Usually he waited a tactful amount of time, like a summer or at least a weekend, before asking her out. The only ones with a guy who started going out with the heroine right away turned out to be ones where the guy was just using the girl to get revenge or something.
But then Tina said even though she loves reading those books, she never takes them as a guide to real life. Because how many times in real life does anybody ever get amnesia? And when do cute young European terrorists ever take anybody hostage in the girls’ locker room? And if they did, wouldn’t it be on the day when you’re wearing your worst underwear, the kind with the holes and loose elastic, and a bra that doesn’t match, and not a pink silk camisole and tap pants, like the heroine of that particular book?
She has a point.
Tina’s turning out the light now, because she’s tired. I’m glad. It’s been a long day.
Saturday, October 18
When I got home, the first thing I did was check to make sure Josh hadn’t called to cancel.
He hadn’t.
Mr. Gianini was there, though (of course). This time he had pants on, thank God. When he heard me ask my mom if a boy named Josh had called, he was all, "You don’t mean Josh Richter, do you?"
I got kind of mad, because he sounded . . . I don’t know. Shocked or something.
I said, "Yes, I mean Josh Richter. He and I are going to the Cultural Diversity Dance tonight."
Mr. Gianini raised his eyebrows. "What about that Weinberger girl?"
It kind of sucks to have a parent who’s dating a teacher in your school. I went, "They broke up."
My mom was watching us pretty closely, which is unusual for her, since most of the time she’s in her own world. She went, "Who’s Josh Richter?"
And I went, "Only the cutest, most sensitive boy in school."
Mr. Gianini snorted and said, "Well, most popular, anyway."
To which my mom replied, with a lot of surprise, "And he askedMia to the dance?"