It’s Halloween, 2019, and Asiya Huda Ahmed is not going to her friend’s party in costume – though to the world, it certainly does not look that way. She looks nothing like herself. She’s wearing something different, something that makes her look… well, she’s not sure what it makes her look like yet. She still can’t tell if it’s good or bad.
On her way out the door, she grabs her plush penguin Gökçe, whom she named after a gentle-hearted warrior woman from a Turkish drama. Then she heads down to the garage, where her mom is already waiting in the car.
All through the drive to the little farmhouse in Cary, she worries. Every so often, she glances at her reflection in the window.
One piece of cloth wrapped around her head is enough to change everything.
She knows that this is not a costume – that she’s still the same Asiya as ever. She’s still the kid who plays Club Penguin obsessively, but also appreciates a good swords-clashing fight scene in “Diriliş: Ertuğrul.” She’ll still play YouTube laugh tracks whenever her older sister tries to talk, and she’ll most certainly continue to get in trouble for biking to McDonald’s without permission. She’s still the klutz who fell into the stream behind the mosque while trying to jump over the current. She’s still the off-key singer, the pun-slinger, the rebel who has always known she will grow up to be a gentle-hearted warrior.
But she worries about what her friends will say. If they’ll look at her differently, their eyes drawn to what she hides instead of all the sunlight she shows. Maybe they’ll think she’s scary, or that she’s too much of a goody-goody to be any fun.
She worries that this cloth will make her round nose look bigger, or draw more attention to the fact that her front teeth look like they tried to do a pirouette and got stuck that way. She worries – as any girl worries – that it will make her ugly.
Or maybe it’ll make her stand taller, the way a crown does for a queen.
The car pulls up in the driveway. She’s worried still. It’s in her eyes.
But she goes forth smiling.
At the party, she is the only one wearing the hijab. But there’s something freeing about being Asiya Huda Ahmed on the day that everyone else hides behind a mask.