First day of classes

Seldom has there been a more excited student on the first day of classes than Fatima bin Laden. She even had someone to see her off on the bus.

After rising early for morning prayer, Fatima made a small pot of coffee and stood before her closet. Her uncle's friends in Manilla had helped her pick a wardrobe for America that would fulfill the Muslim imperative of conservative dress without calling attention. Today she chose loose-fitting black jeans and a stylishly floppy creme sweater that fell below her hips, and a black beret as headcover. She would be the beret girl in America, making a fashion statement. And a military one.

As planned, she knocked on her landlord Mrs. Lop Chong's door, and she went with Fatima out to the bus stop, waiting with her and instructing her on how to pay the driver, how to pull the cord to signal she wanted off. Mrs. Lop Chong was a bus rider and when the bus stopped she knew the driver.

"Eh, Tufi, this is Fatima, just came in from the Philippines to go to school at Windward," Mrs. Lop Chong. "You make sure she gets there, OK."

"Will do."

"Anybody tries anything funny, you know, funny kine touching, you tell Tufi, he'll take care of 'em. Get some weird ones on the bus these days. I even had one guy squeeze my wrinkled old okole! Can you believe that?!"

Thus thoroughly frightened, the chaste Fatima stepped aboard and, Allah be praised, found a seat next to a Caucasian woman in business attire. It was forbidden for a Muslim woman to be touched by any male outside her family, and the crowded bus offered many opportunities for that to happen.

Soon the bus was chugging up the hill and Fatima was stepping off, officially and happily a college student.

The morning was filled with Algebra 101 and Biology 101, and while she was thrilled with the professors' overviews of what they would be studying, she was even more excited about seeing the young Arabic Marine in her Journalism 101 class after lunch. If Fatima were a veteran foreign agent, she'd have known that mixing romance and terrorist ops was a bad idea. But she was just 21, this was the first time she'd been on her own, and she couldn't help being attracted to the Marine. If he was the good Muslim she suspected, he would make an excellent husband. And an ally against America.

She arrived early and, as was the practice in the mosque, took a seat at the back of the room -- it was OK for women to see the rear ends of men, very not OK for men to watch women's behinds bending in prayer.

As the classroom filled, her Marine entered, noted with a slight smile and knowing nod her choice of seat, and sat in front.

Her target was clearly in view now.