Muslim...not really

Well.........this is awkward.

And absolutely uncomfortable, weird, strange, bizarre, peculiar, and unsettling.

Yep, that's all I could find in the thesaurus. You get the drift.

I suppose I'm expected to introduce myself now. Are you, my dear friend, familiar with that one girl who is the ultimate manifestation of a teen queen? Who knows exactly what to wear, what to say, and what to do? Who is practically worshipped at an altar by her peers, persistently pursued by jealousy around the clock, what every female high school student dreams of being? The golden girl on the pedestal, every male's dream, every female's envy? Yeah, the one who draws out an involuntary "daayyuum" from everyone she passes?

Yeah well, I'm not that girl.

It is rather safe to say that I am, in fact, the absolute contradiction to the above mentioned description. I shy away from unwanted attention, have the most ridiculous dressing sense, and couldn't care less about what anyone else thinks of me; and nobody from school, be that male or female, ever pays me a second glance.

Behold the magnificence that is Emaan Ali, the 17 year old lonesome wonder.

This is the drab story of a teenager who, in her final years of schooling, finds herself in an entirely new school, environment, and neighborhood in an unfamiliar country on a completely different continent. The tiresome tale of a girl of Indian roots, born and brought up in Dubai, who one fine morning finds herself on a flight to the US of A.

Welcome to the persistent paradox that is my life.