The best gift my mother gave me was naming me after the bold, beautiful and unstoppable heroine from Gone With the Wind. In fact, it might be the only thing she gave me—I can’t recall anything else. That selfish, feeble inadequate excuse for a parent left me and my dad when I wasn’t even two years old, so I had no collection of embroidered blankets, birthday cards, jewelry or other sentimental things a daughter could expect from her mother; things that my best friend, Annika, had in droves.

Sometimes I envied Annika and her shelves of fancy trinkets, visual evidence that she was loved and adored. But would I trade my cherished moniker for all of it? Would I choose to live life as a dull Jessica or a tedious Samantha or—god forbid—a weak, needy Melanie?

Not a chance.

As soon as I was old enough to read, I got my hands on a worn out paperback copy of Gone with the Wind from a library sale for fifty cents, and I read it cover to cover. And then I read it several times after throughout my youth. When kids at school made fun of me for my shoddy thrift store clothes or because I lived in a trailer park, I held my head high and imagined this was how Scarlett must have felt when she worked in the cotton fields to save Tara after the Civil War. She did what she had to do to pull herself up and out, and I decided I would do the same in my life.

That book saved me.

So, even though my mother was a loser of a parent and was probably drinking herself to death in California, maybe something inside of her knew I would need that name and the resilience and strength that came with it. Maybe she guessed it would give me the fortitude to dream big and work hard to make something of myself and eventually move out of the rusty mobile home I shared with my dad—a man who stopped dreaming altogether the day she left him.

My name was one of two things that helped me survive growing up poor and motherless. The other was my best friend, Annika, and her family, the Bashirs.

I lived right on the border between the dust-covered trailer parks on the outskirts of Fairview, Texas and its wealthy, upper-class neighborhoods with manicured lawns and security guards stationed at the entrances to their gated communities. I was part of the ten percent of the student body who really didn’t belong there. But I learned quickly that money didn’t always buy you acceptance.

They Bashirs were from exotic and colorful India by way of civilized and stoic Britain, and practiced a narrow, esoteric sect of Islam—I found them fascinating and interesting. But according to the mostly white, Baptist population this meant they were outcasts, too, despite their wealth and status.

I was in fourth grade when Annika, shy and dark-skinned, was introduced to our class. She had a slight English accent from having lived in London since birth, and this only confused everyone in our class even more. “What is she?” They would whisper indiscreetly.

 

We bonded quickly one day when things got out of hand at the elementary school playground.

“My dad says you’re going to hell,” sneered Colby, a blonde boy with a thick Texas drawl. I saw Annika freeze on square number four in hopscotch, her eyes filling with tears.

Colby’s father was the pastor of Fairview Baptist Church, so Colby thought of himself qualified to evaluate the spiritual correctness of everyone around him. My dad had brought me to that church once or twice on Easter, and I distinctly recall the looks of pity from the older women in their tailored Sunday dresses with matching hats. It bothered me so much even as a child that I begged we never go back.

A small crowd gathered around the confrontation. With his “congregation” growing, Colby got even bolder.

“Annika, why do you hate Jesus?” he asked threateningly, standing two inches from her frightened face. The crowd of 9-year-olds echoed his line of questioning, getting angry and restless.

As a social reject myself, I had nothing to lose, so I stepped in.

“Leave her alone…or you’ll regret it,” I shouted with a clenched fist to back it up.

Colby laughed, calling my bluff.

So I punched him.

 

I almost got kicked out of school, but I made a friend for life in Annika. In fact, she was my only friend growing up and we were fiercely loyal to each other, like sisters.

Her mother, Mrs. Bashir, would me let come over and play after school for years, feeding me Indian samosas and chicken biryani, and washing it down with large gulps of coconut water from the coconuts she would order direct from Thailand. She taught me how to add just a pinch of this and pinch of that to transform plain white rice into something befitting a four star Indian restaurant. Even better, Annika let me have free reign over her mountains of toys in her perfectly pink room. We would giggle together uncontrollably and play hide-and-seek for hours.

And as we got older, we would talk about boys and wondered who we would eventually marry. That’s when I started to learn that the Bashir family was a little different from mine.