While Katherine Zoepf was reporting on the lives of young women in Saudi Arabia recently, she managed to find a way to get a glimpse of the lives of young men in the Kingdom as well. (Elsewhere on this blog today, Ms. Zoepf is taking questions about love and romance in Saudi Arabia.)

I hadn’t met the boys before, but it was easy to pick them out: a half-dozen Saudi 18- and 19-year-olds shifting uncomfortably on two brocade sofas in the lobby of one of Riyadh’s grandest hotels, Al Faisaliah. The boys looked ill at ease among the marble pillars and elaborate flower arrangements, yet they’d insisted on meeting here. The Saudi religious police were unlikely to raid a luxury hotel, the boys felt, and since the evening activity we’d planned was illegal, it seemed best to take precautions.

Saudi society is strictly segregated along gender lines, and after several weeks spent interviewing Saudi teenage girls, I’d become very curious about life on the other side of the gender divide. I’d seen groups of young Saudi men out “numbering” - chasing cars containing young girls and trying to give the girls their phone numbers via Bluetooth, or by holding written phone numbers up to their car windows. When a Saudi girl I knew told me that her friend’s older brother would be willing to take me out numbering with his friends, I leaped at the chance.

The boys had brought clothes for me to wear over my abaya, and in a secluded corner of the hotel parking lot, we experimented with my disguise. Thamer, a 19-year-old political science student, handed me a knitted cap, and I stuffed my ponytail up underneath it. I zipped a hooded sweatshirt belonging to Mohamed, another of the boys, up over my billowing black cloak, and peered at my reflection in the tinted glass of Thamer’s S.U.V.

“Could I pass for a boy?” I asked. The black skirt of my abaya still trailed the floor, but from the waist up I felt pretty pleased with the effect.

Fahad, the most talkative of the boys, snorted.

“No,” he said. “But I think that’s as good as we’re going to do. We’re going to put you in the middle seat, and if you see someone in another car staring, turn slowly away.”

We piled into the S.U.V., and Thamer clicked through a rap mix CD to find Akon’s “Smack That,” to set the right mood for an evening of numbering. The boys bobbed their heads in time to the music.

“Wanna jump up in my Lamborghini Gallardo/Maybe go to my place and just kick it, like Taebo?” Akon sang.

In reality, getting a girl to go anywhere with him, let alone to “kick it,” is a near impossibility, Fahad explained. For most young Saudi men, a night of numbering is simply a night driving around with friends, listening to music, chasing cars containing black-draped figures that could just as easily be old women as young girls. Since numbering is considered harassment, detention by the religious police is an ever-present possibility.

We turned onto Thalia Street, a prime spot for numbering because of its many restaurants.

“There! There in the GMC!” Mohamed shouted. “Girls!”

Through the tinted windows in the back of the GMC, I could make out three indistinct black shapes. Thamer stepped on the gas, but a white Mercedes S-class containing four young Saudi men edged him out. The Mercedes pulled alongside the GMC, and the two young men in the back seat waved pieces of cardboard with phone numbers written on them.

“They beat us,” Fahad complained, as Thamer tried to pull up behind the GMC. “And they have a hotter car.”

I looked around. We were surrounded by several other cars, all containing young men and all trying to get the attention of the figures in the GMC, while simultaneously trying to edge each other off the road at high speed.

“Isn’t this getting a bit dangerous?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Fahad. “Sometimes the girls get really scared, there are so many cars chasing them. Sometimes they’re in their car, crying and screaming for us to go away. It’s fun to make girls angry.”

A phone number written out on a piece of cardboard is “the classic approach,” Fahad said, but most of the time he and his friends use Bluetooth to try to send their phone numbers directly to the cell phones of girls in the vicinity. Usually this means chasing cars containing women, but sometimes Fahad and his friends drive past the entrances of shopping malls where women wait for their drivers. It’s not easy to tell which of the black-shrouded shapes might be young women, Fahad admitted, but there are a few tricks.

“You look at the style of the abaya, the way she holds her bag,” Fahad explained. “See that one there, how thin she is, and how carefully she’s covered up her face?”

He pointed out a slight figure with a pastel handbag. Sure enough, a pair of girlish-looking sneakers were just visible beneath the hem of her abaya.

“I’d say that maybe 3 out of 10 nights of numbering,we have some success,” Fahad explained.

“You mean that 3 out of 10 nights you get a girl to talk to you?” I asked.

“No, no,” Fahad laughed. “Maybe 3 out of 10 nights we get one phone number. Getting a girl to actually talk to you on the phone is much rarer. But it happens, so we’re always hoping.”

thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/...ering/