by Arvin Ahmadi
I felt awful leaving her. But I felt worse my last few weeks at home, because Soraya was so happy about her role and I was so miserable. I didn’t want to ruin her happiness. That’s why I didn’t tell her I was running away. Pretty stupid, right?
She texted me right after that first phone call in the airport: WTF, Amir. Drama always suited her. It was like a flood of texts after that: What’s going on? Where are you? Why did you skip your graduation? You’re so dumb.
I told her I would come home soon. That was a lie, but I couldn’t crush Soraya. She kept begging me for an explanation, which just tightened the guilty feeling in my chest more. But I couldn’t drag her down with me. I made her promise to stay focused on the musical. I told her I couldn’t wait to see her in it, that I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Twenty-Four Days Ago
I HAD BEEN staring at the text on my phone for a full minute. I know you’re gay.
It was seven thirty a.m. This couldn’t be real.
I looked around at Jahan’s living room. Everything looked so peaceful under the soft morning light. The couch I had woken up on. The stack of books at the foot of the couch. The pasta machine on the kitchen counter, the dishes Jahan and I had been too lazy to wash, the Joni Mitchell album he’d played for me.
All those things were real. Not this text from my sister, the words I had been dreading my entire life.
You know I don’t care, right? read her next text. You know I love you.
The smell of espresso rose up through the window from the café below. Slowly, I started breathing again. I wrote back: Do mom and dad know?
I waited for a response. Finally, Soraya’s WhatsApp status changed to “Online.” She typed, then deleted. Then typed again.
No. Of course not. Next text: Why don’t you tell them?
You know I can’t tell them. I was pounding the letters on my phone’s keyboard. That’s a stupid question, Soraya. Come on.
You know Dad spent the last two days looking for you in New York, Soraya wrote back. He literally went looking for you there.
I took a deep breath. I felt sick to my stomach. To my dad, I was still the old Amir. I wasn’t the person watching drag queens on TV with Jahan and talking about open relationships with Neil. I wasn’t a stranger who had been living in his house. Not yet.
Remember the scoreboard, I thought to myself. The numbers aren’t in your favor.
How did you find out? I asked Soraya.
I talked to Jackson. Fuck. What did Jackson tell her? Before I could ask, Soraya texted again. It doesn’t matter. Come home, Amir.
I can’t come home.
My sister and I usually texted with memes and emojis. We’d never texted with this many full sentences before, this many periods. It was just that kind of conversation.
If I come home, I wrote, I’ll have to tell them.
Or you could make up another excuse, she texted.
That didn’t sit well with me. Lying, again. I’d done it my whole life, but after these days in Rome, I just couldn’t see myself pretending the reason I ran away was because I didn’t feel like crossing the graduation stage or some other bullshit like that. I didn’t reply. Soraya texted again: Where are you now?
As much as my home life had gone to shit, I couldn’t stop thinking about the other night with Jahan and his friends, dancing on the rooftop into the early morning … I wanted more of that. I was hungry for more of that. Life. Authentic, unapologetic life. I wanted to sink my teeth into that kind of living, the kind I’d never thought I would have.
And Jahan. I had grown so comfortable around him. We had absolutely nothing in common, and yet we had everything in common.
I didn’t know what to say to Soraya. Whatever, she finally texted. I still wish you had come out to me. I do musical theater. I’ve been around gay people forever. I’m honestly kind of offended you didn’t think you could tell me.
I threw myself down on the couch, sighing deeply.
A few minutes later, Jahan stumbled out of his room. I watched him hobble past me in his red checkered boxers and into the kitchen.
“You’re up awfully early,” he said.
“So are you,” I said.
“Trust me, I am nowhere near awake.” Jahan came out of the kitchen with a glass of water. He leaned against a wall that was covered in Polaroids and took a long sip, glancing over at me on the couch. “Everything okay?”
No. My sister found out I’m gay. I haven’t talked to my parents in days. I don’t know what to do next.
I looked at Jahan. He could barely keep his eyes open.
“Yeah, everything is fine,” I said.
Jahan nodded sleepily. “Keys are on the shelf by the door,” he said. He went back into his room and closed the door.
I willed myself to leave the apartment. It was the closest thing I had to a routine these past couple of mornings while Jahan slept in until the afternoon. Much like with capitalism and heteronormativity, Jahan believed mornings to be an oppressive construct and made it his personal mission to disregard them.
It was a particularly peaceful morning in Trastevere. A lot of shops hadn’t even opened yet. Even though some of the streets were starting to look familiar to me, I was still in awe of it all: the moss-covered walls, the clothes hanging out the windows, the narrow alleys that opened into wide piazzas.
A morning walk can seriously be like therapy.
I found a restaurant on Isola Tiberina, a small island on the Tiber River, and sat down at a table outside. The other tables around me were empty. I had noticed that most Italians didn’t sit down to have coffee, but instead had their espresso shots standing up at the counter. They were so cool about it. They would just roll in and order un caffè, maybe make some small talk with the barista, and then knock back the shot of espresso and drop a euro and say “ciao” before hopping back on their mopeds.
After the waitress took my order, I reached into my backpack to check my money. It was all twenties and fifties. I had some single euro coins in my pocket. All in all, I had about eight hundred euros left from what I’d taken out at the airport, carefully split among my backpack, duffel, and various pockets.
Still, I was starting to worry about money. I took out my laptop and opened the Wikipedia page for this cryptocurrency start-up that had asked me to make a couple of edits to their Controversies section. It was a little sketchy, but they were offering me a thousand bucks (in real money) for very little work.
The waitress came out with my coffee, in a little white espresso cup on a little white saucer.
“Grazie,” I said.
Then she noticed my laptop on the table and frowned.
“I am sorry,” she said, “but we do not allow laptops here.”
“Shoot. I should have asked before I ordered,” I said. “Do you know anywhere in Rome that’s good for working?”
“Like Starbucks? We do not have such places here.” She thought for a second. “Let me ask my manager.”
The manager was a burly man with a thick head of gray hair. He introduced himself as Roberto. “I apologize,” he said to me, “but we cannot have anyone working in our restaurant. I do know a café in Monti. I believe it is called Gatsby. Many students work there, on the second floor.”
I looked up Gatsby Café on my phone, and it was a forty-minute walk. I sighed.
“It’s all right, I’ll find somewhere else.”
“Are you a student?” he asked.
I shook my head.
The man looked at my computer screen. “Ah, a coder!”
I laughed. “Not exactly. I’m editing a Wikipedia page.”
He scrunched his face. I explained, “Wikipedia—it’s an online encyclopedia.” I opened another tab that showed a finished page.
“Ahhhh, Weekeepehdia!” His face lit up. “You should make page for my daughter. She is very, very talented. I always tell her, Laura, you are so talented! Rising star! You need a page on this, this Weekeepehdia. She is a singer, Lau
ra. Laura Pedrotti, look her up. Very talented.” He was waving his hands in excitement. “And she is in school in America! She finished her first year at Harvard.”
I googled Laura Pedrotti, and as much as I assumed the guy was just being a proud dad, she was in fact legit. She had been profiled in the Harvard Crimson and had one song with millions of Spotify streams; it was in a Nespresso commercial.
Then I had an idea.
“If I make your daughter a Wikipedia page,” I asked Mr. Pedrotti, “could I stay and work out of your restaurant sometimes?”
He thought for a second and shrugged. “Laura Pedrotti on Weekeepehdia. Perfetto! Okay!”
That night, I was back at Garbo, the bar where I had met Jahan. He was hosting a literature night where anyone could get up and read something. It could be something they wrote or just something they really liked. A poem, or a scene from a novel. I wasn’t really in the mood, but Jahan said if I didn’t go he would kick me out of the apartment, and I didn’t really feel like testing him, so I went.
The bar was buzzing with people. All sorts of characters. Men and women. An artistic crowd. These people wore funny hats, had interesting tattoos, looked at me with judgment, and I was honored—honored, I tell you—to have been judged by some of them. Women wore dark eyeliner. Men wore tight pants and loose dress shirts and held cigarettes between their fingers. Smoke swirled in the air above them.
The reading itself was a grand, sweaty affair. There was one woman with a giant tattoo over her chest that read FEMME RAGE in block letters, who read a feministy poem. I really liked it. I thought Soraya would have liked it, too. Jahan read a few quatrains—Rumi poems. The whole thing was intoxicating.
After the reading, everyone returned to drinking and smoking and socializing. Jahan went back behind the bar. He was wearing an oversized pink polo shirt. I remembered it was Wednesday, and I smiled.
“Nice Mean Girls reference,” I said, pointing at the shirt.
He looked at me confused.
I looked at him even more confused. “Please tell me you’ve seen Mean Girls.”
“That would not be an accurate statement,” Jahan said.
“Jahan.”
“Oh, give me a break.”
“Jahan.” I slammed my hands down on the bar. “You are literally participating in an inside joke from one of the greatest cultural phenomena of the twenty-first century, a masterpiece of American letters, and you have no idea.”
I explained the joke to him. Jahan asked me which character he would be, and I told him probably Damien, who was “too gay to function.”
“I take offense to that,” Jahan said. “I function perfectly fine.”
“That’s not the point! You’re missing the point!”
“Says the boy who missed the orgy scene in La Dolce Vita.”
“First of all, I was tired and falling asleep,” I said. “Second, there was no orgy! They just had a pillow fight. I might be a virgin, but I’m gonna need a little more than that if you’re going to call it an ‘orgy’ scene.”
“Is there an orgy in Mean Girls?”
“Um. No.” I thought for a second. “But there’s a scene where two of the girls transform into wild animals and fight over a hot guy?”
“Ooh, animal kingdom realness,” Jahan said, making little claws with his hands.
I laughed. “Seriously, Jahan. Do you know any pop culture?” I began to quiz him while he poured drinks at the bar, and the results were abysmal. He’d never heard of Selena Gomez. He couldn’t name a single Taylor Swift song.
“Not even Tay-Tay?” I said.
Jahan shook his head. “Not even … I’m sorry, but I refuse to acknowledge that nickname.”
“I think I’ve figured it out,” I said. “Look. I don’t know pop culture before the two thousands, and you don’t know pop culture after. That makes Britney Spears our cutoff.”
“What is this about Britney?” Pier Paolo, one of Jahan’s friends, elbowed his way to the bar. He was short and had curly black hair that bounced like springs.
“I’m a slaaaave for you.” Neil came up from behind and hooked an arm around my neck.
“Pier Paolo, Neil, have you heard of Selena Gomez?” Jahan asked.
Pier Paolo shrugged.
“Isn’t that the chick who dated Justin Bieber?” Neil said.
“Exactly!” I said, pointing a finger in the air. “See, I might not know Joni Mitchell and Cher—”
Neil unhooked his arm from my neck. “YOU DON’T KNOW WHO CHER IS?” he bellowed.
“I mean, I know she likes to tweet with a lot of capital letters and emojis,” I said. “I just can’t name any of her songs. But I know she’s a big deal. You know what else is a big deal? Mean Girls. I’ve seen that movie at least fifteen times.”
+15: Has seen Mean Girls no fewer than fifteen times. (I really shouldn’t be awarded points for this, because do we get points for breathing? No. But I’m the scorekeeper.)
I noticed Jahan smiling at me out of the corner of my eye, like he enjoyed watching me take charge, school the others on my pop culture. He suggested we all get together at his apartment to watch the movie that night, after the bar closed.
A small group of us went back to Jahan’s apartment sometime after four a.m. First, we had to find the movie online, and then Jahan had to fidget with his laptop and some kind of connecting cord, but we got it playing on the TV eventually.
After the movie ended, I asked Jahan what he thought.
“Solidly fetch,” he said, nodding.
The room broke into conversation, then full-on debate. Jahan argued that Cady Heron as a protagonist followed the classic Greek hero’s journey, whereas Giovanni believed it was more of a social satire that didn’t adhere to strict archetypes. People referenced Shakespeare and Greek tragedies. They spoke in a mix of Italian and English. Hands were waving; fingers were pinched. I didn’t realize Italians actually did that.
I sank deep into the cushion and smiled as the room grew more animated. Jahan and Pier Paolo. Neil and Giovanni. The FEMME RAGE woman. They were all so grown-up, having grown-up conversations. Outside, the sky was turning bright blue. I was drifting in and out of sleep. But they were awake and alive as ever.
Interrogation Room 38
Roya Azadi
AT THE FARSI school where I teach, I asked one of my students who was two years below Amir at the high school if she had heard anything. She said there had been some rumors going around that semester—there was clearly something this girl didn’t want to tell me. Then she said she would pray for Amir to come home. That was strange, I thought. We hadn’t told anyone Amir was gone.
I wondered: How did she find out?
Interrogation Room 38
Soraya
ONE NIGHT AFTER rehearsal, my mom and dad were waiting for me in the kitchen. They asked me to sit down. I knew it was serious because my mom poured herself a glass of tea and didn’t add any sugar cubes or have any cookies with it. She said, “I’ve heard some things from my students, Soraya. What have you been telling people?”
I was kind of speechless. I thought she knew. I was all, “It shouldn’t have to be private. I hate how we don’t talk about these things. We just let them bottle up.” My mom and dad looked at me like I had transformed into a unicorn before their eyes.
“What are you talking about?” my dad said.
I went, “I’m talking about why Amir ran away.”
They looked at each other this time, like they had missed something. My mom straightened her back and said, “Do you know why he ran away, Soraya?” And my dad went, “If you know something, you need to tell us.”
I was stuck. I realized my parents might not actually know. Or if they did know, they were testing me.
Word was going to get back to them eventually, through one of mom’s nosy students or someone else at Amir’s school. If this Jake person had found out about Amir and Jackson, then other people probably knew, too. It was only a matter of time.
It was either going to be a stranger or me. Amir was never going to tell them.
So I did.
Interrogation Room 37
Amir
SORAYA TEXTED ME right after she told my parents. I was with Jahan and some others, watching old Nina Simone performances on YouTube. I nearly lost it. I had to run into the bathroom to calm down. Soraya’s explanation, her logic that my parents were getting suspicious, that people were talking—it all slipped through my head like grains of sand.
They knew.
They finally knew.
Interrogation Room 38
Soraya
I KNOW I shouldn’t have done that.
That was so stupid of me to come out for Amir. It was like I wasn’t even thinking. But my parents were looking at me so desperately, like they wanted to know more, like nothing I could say would stop them on their quest to find Amir.
They didn’t believe me at first. They thought I had made it up. “No, no, no,” they said. “That can’t be true.” So I doubled down and told them I had already talked to Amir about it and that I loved him, and I just got super mushy and defensive. I think my mom started to believe it first, because her lips became a straight line, kind of like they are now. They asked me to leave the kitchen.
I went up to my room and just sat there on my bed, feeling really, really bad. I texted Amir to tell him. He didn’t text me back until much later. He just asked that if Maman and Baba were going to call him, that I be on the call.
The call didn’t really go very well.
Interrogation Room 37
Amir
I’M NOT GOING to talk about that phone call.
Interrogation Room 39
Afshin Azadi
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH Amir? My relationship with my son is fine. He has always been a very smart, responsible boy, a practical boy, so this running away episode is out of the ordinary. The episode on the plane is out of the ordinary. This is not the Amir I know.