Darius the Great Deserves Better

by Adib Khorram

  But Chip hopped across the aisle, and I scooted closer to the window to let him onto my seat. Our thighs rested against each other, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You crying?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  I sniffed and wiped my eyes again.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Neither did Chip. He just sat there next to me, like he didn’t mind the silence.

  Finally I said, “I let that guy past me.”

  “So did I. So did everyone. So did Diego.”

  “Diego was on their number 12.”

  Chip sighed.

  “We’re a team. We win and lose together.”

  “But I let everyone down.”

  “No you didn’t. I promise.” Chip rested his hand on my knee and shook it back and forth. “Hey. You didn’t.”

  “Then why do I feel like I did?”

  “Because you care. Because you’re too hard on yourself.” He squeezed my knee. “Because you’re Darius.”

  I stared at Chip’s hand. It was kind of square shaped, and his fingers were shorter than his palm.

  It was a nice hand. I could feel its warmth through my joggers.

  It made me sweat a little bit.

  “It just feels like I’ve been doing everything wrong lately.”

  “That sucks.”

  He gave me another squeeze and met my eyes.

  My chest felt tight. My ears burned.

  “Um.”

  I looked down at my knee. Chip still had his hand there.

  I took a deep breath.

  “Yeah.”

  * * *

  Jaden, Gabe, and I were all quiet as we got dressed for Conditioning the next day. I think Gabe was even more upset about the game than I was. Coach Bentley let slip that there’d been a recruiter from UC Berkley there.

  I’m sure, if nothing else, they’d left with a favorable impression of Robbie Amundsen, the Trojans’ indomitable number 7.

  Grandma had made sure to find out his name.

  And then made sure to tell me when I got home.

  And then asked me for help googling to see if he was already committed anywhere.

  (Arizona State University, of all places.)

  When we got to the weight room, Coach Winfield was standing in the corner, talking to Trent, who held his left foot behind him in a calf stretch. Both of them glanced over at us as we came in.

  “Get stretched out,” Coach Winfield said. “You’re doing a five-mile run.”

  I did a couple basic stretches—lateral lunges, inchworms, stuff like that—and then lay facedown on the ground. I arched my right leg over my left, twisted my hips, and lowered my foot to the floor.

  It hurt so good.

  “Kellner, what’re you doing on the floor?” Coach Winfield asked.

  “Getting ready for his next date,” Trent muttered.

  It was loud enough for everyone to hear, but quiet enough for Coach Winfield to ignore.

  “What’s that, Bolger?”

  “Just teasing, Coach. He ate ass at yesterday’s game.”

  “What?”

  “Grass. He ate grass. When he tripped.”

  “Hmm.” Coach Winfield narrowed his eyes but let it go.

  He always let football players get away with stuff like that.

  The Sportsball-Industrial Complex at work once more.

  “Hey. Darius blocked twelve shots yesterday,” Gabe said. “When’s the last time you got up off the bench?”

  “All right, cool it.” Coach Winfield let football players get away with all kinds of stuff, but he never let soccer players talk back.

  He loomed over me as I switched sides, arching my left leg over my right. “Kellner?”

  I let out a slow breath. “Hip extensors. Coach Bentley told us to do it before running.”

  “Hm.”

  He didn’t say anything after that, just wandered off to check on a trio of sophomores from the cross-country team, who had probably run ten or fifteen miles before school even began.

  I was pretty sure Coach Winfield was a little frightened of Coach Bentley, because if we said she’d told us specifically to do something, he always said the same thing: “Hm.”

  And then he always let it go.

  “You’ve got thirty seconds, gentlemen. Let’s go.”

  Jaden offered me a hand. I hooked our thumbs and let him pull me up.

  “Don’t listen to him,” he said, nodding toward Trent.

  “I won’t.” Trent Bolger was like a warp core without antimatter: powerless. He kept trying the same old tactics to make me miserable, but I had grown up. I wasn’t so easy to bully anymore.

  I even had friends.

  The very foundations of Trent’s worldview seemed to depend upon me always being a Target.

  Coach Winfield whistled. “Let’s go, gentlemen!”

  I stuck with Jaden and Gabe as we ran down the halls, out the side doors, and toward the track. Five miles meant twenty laps. The cross-country guys looked longingly toward the road, but we weren’t allowed to leave school grounds during class.

  “What is it with Trent, anyway?” Jaden asked as we dodged around a line of goose poop stretched diagonally across the track.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s been like that pretty much since first grade.”

  “You ever want to just, like, kick him in the balls?”

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.” I sighed.

  And then I said, “Having been through that myself, I don’t think I’d wish that on anyone. Not even Trent.”

  Gabe spun around so he was jogging backward, looking at us.

  “Yeah but, is it just me or is he way worse lately?”

  “I don’t know.” I glanced behind us where Trent was running by himself, ahead of a couple seniors who had only signed up for the class because they’d nearly made it to graduation and needed one more physical education credit.

  “I think he’s kind of mad that Chip tried out for soccer. That he’s on our team now. He and Trent were always on the same team before that.”

  “Yeah, but they still hang out all the time,” Jaden said.

  “I guess.”

  I wondered how much of their hanging out turned into babysitting these days.

  Was Trent angry about that too? Or did he like babysitting Evie? Holding her in his lap and chasing her around the house and listening to her giggle?

  “I don’t know if Trent has any friends. Other than Chip, I mean. Maybe he’s mad he has to share.”

  I didn’t point out that Trent was sharing Chip with me in particular. That we studied together. And I’d even been to his house. And sometimes, we sat together on the bus, and talked about nothing, and Chip rested his hand on my knee.

  I couldn’t point any of that out.

  I still wasn’t sure what to make of it.

  “Well,” Gabe said, “I know I’m supposed to have school spirit or something, but I hope he gets creamed at the homecoming game.”

  I grinned.

  “That would require him getting off the bench.”

  TIRED OLD QUEERS

  That night, Landon cooked another one of his famous dinners for us: asparagus risotto with Italian sausage. After, we lay on my bed facing each other, with one of my arms under Landon’s head and the other draped over his hip.

  Landon had his own hands folded together in front of him. I loved how, when the light caught them just right, his gray eyes had little streaks of blue in them.

  Landon Edwards had beautiful eyes.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Just thinking.”

  “About what?”
/>   “How beautiful you are.”

  He beamed at me, and leaned in to kiss me on the nose.

  “You’re beautiful too.”

  I shook my head, but he gently grabbed my chin to stop me.

  “You are.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I wish you weren’t so down on yourself all the time.”

  I looked down at Landon’s hands so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes.

  “I can’t help it sometimes.”

  That’s what being depressed does. It’s like a supermassive black hole between your sense of self and your actual self, and all you can see is the way you look through the gravitational lensing of your own inadequacies.

  “Hey. Don’t.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say sorry all the time.” Landon rested his hand on my cheek. “I wish I could reach in and scoop all that depression out of your brain. So you could be happy.”

  I wrapped my fingers around his. “I am happy,” I said. “I’m just depressed too.”

  My depression was part of me. Just like being gay was.

  A part, but not the whole.

  Landon bit his lip. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I’m just . . .”

  I thought about Dad, and his depressive episode.

  And I thought about Sohrab, who was worried maybe he was depressed too.

  And I thought about how sometimes, telling people I was depressed felt like its own kind of coming out.

  “Being depressed doesn’t mean I’m not happy. It’s like, happy is one color. And depressed is another color. And you can paint happy, and then paint a little depression around the edges.”

  Landon traced his index finger down the bridge of my nose. I shivered a little.

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  He traced his thumb along my bottom lip, and then down to my chin.

  “Sorry I missed your game.”

  “We lost anyway,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Landon’s thumb moved down to my collarbone, feather-light strokes that gave me goose bumps.

  “Homecoming is coming up. Isn’t it?”

  I swallowed hard. My heart thumped.

  “Yeah,” I squeaked.

  I cleared my throat.

  “So.”

  “So?”

  “Have you thought about . . . maybe . . . going together?”

  “Um.”

  I’d never thought about that before.

  How did you ask another guy to homecoming?

  How did anyone ever ask anyone to homecoming?

  “Wow,” Landon said. He started to roll away from me.

  “Wait,” I said. “It’s just, I’ve never gone to a dance before.”

  “Never?”

  “Not a school one. I’ve been to plenty of Persian dances before. But those are different.”

  Landon chuckled.

  “I guess . . . I never really thought about it before.”

  “And now?”

  My face felt like a fusion reactor.

  “Do you want to go to homecoming with me?”

  * * *

  I said bye to Landon and then curled up on the couch with my new American Lit reading: The Chocolate War, which was even more of a let-down than The Catcher in the Rye.

  We had to do an essay on its “themes,” which as far as I could tell were “people are awful and bullies always win.”

  I yawned, marked my place, and went to make a bowl of matcha. I had fifty more pages to get through, and I knew I’d never make it without something to keep me awake and focused.

  “Will you be able to sleep after all that matcha?” Oma asked as I sieved the emerald powder.

  “I’ll fall asleep without it.”

  “Is there any water left?”

  “Yeah.”

  Oma made a pot of Genmaicha while I whisked my matcha. I used the M-method, just like Mr. Edwards taught me, moving the chasen—the bamboo whisk—in the shape of an M to get the optimal froth, though I threw in an occasional sweep around the circumference of the bowl to grab any particles I might have missed.

  Oma and Grandma had set up on the couch, each with her own iPad, playing one of those puzzle games where you match colored dots on a grid to make them vanish. I took my book and folded myself into the armchair with my legs splayed out.

  If I’d been back in Yazd, with Mamou and Babou, maybe we would have talked about my day. And drank tea, and eaten dessert, and shared old family stories.

  But instead, we sat in silence, except for the music of Oma’s game.

  I found my place and started reading again, but I’d only gone a paragraph before Grandma asked, without looking up from her iPad, “What were you and Landon talking about?”

  “Huh?”

  “In your room.”

  I blushed.

  I knew we hadn’t done anything, but that didn’t make me feel any less guilty.

  Why did I feel guilty?

  “Just talked. About homecoming.”

  “That’s coming up?” Oma asked.

  “Yeah.” I looked down at my book. “We’re gonna go together.”

  “Really? Your school’s okay with it?”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Grandma got this wistful look in her eyes. “Just like that?”

  “What?”

  She locked her iPad and looked at Oma for a long moment. And then she said, “You know, when we were growing up, two guys never could have gone to a dance together. And we were lucky we were married long before Oma ever came out.”

  Oma patted Grandma’s hand.

  “There were times I thought we might not get to stay married, once I started transitioning. But now . . .” She pursed her lips for a second. “You and Landon can just walk down the street holding hands like it’s no big deal.”

  “Um.”

  “What your grandmother means,” Grandma said, “is that things are so much easier for you now. You don’t have to fight for acceptance as much as we did.”

  I blinked.

  Some days it felt like I’d done nothing but fight to be accepted. For being depressed. For being Iranian. For being gay.

  I couldn’t tell them that, though.

  Not when they were finally opening up to me a little bit.

  “But you know, you’re always going to have it easier than us,” Grandma said. “As a cis man. You’ll always have it easier in life.”

  “Oh.”

  I sank back into my chair, my ears aflame.

  I didn’t know what was happening.

  It felt like my grandmothers were mad at me.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Oma studied me for a second. “You don’t have to be. You’ve got your own problems. It’s not like it’s exactly easy now. We’re just a couple of tired old queers.”

  I shook my head.

  Grandma chuckled. “We are. Spend enough of your life fighting and you’ll be tired too.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to fight.”

  Oma shrugged. “It is what it is.”

  I’d never talked to Oma and Grandma like this. Not ever.

  I didn’t want them to stop.

  “Um.”

  I picked up my matcha and took a sip. And another.

  And then I said, “Maybe we can go to Pride together next summer.”

  Grandma sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ve done our marching. You were so little you probably don’t remember, but we used to be up here every month marching for one thing or another. For years. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. DOMA. Prop 8.” Oma shrugged. “After a while
you run out of steam.” I didn’t even know Grandma and Oma had gone to protests before.

  I wanted to know every protest they’d ever been to. What their signs said. What they chanted.

  But before I could ask, Grandma opened up her iPad and started playing again. And after a second, Oma did too. Conversation over.

  I didn’t get my grandmothers.

  I used to think there was a wall between me and Mom’s side of the family: a sort of force field that time and distance had created between us.

  There was no wall between me and Grandma and Oma. Just a door. But no matter how many times I opened that door, they always closed it again.

  I wanted to know them.

  I wanted to know how being queer had shaped their lives.

  I wanted them to give me advice, and teach me our history, and yes, go to marches.

  But instead I finished off my matcha and found my spot in my book.

  And the door between us creaked shut again.

  A PLASMA CONDUIT

  Thursday morning I called Sohrab.

  “Hi, Darioush,” he said. “I can’t talk long.”

  “Is this a bad time?”

  “It’s okay, just busy.”

  “Oh.”

  Sohrab wiped his arm over his forehead. I couldn’t tell if he was sweating or not, but he was breathing hard.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Helping Maman with some things.”

  “Oh. How’re you doing? How’s school? Have you played football lately?”

  “I’m fine. School is—”

  Sohrab’s picture froze while he was scratching his nose.

  “Sohrab?”

  I waited about thirty seconds, but when he still didn’t unfreeze, I hung up and tried again.

  This time it took a couple rings.

  “Darioush?”

  “Hey. I think we got cut off.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Listen, I have to go. But we’ll talk soon, okay?”

  “Oh.” I swallowed.

  I got this feeling, right behind my sternum. This bubble of sadness that slowly floated upward toward my throat.

  Sohrab had never rushed off a call like this.

  Had I done something wrong?

  I didn’t know what was happening.

  So I just said “Okay.”