by Arvin Ahmadi
I shrugged.
“All right, buddy,” Trent began. “What are you having? And where’s Fiora? She’s always late, but it’s a Wednesday and happy hour is all night. The earlier she gets here, the more drinks she can guilt me into pouring for free. You know that girl loves her G and Ts.”
Trent would have kept going if I didn’t stop him to say, “Wait, Trent, are you—”
“High?” He shoved a dirty glass into the sink’s cleaning contraption and wiped it dry with a rag. “Yep, my man, I am high as a drone. And we both know the Democrats are gonna be all over those gizmos to creep on our every friggin’ move. Say goodbye to what little privacy you have left, amigo. Unless my man Renault Cohen does something about it ASAP, liberal America is makin’ moves, and it’s making ’em fast.”
“That sounds—I mean. Yeah, frickin’ drones,” I said. I couldn’t believe Trent was bartending high, but who was I to judge?
“Anyway, man, what have you been up to?” Trent asked.
Before I could answer, Fiora marched up and slammed her hands on the bar.
“Oh. My. God,” she gushed, squeezing herself between the middle-aged man and me.
He shot her a look.
“You won’t believe what just happened to me on the corner of F and 21st. This homeless woman came up to my face and pointed her finger, like, an inch from my nose and goes, ‘You’re shit. D’ya know that?’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ And she squints her eyes and kinda sways and goes off! ‘You albino white-haired piece of shit. All of ya. You’re shittier than shit. You’re piss.’ And then the traffic light changed to walk and I bolted past her, but not without saying, ‘Well, at least I don’t smell like piss.’ Then I walked away. Anyway, how are you?”
“Honestly, just kind of in awe.”
“Awesome. That’s only the beginning, Saaket. I’ve been thinking a lot this afternoon about your predicament, and boy, do I have the answer you’re looking for.”
Trent stuck his head in between us from the bar. “Missus Crossword Queen with the answers,” he said, grinning. “You got a clue? She’s got an answer.”
Fiora pushed his face away.
“Trent puts the merry in marijuana,” she said.
“So what’s my answer?” I blurted out. I was tapping my right foot quickly. Four or five taps per second.
“Specificity,” Fiora said. She leaned into me like she was divulging one of the secrets of the universe. “You need to be specific.”
“How?”
“I don’t specifically know how . . . but you need to go into this professor’s office and make a specific demand.”
“I’ve already asked her to help me twice,” I said.
“She doesn’t even know how to help you.”
I raised one eyebrow. “But she’s the grit expert.”
“Correction: she doesn’t want to help you. And why should she? You’re just a random sixteen-year-old who popped into her office. You’ve got to be specific with your demand—give her no choice but to say, ‘Okay, we can do that.’ Can you do that?”
Trent was busy mixing drinks behind the bar, but that didn’t stop him from eavesdropping on our conversation.
“You know, buddy,” Trent said, his attention squarely focused on the liquor bottles, glasses, and cocktail shakers he was juggling. “Right after I saved your ass the other day, I went home and read up on Iran. It’s amazing, the kinds of people you meet when you get out of the Deep South. Anyway, I was just surfin’ Wikipedia. Your country’s got some insane history—like that poet, the famous one who wrote the epic stories . . .”
“Ferdowsi!” I exclaimed.
“Isn’t that your last name, Saaket?” Fiora asked. I nodded.
I never cared to learn about my family’s namesake, but I knew his stories. Epic tales from Shahnameh, the Persian book of kings that my dad would bring to life at bedtime when I was a kid. He never read them out of books—it was all from memory. These were the stories he grew up with in Iran. Tales of Rostam, the mighty warrior who unknowingly killed his son Sohrab in battle; Zal, the albino king who was banished at birth and raised by a phoenix; and Rudabeh, the Persian Empire’s own Rapunzel, who let down her hair for Zal and fell madly in love with him. These stories were fascinating to me at the time, but I always told myself I would read American stories like Clifford and The Cat in the Hat to my own kids. I never thought I’d hear a word about Shahnameh again.
“No kidding!” Trent said. “Well, Ferdowsi was a boss. Spent thirty years slaving away on that book just to get duped by the sultan. If you’re talking grit, he’s your man.”
I was amazed that Trent had taken such an interest in my background. Fiora must have been, too, because she’d already pulled up Ferdowsi’s Wikipedia page on her phone.
“It says here the king had promised to pay Ferdowsi a piece of gold for every couplet that he wrote,” Fiora said, her eyes laser-focused on her screen.
“Right. I remember the story now,” I said. “The sultan’s messenger replaced the gold pieces with silver. Somehow he made Ferdowsi look like the bad guy and got him exiled for life. You know the craziest part?”
Trent and Fiora shook their heads.
“Eventually the sultan found out his messenger was a two-timing jackass, and he tried sending Ferdowsi the gold again, but it was too late. The gold arrived on the day of his funeral.”
Fiora’s jaw dropped ever so slightly.
“Saaket,” she said slowly. “This is it. Specificity. You need stories.”
“I don’t get it.”
“This poet, Ferdowsi. He was gritty,” she stressed. “That’s just one historic example. Marina Abramovic. She’s endured all sorts of shit for decades for her performance art. Gritty. Nelson Mandela. Thrown in prison over and over for what he believed in. Gritty.”
“Professor Mallard studies kids, though,” I said.
“Who grow up into adults, Saaket. Here’s your proposal: ‘Professor, I think I can be of assistance to you. I would like to investigate Grit throughout History. You keep studying children in your brilliant, academic way, and I, Saaket Ferdowsi, will dig up facts about the most ambitious and gritty minds of our past.’ It’s a project, Saaket. There’s no effort on her part, and it’s obviously valuable for you. She might even get a research lead out of it.”
I liked the idea of learning about important people who found ways to be gritty. Doesn’t everyone like a good success story? Maybe I would learn a thing or two from their example. Fiora and I agreed there was a fifty-fifty chance that Professor Mallard would bite. But we also agreed there was a hundred percent chance that I had nothing to lose. She’d already turned me down twice.
We were only halfway through our drinks, and my plan was all set. Fiora was drinking a gin and tonic, and I was nursing a Coke. (I didn’t want to be hungover again if I was seeing Professor Mallard tomorrow.) An awkward silence and two sips later, I asked: “So . . . if you’re so good at constructing crosswords, could you make one right now?”
Fiora smiled. Without saying a word, she pulled a pen out of her purse and reached over the bar for a napkin. She tapped the pen against her cheek a few times, then began scribbling furiously. Five minutes later, she took another napkin. Her eyes ping-ponged between the two as she transferred an empty grid and came up with clues. She slid the second napkin down to me:
Across:
1. Position on grid
4. Feeling that everyone’s having fun without you
5. Scrutinize
6. Scott is high on ___
7. Hurricane center
Down:
1. “It’s _____ for!”
2. Leave out
3. Trent is high on ___, slang
4. Anger
5. 21+ to drink, e.g.
“It’s pretty sloppy, even for a five-by-five,” Fiora
warned shyly, “but I didn’t want to keep you waiting too long.”
I went straight to work. A few minutes later I slid the napkin back in her direction. She compared it against the solution while I held my breath. Thumbs-up. I breathed a sigh of relief, then giggled.
“That was weirdly fun,” I said. “Satisfying.”
“Welcome to my world.” Fiora smirked.
I gazed at her as if she’d just done a triple backflip. “How’d you even—”
“I started with grit and pot, and then I liked the inverse-ness of pot and top, so I made it all work. Broke some construction rules, but whatever. I figured you would appreciate the personalization.”
“Incredible.” I imagined what it might look like inside of Fiora’s mind. An alphabet soup with letters floating into place? Or an assembly line with pulleys and levers and conveyer belts manufacturing the puzzle in its rightful order? Whatever was going on in there, I couldn’t contain my astonishment.
“Would you show me how to make one?” I blurted out.
Fiora had already finished her drink, but she kept sipping through the tiny red straw, making a slurpy, air-sucking sound. “Tell you what,” she said. “You come back here tomorrow with a grit update, and I’ll share a thing or two about how I construct these puzzles.”
Before I could get more than a nod in, Fiora stepped away from the bar. I figured she was going to the bathroom, so I waited. She didn’t come back in five minutes, and she didn’t come back in ten, and finally fifteen minutes later Trent came around the bar and put his hand on my shoulder, telling me she was long gone. Honestly, I wasn’t hurt. I wasn’t even confused. It all made sense in a strange Fiora way.
I stuck around until Trent had shut down the bar, and we left together. It was a balmy summer night, made bearable by a whistling breeze that kept teasing us. The streets of DC were empty, dark, and wide.
Trent and I bonded on our walk about Fiora’s elusiveness and her other quirks, like how fidgety she would get sometimes, or how she would bend straws into halves and quarters and eighths. I asked Trent if he ever had a crush on Fiora growing up, and he clarified that no, never, they were only friends and didn’t have any sexual history. She wasn’t his type, he assured me, which I thought was absurd. But then I reasoned that Southern Gentlemen like Trent were destined to marry Southern Belles with proper etiquette who cooked nice meals and went to church and carried small talk.
Fiora didn’t give two shits about any of those things. She was a crossword girl, and there was more beneath her surface than nice meals and small talk.
“Her parents divorced when she was a kid,” Trent explained. “That’s when Fiora got crazy obsessed with crosswords. Her mom left and her dad didn’t want to talk about it; he just kept her in the dark till she stopped caring.”
We crossed at a red light. There were no cars in sight, but I still looked both ways.
“What exactly is her mom’s deal?” I asked.
“It’s a slippery pickle.”
“I don’t speak Southern . . .”
“It’s complicated,” Trent said, elbowing me hard. “Lucy Buchanan’s Oxy addiction was no secret. Everyone in town knew. When she went AWOL after the divorce, no one asked questions. My folks were friends with Fiora’s dad, and they knew he was still struggling with the divorce on top of his mom’s death, so they told me, ‘Play nice with that Fiora girl, bless her heart. She’s got it tough.’ So I did. That’s when we became friends.
“Fiora never heard from her mom until a couple years ago. She started getting these letters saying she’d gotten clean, got married, even had a baby on the way. But Fiora didn’t want anything to do with her new family. That all changed this year, God knows why. It’s why she goes to Philly so much; she’s visited three times just since I moved here. And you know what? The minute she steps off that bus, it’s the last thing she wants to talk about. She’d rather preoccupy herself with more . . .”
“More what?”
Trent pursed his lips, searching for the right explanation. “Have you ever heard that saying, the personal is political?”
“Sure.”
“Fiora’s the opposite of that. She hates politics, and she avoids the personal.” Trent bit his lower lip. “The impersonal is Fiora.”
Fiora was a crossword girl. A beautiful, slippery-pickle crossword girl.
That night in bed, I felt something tugging at my insides, restless and optimistic. That feeling where your heart swells and your arms go limp, and a tickling spirit gallops through your veins, Paul Revere-ing at the top of its lungs: An adventure is coming! An adventure is coming! My lungs tightened from excitement. Tomorrow, I would follow through on my most important project yet. I would confront the genius who could help with my problem. The finish line felt so close. I could see myself crossing it, tearing through the ribbon, determined never to fail again.
SPOILER ALERT: Professor Mallard didn’t hate the idea.
I wasn’t sure she’d be in her office, since she didn’t technically hold office hours on Thursdays. And if she was, I’d be catching her even more off guard than usual. But Professor Mallard wasn’t angry. In fact, she looked more chipper than the last time. I caught a smile flicker across her face when I walked in, and that threw me off guard. Before I had the chance to pitch her on the grit study, she put one hand up. I held my breath, almost certain I was getting kicked out again.
“I need to apologize,” she began, and we simultaneously took a deep breath, “for my erratic behavior the last two times you visited my office. I gave it some serious thought last night. Professors are not celebrities, and I should be flattered that you care enough about my research to travel all the way down from Philadelphia. I’m glad you came back.”
And so, with newfound confidence, I accepted her apology and immediately dove into my quasi-research proposal, starting with I had a specific idea . . . and sprinkled with it could benefit both of us and you don’t have to say yes. I didn’t bring up my parental situation. I was on a roll—a surge of blind faith rippled down my neck—and I convinced myself that I could make DC work all summer. My parents would be angry, sure, but a research internship with a famous Georgetown professor? True grit? My dad would be beyond impressed.
Professor Mallard didn’t accept the idea right away, but she didn’t wrinkle her nose and reject it, either. As I rambled on about important people who had discovered their passion later in life, she nodded absently, like her eyes were on me but her mind was somewhere else.
When I finished, Professor Mallard nodded one more time, half smiling. “I am actually writing a new book about—well, you can guess the subject. In it, I depict many firsthand cases of grit in sports teams, classrooms, fields like entrepreneurship and politics. But I must admit, I am intrigued by the direction you’re going with historic grit. . . . My book is almost finished, but perhaps your findings could be of some use. We can always learn from the past. I have a feeling you can, too.”
I took a seat in the same chair where I choked that first morning, my muscles tense from the nostalgia, as Professor Mallard laid out a few ground rules:
I would begin the project on Monday. I could come in every day if I wished, but no less than every other day. (This would give me nearly three weeks to legitimize my quasi-internship before Mom and Dad got home on my birthday.)
I would work out of the empty room next to hers. It was another professor’s office, but he was out on sabbatical for the year.
I shouldn’t expect my research to end up in Professor Mallard’s book. In fact, it most likely wouldn’t. She was a psychology professor, not a historian. And I was in no way an official researcher.
As she explained how she was interested in my historical grit research but didn’t necessarily need it, I had to wonder why Professor Mallard was really going through with this. Did she feel bad for me? Maybe my persistence was finally pa
ying off. Three visits could have easily turned into seven or fifteen or fifty, and before we knew it I’d be sitting in her classroom as a Georgetown freshman—
“Last condition,” she said, her face gravely serious. “Let me make myself abundantly clear: our relationship will not afford you any competitive edge for admission into Georgetown. I’m sorry, but that’s my firm stance. I only take bribes from immediate family members and people with lots of money.”
It took a moment for me to realize that Professor Mallard—the MacArthur Grant “genius” with bestselling books, groundbreaking studies, and viral YouTube videos under her belt—had actually cracked a joke. My neck and shoulder muscles relaxed, and a wiry smile slid across my face. Professor Mallard’s uproarious laughter filled the rest of the room.
I made a triumphant exit through the wooden doors of White-Gravenor Hall, the sun shining in my face as I marched down the steps and across the lawn. It was the opposite of a walk of shame. It was a walk of game. Stride of pride. Pace of Ace.
Suddenly it occurred to me that without realizing it, I had decided to stay in DC. I was already feeling at home in this new city. Independence was one of those things I never had growing up with strict immigrant parents. They always wanted the best for me, but what if that meant giving me space? As a kid, I begged my parents to send me to summer camp. I had an impulse to get away and discover myself—not some mom-and-dad-monitored version of myself. Where better than the great outdoors?
“We don’t know anything about summer camps,” Mom would say in her high-pitched Farsi accent. “Maybe when you’re older, we’ll all go camping together.”
After begging didn’t work, I tried a different tactic: PowerPoint presentations. I put together slides with photos of campers hiking the Appalachian Trail, roasting marshmallows, and trust-falling into each other’s arms. I researched five reputable camps in the Northeast, comparing activities and fees. My slides were impeccable. They had graphics. They had music. They had custom animations! I presented to my parents in front of the PC, their eyes beaming with pride as I recited my rehearsed lines. I was convinced they would say yes.