A Very Large Expanse of Sea

by Tahereh Mafi

  Anyway, I was usually on my own.

  My brother, though, he was always busy. He and I used to be close, used to be best friends, but then one day he woke up to discover he was cool and handsome and I was not, that in fact my very existence scared the crap out of people, and, I don’t know, we lost touch. It wasn’t on purpose. He just always had people to see, things to do, girls to call, and I didn’t. I liked my brother, though. Loved him, even. He was a good guy when he wasn’t annoying the shit out of me.

  I survived the first three weeks at my new school with very little to report. It was unexciting. Tedious. I interacted with people on only the most basic, perfunctory levels, and otherwise spent most of my time listening to music. Reading. Flipping through Vogue. I was really into complicated fashion that I could never afford and I spent my weekends scouring thrift stores, trying to find pieces that were reminiscent of my favorite looks from the runway, looks that I would later, in the quiet of my bedroom, attempt to re-create. But I was only mediocre with a sewing machine; I did my best work by hand. Even so, I kept breaking needles and accidentally stabbing myself and showing up to school with too many Band-Aids on my fingers, prompting my teachers to shoot me even weirder looks than usual. Still, it kept me distracted. It was only the middle of September and I was already struggling to give even the vaguest shit about school.

  After another exhilarating day at the panopticon I collapsed onto the couch. My parents weren’t home from work yet, and I didn’t know where my brother was. I sighed, turned on the television, and tugged my scarf off my head. Pulled the ponytail free and ran a hand through my hair. Settled back onto the couch.

  There were Matlock reruns on TV every afternoon at exactly this hour, and I was not embarrassed to admit out loud that I loved them. I loved Matlock. It was a show that was created even before I was born, about a really old, really expensive lawyer named Matlock who solved criminal cases for a ton of money. These days it was popular only with the geriatric crowd, but this didn’t bother me. I often felt like a very old person trapped in a young person’s body; Matlock was my people. All I needed was a bowl of prunes or a cup of applesauce to finish off the look, and I was beginning to wonder if maybe we had some stashed somewhere in the fridge when I heard my brother come home.

  At first I didn’t think anything of it. He shouted a hello to the house and I made a noncommittal noise; Matlock was being awesome and I couldn’t be bothered to look away.

  “Hey—didn’t you hear me?”

  I popped my head up. Saw my brother’s face.

  “I brought some friends over,” he was saying, and even then I didn’t quite understand, not until one of the guys walked into the living room and I stood up so fast I almost fell over.

  “What the hell, Navid?” I hissed, and grabbed my scarf. It was a comfortable, pashmina shawl that was normally very easy to wear, but I fumbled in the moment, feeling flustered, and somehow ended up shoving it onto my head. The guy just smiled at me.

  “Oh—don’t worry,” he said quickly. “I’m like eighty percent gay.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, irritated, “but this isn’t about you.”

  “This is Bijan,” Navid said to me, and he could hardly contain his laughter as he nodded at the new guy, who was so obviously Persian I almost couldn’t believe it; I didn’t think there were other Middle Eastern people in this town. But Navid was now laughing at my face and I realized then that I must’ve looked ridiculous, standing there with my scarf bunched awkwardly on my head. “Carlos and Jacobi are—”

  “Bye.”

  I ran upstairs.

  I spent a few minutes considering, as I paced the length of my bedroom floor, how embarrassing that incident had been. I felt flustered and stupid, caught off guard like that, but I finally decided that though the whole thing was kind of embarrassing, it was not so embarrassing that I could justify hiding up here for hours without food. So I tied my hair back, carefully reassembled myself—I didn’t like pinning my scarf in place, so I usually wrapped it loosely around my head, tossing the longer ends over my shoulders—and reemerged.

  When I walked into the living room, I discovered the four boys sitting on the couch and eating, what looked like, everything in our pantry. One of them had actually found a bag of prunes and was currently engaged in stuffing them in his mouth.

  “Hey.” Navid glanced up.

  “Hi.”

  The boy with the prunes looked at me. “So you’re the little sister?”

  I crossed my arms.

  “This is Carlos,” Navid said. He nodded at the other guy I hadn’t met, this really tall black dude, and said, “That’s Jacobi.”

  Jacobi waved an unenthusiastic hand without even looking in my direction. He was eating all the rosewater nougat my mom’s sister had sent her from Iran. I doubted he even knew what it was.

  Not for the first time, I was left in awe of the insatiable appetite of teenage boys. It grossed me out in a way I couldn’t really articulate. Navid was the only one who wasn’t eating anything at the moment; instead, he was drinking one of those disgusting protein shakes.

  Bijan looked me up and down and said, “You look better.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “How long are you guys going to be here?”

  “Don’t be rude,” Navid said without looking up. He was now on his knees, messing with the VCR. “I wanted to show these guys Breakin’.”

  I was more than a little surprised.

  Breakin’ was one of my favorite movies.

  I couldn’t remember how our obsession started, exactly, but my brother and I had always loved breakdancing videos. Movies about breakdancing; hours-long breakdancing competitions from around the world; whatever, anything. It was a thing we shared—a love of this forgotten sport—that had often brought us together at the end of the day. We’d found this movie, Breakin’, at a flea market a few years ago, and we’d watched it at least twenty times already.

  “Why?” I said. I sat down in an armchair, curled my legs up underneath me. I wasn’t going anywhere. Breakin’ was one of the few things I enjoyed more than Matlock. “What’s the occasion?”

  Navid turned back. Smiled at me. “I want to start a breakdancing crew.”

  I stared at him. “Are you serious?”

  Navid and I had talked about this so many times before: what it would be like to breakdance—to really learn and perform—but we’d never actually done anything about it. It was something I’d thought about for years.

  Navid stood up then. He smiled wider. I knew he could tell I was super excited. “You in?”

  “Fuck yeah,” I said softly.

  My mom walked into the room at that exact moment and whacked me in the back of the head with a wooden spoon.

  “Fosh nadeh,” she snapped. Don’t swear.

  I rubbed the back of my head. “Damn, Ma,” I said. “That shit hurt.”

  She whacked me in the back of the head again.

  “Damn.”

  “Who’s this?” she said, and nodded at my brother’s new friends.

  Navid made quick work of the introductions while my mother took inventory of all that they’d eaten. She shook her head. “Een chiyeh?” she said. What’s this? And then, in English: “This isn’t food.”

  “It’s all we had,” Navid said to her. Which was sort of true. My parents never, ever bought junk food. We never had chips or cookies lying around. When I wanted a snack my mom would hand me a cucumber.

  My mother sighed dramatically at Navid’s comment and started scrounging up actual food for us. She then said something in Farsi about how she’d spent all these years teaching her kids how to cook and if she came home from work tomorrow and someone hadn’t already made dinner for her we were both going to get our asses kicked—and I was only forty percent sure she was joking.

  Navid looked annoyed and I almost started laughing when my mom turned on me and said, “How’s school?”

  That wiped the smile off my face pretty quickly
. But I knew she wasn’t asking about my social life. My mom wanted to know about my grades. I’d been in school for less than a month and she was already asking about my grades.

  “School’s fine,” I said.

  She nodded, and then she was gone. Always moving, doing, surviving.

  I turned to my brother. “So?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’re going to meet after school.”

  “And if we get a teacher to supervise,” Carlos said, “we could make it an official club on campus.”

  “Nice.” I beamed at my brother.

  “I know, right?”

  “So, uh, small detail,” I said, frowning. “Something I think you might’ve forgotten—?”

  Navid raised an eyebrow.

  “Who’s going to teach us to breakdance?”

  “I am,” Navid said, and smiled.

  My brother had a bench press in his bedroom that took up half the floor. He found it, disassembled and rusted, next to a dumpster one day, and he hauled it back to one of our old apartments, fixed it, spray-painted it, and slowly amassed a collection of weights to go with it. He dragged that thing around with us everywhere we moved. He loved to train, my brother. To run. To box. He used to take gymnastic classes until they got to be too expensive, and I think he secretly wanted to be a personal trainer. He’d been working out since he was twelve; he was all muscle and virtually no body fat, and I knew this because he liked to update me on his body-fat percentage on a regular basis. Once, when I’d said, “Good for you,” he’d pinched my arm and pursed his lips and said, “Not bad, not bad, but you could stand to build more muscle,” and he’d been forcing me to work out with him and his bench press ever since.

  So when he said he wanted to teach us how to breakdance, I believed him.

  But things were about to get weird.

  3

  Three

  It happened a lot, right? In high school? Lab partners. That shit. I hated that shit. It was always an ordeal for me, the awkward, agonizing embarrassment of having no one to work with, having to talk to the teacher quietly at the end of class to tell her you don’t have a partner, could you work by yourself, would that be possible, and she’d say no, she’d smile beatifically, she’d think she was doing you a favor by making you the third in a pair that had been very excited about working the hell alone, Jesus Christ—

  Well, it didn’t happen that way this time.

  This time God parted the heavens and slapped some sense into my teacher who made us partner off at random, selecting pairs based on our seats, and that was how I found myself in the sudden position of being ordered to skin a dead cat with the guy who hit me in the shoulder with his bio book on the first day of school.

  His name was Ocean.

  People took one look at my face and they expected my name to be strange, but one look at this dude’s very Ken-Barbie face and I had not expected his name to be Ocean.

  “My parents are weird,” was all he said by way of explanation.

  I shrugged.

  We skinned the dead cat in silence, mostly because it was disgusting and no one wanted to narrate the experience of cutting into sopping flesh that stank of formaldehyde, and all I could think was that high school was so stupid, and what the hell were we doing, why was this a requirement oh my God this was so sick, so sick, I couldn’t believe we had to work on the same dead cat for two months—

  “I can’t stay long, but I have a little time after school,” Ocean said. It felt like a sudden statement, but I realized only then that he’d been talking for a while; I was so focused on this flimsy scalpel in my hand that I hadn’t noticed.

  I looked up. “Excuse me?”

  He was filling out his lab sheet. “We still have to write a report for today’s findings,” he said, and glanced up at the clock. “But the bell is about to ring. So we should probably finish this after school.” He looked at me. “Right?”

  “Oh. Well. I can’t meet after school.”

  Ocean went a little pink around the ears. “Oh,” he said. “Right. I get it. Are you— I mean, are you not allowed, to, like—”

  “Wow,” I said, my eyes going wide. “Wow.” I shook my head, washed my hands, and sighed.

  “Wow what?” he said quietly.

  I looked at him. “Listen, I don’t know what you’ve already decided about what you think my life is like, but I’m not about to be sold off by my parents for a pile of goats, okay?”

  “Herd of goats,” he said, clearing his throat. “It’s a herd—”

  “Whatever the hell kind of goats, I don’t care.”

  He flinched.

  “I just happen to have shit to do after school.”

  “Oh.”

  “So maybe we can figure this out some other way,” I said. “Okay?”

  “Oh. Okay. What, uh, what are you doing after school?”

  I’d been stuffing my things into my backpack when he asked the question, and I was so caught off guard I dropped my pencil case. I reached down to grab it. When I stood up he was staring at me.

  “What?” I said. “Why do you care?”

  He looked really uncomfortable now. “I don’t know.”

  I studied him just long enough to analyze the situation. Maybe I was being a little too hard on Ocean with the weird parents. I shoved my pencil case into my backpack and zipped the whole thing away. Adjusted the straps over my shoulders. “I’m joining a breakdancing crew,” I said.

  Ocean frowned and smiled at the same time. “Is that a joke?”

  I rolled my eyes. The bell rang.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “But what about the lab work?”

  I mulled over my options and finally just wrote down my phone number. I handed it to him. “You can text me. We’ll work on it tonight.”

  He stared at the piece of paper.

  “But be careful with that,” I said, nodding at the paper, “because if you text me too much, you’ll have to marry me. It’s the rules of my religion.”

  He blanched. “Wait. What?”

  I was almost smiling. “I have to go, Ocean.”

  “Wait— No, seriously— You’re joking, right?”

  “Wow,” I said, and I shook my head. “Bye.”

  My brother, as promised, had managed to get a teacher to sign off on the whole breakdancing thing. We’d have paperwork by the end of the week to make the club official, which meant that, for the first time in my life, I’d be involved in an extracurricular activity, which felt strange. Extracurricular activities weren’t really my thing.

  Still, I was over the goddamn moon.

  I’d always wanted to do something like this. Breakdancing was something I’d admired forever and always from afar; I’d watched b-girls perform in competitions and I thought they looked so cool—so strong. I wanted to be like them. But breakdancing wasn’t like ballet; it wasn’t something you could look up in the yellow pages. There weren’t breakdancing schools, not where I lived. There weren’t retired breakdancers just lying around, waiting for my parents to pay them in Persian food to teach me to perfect a flare. I wasn’t sure I’d have been able to do something like this if it weren’t for Navid. He’d confessed to me, last night, that he’d been secretly learning and practicing on his own these last couple of years, and I was blown away by how much he’d progressed all by himself. Of the two of us, he was the one who’d really taken our dream seriously—and the realization made me both proud of him and disappointed in myself.

  Navid was taking a risk.

  We moved around so much that I felt like I could never make plans anymore. I never made commitments, never joined school clubs. Never bought a yearbook. I never memorized phone numbers or street names or learned anything more than was absolutely necessary about the town I lived in. There didn’t seem to be a point. Navid had struggled with this, too, in his own way, but he said he was done waiting for the right moment. He would be graduating this year, and he finally wanted to give breakdancing a shot
before he went off to college and everything changed. I was proud of him.

  I waved when I walked into our first practice.

  We were meeting in one of the dance rooms inside the school’s gym, and my brother’s three new friends looked me up and down again, even though we’d already met. They seemed to be assessing me.

  “So,” Carlos said. “You break?”

  “Not yet,” I said, feeling suddenly self-conscious.

  “That’s not true.” My brother stepped forward and smiled at me. “Her uprock isn’t bad and she does a decent six-step.”

  “But I don’t know any power moves,” I said.

  “That’s okay. I’m going to teach you.”

  It was then that I sat down and wondered whether Navid wasn’t doing this whole thing just to throw me a bone. Maybe I was imagining it, but for the first time in a long while, my brother seemed to be mine again, and I didn’t realize until just that moment how much I’d missed him.

  He was dyslexic, my brother. When he started middle school and began failing every subject, I finally realized that he and I hated school for very different reasons. Words and letters never made sense to him like they did to me. And it wasn’t until two years ago when he was threatened with expulsion that he finally told me the truth.

  Screamed it, actually.

  My mom had ordered me to help him with his homework. We couldn’t afford a tutor, so I would have to do, and I was pissed. Tutoring my older brother was not how I wanted to spend my free time. So when he refused to do the work, I got angry.

  “Just answer the question,” I’d snap at him. “It’s simple reading comprehension. Read the paragraph and summarize, in a couple of sentences, what it was about. That’s it. It’s not rocket science.”

  He refused.

  I pushed.

  He refused.

  I insulted him.

  He insulted me back.

  I insulted him more.

  “Just answer the goddamn question why are you so lazy what the hell is wrong with you—”