by Tahereh Mafi
I think it was my fault. I kind of froze. I’d pushed him so hard to give me a straight answer but the one I got wasn’t the one I was expecting and it threw me off-balance. I didn’t know what to do with it.
It made me feel vulnerable.
So we talked about movies. Things we’d seen; things we hadn’t. It was fine, but it was kind of boring. I think we were both relieved when we finally left IHOP behind, like we were trying to shake off something embarrassing.
“Do you know what time it is?” I asked him. We’d been walking in silence, side by side, heading in no particular direction.
He glanced at his watch and said, “Third period is almost over.”
I sighed. “I guess we should go back to school.”
“Yeah.”
“So much for ditching.”
He stopped walking and touched my arm. Said my name.
I looked up.
Ocean was quite a bit taller than me, and I’d never looked up at him like this before. I was standing in his shadow. We were on the sidewalk, facing each other, and there wasn’t much space between us.
He smelled really nice. My heart was being weird again.
But his eyes were worried. He opened his mouth to say something and then, very suddenly, changed his mind. Looked away.
“What is it?” I said.
He shook his head. Smiled at me out of the corner of his eye, but only briefly. “Nothing. Never mind.”
I could tell that something was bothering him, but his reluctance to share made me think I probably didn’t want to know what he was thinking. So I changed the subject.
“Hey, how long have you lived here?”
Unexpectedly, Ocean smiled. He seemed both pleased and surprised to be asked the question. “Forever,” he said. And then, “I mean, I moved here when I was, like, six, but yeah, basically forever.”
“Wow,” I said. I almost whispered the word. He’d described in a single sentence something I’d often dreamed about. “Must be nice to live in the same place for so long.”
We’d started walking again.
Ocean reached up, plucked a leaf from a tree we were passing, and spun it around in his hands. “It’s okay.” He shrugged. “Gets kind of boring, actually.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It sounds really nice. You probably know your neighbors, huh? And you get to go to school with all the same people.”
“Same people,” he said, nodding. “Yeah. But trust me, it gets old, fast. I’m dying to get the hell out of here.”
“Really?” I turned to look at him. “Why?”
He tossed the leaf, shoved his hands into his pockets. “There’s so much I want to do,” he said. “Things I want to see. I don’t want to get stuck here forever. I want to live in a big city. Travel.” He glanced at me. “I’ve never even left the country, you know?”
I smiled at him, kind of. “Not really,” I said. “I think I’ve traveled enough for the both of us. I’m ready to retire. Settle down. Get old.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“But in my heart I’m a seventy-five-year-old man.”
“Wow, I really hope not.”
“You know, when I was eight,” I said, “my parents tried to move back to Iran. They packed up all our shit and sold the house and just, took a leap.” I adjusted the backpack on my shoulders. Sighed. “Ultimately, it didn’t work out. We were too American. Too much had changed. But I lived in Iran for six months, bouncing between the city and the countryside. I went to this really fancy international school in Tehran for a while, and all my classmates were these horrible, spoiled, dipshit children of diplomats. I’d cry every day. Beg my mom to let me stay home. But then we spent some time farther north, in a part of the country even closer to the Caspian Sea, and I went to class with a bunch of village kids. The entire school was a single room—straight out of Anne of Green Gables—and of the twelve schools I’ve attended in my life, it’s still my favorite.” I laughed. “The kids used to chase me around at lunchtime and beg me to say things in English. They were obsessed with America,” I explained. “I’d never been so popular in my life.” I laughed, again, and looked up to meet Ocean’s eyes, but he’d slowed down. He was staring at me, and I couldn’t read his expression.
“What?” I said. “Too weird?”
The intense look in his eyes evaporated. In fact, he seemed suddenly frustrated. He shook his head and said, “I wish you’d stop saying things like that to me. I don’t think you’re weird. And I don’t know why you think I’m going to have a sudden epiphany that you’re weird and start freaking out. I’m not. Okay? I genuinely don’t care that you cover your hair. I don’t. I mean”—he hesitated—“as long as it’s, like, something you actually want to do.”
He looked at me. Waited for something.
I looked back, confused.
“I mean,” he said, “your parents don’t, like, force you to wear a headscarf, do they?”
“What?” I frowned. “No. No, I mean, I don’t love the way people treat me for wearing it—which often makes me wonder whether I shouldn’t just stop—but no,” I said. I looked off in the distance. “When I’m not thinking about people harassing me every day, I actually like the way it makes me feel. It’s nice.”
“Nice how?”
We’d officially stopped walking. We were standing on the sidewalk, next to a sort of busy road, where I was having one of the most personal conversations I’d ever had with a boy.
“I mean, I don’t know,” I said. “It makes me feel, I don’t know. Like I’m in control. I get to choose who gets to see me. How they see me. I don’t think it’s for everyone,” I said, and shrugged. “I’ve met girls who do feel forced to wear it and they hate it. And I think that’s bullshit. Obviously I don’t think anyone should wear it if they don’t want to. But I like it,” I said. “I like that you have to ask for my permission to see my hair.”
Ocean’s eyes widened suddenly. “Can I see your hair?”
“No.”
He laughed out loud. Looked away. He said, “Okay.” And then, quietly, “I can already kind of see your hair, though.”
I looked at him, surprised.
I wrapped my scarf a little loosely, which made it so that a little of my hair, at the top, sometimes showed, and some people were obsessed with this detail. I wasn’t sure why, but they loved pointing out to me that they could already see an inch of my hair, like maybe that would be enough to nullify the whole thing. I found this fixation kind of hilarious.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, I mean, that’s usually all it takes. Guys see an inch of my hair and they just, you know”—I mimed an explosion with my hand—“lose their minds. And then it’s just, like, marriage proposals, all over the place.”
Ocean looked confused.
He didn’t say anything for a second, and then—
“Oh. Oh. You’re joking.”
I looked curiously at him. “Yes,” I said. “I’m super joking.”
He was looking at me just as curiously as I looked at him. We were still standing on the sidewalk, talking. Staring at each other.
Finally, he said: “So you’re trying to tell me that what I said was stupid, huh? I only just got that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m usually more direct.”
And he laughed. He looked away. Looked back at me. “Am I making this weird? Should I stop asking you these questions?”
“No, no.” I shook my head. Smiled, even. “No one ever asks me these questions. I like that you ask. Most people just assume they know what I’m thinking.”
“Well, I have no idea what you’re thinking. Like, ever.”
“Right now,” I said, “I’m thinking you’re so much ballsier than I thought you’d be. I’m kind of impressed.”
“Wait, what do you mean, than you thought I’d be?”
I couldn’t help it, I was suddenly laughing. “Like, I don’t know. When I first met you? You seemed really—timid,” I said. “
Kind of terrified.”
“Well, to be fair, you’re kind of terrifying.”
“Yeah,” I said, sobered in an instant. “I know.”
“I don’t mean”—he shook his head, laughed—“I don’t mean because of your scarf or your religion or whatever. I just mean I don’t think you see yourself the way other people do.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “I’m pretty sure I know how other people see me.”
“Maybe some people,” he said. “Yeah. I’m positive there are horrible people in the world. But there are a lot of other people who are looking at you because they think you’re interesting.”
“Well I don’t want to be interesting,” I said. “I don’t exist to fascinate strangers. I’m just trying to live. I just want people to be normal around me.”
Ocean wasn’t looking at me when he said, quietly, “I have no idea how anyone is supposed to be normal around you. I can’t even be normal around you.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because you’re crazy intimidating,” he said. “And you don’t even see it. You don’t look at people, you don’t talk to people, you don’t seem to care about anything most kids are obsessed with. I mean, you show up to school looking like you just walked out of a magazine and you think people are staring at you because of something they saw on the news.”
I went suddenly still.
My heart seemed to speed up and slow down. I didn’t know what to say, and Ocean wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Anyway,” he said. He cleared his throat. I noticed he’d gone pink around the ears. “So you went to twelve different schools?”
I nodded.
“Damn.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It sucked. Continues to suck.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I mean, it doesn’t suck right now,” I said, staring at our feet. “Right now it’s not so bad.”
“No?”
I glanced up. He was smiling at me.
“No,” I said. “Right now it’s not bad at all.”
12
Twelve
Ocean and I split up for lunch.
I think he might’ve joined me, if I’d asked, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t know what he did for lunch, who his friends were, what his social obligations might be, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know yet. At the moment, I just wanted space to process our conversation. I wanted space to figure out what to do about Mr. Jordan’s class. I wanted time to get my brain on straight. I was no longer hungry, thanks to the stack of pancakes I’d eaten at IHOP, so I headed straight to my tree.
This had been my solution to the lonely lunchtime problem. I’d grown tired of both the bathroom and the library, and enough time had passed that I no longer felt too self-conscious about eating alone. This school had a couple of green spaces, and I’d picked one at random to make my own. I chose a tree. I sat under it, leaning against the trunk. I ate food if I was hungry; but mostly I wrote in my journal or read a book.
Today, I was late.
And someone else was sitting under my tree.
I hadn’t been looking at people, as was my unfortunate habit, so I hadn’t noticed the person sitting under my tree until I nearly stepped on him.
He shouted.
I jumped back. Startled. “Oh,” I said, “Oh my God, I’m sorry.”
He stood up, frowned, and I took one real look at his face and just about fell over. He was, wow, he was possibly the most good-looking guy I’d ever seen. He had warm brown skin and hazel eyes and he looked distinctly Middle Eastern. I had, like, a Spidey-sense for that sort of thing. He was also clearly not a sophomore, whoever he was; he was maybe my brother’s age.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” he said back. He was looking curiously at me. “You new here?”
“Yeah. I transferred in this year.”
“Wow, cool,” he said. “We don’t get a lot of hijabis in these parts. That’s pretty brave,” he said, nodding at my head.
But I was distracted. I never thought I’d hear any kid at this school use the word hijab so casually. Hijab was the word for a headscarf in Arabic. Hijabis was a sort of colloquial term some people used to describe girls who wore hijab. There had to be a reason he knew that.
“Are you Muslim?” I asked.
He nodded. “Hey, why were you about to step on me?”
“Oh,” I said, and felt suddenly awkward. “I usually sit here during lunch. I just didn’t see you.”
“Oh, my bad,” he said, looking back at the tree. “I didn’t realize this was someone’s spot. I was catching up on some homework before class. Needed a quiet place to work.”
“The library is pretty reliable for that sort of thing,” I said.
He laughed, but didn’t offer to explain why he’d bypassed the library. Instead, he said, “Are you Syrian?”
I shook my head.
“Turkish?”
I shook my head again. I got this a lot. There was something about my face, apparently, that made it so people never really knew where to place me on the map. “I’m Persian.”
“Oh,” he said, his eyebrows high. “Cool, cool. I’m Lebanese.”
I nodded, unsurprised. In my experience, the hottest Middle Eastern guys were always Lebanese.
“Anyway,” he said, and took a deep breath. “It was nice to meet you.”
“You too,” I said. “I’m Shirin.”
“Shirin,” he said, and smiled. “Nice. Well, I hope I see you again sometime. I’m Yusef.”
“Okay,” I said, which was kind of a stupid thing to say, but I didn’t really notice in the moment. “Bye.”
He waved and walked away and I was not too proud to watch him go. He was wearing a tight sweater that did little to hide the fact that he had the body of an athlete.
Damn. I was really beginning to like this school.
Bio was my last class of the day. I was expecting to see Ocean, but he never showed up. I dropped my bag on the floor and looked around the classroom. I sat in my seat and felt distracted. When we were sent to our lab stations, I cut into my soggy cat and couldn’t stop wondering where he was. I even worried, for a second, that something bad might’ve happened. But there was nothing to be done about it.
When the bell rang, I headed to practice.
“So I heard you cut class today,” was the first thing my brother said to me.
Shit.
I’d almost forgotten about that. “Who told you I cut class?”
“Mr. Jordan.”
“What?” Outrage, again. “Why? How do you two even know each other?”
Navid just shook his head. He almost laughed. “Mr. Jordan is our supervisor for the breakdancing club.”
“Of course he is.” Cool Teacher Mr. Jordan would’ve jumped at the chance to supervise a breakdancing club. Of course.
“He said he was worried about you. He said you got upset during class and ran out without a word.” Navid paused. Leveled me with a look. “He said you ran off with some dude.”
“What?” I frowned. “First of all, I didn’t run out of class. And second of all, I didn’t leave with some dude. He followed me out.”
“Whatever,” Navid said. “What’s going on here? You’re ditching class? Running off campus with random guys? Am I going to have to kick the shit out of someone tomorrow?”
I rolled my eyes. Carlos, Bijan, and Jacobi were watching our conversation with great fascination and I was annoyed with all of them. “Mr. Jordan was being an asshole,” I said. “He forced me and this other guy to stare at each other in front of the whole class, and then he told the guy to say, out loud, exactly what he was thinking when he looked at me.”
“And?” My brother crossed his arms. “So what?”
I looked at him, surprised. “What do you mean, so what? What do you think happened? It was humiliating.”
Navid dropped his arms. “What do you mean it was humiliating?”
“I mean it was horrible. He said I lo
oked like nothing. That I basically didn’t even exist.” I waved a frustrated hand. “Whatever. It sounds stupid now, I know, but it really hurt my feelings. So I walked out.”
“Damn,” Navid said quietly. “So I really do have to kick the shit out of someone tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to kick the shit out of anyone,” I said, and slumped down on the floor. “It’s fine. I think I might just drop the class. There’s still time.”
“I don’t think so.” Navid shook his head at me. “I’m pretty sure you missed the window. You can still withdraw, but it’ll show up on your transcript like that, which m—”
“I don’t give a damn about my transcript,” I said, irritated.
“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands. “Okay.” My brother looked at me, genuinely sympathetic, for all of five seconds before he suddenly frowned. “Wait, I don’t understand one thing—why would you ditch class with a guy who thinks you don’t exist?”
I shook my head. Sighed. “Different guy,” I said.
Navid raised his eyebrows. “Different guy?” He glanced at his friends. “You three hearing this shit? She says it was a different guy.”
Carlos laughed.
“These kids grow up fast,” Jacobi said.
Bijan grinned at me and said, “Damn, girl.”
“Oh my God,” I said, squeezing my eyes closed. “Shut up, all of you. You’re being ridiculous.”
“So who’s the different guy?” Navid asked. “Does he have a name?”
I opened my eyes. Stared at him. “No.”
Navid’s mouth dropped open. He was half smiling, half surprised. “Wow,” he said. “Wow. You must really like him.”
“I don’t like him,” I snapped. “I just don’t want you bothering him.”
“Why would we bother him?” My brother was still smiling.
“Can we just get started on practice? Please?”
“Not until you tell me his name.”
I sighed. I knew my evasiveness would only make the situation worse, so I gave in. “His name is Ocean.”
Navid frowned. “What the hell kind of a name is Ocean?”
“You know, people wonder the same thing about you.”
“Whatever,” he said. “My name is awesome.”