by Tahereh Mafi
“Some girl took a picture of me in the bathroom,” I said quietly.
He took a tight breath. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“You do?”
He nodded.
I turned away. I wanted to cry but I swore I wouldn’t. I promised myself I wouldn’t. Instead, I whispered, “What’s going on, Ocean? What’s happening right now?”
He shook his head. He looked devastated. “This is my fault,” he said. “This is all my fault. I should’ve listened to you, I never should’ve let this happen—”
And just then some guy I’d never even seen before walked past us, slapped Ocean on the back and said, “Hey man, I understand—I’d hit that, too—”
Ocean shoved him, hard, and the guy shouted something angry and fell back, landing on his elbows.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Ocean said to him. “What happened to you?”
They started yelling at each other and I just couldn’t take it anymore.
I needed to leave.
I knew a little about digital cameras, but I didn’t own one myself, so I couldn’t, in that moment, understand how people were sharing photos of me so quickly. I only knew that someone had taken a photo of me without my scarf on—without my consent—and was now passing it around. It was a kind of violation I’d never experienced before. I wanted to scream.
It was my hair, I wanted to scream.
It was my hair and it was my face and it was my body and it was my fucking business what I wanted to do with it.
Of course, nobody cared.
I ditched school.
Ocean tried to come with me. He kept apologizing and he tried, so hard, to make it better, but I just wanted to be alone. I needed time.
So I left.
I walked around for a while, trying to clear my head. I didn’t know what else to do. There was a part of me that wanted to go home, but I worried that if I locked myself in my bedroom I might never come out. I also really, really didn’t want to cry.
I felt like crying. I felt like crying and screaming all at the same time, but I didn’t want to give in to the feeling. I just wanted to push through this. I wanted to survive it without losing my head.
I knew, hours later, that things had gotten bad when Navid started texting me. If Navid had heard about this, things had to have blown up. And he was worried.
I told him I was okay, that I’d left campus. I’d ended up hiding in a local library. I was sitting in the horror section on purpose.
Navid told me to come to practice.
why?
because it’ll help get your mind off things
I sighed.
how bad is it?
A few seconds later:
well, it’s not great
I slipped back on campus only when I knew school was officially out. I went to my locker to grab my gym bag, but when I opened the door, a piece of paper fell out. I unfolded it to discover that there were two pictures of me, printed side by side. One with my scarf on, one without.
I looked confused in the latter of the two, but the photo wasn’t otherwise unflattering. It was a perfectly okay picture. I’d always liked my hair. I thought I had nice hair. And it photographed well, actually, maybe better than it had looked in real life. But this revelation only made the whole thing more painful. It was more obvious than ever that this was never meant to be a silly stunt; the point here was never to make me look ugly or stupid. Whoever did this had wanted only to unmask me without my permission, to humiliate me by intentionally undermining a decision I’d made to keep some parts of me for just myself. They’d wanted to take away the power I thought I had over my own body.
It was a betrayal that hurt, somehow, more than anything else.
When I showed up to practice, Navid just looked sad.
“You okay?” he said, and pulled me in for a hug.
“Yeah,” I said. “This school blows.”
He took a deep breath. Squeezed me once more before letting go. “Yeah,” he said, and exhaled. “Yeah, it really does.”
“People are so fucked up,” Bijan said to me, shaking his head. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this.”
I didn’t know what to say. I tried to smile.
Carlos and Jacobi were sympathetic.
“Hey, just point me in the right direction,” Carlos said, “and I’ll happily kick the shit out of someone for you.”
I actually smiled, then. “I don’t even know who did it,” I said. “I mean, I saw the girl who took the photo of me, but I don’t know anything else. I don’t know anything about her,” I said, and sighed. “I don’t know people at this school.”
And then Jacobi asked me what happened, how the girl had even managed to get the picture of me, and I told them that I’d been in the bathroom, cleaning up, because some guy had thrown a cinnamon roll at my face, and I tried to laugh about it, to make it seem funny, but all four of them went suddenly quiet.
Stone-faced.
“Some dude threw a cinnamon roll at your face?” Navid looked dumbstruck. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
I blinked. Hesitated. “No?”
“Who?” It was Jacobi now. “Who was it?”
“I don’t know—”
“Son of a bitch,” Carlos said.
“And Ocean didn’t do anything?” Bijan, this time. “He just let some guy throw food at you?”
“What? No,” I said quickly. “No, no, he, like, I don’t know, I think he started fighting with him but I just walked away, so I didn’t—”
“So Ocean knows who this guy is.” Bijan again. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at Navid.
“I mean, I think so,” I said carefully, “but, like, it’s really not—”
“You know what, fuck this shit,” Navid said, and he grabbed his stuff. So did the other guys. They were all packing up.
“Wait—where are you going?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Carlos said to me.
“I’ll see you at home,” Navid said, squeezing my arm as he walked past me.
“Wait—Navid—”
“You’ll be okay walking home today?” Jacobi now.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, but—”
“All right, cool. We’ll see you tomorrow.”
And they just left.
I heard, the next day, that they really had kicked the shit out of this guy, because the cops showed up at my house, looking for Navid, who shrugged it off. He told my horrified parents it was just a big misunderstanding. Navid thought it was hilarious. He said the only people who ever called the cops over a street fight were white people.
In the end, the kid didn’t want to press charges. So they let it go.
Navid would be fine.
But things, for me, just kept getting worse.
28
Twenty-Eight
It was one thing for me to have to deal with this sort of thing. I’d been here before. I knew how to handle these blows and I knew how to walk them off, even as they wounded me. And I took great care to appear so deeply, thoroughly unmoved by the whole photo debacle that the mess defused itself in a matter of days. I gave it no life. No power. And it withered easily.
Ocean, on the other hand, was new to this.
Watching him try to navigate the at once overwhelming and heartbreaking experience of the unmasked mob—
It was like watching a child learn about death for the first time.
People wouldn’t leave him alone, suddenly. My face had become notorious overnight, and Navid kicking the crap out of one of these kids for throwing a pastry at my head had complicated everything. I mean, I didn’t love Navid’s methods, but I will say this: no one ever threw anything at me, not ever again. But kids now seemed terrified to even be near me. People were both angry and scared, which was possibly the most dangerous combination of emotions, and it made Ocean’s association with me more outrageous than ever. His friends said awful things to him about me, about himself—things I don’t
even want to repeat—and he was forced into an impossible position, trying to defend me against slanderous statements about my faith, about what it meant to be Muslim, about what it was like to be me. It was exhausting.
Still, Ocean swore he didn’t care.
He didn’t, but I did.
I could feel myself pulling away, retreating inward, wanting to save him and myself by sacrificing this newfound happiness, and I knew he felt it happening. He could feel the distance growing between us—could see me shutting down, closing off—and I felt his panic. I could see it in the way he looked at me now. I heard it in his voice when he whispered Are we okay? on the phone last night. I felt it when he touched me, tentatively, like I might spook at any second.
But the more I pulled away, the steadier he became.
Ocean had made a choice, and he was so willing to stand by that choice that it made everyone angrier. He was alienated by his friends and he shrugged it off; his coach kept harassing him about me and he ignored it.
I think it was that he showed them no loyalty—that he seemed to care so little about the opinions of people he’d known for far longer than he’d ever known me—that finally pissed them off so much.
It was the middle of December, a week before winter break, when it all got really ugly.
It was just a prank, in the end.
It was a stupid prank. Someone had wanted to mess with Ocean and the whole thing spun so far out of control it threw our entire world off its axis.
Some anonymous person hacked into the computer systems and sent out a mass email to the entire school district’s database. All the students and teachers in the entire county—even the parents who were on school mailing lists—got this email. The note was terrible. And it wasn’t even about me. It was about Ocean.
It accused him of supporting terrorism, of being anti-American, of believing it was okay to kill innocent people because he wanted access to seventy-two virgins. It called for him to be kicked off the team. It said that he was a poor representative of his hometown and a disgrace to the veterans who supported their games. The note called him horrible names. And the thing that made it even worse, of course, was that there was a picture of the two of us holding hands at school. Here was proof, it seemed to say, that he’d made friends with the enemy.
The school started getting angry calls. Letters. Horrified parents were demanding an explanation, a hearing, a town hall meeting. I never knew people could care so much about the dramas surrounding high school basketball, but holy hell, it was apparently a very big deal. Ocean Desmond James was a very big deal, it turned out, and I don’t think even he’d realized just how much until any of this happened.
Still, it wasn’t hard for me to understand how we got here. I’d been expecting it. I’d been dreading it. But it was so hard for Ocean to stomach that the world was filled with such awful people. I tried to tell him that the bigots and the racists had always been there, and he said he’d honestly never seen them like this, that he never thought they could be like this, and I said yes, I know. I said that’s how privilege works.
He was stunned.
We’d run out of places to find privacy—even just to talk about all that had transpired. We talked at night, of course, but we rarely had a chance to connect during the day, in person. The school was still so abuzz with all this bullshit that I couldn’t even stop to speak to him in the halls anymore. Every class was an ordeal. Even the teachers looked a little freaked out. Only Mr. Jordan seemed sympathetic, but I knew there wasn’t much he could do. And every day people I’d never once made eye contact with would lean over and say things to me when I took my seat.
“What does he have to do, exactly, to get the seventy-two virgins?”
“Isn’t it against your religion to date white guys?”
“So are you, like, related to Saddam Hussein?”
“Why are you even here, if you hate America so much?”
I told them all to fuck off, but it was like a game of Whac-a-Mole. They just kept coming back.
Ocean blew off basketball practice one afternoon so that we could finally find a moment alone together. His coach was suddenly drowning the team in extra, unnecessary practices, and Ocean said it was because his coach was trying to keep him busy—that he was trying to keep the two of us apart. I knew that Ocean’s decision to ditch practice would probably blow up in both our faces, but I was also grateful for the moment of peace. I’d been dying to see him, to speak to him in person and see for myself that he was okay.
We were sitting in his car in the parking lot at IHOP.
Ocean rested his head against the window, his eyes squeezed shut, as he told me about the most recent development in this shitstorm. His coach had been begging him to make the whole thing go away, and he’d said it would be easy: the school would issue a statement saying it was a stupid hoax, that the whole thing was nonsense, no big deal. Done.
I frowned.
Ocean looked upset, but I couldn’t understand why. This didn’t seem like a terrible idea. “That actually sounds like a great solution,” I said. “It’s so simple.”
Ocean laughed then, but there was no life in it. And he finally met my eyes when he said, “In order for the statement to stick, I can’t be seen with you anymore.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. “Oh,” I said.
In fact, it would be best, his coach had said, if Ocean were never publicly associated with me in any way, ever again. There was already school drama circling the two of us, and now this, the picture of us together, he said, was just too much. It was too political. All major news outlets seemed to indicate that we were about to go to war with Iraq, and the news cycle, though always insane, had been perhaps especially insane lately. Everyone was on edge. Everything was so sensitive. Ocean’s coach wanted to tell everyone that the photo of us together was just another part of the prank, that it had been photoshopped, but this explanation would only have been believable if Ocean also promised to stop spending time with me. There could be no more photos of the two of us together.
“Oh,” I said again.
“Yeah.” Ocean looked exhausted. He ran both hands through his hair.
“So, do you”—I took a quick, painful breath—“I mean—I’d understand if y—”
“No.” Ocean sat up, looked suddenly panicked. “No—no, hell no, fuck him, fuck all of them, I don’t care—”
“But—”
He was shaking his head, hard. “No,” he said again. He was staring at me in disbelief. “I can’t believe you’d even— No, it’s not even a discussion. I told him to go to hell.”
For a moment, I didn’t know what to say. I felt anger and heartbreak and even, suddenly, an immeasurable swell of joy, all in the same moment. It seemed impossible to know which emotion to follow, which one would lead me to the right decision. I knew that just because I wanted to be with Ocean didn’t mean it would—or should—work out that way.
And my thoughts must’ve been easy to read, because Ocean leaned in and took my hands. “Hey, this isn’t a big deal, okay? It seems like a big deal right now, but I swear this will blow over. None of this matters. They don’t matter. This doesn’t change anything for me.”
But I couldn’t meet his eyes anymore.
“Please,” he said. “I don’t care. I really don’t. I don’t care if they cut me from the team. I don’t care about any of it. I never have.”
“Yeah,” I said softly. But I’d have been lying if I said I didn’t think my presence in his life had only made things worse for him.
He didn’t care.
But I did.
I cared. Things had been snowballing, fast, and I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t scared anymore. I cared that Ocean was about to be blacklisted by everyone in this town. I cared about his prospects. I cared about his future. I told him that if they cut him from the team he’d lose his chance at getting a basketball scholarship, and he told me not to worry about it, that he didn’t even need the s
cholarship, that his mom had set aside some of her inheritance to pay for college.
Still, it bothered me.
I cared.
I was shaking my head, staring into my open hands when he touched my cheek. I looked up. His eyes were anguished.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Don’t do this, okay? Don’t give up on me. I’m not going anywhere.”
I felt paralyzed.
I didn’t know what to do. My gut said walk away. Let him live his life. Even Navid told me that things had gone too far, that I should break things off.
And then, the next day, Coach Hart cornered me.
I should’ve known better than to talk to him alone, but he caught me in a crowd and managed to bully me, loudly, into coming into his office. He swore he just wanted to have a friendly chat about the situation, but the minute I stepped inside he started shouting at me.
He told me I was ruining Ocean’s life. He said he wished I’d never moved to this town, that from the moment I’d shown up I’d been a distraction, that he’d known all along that it must’ve been me putting ideas in Ocean’s head about quitting the team, causing trouble. He said that I’d shown up and made a mess of everything, of the entire district, and couldn’t I see what I’d done? Parents and students across the county were in chaos, games had been postponed, and their reputation was on the line. They were a patriotic town, he said, with patriots among them, and my association with Ocean was destroying their image. This team mattered, he said to me, in ways that I could never understand, because he was sure that wherever I came from didn’t have basketball. I didn’t tell him that where I came from was California, but then, he never gave me a chance to speak. And then he said that I needed to leave Ocean the hell alone before I took away every good thing he had in his life.
“You end this, young lady,” he said to me. “End it right now.”
I really wanted to tell him to go to hell, but the truth was, he kind of scared me. He seemed violently angry in a way I’d never experienced alone in a room with an adult. The door was closed. I felt like I had no power. Like I couldn’t trust him.
But this little chat had made things clearer for me.