The Authentics

by Abdi Nazemian

  We all laughed, and Caroline clapped her hands together. “That kind of explains everything!” Caroline exclaimed.

  “At the very least, it establishes why I have such a big brain,” Kurt said.

  “And a big head,” Joy added.

  “In all honesty, I’m three-point-seven percent Neanderthal, but I looked it up, and that’s bizarrely high for a modern human. I mean, isn’t that weird? I’m, like, not completely human. I am literally part of a different species.”

  “Well,” I said, remembering biology class, “you’re part subspecies of human.”

  “It’s so cool,” Kurt said. “And you know, Neanderthals lived in complex social groups, so maybe that explains why I fit so well in the Authentics.”

  “Are we a complex social group?” I asked.

  “I mean, we’re not that complex,” Joy said. “My results were pretty boring. The only cool thing is that I have two percent ancestry from the Middle East, which I guess isn’t that surprising since it’s close to Africa, but I like that it kind of makes us sisters, Daria.”

  “Cool,” I said with a smile, but I wasn’t smiling inside. Secretly, I wished I had gotten results like hers. Why couldn’t I have received confirmation that everything I believed to be true actually was true? Why was I the one who had to have my whole identity questioned by a stupid pie chart?

  “What about you, Caroline?” Kurt asked. “Any big revelations in your results?”

  “Not really,” Caroline said. “My ancestry chart looks like a Eurail pass. Switzerland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, France, Poland. Oh, but there was one really weird detail. I have something called a warrior gene.”

  “Not surprising,” Joy muttered.

  “I think it just means I’m passionate,” Caroline said, a little defensive. “Oh, and this is so random, but it said my earwax type is wet.”

  “My earwax type is wet too!” Kurt said, a little too loud. A few skaters looked over at us.

  “You guys, can we not talk about earwax?” Joy said. “It’s really vile.”

  “But what kind of earwax do you have?” Caroline asked as she tried to poke a finger into Joy’s ear. Joy gracefully dodged Caroline’s finger, causing Caroline to fall as Joy skated away.

  Joy glided back toward Caroline and helped her up, before saying, “I have wet earwax too, okay?”

  “Maybe the reason we’re such good friends is because we all have wet earwax,” Kurt said. “It’s our secret bond.”

  I remembered that on my results, it said I had dry earwax. It was such a silly detail, but in that moment, it suddenly felt like a monumental difference between us. Once again, I was surrounded by people I loved, and I felt alone. Maybe that’s what keeping a secret does to you, and perhaps if I’d just told them about my own results, I wouldn’t have felt so isolated. But I just couldn’t bring myself to say anything. Not until I knew more.

  Chapter Five

  I HAD TO KNOW MORE, so I accompanied my mother to our family lawyer’s office at the Emerald Tower on Monday morning. The Emerald Tower was a nondescript office building from the 1960s. If you entered the Emerald Tower, you would immediately have been faced with a building directory, and if you weren’t part of the tribe, you would most likely have found the names very difficult to pronounce: Alizadeh, Bahrampour, Darband, Davoudi, Esfandyar, Farrokhzadeh, Golsorkhi, Hakimi. I could go on, but you get the picture. Baba’s office was on the sixth floor.

  If the idea of an all-Persian office building in the middle of Los Angeles sounds strange to you, then you may not know that Persians like to pretend they live in prerevolutionary Iran even though they don’t. It’s like they don’t want to face the fact that they were forced to leave their country.

  My parents left Iran in 1979. They had just started dating when Baba’s family decided they were going to flee. Sheila’s family wanted to stay. That’s when Baba proposed. I think it’s a really romantic story, though sometimes I used to wonder whether they would have gotten married at all if there hadn’t been a revolution in Iran.

  Anyway, it doesn’t matter because there was a revolution in Iran. See, before we had a revolution, Iran was a monarchy and we had a king who we called the shah. He wanted to make the country more modern—more like America, I guess. My parents loved the shah. Because of him, Sheila got to wear short skirts and see Bob Dylan and Dalida in concert in Tehran. But there were also people who didn’t like the shah so much. Like Auntie Lida, who stayed in Iran. She once told me that the shah didn’t believe in freedom of speech, that he killed people who spoke against him, and that he was a puppet of the CIA. At the time, I was too young to understand what she meant. But as I got older, I Googled my way through Iran’s history and realized how complicated it all was. Like imagine if we had a terrible president and the people protested to get him to leave, and he did, but then he was replaced by an even worse president who told women they couldn’t sing or show their ankles. That’s pretty much what happened in Iran. Which I guess is why Persians in LA want to pretend they still live in 1970s Iran. They feel like their real country was taken from them, and so they have tried to re-create it, in Westwood, of all places. How authentic is that?

  When I was eleven, Baba took me on my first tour of the Emerald Tower.

  “Azizam,” he said. “You can do anything you want with your life. You can be anyone you want to be.”

  “I want to be Selena Gomez,” I said, and he looked confused, ’cause he had no idea who that was.

  Then Baba took me to visit all the men and women who rented office space in the building, many of whom I recognized from our parties. I met Dr. Alizadeh, the chiropractor. I met Mrs. Bahrampour, the esthetician. I met Mrs. Davoudi, the accountant. I met Mr. Farrokhzadeh, the lawyer. And of course I already knew our dentist, Dr. Majidi, and our doctor, Dr. Kalimi.

  “You see, aziz,” Baba said when our tour was over. “You can be a dentist, an accountant, a doctor, an esthetician. You can be anything you want.”

  “Can I be a nanny like Lala?” I asked. Baba frowned. Obviously, I had said something to upset him. “You said I could be anything I wanted.”

  “Yes. Of course,” he said. “But you also want to make money.”

  “Does Lala not make money?” I asked.

  “Of course she does. We pay her well,” he assured me.

  “Good,” I said. “Then I can be like Lala when I grow up and make lots of money.”

  Baba finally nodded and told me that was fine. But of course I knew it wasn’t. I wanted him to understand that being a nanny was just as valid a job for his daughter as being an accountant, chiropractor, or esthetician. I wanted him to get that Lala had a much more important job than cracking someone’s back or squeezing someone’s blackheads. I mean, she shaped my life, and wouldn’t he rather I change someone’s life than prepare their taxes?

  When Sheila and I walked into Mr. Farrokhzadeh’s office, he was walking briskly on his treadmill desk while typing. “Sheila!” he exclaimed, and then after a few pants, he added, “Daria!”

  “Hello, Mr. Farrokhzadeh,” I said. “Nice to see you.”

  “Who. Wants. Some. Tea?” he asked, taking a break between each word to catch his breath. His Stanford Law diploma stared at me from above his desk, along with a large framed oil painting of his wife and children.

  “I’m fine,” Sheila said.

  “Me too. Thank you, Mr. Farrokhzadeh,” I said.

  “Please, call me Fred,” he said.

  FRED? His real name was Farhad. I hated when Iranians Americanized their names. It’s like, could you be more ashamed of your culture? And it wasn’t just Persians who were ashamed. Andrew’s real name was Liang. When I called him on it, he said he changed it after he read a study that people with names that are foreign or hard to pronounce are less likely to get hired for jobs. I mean, the guy had a PhD in neurochemistry. I think he could get a job no matter how hard his name was to pronounce.

  “So. You’re. Here. To. Talk. About. Your. Mot
her?” Fred asked Sheila.

  “She probably won’t come to America. She hates it here. She’s only visited once, and she said all the fruit tasted the same.”

  “She. Has. A. Point,” Fred said.

  “Farhad,” Sheila said. “Will you please get off that silly treadmill and sit down? You can barely speak.”

  Fred jumped off the treadmill and had a seat. He took a deep breath. “My doctor recommended I get that thing. Apparently, sitting down is killing us.”

  “They say everything is killing us,” Sheila said. “I say let’s enjoy life and not worry about any of it.”

  “I agree,” Farhad said. He looked over at me and smiled wide. “Daria, you are so big now!” I know he meant I had grown, but it kind of sounded like he was calling me fat. And then he reached over and pinched my left cheek. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I still see a little girl when I see you. You know you vomited on me once.”

  “That’s, um, gross,” I said, forcing a smile. I kind of wanted to vomit on him again. It would’ve been better than having my cheeks pinched like a baby.

  “Now I have to do the other cheek,” he said, reaching for the right side of my face.

  Before his hairy fingers could make contact with my face, I bolted up. “I think I’m gonna leave you two alone,” I said.

  “Great to see you,” Farhad said. “I can’t wait for your sweet sixteen. It’s already in my calendar.” Of course it is.

  I glared at my mother as I left. Once I was out the door, I could hear Sheila say, “Like I said, the chances of my mother coming are very low. But let’s get her a visa anyway. You never know. Perhaps in her old age, she’ll decide to make peace with bland fruit. And even if she doesn’t come, my sister won’t be able to tell me I haven’t offered to help.”

  I didn’t hear Fred’s response. By that point, I was back in the greeting area of his small office with a mission on my mind. If one of my parents wasn’t my parent, there might be some kind of legal paperwork to prove it, and if there was legal paperwork to prove it, it would be somewhere in this office. Which meant I had to snoop.

  Mina, Mr. Farrokhzadeh’s intern, was sitting at the front desk, answering phones and reading a James Joyce book at the same time. That’s the other thing about the Emerald Tower. Every Persian kid in town was expected to intern in one of the offices if they went to college in Los Angeles. I always thought this was a way for the Persian parents of Tehrangeles to keep a watchful eye on each other’s kids while they were at their most rebellious age, and get some free labor while they’re at it.

  Mina looked up from her book just long enough to give me a barely audible “What’s up, Daria?” She had her hair cut in a severe Cleopatra bob, and heavy black eyeliner on. Her whole look was very hipster–meets–ancient Egypt.

  “Nothing,” I said. “My mom’s talking visas with Fred.”

  “I’ve told him a hundred times not to call himself Fred,” she said.

  “It sounds like he’s a dad on some old sitcom,” I added.

  She laughed, which made me secretly proud. Mina was always so smart and cool. Of the Tehrangeles girls in the generation above mine, she was probably my second favorite after Goly Elghanyan, who was a professional snowboarder with a tattoo of Mossadegh on her shoulder. Goly was as cool as Iranians got.

  “So, how’s college?” I asked her, genuinely curious. I couldn’t wait to go to college, as long as I could go to the same school as the Authentics, obviously. I couldn’t imagine surviving a new school without them.

  “The first year was rough,” she said. “But now I get to take all my classes in my major, which is English. So basically I get to spend all my time reading, which is pretty much heaven.”

  That did sound like heaven. Though I was what Baba referred to as a well-rounded student, English had always been my favorite subject. I loved reading books and discussing them. I loved entering new worlds, imagining what it would be like to be different people, live in different places, make different choices. “How about this internship? Fun?”

  Mina shrugged. “I mean . . . it’s fine. My mom says English majors who want to make money need to go to law school, so here I am.”

  “Is it interesting or is it just, like, lots of filing?” I asked.

  Mina pointed to a small room in the back. “See that room?” she said. “It’s full of all his old files. I have literally spent most of the year organizing them all. They were a mess. You couldn’t find anything. But I’m weird about organizing. I love it.”

  “You must be a Virgo,” I said, remembering what Kurt had said about Virgos being superorganized.

  “Impressive,” she said. Then she put her book down and stood up. “Time for another cup of the grossest coffee known to woman,” she said.

  “I can watch the phones if you wanna walk to Starbucks,” I said. “I’m pretty sure there’s one down the street.”

  “Starbucks gets a B-minus,” she said. “But there’s this amazing coffee shop run by a Guatemalan psychic five minutes away. You don’t mind?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  I gave her enough time to make it down the hall and into the elevator, and then I rushed into that room in the back. The filing cabinets were organized alphabetically by client name, and then within each client’s file, she had separated the files into years. Most of the files dated back to 1979, the year Mr. Farrokhzadeh and most of his clients left Iran. I wondered how many secrets I would uncover if I had hours to spend in this room. Dozens at least. But I didn’t have hours to spend. At most, I had ten minutes, and I would have to run back out into the waiting room if the phone rang because I couldn’t have Fred wondering why no one was answering his phone.

  I opened up cabinet after cabinet until I finally got to the Es and found our family file: Esfandyar. Like most of the other files, ours began in 1979, but I wasn’t interested in that year. I was interested in the year I was born, so I went straight there.

  I wondered whether there were security cameras in the office, and if there were, was it against the law to snoop in a lawyer’s office? But then I figured my parents’ file is like my file. We’re all family, right? That’s what Sheila must have told herself every time she checked my Twitter account, which was obviously meant for public but not parental consumption. Well, if she could poke around my social media, then I felt I could poke around in her legal files.

  The first thing I found in the file for the year of my birth was an amendment to Baba’s will, which I didn’t read. I mean, I guess I was a little curious about it, but even the idea of reading it made me realize I would lose him someday, and I didn’t want to think about that. Same goes for an amendment to Sheila’s will, which was filed just after his. I preferred to think they were both immortal, or fantasize that by the time they got really old, doctors would have invented some way for them to stay alive forever.

  I fingered through some boring documents, like life insurance policies, before I got to something strange. It was a contract between my parents and a woman named Encarnación Vargas. It was signed on February 19, my birthday. As I read the document, I became short of breath and dizzy again, and the words on the page grew blurrier and blurrier. But certain words—adoption, no communication, birth mother, adoptive parents—seemed to leap out at me. My head was spinning, and my ears were ringing, and then I realized the ringing was the phone outside. I stared at the last page of the contract. There were three signatures, and one blank space marked “birth father.” That’s what I felt like: a blank space.

  Shocked and dazed, I quickly filed the contract back where it belonged, and ran to the front desk. “Mr. Farrokhzadeh’s office,” I said.

  “It’s Mina,” the voice from the other line said. “I just realized I didn’t offer to get you anything. Pick your poison.”

  “Oh,” I uttered, barely audible. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m getting you a coconut chai latte. It’s their specialty.”

  I hung up the phone and closed
my eyes tight, wishing I could be somewhere else, or better yet someone else. And then it hit me. I was someone else, and that was the problem. With my eyes closed, all I saw was blackness. But then little white dots invaded the blackness, coming toward me like soldiers on a battlefield, and soon those dots were spelling words like birth and adoption and communication and parents, words that now felt like they were growing inside me.

  “Daria, are you ready?” Sheila asked. I opened my eyes and looked up. There was my mother, hovering over me, looking as perfect and relaxed as ever, unaware that everything had changed and that her world had just spun off its axis.

  “Sure, I’m ready,” I said. But of course I wasn’t ready for this. How could I have been? Nothing in my life had prepared me for this moment. I felt empty, like someone had taken a vacuum and sucked the me out of me, and left nothing but an empty shell with frizzy hair, bad skin, and a pug nose.

  Chapter Six

  I COULD HEAR THE DING of my phone. I knew it must be one of my friends. I never ignored their messages, but I just didn’t know what to say to them. There were no words or emojis for how I was feeling. I was lying on my bed, with my face stuffed into my pillow, screaming as loud as I could for as long as I could. Usually, this trick of Sheila’s worked, but this time it only made me more frustrated. Ding. Another message. I pushed my head deeper into the worn fabric of my pillowcase and screamed at a higher pitch, but it still didn’t help. Ding. I grabbed a second pillow and smashed it above the back of my skull, so that I was encased by pillows. I grunted out as many strange, angry sounds as I could think of, but still felt awful.