by Sara Saedi
But once we went to the same school, I learned a very important lesson: Samira was far more valuable to me than my parents. They didn’t have the power to improve my social status. So my loyalties lay with my sister. I had to let her know that I could be trusted. I would do anything to demonstrate my allegiance. I kept every illicit activity to myself. I didn’t tell my parents when she’d cut school to go to the beach, or that she once missed an entire Aerosmith concert because she passed out from drinking before the band took the stage.
But a year or so later, when Samira was in college, I reluctantly agreed to keep her most severe act of rebellion to myself. When she revealed to me she was taking a secret trip to Mexico with her friends, I didn’t say, “But you know that we don’t have green cards, and we’re not allowed to leave the country. If you get stopped at the border, they could detain you. Worst-case scenario: They might send you to Iran, and then no one will be around to loan me cool outfits and drive me around town. Or you might have to live in Mexico forever, and you took French in high school.” Instead, I said something like: “That’s so awesome. Bring me back a souvenir. ¡Hasta luego!”
I knew better than to give her a lecture. Besides, her friends had assured her that they checked driver’s licenses only when you crossed into Mexico. How could girls with perfect hair and a closetful of stylish flannels from Hot Topic be wrong about anything? Clearly, they knew how Border Patrol operated. They were the original girl squad. There was no way they’d let one of their own get deported.
But during the few days my parents thought my sister was safely within our country’s borders in San Diego, I was terrified for her. How would I be able to look my parents in the eye if something happened? It was like being stuck between a rock and Ryan Gosling’s chiseled abs. If I took the responsible route and told my parents the truth, my sister would never speak to me again, and I’d never get to party with her in college. There was too much on the line. I had way too much to lose. If I had to live out the rest of my years sending letters to a Mexican prison, I could handle it. My parents would never have to know that I aided and abetted her bad behavior. After all, wasn’t that a younger sibling’s primary reason for living? I was the Solange to her Beyoncé. The Serena to her Venus. The Pippa to her Kate. I was not the Fredo to her Michael Corleone. Not just because Fredo was older, but because he betrayed Michael. And Michael had him killed.
My sister did make it back across the border, and my parents were none the wiser. And I’d finally proven myself to be a trusted servant. But if the secret Mexico trip was the defining test of my loyalty, I really earned my stripes when my sister and her best friend turned me into a legitimate stalker. I’ll call my sister’s friend Claudia*2 to protect her identity. Claudia had a longtime crush on a guy named Connor, pining for him through most of high school and at the start of college. After a series of flirtatious phone calls, it seemed like Claudia and Connor’s time had finally arrived. They’d both returned home for Thanksgiving with the understanding that their love would be consummated. Or that they would make out and hold hands. But Connor was suddenly acting weird. He wouldn’t return Claudia’s calls and wouldn’t commit to any of the plans they’d made leading up to the visit. It didn’t matter that it was almost midnight when my sister and Claudia filled me in on the Connor Affair. There was only one solution: we had to drive by his house on the other side of town and see what the guy was hiding.
Keep in mind that this is before the Internet was in every household (seriously) and we didn’t have the luxury of cyberstalking. If you wanted to invade someone’s privacy, you couldn’t do it easily from the safety of your computer. You had to have enormous balls to track someone’s every move, and I was about to grow a pair. Samira, of course, was the mastermind of the entire operation. The plan was as follows: We would drive by Connor’s house, and if anything seemed fishy, we would park down the block. I would get out of the car, make the long walk to his house, knock on his door, and recite everything my sister had directed me to say.
“You have to pretend to be really upset,” Samira added as we turned down his street. When we slowly inched past his house, Claudia noticed an unidentified white Jetta in the driveway (a car that could be driven only by a female), and that was our cue. We had no choice. We had to carry out the plan. They parked down the street and wished me luck, and I quietly slipped out of the car.
Be brave, I told myself as I made the agonizingly long walk in the pitch-black to his driveway. I could do this. I was a badass. I was Little Sami. If I could lie to the American government, then I could con my way through a conversation with some shady college kid. There was only one problem: Connor wasn’t just some college kid. After years of studying my sister’s yearbooks, I knew him from afar. I knew he was a ravishing ginger with perfect dimples and an irresistible smile. Even though he’d graduated from Lynbrook before I enrolled, he was the kind of guy who was still talked about in the hallways.
Once I arrived at the front door, I took a deep breath and knocked. The door swung open, and Connor stood in the entryway…with his bare chest on display. He smiled at me. I tried to resist his charms and not smile back. For a brief moment, I imagined telling him this was a setup and I’d been forced by my mentally unstable sister and her clingy friend to harass him. He’d invite me in for a hot cocoa, praise me for my honesty, and then we’d fall in love and run away together. Claudia would eventually understand. But I didn’t do that.
“Hi,” I said shyly. “Um, I live down the street, and my dog got loose, and I can’t find him. I was wondering if maybe you heard anything?”
Connor gave me a sympathetic shrug, and said he hadn’t. He asked what kind of dog I owned, and the first breed that came to mind was a Chihuahua. I could tell I’d given a convincing performance by the way he assured me that he’d keep his eyes peeled for my scared, lost, fake dog. Just as I turned to leave, I heard a girl’s voice from inside ask him who was at the door. I did not give in to my sudden urge to kick him in the nuts, call him a jerk, and berate him for lying to sweet Claudia with the perfect tan and ridiculously long legs. Instead, I made my way down his front steps. The walk back to the car was even more excruciating than the walk to Connor’s door. Nowhere in the little-sister job requirements did it say that I had to break the heart of one of the VIP members of the girl squad. I slid into the back seat and announced, “He didn’t have his shirt on and I heard a girl’s voice inside the house.”
I was only fifteen, but even I knew what this meant. They were totally boning. Claudia didn’t cry when I confirmed her worst fear, but I could tell from the shaky tone of her voice that she was wounded. My sister consoled her all the way home, and we agreed that Connor was a pasty dick. We also agreed that I was the coolest little sister for going through with the plan in the first place.
But despite their praise, I was never as brave as Samira. I’m still not. I didn’t like to break the rules. I would have never gone to Mexico when I was undocumented. I wasn’t as good at speaking my mind as she was, or as quick on my feet in a crisis. Samira Saedi was tough. She gave zero fucks before that was a meme. If it had been my sister at Connor’s door, she’d have pushed herself into his house and told the girl who was sitting inside that he was a two-timer. She was my hero, and that night, a tiny bit of her power and glory rubbed off on me. I hated that in a couple of days she’d be going back to college and I’d be getting ready for school Monday morning without her.
Sisterly love.
My mom had seen into the future and she was right. We were best friends. It felt as though we couldn’t live without each other, and that was why a few months prior, I’d sobbed during her high school graduation, flung myself onto the stage, grabbed hold of her legs, and screamed “NEVER LEAVE ME” while she accepted her diploma. Okay, that’s maybe a slight exaggeration. But without her, I knew I would no longer be Little Sami. I would no longer confidently stride through the senior parking lot. Instead, I’d be dropped off in the bus circle by my dad wi
th the rest of the nerds. Even worse, I knew it was the end of an era. With my sister away at college, our family of five would never live under the same roof together again. The other upstairs bedroom would be empty. I didn’t care if I would have the bathroom to myself, because it would mean losing my better half.
For most of my childhood, my sister brought me to hysterics from fights and days of the silent treatment. Back when we shared a room, she was the one who’d divide up the floor with masking tape, building an invisible wall between us. But the day we dropped her off at UC Davis, she once again threw me into an emotional tailspin. I didn’t want to go from being the middle child to the oldest kid in the house. I kept it together throughout the whole day. My smile didn’t waver when we met her college roommate and helped set up her dorm room. I managed to stay upbeat when we explored the town and ate lunch together as a family. But the moment we dropped her off for good, I turned into a complete puddle. And she cried, too. Because that’s what happens when you feel that connected to someone. They laugh and you laugh. You cry and they cry. More than twenty years later, my sister still has the same effect on me. She lives in Northern California with her family, and I live in Los Angeles with mine…but if it were up to me, we’d take a page from my mom and aunt’s book and live next door to each other.
* * *
*1 The term “undocumented immigrant” includes anyone who is not a permanent resident of the country and does not have a visa to be here. Those with lawful permanent residency applications pending, and those who haven’t filed any paperwork, are still considered “undocumented.” It’s important to remember that just because you file for a green card, there’s no guarantee you will be granted one.
*2 All names have been changed, with the exception of those of close family members.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION #1
What’s the difference between being Persian and being Iranian?
Essentially, there isn’t much separating the two. I’ll be using them interchangeably, because when you’re writing a book it’s nice to use different words to say the same thing. Technically speaking, Persian is an ethnicity, while Iranian is a nationality. So you may be from Iran, but you could be Kurdish instead of Persian.
But the country was also formally called Persia until the government changed the name to Iran in 1935. By 1959, scholars convinced the government that Persia and Iran should both be part of the vernacular.
When people inquire about my ethnicity, I prefer to say that I’m Iranian. It always feels like “Persian” is the more pretentious response, and a term to use when you don’t want people to associate you with a country that’s been referred to as part of the axis of evil. But to anyone who still refers to Iran in those terms, I respectfully say: stop being a horrible xenophobe.
It’s like every time I walk by him, I have a tinge of hope that this could be it. He might talk to me or bump into me or whatever, but when nothing ever happens when he walks by, he takes a little piece of my heart with him.
—Diary entry: December 3, 1994
The comment left me adrift in a river of teen angst. Words escaped me. For once, I didn’t have a cutting response at the ready. My face was on fire. My eyes filled with hot tears. I wanted to crawl under my wobbly desk in ninth-grade English and stay hidden there forever. It wasn’t the worst plan. Our high school was equipped with showers and a well-stocked cafeteria. I could remain tucked away on the floor of Mrs. Carter’s classroom until the final bell rang, and when everyone left to go home, I could emerge from hiding to eat the leftover scraps in the commissary kitchen and shower in the girls’ locker room. I’d let the warm water run over me as I cradled myself in the fetal position. I’d sleep on the cot in the nurse’s office, and when morning rolled around, I’d find safe harbor beneath another desk so that I would never have to make eye contact with anyone again. I would miss my parents, but then again, they were the ones to blame for my predicament.
“You did this to me!” I would scream if they tried to take me home. “You’re the reason I have to live the rest of my days like Quasimodo’s busted little sister.”
Unless you make your living as a supermodel, you know what it’s like to have at least one physical imperfection that makes you feel irreversibly ugly. That one feature you’d change in a heartbeat if you could. For me, it’s always been my dominant nose. Why couldn’t I have been the first Iranian in the history of the world born with a button nose? Why did my face have to confirm the most widespread stereotype about our people? But it wasn’t my unfortunate nasal structure that nearly turned me into a hermit the day I decided to build a home under my desk. It was a tiny patch of unwanted hair that had never even made it onto my “Ten Things I Hate About Myself” list, until Gideon Wright pointed it out.
Gideon was my very first high school crush. The pages of my freshman-year diary are littered with his name. My love for him vacillated from one entry to another. Some days, I wanted to be with him forever. Other days, I knew my feelings would never be reciprocated and that it was my civic feminist duty to get over him. I didn’t know any of the other boys in our freshman class, and Gideon was the only guy I’d come across who not only was cute and charming but also appreciated my dry humor. I fell for him by default. We sat next to each other in English, and even though he was way out of my league, a part of me clung to the hope that my dazzling personality and biting sense of humor would wear him down. The beginning of our relationship would play out like the end of every good teen movie where the popular guy falls for the nerdy girl. I imagined that Gideon would proudly hold my hand through the halls of our high school and announce to his football player buddies that he was into me and that he wasn’t going to hide it anymore. Those were the kinds of fantasies that monopolized my thoughts at night…and during the day…and in the morning…and at dusk.
Here’s what I never imagined Gideon doing in those fantasies: snickering at me in class and declaring, “You only have ONE eyebrow.”
It took me a moment to fully comprehend what he was saying. I had two eyebrows, just like everyone else. And then I realized he was referring to the thin strands of hair that existed between them. I’d been cursed with a unibrow. How had I never realized it before? I never thought it was that noticeable. My whole life, my mom and aunts had praised me for how American I looked. It was a virtue to have paler skin than most Iranians, not to mention hair that was several shades lighter than my family members’. The dense hair on my arms was almost blond, and my eyebrow hairs weren’t nearly as thick as the ones my sister had been born with. If she was blessed with flawless skin and a great rack, then I was blessed with unwanted hair that was less visible in the sun. My unibrow being made fun of wasn’t part of the love story I’d envisioned for Gideon and me. I’d expect that from the shallow, pompous best-friend character who would try to get between us, but not from the guy I was supposed to end up with before the credits rolled.
I went home that day and examined my eyebrows in the mirror. Good God, they were awful. I took another look at my school portrait and discovered that I looked like I had a hungry, fuzzy caterpillar sprawled across my face. That’s when I had an epiphany: when my mom and aunts praised me for being hairless…they meant by Persian woman standards. I was still hairy by everyone else’s standards. Why didn’t any of my “no hair, don’t care” Asian friends or my fair-skinned, blond American friends take me aside and say, “Sara, if you want to have sex with anyone ever, then you might want to consider purchasing tweezers and separating your Siamese eyebrows from each other”?
Freshman-year school portrait.
But even if they had, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Believe it or not, plucking your eyebrows is considered a rite of passage for Iranian girls. According to my mom, we couldn’t mess with our brows until we turned fifteen. We were, however, allowed to shave our legs and bleach our mustaches. (I mean, the woman wasn’t a monster.) But that meant I still had one very long and torturous year before I stopped being Fuzzy
Caterpillar Forehead Girl. There was no way Gideon would publicly call me his girlfriend if I didn’t pluck the ten to fifteen hairs that were ruining my life. Danny Zuko didn’t want to be seen with Sandy because she wore cardigans. Grease would have had a very different ending if she’d shown up at that carnival in spandex, a head of curls, and a bushy unibrow.
I didn’t understand why my mom insisted on making me suffer. Didn’t she know that all the other girls in my freshman class were sporting the coveted and trendy two-eyebrow look?
“Trust me,” my maman would say, “once you start plucking your eyebrows, you’ll never be able to stop.”
But even if my mom backed off and let me pluck the unwanted hairs, I knew I couldn’t show up to school the very next day with stand-alone eyebrows. Gideon would know that he’d been the reason for the cosmetic change. I may have been in love with him, and I may have thought he was way too good for me, but I still had enough pride and dignity to know that I couldn’t show him that he had that much power over me. I had to play it cool and keep my unibrow proudly on display. It was okay to cry in the privacy of my own bedroom, but I would never let him see me crumble. Life would have to go on relatively unchanged. I would forge ahead. I would continue to manage my upper-lip hair, and do my best not to constantly run my finger over the tiny patch of hair that was destroying my will to live.
Despite my plan, I still couldn’t understand why Iranian societal norms dictated an age-appropriate time to shape one’s eyebrows. I’d already accepted that Persians cared the most about (1) family and (2) how extended family members perceived them. The latter splintered into a whole slew of issues. Appearances were everything in our culture. How much money we appeared to have, how we dressed, how much we weighed, what we looked like—the list goes on. In a family of immigrants where the Saedis were essentially the only ones who hadn’t been granted permanent residency, we were already at a disadvantage. There were only a few things that could help us save face, and that included keeping a nice house and looking our best. I had optimum success with the former. My bedroom was decked out in white wicker furniture and a trendy daybed. My decorating aesthetic included a poster of the earth with the tagline “Save the Humans.” Another wall included the iconic photo of a gingerbread man with the description “The Perfect Man (He’s Quiet, He’s Sweet, and If He Gives You Any Grief, You Can Bite His Head Off).” My bedroom perfectly encapsulated my personality. It said: Here’s a girl who cares about the environment but also has an irreverent sense of humor. Who wouldn’t want to hang out with her?