by Tahereh Mafi
Dad. Uncle.
I hadn’t known it was a secret. His Iranian accent was so thick I was astonished anyone was dumb enough to accept it as Italian. And I’d heard such great things about Giovanni’s that, when I first showed up and discovered a Persian man behind the counter, I was delighted. Proud.
Javad never looked me in the eye anymore.
I bit into my cold slice of pizza, retrieved the newspaper from my waistband. I cracked the paper open with one hand, took a second bite of pizza with the other. I felt a familiar dread as I scanned the headlines, and prepared for a deep dive into a brand-new existential crisis.
“Hey.” A body collapsed beside me with an exhale, blocked my view of a particularly dirty minivan. “Okay if I sit here?”
I stared, unblinking, at the newcomer.
To say that I was confused would’ve been a disservice to the maelstrom of thoughts suddenly kicked up in my head. Noah from AP Art History was sitting next to me, and I gaped at him like he’d opened a third eye. I’d forgotten my manners entirely.
Noah’s smile faded.
He picked up his plate, the paper graying with pizza grease. “I can go,” he said, moving to stand. “I didn’t mean t—”
“No. Oh my God. No, of course you can stay,” I said too quickly, too loudly. “Please stay. I was just—surprised.”
His smile grew back, bigger this time. “Cool.”
I attempted a smile of my own before picking up my newspaper again. I shook out the crease, tried to find my spot. I didn’t mind Noah sitting next to me, not as long as he was willing to be quiet. I’d never had a chance to finish reading a piece about the terrifying similarities between the Iraq and Vietnam Wars, and I’d been waiting all day to get back to it. I took another bite of pizza.
“So, um, your name is Shadi, right?”
I looked up. Felt the distant world come back into focus.
I saw only Noah’s eyes over the top of my paper, and I realized then that I’d never studied him closely. I folded the paper down; the rest of his face came into view. His black curls were cropped close to his head, his deep-set eyes a couple shades darker than his brown skin. He had unusually striking features—something about his cheekbones, the line of his nose. He was undeniably good-looking. I didn’t know why he was talking to me.
“Yes.” I frowned. “You’re Noah?”
“Yeah.” His eyes lit up. He seemed delighted by this, the revelation that I knew his name. “I just moved here. Like, last month.”
“Oh. Wow.” I gestured with my pizza to the damp, depressing parking lot. “I’m sorry.”
He laughed. “It’s not so bad.”
I raised an eyebrow.
He bit back another laugh. “Yeah, okay. It’s pretty bad.”
I cracked a smile then. Picked up my paper.
“So, um, you’re Muslim, right?”
I was still reading when I said, “What gave it away?”
He laughed for a third time. I liked that he laughed so much, so easily. The sound alone made my heart kick a little.
“Yes,” I said, my face buried in the article. “I’m Muslim.”
Gently, he pushed the newspaper down, away from me, and I flinched at his closeness, sat back an inch. He was staring at me with barely suppressed mirth, like he was fighting a smile.
“What?”
“Okay,” he said finally. “Okay. I’m going to say something right now, and please don’t take this the wrong way or anything”—he held up his hands—“but I didn’t think you’d be so funny.”
I raised both eyebrows. “Don’t take this the wrong way?”
“You just seem so intense all the time,” he said, his whole body like an exclamation point. “Like, why are you always reading the newspaper? That seems unhealthy.”
I frowned at him. “I’m a masochist.”
He frowned back. “Doesn’t that mean you like to hurt people?”
“It means I like to hurt myself.”
“Weird.”
“Hey, how do you know I’m always reading the newspaper?”
Noah’s smile slipped. He looked suddenly nervous. “Okay—please don’t freak out—”
“Jesus Christ, Noah.”
“Wait—are you talking to me?” He pointed at himself. “Or are you just listing prophets?”
My eyes widened.
He couldn’t stop laughing, not even when he said, “Okay, okay, complete honesty: I’ve been, like, trying to figure out how to talk to you for a little while.”
I sighed. Put down the paper. “Let me guess: you’re a serial killer.”
“I’m not! I swear, I just—I promised to do my mom a favor, and I didn’t know exactly how to approach you.”
I straightened. Noah suddenly had my full attention; I was one hundred percent freaked out. “What kind of favor?”
“Nothing weird.”
“Oh my God.”
He spoke in a rush. “Okay, so, my mom was dropping me off at school one day and she saw you on campus and she wanted me to talk to you.”
“Why?” I was suddenly wishing I’d never gone out for lunch. I was suddenly wishing I’d told Noah not to sit next to me.
He sighed. “Because we’re new here, and my parents have been looking for a mosque to go to, and my mom thought you’d—”
“Wait.” I held up a hand, cut him off. “You’re Muslim?”
He frowned. “Did I not mention that?”
I hit him with my newspaper. “What the hell is wrong with you? You scared the crap out of me.”
“I’m sorry!” He jerked out of reach. “I’m sorry. My mom just saw a girl in hijab and sent me on a mission to talk to you like it was normal, and it’s not normal. It’s super awkward.”
I shot him a look. “More awkward than this?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” But his attempt at penitence was belied by his smile. “So? Can you help me out?”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“Cool.”
“But I swear to God,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him, “if you turn out to be an undercover FBI agent I will be so pissed.”
“What?” His smile vanished. “FBI agent?”
My guilt was instantaneous.
Noah looked suddenly freaked out, so different from his lighthearted mien a moment ago, and I didn’t like that I’d put that look on his face. His family had just moved here; I didn’t want to scare him.
“Nothing.” I forced a smile. “I was just giving you a hard time.”
“Oh,” he said. “Okay.” But the wariness in his eyes said he wasn’t sure if he believed me.
I tried to move past it.
“So, there are a couple of different mosques around here,” I explained, “but the one my family goes to has a predominantly Persian congregation. I can give you other—”
“Oh, no, that’s perfect.” Noah’s smile returned in full force. “My mom will love that. I’m half-Persian.”
I went suddenly stupid. I stared at him, slack-jawed. “What?”
He was laughing again. “Damn, the look on your face right now. I wish you could see yourself.”
“You’re half-Persian?”
“I speak a little Farsi, too.” He cleared his throat, made a big show. “Haleh shoma chetoreh?”
“That’s not terrible,” I said, trying not to laugh. “So—your mom is Persian?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“That’s so cool. That makes me so happy.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Why happy?”
“I don’t know.” I hesitated. “I guess I thought most Persian people were racist.”
Noah froze, his eyes widening. Then he laughed so hard he doubled over. He laughed so hard it attracted notice, passersby pausing to stare at the source of the unbridled sound.
“Hey. Stop.” I pushed at his arm to get his attention. “Why are you laughing?”
He shook his head, wiped tears from his eyes. “I’m just—” He shrugged, shook hi
s head again, his shoulders still shaking with silent laughter. “Just, damn, Shadi. Wow.”
“What?”
“I’m just glad you said it and not me.” He took a sharp breath, held it, let it go as he stared into the distance. “Man, my mom is going to love that. You don’t even know the shit my parents have had to deal with.”
“I can only imagine.”
“Well, you’d be the first to try. People never want to admit we have problems like that in our own communities.” He sighed, shook his head, jumped to his feet. “All right, we should go. We’re going to be late.”
I realized then that I didn’t even know what time it was. It had been too long since I’d spent my lunch break focused on anything but the fractures in my heart, and when I got to my feet, I felt a little lighter.
Noah and I tossed our plates, walked back to campus. I told him the name of our mosque. Gave him a phone number his mom could call. We were nearly back at school when I remembered—
“Oh, hey, I’ll be there this weekend, actually. My sister and I volunteer on Saturday nights to help people learn how to use computers, set up email addresses, that sort of thing. If your parents want to stop by, I can introduce them to some people.”
Noah raised his eyebrows. “Saturday night computer classes at the mosque. Nice.”
My smiles were coming more easily now. “We have a lot of refugees in our community,” I explained. “People who fled Afghanistan, ran for their lives from the Taliban. There are a few people at our mosque whose entire families were beheaded by Saddam Hussein. Most of them came here with nothing, and they need help getting started again.”
“Jesus,” he said, sobering quickly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Their stories are insane.”
“Insane how?”
A sharp breeze stole into my jacket then, and I struggled, for a moment, to pull the zipper closed.
“I don’t know,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets. “Like, you know what a burqa is? Those gross tent things the Taliban forces women to wear in Afghanistan?”
He nodded.
“Well, apparently they’re really good for hiding people. Imagine disguising your entire family—men, women, children—in those burqas, and running for your life through the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan, hoping at every turn not to be found out and executed.”
“Holy shit.” We’d come to an abrupt stop at an intersection. Noah turned to look at me, his eyes wide. “You actually know people who did that? Went through that?”
“Yeah,” I said, hitting the button for the crosswalk. “They go to our mosque.”
“That’s . . . crazy.”
Noah’s solemn tone—and his proceeding silence—made me aware, a beat too late, of the dark tension I’d just carried into the conversation. We were still waiting at the crosswalk, quietly watching the seconds tick down until the light would change.
I tried to salvage the moment.
“Hey,” I said, pasting a smile on my face, “you’re welcome to join us on Saturday night. We might even order pizza.”
Noah laughed, raised his eyebrows at me. “That’s quite an offer.”
“It’s also worth noting,” I said, “that it will be extremely boring.”
“Amazing.” He shook his head slowly, his smile growing impossibly wider. “I mean, I’m going to pass? But thanks.”
“Honestly, if you’d said yes I would’ve judged you.”
He laughed.
Noah and I had classes in different directions, so we split up when we got back to the campus parking lot. He was already several feet away when he turned back and shouted, “Hey, I’ll find you at lunch tomorrow.” He pointed at me. “I’ll even bring my own newspaper.”
I was still smiling long after he disappeared from sight.
I felt strangely buoyant, more like a real person than I’d felt in a long time. I tried to hold on to the feeling as I wended my way through the parked vehicles, but my luck abruptly ran out.
It was moments like this that made me believe in fate.
It seemed impossible that coincidence alone could account for the thousand tiny decisions I’d made today that nudged my feet into this exact position, at precisely this hour, into the wrong person at the wrong time. Everything around me seemed suddenly to be happening in slow motion, the scene pulling apart to make room for my thoughts, my unprocessed emotions. And then, all at once, the moment hurled itself back together with a gasp.
Mine.
My breath left my body in a single, painful exhalation as my back slammed into metal, my head spinning.
A girl was standing in front of me. My ears were still ringing from the impact, from the severe turn my body had to make in order to now be flattened against a parked vehicle. I counted four heads—three girls, one guy. The one who shoved me had long, dirty-blond hair that moved when she did, and I was staring at those limp yellow waves when she stabbed me in the collarbone with a single finger, her face contorting as she shouted.
I felt my mind dissolve.
My brain retreated from my body, panic shutting down my nervous system. Everything seemed to disconnect inside of my skull. I heard her words as if from a distance, as if I were someone else watching this happen to someone else. I listened as she told me to go back to where I came from, listened as she called me a filthy towelhead, stared at her as she stared at me, her eyes bright with a violence I found breathtaking.
And then, suddenly, she stopped.
She was done, all done, just a couple of angry sentences and that was it, the moment was over. I frowned. I’d thought, for some reason, that there’d be more, something new. I’d been stopped at least a dozen times by people who’d all spoken these exact same lines to me, and I was beginning to realize that none of them talked to each other, compared notes, jazzed things up.
She jerked back, let me go.
I straightened too quickly, nearly stumbled. Blood rushed back into my head, my nerves fired back to life. Sounds seemed suddenly too loud, the ground too far. My heartbeat was strange.
The girl was frowning at me.
She was frowning at me like she was confused, maybe disappointed. And then—so suddenly I could practically see the moment she answered her own question—her eyes lit up.
“Oh my God, you don’t even speak English, do you?” She started laughing. “Oh my God, you don’t even fucking speak English.”
She laughed again and again, hysterically now, a hyena. “This fucking piece of shit doesn’t even fucking speak English,” she said to the sky, to the moon, to her friends, and they laughed and laughed and laughed.
This wasn’t new, either.
People always assumed I wasn’t born here. They always assumed I wasn’t American, that English wasn’t my first language.
People, I knew, thought I was dumb.
I didn’t care.
I closed my eyes, let the pain leak from my body. I waited for them to get tired of me, waited for them to leave. I waited, quietly, because there was nothing else I could do.
I’d promised my mom I’d never engage with bigots, never talk back, never make a scene. Shayda had refused to make such promises to my mother, so my mom had turned to me instead, begging me to be reasonable, to walk away, to exercise the self-restraint that Shayda refused to employ. So I’d promised. Sworn it. I took the hits to my pride for my mother, for my mother alone. She was the reason I seldom spoke these days, the reason I didn’t fight.
My mother.
And the police, if I’m being honest. The police and the FBI. The CIA. DHS. The Patriot Act. Guantanamo Bay. The No Fly List.
When I opened my eyes again, the group was gone.
I collected myself, gathered my bones. I walked to class on unsteady legs, clenched and unclenched my shaking hands. I felt my heart grow harder as I moved through the halls, felt it get heavier.
One day, I worried, it would simply fall out.
Twelve
I sat in the wet grass after
school, pulled my knees up to my injured chin. I was perilously close to something that felt like a flood, oceans dammed behind my eyes. I did not hope for a ride home today; I was merely tired. My father had been unable to work for nearly a month now, and my mom had taken a part-time job at Macy’s to help with the pressure on our finances, which meant that my sister’s mercy was the axis upon which my world turned—which meant my world was oft static, merciless.
I lifted my head, took a deep breath, drew the scent of cold wind and wet dirt into my body.
Petrichor.
It was a strange word, an excellent word.
You know there’s a word for that, right? Ali had said to me once. For that smell. The smell of water hitting the earth.
I’d been standing in the backyard of my old house breathing in the drizzle when Ali said those words, walking toward me in the dark. Our living room had a sliding glass door that opened to the yard, and he’d left it open in his wake; I’d looked past him, past his milky, silhouetted stride to the glow of bodies in the living room, all of them laughing, talking. Remnants of conversation carried over to us in the darkness, and the effect was unexpectedly cozy. Ali’s family had come over for dinner, but I’d disappeared after dessert, wanting to escape the commotion for a moment with the evening breeze.
“You left the door open,” I’d said. “All the bugs are going to get inside.”
He’d smiled. “It’s called petrichor.”
I shook my head, smiled back. “I know what it’s called.”
“Right.” He laughed. Looked up at the sky. “Of course you do.”
“Ali, the mosquitoes are going to eat everyone alive.”
He glanced back. “Someone will close the door.”
I’d rolled my eyes at him, started heading for the house. “They’re not going to notice until it’s—”
I jumped back, suddenly, when my foot sank into a muddy patch of grass, and promptly collided into Ali, who’d been following me inside. I’d been wearing a silk dress that summer day, but when he touched me, I might’ve been wearing nothing at all. The delicate fabric did little to dull the blow of sensation; I felt his hands on me like they were pressed against my skin, like I was naked in his arms.
I’d felt it, too, when he became aware of me, of the shape of me under his hands. When we collided he’d caught me from behind; I couldn’t see his face. Instead, I’d felt his weight pressed up against my own, heard the change in his breath when we touched, when his hands froze where they’d landed. One of his palms was flat against my stomach, the other holding fast to my hip. He let go of me slowly, with excruciating care, like he’d caught a crystal bowl in midair. His fingers grazed my torso as they retreated, skated across my belly button. We’d both gone quiet, the sounds of our breathing amplified in the silence.
