Down and Across

by Arvin Ahmadi

  When my dad talked about grit, I hated it. I was convinced he was using it to put me down. But Professor Mallard wasn’t putting me down; she was telling me there was still hope. That I could still be successful—with grit.

  By the end of the week, I had grown obsessed. Grit became my magic potion: the cure to my constantly sidetracked train of thought. It was the gigantic anvil that would squash my insecurities and pave the way for the rest of my life. I watched all of Professor Mallard’s lecture videos, read all of her interviews, and absorbed as much as I could from her psychological studies. I even checked out a copy of her book from the Union Library.

  Sunday night, I took her online evaluation, the Grit Quiz, which asked me to value how much I identified with a series of statements:

  #1: New ideas and projects distract me from previous ones.

  If grit was distracting me from my internship, didn’t that mean . . . Never mind. Too meta. I was stuck between “Very much like me” and “Mostly like me,” which sounded like the same answer. These options were sketchily subjective. [Mostly like me.]

  #2: Setbacks don’t discourage me.

  The double negative threw me off, so I simplified the statement: Setbacks encourage me. That sounded even weirder. I picked the neutral option. [Somewhat like me.]

  #3: I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest.

  Wasn’t this just the first question worded differently? For variety’s sake, I stepped up my answer. [Very much like me.]

  The assessment went on like this for a few more questions.

  Calculating your grit . . .

  Your grit score is: 2.63. You are grittier than 10% of the US population.

  I flunked. At first I wasn’t surprised. The Grit Quiz was just confirming what I already knew about myself. But then it hit me—the heavy hand of failure—and boy, did it sting. Suddenly I was back in that godforsaken boxing ring. When are you going to get serious? Jab. You’re all over the place! Punch. Stop playing games. You’re almost an adult. What in the world do you care about? Knockout.

  Grit was supposed to be this equal-access path to success, but what if I was just lost? What if I kept stumbling down all the wrong paths until it was too late? If I couldn’t get gritty about something on my own terms, then I would no doubt get forced into one of my dad’s “practical” career paths. There were plenty of people who wanted to become engineers and doctors. I wasn’t one of them.

  The Grit Quiz left a giant, bleeding stain in my mind that I couldn’t wash off. What it didn’t leave was a how-to guide. If I wanted to be gritty, I needed a passion—that much was obvious. But as far as I could tell, Professor Mallard’s site didn’t offer a BuzzFeed-style quiz for that. Instead it linked to her bio, which noted her summer office hours: Mondays 2–4 p.m. and Wednesdays 8–10 a.m.

  If I was going to take control of my life, I had to prove this diagnosis wrong. The first step would be showing up at Professor Mallard’s office on Monday. No one was better equipped to reverse my track record than the expert herself. Since her website wouldn’t tell me how to improve my grit score, I would solicit her guidance in person. I had no choice but to get gritty about grit.

  I woke up about an hour into the bus ride. I could hear Fiora riffling through a newspaper, folding it, and scribbling with a pen before I had even opened my eyes.

  “You know you were snoring,” Fiora said. She was curled up in the fetal position, her legs digging into the seat in front of her.

  “Well . . . you’re scribbling in a newspaper,” I muttered back.

  “I’m not scribbling, asshole, I’m doing a crossword.” I’d known Fiora for less than an hour and she had already called my bluff, endured my snoring, and dubbed me an asshole. And I wonder why I’m still a virgin.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m in a weird place right now. I’m kind of discombobulated from my nap and from life and—”

  “Discombobulated from life?” She looked up quickly and tilted her face sideways in an attempt to read mine. I froze. “Join the club.”

  Again with the words behind her lips. This girl had a story. May I continue?

  “I like that word,” she continued. “Discombobulated. It’s exactly fifteen letters. Fits perfectly into a standard grid. I take it you’re not a cruciverbalist?”

  “A cruci-what?”

  Fiora pointed at her newspaper. “A cruciverbalist. Someone who’s into crossword puzzles. Like when you have a bunch of boxes going across and down, and you have to fill them with . . .”

  “I know what a crossword puzzle is.”

  “Do you solve them?”

  “I don’t,” I said. Fiora shrugged and went back to her crossword. This should have been my cue to take another nap—or better yet, think about what I’d say to Professor Mallard—but all I wanted was to keep talking to Fiora. There was this relentless force whirling between us, magnetic but not quite two-sided. It was more like a hurricane, sucking me into the eye of the storm. Her eyes. God. They were turned away, yet I could still feel their pull.

  Before I could come to my senses about Fiora, the bus hit a bump in the road, and it was as if one of my friends had pushed me into her at a school dance.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever done a crossword puzzle in my life,” I blurted.

  No reaction.

  “Maybe I’ve done one or two . . .”

  Fiora looked at me like I was a crazy person. A sharp pang of humiliation twisted my stomach. Quickly I resorted to sarcasm.

  “Aw, shucks. I guess this means we can’t be seatmates. You could try switching seats with someone up front, although I recommend steering clear of the Asian guy with dreads. I’m suspicious of anyone that culturally juxtaposed.”

  Fiora held back her laughter. Success.

  “Good try,” she said. “I’ll stay right here, if you don’t mind. Unless your friend decides to come back from the bathroom. He must really be struggling in there.”

  “Very funny, Fiora. Maybe I should go and look for my friend, it could take—”

  “Also, culturally juxtaposed? Really?”

  “It was a joke,” I mumbled. Fine, it was a stupid joke. I kicked at my backpack—in part because it was cramping my legroom, but also to relieve myself of our conversation’s awkward turn.

  “The joke wasn’t going anywhere,” Fiora said. “That’s not the nature of our relationship, anyway.”

  “What relationship? I’ve known you for all of, like, five waking minutes.”

  Fiora lifted her knees from the seat back and bent down to reach her bag. She popped back up with a pack of Twizzlers, which she promptly shared.

  “Our bus friendship. The one where we’re the kind of people taking a Monday-morning bus to get away from their . . . discombobulated circumstances.”

  “Would you like to talk about it?” I asked.

  “Nah. Not anymore.”

  “You must be itching to get back to that crossword puzzle.”

  Fiora rolled her eyes, smiling. “Why are you going to DC, anyhow?”

  “To meet a Georgetown professor,” I said, biting off another chunk of Twizzler. In an attempt to sound cooler, I added, “I’m kind of running away from home.”

  Fiora simply replied: “Cool.”

  While I wasn’t going to let my microcrush on Fiora distract me from my real business in DC, I couldn’t help feeling a little turned on by her nonchalant reaction. Cool. No prying, no eyes-growing-wide with a side of “Oh my God!” She started taking these colorful bracelets off her wrist, two by two, and I swear, the casualness of it all gave me goose bumps.

  “Well, I’m getting tired myself.” Fiora bent over to pack the wristbands, Twizzlers, and newspaper into her bag. “It’s been super chatting . . .”

  “Scott,” I said, filling in her implied
blank.

  Fiora had barely closed her eyes when we hit another bump. A series of bumps, actually. She let out a theatrical groan.

  “Is that your real name?” I blurted again. “Fiora?”

  “Is your real name Scott?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t look Scottish to me. Unless you’re culturally, what was it? Juxtaposed?”

  I shook my head, glaring at the back of the seat in front of me.

  “What’s your real name?” she asked.

  Ah, the uphill battle with my real name. First days of school were always a nightmare. Every roll call went the same way: Suh . . . Suh-keet? SAY-kit? “It’s Scott,” I’d say, staring at the podium to avoid eye contact. They’d cross out my Iranian name and scribble down my “American” one. Kids used to tease me about it in elementary school, calling me every variation of “Suck It” imaginable. (Philadelphia might be the City of Brotherly Love, but second-grade classrooms are all the same.) High school was better because I got into Tesla, our local magnet school, and my classmates morphed from mostly white to mostly Asian and Indian. I was surrounded by other kids who shared my name woes. Like Kevin—that’s his real name, but his last name is Ho. Sophomore year I won a bet and now he has to name his firstborn after me. Saaket Ho. That poor kid will never hear the end of it.

  “Saaket Ferdowsi,” I told Fiora.

  “I like it. Saaket Ferdowsi,” she said perfectly, like she was the first person ever to utter my name. “Well, it’s been super chatting, Saaket.”

  Before I could react, Fiora turned her head to rest. Her eyes slipped effortlessly back into the hospitality of their spheres. Then she turned again to face me directly.

  What a tease.

  I stared out the bus window as we passed hazy fields and concrete walls, the highway blurring in a streak of gray. I relished this extra-fictional turn of events. People weren’t supposed to meet like this in real life. But, then again, people weren’t supposed to ditch their summer jobs to run away and confront world-class professors. I couldn’t resist imagining my life as one of those coming-of-age movies—and Fiora as the quirky, two-dimensional female character, written in solely to help me discover my full potential. The idea was nice. It smoothed over a good fifteen minutes of bumpy road time.

  But that wasn’t Fiora’s job. I was counting on a real genius to help me out. For the rest of the bus ride, I told myself over and over that I would not let Fiora or anyone else distract me. I had to stay gritty. Otherwise, I’d never make it to Professor Mallard’s.

  WE STEPPED OFF the bus an hour later at Dupont Circle. I said goodbye to Fiora, but then we did that awkward thing where we started walking in the same direction. I looked over and smiled politely before turning around. I thought Fiora would keep moving along, so I stopped to pull up directions to the hostel I had found online the night before.

  Fiora tapped me on the shoulder. “You don’t know where you’re going, do you?”

  I opened my last Google search. “The . . . Hanover Hostel?”

  It turned out she knew exactly where that was. My hostel was on the way to Fiora’s apartment, so she insisted on walking me there. “Blame it on my Southern hospitality,” she said, though her eyes flickered with sarcasm.

  Dupont Circle was many things: bustling traffic circle, commercial hub, sprawling park with kids running around carelessly and a gushing fountain in the middle. From there we moved down New Hampshire Avenue. The street was packed tight with town houses, all glowing majestically under the early-afternoon sun. I cupped a hand over my eyes and followed Fiora’s lead. The skin of her hips jutted out above the waistline of her ripped jeans, rocking with a seductive rhythm as she moved.

  “So how’d you do it?” Fiora asked. “The old note on the pillow?”

  “Even easier,” I said. “My parents are out of the country for a while. They flew to Iran last week and don’t get back until July fourteenth.”

  “Le quatorze juillet!” Fiora twirled her hand in a faux-snooty way. “Pardon my French. That’s Bastille Day. My boyfriend is French.”

  Her boyfriend. Of course this Twizzler-carrying crossword girl had a boyfriend. Not that I was interested in Fiora. I had my own mission.

  “Does he live in Philly?”

  “No, he lives here. I live here, too, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “I’m a student at George Washington, but I grew up in Charleston.”

  Almost like she sensed that I would ask about Charleston, or that I’d pry into why she had spent the weekend in Philly and what made it so discombobulated, Fiora quickly added: “What’s the deal with this professor you’re seeing?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We’ve got two blocks,” she said.

  “Ehhh . . .”

  “Come on! Don’t be shady. Give me the short version.”

  I took a deep breath and picked up the pace. “So this professor, Cecily Mallard. She’s literally a genius—like, they gave her one of those awards for geniuses, the MacArthur Grant. Her whole thing is grit. How if you choose a path and work hard and persist, even in the face of setbacks and fire-breathing dragons, you’ll succeed. I took a quiz on her website, the Grit Quiz, and I failed miserably. I’m not gritty. My parents are obsessed with me growing up and becoming a successful something, and if I can’t figure it out myself, then they’ll force me into a career that I hate. So I need to talk to Professor Mallard.”

  “Ballsy.”

  “Thanks,” I said, sweaty and breathless. That’s what I got for yapping about fire-breathing dragons.

  “How long are you here for?” Fiora asked.

  I took a second to catch my breath again and cool down. I shook my T-shirt. I could feel the individual letters sticking to my body: TESLA MODEL UN on one side, CRISIS AVERTED on the other. Crisis most definitely not averted.

  “Well, I’m meeting Professor Mallard this afternoon,” I finally said. “And my bus back is tomorrow morning.”

  Fiora scowled. “Why would you leave so soon?”

  “To go home and actually get grittier,” I said. “Write a novel, learn to code . . . whatever this genius tells me I should be doing. I’ve already quit my summer internship for this. I need to focus on the rest of my life.”

  “Aren’t you already focused?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m saying you had the balls to come here. Why don’t you ‘get grittier,’” she said, using air quotes, “in DC? That’s what a real runaway would do.”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. Going home just makes sense.”

  Apparently that wasn’t the right answer.

  “Saaket. I know we just met, but trust me. You’re too young to be preoccupied with making sense.” Fiora spat the last word out like a mosquito had flown into her mouth. “Rational thinking moves us forward, sure, but only in big steps. Industrial revolutions and shit. That’s how humans evolve: they set goals and chase them, make families and protect them . . . But people like us? It’s not our job. Not yet. We’re still figuring things out. So we take smaller steps and enjoy them irrationally.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying you should stay for two weeks! Two months! Anything longer than two days.”

  “Why should it matter to you?”

  “Because!” Fiora sighed, running her fingers along the reflective glass of an office building. “I—I don’t know. For a second there, when you said you were running away, I felt relieved. I thought I wasn’t the only crazy one.”

  “Thanks . . . ?”

  “I’m joking,” she said half-heartedly. “But seriously. Don’t chicken out. You’ll find pockets of excitement here.”

  “How would you know that?”

  Fiora smiled, her eyes growing wide. “Last winter break! I spent a month in Spain by myself, sell
ing pocket warmers. Literal pockets of excitement. The kind you snap and shake vigorously to make heat.” She gave a demonstration, flicking her wrists—delicate and thin, but not so thin that you could see bone—and shaking the imaginary pocket warmer before slipping both hands back into her real pockets. “It was right when things with my mom got complicated, and I’d just flunked my Spanish final. I bought the flight at the last minute and found the job through a friend of a friend of a distant cousin. Best month of my life, and now my Spanish is a lot better.”

  There was something endearing about Fiora’s satisfaction with the little things when I had set out to confront something bigger. I should have brushed off her Spain story—distractions were my problem, not my fix—but instead, I simply shrugged. Fiora took this as a small victory and shot back a cocky smile.

  We arrived at the Hanover Hostel on the corner of 21st and New Hampshire. It was a quiet brick town house with large bay windows and a deck overlooking the front yard. There was a fenced-off lawn that tapered into the street corner—perfect for Slip ’N Slide in the intense summer heat. Fiora turned around and placed a hand on my shoulder.

  “Stay right here,” she said. Her tone was urgent, like I was being assigned to a special mission. “I have something for you. I’ll be back in two seconds.”

  Twenty minutes later, Fiora came riding back on an outrageous lime-green bicycle with razor-thin wheels and 1920s-style curved handlebars. Even with its wear and tear, it was the kind of bike that screamed for attention.

  “What do you think?” Fiora said. “It’s brand spankin’ new. A work of modern, vehicular, two-wheeled innovation.”

  “It’s a bike, Fiora, and there’s no way it’s new. Maybe like a decade old.”

  “Well, do you want it? This bike is your access to DC, your manifest destiny.”

  Fiora would have made a great salesperson, because instead of questioning her use of “manifest destiny” or telling her I didn’t need a bike, I asked: “How much does it cost?”