by Arvin Ahmadi
FROM: Dad
SUBJECT: Fwd. 5 Top Premed Programs for the Uncertain Doctor
FROM: Dad
SUBJECT: Fwd. A professor discovered the secret to happiness. You won’t believe what it is.
Delete, delete, delete . . . Tempting, but delete.
FROM: Kevin Ho
SUBJECT: GREETINGS FROM WIFI-WONDERFUL WUHAN
Dude!
We miss you!!!!!!
So it turns out we’re not totally disconnected from the Western world. Jack and I got lucky with our student host here in Wuhan. We got this chill dude named Xu who’s letting us use his computer for TWENTY MINUTES. Can you believe we’re in China?!? Anyway, we have generously decided to spend five of our precious WiFi minutes emailing you. (The other fifteen were for Facebook. We got past the Great Firewall!!! Priorities, man.)
How’s the internship going? You sounded pretty excited about it before we left. Still bummed you couldn’t be here with us, man. We give the SAYLT people shit all the time for not accepting our best buddy Scotty.
China is crazy. Check out the photo we just posted on Facebook. We’ll tell you more stories when the gang’s back together at the end of the summer.
Kevin & Jack
The email was time-stamped 2:35 a.m. on Tuesday, so they must have already moved on to the next Southeast Asian city. The next adventure. It sounded like Kevin and Jack were having exactly the kind of worldly, eye-opening trip that we’d imagined.
All three of us applied to the Southeast Asia Youth Leaders Tour. We loved saying the acronym out loud. “I submitted my SAY-LIT application last night!” “I got in touch with my SAY-LIT interviewer.” The program was supposed to be highly selective—they only accepted 4 percent of the nearly one thousand high school juniors who applied. Kevin, Jack, and I never discussed that part. We were hoping for a miracle. No, we expected a miracle. For a month after submitting our applications, we spent every lunch fantasizing about our all-expenses-paid trip together. “What happens at SAY-LIT . . .” became a running joke.
It was an awkward day when I didn’t get in. We had plans to meet at Kevin’s locker at exactly 2:58 p.m. on the day results were coming out. Kevin and Jack could hardly contain their excitement; they’d crushed their interviews the week before. I felt less certain. “Earth Club, Model UN, Iranian instruments . . . You’re all over the place, Mr. Ferdowsi,” I remember my interviewer saying over Skype. “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” Needless to say, I was stumped.
At 3 p.m., we refreshed our phones one more time. Kevin and Jack jumped in the air almost simultaneously, high-fiving and pounding their fists. I looked up from my phone screen and forced a smile. Their expressions dropped.
“Admissions processes aren’t perfect,” Jack said, patting my shoulder. He was always more sympathetic to my shortcomings than Kevin.
Jack the aspiring diplomat. Kevin the aspiring economist. I knew exactly why I wasn’t selected. My friends were more qualified than I was, plain and simple.
Later that day, after the sun had fallen and a soft gust of wind replaced the stuffy air, I went out again for a walk around the neighborhood. I needed to clear my mind. Being so close to GW and Georgetown, Dupont Circle was one of those places where the average age plummets on weekends. Flocks of college-looking people had swarmed to the local restaurants and bars on this Friday night. All the groups looked the same: mostly white, attractive, and an even guy-to-girl ratio. The guys looked nothing like my friends from home. They were dressed in pastel-colored shorts and oxford shirts, downing beer and bellowing phrases like “What’s up, player!” and “No way, bro!”
The girls were another story. There was one in particular who spoke exclusively through her nose. She stood outside a Spanish restaurant, stick thin and brunette, suffocating in her little black dress. One by one, her girlfriends arrived, and she greeted them the same way:
“Ohhh mey gawwwd. How are yaaaewwww?” High-pitched. Expressionless. It was like a bad horror movie.
Later I noticed an elderly Muslim woman sitting alone outside a coffee shop, her hair covered in a flowery hijab. She started talking to this African American man who was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket. The two clearly didn’t know each other, but their conversation was filled with gestures and smiles nonetheless. A few doors down, a father and son stood before a tiny patch of purple flowers. The son, who was maybe five years old, turned to his dad and gave a high-pitched assertion: “Blue!” The dad retorted: “Purple!” They went off on a list of colors—pink! lavender!—talking over each other like snappy firecrackers.
This Friday-night crowd felt all too familiar. Everyone was a friend, a father, someone’s something. Short bursts of memories went off in my head—the same ones that had been haunting me since I came to DC. Perhaps I couldn’t shake off my past. It wasn’t something you could leave behind or bury in the ground.
I found myself back outside Tom’s Foolery. I was tempted to go inside for some Etch A Sketch or Mario Kart—a fitting “blast from the past”—but they were checking IDs.
The bouncer turned me away, and within seconds, I heard a crack of thunder. The sound punched at my bones, and it started to drizzle. I ran back to the hostel, but not before getting soaked by the torrential downpour that ensued.
THE SUN SHONE relentlessly on Saturday morning. I trekked more than two miles up Connecticut Ave to the National Zoo, the back of my neck burning, and by the end of it I was sweating through every fiber of my T-shirt. I hated sweat. I realized no one was going around saying they loved sweat, but I hated it for so much more than the physical discomfort. It reminded me of all the other things in the world that made me uncomfortable. It reminded me of my lanky body, which people were always commenting on. “Eat something, why don’t you!” “You look like you could disappear into thin air.” Because how could I be self-conscious about my body image if I wasn’t fat, right? It reminded me of salt water, which was half the reason I couldn’t stand the beach. Being shirtless was the other half. And it reminded me of sex, because I hadn’t done it yet, which was fine a few years ago but was becoming less fine—or at least, it felt that way.
When I reached the zoo, I noticed that the space inside the gates resembled my quiet cul-de-sac back in Pennsylvania, with a granite ledge where the houses would be. I sat on the part of the ledge that would have been my house, not for any sentimental reason, but because it was the only dry space. Most of the ledge was still soaking wet from the night before. I figured the sun needed more time.
A few minutes later, Fiora biked through the gates and braked abruptly in front of my house on the cul-de-sac. She skidded just past the doormat.
“Where’d you get that bike?” I asked suspiciously.
“It’s mine,” Fiora said, ruffling her hair. She wasn’t wearing a helmet.
“You own a bike?”
“Of course I own a bike,” she said, locking it in the rack near the entrance. “I wouldn’t have given you the other one if I didn’t.”
I looked stumped. “The other one? You mean—” The stolen one. Which didn’t come with a helmet, either. Now that I thought about it, I was really quite lucky to have survived that accident with just a few scratches. If my mother knew . . .
“I mean what?” Fiora raised one eyebrow.
“Never mind.”
She perked her ears. “You know what I hear?”
I listened for a second. “The soft mating call of a tufted sparrow?”
“No, you goddamn sap. I hear the lions all the way in the back of the zoo, roaring at us to get a fuckin’ move on!”
Without so much as a nod, Fiora led me into the zoo. I trailed behind like an obedient puppy on a leash; I was following through with her dare. We walked down a stone path with benches and concession stands—no animals in sight. I couldn’t even hear any birds. I wondered whether Fiora had taken me to
an imaginary zoo, or a sexual health clinic or a cancer support group like she had joked. Maybe Fiora really didn’t have any boundaries.
We crossed a small bridge to enter the Asia Trail, the first section of the zoo, where we were surrounded by gentle streams and gangly bamboo. Unruffled silence. A shadow fell upon us and cooled the back of my neck. The entire world shrank into that twenty-foot radius, and for a few seconds, time swelled into an eternity. It was the kind of stuff you’d expect Fiora to scoff at, but instead, she took it all in, literally. She paused over the stream with her hands on her hips, puffing her chest to fill it with 1,256 square feet of oxygen.
Before I knew it, we stood face-to-face with an animal exhibit:
A Case of Mistaken Identity
Sloth bears are not sloths?
Early biologists mistakenly thought sloth bears were very large sloths. Both have shaggy fur and long, curved claws, but sloth bears are not related to slow-moving sloths.
The actual sloth bear was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t blame it. I wouldn’t have wanted to live in an “exhibit,” either. The word sounds so impersonal, like it needs a letter or numerical label—Exhibit A or Exhibit 3.1.5.
“The sloth’s not home,” I told Fiora.
“Patience, dude. Just look around.”
“Maybe he’s still hungover from his Friday night,” I joked.
“Maybe he ran away,” Fiora said.
Pretty soon we dismissed the Case of the Missing Sloth Bear, and we went looking instead for clouded leopards. We followed a curvy path that was concealed by trees and hedges. It felt strangely private.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Fiora gave me a look.
I gave her a look back that said: Okay, yes, technically that was a question.
“I didn’t even have to use any words,” she remarked. “But yes, you may ask me another question.”
“The other day you said there was too much going on in your life . . . that you weren’t doing this out of boredom or because you feel bad for me—this pickup challenge—but because it takes your mind off the other stuff.”
“First of all, I don’t feel bad for you. You’re refreshingly genuine. And flawed, but not in a fucked-up way. I like that. Second, what’s your question?”
I held back a smile at Fiora’s comment. I like that.
“Aren’t you flawed, too?”
“Excuse me?”
I’d been curious about the details of Fiora’s discombobulated situation, and I was feeling ballsy enough behind these green walls to bring it up.
“Sorry, that wasn’t my question,” I said. “I’m just saying, I know all these half facts about you, but I feel like I don’t have the full picture.”
Fiora laughed shyly, like she was aiming for confidence but fell just short.
“What do you want to know?”
Lucky for me, I had an arsenal of questions ready to fire. I started with her dad.
“He’s a workaholic,” she began. Her tone was raw and exposed. “I didn’t see much of him growing up, especially after the divorce.”
“Why’d your parents split up?”
“Because they’re terrible adults. One shut down after a tragic life event and the other had a drug problem. Not exactly a compatible pairing.”
“Your mom’s got to be doing better if you visited her last weekend, right?”
“She, um—jeez, do we really have to talk about this?”
Clearly I’d struck a chord with Fiora’s mom. Had she relapsed? Or was there something about her new life in Philly that rubbed Fiora the wrong way? I stopped thinking these questions when I realized I might actually say one of them out loud.
“Sorry,” I said, kicking at the dirt trail.
“No worries.” From the corner of my eye, I saw Fiora turning her face and smiling. She knew I felt embarrassed. This almost evened out the playing field, the fact that I had suffered at the hands of Fiora’s predicament for just one second. Her pain had to be orders of magnitude worse, but still.
We turned around after realizing we had missed the clouded leopard. Halfway up the curved path, a yellow squirrel leapt out and scurried in front of us.
“What’s her name?” Fiora asked.
“Mustard,” I replied.
All of a sudden the squirrel sprinted out again. Fiora almost tripped, because this time Mustard stopped mid-sprint and glared at us—the pesky humans who were arrogant enough to assign them a gender and name.
“Silly Mustard,” Fiora said. “You know what’s an even weirder name?”
I knew where she was going with this. “Definitely Fiora.”
“Saaket,” she said, eyeing me intensely. “Where’d your parents come up with a name like that, anyway?”
“In Farsi it means ‘quiet.’ It’s not really a common name. My mom and dad wanted something unique, and they were hoping I’d be a quiet baby, so boom, Saaket.”
“I bet you were the whiniest baby,” she said. “I bet you cried ironically all the time.”
“Still do,” I said proudly.
“Really?”
Shit. I thought I was making a smooth comment, when in fact, I’d just admitted to being a teenage crybaby.
“Um. I guess sometimes. Just with my dad, really. He puts a lot of pressure on me to figure out my career. You know, apply myself and get my life together.”
“You’re lucky he cares,” Fiora said.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” I burst out. “It’s the worst. I’m not even a senior in high school and he expects me to know exactly what I’m doing for the next four hundred years of my life. Focus, focus, fucking focus. Like, I need to discover the one thing I’m passionate about tomorrow? Or in five years? And it has to be something practical, too, because, well, ‘Your mom and I immigrated to America and worked hard so that you can have a better life.’ What if I decide that the one thing I want to do for the rest of my life isn’t law or medicine or engineering? That I’m not going to make buckets of money? He would explode. I can’t just wake up and say I’m going to write crossword puzzles for the rest of my days. I don’t have that stupid luxury.”
“Okay, okay,” Fiora said, looking down and tensing up her jaw.
“I think we passed the clouded leopard again,” I said softly.
The clouded leopard was hidden behind a tall, perfectly trimmed hedge at the center of the loopy path. It was the first zoo animal I’d seen all day, perched atop the highest branch in its zoo habitat. My eyes traced the soft, splashy black spots on the leopard’s fur. The kids around us giggled and yelped, and I became giddy, too. My fingers tingled, knees fidgeted, all that. But then I noticed something: the clouded leopard did not actually look happy. It upset me that no one else was the least bit concerned for its happiness.
“What a nice place to take a nap!” one boy shouted, tugging his mom’s arm.
“Make it do something,” whined another.
I look over at Fiora. She had this hollow expression on her face, a mirror image of the clouded leopard’s. It was as if they were saying to each other: All right, yeah. They’ll see whatever they want to see.
“Hey,” I said, tapping her shoulder. “Look, I’m sorry for my soliloquy of sucky parenting over there. I didn’t mean to get fired up like that.”
Then, almost in sync, Fiora and the leopard shook themselves back into motion.
WE FINALLY REACHED the panda exhibit, and Fiora smiled wickedly.
“This is where you’re going to pick her up.”
I grimaced. I could feel my body turning inside out, like the prank my swim teammates used to pull on my duffel bag. They would dump all my stuff out, turn it inside out, throw everything back in, and zip it shut so that it looked like a chicken nugget. The prank was called “nuggeting.” Real clever.
At swim meets, I
would get butterflies in my stomach right before diving into the pool. Fiora didn’t even give me a diving board. She pushed me into the deep end, retreated to the benches, and crossed her legs. She might as well have brought popcorn and a jumbo soda—she was ready for a show.
I took a deep breath. All I had to do was find a girl, get her number, and maintain some amount of dignity. Boom. Fifty bucks. Easy enough when there’s a cute panda exhibit, right? Except the panda, like its sloth brethren, was noticeably missing.
“Look!” shouted a heavy man with an even heavier Southern accent, pointing his finger below the guardrail. “There it is!”
Everyone looked down. These two twins even turned their faces toward each other and whacked noses. The man let out a roaring laugh; he was pointing at a squirrel. The rest of us were less amused.
“He’s in the tree!” exclaimed a girl with turquoise highlights in her blonde hair. She was wearing a yellow-striped halter top and looked about my age. This feels creepy, I thought, rocking back and forth on my heels and toes. I took a deep breath and stepped forward to say . . .
Swoop. An older man came out of nowhere and curled her into his arms. He planted a big, wet kiss on her now-undesirably thin lips. Pickup Fail #1. I looked back at Fiora with the most desperate puppy-dog face, wide eyes and all. She pretended not to notice.
The panda was, in fact, hiding high up in the tree. It was hardly noticeable except for a patch of fur where the black turned to white. I didn’t even know pandas could climb trees. Everyone around me was twisting and bending to get the best glimpse of this high-up, distant sonuvva-panda. One girl didn’t seem to care, instead doling out pieces of bread crust to a flock of pigeons.
“I’m pretty sure there’s an underground bird operation going on here,” I said, just loud enough to feel like I tried, hoping she wouldn’t actually hear me.
“Do I know you?”
“Sorry, sorry. I wasn’t talking to—”
She got up and smiled sweetly. “Me. You were talking to me. Don’t worry, I’m curious. What’s this underground bird operation you speak of?” The girl was curvy and cute, wearing jeans and a hot-pink V-neck with sneakers. Her hair was tied back in a tight ponytail. I looked behind me to make sure Fiora was paying attention.
