by Tahereh Mafi
And then—
double ding
riversandoceans04: I don’t think you’re weird.
I blinked at the computer screen.
double ding
riversandoceans04: I’m sorry
Ocean appeared to be a chronic apologizer.
jujehpolo: It’s okay
jujehpolo: I’m sorry for putting you on the spot like that. You were just trying to be nice.
jujehpolo: I get it
jujehpolo: It’s fine
Another five seconds dragged on.
riversandoceans04: Okay
I sighed. Dropped my face into my hands. Somehow I’d made things awkward. Everything was fine, totally normal, and then I had to go and make it weird. There was only one way to fix this now. So I took a deep, sad breath, and typed.
jujehpolo: You don’t have to be my lab partner if you don’t want to be.
jujehpolo: It’s okay
jujehpolo: I can tell Mrs. Cho tomorrow.
riversandoceans04: What?
riversandoceans04: Why would you say that?
riversandoceans04: You don’t want to be my lab partner?
I frowned.
jujehpolo: Uh, okay, I don’t know what’s happening.
riversandoceans04: Me neither
riversandoceans04: Do you want to be my lab partner?
jujehpolo: Sure
riversandoceans04: Okay
riversandoceans04: Good
jujehpolo: Okay
riversandoceans04: I’m sorry
I stared at my computer. This conversation was giving me a headache.
jujehpolo: Why are you sorry?
Another couple of seconds.
riversandoceans04: I don’t actually know anymore
I almost laughed. I didn’t understand what the hell had just happened. I didn’t understand his apologies or his confusion and I didn’t even think I wanted to know. What I wanted was to go back to not caring about Ocean James, the boy with two first names. I’d spoken to this kid for a total of maybe an hour and suddenly his presence was in my bedroom, in my personal space, stressing me out.
I didn’t like it. It made me feel weird.
So I tried to keep things simple.
jujehpolo: Why don’t we just do the homework?
Another ten seconds.
riversandoceans04: Okay
And we did.
But I felt something change between us, and I had no idea what it was.
5
Five
The next morning, my brother, who had a zero period and always left for school an hour before I did, stopped by my room to borrow the Wu-Tang CD I’d stolen from him. I’d been putting on mascara when he started knocking on my door, and he was now demanding I give him back not only his CD but his iPod, too, and I was shouting back that his iPod was far more useful to me during the school day then it had ever been for him, and I was still making this argument when I opened the door and he suddenly froze. He looked me up and down and his eyes widened, just a little.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.”
I let him inside. I gave him the CD he was looking for. He kept looking at me.
“What?” I said again, irritated.
“Nothing,” he said, and laughed. “You look nice.”
I raised an eyebrow. This was a trick.
“New outfit?”
I looked down at what I was wearing. My sweater wasn’t new. But I’d bought these jeans from the thrift store last week and had just finished altering them. They’d been a few sizes too big for me, but the quality of the denim was too good to pass up. Besides, they’d only cost me fifty cents. “Sort of,” I said. “The jeans are new.”
He nodded. “Well, they’re nice.”
“Yeah. Okay,” I said. “Why are you being weird?”
He shrugged. “I’m not being weird,” he said. “The jeans are nice. They’re just, uh, really tight. I’m not used to seeing you in pants like that.”
“Gross.”
“Hey, listen, I don’t care. They look good on you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“No, I mean it. They look nice.” He was still smiling.
“Oh my God, what?”
“Nothing,” he said for the third time. “I just, you know, I don’t think Ma is going to like seeing your ass in those jeans.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well she doesn’t have to look at my ass if she doesn’t want to.”
Navid laughed. “It’s just—sometimes what you wear doesn’t really match, you know? It’s a little confusing.” He gestured, vaguely, at my head, even though I hadn’t put on my scarf yet. Still, I knew what he was trying to say. I knew he was trying not to be judgmental. But the conversation irritated me.
People—and often guys—liked to say that Muslim women wore headscarves because they were trying to be demure, or because they were trying to cover up their beauty, and I knew that there were ladies in the world who felt that way. I couldn’t speak for all Muslim women—no one could—but it was a sentiment with which I fundamentally disagreed. I didn’t believe it was possible to hide a woman’s beauty. I thought women were gorgeous no matter what they wore, and I didn’t think they owed anyone an explanation for their sartorial choices. Different women felt comfortable in different outfits.
They were all beautiful.
But it was only the monsters who forced women to wear human potato sacks all day that managed to make headline news, and these assholes had somehow set the tone for all of us. No one even asked me the question anymore; people just assumed they knew the answer, and they were nearly always wrong. I dressed the way I did not because I was trying to be a nun, but because it felt good—and because it made me feel less vulnerable in general, like I wore a kind of armor every day. It was a personal preference. I definitely didn’t do it because I was trying to be modest for the sake of some douchebag who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. People struggled to believe this, because people struggled to believe women in general.
It was one of the greatest frustrations of my life.
So I shoved Navid out of my room and told him it was none of his business what my ass looked like in my jeans and he said, “No, I know—that’s not what I meant—”
“Don’t make it weird,” I said, and closed the door in his face.
After he left, I looked in the mirror.
The jeans were nice.
The days continued to dissolve, and quietly.
Aside from breakdancing, pretty much nothing had changed except that Ocean was suddenly different around me in bio. He’d been different ever since that first, and only, AIM conversation we’d had, over two weeks ago.
He talked too much.
He was always saying things like Wow, the weather is so weird today and How was your weekend? and Hey, did you study for the quiz on Friday? and it surprised me, every single time. I’d glance at him for only a second and say Yeah, the weather is weird and Um, my weekend was fine and No, I didn’t study for the quiz on Friday and he’d smile and say I know, right? and That’s nice and Really? I’ve been studying all week and I’d usually ignore him. I never asked him a follow-up question.
Maybe I was being rude, but I didn’t care.
Ocean was a really good-looking guy, and I know this doesn’t sound like a valid reason to dislike someone, but it was reason enough for me. He made me nervous. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to get to know him. I didn’t want to like him, which was harder than you’d think, because he was very likable. Falling for someone like Ocean, I knew, would only end badly for me. I didn’t want to embarrass myself.
Today he’d been trying really hard to make small talk—which I guessed was understandable, as it was otherwise awkward to sit around for an hour saying nothing while you picked apart a dead cat—and he said, “So, are you going to homecoming?”
I’d actually looked up, then. I looked up because I was amazed. I laughed, softly, and turned away.
His question was so ridiculous I didn’t even answer him. We’d been having pep rallies all week in anticipation of the homecoming game—it was a football thing, I think—and I’d been skipping them. We were also, apparently, having class spirit competitions, whatever that meant. I was supposed to be wearing green or blue or something today, but I wasn’t.
People were losing their minds over this shit.
“You don’t really do school stuff, huh?” Ocean said, and I wondered why he cared.
“No,” I said quietly. “I don’t really do school stuff.”
“Oh.”
There was a part of me that wanted to be friendlier to Ocean, but sometimes it made me really, actually, physically uncomfortable when he was nice to me. It felt so fake. Some days our interactions felt like he was trying really hard to overcompensate for that first error, for thinking my parents were about to ship me off to a harem or something. Like he wanted another chance to prove he wasn’t close-minded, like he thought I might not notice that he went from thinking I couldn’t even meet up after school to thinking I might show up at a homecoming dance, all in the span of two weeks. I didn’t like it. I just didn’t trust it.
So I cut the heart out of a dead cat and called it a day.
I showed up to practice a little too early that afternoon and the room was still locked; Navid was the one who had the key that would let us in and he hadn’t arrived yet, so I slumped down on the ground and waited. I knew that basketball season was starting sometime next month—I knew this, because I saw the posters plastered everywhere—but the gym was, for some reason, already busier than I’d ever seen it. It was loud. Super loud. Lots of shouting. Lots of whistles blowing and sneakers squeaking. I didn’t really know what was happening; I didn’t know much about sports, in general. All I heard were the thunderous sounds of many feet running across a court. I could hear it through the walls.
When I finally got into the dance room with the other guys, we turned up the music and did our best to drown out the reverberations of the many basketballs hitting the floor. I was working with Jacobi today, who was showing me how to improve my footwork.
I already knew how to do a basic six-step, which was exactly what it sounded like: it was a series of six steps performed on the ground. You held yourself up on your arms while your legs did most of the work, moving you in a sort of circular motion. This served as an introduction to your power move—which was your acrobatic move—the kind of thing that looked, sometimes, like what you saw gymnasts do on a pommel horse, except way cooler. Breakdancing was, in many ways, closer to something like capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian form of martial arts that involves a lot of kicks and spins in midair; capoeira made kicking someone’s ass look both scary and beautiful.
Breakdancing was kind of like that.
Jacobi was showing me how to add CCs to my six-step. They were called CCs because they were invented by a group of breakers who called themselves the Crazy Commandos, and not because the move looked anything like a c. They were body rotations that made my legwork more complex, and just, overall, made the routine look cooler. I’d been working at it for a while. I’d already learned how to do a double-handed CC, but I was still getting the hang of doing a one-handed CC, and Jacobi was watching me as I tried, over and over again, to get the thing right. When I finally did, he clapped, hard.
He was beaming.
“Nice job,” he said.
I just about fell backward. I was on the ground, splayed like a starfish, but I was smiling.
This was nothing; these were baby steps. But it felt so good.
Jacobi helped me to my feet and squeezed my shoulder. “Nice,” he said. “Seriously.”
I smiled at him.
I turned around to find my water bottle and suddenly froze.
Ocean was leaning against the doorframe, not quite in the room and not quite outside of it, a gym bag slung across his chest. He waved at me.
I looked around, confused, like maybe he’d been waving at someone else, but he laughed at me. Finally I just met him at the door, and I realized then that someone had propped it open. It happened, sometimes, when it got really hot in here; one of the guys would wedge the door open to let the room breathe a little.
Still, our open door had never attracted visitors before.
“Uh, hi,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
Ocean shook his head. He seemed, somehow, even more surprised than I was. “I was just walking by,” he said. “I heard the music. I wanted to know what was happening.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You were just walking by.”
“Yeah.” He smiled. “I, um, spend a lot of time in the gym. Anyway, I honestly didn’t know you’d be in here. Your music is just super loud.”
“Okay.”
“But I figured I should say hi instead of standing here, watching you like a creep.”
“Good call,” I said, but I was frowning. Still processing. “So you don’t, like, need something? For class?”
He shook his head.
I stared at him.
Finally, he took a deep breath. “You really weren’t kidding,” he said. “About the breakdancing thing.”
I laughed. Looked at him incredulously. “You thought I would lie about something like that?”
“No,” he said, but he seemed suddenly uncertain. “I just, I don’t know. I didn’t know.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are these your friends?” Ocean said. He was staring at Jacobi, who was shooting me a look that said Who’s the guy? and What’s going on? all at the same time.
“Sort of,” I said.
“That’s cool.”
“Yeah.” I was so confused. “Um, I should go.”
Ocean nodded. Stood up straighter. “Yeah, me too.”
We said awkward goodbyes. As soon as he was out of sight, I closed the door.
Jacobi was the only one who noticed me talking to Ocean that day, and when he asked me about it, I said it was nothing, just a kid from class who needed something. I wasn’t even sure why I lied about it.
I was totally perplexed.
6
Six
Things in my life began to find a rhythm.
I was settling into a new routine in this town, and my anxieties about being friendless at school were beginning to fade. I was no longer a shock to the system; instead, I’d become a regular fixture at school, one that most of my classmates could now comfortably ignore. People still enjoyed referring to me as the Taliban as I walked by, and every once in a while I’d find an anonymous note in my locker telling me to fuck off back to where I came from, and occasionally someone would take the time to point out that towelheads like me didn’t deserve to live in their country—but I tried not to let it bother me. I tried to get used to it. I’d heard somewhere that people could get used to anything.
Luckily, breakdancing kept me busy in the best possible way.
I loved everything about it: the music, the moves, even the history. Breakdancing started back in the 1970s in the South Bronx, New York, and slowly, over time, made its way across the country to Los Angeles. It was an iteration, a simultaneous arm and evolution of hip-hop, and, coolest of all—it was originally used as an alternative to physical violence. In their fights over territories, gangs would have breakdancing battles to determine ownership—and that’s why the term battle still exists today. Breaking crews don’t compete; they battle. Each crew member delivers a performance.
Best b-boy—or b-girl—wins.
I threw myself into the work, hitting the gym nearly every day. When we didn’t have access to the school’s dance studio we’d break down oversize cardboard boxes in abandoned streets and parking lots, set up a boom box, and practice. Navid would drag me out of bed way too early on weekend mornings to do ten-mile runs with him. We started training together, regularly. Breakdancing involved extremely taxing physical work, but it was work that filled me with joy and purpose. In fact, I was so focused on this new life outside of
school—and so tired after practice every day—that I hardly had time to be angry about all the assholes littered everywhere.
The educational aspect of school was pretty boring.
I’d figured out a long time ago how to get As without trying; my secret to success was that I genuinely didn’t care. I felt no pressure to perform, so I usually did fine. I’d stopped caring about school a few years ago, right around the time I was old enough to realize that caring about a school—its teachers, its students, its walls and doors and many hallways—nearly always ended in heartbreak. So I just stopped. I stopped remembering things. People. Faces. In time, the institutions and their many names all blurred together. Mrs. Someone was my first grade teacher. Mr. Whatsisname taught third grade. Who knew.
I was required by law and the wooden spoon my mom liked to whoop my ass with to show up every day, so I did. I showed up, I did the work, I dealt with the dependable, unrelenting microaggressions from the masses that influenced the emotional weather patterns of my day. I didn’t stress about getting into a good college because I already knew I couldn’t afford to go to a good college. I didn’t stress about AP classes because I didn’t think of them as any different from regular classes. I didn’t stress about the SATs because who gave a shit about the SATs. Not me.
I don’t know, I guess I always thought I’d turn out okay, no matter how badly my many schools tried to mutilate me. And I held on to that feeling every day. Two and a half more years, I thought. Just two and a half more years until I could get the hell away from this existence organized by school bells that, let’s be honest, didn’t even ring.
They beeped.
This was what I was thinking as I peeled another layer of soggy cat flesh away from soggy cat muscle. I was thinking about how much I hated this. How I was already anxious to get into the gym again. I was getting better at holding the crab pose now—I’d almost managed to hold my body weight up on my elbows yesterday—and I wanted to see if I’d make more progress this afternoon. I was headed to my first live breakdancing battle this weekend, and I wanted to feel like I knew something when I got there.
I finished my shift with the cat and peeled off my gloves, tossing them into the trash before washing my hands—for good measure—in our lab station’s sink. So far, our discoveries had been underwhelming, which was how I liked them. One of the groups in our class discovered that the cat they’d been dissecting had died pregnant; they’d found a litter of unborn kittens in her uterus.
