by Tahereh Mafi
“Listen,” he said, “maybe you should reconsider this whole . . . getup.” He gestured vaguely at my face. “Walking around like this all the time?” He shook his head. Sighed. “I’m sorry, kid, but it’s like you’re asking for it. Don’t make yourself a target. Things are complicated in the world right now. People are scared. Do you understand?” And then, “Do you speak English?”
I remember shaking so hard I could barely sit straight. I remember looking up at the cop and feeling powerless. I remember staring at the gun holstered at his hip and being terrified.
“Here,” he said, and offered me a card. “Call this number if you ever feel unsafe, okay?”
I took the card. It was a number for Child Protective Services.
That wasn’t the beginning—this wasn’t where my anger started—but it was a cauterizing moment I would never forget.
When I came home that day, still so stunned I hadn’t figured out yet how to cry, my parents were transformed. It was the first time they’d ever seemed small to me. Petrified. My dad told me then, that day, that maybe I should stop wearing my scarf. If maybe it would be better for me that way. Easier.
I said no.
I told him I was fine, that everything would be fine, that they didn’t need to worry, that I just needed to take a shower and I would be fine. It was nothing, I said. I told my parents I was fine because somehow I knew they needed the lie even more than I did. But when we moved away a month later, I knew it wasn’t coincidence.
I’d been thinking about it a lot, lately. All the bullshit. The exhaustion that accompanied my personal choice to wrap a piece of cloth around my hair every day. I was so tired of dealing with this crap. I hated how that crap seemed to poison everything. I hated that I cared at all. I hated how the world kept trying to bully me into believing that I was the problem.
I felt like I could never catch a break.
I paused before pushing open the door to my house, my hand frozen on the handle. I knew my mom was cooking something because the crisp, cool air was infused with a delicious aroma. It was that perfect, perfect smell that would always take me back to the specific feeling of being a child: the scent of onions being sautéed in olive oil.
I felt my body relax.
I stepped inside, dropped my bag, and sank into a seat at the kitchen table. I leaned into the familiar, comforting sounds and smells of home, holding on to them like a lifeline, and I stared at my mom, who was, unquestionably, a human being of the superior variety. She dealt with so much. She’d survived so much. She was the bravest, strongest woman I’d ever known, and though I knew she faced all kinds of discrimination on a daily basis, she only rarely discussed it. Instead, she pushed through every obstacle, never complaining. I aspired to her levels of grace and perseverance. She worked all day long and came home just before my dad did, cooked up an amazing meal, and always had a smile, a slap to the back of the head, or a devastating piece of wisdom to impart.
Today, I wanted desperately to ask her what to do. But I knew I’d probably get the slap to the back of the head, so I reconsidered. Instead, I sighed. I looked at my phone. I had six missed calls and two text messages from Ocean—
please call me
please
—and I’d already looked at them about a hundred times. I kept staring at his words on my phone, feeling everything all at once. Just the memory of kissing him was enough to make me flush. I remembered him, every inch of him. My mind had recorded the moment in surprising detail, and I replayed it, over and over again. When I closed my eyes I could still feel him against my lips. I remembered his eyes, the way he’d looked at me, and my skin felt suddenly hot and electric. But when I thought about the fallout—the weirdness I would inevitably be forced to deal with at school the following day—I felt awful and embarrassed. I felt so dumb that I hadn’t known his place in the hierarchy of this stupid school, I felt dumb that I’d never asked him what he did in his free time. I felt suddenly frustrated that I’d ditched all those pep rallies. I would’ve seen him when they paraded all the basketball players out into the center of the gym.
I would’ve known.
But I was now knee-deep in metaphorical cow shit, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t think ignoring Ocean was an option anymore—in fact, I’m not sure it ever was—but I also didn’t know if talking to him would help, either. I’d already tried that. Today, in fact. That was the whole plan. I thought I was being mature by ending things in person. I could’ve been—in fact, would’ve preferred to have been—a coward who sent him a simple, unkind text message, telling him to leave me alone forever; but I’d wanted to do the right thing. I thought he deserved to have a proper conversation about it. But I’d somehow screwed everything up.
I dragged my feet that night. I stayed downstairs with my parents for far longer than I normally would. I ate dinner slowly, pushing my food around my plate long after everyone else had left the table and said, “I’m fine, just tired,” to my parents’ many concerned questions. Navid didn’t say much to me except to shoot me a sympathetic smile, which I appreciated.
Nothing helped, though.
I was stalling for time. I didn’t want to go up to my room where the closed door, the quiet, and the privacy would force me to make a decision. I was worried I would cave and call Ocean back, that I would hear his voice and lose my ability to be objective and then, inevitably, agree to try, to see what happens, to ultimately be alone with him on another, imminent occasion because wow, I desperately wanted to kiss him again. But I knew that this whole situation was hazardous to my health. So I put it off.
I managed to put it off until three in the morning.
I was lying in bed, wide-awake, completely incapable of shutting down either my brain or my body, when my phone buzzed on the table beside me. Ocean’s message was at once simple and heartbreaking.
:(
I don’t know why it was the sad-face emoticon that finally broke through my defenses. Maybe because it seemed so human. So real.
I picked up my phone because I was weak and I missed him and because I’d been lying there, thinking about him for hours already; my brain had succumbed long before he’d texted me.
Still, I knew better.
I clicked through to his number and I knew—even as I hesitated, my finger hovering over the call button—I knew that I was only inviting trouble. But I was also just, you know, a teenager, and my heart was still too soft. I was not a paragon of anything. I was definitely not a saint, as my brother had so clearly pointed out. Not a saint, not by a long shot.
So I called him.
Ocean sounded different when he picked up. Nervous. I heard him exhale, just once, before he said, “Hey.”
“Hi,” I whispered. I was hiding under my covers again.
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
I waited.
“I really thought you weren’t going to call me,” he finally said. “Like, ever again.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is it because I kissed you?” he said, and his voice was strained. “Was that—should I not have done that?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. This conversation was already doing things to my nerves. “Ocean,” I said. “The kiss was amazing.” I could hear him breathing. I could hear the way his breathing changed as I spoke. “The kiss was perfect,” I said. “Kind of blew my mind.”
He still didn’t say anything.
And then—
“Why didn’t you call me?” he whispered, and he sounded suddenly broken.
I knew then that this was it. Here it was. Here was the moment and I had to say it. In all likelihood it would kill me, but I had to say it.
“Because,” I said. “I don’t want to do this.”
I heard the breath go out of him. I heard him turn away from the phone and swear and he said, “Is this because of the idiots at school? Because people saw us together?”
“That has a lot to do with it, yeah.”
He
swore again.
And then, quietly, I said, “I didn’t know you were a basketball player.”
It felt like a stupid thing to say, like it shouldn’t have mattered what sport he played in his free time, but it had also begun to feel like a blatant omission on his end. He wasn’t an average kid who’d decided to take up basketball in his spare time. He was a star player on the team. He’d apparently scored a lot of goals for someone his age. Baskets. Whatever. I’d looked it up online when I finally mustered the courage to lock myself in my room. There were articles about him in the local papers. Colleges were already circling him, talking about scholarships, talking about his potential, his future. I came across a few blogs and school-sponsored webcasts that were pretty illuminating, but when I dug deeper I discovered an anonymous LiveJournal account devoted only to him and his statistics over the years—a ton of numbers I couldn’t understand about points and rebounds and steals—and I was suddenly confused.
Basketball was clearly a huge part of Ocean’s life; it was obvious it had been for some time. And it had just occurred to me that, while yes, there was some fault on my end for not asking him more questions about himself, his omission was also strange. He’d never even casually mentioned basketball, not in a single one of our conversations.
So when he said, “I really wish you’d never found out,” the whole thing began to make a little more sense to me.
And then—well, then he kind of broke open.
He said he started playing basketball after his parents split up, because his mom’s new boyfriend was a youth basketball coach. He said he did it only because spending time with the new boyfriend seemed to make his mom happy. He played well, which made the boyfriend happy. Which made the mom happy. Which made him happy.
When his mom and the boyfriend split, Ocean was twelve. He tried to quit basketball, but his mom wouldn’t let him. She said it was good for him. She said it made her happy to see him play so well. And then horribly, unexpectedly, his mom’s parents died, he said, in this really tragic car accident, both of them at the same time, and his mom kind of lost her mind. But it was awful in two ways, he said. He said his mom was reeling from the emotional hit, but that she also, suddenly, didn’t have to go to work anymore. Her parents had left everything to her—land, investments, all kinds of stuff—and he said it was all the money that eventually ruined his life.
He said he spent the next few years trying to keep his mom from crying all the time and that, eventually, they switched roles; one day he’d become the responsible one while she sort of collapsed inward and lost track of everyone but herself. When his mom finally pushed through the darkness, she became entirely about her social obligations. He said she became obsessed with finding another husband, and that it was awful and painful to watch.
“She never even notices when I’m not home,” he said to me. “She’s always out, always doing things with her friends or dating some new guy I have no interest in meeting. She’s so convinced I’m going to be fine—she’s always telling me I’m a good kid—and then she just disappears. She leaves money on the table and then, I don’t know, I never know when I’m going to hear from her. She comes and goes. No schedule. Never commits to anything. She never even comes to my games. I left home for a week, once, just to see what would happen, and she didn’t even call me. When I finally came home she seemed surprised to see me. She said she’d assumed I was away at basketball camp or something.” He hesitated. “But it was the middle of the school year.”
He said he kept playing basketball because his team had become a substitute for his family. It was the only one he had.
“But there’s so much pressure,” he said. “There’s so much pressure to perform—and I’m really beginning to hate it. All of it. My coach is killing me every day, stressing me out about scouts and stats and these stupid awards and I don’t know,” he said. “I feel like I don’t even know why I’m doing it anymore. I never played basketball because I loved it. It just became this thing that took over my entire life. It’s like a parasite. And everyone is so obsessed with it,” he said, anger bleeding into his voice. “It’s like they can’t even think about anything else. People only ever want to talk to me about basketball,” he said. “Like it’s all I am. Like it’s everything I am. And it’s not.”
“Of course it’s not,” I said, but my voice was quiet. Sad. I understood too well what it was like to feel like you were defined by one superficial thing—to feel like you would never escape the box people had put you in.
It felt like you were going to explode.
“Ocean,” I said, “I’m so sorry about your mom.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you all of this sooner.”
“It’s really okay,” I said. “I get it.”
He sighed. “This is going to sound weird, I know—and really dumb—but I just—I loved how you never seemed to give a shit about who I was. You didn’t know me. You didn’t know anything about me. Like—not just that first day,” he said, “but, like, for the next couple of months. I kept waiting for you to find out—I thought maybe you’d see me at a pep rally or show up to an event or something, I don’t know, but you never did. You never even saw me after school.”
“After school?” I said. But then I remembered, with a sudden moment of clarity, discovering him in the doorway of our dance room. And later, for a split second, leaving the gym. “What do you do after school?”
Ocean laughed. “See? This is exactly what I mean. I’ve been going to practice,” he said. “We’re always in the gym. I’d see you disappear into the dance room with those other guys and I always thought you’d, like”—he laughed again—“I don’t know, I guess I thought maybe one day you’d walk by? See me in my basketball uniform? But it never happened. And I got so comfortable talking to you like this. Without the noise. It was like you actually wanted to get to know me.”
“I did want to get to know you,” I said. “I still do.”
He sighed. “Then why walk away? Why throw this all away?”
“We don’t have to throw anything away. We can just go back to being friends. We can still talk to each other,” I said. “But we can have space, too. From each other.”
“I don’t want space,” he said. “I’ve never wanted less space.”
I didn’t know what to say. My heart was hurting.
“Do you?” he said, and his voice was suddenly strained again. “Do you really want space from me? Honestly?”
“Of course not,” I whispered.
He was quiet for a second or two. And when he next spoke, his words were soft. So sweet. He said, “Baby, please don’t do this.”
I felt a jolt of feeling flood through me. It left me a little breathless. The way he’d called me baby, the way he’d said it, it was nothing and everything all at once. There was so much emotion in the word, like he wanted me to be his, like he wanted us to belong to each other.
“Please,” he whispered. “Let’s just be together. Hang out. I want to spend more time with you.”
He said he promised he wouldn’t try to kiss me again and I wanted to say don’t you dare promise not to kiss me again but I didn’t.
Instead, I did exactly what I said I wouldn’t do.
I gave in.
22
Twenty-Two
School was suddenly weird as hell.
I’d gone from being the kind of person people pretended they weren’t staring at to being the kind of person who was openly gawked at. Some students didn’t bother to hide the fact that they were talking about me as I passed. Some of them actually pointed at me as I walked by.
It was suddenly very good for me that I’d had so much practice ignoring faces. I stared at nothing as I walked; I looked at no one. Ocean and I had no plans; we hadn’t discussed what today would look like simply because he was so certain it would be fine, that we were surrounded by idiots and none of it would matter. I knew he was wrong, of course, that all of it mattered, that we were actively swim
ming in the sewage that was high school and it wouldn’t do us any good to pretend otherwise. I knew it was only a matter of time before it bubbled up into something ugly. But that first day, at least, was fairly uneventful. Sort of.
My first four periods were easy. I zoned out completely; hid earbuds under my scarf and listened to music while the world droned on. It was fine enough. Plus, Ocean and I had never really engaged each other in Mr. Jordan’s class, so the whole thing was pretty low-key. Ocean found me after the bell rang, smiling so bright it lit up his whole face. He said hi. I said hi back. And then we split up. Our next classes were in different directions.
It was right around lunch when things hit peak weird.
This random girl cornered me. It was fast. Totally unexpected. She just about knocked me into one of the outdoor picnic benches.
I was stunned.
“Can I help you?” I snapped at her.
She was a beautiful Indian girl. She had long, dark hair, and really expressive eyes, and she was using those eyes today to express to me that she wanted to kill me. She looked livid. “You are a terrible role model for Muslim girls everywhere!” she said.
I was so surprised I actually laughed. Just once, but still.
I’d imagined today going badly in any number of different ways, but wow, wow, I had not been expecting this.
For a second, I thought she might be messing with me. I gave her a chance to take it back. To suddenly smile.
She didn’t.
“Are you serious?” I said.
“Do you know how hard I have to work, every single day, to undo the kind of damage people like you do to our faith? To the image of Muslim women in general?”
Now I frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You are not allowed to go around kissing boys!” she cried.
I looked her over. “Have you never kissed a boy?”
“This isn’t about me,” she huffed, “this is about you. You wear hijab,” she said. “You’re disrespecting everything you’re supposed to stand for.”
