by Tahereh Mafi
“Um. Okay.” I squinted at her. Half smiled. Flipped her off and kept walking.
She followed me.
“Girls like you don’t deserve to wear hijab,” she said, matching my pace. “It’d be better for everyone if you just took it off.”
Finally, I stopped. Sighed. I turned to face her. “You are, like, everything that is wrong with people, you know? You,” I said, “are what’s wrong with religion. People like you make the rest of us look crazy, and I don’t think you even realize it.” I shook my head. “You don’t know shit about me, okay? You don’t know shit about how I’ve lived or what I’ve been through or why I choose to wear hijab and it’s not your place to judge me or how I live my life. I get to be a fucking human being, okay? And you can go straight to hell.”
Her jaw dropped open in such dramatic fashion that, for a second, she looked like an anime character. Her eyes went impossibly wide, her mouth shaped into a perfect o.
“Wow,” she said.
“Bye.”
“You’re even more horrible than I thought you’d be.”
“Whatever.”
“I’m going to pray for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, and started walking again. “I’ve got a test after lunch, so if you could focus your energy there, that’d be great.”
“You are a terrible person!” she called after me.
I waved goodbye as I left.
Ocean was sitting under my tree.
He stood up when he saw me coming. “Hi,” he said. His eyes were so bright—happy—in the sunlight. It was a beautiful day. It was the end of October; fall had officially arrived. There was a chill in the air, and I loved it.
“Hi,” I said, and smiled.
“How was your day?” we both said at the same time.
“Weird,” we answered in unison.
He laughed. “Yeah,” he said, and ran a hand through his hair. “Really weird.”
I tried hard not to say I told you so, because I didn’t want to be that person, but I really had told him so, so I settled on a variation of the same thing and hoped he wouldn’t notice. “Yeah,” I said. “I, uh, figured it might be.”
He grinned at me. “Yeah, yeah. I know.”
“So,” I said, and smiled back. “Are you sorry yet? Ready to call it quits?”
“No.” He frowned, and looked, for a moment, genuinely upset. “Of course not.”
“Okay.” I shrugged. “Then let the shitshow begin.”
23
Twenty-Three
The first couple of weeks really weren’t that bad, except for the fact that I’d started fasting, which just made me kind of tired. Ramadan was, honest to goodness, my favorite month of the year, despite how crazy that sounds. Most people weren’t big fans of fasting for thirty days—each day from sunrise to sunset—but I loved it. I loved how it made me feel. It gave me a sharpness of heart and mind; I experienced clarity then as I rarely did during the rest of the year. Somehow, it made me stronger. After surviving a month of serious focus and self-discipline, I felt like I could overcome anything.
Any obstacle. Mental or physical.
Navid hated it.
All day long all he did was complain. He was never more annoying as a human being than he was during Ramadan. All he did was whine. He said fasting messed up his carefully balanced diet of simply grilled chicken breasts and staring at his abs in the mirror. He said it made him slow, that his muscles needed fuel, that all his hard work was being flushed down the toilet and he was losing too much weight, getting leaner every day and what about all the bulk he’d worked so hard to build? Besides, his head hurt, he was tired, he was thirsty; he’d stare at his abs again and make an angry noise and say, “This is such bullshit.”
All day long.
Ocean was, unsurprisingly, curious about the whole thing. I’d stopped using the word fascinated to describe the way he engaged with me and my life, because the pejorative iteration of the word no longer seemed fair. In fact, his affection felt so sincere that I could no longer bring myself to even tease him about it. He was easily wounded. One day he’d asked me about Persian food again and I’d made a joke about how funny it was that he knew so little, how he’d really thought falafel and hummus were my thing, and he was suddenly so embarrassed he wouldn’t even look at me.
So I tried to be gentle.
True to his word, Ocean really didn’t seem to care about the general weirdness surrounding our situation. But then, we were also being really careful. Ocean’s basketball commitments were even more intense than I’d expected—he was busy pretty much all the time. So we took it day by day.
We didn’t do much at first.
I didn’t meet his friends. I didn’t go to his house. We didn’t spend every moment together; we didn’t even spend all our lunches together. To be clear, these were my suggestions, not his. Ocean wasn’t thrilled about the distance I kept between us, but it was the only way I could do this—I wanted our worlds to merge slowly, without chaos—and he seemed resigned to accept it. Still, I worried. I worried about everything he’d have to deal with. What he might’ve already been dealing with. I’d check in with him daily, ask him if anything had happened, if anyone had said anything to him, but he refused to talk about it. He said he didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to give it oxygen.
So I let it go.
After a week, I stopped asking.
I just wanted to enjoy his company.
There was another breakdancing battle happening that next weekend, not long after Ocean and I first started, officially, spending time together, and I was excited. I wanted him to come with me, to see what it was like to attend one of these things in person, and, bonus: it was an outing that’d already been parent-approved, which would make any additional lies to my mom and dad much easier to believe. I had absolutely no interest in telling my parents the truth about Ocean, as I could imagine literally no scenario in which they would happily send me off into the night with a boy who wanted to kiss me, and I was very okay lying about it. My parents weren’t the type to care about Ocean’s race or religion; I already knew this about them. No, they would’ve disapproved no matter who he was. They just never wanted to believe that I was a normal teenager who liked boys, period. So it was kind of a relief, actually, not to tell them anything. This whole thing was dramatic enough without my involving my parents and their inevitable hyperventilations.
Ultimately, I thought I’d come up with a pretty solid plan; it would be a fun way to spend a Saturday night. Plus, Ocean could officially meet Navid and the other guys, and I could show him around this world I loved. But when I pitched it to Ocean, he sounded surprised. And then, polite.
“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Sure.”
Something was wrong.
“You don’t like this plan,” I said. “You think this is a bad plan.” We were on the phone. It was late, really late, and I was whispering under my covers again.
“No, no,” he said, and laughed. “It’s a great plan. I’d love to see one of these battles—they sound so cool—it’s just—” He hesitated. Laughed again. Finally, I heard him sigh.
“What?” I said.
“I kind of wanted to be alone with you.”
“Oh,” I said. My heart picked up.
“And you’re inviting me to go out with you and, um, four other guys.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “Which, I mean, is totally fine, if that’s what you want to do, but, I just—”
“Wow,” I said. “I’m so dumb.”
“What? You’re not dumb. Don’t say that,” he said. “You’re not dumb. I’m just selfish. I was looking forward to having you all to myself.”
A pleasant warmth filled my head. Made me smile.
“Can we do both?” he said. “Can we go to the event and then, I don’t know, do something afterward, just you and me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Definitely.”
The event was late, long after sunset, so Navid and I had already
broken our fasts and had dinner before we headed out. I drove over with Navid, and when we got there, Carlos, Jacobi, and Bijan found us in the parking lot. Ocean showed up soon after, but we had to find each other inside with the help of several text messages.
The place was packed.
I’d been to a few more battles since the first one I’d attended—we’d been going almost every weekend—and this one was, by far, the biggest. The crews here, tonight, were better; the stakes were higher. I looked around the room and realized my parents must not have known what kind of event they’d been approving all this time; I couldn’t imagine them walking through here now and giving it the thumbs-up.
This wasn’t really a scene for high school kids.
Nearly everyone around me looked like they were in college—or at the very least, nearly there—but even though they looked like kind of a rough crowd, I knew they weren’t. There were looks you’d expect—piercings, tattoos, infinite hoodies and sweatpants—but then, it wasn’t always obvious who was secretly the best. People would surprise you. I knew, for example, that the Korean dude in the far corner who rarely spoke and always showed up to these things in the same unassuming white shirt, cargo pants, and wire-framed glasses, would later strip down to a pair of metallic gym shorts and do air flares like nobody’s business. There was always time, after the battle ended but while the music was still going strong, when people from the crowd would form cyphers—impromptu breaking circles—and blow your mind. There was nothing official about it. It was all adrenaline.
I loved it.
Ocean was taking in the room, his eyes wide. The crews were getting ready, the judges were taking their seats, and the DJ was hyping up the crowd, the bass so loud it made the walls vibrate. We had to shout to hear each other. “This,” he said, “is what you do on the weekends?”
I laughed. “This, and homework.”
The room was so tightly packed that Ocean and I were already pretty close to each other. He’d been standing behind me, because he didn’t want to block my view, and it didn’t take much for him to close the remaining inch of space between us. I felt his hands at my waist and I took a sudden breath; he tugged me backward, gently, pulling me close. It was a subtle move; I’m not sure anyone else even noticed it. The crowd was so loud and wild I could only barely make out Navid’s head a couple of feet away. But I spent the rest of the night with my consciousness in two places at once.
The event was amazing. I always found these battles exhilarating. I loved watching people do things they were really good at, and the crews who came out like this were always at the top of their game.
But it wasn’t the same for me this time. I was only half there.
The other half of me was focused, in every moment, on the warm, strong body pressed against me. It didn’t seem possible that something so simple could’ve had such a profound effect on my cardiovascular system, but my heart never slowed its pace. I never relaxed, not really. I didn’t know how. I’d never spent an hour standing this close to anyone. My nerves felt frayed, and it was all somehow more intense because we didn’t really speak. I didn’t know how to acknowledge, out loud, that this was insane, that it was crazy that any person could make another person feel so much with so little effort. But I knew Ocean and I were thinking the same thing. I could feel it in the subtle shifts of his body. I heard it in his sudden, slow inhalations. In the tightness in his breath when he leaned in and whispered, “Where the hell did you come from?”
I turned my head, just a little, just so I could see his face, and I whispered back, “I thought I told you I moved here from California.”
Ocean laughed and pulled me, somehow, impossibly closer, wrapping both his arms fully around my waist, and then he shook his head and said, even as he was smiling, “That wasn’t funny. That was a terrible joke.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” I said, and laughed. “You just make me so nervous.”
“I do?”
I nodded.
I felt him inhale, his chest rising with the movement. He said nothing, but I heard the slight shake in his breath as he blew it out.
24
Twenty-Four
Navid really came through for me that night.
He bought me an extra hour after the crowds cleared out so that I could go off on my own, somewhere, with Ocean.
“One hour, that’s it,” he said. “That’s all I can swing. It’s already late and if I get you home any later than eleven, Ma will kill me. Okay?”
I just smiled at him.
“Uh-uh. No,” he said, and shook his head. “No smiling. I will be back here in exactly one hour, and no smiling. I want your happiness level to be, like, medium, when I come back here. If you have too much fun I’ll end up having to kick someone’s ass.” He looked at Ocean. “Listen,” he said, “you seem like a nice guy, but I just want to be clear: if you hurt her, I will fucking murder you. Okay?”
“Navid—”
“No, no, it’s okay.” Ocean laughed. “It’s fine. I get it.”
Navid studied him. “Good man.”
“Bye,” I said.
Navid raised an eyebrow at me. Finally, he left.
Ocean and I were suddenly alone in the parking lot, and though the moon was a mere crescent in the sky, it was beautiful and bright. The air smelled fresh and icy and like a particular type of vegetation I’d never learned the name of, but the scent of which seemed to come alive only in the late evenings.
The world felt suddenly full of promise.
Ocean walked me to his car and it was only after I was buckled in that I realized I’d never asked him where we were going. Part of me didn’t even care. I would’ve been happy to just sit in his car and listen to music.
He told me then, without my asking, that we were going to a park.
“Is that okay?” he said, and glanced at me. “It’s one of my favorite places. I wanted to show it to you.”
“That sounds great,” I said.
I rolled down the window when he started driving and leaned out, my arms resting on the open ledge, my face resting on my arms. I closed my eyes and felt the wind rush over me. I loved the wind. I loved the scent of the night air. It made me happy in a way I could never explain.
Ocean pulled into a parking lot.
There were gentle, grassy hills in the distance, their soft contours lit by dim uplights. The park seemed vast, like it went on and on, but it was clearly closed for the day. The thing that made the whole thing shine, however, were the bright lights from the adjacent basketball court.
It wasn’t impressive. The court looked weathered, and the hoops were missing nets. But there were a couple of tall streetlamps, which made the space seem imposing, especially this late at night. Ocean turned off his car. Everything was suddenly black and milky with distant, diffused light. We were silhouettes.
“This was where I first learned to play basketball,” he said quietly. “I come here when I feel like I’m losing my mind sometimes.” He paused. “I’ve been coming back here a lot, lately. I keep trying to remember that I didn’t always hate it.”
I studied his face in the darkness.
There was so much I wanted to say, but this seemed like such a sensitive topic for him that I also wanted to be careful. I didn’t know if what I wanted to say was the right thing to say.
Eventually, I said it anyway.
“I don’t get it,” I said, “why do you have to play basketball? If you hate it, can’t you just—I don’t know? Stop?”
Ocean smiled. He was looking straight out the windshield. “I love that you would even say that,” he said. “You make it sound so simple.” He sighed. “But people here are weird about basketball. It’s more than just a game. It’s, like, a lifestyle. If I walked away I’d be disappointing so many people. I’d piss off so many people. It would be . . . really bad.”
“Yeah, I get that,” I said. “But who cares?”
He looked at me. Raised his eyebrows.
“I
’m serious,” I said. “I don’t know anything about basketball, that’s true, but it doesn’t take much to see that people are putting pressure on you to do something you don’t want to do. So why should you have to do this—put yourself through this—for someone else? What’s the payoff?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and frowned. “I just, I know these people. Basketball is, like, the only thing I even talk to my mom about anymore. And I’ve known my coach forever—I knew him even before I started playing in high school—and he spent so much time helping me, training me. I feel like I owe him. And now he’s relying on me to perform. Not just for him,” Ocean said, “but for the whole school. These last two years—my junior and senior year—I mean, this is what we’ve been working toward. My team is counting on me. It’s hard to walk away now. I can’t just tell everyone to go to hell.”
I was quiet a moment. It was becoming clear to me that Ocean’s feelings about this sport were far more complicated than even he let on. And there was so much about this town and its interests that I still didn’t understand. Maybe I was out of my depth.
Still, I trusted my gut.
“Listen,” I said gently, “I don’t think you should do anything that doesn’t feel right to you, okay? You don’t have to quit basketball. That doesn’t have to be the solution. But I want to point out one thing. Just one thing I hope you’ll think about the next time you’re feeling stressed about all this.”
“Yeah?”
I sighed. “You keep focusing on whether or not you’ll disappoint all these people,” I said. “Your mom. Your coach. Your teammates. Everyone else. But none of them seem to care that they’re disappointing you. They’re actively hurting you,” I said. “And it makes me hate them.”
He blinked.
“It isn’t fair,” I said quietly. “You’re clearly in pain over this, and they don’t seem to give a shit.”
Ocean looked away. “Wow.” He laughed. “No one’s ever framed it for me like that before.”
“I just wish you’d take your own side. You’re so worried about everyone else,” I said. “But I’m going to worry about you, okay? I get to worry about you.”
