by Tahereh Mafi
I’d scanned the whole space in a few seconds, and decided it would have to do. Ocean, on the other hand, was still staring; his assessment was taking a lot longer. I felt anxious.
“If I’d known you’d be coming in my room today,” I said, “I would’ve, um, made it nicer.”
But he didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes were locked onto my bed. “This is where you talk to me at night?” he said. “When you’re hiding under your covers?”
I nodded.
He walked over to my bed and sat down. Looked around. And then he noticed my pajamas, which seemed to baffle him for only a second before he said, “Oh, wow.” He looked up at me. “This is going to sound so stupid,” he said, “but it’s only just occurred to me that you must take your scarf off when you get home.”
“Um. Yeah,” I said. I laughed a little. “I don’t sleep like this.”
“So”—he frowned—“when you’re talking to me at night, you look totally different.”
“I mean, not totally different. But kind of. Yeah.”
“And this is what you’re wearing?” he said. He touched the tank top and shorts on my bed.
“It’s what I was wearing last night,” I said, feeling nervous. “Yeah.”
“Last night,” he said quietly, his eyebrows raised. And then he took a deep breath and looked away, picking up one of my pillows like it might’ve been made of glass.
We’d been on the phone for hours last night, talking about everything and nothing, and just the memory of our conversation sent a sudden thrill through my heart. I didn’t know exactly what time it was when we finally went to bed, but it was so late I remember only a weak attempt at shoving my phone under my pillow before happily dissolving into dreams.
I wanted to imagine that Ocean was thinking what I was thinking: that he, too, felt this thing between us building with terrifying, breathless speed and didn’t know how or even whether to slow it down. But I couldn’t know for certain. And Ocean had gone quiet for so long I started to worry. He didn’t move from my bed as he scanned my room again, and my knot of nervousness grew only more wild.
“Too weird?” I finally said. “Is this too weird?”
Ocean laughed as he stood up, shook his head, and smiled. “Is that really what you think is going through my mind right now?”
I hesitated. Reconsidered. “Maybe?”
He laughed again. And then he glanced at the clock on my wall and said, “Looks like we only have a few minutes left.” But he’d come forward as he spoke. He stood in front of me now.
“Yeah,” I said softly.
He stepped, somehow, even closer to me. He slipped his hands into the back pockets of my jeans and I almost gasped and he pulled me tighter, pressed the lines of our bodies together and he leaned in, rested his forehead against mine. He wrapped his arms around my waist and just held me there, like that, for a moment. “Hey,” he whispered. “Can I just tell you that I think you’re really, really beautiful? Can I just tell you that?”
I felt my cheeks warm. He was so close I was sure he could hear my heart pounding. Our bodies seemed soldered together.
I whispered his name.
He kissed me once, gently, and lingered there, our lips still touching. My body trembled. Ocean closed his eyes.
“This is crazy,” he said.
And then he kissed me desperately, without warning, and feeling shot through my veins with a searing, explosive heat. I felt suddenly molten. His lips were soft and he smelled so good and my mind had filled with static. My hands moved from his waist and up his back, and, in an accidental, unrehearsed movement, they slipped under his sweater.
I froze.
The sensation of his bare skin under my hands was so unexpected. New. A little frightening. Ocean broke our kiss and smiled, gently, against my mouth.
“Are you afraid to touch me?” he said.
I nodded.
I felt his smile deepen.
But then I trailed my fingers along the smooth expanse of his back and he took a quick, sudden breath. I felt his muscles tighten.
Carefully, I traced the curve of his spine. I touched his waist, my hands moving around his torso. He felt so strong. The lines of his body were deeply, alarmingly sexy. And I was just beginning to get brave when he clamped his hands down on mine.
He took another unsteady breath and pressed his face into my cheek. Laughed, shakily. He didn’t say a word. He just shook his head.
The pleasure of being this close to him was unlike anything I’d ever imagined. It was hyper-real. Impossible. His arms were around me now, strong and warm and pulling me close, and he just about lifted me off the floor.
There was a tiny part of my brain that knew this was a bad idea. I knew Navid could walk in here at any minute. I knew my parents were just moments away. I knew it, and somehow, I didn’t care.
I closed my eyes and rested my head against his chest. Breathed him in.
Ocean pulled back, just a little. He looked me in the eye and his own eyes were heavy, suddenly. Bright and deep and terrified.
He said, “What would you do if I fell in love with you?”
And my entire body answered his question. Heat filled my blood, the gaps in my bones. My heart felt suddenly alive with emotion and I didn’t know how to say what I was thinking, what I wanted to say, which was—
Is this love?
—and I never had the chance.
Navid knocked on the door, hard, and we were like shrapnel, flying apart.
Ocean looked a little flushed. He took a second, looked around, looked at me. He didn’t say goodbye, exactly. He just looked at me.
And then he was gone.
Two hours later, he texted me.
are you in bed?
yes
can i ask you a weird question?
I stared at my phone for a second. I took a deep breath.
okay
what does your hair look like?
I actually laughed out loud, before I remembered that my parents were sleeping. Girls never seemed to care about the state of my hair, but guys had been asking me this question forever. It was always the same question, and they never seemed to grow out of it.
it’s brown. kind of long.
And then he called me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” I smiled.
“I like that I can imagine where you are now,” he said. “What your room looks like.”
“I still can’t believe you were here today.”
“Yeah, thanks for that, by the way. Your parents are amazing. That was really fun.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t excruciating,” I said, but I felt sad, suddenly. I didn’t know how to tell him that I wished his mom would get her shit together. “My parents are officially in love with you, by the way.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m sure they’d trade me in for you any day of the week.”
He laughed. And then he didn’t say anything for a while.
“Hey,” I finally said.
“Yeah?”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.” But he sounded a little out of breath.
“Are you sure?”
“I was just thinking about how your brother has terrible timing.”
I was only a beat behind; it took me a second, but I suddenly understood what he was trying to say.
I’d never answered his question.
And I was suddenly nervous. “What did you mean,” I said, “when you asked what I would do? Why did you phrase the question like that?”
“I guess,” he said, and took a sharp breath, “I was just wondering if it would scare you away.”
There was a part of me that adored his uncertainty. How he seemed to have no idea that I was just as far gone as he was.
“No,” I said softly. “It wouldn’t scare me away.”
“No?”
“No,” I said. “Not a chance.”
27
Ramadan was over. We celebrated, we exchanged gifts, and Navid devoured the contents of our entire kitchen. The fall semester was quickly coming to a close. We were tipping over into the second week of December, and I’d managed to keep some level of distance in place between myself and Ocean for as long as either of us could bear it.
It had been almost two months since the day he’d kissed me in his car.
I couldn’t believe it.
In the quiet, relative peace that surrounded our careful efforts to be inconspicuous, time sped up. Flew by. I’d never been so happy, maybe, ever. Ocean was fun. He was sweet and he was smart and we never ran out of things to talk about. He didn’t have a lot of free hours, because basketball was a demanding extracurricular activity and a massive time-suck, but we always found a way to make it work.
I was happy with the compromise we’d made. It was safe here. Secretive, yes, but it was safe. No one knew our business. People had finally stopped gawking at me in the hallways.
But Ocean wanted more.
He didn’t like hiding. He said it made it seem like we were doing something wrong, and he hated it. He insisted, over and over again, that he didn’t care what other people thought. He didn’t care, he said, and he didn’t want a bunch of idiots to have this much control over his life.
Honestly, I couldn’t disagree with him.
I was tired of hiding, too; I was tired of ignoring him at school, tired of always giving in to my cynicism. But Ocean was a lot more visible than even he knew or understood. Once I started paying closer attention to him—and to his world—the subtle gradations of his life began to come into focus. Ocean had ex-girlfriends at this school. Old teammates. Rivalries. There were guys who were openly jealous of his success, and girls who hated him for being uninterested. More important: there were people who’d built their careers on the back of the high school basketball team.
I knew by now that Ocean was really good at basketball, but I didn’t know just how good until I started listening. He was only a junior, but he was outperforming his teammates by a wide margin, and he was, as a result, attracting a lot of attention; people were talking about how he might be good enough to win all kinds of state and national Player of the Year awards—and not just him, but his coach, too.
It made me nervous.
Ocean had this quintessential all-American look, the kind of look that made it easy for girls to fall in love with him, for scouts to know where to place him, for the community to think of him, always and forever, as a good boy with great potential and a bright future. I tried to explain why my presence in his life would be both complicated and controversial, but Ocean couldn’t understand. He just didn’t think it was that big of a deal.
But it wasn’t something I wanted to fight over. So we compromised.
I agreed to let Ocean drive me to school one morning. I thought it would be a small, carefully measured step. Totally innocent. What I kept forgetting, of course, was that high school was home to infinite clichés for a reason, and that Ocean was, in some ways, still inextricable from his own stereotype. Even where he parked his car in the school parking lot seemed to matter. I’d never had a reason to know or care about this, because I was the weirdo who walked to school every day. I’d never interacted with this side of campus in the morning, never saw these kids or spoke to them. But when Ocean opened my door that day, I stepped out into a different world. Everyone was here. Here—in this school parking lot—this was where he and his friends hung out every morning.
“Oh, wow, this was a bad idea,” I said to him, even as he took my hand. “Ocean,” I said, “this was a bad idea.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” he said, and squeezed my fingers. “We’re just two people holding hands. It’s not the end of the world.”
I wondered, then, what it would be like to live in his brain. I wondered how safe and normal a life he must’ve lived in order to say something like that, so casually, and really, truly, believe it.
Sometimes, I wanted to say to him, for some people, it really was the end of the world.
But I didn’t. I didn’t say it because I was suddenly distracted. An unnerving quiet had just infected the groups of kids standing nearest to us, and I felt my body tense even as I looked forward and stared at nothing. I waited for something—some kind of hostility—but it never came. We managed to weave our way through the parking lot, eyes following our bodies as we went, without incident. No one spoke to me. Their silence seemed to be infused with surprise, and it felt, to me, like they were deciding what to think. How to respond.
Ocean and I had very different reactions to this experience.
I told him we should go back to arriving separately at school, that it was a nice try, but, ultimately, a bad idea.
He did not agree, not even a little bit.
He kept pointing out to me that it had been fine, that it was weird but it wasn’t bad, and he insisted, most of all, that he didn’t want their opinions to control his life.
“I want to be with you,” he said. “I want to hold your hand and eat lunch with you and I don’t want to have to pretend that I’m not, like”—he sighed, hard—“I just don’t want to pretend not to notice you, okay? I don’t care if other people don’t like it. I don’t want to worry all the time. Who gives a shit about these people?”
“Aren’t they your friends?” I said.
“If they were my friends,” he said, “they’d be happy for me.”
The second day was worse.
On the second day, when I stepped out of Ocean’s car, no one was surprised. They were just assholes.
Someone actually said, “Why’re you fucking around with Aladdin over here, bro?”
This was not a new insult, not to me. For some reason people loved using Aladdin to put me down, which made me sad, because I really liked Aladdin. I loved watching that movie as a kid. But I’d always wanted to tell people that they were insulting me incorrectly. I wanted them to understand that Aladdin was, first of all, a guy, and that, second of all, he wasn’t even the one who covered his hair. This wasn’t even an accurate insult, and it bothered me that it was so lazy. There were so many better, meaner alternatives from the movie to choose from—like, maybe, I don’t know, compare me to Jafar—but there was never a good time, during these types of situations, to bring it up.
Regardless, Ocean and I did not have the same reaction to the insult.
I was irritated, but Ocean was angry.
I could feel it then, in that moment, that Ocean was even stronger than he looked. He had a lean, muscular frame, but he felt, suddenly, very solid standing next to me. His whole body had gone rigid; his hand in mine felt foreign. He looked both angry and disgusted and he shook his head and I could tell he was about to say something when someone, very suddenly, threw a half-eaten cinnamon roll at my face.
I was stunned.
There was a moment of perfect silence as the sweet, sticky bun hit part of my eye and most of my cheek and then dragged, slowly, down my chin. Fell to the floor. There was icing all over my scarf.
This, I thought, was new.
Whoever threw the thing at me was suddenly laughing his ass off and Ocean just kind of lost it. He grabbed the guy by the shirt and shoved him, really, really hard and I wasn’t sure what was happening anymore, but I was so mortified I could hardly see straight and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to just disappear.
So I did.
No one had ever thrown food at me before. I felt numb as I walked away, felt stupid and humiliated and numb. I was trying to make my way to the girl’s bathroom because I really wanted to wash my face but Ocean suddenly caught up to me, caught me around the waist.
“Hey,” he said, and he was out of breath, “Hey—”
But I didn’t want to look at him, I didn’t want him to see me with this shit all over my face so I pulled away. I didn’t meet his eyes.
“Are you okay?” he said. “I’m so sorry—”
“Yeah,” I said, but I was already turning around again. “I, um—I just need to wash my face, okay? I’ll see you later.”
“Wait,” he said, “wait—”
“I’ll see you later, Ocean, I swear.” I waved, kept walking. “I’m fine.”
I mean, I wasn’t fine. I would be fine. But I wasn’t there yet.
I got to the girl’s bathroom and dropped my bag on the ground. I unwrapped my scarf from around my head and used a damp paper towel to scrub the icing off my face. I tried to clean my scarf the same way, but it wasn’t as effective. I sighed. I had to try and wash parts of it in the sink, which just made everything wet, and I was feeling more than a little demoralized as I hung the slightly damp scarf around my neck.
Just then, someone else walked into the bathroom.
I was glad that I’d at least finished with the scrubbing of my face before she came in. I’d just pulled my ponytail free—I’d had to wash a little icing out of my hair, too, and I needed to retie the whole thing—when she walked over to the sink next to me. I knew I’d made myself super conspicuous in here, because I’d tossed my bag to the floor, disassembled myself, and was surrounded, at the moment, by little mountains of damp paper towels, but I hoped she wouldn’t notice. Wouldn’t ask questions. I didn’t know who she was and I didn’t care; I just didn’t want to deal with any more people today.
“Hey,” she said, and instinct forced my head up.
I’ll always remember that moment, the way my hair fell around my face, how it shook out, in long waves, as I turned, the hair tie still wrapped around my wrist.
I looked at her, a question in my eyes.
And she took a picture of me.
“What the hell?” I stepped back, confused. “Why did y—?”
“Thanks,” she said, and smiled.
I was dazed. She walked out the door and it took me a minute to find my head. It took me another few seconds to understand.
When I did, I was struck still.
And I suddenly felt so sick to my stomach I thought I might faint.
It had been a really shitty day.
Ocean finally found me in the hall. He took my hand and I turned around and at first he didn’t say anything. At first he just looked at me.
