A Very Large Expanse of Sea

by Tahereh Mafi

  We were practicing in the far corner of a rarely frequented Jack in the Box parking lot when Yusef first showed up, and I was upside down when I saw him. Navid had been in the middle of teaching me to spin on my head, and when he let go of my legs to say hi, I fell over on my ass.

  “Oh my God,” I shouted, “What the hell, Navid—”

  I shucked off my helmet, readjusted my scarf, and tried to sit up with some dignity.

  Navid only shrugged. “You have to work on your balance.”

  “Hey,” Yusef said, and smiled at me. His eyes lit up; his whole face seemed to shine. Smiling was an objectively good look for him. “I didn’t know you’d be here, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and tugged absently at my sweater. I tried to smile back but wasn’t really feeling it, so I waved. “Welcome.”

  We spent the rest of the week together, all six of us. It was nice. Carlos and Bijan and Jacobi had somehow become my friends, too, which was comforting. They never really talked to me about what happened with Ocean, even though I knew they knew, but they were kind to me in other ways. They told me they cared without ever saying the words. And Yusef was just—cool. Friendly.

  Easy.

  It was kind of amazing, actually, not to have to explain everything to him all the time. Yusef wasn’t terrified of girls in hijab; they didn’t perplex him. He didn’t require a manual to navigate my mind. My feelings and choices didn’t require constant explanations.

  He was never weird with me.

  He never asked me dumb questions. He never wondered aloud whether or not I had to shower with that thing on. One day, last year—at a different high school—I was sitting in math class and this guy I barely knew wouldn’t stop staring at me. At all. Fifteen minutes passed and finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I spun around, ready to tell him to go to hell, when he said,

  “Hey, okay, so—what if you were having sex and that thing just, like, fell off your head? What would you do then?”

  Yusef never asked me questions like that.

  It was nice.

  He started hanging out at our house all the time, actually. He’d come over after practice to eat and play video games with my brother and he was always really, really nice. Yusef was the obvious choice for me, I knew that. I think he knew that, too, but he never said anything about it. He’d just look at me a little longer than most people did. He’d smile at me a little more than most people did. He waited, I think, to see if I’d make a move.

  I didn’t.

  On New Year’s Eve I sat in the living room with my dad, who was reading a book. My dad was always reading. He read before work in the mornings and every evening before bed. I often thought he had the mind of a mad genius and the heart of a philosopher. I was staring at him that night, and staring into a cold cup of tea, thinking.

  “Baba,” I said.

  “Hmm?” He turned a page.

  “How do you know if you’ve done the right thing?”

  My dad’s head popped up. He blinked at me and closed his book. Removed his glasses. He looked me in the eye for only a moment before he said, in Farsi, “If the decision you’ve made has brought you closer to humanity, then you’ve done the right thing.”

  “Oh.”

  He watched me for a second, and I knew he was saying, without speaking, that I could tell him what was on my mind. But I wasn’t ready. I still wasn’t ready. So I pretended to misunderstand.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

  He tried to smile. “I’m sure you’ve done the right thing,” he said.

  But I didn’t think I had.

  33

  Thirty-Three

  We went back to school on a Thursday, my heart lodged firmly in my throat, but Ocean wasn’t there. He didn’t show up for either of the classes we had together. I didn’t know if he’d gone to school that day, because I never saw him, and I suddenly worried that maybe he’d transferred classes. I couldn’t blame him if he had, of course, but I’d been hoping for a glimpse of him. Of his face.

  School was, otherwise, anticlimactic. I’d become a photoshopping error, and our two weeks away on break had given everyone some kind of amnesia. No one cared about me anymore. There was new gossip now, gossip that didn’t concern me or my life. As far as I could tell, Ocean had been returned to his former status. There was no longer any need to panic, as I’d been surgically removed from his life.

  Everything was fine.

  People went back to ignoring me in the way they always had.

  I was sitting under my tree when I saw that girl again.

  “Hey,” she said. Her long brown hair was tied up into a ponytail this time, but she was still unmistakably the same girl who told me I was a terrible person.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to say hi to her.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I sit down?” she said.

  I raised an eyebrow, but I said okay.

  We were both silent for a minute.

  Finally, she said, “I’m really sorry about what happened. With that picture. With Ocean.” She was sitting cross-legged on the grass, leaning against my tree, and staring out toward the quad in the distance. “That must’ve been really awful.”

  “I thought you said I was a terrible person.”

  She looked at me, then. “People in this town are so racist. Sometimes it’s really hard to live here.”

  I sighed. Said, “Yeah. I know.”

  “I kind of couldn’t believe it when you showed up,” she said, and she was looking away again. “I saw you on the first day of school. I couldn’t believe you were brave enough to wear hijab here. No one else does.”

  I broke off a blade of grass. Folded it in half. “I’m not brave,” I said to her. “I’m scared all the time, too. But whenever I think about taking it off, I realize my reasons have to do with how people treat me when I’m wearing it. I think, it would be easier, you know? So much easier. It would make my life easier not to wear it, because if I didn’t wear it, maybe people would treat me like a human being.”

  I broke off another blade of grass. Tore it into tiny pieces.

  “But that seems like such a shitty reason to do something,” I said. “It gives the bullies all the power. It would mean they’d succeeded at making me feel like who I was and what I believed in was something to be ashamed of. So, I don’t know,” I said. “I keep wearing it.”

  We were both quiet again.

  And then—

  “It doesn’t make a difference, you know.”

  I looked up.

  “Taking it off,” she said. “It doesn’t make a difference.” She was staring at me now. Her eyes were full of tears. “They still treat me like I’m garbage.”

  She and I became friends after that. Her name was Amna. She invited me to have lunch with her and her friends, and I was genuinely grateful for the offer. I told her I’d look for her around school tomorrow. I thought maybe I’d ask her to go to the movies sometime. Hell, I might even pretend to give a shit about the SATs when she was around.

  It sounded nice.

  I saw Ocean for the first time the next day.

  I’d gotten to the dance room a little early, and I was waiting outside for Navid to arrive with the key when Yusef showed up.

  “So this is where the magic happens, huh?” Yusef was smiling at me again. He was a big smiler. “I’m excited.”

  I laughed. “I’m glad you like it,” I said. “Not many people even know what breakdancing is, which is kind of heartbreaking. Navid and I have been obsessed with it for, I don’t know, forever.”

  “That’s really cool,” he said, but he was smiling at me like I’d said something funny. “I like how much you like it.”

  “I do like it,” I said, and I couldn’t help it—I smiled back. Yusef was so buoyant all the time; his smiles were occasionally contagious. “Breakdancing is actually a combination of kung fu and gymnastics,” I said to him, “which I think will work out well for you, because Navid said y
ou used to fi—”

  “Oh—” Yusef looked suddenly startled. He was staring at something behind me. “Maybe”—he glanced at me—“should I go?”

  I turned around, confused.

  My heart stopped.

  I’d never seen Ocean in his basketball uniform before. His arms were bare. He looked strong and toned and muscular. He looked so good. He was so gorgeous.

  But he looked different.

  I’d never gotten to know this side of him—the basketball player version of him—and in his uniform he looked like someone I didn’t know. In fact, I was so distracted by his outfit that it took me a second to realize he looked upset. More than upset. He looked upset and angry all at once. He was frozen in place, staring at me. Staring at Yusef.

  I started to panic.

  “Ocean,” I said, “I’m not—”

  But he’d already left.

  I found out on Monday that Ocean had been suspended from the team. He’d gotten into a fight with another player, apparently, and he’d have to sit out the next two games for disorderly conduct.

  I knew this, because everyone was talking about it.

  Most people seemed to think it was funny—it was almost like they thought it was cool. Getting into a fight on the court seemed to give Ocean some kind of street cred.

  But I was worried.

  The second week was just as bad. Awful. Stressful. And it wasn’t until the end of the week that I realized Ocean had not, in fact, switched any of his classes.

  He was just cutting class. All the time.

  I realized this when I showed up in bio on Friday, and he was there. Sitting in his chair. The same one he always sat in.

  My heart was suddenly racing.

  I didn’t know what to do. Did I say hi? Did I ignore him? Would he want me to say hi? Would he prefer that I ignore him?

  I couldn’t ignore him.

  I walked up slowly. Dropped my bag on the floor and felt something in my chest expand as I stared at him. Emotions, filling the cavity.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He looked up. He looked away.

  He didn’t say anything to me for the rest of the period.

  34

  Thirty-Four

  Navid had been working all of us harder than we’d ever worked in practice. The talent show was in two weeks, which meant we were practicing until really late, every night. Every day it seemed increasingly stupid to me that I’d be performing in a talent show for this terrible school, but I figured we’d just see it through. Get it over with. Breakdancing had been my only constant through everything this year, and I was so grateful for the space it gave me to just be, to breathe, and to get lost in the music.

  I felt like I owed Navid this favor.

  Besides, the stakes were higher than I thought they’d be. It turned out that the talent show was a really big deal at this school—bigger, it seemed, than at any of the other schools I’d been to, because it took place during the actual school day. They shut down classes for this. Everyone came out. Teachers, students, all the staff. Moms and dads and grandparents were already standing around the gym, anxiously snapping pictures of nothing important. My own parents, on the other hand, had no idea what we were doing today. They weren’t here cheering us on, holding bouquets of flowers in sweaty, nervous hands. My parents were so generally unimpressed with their own children that I really believed I could, I don’t know, win something like a Nobel Peace Prize, and they’d only reluctantly attend the ceremony, all the while pointing out that lots of people won Nobel Prizes, that, in fact, they gave out Nobel Prizes every year, and anyway the peace prize was clearly the prize for slackers, so maybe next time I should focus my energy on physics or math or something.

  My parents loved us, but I wasn’t always sure they liked us.

  Mostly, the vibe I got from my mom was that she thought I was a dramatic, sentimental sort of teenager whose interests were cute but useless. She loved me, fiercely, but she also had very little tolerance for people who couldn’t sack up and get their shit together, and my occasional lapses into deep, emotional holes made her think I was still uncooked. She was always waiting for me to grow up.

  She’d been getting ready to leave for work this morning when, as she was saying goodbye, she caught a glimpse of my outfit. She shook her head and said, “Ey khoda. Een chiyeh digeh?” Oh God. What is this?

  I was wearing a newly altered, totally revamped military-style jacket with epaulets and brass buttons, and I’d embroidered the back, by hand; it read, in a loose script, people are strange. It was not only an homage to one of my favorite songs by the Doors—but it was a statement that deeply resonated with me. The whole thing had taken hours of work. I thought it was amazing.

  My mom cringed and said, in Farsi, “Is this really what you’re going to wear?” She craned her neck to read the back of my jacket. “Yanni chi people are strange?” And I didn’t even have a chance to defend my outfit before she sighed, patted me on the shoulder, and said, “Negaran nabash.” Don’t worry. “I’m sure you’ll grow out of it.”

  “Hey,” I said, “I wasn’t worried—” But she was already walking out the door. “Hey, seriously,” I said, “I actually like what I’m wearing—”

  “Don’t do anything stupid today,” she said, and waved goodbye.

  But I was about to do something stupid.

  I mean, I thought it was stupid, anyway. Navid thought this talent show was awesome. It was apparently a big deal that we even got to perform; some committee had whittled down a stack of submissions and chosen, of the many, only ten acts to be onstage today.

  We were up fourth.

  I hadn’t realized how serious this was until Navid explained it to me. Still, there were, like, a couple thousand kids at our school, and they’d all be sitting in the audience, watching us—and nine other performances—and I didn’t understand how this could turn out to be a good thing. I thought it was dumb. But I reminded myself that I was doing it for Navid.

  We were waiting in the wings with the other performers—mostly singers; a couple of bands; there was even a girl who’d be performing a solo on the saxophone—and for the first time, I was the only one in our group who appeared to have retained any level of chill. We’d changed into matching silver windbreakers, gray sweatpants, and gray Puma suedes—and I thought we looked good. I thought we were ready. But Jacobi, Carlos, Bijan, and Navid seemed super nervous, and it was weird to see them like this. They were normally so cool; totally unflappable. I realized then that the only reason I didn’t share their nerves was because I genuinely didn’t care about the outcome.

  I felt deflated. Kind of bored.

  The guys, on the other hand, wouldn’t stop pacing. They talked to each other; they talked to themselves. Jacobi would start saying, “So, like we all walk— Yeah, we all walk out at the same—” and then he’d stop, count something out on his fingers, and then nod, only to himself. “Okay,” he’d say. “Yeah.”

  And every time a new act went up, I felt them tense. We listened to the thuds and squeaks that meant they were prepping the stage for a new performance; we heard the slightly muted cheers following the introduction; and then we sat, very quietly, and listened to our competitors. Carlos was always wondering aloud whether or not the other performers were any good. Bijan would assure him that they sucked. Jacobi would disagree. Carlos would agonize. Navid would look up at me and ask, on five different occasions, whether I’d gotten the right music to the AV tech.

  “Yeah, but, remember—we changed the mix at the last minute,” he said. “Are you sure you got him the new one?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to roll my eyes.

  “You’re sure? It was the CD that said Mix Number Four on it.”

  “Oh,” I said, feigning surprise. “Was it mix number four? Are you su—”

  “Oh my God Shirin don’t mess with me right now—”

  “Calm down,” I said, and laughed. “It’s going to be fine. We’ve done this a tho
usand times.”

  But he wouldn’t sit still.

  In the end, I was wrong.

  The show wasn’t dumb at all. Actually, the whole thing was kind of awesome. We’d done this routine so many times I didn’t even have to think about it anymore.

  We started out with all five of us doing a fully choreographed dance routine, and as the music changed, so did we. We broke apart and took turns taking center stage, each of us performing a different combination of moves; but our performances were fluid—they talked to each other. The whole thing was meant to breathe, like everything we did was part of a larger heartbeat. The boys killed it.

  Our choreography was fresh; our moves were tight and perfectly in sync; the music was mixed beautifully.

  Even I wasn’t too bad.

  My uprock was the best it’d ever been; my six-step was spot-on, and I dropped into a crab walk that morphed, briefly, into a cricket. The cricket was a similar move; my body weight was still balanced on my elbows, which I’d tucked into my torso; the difference was that you moved around in a circle. The whole thing was pretty fast. I felt strong. Totally stable. I ended with a rise up, and then fell forward into a handstand, only to arch my back and let my legs curve behind me, never touching the ground. This was a pose called hollowback, and it was a move that might’ve been, for me, even harder than the crab walk. I’d been working on it forever. After a few seconds, I let gravity pull me down, slowly, and I jumped back up again.

  It was my one routine. I’d practiced it a million times.

  Bijan ended the whole set by doing four backflips across the stage, and when our performance was over we all had about half a second of quiet to look at each other, still catching our breaths. Somehow we knew, without speaking, that we’d done okay.

  What I hadn’t been expecting, of course, was for the rest of the school to agree. I hadn’t been expecting them to suddenly stand up, to start screaming, to generally lose their shit at our performance. I hadn’t been expecting the cheers, the thunder of applause.