A Very Large Expanse of Sea

by Tahereh Mafi

  I hadn’t been expecting us to win.

  Mostly, I was happy for my brother. He’d built this moment; he’d spearheaded this mission. And when we were handed a plastic trophy and a fifty-dollar gift certificate to the Olive Garden, Navid looked like he’d been handed the moon. I was so happy for him.

  But then, I don’t know—

  School became suddenly ridiculous.

  For a full week after the talent show I couldn’t get to class without incident. People started chasing me down the hall. Everyone wanted to talk to me. Kids began waving at me as I walked by. I was cutting across the quad one day and one of the janitors saw me, said, “Hey, you’re that girl who spins on her head!” and I was legitimately freaked out.

  I hadn’t even spun on my head.

  I mean, I was happy they weren’t calling me towelhead anymore, but the sudden and abrupt transition from nasty to nice was giving me whiplash. I was confused. I couldn’t believe people thought I’d forget that just over a month ago they were treating me like an actual piece of shit. My teachers, who, post-Ramadan—when I’d wanted to take a day off to celebrate literally the biggest holiday in the Muslim calendar—had said to me, “We’re going to need a note from your parents to make sure you’re missing school for a real thing,” were now congratulating me in front of the whole class. The politics of school popularity were baffling. I didn’t know how they could change gears like this. They’d all seemed to have abruptly forgotten that I was still the same girl they’d tried to humiliate, over and over again.

  Navid was experiencing a similar issue, but, unlike me, he didn’t seem to mind. “Just enjoy it,” he said.

  But I didn’t know how I could.

  By the end of January I had an entirely different social status than I’d had just weeks prior. It was insane.

  I opened my locker and five invitations to five different house parties all fell out, onto my face. I was sitting under my tree at lunch, reading a book, when a group of girls shouted at me, from across the quad, to come sit with them. Guys had started talking to me in class. They’d come up to me after school, ask me if I had plans, and I’d say yes, I have big plans to get the hell out of here, and they didn’t get it. They’d offer to drive me home.

  I wanted to scream.

  I’d somehow, inadvertently, done something that’d given the population at this school permission to put me in a different kind of box, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. It was more than confusing—it killed me to discover the depth of their spinelessness. Somehow, I wasn’t a terrorist anymore. I’d leveled up. They now saw me as some kind of exotic-looking breakdancer. Our performance had deactivated their alarms.

  I was deemed cool. Safe.

  Threat Level Green.

  And it wasn’t until Coach Hart passed me in the hall, tipped his basketball hat at me and said, “Nice job the other day,” that I felt suddenly certain I’d spontaneously combust.

  I’d broken up with Ocean over this.

  I’d walked away from one of the most amazing people I’d ever known because I’d been bullied into it by his coach, by his peers, by his own mother. My face, my body, my general image in his life had been hurting him. Had been a threat to his career. To his prospects.

  What about now?

  What if Ocean had fallen for me now? Now, when the students didn’t find me so scary anymore. Now, when people looked in my direction and smiled; now, when I couldn’t walk down the hall without someone trying to talk to me; now, when my teachers stopped me after class and asked me where I’d learned to dance like that.

  Would the timing have made a difference?

  The breathtaking levels of their hypocrisy had given me a migraine.

  I saw Ocean again on a Wednesday.

  I was at my locker long after the final bell rang, swapping my things out in preparation for practice—the talent show was over, but we still had a lot more we wanted to do—when Ocean found me. I hadn’t spoken a single word to him since the day I’d seen him in bio, and for the first time in a month, I had a real opportunity to study him. To look into his eyes.

  But what I saw only made me feel worse.

  He looked tired. Worn-out. He looked thinner. He never really showed up to class anymore, and I wasn’t sure how he was getting away with it.

  “Hi,” he said.

  I felt frozen at just the sound of his voice. Overwhelmed. A little bit like I wanted to cry.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “I don’t”—he looked away, ran a hand through his hair—“I don’t actually know what I’m doing here. I just—” He stopped and looked up, off into the distance. I heard him sigh.

  He didn’t have to explain.

  It was the middle of February. The halls had been plastered with Cupid cutouts and paper hearts. Some club on campus was selling Valentine’s Day candy grams and the violently pink posters assaulted me everywhere I went. I’d never needed an excuse to think about Ocean, but Valentine’s Day was only two days away, and it was hard not to be constantly reminded of what I’d lost.

  Finally, he looked at me.

  “I never got to tell you that I saw you,” he said. “In the talent show.” His mouth threatened to smile, and then, didn’t. “You were great,” he said softly. “You were so great.”

  And I could no more control the words I said next than the earthquake he’d left in my bones. “I miss you,” I said. “I miss you so much.”

  Ocean flinched, like I’d slapped him. He looked away and when he looked up again I swore I saw tears in his eyes. “What am I supposed to do with that?” he said. “What am I supposed to say to that?”

  I don’t know, I said, I’m sorry, I said, never mind, I said, and my hands were shaking, and I dropped my books all over the floor. I scrambled and Ocean tried to help me but I told him I was fine, it was fine, and I stacked the books in my locker, I said a clumsy goodbye, and the whole thing was so awful that I didn’t realize I’d forgotten to spin the combination—that I’d forgotten to make sure my locker was even closed—until long after I’d finished practice.

  When I came back to check, I breathed a sigh of relief. Everything was still there. But I was just about to close it back up when I realized that my journal, which I’d always, always hidden at the bottom of my locker, had suddenly moved to the top.

  35

  Thirty-Five

  I spent the whole rest of the night feeling vaguely terrified.

  Was I imagining it? Had I managed to move my journal when I was reshuffling everything? Was it coincidence or accident?

  And then—

  What if I hadn’t imagined it? What if Ocean actually read my journal?

  I’d been gone for under two hours, so I didn’t think there was any danger of him having read the whole thing, but even small portions of my diary were extremely sensitive to me.

  I grabbed it from its current hiding place in my bedroom and starting reading in reverse. I figured if Ocean had started reading my journal, he’d have been most interested in the things I’d written recently, and I only had to scan the page for a second before I felt suddenly awash with mortification. I squeezed my eyes shut. Covered my face with one hand.

  I had a dream about Ocean last night, the contents of which were extremely intense. This was, wow. This was terrible. I sat down on my bed, cringing through another flush of embarrassment, and kept turning pages, going backward in time.

  My anger at how other students treated me now; how they pretended their original cruelty had never happened.

  My thoughts on seeing Ocean in his uniform; my fear that he’d think I was interested in Yusef.

  The agony of coming back to school; worrying about Ocean, worrying about his suspension.

  My conversation with my father; my worries that I’d done the wrong thing.

  Reflections on conversations with Yusef; how I never had to explain myself to him.

  Pages and pages trying to capture how I felt about Ocean’s absence in my life; how
much I missed him; how terrible I felt about everything that’d happened.

  A single page that read—

  I love you, too, so much, so much

  It went on like this through the last few weeks. Mostly it was just me, chronicling heartbreak the only way I knew how.

  I exhaled a long, shaky breath and looked up at the wall. My mind was at war with itself.

  There was a part of me that felt true horror at the idea of Ocean having read any of this. It felt like an intrusion, a betrayal. But there was another part of me that understood why he might’ve been looking for answers.

  I hated how things had ended between us. I hated how I was forced to walk away from him, hated that he didn’t know the truth, hated that he told me he loved me and I’d just ignored him. Especially after everything—after everything we’d been through, after everything he’d said to me and how hard he’d fought to be with me—

  He told me he loved me and I’d just ignored him.

  Just thinking about it broke my heart all over again. And suddenly, I hoped he really had read these pages. Suddenly, I wished he would. I wished he knew.

  Suddenly, I wanted to tell him everything.

  The more I thought about it, the more the prospect of Ocean discovering these pages felt a bit like freedom. I wanted him to know that I loved him, but I knew I couldn’t say it to him now, not in person, not without an explanation about the way things ended between us. It was embarrassing, in so many ways, to imagine him reading my personal thoughts. In other ways, it was kind of liberating.

  Still, I didn’t know for sure if he’d read any of it.

  It was then that I noticed one of the pages in the journal had been torn, just a little. I flipped to it. It was dated that last day of school, just before winter break. The day I’d ended things with Ocean.

  The first part was all about his coach, cornering me. All the awful things he’d said about me. How he’d threatened to expel Ocean if I didn’t break up with him. And then more, later, about his mother. How she’d lost his money for school. How she’d asked me never to tell him anything about our conversation.

  And then, at the end, how, regardless of all the threats, I just didn’t think I was worth the sacrifices he was making for me.

  I closed the book. I was breathing too fast.

  36

  Thirty-Six

  The next day at school was insane.

  Ocean was expelled.

  I was sitting with Amna under my tree when I heard the commotion. Kids in the quad were shouting—people were scrambling—and a few of them were screaming, “Fight! Fight!”

  I felt a sudden, horrible feeling tighten in my gut.

  “What do you think is happening?” I said.

  Amna shrugged. She stood up, walked out several feet, and looked out into the distance. She’d come by today to give me a bag of ginger candies her mother had made, and I remembered this because when she spun around, her eyes wide, she dropped the little ziplock bag to the ground.

  Ginger candies spilled out over the grass.

  “Oh my God,” she said, “it’s Ocean.”

  He’d punched his coach in the face. I ran into the quad just in time to see two guys trying to break up the fight and Ocean started fighting them, too. People were screaming at each other.

  Ocean was shouting, “You’re all a bunch of hypocrites,” and someone tried to haul him away and he said, “Don’t touch me—don’t you fucking touch me—”

  He’d quit the team.

  He was expelled later that day. He’d apparently broken Coach Hart’s nose pretty badly; he’d need to have surgery.

  And I wasn’t sure I’d ever see Ocean again.

  37

  Thirty-Seven

  My mornings were always something like this:

  Navid and I fought over who got to shower first in our shared bathroom, because he always managed to make everything wet, and after he finished shaving he’d leave these tiny little hairs all over the sink and it didn’t matter how many times I told him how gross it was, he never seemed to take the hint. Still, he usually won the right to take the first shower because he had to be at school an hour earlier than me. My parents would then force the both of us to come downstairs and eat breakfast, during which time my mother would ask us if we’d done our morning prayers and Navid and I would spoon cereal into our mouths and lie that we had, and my mom would roll her eyes and tell us to make sure we at least did our afternoon prayers, and we’d lie that we would, and my mom would sigh, heavily, and then Navid would leave for school. My parents left for work shortly thereafter, and I usually had the house to myself for at least thirty glorious minutes before I began my hike to the panopticon.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that this information—information I’d shared with Ocean when he wanted to drive me to school for the first time—would continue to be useful to us.

  I’d just finished locking the door when I turned around to discover Ocean standing in front of my house. He was in front of his car, in front of my house. Looking at me.

  I almost couldn’t believe it.

  He lifted his hand in an approximation of a wave, but he seemed uncertain. I walked over, my heart beating out of my chest, until I was standing right in front of him and somehow, this seemed to surprise him. He’d been leaning against his car; he suddenly stood up straighter. He shoved his hands in his pockets. He took a deep breath and said, “Hey.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  The air was cold—icy, even—and it smelled the way early mornings always smelled to me: like dead leaves and the dregs of unfinished cups of coffee. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, I realized, and I didn’t know how long he’d been standing out here. His cheeks were pink. His nose looked cold. His eyes were brighter in the morning light; more blues, sharper browns.

  And then—

  “I’m so sorry,” we said at the same time.

  Ocean laughed, looked away. I merely stared at him.

  Finally, he said, “Do you want to skip school with me today?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

  He smiled.

  I watched him while he drove. Studied his profile, the lines of his body. I liked the way he moved, the way he touched things, the way he held his head up with such casual dignity. He always seemed so comfortable in his own skin, and it reminded me of what I loved about the way he walked: he had this really steady, certain step. The way he moved through the world made me think it had never occurred to him, not once, not even on a really rough day, to wonder whether he might’ve been a bad person. It was obvious to me that he didn’t dislike himself. Ocean didn’t dissect his own mind. He never agonized over his actions and he was never suspicious of people. He never even seemed to experience embarrassment the way that I did. His mind seemed, to me, like an extremely peaceful place. Free from thorns.

  “Wow,” he said, and when he exhaled it was a little uneven. “I don’t, um, want to tell you to stop, like, looking at me, exactly, but all this uninterrupted staring is really making me nervous.”

  I sat back, suddenly mortified. “I’m sorry.”

  He glanced in my direction. Attempted a smile. “What are you thinking about?”

  “You,” I said.

  “Oh.” But it sounded more like a breath.

  And then, suddenly, we were somewhere else. Ocean had parked his car in the driveway of a house I didn’t recognize but felt fairly certain was his own home.

  “Don’t worry, my mom isn’t here,” he said, after he’d turned off the car. “I just really wanted to talk to you somewhere private, and I didn’t know where else to go.” He met my eyes and I felt panic and peace all at the same time. “Is this okay?”

  I nodded.

  Ocean opened my door for me. He took my backpack and slung it over his shoulder and walked me toward his house. He looked a bit apprehensive. I felt a bit apprehensive. His house was big—not too big—but big. Nice. I wish I’d noticed more when we walked inside, but the morning ha
d already been punctuated by moments so intense that its details seemed to be rendered in watercolor. Soft and a little blurred. All I really remember was his face.

  And his bedroom.

  It wasn’t a complicated space. In fact, it was reminiscent of my own room. He had a bed, a desk, a computer. A bookshelf that was filled not with books but with what appeared to be basketball-related awards. There were two doors in here, which made me think he had his own bathroom, and a maybe a walk-in closet. The walls were white. The carpet was soft.

  It was nice. There was no clutter.

  “Your room is so clean,” I said to him.

  And he laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “well, I actually hoped you’d be coming over today. So I cleaned it.”

  I looked at him. I didn’t know why I was surprised. It was obvious that he’d made a kind of plan to come get me today. To talk to me. But there was something about imagining him cleaning his room in anticipation of my possible visit that made me adore him. I suddenly wanted to know what he’d done. What he’d removed. I wanted to know what his room looked like before he’d organized it.

  Instead, I sat on his bed. His was a lot bigger than mine. But then, he was also a lot taller than me. My bed would’ve squished him.

  Ocean was standing in the middle of his room, watching me as I looked over the details of his life. It was all very spare. His comforter was white. His pillows were white. His bed frame was made of a dark brown wood.

  “Hey,” he said gently.

  I looked up.

  He sounded suddenly close to tears. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “About everything.”

  He told me he’d read my journal. He apologized, over and over again. He said he was sorry, he was so sorry, but he’d just wanted to know what had happened with his mom—what she’d said to me to cause all this—because he didn’t think I’d ever tell him. He said he’d asked his mom a thousand times what she’d said to me that day but that she refused to answer any of his questions, that she’d shut him out completely. But then, in the process of searching for the parts about his mother, he’d seen everything else, too. How his coach had bullied me. Screamed at me. All the awful things that’d happened to me at school. All of it.