The Authentics

by Abdi Nazemian

  Chapter Nine

  WE WERE PILED ONTO JOY’S bed, in the house she referred to as “Nigeria adjacent.” Before entering the house, Joy had changed from her fabulous outfit into a far more conservative long dress and cardigan that she had stuffed into a neighbor’s mailbox. Now Joy was perusing the website for her favorite vintage store, on the hunt for outfits for my sweet sixteen party. “I know you don’t want to have the party,” Joy said. “But if you have no choice, then at least let me dress you. Oh, wait, here it is!” Joy turned her laptop toward me and Caroline, revealing an image of a supersexy, body-hugging, floor-length zebra-print dress.

  “Um, I am never wearing that,” I said with a laugh.

  “You would look stunning in it,” Joy said.

  “No, you would look stunning in it,” I shot back. Fact: Joy would look stunning in anything.

  “Whatever, I’m buying it as your early birthday present,” Joy said as she closed her computer. “It’s Halston!” I nodded, like I knew what that meant.

  “So, what did your parents do tonight?” I asked.

  Joy laughed. “I’m sure they spent it watching TV. They’re in their forties, but they act like they’re in their sixties.”

  “Whatever, at least they still enjoy each other’s company,” Caroline said. Caroline’s parents were divorced, and pretty much only communicated with each other through her. “Seriously, you won the parent lottery, Daria.”

  “Every family has their issues,” I said.

  “Sure,” Joy said. “But your family’s issues are so minor compared to everyone else’s. I mean, your parents are awesome, and your brother is having a gayby. What’s cooler than that?”

  “Oh my God, please don’t say the word gayby in front of an actual gay person,” Caroline said.

  “I think I’m allowed to use the word gayby if I want to,” Joy countered.

  “Not unless you’re a lesbian,” Caroline said. “Are you?”

  Joy giggled. “Um, no,” she said. “And please don’t even suggest that in my parents’ house or they will somehow telepathically hear you.”

  “Fine,” Caroline said. “Well, in that case, when you have a baby someday, I’m going to call it a straightby.”

  Joy laughed. “I give you permission to call my child a straightby when he or she is born. Someday. Far in the future. When my crazy parents allow a boy within a one-mile radius of me.”

  “Good,” Caroline said. “I can’t wait to attend your straight wedding.”

  “You guys,” I said. “My parents have real issues too.”

  “We’ve moved on, Daria,” Caroline said. “Let’s keep making fun of Joy’s straightby.”

  “But I haven’t moved on,” I said. Joy and Caroline turned to me, surprised. Suddenly, my face felt like a furnace. I wanted to tell them the truth, but I was so nervous.

  “I have something to tell you,” I said, and my voice cracked.

  “Oh God, are your parents getting a divorce?” Caroline asked. “Because I know how it feels.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “It’s just . . . I don’t know who I am anymore, you guys.”

  They stared at me expectantly. I didn’t know where to start, so I started from the beginning, with the DNA test results and the lawyer’s office. Then I told them about visiting Seth Nijensen in the Local factory, and about meeting Enrique, and about how I called him Iglesias. The only part of the story I didn’t tell was the part about Heidi and her family lying about their vacations and buying fake purses. I guess I didn’t feel that was my secret to tell. When I finished, they both sat in front of me with their mouths hanging open.

  “You guys,” I said when I finished the tale, “I’m so sorry I lied to you. I wanted to tell you sooner.”

  Joy put an arm around me and pulled me into a hug.

  “You’re sorry?” Caroline asked, incredulous. “It’s your parents who should be sorry. They lied to you. For years. There’s nothing shameful about adoption, and they’ve made you feel that there is.”

  I gulped down hard. I knew Caroline would zero in on my parents’ guilt, and I didn’t blame her. She was righteous, but she was also right.

  Joy turned to Caroline. “Let’s focus on Daria right now,” she said. Then she looked at me gently. “We love you. So much.”

  “Of course I love you,” Caroline said. “Which is why I want you to know how pissed I am your parents did this to you.”

  “I get it,” I said. “I’m pissed too, okay? But Persians are decades behind when it comes to issues like this.”

  “Issues like what?” Caroline barked. “Adoption? Sexuality? Why are you defending them?”

  “Caroline, enough!” Joy rarely raised her voice, so it shocked Caroline into shutting up. “We’re totally here for you, Daria,” Joy continued. “Whatever you need. We just want you to be okay.”

  I lingered in the hug as long as I could, and when we all separated, I said, “I’m fine. I mean . . . I’m confused. And a little scared. And . . .” My lips quivered, and finally I admitted, “I feel like somebody ripped me in half.” A few tears fell from my eyes.

  “You’re the same Daria you’ve always been,” Caroline said.

  “That’s right,” Joy echoed. “Nothing has changed.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “I mean, I know that’s what you’re supposed to tell me, and I appreciate it. But the thing is, everything has changed. I can’t look at my parents the same way. I’m so angry at them.”

  I was about to tell them my theory that Baba was still my father, and had had an affair with Encarnación Vargas, but I stopped myself. It made sense in my head, but I knew that the moment I verbalized it, I would realize how nuts it was.

  Caroline was about to speak, but Joy nervously stopped her. “Let’s not say anything else,” Joy said. “Let’s just be here. We’re here for you.”

  We didn’t speak for a long time. They had known me long enough to just sit with me in silence. To my surprise, I felt a little better after telling them about it all. I was still stressed and confused, but somehow not quite as alone.

  Finally, I broke the silence by saying, “I really want you guys to meet Iglesias.”

  “Your brother?” Joy asked.

  “He’s not my brother!” I protested, too vehemently.

  “I’m kind of confused,” Caroline said. “Now that you know there’s nothing incest-y about him, are you into him again?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, with a growing smile that was giving me away. “He told me to text him when the show was done. He said he’d be out with friends.”

  “Let’s go meet him,” Caroline said.

  “My parents will kill me!” Joy protested.

  “We’ll be superquiet. They won’t find out,” Caroline said. “Come on, it’s New Year’s Eve. Let’s go make some trouble. We’re hormonal, ripe, fecund teenagers.”

  “Ew, the word fecund is gross,” Joy said.

  “Fecund, fecund, fecund,” Caroline said. “That’s what you are, whether your parents like it or not.”

  “Ew,” Joy said. “I am not fecund.”

  “Really,” Caroline said. “How authentic is that?”

  “It’s very authentic,” Joy said, annoyed.

  “Daria has a crush on her biological mother’s stepson,” Caroline continued. “This. Is. Huge. Can we just live a little?”

  “If I live a little,” Joy said, “then my parents will make me die a lot.”

  “I’ll go with you, then,” Caroline said to me. And then she turned to Joy. “Is that okay?”

  Joy shrugged. “Sure, I think my parents are out by now. Just please don’t wake them up.”

  “Cool,” Caroline said. “Then text your man, Daria. We’re about to hit the streets.”

  I texted Iglesias and asked what he was up to. He texted me back a street address in downtown LA, and told us to join him soon.

  Caroline and I took a cab to the address Iglesias gave me. I laid my head on her shoulder in the
backseat. I couldn’t believe I was going out past midnight, without my parents’ permission. But they had broken my trust, so I was breaking theirs. I guess maybe that’s what happens when you keep one secret from your parents. It becomes easier to add another secret to the pile. Maybe this is what it was like for Sheila. Maybe she started with one small secret, and then added one atop the other until she had as many secrets as she had shoes.

  The driver drove past skid row and stopped at a run-down street in the arts district. The street was virtually empty, except for two guys toward the end of it, spray-painting a wall. I immediately recognized one of the guys as Iglesias. I led Caroline toward him. Iglesias and his friend didn’t hear us, so they just kept spray-painting. Iglesias was spray-painting the face of the Mona Lisa on the wall. He had done a pretty good job of reproducing her.

  “Should I give her a nose ring?” he asked his friend, who was busy drawing some kind of robotic spider creature.

  “Nah, give her a septum piercing,” his friend said. “That’d be dope.”

  Iglesias took a can of black spray paint and gave Mona Lisa a septum piercing, then signed his work in red spray paint with the name Rico.

  “Bravo,” I said as I clapped my hands, wanting to alert him that I was standing right behind him.

  “Hey, the tide has rolled in,” he said, a wide smile overtaking his face. “I can’t believe you came, Ocean.”

  “I mean . . . this is basically the worst thing I’ve ever done, and if my parents found out I was here, they would put out a hit on me, but yeah, I’m here. This is my friend Caroline.”

  Iglesias shook Caroline’s hand, then put his arm around his friend, a lanky white kid with a wisp of a beard, and an outfit that looked like it belonged in a 1980s hip-hop video. “This is my buddy Stuey,” Iglesias said.

  Stuey approached Caroline with his arms outstretched. “I’m a hugger,” he said.

  “And I’m a lesbian,” Caroline said. “So back off.”

  “Whoa,” Stuey said. “I was just saying hello. But if you’re a little nicer, maybe I’ll set you up with my hot sister.”

  “Thanks,” Caroline said, “but I don’t need to be set up.” Caroline so needs to be set up, I thought to myself. She was the only out lesbian in our whole school, and she was vehemently opposed to online dating. “A handshake will suffice,” she said, as she put her hand out for Stuey, who put his hand in hers. Caroline squeezed his hand tight, then moved on to Iglesias. As she kept Iglesias’s hand in hers for an uncomfortably long time, she looked him dead in the eyes and said, “Look, Daria told me everything. And she’s one of my best friends. And she’s not tough like me, okay?”

  “I’m tough,” I said.

  “Oh please, your idea of hardship before this week was getting a zit.”

  “That is not true,” I said, my gaze fixed on Iglesias. “Remember that time I had ants in my bedroom?”

  “Whatever,” Caroline said. “The point is that Daria’s going through a lot right now. And you, Iglesias or Enrique or Rico or whatever your name is, better not be playing some game with her right now.”

  “I’m not playing a game,” Iglesias said, trying to wriggle his hand out from Caroline’s.

  “You need to understand something,” Caroline continued. “Daria’s mission right now is to meet her birth mother. You are just a stepping-stone on that mission. And you’d better not screw up her mission.”

  “How would I do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you break her heart and she doesn’t want to see you again, so she never goes through with meeting her birth mother just to avoid you.”

  “She would have to like me for me to break her heart,” Iglesias said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “And I don’t like him.” I glared at Caroline. I loved her for trying to protect me. But she was revealing way too much.

  Taking the hint, Caroline finally let go of Iglesias’s hand. “Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s have some fun. Somebody pass me a can of spray paint, and it had best not be pink.”

  Stuey tossed Caroline a can of green paint. Caroline moved toward an untouched patch of wall and pointed the can at the wall. Stuey told her to hold on and pulled a pair of gloves out of his bag for her. “You don’t want that toxic crap all over your hands,” he said. Caroline put the gloves on, and began painting the wall in bursts of green. She was having a blast.

  Suddenly, I became dizzy, and grabbed on to Iglesias’s arm. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just got a random head rush. I don’t usually stay up this late.”

  Iglesias laughed. “Living on the edge, Ocean.” Then he took my arm and led me a few feet away from Caroline and Stuey. “It’s the chemicals in the spray paint. Makes you a little high.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So you’re trying to get me high, huh?”

  Iglesias took a deep breath and then exhaled loudly. “Nothing like the smell of spray paint in the morning.”

  “It’s nighttime,” I said.

  “There’s a line from a movie about the smell of napalm in the morning,” he said. “It was an attempt at a joke.”

  I didn’t laugh. Neither did he. We sat in silence for a few breaths, my heart beating fast. I couldn’t tell what was making me so nervous. Was it sitting so close to Iglesias that I could hear him breathe? Was it breaking the rules that I had followed so dutifully for fifteen years? Or was it the smell of spray paint in the nighttime?

  “Sorry about Caroline,” I finally said, breaking the silence. “She can be a little intense, but she’s really sweet once you get to know her. She’s like Persian rice.”

  “Is Persian rice a pissed-off lesbian?” he asked.

  “No.” I laughed. “It’s hard on the outside and soft on the inside.”

  “Well, she’s got your back,” he said. “I like that.”

  “Yeah, she’s a real friend.” There was a long pause. “How about you and Stuey?”

  “We met last year,” he said. “He’s been real good to me. Like a mentor, kind of.”

  “What’s he mentoring you in?”

  “He’s a legendary tagger. You’ve probably seen his tags. He goes by Koffin.”

  “I know you’re speaking English, but I don’t really get what you’re saying.”

  “A tagger’s a street artist. Your tag is your name, or your symbol, or whatever. His is Koffin. He used to paint coffins everywhere, with different shit inside them. Like he would make a coffin and inside he would write war or AIDS or hate or shit like that. You’ve never seen his stuff?” I shook my head. “See, that’s what sucks. We make art. We make beauty. And the city arrests us, and then cleans it up like we’re defacing shit. You know who’s defacing shit? The developers who tear down our awesome old buildings and replace them with ugly stucco crap.”

  Baba was a developer, and I knew that he didn’t tear down beautiful things and replace them with ugly ones. In fact, it was usually the opposite. But it mattered to me that Iglesias like me, so I kept my mouth shut and changed the subject. “What’s your tag name?” I asked.

  He laughed. “It’s not my tag name. Just my tag. It used to be Karne, like meat in Spanish with a K, but I hated that, so then I changed it to Hoopla, but I thought that sucked too, and now I’m just Rico, but I don’t know . . .”

  “Sounds like you have an identity crisis,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Who doesn’t?”

  I laughed. That was certainly very true. Iglesias took his yellow glove off, and placed my hand in his, locking his fingers into mine. “Is this cool?” he asked. “I don’t want your friend over there to come beat me up.” We both looked up at Caroline, who was getting a lesson in tagging from Stuey. She had obviously warmed up to him.

  My hand felt great in his. I thought back to Kurt and me holding hands at the ice rink. It felt nothing like this. With Iglesias, it was like every inch of my fingers and my palm was filled with nerve endings that were shooting energy through my body, making me feel mor
e alive than I had ever felt. Now I understood why people said you glowed when you were in love. It was because all these nerve endings were lighting up your body from inside. I felt like I was iridescent.

  I wanted to tell Iglesias that holding my hand was more than cool. I wanted to tell him that it felt fantastic, that it felt like a lunar eclipse happening within me. But all I said was, “Yeah, it’s okay.”

  “Listen,” he said. “My mom gets back next Saturday.”

  “Oh,” I said. We had been living in our own fantasy world, and this brought me back down to earth. On Saturday, my birth mother was coming back, and I would meet her. The thought of it filled me with a mixture of dread and excitement.

  “If you want, I’ll introduce you,” he said. And then, as if there were any question who we were talking about, he added, “My mom.”

  “Can you call her your stepmom? It would be so much less creepy,” I said. “You call her your stepmother, and I’ll call her my birth mother. Deal?”

  “Deal,” he said.

  “Okay. Thank you,” I said. “Do you think she’ll be happy to see me?”

  Iglesias squeezed my hand. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess maybe she’ll be happy and sad at the same time.”

  “Why would she be sad?” I asked.

  “Not sad. But maybe a little guilty. ’Cause seeing you will remind her that she gave you up. And she’ll see how awesome you are, and she’ll feel guilty about giving up somebody so cool. And maybe that guilt will make her feel a little sad.”

  “So you think I’m awesome?” I asked, with a smile.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think you’re pretty awesome.”

  “So you think I’m pretty too?” I asked, and he laughed. “The thing is,” I continued, “maybe I wouldn’t be as awesome if she’d raised me. ’Cause obviously she wasn’t ready. And I wouldn’t be me if she had raised me, would I? So she can’t think like that. She shouldn’t feel guilty. I hope she doesn’t feel guilty. I don’t want to make her feel that way. I just want, I don’t know, I want to know her.”