Like a Love Story(2)

“You have such a quiet child,” the dentist says. “My own kids won’t stop talking.”

“I’m not a child,” I say, coming out of my haze. “I’m seventeen. I should be allowed to make my own decisions.”

“Reza,” my mom says. “When you are my age, you will thank me. I promise you.” My mother has made many promises to me. That the revolution would never succeed. That my father would change. That I would grow into a good-looking man.

I don’t tell her that I will never be her age. I have known this from the moment we left Iran and landed in Toronto. I was eleven years old, and there was so little I knew about the world. But I knew that my dad would never change, and that my mom had finally found the strength to leave him. But there was something else I knew, something I knew from the moment I first went swimming with some other boys, and one of those boys’ swim trunks fell. I knew that I longed for other boys, to touch them, and hold them, and be with them. I hid that knowledge away, buried it. It was safe inside me. Then we landed in Toronto, and my mom and my sister made a beeline to the airport newsstand, giddy over the selection of fashion magazines, choosing which to buy, discussing Isabella Rossellini’s beauty.

Does she not look vaguely Iranian?

Well, Iranians and Italians do not look so different.

No chadors. I can’t believe it.

She looks identical to her mother. You both look like your father.

I think I want to be the first Iranian supermodel.

My eyes were glued to another section of magazines, and to the cover of Time. “The AIDS Hysteria.” My mom and my sister were so immersed in analyzing Isabella’s skin tone that I managed to covertly flip through the magazine, and inside I saw sickness, disease, lesions, young men dying. I knew that I liked it when boys’ swim trunks fell. But the fact that this would kill me, this was something I did not know until that moment. Until Time magazine informed me that I would die soon.

I’ve been living in fear ever since.

“I just want to be able to smile this year,” I plead, to both my mom and the orthodontist. Before getting the braces, my incisors were so high on my gum line that even when I smiled, they were invisible to the outside world. This horror was among the many reasons I never smiled, but let me be honest, I had many other reasons for not smiling.

“Is that too much to ask, to be able to smile without scaring people? To be able to start at a new school without being the four-eyed, metal-mouthed kid everyone makes fun of? To actually have someone . . . like me?” I can feel my face burning.

My mother suddenly smiles. “Oh,” she says. And then adding a few syllables to the word the way she loves to do, “Ohhhhhh.” I have no idea what is going on in her overactive mind, but then she declares, “I understand. You want to have a girlfriend!”

She does not understand. She never does.

My mother turns to the orthodontist. “Is there anything we can do?” she asks. “We need your approval, of course.”

I don’t understand why she treats this orthodontist as her accomplice, and not as a man that we just randomly chose from the yellow pages. Or as a creep who likes talking about her beautiful eyelashes.

The orthodontist makes a deal with me. He will remove the braces if I wear a retainer every night without fail. I shrug in acceptance, and a small smirk of victory forms on my face.

When we get back home, I rush into my room, which is too big for me, and stand in front of the mirror. I run my tongue around my mouth, reveling in the feeling of smooth teeth. Maybe I’m a little fixated on my teeth, maybe I have spent too much time analyzing them, measuring with my ruler the microscopic movements they made day by day. But now that the braces are gone, I can already tell that this obsession only saved me from thinking about the sad state of the rest of my appearance: my thin, nondescript body (not tall enough to be lanky, not stocky enough to be athletic), my cheeks with their remnants of baby fat (which have been mercilessly pinched by my sister), and my thick mop of unkempt hair.

The pathetic state of my appearance is only reinforced when Saadi walks into my room without knocking. My sister may be in college now (or at least pretending to be in college, since no one trusts her to show up to class or read a book), but I have inherited a new stepbrother. He’s six feet tall. He plays lacrosse, whatever that is. He’s the same age as me, but he’s twice my size. He walks around the house in white boxer shorts and a white baseball hat, and he calls me “the little prince,” since I’m named after the former shah of Iran, even though my dad hated him. I suppose that reveals a lot about how present my dad was in my life, even back when I was born. I think I hate the shah too. Maybe if he had been strong enough to stop the revolution, we would all still be living together in a place where people look like me.

He starts opening my drawers. “Where’s my Fine Young Cannibals CD?” he asks.

“I, um, did not touch it.” I keep my gaze fixed on the mirror, but in the reflection, I see him bending down to open a bottom drawer. For a moment, I compare his thick legs to my scrawny ones, but after that moment passes, I don’t think of my legs at all. All that exists are his legs, his back, his shoulders. I hate myself. I wish I had braces in my mouth again so I could rip them out a second time. I wish I would die, and if there is an afterlife, I could find my dad there and tell him that I’m just as messed up as he was.