A Very Large Expanse of Sea(32)

I have so many questions.

I looked back at him, surprised, and he smiled so hard he almost laughed. He looked very pleased with himself.

I shook my head, but I was smiling, too. And then I deliberately pulled the iPod out of my pocket and hit play.

When I turned back around in my seat, I nearly jumped out of my skin.

The three other girls in my cluster were now staring blankly at me, looking possibly more confused by my existence than I’d expected.

“Don’t forget to introduce yourselves,” Mr. Jordan bellowed. “Names are important!” And then he picked up the large mason jar that sat on his desk every day and said, “Today’s topic is”—he pulled a piece of paper out of the jar, read it—“the Israeli-Palestinian conflict! This one should be really good,” he said. “Hamas! Terrorism! Is Iran complicit? Talking points will be on the board! Have fun!”

I dropped my head onto my desk.

It will probably surprise no one to hear that I was terrible at ignoring Ocean.

I pretended, really hard, to appear uninterested in him, but that’s all it was. I was just really good at pretending. I’d denied myself permission to think about him, which somehow made it so that I thought about him all the time.

I noticed him too much now.

He seemed to be everywhere, suddenly. So much so that I started wondering if maybe I was wrong, if maybe it wasn’t mere coincidence that kept bringing us together. Maybe, instead, he’d always been there, and maybe I’d only just begun to see him. It was like when Navid bought that Nissan Sentra; before Navid got the car, I’d never, ever noticed one of them on the road before. Now I saw old Nissan Sentras everywhere.

This whole thing was stressing me out.

I felt nervous, even just sitting in the same class with him. Our work in bio had become more difficult than ever, simply because I was trying to dislike him and it wasn’t working; he was almost bionically likable. He had this really calming presence that always made me feel like, I don’t know, like I could let my guard down when I was with him.

Which, somehow, only made me more nervous.

I thought being quiet—speaking only when I absolutely had to—would help defuse whatever tension existed between us, but it only seemed to make things more intense. When we didn’t talk, some invisible lever was still winding a coil between our bodies. In some ways, my silence was more telling than anything else. It was a breathless sort of standoff.

I kept trying to break away, and I couldn’t.

Today—it was now Monday—I only made it through thirty minutes of ignoring Ocean in bio. I was tapping my pencil against a blank page in my notebook, avoiding the dead cat between us and instead trying to think of things to hate about him, when Ocean turned to me, apropos of nothing, and said, “Hey, am I saying your name right?”

I was so surprised I sat up. Stared at him. “No,” I said.

“What? Are you serious?” He laughed, but he looked upset. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

I shrugged. Turned back to my notebook. “No one ever says my name right.”

“Well, I’d like to,” he said. He touched my arm, and I looked up again. “How am I supposed to say it?”

He’d been pronouncing my name Shi-reen, which was better than most people; most people had been saying it in two hard syllables: Shir-in, which was very wrong. It was actually pronounced Shee-reen. I tried to explain this to him. I tried to tell him that he had to roll the r. That the whole thing was meant to be pronounced softly. Gently, even.

Ocean tried, several times, to say it correctly, and I was genuinely touched. A little amused.

“It sounds so pretty,” he said. “What does it mean?”

I laughed. I didn’t want to tell him, so I shook my head.

“What?” he said. His eyes widened. “Is it bad?”

“No.” I sighed. “It means sweet. I just think it’s funny. I think my parents were hoping for a different kind of kid.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean no one has ever accused me of being sweet.”

Ocean laughed. He shrugged, slowly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess you’re not sweet exactly. But”—he hesitated; picked up his pencil, rolled it between his hands—“you’re, just, like—”

He stopped. Sighed. He wouldn’t look at me.

And I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I definitely wanted to know what he was thinking but I didn’t want him to know that I wanted to know what he was thinking, so I just sat there, waiting.

“You’re so strong,” he said finally. He was still staring at his pencil. “You don’t seem to be afraid of anything.”

I didn’t know what I’d been hoping he’d say, exactly, but I was surprised. So surprised, in fact, that I was rendered, for a moment, speechless.

I so rarely felt strong. Mostly I felt scared.

When he finally looked up, I was already staring at him.

“I’m afraid of lots of things,” I whispered.

We’d just been looking at each other, hardly breathing, when suddenly the bell rang. I jumped up, feeling unexpectedly embarrassed, grabbed my things, and disappeared.

He texted me that night.

what are you afraid of? he wrote.