A Very Large Expanse of Sea(45)

“How was your day?” we both said at the same time.

“Weird,” we answered in unison.

He laughed. “Yeah,” he said, and ran a hand through his hair. “Really weird.”

I tried hard not to say I told you so, because I didn’t want to be that person, but I really had told him so, so I settled on a variation of the same thing and hoped he wouldn’t notice. “Yeah,” I said. “I, uh, figured it might be.”

He grinned at me. “Yeah, yeah. I know.”

“So,” I said, and smiled back. “Are you sorry yet? Ready to call it quits?”

“No.” He frowned, and looked, for a moment, genuinely upset. “Of course not.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “Then let the shitshow begin.”





23

Twenty-Three

The first couple of weeks really weren’t that bad, except for the fact that I’d started fasting, which just made me kind of tired. Ramadan was, honest to goodness, my favorite month of the year, despite how crazy that sounds. Most people weren’t big fans of fasting for thirty days—each day from sunrise to sunset—but I loved it. I loved how it made me feel. It gave me a sharpness of heart and mind; I experienced clarity then as I rarely did during the rest of the year. Somehow, it made me stronger. After surviving a month of serious focus and self-discipline, I felt like I could overcome anything.

Any obstacle. Mental or physical.

Navid hated it.

All day long all he did was complain. He was never more annoying as a human being than he was during Ramadan. All he did was whine. He said fasting messed up his carefully balanced diet of simply grilled chicken breasts and staring at his abs in the mirror. He said it made him slow, that his muscles needed fuel, that all his hard work was being flushed down the toilet and he was losing too much weight, getting leaner every day and what about all the bulk he’d worked so hard to build? Besides, his head hurt, he was tired, he was thirsty; he’d stare at his abs again and make an angry noise and say, “This is such bullshit.”

All day long.

Ocean was, unsurprisingly, curious about the whole thing. I’d stopped using the word fascinated to describe the way he engaged with me and my life, because the pejorative iteration of the word no longer seemed fair. In fact, his affection felt so sincere that I could no longer bring myself to even tease him about it. He was easily wounded. One day he’d asked me about Persian food again and I’d made a joke about how funny it was that he knew so little, how he’d really thought falafel and hummus were my thing, and he was suddenly so embarrassed he wouldn’t even look at me.

So I tried to be gentle.

True to his word, Ocean really didn’t seem to care about the general weirdness surrounding our situation. But then, we were also being really careful. Ocean’s basketball commitments were even more intense than I’d expected—he was busy pretty much all the time. So we took it day by day.

We didn’t do much at first.

I didn’t meet his friends. I didn’t go to his house. We didn’t spend every moment together; we didn’t even spend all our lunches together. To be clear, these were my suggestions, not his. Ocean wasn’t thrilled about the distance I kept between us, but it was the only way I could do this—I wanted our worlds to merge slowly, without chaos—and he seemed resigned to accept it. Still, I worried. I worried about everything he’d have to deal with. What he might’ve already been dealing with. I’d check in with him daily, ask him if anything had happened, if anyone had said anything to him, but he refused to talk about it. He said he didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to give it oxygen.

So I let it go.

After a week, I stopped asking.

I just wanted to enjoy his company.

There was another breakdancing battle happening that next weekend, not long after Ocean and I first started, officially, spending time together, and I was excited. I wanted him to come with me, to see what it was like to attend one of these things in person, and, bonus: it was an outing that’d already been parent-approved, which would make any additional lies to my mom and dad much easier to believe. I had absolutely no interest in telling my parents the truth about Ocean, as I could imagine literally no scenario in which they would happily send me off into the night with a boy who wanted to kiss me, and I was very okay lying about it. My parents weren’t the type to care about Ocean’s race or religion; I already knew this about them. No, they would’ve disapproved no matter who he was. They just never wanted to believe that I was a normal teenager who liked boys, period. So it was kind of a relief, actually, not to tell them anything. This whole thing was dramatic enough without my involving my parents and their inevitable hyperventilations.

Ultimately, I thought I’d come up with a pretty solid plan; it would be a fun way to spend a Saturday night. Plus, Ocean could officially meet Navid and the other guys, and I could show him around this world I loved. But when I pitched it to Ocean, he sounded surprised. And then, polite.

“Oh,” he said. “Okay. Sure.”

Something was wrong.

“You don’t like this plan,” I said. “You think this is a bad plan.” We were on the phone. It was late, really late, and I was whispering under my covers again.

“No, no,” he said, and laughed. “It’s a great plan. I’d love to see one of these battles—they sound so cool—it’s just—” He hesitated. Laughed again. Finally, I heard him sigh.