A Very Large Expanse of Sea(56)

Navid would be fine.

But things, for me, just kept getting worse.





28

Twenty-Eight

It was one thing for me to have to deal with this sort of thing. I’d been here before. I knew how to handle these blows and I knew how to walk them off, even as they wounded me. And I took great care to appear so deeply, thoroughly unmoved by the whole photo debacle that the mess defused itself in a matter of days. I gave it no life. No power. And it withered easily.

Ocean, on the other hand, was new to this.

Watching him try to navigate the at once overwhelming and heartbreaking experience of the unmasked mob—

It was like watching a child learn about death for the first time.

People wouldn’t leave him alone, suddenly. My face had become notorious overnight, and Navid kicking the crap out of one of these kids for throwing a pastry at my head had complicated everything. I mean, I didn’t love Navid’s methods, but I will say this: no one ever threw anything at me, not ever again. But kids now seemed terrified to even be near me. People were both angry and scared, which was possibly the most dangerous combination of emotions, and it made Ocean’s association with me more outrageous than ever. His friends said awful things to him about me, about himself—things I don’t even want to repeat—and he was forced into an impossible position, trying to defend me against slanderous statements about my faith, about what it meant to be Muslim, about what it was like to be me. It was exhausting.

Still, Ocean swore he didn’t care.

He didn’t, but I did.

I could feel myself pulling away, retreating inward, wanting to save him and myself by sacrificing this newfound happiness, and I knew he felt it happening. He could feel the distance growing between us—could see me shutting down, closing off—and I felt his panic. I could see it in the way he looked at me now. I heard it in his voice when he whispered Are we okay? on the phone last night. I felt it when he touched me, tentatively, like I might spook at any second.

But the more I pulled away, the steadier he became.

Ocean had made a choice, and he was so willing to stand by that choice that it made everyone angrier. He was alienated by his friends and he shrugged it off; his coach kept harassing him about me and he ignored it.

I think it was that he showed them no loyalty—that he seemed to care so little about the opinions of people he’d known for far longer than he’d ever known me—that finally pissed them off so much.

It was the middle of December, a week before winter break, when it all got really ugly.

It was just a prank, in the end.

It was a stupid prank. Someone had wanted to mess with Ocean and the whole thing spun so far out of control it threw our entire world off its axis.

Some anonymous person hacked into the computer systems and sent out a mass email to the entire school district’s database. All the students and teachers in the entire county—even the parents who were on school mailing lists—got this email. The note was terrible. And it wasn’t even about me. It was about Ocean.

It accused him of supporting terrorism, of being anti-American, of believing it was okay to kill innocent people because he wanted access to seventy-two virgins. It called for him to be kicked off the team. It said that he was a poor representative of his hometown and a disgrace to the veterans who supported their games. The note called him horrible names. And the thing that made it even worse, of course, was that there was a picture of the two of us holding hands at school. Here was proof, it seemed to say, that he’d made friends with the enemy.

The school started getting angry calls. Letters. Horrified parents were demanding an explanation, a hearing, a town hall meeting. I never knew people could care so much about the dramas surrounding high school basketball, but holy hell, it was apparently a very big deal. Ocean Desmond James was a very big deal, it turned out, and I don’t think even he’d realized just how much until any of this happened.

Still, it wasn’t hard for me to understand how we got here. I’d been expecting it. I’d been dreading it. But it was so hard for Ocean to stomach that the world was filled with such awful people. I tried to tell him that the bigots and the racists had always been there, and he said he’d honestly never seen them like this, that he never thought they could be like this, and I said yes, I know. I said that’s how privilege works.

He was stunned.

We’d run out of places to find privacy—even just to talk about all that had transpired. We talked at night, of course, but we rarely had a chance to connect during the day, in person. The school was still so abuzz with all this bullshit that I couldn’t even stop to speak to him in the halls anymore. Every class was an ordeal. Even the teachers looked a little freaked out. Only Mr. Jordan seemed sympathetic, but I knew there wasn’t much he could do. And every day people I’d never once made eye contact with would lean over and say things to me when I took my seat.

“What does he have to do, exactly, to get the seventy-two virgins?”

“Isn’t it against your religion to date white guys?”

“So are you, like, related to Saddam Hussein?”

“Why are you even here, if you hate America so much?”

I told them all to fuck off, but it was like a game of Whac-a-Mole. They just kept coming back.

Ocean blew off basketball practice one afternoon so that we could finally find a moment alone together. His coach was suddenly drowning the team in extra, unnecessary practices, and Ocean said it was because his coach was trying to keep him busy—that he was trying to keep the two of us apart. I knew that Ocean’s decision to ditch practice would probably blow up in both our faces, but I was also grateful for the moment of peace. I’d been dying to see him, to speak to him in person and see for myself that he was okay.