A Very Large Expanse of Sea(65)

School became suddenly ridiculous.

For a full week after the talent show I couldn’t get to class without incident. People started chasing me down the hall. Everyone wanted to talk to me. Kids began waving at me as I walked by. I was cutting across the quad one day and one of the janitors saw me, said, “Hey, you’re that girl who spins on her head!” and I was legitimately freaked out.

I hadn’t even spun on my head.

I mean, I was happy they weren’t calling me towelhead anymore, but the sudden and abrupt transition from nasty to nice was giving me whiplash. I was confused. I couldn’t believe people thought I’d forget that just over a month ago they were treating me like an actual piece of shit. My teachers, who, post-Ramadan—when I’d wanted to take a day off to celebrate literally the biggest holiday in the Muslim calendar—had said to me, “We’re going to need a note from your parents to make sure you’re missing school for a real thing,” were now congratulating me in front of the whole class. The politics of school popularity were baffling. I didn’t know how they could change gears like this. They’d all seemed to have abruptly forgotten that I was still the same girl they’d tried to humiliate, over and over again.

Navid was experiencing a similar issue, but, unlike me, he didn’t seem to mind. “Just enjoy it,” he said.

But I didn’t know how I could.

By the end of January I had an entirely different social status than I’d had just weeks prior. It was insane.

I opened my locker and five invitations to five different house parties all fell out, onto my face. I was sitting under my tree at lunch, reading a book, when a group of girls shouted at me, from across the quad, to come sit with them. Guys had started talking to me in class. They’d come up to me after school, ask me if I had plans, and I’d say yes, I have big plans to get the hell out of here, and they didn’t get it. They’d offer to drive me home.

I wanted to scream.

I’d somehow, inadvertently, done something that’d given the population at this school permission to put me in a different kind of box, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. It was more than confusing—it killed me to discover the depth of their spinelessness. Somehow, I wasn’t a terrorist anymore. I’d leveled up. They now saw me as some kind of exotic-looking breakdancer. Our performance had deactivated their alarms.

I was deemed cool. Safe.

Threat Level Green.

And it wasn’t until Coach Hart passed me in the hall, tipped his basketball hat at me and said, “Nice job the other day,” that I felt suddenly certain I’d spontaneously combust.

I’d broken up with Ocean over this.

I’d walked away from one of the most amazing people I’d ever known because I’d been bullied into it by his coach, by his peers, by his own mother. My face, my body, my general image in his life had been hurting him. Had been a threat to his career. To his prospects.

What about now?

What if Ocean had fallen for me now? Now, when the students didn’t find me so scary anymore. Now, when people looked in my direction and smiled; now, when I couldn’t walk down the hall without someone trying to talk to me; now, when my teachers stopped me after class and asked me where I’d learned to dance like that.

Would the timing have made a difference?

The breathtaking levels of their hypocrisy had given me a migraine.

I saw Ocean again on a Wednesday.

I was at my locker long after the final bell rang, swapping my things out in preparation for practice—the talent show was over, but we still had a lot more we wanted to do—when Ocean found me. I hadn’t spoken a single word to him since the day I’d seen him in bio, and for the first time in a month, I had a real opportunity to study him. To look into his eyes.

But what I saw only made me feel worse.

He looked tired. Worn-out. He looked thinner. He never really showed up to class anymore, and I wasn’t sure how he was getting away with it.

“Hi,” he said.

I felt frozen at just the sound of his voice. Overwhelmed. A little bit like I wanted to cry.

“Hi,” I said.

“I don’t”—he looked away, ran a hand through his hair—“I don’t actually know what I’m doing here. I just—” He stopped and looked up, off into the distance. I heard him sigh.

He didn’t have to explain.

It was the middle of February. The halls had been plastered with Cupid cutouts and paper hearts. Some club on campus was selling Valentine’s Day candy grams and the violently pink posters assaulted me everywhere I went. I’d never needed an excuse to think about Ocean, but Valentine’s Day was only two days away, and it was hard not to be constantly reminded of what I’d lost.

Finally, he looked at me.

“I never got to tell you that I saw you,” he said. “In the talent show.” His mouth threatened to smile, and then, didn’t. “You were great,” he said softly. “You were so great.”

And I could no more control the words I said next than the earthquake he’d left in my bones. “I miss you,” I said. “I miss you so much.”

Ocean flinched, like I’d slapped him. He looked away and when he looked up again I swore I saw tears in his eyes. “What am I supposed to do with that?” he said. “What am I supposed to say to that?”