A Very Large Expanse of Sea(7)

I waved when I walked into our first practice.

We were meeting in one of the dance rooms inside the school’s gym, and my brother’s three new friends looked me up and down again, even though we’d already met. They seemed to be assessing me.

“So,” Carlos said. “You break?”

“Not yet,” I said, feeling suddenly self-conscious.

“That’s not true.” My brother stepped forward and smiled at me. “Her uprock isn’t bad and she does a decent six-step.”

“But I don’t know any power moves,” I said.

“That’s okay. I’m going to teach you.”

It was then that I sat down and wondered whether Navid wasn’t doing this whole thing just to throw me a bone. Maybe I was imagining it, but for the first time in a long while, my brother seemed to be mine again, and I didn’t realize until just that moment how much I’d missed him.

He was dyslexic, my brother. When he started middle school and began failing every subject, I finally realized that he and I hated school for very different reasons. Words and letters never made sense to him like they did to me. And it wasn’t until two years ago when he was threatened with expulsion that he finally told me the truth.

Screamed it, actually.

My mom had ordered me to help him with his homework. We couldn’t afford a tutor, so I would have to do, and I was pissed. Tutoring my older brother was not how I wanted to spend my free time. So when he refused to do the work, I got angry.

“Just answer the question,” I’d snap at him. “It’s simple reading comprehension. Read the paragraph and summarize, in a couple of sentences, what it was about. That’s it. It’s not rocket science.”

He refused.

I pushed.

He refused.

I insulted him.

He insulted me back.

I insulted him more.

“Just answer the goddamn question why are you so lazy what the hell is wrong with you—”

And finally he just exploded.

That was the day I learned that my brother, my beautiful, brilliant older brother, couldn’t make sense of words and letters the way that I could. He’d spend half an hour reading a paragraph over and over again and even then, he didn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t craft sentences. He struggled, tremendously, to translate his thoughts into words.

So I started teaching him how.

We worked together every day for hours, late into the night, until one day he could put sentences together by himself. Months later he was writing paragraphs. It took a year, but he finally wrote his own research paper. And the thing no one ever knew was that I did all his schoolwork in the interim. All his writing assignments. I wrote every paper for him until he could do it on his own.

I thought maybe this was his way of saying thanks. I mean, it almost certainly wasn’t, but I couldn’t help but wonder why else he’d take this chance on me. The other guys he’d collected—Jacobi, Carlos, and Bijan—already had experience in other crews. None of them were experts, but they weren’t novices, either. I was the one who needed the most work, and Navid was the only one who didn’t seem irritated about it.

Carlos, in particular, wouldn’t stop looking at me. He seemed skeptical that I’d end up any good, and he told me so. He wasn’t even mean about it, just matter of fact.

“What?” I said. “Why not?”

He shrugged. But he was staring at my outfit.

I’d switched into some of the only gym clothes I owned—a pair of slim sweatpants and a thin hoodie—but I was also wearing a different scarf; it was made of a light, cotton material that I’d tied up into a turban style, and this seemed to distract him.

Finally, he nodded at my head and said, “You can breakdance in that?”

My eyes widened. For some reason I was surprised. I don’t know why I’d thought these dudes would be marginally less stupid than all the other ones I’d known.

“Are you for real?” I said. “What a dick thing to say.”

He laughed and said, “I’m sorry, I’ve just never seen anyone try to breakdance like that before.”

“Wow,” I said, stunned. “I’ve literally never seen you take off that beanie, but you’re giving me shit for this?”

Carlos looked surprised. He laughed harder. He tugged the beanie off his head and ran his hand through his hair. He had very black, springy curls that were slightly too long and kept falling in his face. He put the beanie back on. “All right,” he said. “All right. Okay. Sorry.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but he was smiling. “Seriously. I’m sorry. That was a dick thing to say. You’re right. I’m an asshole.”

“Clearly.”

Navid was laughing so hard. I suddenly hated everyone.

Jacobi shook his head and said, “Damn.”

“Wow,” I said. “You all suck.”

“Hey—” Bijan was in the middle of stretching his legs. He pretended to look hurt. “That’s not fair. Jacobi and I didn’t even say anything.”

“Yeah but you were thinking it, weren’t you?”

Bijan grinned.

“Navid,” I said, “your friends suck.”