Darius the Great Is Not Okay(18)

“We have lots of architecture in my country,” he said. “You must see the Azadi Tower.”

“Um.” I had seen pictures of the Azadi Tower, and it was stunning—gleaming white angles intertwining into a tall edifice, with intricate latticework that made me think of The Lord of the Rings.

Only Elves could have wrought something so delicate and fantastic.

“And the Tehran Museum.”

I didn’t know that one.

“And the Shah Cheragh in Shiraz.”

That one I had heard of. It was a mosque covered with mirrors on the inside, and the reflected light turned the whole thing into a shimmering jewel box.

“Okay.”

“Here.” He shoved my papers and medicine back into the Kellner & Newton Messenger Bag. I slung it over my shoulder.

“You can go,” he said. “Welcome to Iran.”

I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I said thank you and backed out of the room.

Part of me wanted to shout, “THERE! ARE! FOUR! LIGHTS!” as I left, the way Captain Picard did when he was finally released, but Customs Officer II seemed to have decided he liked me, and I didn’t want to ruin it with a reference he probably wouldn’t understand.

Besides.

I didn’t want to cause an international incident.



* * *





Mom kept a Level Seven Death Grip on my arm the rest of the way through the airport.

I wanted to pull away, to tell Dad about my interrogation and how there really were four lights.

I wanted to tell him about the Azadi Tower and the other places Customs Officer II mentioned.

I wanted to tell him how impressed Customs Officer II was that he was an architect.

But Dad walked ahead of us, fighting a losing battle to keep Laleh upright and walking on a relatively direct heading.

My sister was on the verge of collapse. “I’ll take her,” I said.

Mom released me so I could take Laleh piggyback, and we walked through the sliding glass doors into the cool Tehran night.





THE DANCING FAN



It was colder than I expected outside. I shivered, even with Laleh warm against my back. I was in a long-sleeved T-shirt and pants—Mom had said that was the best thing to wear through Customs—and I wished I had a hoodie, but they were all in my suitcase.

Tehran didn’t smell much different from Portland. I guess I had kind of expected everything to smell like rice. (To be fair, most Persian households, even Fractional ones like ours, smell at least a little bit like basmati rice.) But Tehran’s air was regular city air, with a tang of smog to it, and a bit less of Portland’s rain-soaked earth smell.

A scream split the night, like the piercing cry of a Nazg?l, and I almost dropped Laleh. “Eyyyyyyyy!”

Mamou—my real, flesh-and-blood grandmother—was screaming and charging toward us. She crashed into Mom and grabbed her by the face, kissed her on both cheeks, left-right-left, and then wrapped her in a hug strong enough to buckle a starship’s hull.

Mom laughed and hugged her mother for the first time in seventeen years.

It was the happiest I had ever seen her.



* * *





Dayi Jamsheed had driven Mamou to Tehran, and we all piled into his silver SUV for the ride to Yazd. Mom sat up front with him, talking in Farsi and sharing a bag of tokhmeh, roasted watermelon seeds, which are the favorite snack of True Persians everywhere. Dad sat in the back with Laleh stretched across his lap—she had finally collapsed, though not before being hugged to within an inch of her life by Mamou and Dayi Jamsheed.

I shared the middle with Mamou.

Fariba Bahrami was a short woman—I had only seen her from the shoulders up before—but when she wrapped her arms around me, it was like she had fifteen years’ worth of hugs saved up just for me. She kept her arm draped across my back the whole ride, holding me against her.

I studied her hands. I had never really seen my grandmother’s hands before.

Mamou kept her fingernails short and nicely manicured, painted pomegranate red. Her perfume smelled like peaches. And she was so warm. She squeezed and squeezed me, like she was worried I would blow out the window if she didn’t hold on tight enough.

Maybe she was trying to fit a lifetime of missed hugs into the one car ride.

Maybe she was.

“Tell me about your school, maman.”

“School is okay. I guess.”

The sociopolitical climate of Chapel Hill High School seemed a little too complicated to get into with Mamou on a car ride, especially since I didn’t want her to know that people called me D-Bag and left bright blue fake testicles on my bicycle.

I never wanted to talk about testicles with my grandmother.

“You have lots of friends? A girlfriend?”

My ears went straight to red alert.

True Persians are heavily invested in the reproductive opportunities of their descendants.

“Um. Not really,” I said. The red alert was spreading to my cheeks.

“Not really” was the safest form of “no” I could come up with.

I couldn’t stand to disappoint my grandmother.

“Eh? Why?” Mamou had a funny way of curling the ends of her words to make them into questions. “You are so handsome, maman.”