Darius the Great Is Not Okay(19)

I didn’t know how she could say that. I was oily and puffy from thirty-two hours of flying, and I still had the caldera of the solar system’s largest volcano smoldering between my eyebrows.

Besides. No one ever noticed me. Not the way they noticed Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy like Chip Cusumano, who really was handsome.

I shrugged, but the shrug turned into a yawn. All the temporal dilations we had gone through were catching up with me.

“You’re tired, maman.”

“I’m okay.”

“Why don’t you have a sleep? It’s still a few hours to Yazd.” She pulled me closer still, so I could lean my head on her shoulder, and ran her fingers through the curls of my hair. “I’m so happy you are here.”

“Me too.” Her hand was warm, but her fingers sent shivers of euphoria through my scalp.

She kissed the crown of my head, over and over again, until it was wet where her tears had trickled down and run into my hair.

I didn’t mind, though.

“I love you, maman.”

Grandma and Oma, Dad’s moms, didn’t say that very often. It’s not that they didn’t love me and Laleh, but they were full of Teutonic reserve, and didn’t express affection very often.

Mamou wasn’t like that.

For Fariba Bahrami, love was an opportunity, not a burden.

I swallowed away the lump in my throat. “I love you, Mamou.”



* * *





I only half slept on the drive to Yazd. I was too tired to fall all the way asleep, and even though Mamou was soft and warm, leaning up against her wasn’t a terribly comfortable position to sleep in. So I dozed and floated on the clouds of Farsi that blew my way from the front seat of Dayi Jamsheed’s SUV.

It reminded me of when I was little, and Mom chanted to me in Farsi every night before bedtime. It’s hard to describe Farsi chanting: the way Mom drew her voice out like the notes of a cello as she recited poems by Rumi or Hafez. I didn’t know what they meant, but that didn’t matter. It was quiet and soothing.

It was Mom’s job to put me to sleep, because Dad got me too excited before bedtime. He would sit on my bed and tuck me in, and then he would start telling me a story, leaving gaps for me to fill in with heroes and monsters.

We told the story together.

There’s a lot I don’t remember from back then, the years before my own Great Depression. Dr. Howell says antidepressants can do that sometimes, dull the memory, plus I was pretty little at the time anyway. But I remember Story Time with Dad, because I remember the night it stopped.

It was about six months before Laleh was born.

Dad came to tuck me in. He kissed me, said “Love you,” and turned to leave.

“Dad? Don’t I get a story?” I squeaked.

My voice was much squeakier back then, like a cheese curd.

Dad blinked at me. He sighed. “Not tonight, Darius.”

And then he left. Just walked out of my bedroom.

I lay there and waited for Mom to come chant to me.

And we didn’t tell stories anymore after that.

I didn’t get why Dad had stopped. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Mom explained. “I can tell you a story.”

But it wasn’t the same.

Shirin Kellner was an expert chanter but a lackluster storyteller.

And no matter the story she told, the one I told myself, the one I understood deep down, was this:

Stephen Kellner didn’t want to tell me stories anymore.



* * *





“Wake up, Darioush-jan.” Mamou scratched my scalp, which sent goose bumps down my neck. “We’re here.”

I blinked in the gray morning, sat up, and took my first look at Yazd.

To be honest, even though I had seen plenty of pictures, I still kind of expected Yazd to look like a scene from Aladdin: dirt streets lined with palm trees, domed palaces made out of sparkling alabaster, laden camels carrying goods to a bazaar of wooden stalls covered in jewel-colored fabric awnings.

There were no camels anywhere in sight, despite what Fatty Bolger might have claimed. I didn’t even know camel jockey was a legitimate slur until the first time he called me one. Trent Bolger was not particularly creative, but he was thorough, and subtle enough to evade detection by the enforcers of Chapel Hill High School’s Zero Tolerance Policy toward racial and ethnic slurs.

The streets of Mamou’s neighborhood didn’t look so different from the streets back home: dull gray asphalt.

The houses didn’t look so different either, except they were made of whitish bricks instead of seamless siding. Some had ornate wooden double doors in front, with elaborate metal knockers. They almost reminded me of Hobbit-hole doors, except they weren’t round.

Dayi Jamsheed pulled up in front of a white house that looked more or less like all the others. It was a single story, with a thin strip of yard full of sparse, scrubby grass in front.

There were no cacti anywhere—another oversight on Fatty Bolger’s part, because I looked it up, and cacti are actually native to the Americas.

Dayi Jamsheed parked the SUV under the shade of a gigantic walnut tree that hung over the street and thrust its roots beneath the cracking sidewalk.

“Agha Stephen,” Dayi Jamsheed said. He pronounced it esStephen, which is what a lot of True Persians called Dad. In Farsi you couldn’t start a word with two consonants. You had to put a vowel before them (or between them, which is why a few people called Dad “Setephen”).