Darius the Great Is Not Okay(27)

My feet were a bit longer but a lot wider.

I had Hobbit feet.

At least they weren’t furry on top.

My stomach tickled where Sohrab had grabbed me. I blushed.

No one ever stood right next to me like Sohrab did.

I wasn’t used to guys doing that.

“I wear forty-four,” Sohrab said. “I think they will fit you. They will be tight, though.”

“Oh.” I didn’t even realize Iran used a different shoe sizing system. “That’s okay. Thanks.”

Sohrab dug in his bag and handed me a pair of faded black Adidas.

He avoided my eyes as he passed me the cleats, rummaged through his bag, and pulled out another pair of cleats for himself. They were white (well, they had been, once), and were in imminent danger of experiencing a non-passive failure.

“Uh. Wouldn’t you rather use these?” I tried to give back the black Adidas. “I can play in my Vans.”

“No. You use them. They are newer.”

They were so worn, I wasn’t sure they had ever been new, but they were in better shape than Sohrab’s white cleats.

“They’re yours,” I said. “You should use them.”

“But you are my guest.”

This was another taarof: Sohrab giving me his nicer cleats. And invoking my being a guest was one of the strongest strategies you could employ in taarof.

I felt terrible for using his nice cleats, but I couldn’t see any way out of it.

“Thank you.”

I took my new kit into a stall to change, which was awkward because I kept banging my elbows into the walls and my knees into the toilet. My boxers were not suited for providing structural integrity while I was running around, and I wished I had thought to bring some compression shorts or something.

I would not have borrowed any of Sohrab’s, even if he had offered.

There are some garments you should never share.

I hopped my way into the borrowed Adidas. They fit okay—a little tight, but okay. And they felt light and agile compared to my gray Vans.

Even though the shirt was stretched across my chest, and the shorts kept riding up my butt, I felt very Iranian when I emerged from the stall in my borrowed kit and cleats.

But then I saw Sohrab in his red shirt and shorts, and his white cleats. He looked fit and ready for a real game.

It made me feel very inadequate.

I was only a Fractional Persian, after all.

“Ready?”

“Um.”

I wasn’t so sure I wanted to play anymore.

But Sohrab squinted at me, and the knot of nerves in my chest melted a little bit.

Some friends just have that effect on you.

“Ready.”



* * *





Two boys waited on the field for us. Sohrab hollered at them in Farsi and then waved his hand for me to jog after him.

“This is Darioush. Agha Bahrami’s grandson. From America.”

I said, “Salaam.”

“Salaam,” Iranian Boy Number One said. He talked out of the side of his mouth, which made it seem like he was half smiling. He was almost my height, but he was rail thin, and he had his hair spiked up in front, almost like a Soulless Minion of Orthodoxy.

I held out my hand, and he shook it, though it was loose and fleeting and felt kind of weird.

“Nice to meet you. Um.”

“Ali-Reza,” he said.

Ali and Reza are both popular Iranian names—maybe even more popular than Sohrab—though both are technically Arabic in origin.

I held out my hand to the other boy, who had lost the genetic lottery and ended up with the dreaded Persian Unibrow. I thought he would be hairy everywhere else too, but his hair was cut shorter than Sohrab’s, and he had pale, hairless arms.

“Hossein,” he said. His voice was thick and dark like coffee. He was shorter than me too—shorter even than Sohrab—but with his unibrow and the ghost mustache haunting his upper lip, he looked older: ready to get a job interrogating temporally-displaced Fractional Persians as they arrived at Customs in Imam Khomeini International Airport.

Hossein didn’t smile at all as he glanced from me to Sohrab.

“Thanks for letting me play with you,” I said.

Sohrab squinted at me.

Ali-Reza elbowed Hossein and said something in Farsi. Sohrab’s neck turned red, and his jaw twitched, like he was grinding his teeth a little bit.

“Um.”

Sohrab didn’t let me ask. “Come on, Darioush.”



* * *





Like I said, I hadn’t been on a soccer team—a real one, not just one in physical education class at Chapel Hill High School (Go Chargers)—since I was twelve. Dad had signed me up for the neighborhood soccer club when I was seven. I was okay at it, but according to our coach I wasn’t aggressive enough.

And then I got diagnosed with depression, and I started on my first round of medication, and I couldn’t focus on the game at all. I was too slow to track the other players, or the ball, or even the score.

One week, I left every single practice in tears because Coach Henderson (father of our midfielder, Vance Henderson, who I was destined to smack across the face less than a year later) kept humiliating me in front of the whole team. He didn’t understand why I had gone from being an okay-but-not-very-aggressive center-back to a complete and utter failure. All he could see was that I wasn’t trying hard enough.