Darius the Great Is Not Okay(30)

At me.

I thought I understood Sohrab.

I thought we were going to be friends.

How had I misjudged him so badly?

Maybe Dad was right.

Maybe I would always be a target.

Even for things I couldn’t help. Like being from America. Like having a foreskin.

Those things were normal back home, but not in Iran.

I would never fit in. Not anywhere.

I wiped my face to hide my sniffling while Sohrab and Hossein and Ali-Reza laughed about my penis in Farsi. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand them.

I didn’t bother with my hair. I scrubbed the grass off my shins, rinsed off at warp 9, then grabbed my borrowed towel and slunk out of the shower. I would have run if I hadn’t been worried about slipping on the wet floor.

The guys’ laughter followed me, bouncing off the tiles, between my ears, rattling around in my head.

I wanted to die.

I wasn’t allowed to say that, not out loud. The one time I did—and it was only hyperbole—Dad freaked out and threatened to send me to a hospital.

“Don’t ever joke about that, Darius.”

I didn’t really want to die, anyway. I just wanted to slip into a black hole and never come out.

I pulled my pants back on. I didn’t have any extra underwear. I hadn’t thought about that.

Was it wrong to go commando in Iran?

I was certain there had to be a Social Cue against that, but my options were limited.

And what was the point and purpose of following Social Cues, anyway? I was never going to fit in.

I pulled my shirt back on, fighting to get it over my wet hair and down my back.

“Oh.” Sohrab had come around the corner. I wiped at my face to make sure he couldn’t see anything. “Are you leaving, Darioush?”

“Yeah.” I hated that my voice still squeaked.

Bare feet slapped on the tiles as Ali-Reza and Hossein followed. “Khodahafes,” Hossein said.

And then Ali-Reza said, “Nice to meet you, Ayatollah.”

It was a new record for me: Less than forty-eight hours in Iran, and I already had a new nickname, one more humiliating than anything Trent Bolger and his Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy had ever come up with.

I dropped my borrowed towel on the floor, wiped my nose with the back of my hand, and made my escape.





STANDARD PARENTAL MANEUVER ALPHA



Dr. Howell says that crying is normal.

He says that it’s a healthy reaction.

He says it helps the body excrete stress hormones.

Having Hossein and Ali-Reza and Sohrab—Sohrab—make fun of my penis had me excreting a lot of stress hormones.

I was not ashamed of my penis. It’s just that Stephen Kellner isn’t circumcised, and even though it was ubiquitous in Iran, Mom thought it was important for the son to look like the father.

Like I said, we didn’t shower after physical education at Chapel Hill High School. And I wasn’t on any of Chapel Hill High School’s Sportsball Teams (Go Chargers), so I never had to shower after any practices.

And even if I had been on a team, the showers in the Chapel Hill High School locker room were individual stalls with curtains and everything.

I had never showered with other guys looking at me before.

Maybe my penis really was weird-looking.

Okay. I will admit I was pretty sure I was not weird-looking, because there was the Internet.

I knew I didn’t look any different.

Though I still hoped I was going to grow some more.

That’s normal.

Right?



* * *





The front door was locked, so I went around back. Babou was still at the kitchen table, sipping tea and eating tokhmeh, when I stepped inside. I wondered if he had been there the whole time, caught in a temporal causality loop while I was out playing soccer/non-American football and being humiliated for having an intact foreskin.

He spat out an empty shell and glanced at me as I struggled to toe my shoes off.

I had been in such a rush to leave, I had put Sohrab’s worn black Adidas back on, and they were much tighter on my Hobbit feet than my Vans.

I hated them.

“Darioush,” he grumbled. “Did you have fun? Did you win?”

“Um. Yeah. We won.”

“You played with Sohrab’s friends?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is Sohrab? He didn’t come back?”

I shook my head.

“Darioush-jan. You don’t want to invite him to dinner? Next time ask him over after you play.”

“I don’t think I’m going to play again.”

Not ever.

I couldn’t take any more penile humiliation.

Babou scooted his chair back and stared at me. “Eh? Why not?”

“Um.”

I could not tell my grandfather the boys had compared my penis to Iran’s Supreme Cleric.

“They don’t like me very much.”

“What?” Babou got up and took me by the shoulders. “Why do you think that, Darioush-jan? It’s probably a misunderstanding.”

It was the sort of thing Stephen Kellner would have said.

I blinked and blinked because I didn’t want Babou to witness my stress hormones build up to a containment breach.