Darius the Great Is Not Okay(33)
Sohrab had pants on, so I couldn’t tell if he pulled his socks all the way up—which was the fashion back home, if you were a Soulless Minion of Orthodoxy—or if he folded them over, like Dad used to do when he mowed the yard, before he delegated that duty to me.
I suspected Sohrab pulled them all the way up.
“Sohrab!” Mamou pulled him close and kissed him on both cheeks. My stomach churned. Mamou had no way of knowing that Sohrab had made fun of my foreskin only a few hours earlier. She didn’t know he’d called me Ayatollah Darioush. But I still felt the burn of jealousy behind my sternum.
I really hated myself for that.
I hated how petty I was.
Mamou started talking to Sohrab in rapid-fire Farsi. All I caught was “chai mekhai,” a phrase I had memorized because it meant “Do you want tea?”
“Nah, merci,” Sohrab said, and then something else I couldn’t follow. Whatever he said, it was magical, because Mamou didn’t even offer again.
He had defeated taarof in a single sentence.
“I’m sorry,” Mamou said, “I forgot.”
Sohrab squinted at her. I hated that he was squinting at my grandmother. “It’s fine. Thank you.”
“You’re fasting?” Laleh said from my side. She had snuck up to inspect our visitor.
“Yes. I can’t eat or drink until sunset.”
“Not even tea?”
“Not even tea.”
“Not even water?”
“Only if I get sick.”
I hadn’t realized Sohrab’s fast included water. I wondered if it was wise to work up a sweat playing soccer/non-American football if you couldn’t hydrate after.
Then I remembered the locker room, and I decided I didn’t care if Sohrab passed out from dehydration or not.
Dad cleared his throat from behind me.
“Oh. Uh. Dad, Laleh, this is Sohrab. We played soccer together. Football.”
Dad gave Sohrab a firm Teutonic handshake. Laleh looked up at Sohrab and then back to me. She could sense the tension hidden between us like a cloaked Romulan Warbird.
“I’m going to put these away,” I said, holding up my Vans. “Thanks.”
* * *
Sohrab followed me down the hall.
“Darioush. Wait.”
I kept going. The back of my neck was heating up. I didn’t want to start crying again. And if I did, I didn’t want Sohrab to see me.
He brushed my shoulder but I shrugged him off.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “About before.”
He followed me into my bedroom at the end of the hall and closed the door behind him.
“It’s fine.” I kept my back to him and took as long as I could to put my shoes away. I tucked the laces inside and lined them up perfectly parallel at the foot of my bed.
“No. It was not nice. I should not have said it. I should have stopped them.”
I sighed.
I wanted Sohrab to leave.
“It’s okay. I get it.”
Sometimes you’re just wrong about people.
“Thank you for bringing these back. They’re the only shoes I brought.”
“Darioush. Please.” Sohrab rested his palm on my shoulder. It was warm and tentative, like he thought I would pull away.
I thought I would too.
“I was . . .” He paused, and I looked over to see him swallow, his sharp Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “It was nice. You know? Not being the one that Ali-Reza was making fun of.”
I mean, I could understand where Sohrab was coming from.
It sucked being a target all the time.
“But he is not my friend, Darioush. Or Hossein. I’m not like them.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry. Really.”
Sohrab smiled—not a squinty one, but almost like a question—and I knew he really meant it.
“It’s okay. I just took it wrong is all.”
“No.” Sohrab squeezed my shoulder. “I was very rude. And I am sorry. Will you give me another chance?”
I thought I had been wrong about Sohrab.
But maybe I had been right.
Maybe Sohrab and I really were destined to be friends.
Maybe we were.
“Okay.”
Sohrab’s smile brightened into a squint. “Friends?”
I smiled too.
It was impossible not to.
“Friends.”
SINS OF THE FATHER
You can know things without them being said out loud.
I knew Sohrab and I were going to be friends for life.
Sometimes you can just tell that kind of thing.
I knew my dad wished I was more like him. Our problems went deeper than my hair and my weight. It was everything about me: the outfits I picked for school photos, the messiness of my bedroom, even how inaccurately I used to follow the directions on my LEGO sets.
Stephen Kellner was a firm believer in adhering to the included directions, which had been diligently prepared by a professional LEGO engineer. Designing my own models was tantamount to architectural blasphemy.
Another thing I knew:
I knew my sister, Laleh, wasn’t an accident.
A lot of people thought so, because she was eight years younger than me, and my parents weren’t “trying for another child,” which is kind of gross if you think about it. But she was not an accident.