Darius the Great Is Not Okay(36)

Mom sipped her tea and let out a long, contented sigh. She ran the fingers of her left hand through my hair and stared at the Bahrami Family Portrait Gallery until she found a photo of my tenth birthday party.

“Your hair,” she said.

When I was ten, I had decided I wanted to wear my hair like Lt. Commander Data, the Enterprise’s android operations officer. Every morning, Mom helped me blow dry my hair and brush it back into perfectly straight lines, and then gel it until it was as stiff as a bicycle helmet.

“The Android Look was not a good one for me.”

Mom laughed.

“What are we going to do for your birthday this year?”

“Um. I dunno.”

My birthday was April 2, which was the day before we left Iran.

According to Mom, even though I was born on April 2, she went into labor with me on April Fools’ Day.

When her water broke, and she told Dad, he thought she was joking.

It wasn’t until she got in the car without him that Dad realized it was really happening.

Sometimes Mom said I was her April Fools’ Joke.

I knew—without her saying—that she didn’t realize how bad it made me feel.



* * *





When I took my teacup/glass to the kitchen, Babou had his nose in the cupboard.

“Darioush. What is this?” He pulled out the FTGFOP1 First Flush Darjeeling and shook the tin around.

“It’s a gift. For having us here.”

“This is tea?” He popped open the tin and peered in. “This is not Persian tea. I will teach you how we make Persian tea.”

I already knew how to damn Persian tea with hell.

“Um.”

“Come. Darioush.” Babou grabbed the teapot off the stove—it was nearly empty—and dumped the dregs into the sink. “We will make it fresh.”

Babou rinsed out the pot once and banged it on the counter in front of me. The back of my neck prickled.

Having my foreskin compared to a turban was still the most humiliating moment of my life, but being taught how to make Persian tea—when I had been making it for years—came in a close second.

“We put the tea in like this,” he said, scooping loose tea from the huge frosted glass jar on the counter. The leaves were black, short, and sharp, but they were bursting with fragrance. Bergamot, mostly—kind of lemony—but there was something else in there too, something I couldn’t place. It was earthy, kind of like feet (not Cool Ranch Doritos), but kind of like the wet mulch in the flower beds outside of Chapel Hill High School’s student entrance.

I leaned over the pot to get a better whiff, but Babou pushed me back.

“What are you doing? This is for drinking, not for smelling.”

“Uh.”

Tea—good tea, at least—was for smelling too.

When I took cupping classes at Rose City Teas, we always had to smell the tea leaves both before and after they had been steeped. Not that I could ever admit to taking cupping classes. Charles Apatan, Manager of the Tea Haven at the Shoppes at Fairview Court, would have called that elitist too.

“Four scoops,” Babou said. “And we crush the hel. You know hel?”

“Cardamom.”

“Yes.” He shook out five green pods from a smaller frosted glass jar. “We crush it like this.” He rolled the bottom of the teapot around on the cardamom pods to pop them open, then scooped them up and dropped them in with the tea leaves. “Cover it with water.”

Babou grabbed the kettle. The lid was still off, from where the teapot had been sitting. Steam billowed around his hand like the scalding breath of Smaug the Ever-Boiling, but Ardeshir Bahrami’s skin was part dragon hide. He filled the teapot, flipped the lid closed, then put it and the kettle back on the burner.

“Now we let it sit.”

“Dam it.”

“Yes. Ten minutes.”

“Okay.”

“Not before. It will be too light.”

“Okay.”

“Now you know. Next time you can make it.”

“Okay.”

Babou made me stand with him in a Level Five Awkward Silence while the tea dammed.

It was upgraded to a Level Six Awkward Silence when Dad came in to take his medicine. He glanced back and forth between me and Babou for a second.

“You okay, Darius?” he asked, which broke the silence, but not the awkwardness.

I nodded.

Dad shook out his pills and filled a glass of water.

Babou’s mustache twitched. “Stephen,” he said, “you take these pills too?”

Dad dry-swallowed and then drank his water—the entire glass—in one long gulp. He almost blushed.

Almost.

“Yes,” he said.

And then he said, “Hey. Is that tea ready?”

I glanced at the timer on my phone.

“Another two minutes.”

“Mind pouring me one? I’ll get Star Trek set up in the living room.”

“What about the censors?”

“I’ve got the whole season on my iPad.”

It shouldn’t have surprised me. übermensches were known for their foresight.

But I honestly had not expected Stephen Kellner to bring it up on his own.