Darius the Great Is Not Okay(54)

“Do you like this bread, Darioush-jan? Noon-e barbari?”

“Um. Yeah. Mom gets it from the Persian bakery sometimes.”

“You don’t make it at home?”

“Not really.”

“I’ll make some for you. You can put it in the freezer and take it home with you.”

“Maman!” Sohrab had reappeared in the doorway, dressed in real pants and a white polo shirt. He said something to his mom in Farsi, something about dinner, but it was too quick. “Come on, Darioush. Let’s go.”

“Um. Thank you,” I said to his mom. I followed Sohrab to the door and laced up my Vans.

There was something he wanted to show me.





THE KHAKI KINGDOM



We headed down Sohrab’s street, away from Mamou’s. A breeze had picked up, and the air smelled crisp and a little bit dusty.

As we passed an intersection, Sohrab pointed to our right.

“My school is about five kilometers that way.”

He put the accent on the ki in kilometers, instead of the lo, which was cool.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s okay.” He shrugged. “I have class with Ali-Reza and Hossein there.”

“Oh.”

No matter where you went to school, Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy were unavoidable.

We passed a long white wall, the backside of a row of shops. The sun shone off it.

I sneezed.

“But you have friends there too. Right?”

“Some. Not as good as you, Darioush.”

I smiled, but it turned into another sneeze.

“Sorry. Are they all Bahá’ís?”

“No. Only a few.” He chuckled. “Most people are not like Ali-Reza, Darioush. They aren’t so prejudiced.”

“Sorry.” My ears burned. “Your school is all boys. Right?”

“Yes.”

We reached a crosswalk. Sohrab chewed his cheek and looked at me while we waited for the cars to pass.

“So you don’t have a girlfriend, Darioush?”

I swallowed. “No.”

I tried to keep my voice neutral, but no matter how you answer that question, people will always read too much into it. The fire in my ears spread to my cheeks.

“How come?”

I didn’t know how to answer that.

It wasn’t like I could lie to Sohrab.

I think Sohrab realized how uncomfortable I was, though, because before I could say anything else, he said, “It’s okay. I don’t have one either.”

I almost smiled.

Almost.

He said, “It’s different here. Boys and girls don’t . . .”

He chewed on his sentence for a moment.

“There is not much interaction. Until we are older. Yazd is very conservative. You know?”

“Oh. I guess.”

I didn’t know. Not really.

But before I could ask, Sohrab looked away and pointed.

The khaki wall on our right had given way to a wide green park. Scrubby trees dotted the lawn, casting dappled shadows over the benches scattered around. A squat public bathroom stood in the corner, surrounded by a chain-link fence.

Who puts a fence around a bathroom?

The breeze came up again, stirring the grass. Sohrab closed his eyes and breathed in.

“This is our favorite park,” he said. “We come here for Sizdeh Bedar.”

Sizdeh Bedar is the thirteenth day after Nowruz, when Persians go for a picnic.

Persians are crazy about picnics, especially Sizdeh Bedar. Back home, every family makes too much of whatever dish they are most famous for—dolmeh and salad olivieh and kotlet—and we commandeer an entire park so there’s room for pretty much every Persian, Fractional or otherwise, in a fifty-mile radius.

Because Nowruz moves around every year, depending on the equinox, so does Sizdeh Bedar, which means it sometimes falls on my birthday. But somehow I could never manage to correctly calculate it.

“It’s April first this year. Right?”

Sohrab looked up as he did the calculations from the Iranian calendar to the Gregorian one.

“April two.”

“Oh. That’s my birthday.”

“You’ll still be here?”

I nodded.

“Good. We can celebrate both.”

Sohrab grabbed me by the shoulder and led me toward the bathroom.

“We play football here, sometimes. When the field is too full.”

“Oh.” I hoped we weren’t about to play soccer/non-American football. I wasn’t ready for that. “Cool.”

“Come on,” Sohrab said, leading me around the back of the squat building. “I want to show you something.”

Sohrab spared me a brief squinty smile, then stuck his fingers in the chain-link fence surrounding the bathroom and started to climb. The metal flexed and bowed under his slender weight as he wedged the toes of his sneakers into the diamond-shaped gaps.

“Come on!” he said again as he scrambled onto the bathroom’s roof.

I was heavier than Sohrab, and the fence’s structural integrity was highly dubious. I was certain it would experience a non-passive failure if I tried to climb it.

“Darioush!” Sohrab called. The roof clattered as he shifted his feet. “Come see!”