But there it was.
I hadn’t expected much when we moved here, but I was still sorry to discover that this school seemed no better than my last one. I was stuck in another small town, trapped in another universe populated by the kind of people who’d only ever seen faces like mine on their evening news, and I hated it. I hated the exhausting, lonely months it took to settle into a new school; I hated how long it took for the kids around me to realize I was neither terrifying nor dangerous; I hated the pathetic, soul-sucking effort it took to finally make a single friend brave enough to sit next to me in public. I’d had to relive this awful cycle so many times, at so many different schools, that sometimes I really wanted to put my head through a wall. All I wanted from the world anymore was to be perfectly unremarkable. I wanted to know what it was like to walk through a room and be stared at by no one. But a single glance around campus deflated any hopes I might’ve had for blending in.
The student body was, for the most part, a homogenous mass of about two thousand people who were apparently in love with basketball. I’d already walked past dozens of posters—and a massive banner hung over the front doors—celebrating a team that wasn’t even in season yet. There were oversize black-and-white numbers taped to hallway walls, signs screaming at passersby to count down the days until the first game of the season.
I had no interest in basketball.
Instead, I’d been counting the number of dipshit things people had said to me today. I’d been holding strong at fourteen until I made my way to my next class and some kid passing me in the hall asked if I wore that thing on my head because I was hiding bombs underneath and I ignored him, and then his friend said that maybe I was secretly bald and I ignored him, and then a third one said that I was probably, actually, a man, and just trying to hide it and finally I told them all to fuck off, even as they congratulated one another on having drummed up these excellent hypotheses. I had no idea what these asswipes looked like because I never glanced in their direction, but I was thinking seventeen, seventeen, as I got to my next class way too early and waited, in the dark, for everyone else to show up.
These, the regular injections of poison I was gifted from strangers, were definitely the worst things about wearing a headscarf. But the best thing about it was that my teachers couldn’t see me listening to music.
It gave me the perfect cover for my earbuds.
Music made my day so much easier. Walking through the halls at school was somehow easier; sitting alone all the time was easier. I loved that no one could tell I was listening to music and that, because no one knew, I was never asked to turn it off. I’d had multiple conversations with teachers who had no idea I was only half hearing whatever they were saying to me, and for some reason this made me happy. Music seemed to steady me like a second skeleton; I leaned on it when my own bones were too shaken to stand. I always listened to music on the iPod I’d stolen from my brother and, here—as I did last year, when he first bought the thing—I walked to class like I was listening to the soundtrack of my own shitty movie. It gave me an inexplicable kind of hope.
When my last class of the day had finally assembled, I was already watching my teacher on mute. My mind wandered; I kept checking the clock, desperate to escape. Today, the Fugees were filling the holes in my head, and I stared at my pencil case, turning it over and over in my hands. I was really into mechanical pencils. Like, nice ones. I had a small collection, actually, that I’d gotten from an old friend from four moves ago; she’d brought them back for me from Japan and I was mildly obsessed. The pencils were delicate and colorful and glittery and they’d come with a set of adorable erasers and this really cute case with a cartoon picture of a sheep on it, and the sheep said Do not make light of me just because I am a sheep, and I’d always thought it was so funny and strange and I was remembering this now, smiling a little, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. Hard.
“What?” I turned around as I said it, speaking too loudly by accident.
Some dude. He looked startled.
“What?” I said quietly, irritated now.
He said something but I couldn’t hear him. I tugged the iPod out of my pocket and hit pause.
“Uh.” He blinked at me. Smiled, but seemed confused about it. “You’re listening to music under there?”
“Can I help you?”
“Oh. No. No, I just bumped your shoulder with my book. By accident. I was trying to say sorry.”
“Okay.” I turned back around. I hit play on my music again.
The day passed.
People had butchered my name, teachers hadn’t known what the hell to do with me, my math teacher looked at my face and gave a five-minute speech to the class about how people who don’t love this country should just go back to where they came from and I stared at my textbook so hard it was days before I could get the quadratic equation out of my head.
Not one of my classmates spoke to me, no one but the kid who accidentally assaulted my shoulder with his bio book.
I wished I didn’t care.
I walked home that day feeling both relieved and dejected. It took a lot out of me to put up the walls that kept me safe from heartbreak, and at the end of every day I felt so withered by the emotional exertion that sometimes my whole body felt shaky. I was trying to steady myself as I made my way down the quiet stretch of sidewalk that would carry me home—trying to shake this heavy, sad fog from my head—when a car slowed down just long enough for a lady to shout at me that I was in America now, so I should dress like it, and I was just, I don’t know, I was so goddamn tired I couldn’t even drum up the enthusiasm to be angry, not even as I offered her a full view of my middle finger as she drove away.
Two and a half more years, was all I could think.
Two and a half more years until I could get free from this panopticon they called high school, these monsters they called people. I was desperate to escape the institution of idiots. I wanted to go to college, make my own life. I just had to survive until then.
2
Two
My parents were actually pretty great, as far as human beings went. They were proud Iranian immigrants who worked hard, all day, to make my life—and my brother’s life—better. Every move we made was to bring us into a better neighborhood, into a bigger house, into a better school district with better options for our future. They never stopped fighting, my parents. Never stopped striving. I knew they loved me. But you have to know, right up front, that they had zero sympathy for what they considered were my unremarkable struggles.
My parents never talked to my teachers. They never called my school. They never threatened to call some other kid’s mother because her son threw a rock at my face. People had been shitting on me for having the wrong name/race/religion and socioeconomic status since as far back as I could remember, but my life had been so easy in comparison to my parents’ own upbringing that they genuinely couldn’t understand why I didn’t wake up singing every morning. My dad’s personal story was so insane—he’d left home, all alone, for America when he was sixteen—that the part where he was drafted to go to war in Vietnam actually seemed like a highlight. When I was a kid and would tell my mom that people at school were mean to me, she’d pat me on the head and tell me stories about how she’d lived through war and an actual revolution, and when she was fifteen someone cracked open her skull in the middle of the street while her best friend was gutted like a fish so, hey, why don’t you just eat your Cheerios and walk it off, you ungrateful American child.
I ate my Cheerios. I didn’t talk about it.
I loved my parents, I really did. But I never talked to them about my own pain. It was impossible to compete for sympathy with a mother and father who thought I was lucky to attend a school where the teachers only said mean things to you and didn’t actually beat the shit out of you.
So I never said much anymore.
I’d come home from school and shrug through my parents’ many questions about my day. I’d do my homework; I’d keep myself busy. I read a lot of books. It’s such a cliché, I know, the lonely kid and her books, but the day my brother walked into my room and chucked a copy of Harry Potter at my head and said, “I won this at school, looks like something you’d enjoy,” was one of the best days of my life. The few friends I’d made who didn’t live exclusively on paper had collapsed into little more than memories and even those were fading fast. I’d lost a lot in our moves—things, stuff, objects—but nothing hurt as much as losing people.