A Very Large Expanse of Sea. Tahereh Mafi
he woke up to discover he was cool and handsome and I was not, that in fact my very existence scared the crap out of people, and, I don’t know, we lost touch. It wasn’t on purpose. He just always had people to see, things to do, girls to call, and I didn’t. I liked my brother, though. Loved him, even. He was a good guy when he wasn’t annoying the shit out of me.
I survived the first three weeks at my new school with very little to report. It was unexciting. Tedious. I interacted with people on only the most basic, perfunctory levels, and otherwise spent most of my time listening to music. Reading. Flipping through Vogue. I was really into complicated fashion that I could never afford and I spent my weekends scouring thrift stores, trying to find pieces that were reminiscent of my favorite looks from the runway, looks that I would later, in the quiet of my bedroom, attempt to re-create. But I was only mediocre with a sewing machine; I did my best work by hand. Even so, I kept breaking needles and accidentally stabbing myself and showing up to school with too many Band-Aids on my fingers, prompting my teachers to shoot me even weirder looks than usual. Still, it kept me distracted. It was only the middle of September and I was already struggling to give even the vaguest shit about school.
After another exhilarating day at the panopticon I collapsed onto the couch. My parents weren’t home from work yet, and I didn’t know where my brother was. I sighed, turned on the television, and tugged my scarf off my head. Pulled the ponytail free and ran a hand through my hair. Settled back onto the couch.
There were Matlock reruns on TV every afternoon at exactly this hour, and I was not embarrassed to admit out loud that I loved them. I loved Matlock. It was a show that was created even before I was born, about a really old, really expensive lawyer named Matlock who solved criminal cases for a ton of money. These days it was popular only with the geriatric crowd, but this didn’t bother me. I often felt like a very old person trapped in a young person’s body; Matlock was my people. All I needed was a bowl of prunes or a cup of applesauce to finish off the look, and I was beginning to wonder if maybe we had some stashed somewhere in the fridge when I heard my brother come home.
At first I didn’t think anything of it. He shouted a hello to the house and I made a noncommittal noise; Matlock was being awesome and I couldn’t be bothered to look away.
“Hey—didn’t you hear me?”
I popped my head up. Saw my brother’s face.
“I brought some friends over,” he was saying, and even then I didn’t quite understand, not until one of the guys walked into the living room and I stood up so fast I almost fell over.
“What the hell, Navid?” I hissed, and grabbed my scarf. It was a comfortable, pashmina shawl that was normally very easy to wear, but I fumbled in the moment, feeling flustered, and somehow ended up shoving it onto my head. The guy just smiled at me.
“Oh—don’t worry,” he said quickly. “I’m like eighty percent gay.”
“That’s nice,” I said, irritated, “but this isn’t about you.”
“This is Bijan,” Navid said to me, and he could hardly contain his laughter as he nodded at the new guy, who was so obviously Persian I almost couldn’t believe it; I didn’t think there were other Middle Eastern people in this town. But Navid was now laughing at my face and I realized then that I must’ve looked ridiculous, standing there with my scarf bunched awkwardly on my head. “Carlos and Jacobi are—”
“Bye.”
I ran upstairs.
I spent a few minutes considering, as I paced the length of my bedroom floor, how embarrassing that incident had been. I felt flustered and stupid, caught off guard like that, but I finally decided that though the whole thing was kind of embarrassing, it was not so embarrassing that I could justify hiding up here for hours without food. So I tied my hair back, carefully reassembled myself—I didn’t like pinning my scarf in place, so I usually wrapped it loosely around my head, tossing the longer ends over my shoulders—and reemerged.
When I walked into the living room, I discovered the four boys sitting on the couch and eating, what looked like, everything in our pantry. One of them had actually found a bag of prunes and was currently engaged in stuffing them in his mouth.
“Hey.” Navid glanced up.
“Hi.”
The boy with the prunes looked at me. “So you’re the little sister?”
I crossed my arms.
“This is Carlos,” Navid said. He nodded at the other guy I hadn’t met, this really tall black dude, and said, “That’s Jacobi.”
Jacobi waved an unenthusiastic hand without even looking in my direction. He was eating all the rosewater nougat my mom’s sister had sent her from Iran. I doubted he even knew what it was.
Not for the first time, I was left in awe of the insatiable appetite of teenage boys. It grossed me out in a way I couldn’t really articulate. Navid was the only one who wasn’t eating anything at the moment; instead, he was drinking one of those disgusting protein shakes.
Bijan looked me up and down and said, “You look better.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “How long are you guys going to be here?”
“Don’t be rude,” Navid said without looking up. He was now on his knees, messing with the VCR. “I wanted to show these guys Breakin ’.”
I was more than a little surprised.
Breakin ’ was one of my favorite movies.
I couldn’t remember how our obsession started, exactly, but my brother and I had always loved breakdancing videos. Movies about breakdancing; hours-long breakdancing competitions from around the world; whatever, anything. It was a thing we shared—a love of this forgotten sport—that had often brought us together at the end of the day. We’d found this movie, Breakin ’, at a flea market a few years ago, and we’d watched it at least twenty times already.
“Why?” I said. I sat down in an armchair, curled my legs up underneath me. I wasn’t going anywhere. Breakin ’ was one of the few things I enjoyed more than Matlock. “What’s the occasion?”
Navid turned back. Smiled at me. “I want to start a breakdancing crew.”
I stared at him. “Are you serious?”
Navid and I had talked about this so many times before: what it would be like to breakdance—to really learn and perform—but we’d never actually done anything about it. It was something I’d thought about for years.
Navid stood up then. He smiled wider. I knew he could tell I was super excited. “You in?”
“Fuck yeah,” I said softly.
My mom walked into the room at that exact moment and whacked me in the back of the head with a wooden spoon.
“Fosh nadeh,” she snapped. Don’t swear.
I rubbed the back of my head. “Damn, Ma,” I said. “That shit hurt.”
She whacked me in the back of the head again.
“Damn.”
“Who’s this?” she said, and nodded at my brother’s new friends.
Navid made quick work of the introductions while my mother took inventory of all that they’d eaten. She shook her head. “Een chiyeh? ” she said. What’s this? And then, in English: “This isn’t food.”
“It’s all we had,” Navid said to her. Which was sort of true. My parents never, ever bought junk food. We never had chips or cookies lying around. When I wanted a snack my mom would hand me a cucumber.
My mother sighed dramatically at Navid’s comment and started scrounging up actual food for us. She then said something in Farsi about how she’d spent all these years teaching her kids how to cook and