Darius the Great Deserves Better - Adib Khorram Page 0,36

been your friend, you can’t conceive of why anyone would want to avoid him like a hull breach.

“I think I’m gonna head home. I need to shower anyway.” I stood and pulled my helmet on.

“Aww, come on.”

Another cascade failure.

Why would Chip want me to come along, anyway?

Chip reached his hand out, and I helped him up. “Maybe next time?” he asked, his eyebrows all perked up in hope.

“Maybe.”

Like if we ever found ourselves in mirror universe where people had goatees and inverted senses of morality.

“Cool.” Chip hopped onto his bike. “See you, Darius.”

“See you, Cyprian.”

He grinned at me and pedaled away.

I shook my head, wiped off my face, and headed home.

KOTAK MEKHAI

Grandma and Oma were at the dining room table when I got home, sipping mint tea and reading.

Oma was always reading mysteries—the more twisted, the better—while Grandma was into biographies.

I’d never managed to convince either of them to read any science fiction or fantasy. They said they preferred “real books.”

I don’t know why that made me so mad.

Neither of them looked up when I walked in. I pulled the door shut behind me, and they didn’t respond.

That aura of quiet unhappiness had returned to our house, an oppressive miasma that hung in the air like a coolant leak.

I cleared my throat and said, “Hi.”

“How’d it go today?” Oma said.

“We won.”

“Good. That makes three in a row, right?”

“Yeah. Gabe—that’s our forward—he even got a hat trick.”

Grandma whistled but kept reading.

“How about you?” Oma asked. “How’d you do?”

I shrugged. “The ball barely made it to me.”

“You should be more aggressive.”

That was something my old coach, from when I played as a kid, would say. Be aggressive.

Coach Bentley never said anything like that.

I really liked that about her.

“Where’s Laleh?” I asked.

Grandma sighed. “In her room. She’s been there most of the night.”

“How come?”

Oma folded down the page she was reading and closed her book. “She got into a fight at school today.”

First of all, I never folded pages—I always used bookmarks—and there was a moment where I wondered if Oma and I were even related to each other.

Second, Laleh had never been in a fight in her life. Not ever. What Oma said was impossible.

So I said, “What?”

And then I said, “Laleh’s never been in a fight before.”

Oma nodded. “She won’t tell us what happened.”

Grandma said, “Her teacher couldn’t get the full story either.”

So then I said, “Maybe she’ll talk to me.”

* * *

My sister never kept her door closed, not even at night. She always left it cracked open.

But when I went to see her, the door was all the way shut.

I guess I always knew there would be a point where she closed a door between us. When she would grow too tall for me to carry piggyback, or for Mom and Dad to tuck in at night.

I knocked, but there was no answer.

“Laleh? It’s me. Can I come in?”

“I guess,” she murmured.

I opened her door and poked my head into her room. The only light came from the night-light on her bedside table—this weird carousel-looking thing that played creepy tinkling music when you cranked a knob on it.

Laleh never used that feature, except on Halloween, when she would play the music and I would pretend to be terrified of it, and she would shriek with laughter at the way I cringed and flailed and hid under her blankets.

Laleh was already in bed, the lump of her facing away from me, toward the lamp.

I sat on the edge of her bed, and then kind of laughed at myself, because Mom and Dad always did that.

Standard Parental Maneuver Alpha.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Laleh mumbled.

“I’m not. Mom and Dad always sit like this when they come talk to me.”

Laleh didn’t say anything.

“You wanna tell me what happened?”

Nothing.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I got in trouble for hitting someone?”

At that, Laleh turned over, leaving her book open behind her. “You hit someone?”

“This guy named Vance Henderson.” I scrunched up my nose. “He always made fun of me, which was bad enough. But one time he started making fun of Mom. Her accent.”

Laleh scrunched up her face too.

“I know. So I gave him a kotak.”

Laleh giggled. “Kotak mekhai? Ba posta das?”

While we were in Iran, one of our cousins taught Laleh that phrase. It means “Do you want a slap? With the back of my hand?”

For months after we got home, she kept saying it to people whenever they annoyed her. And after a while she started saying it whenever she