but guys had been asking me this question forever. It was always the same question, and they never seemed to grow out of it.
it’s brown. kind of long.
And then he called me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” I smiled.
“I like that I can imagine where you are now,” he said. “What your room looks like.”
“I still can’t believe you were here today.”
“Yeah, thanks for that, by the way. Your parents are amazing. That was really fun.”
“I’m glad it wasn’t excruciating,” I said, but I felt sad, suddenly. I didn’t know how to tell him that I wished his mom would get her shit together. “My parents are officially in love with you, by the way.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m sure they’d trade me in for you any day of the week.”
He laughed. And then he didn’t say anything for a while.
“Hey,” I finally said.
“Yeah?”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.” But he sounded a little out of breath.
“Are you sure?”
“I was just thinking about how your brother has terrible timing.”
I was only a beat behind; it took me a second, but I suddenly understood what he was trying to say.
I’d never answered his question.
And I was suddenly nervous. “What did you mean,” I said, “when you asked what I would do? Why did you phrase the question like that?”
“I guess,” he said, and took a sharp breath, “I was just wondering if it would scare you away.”
There was a part of me that adored his uncertainty. How he seemed to have no idea that I was just as far gone as he was.
“No,” I said softly. “It wouldn’t scare me away.”
“No?”
“No,” I said. “Not a chance.”
27
Twenty-Seven
Ramadan was over. We celebrated, we exchanged gifts, and Navid devoured the contents of our entire kitchen. The fall semester was quickly coming to a close. We were tipping over into the second week of December, and I’d managed to keep some level of distance in place between myself and Ocean for as long as either of us could bear it.
It had been almost two months since the day he’d kissed me in his car.
I couldn’t believe it.
In the quiet, relative peace that surrounded our careful efforts to be inconspicuous, time sped up. Flew by. I’d never been so happy, maybe, ever. Ocean was fun. He was sweet and he was smart and we never ran out of things to talk about. He didn’t have a lot of free hours, because basketball was a demanding extracurricular activity and a massive time-suck, but we always found a way to make it work.
I was happy with the compromise we’d made. It was safe here. Secretive, yes, but it was safe. No one knew our business. People had finally stopped gawking at me in the hallways.
But Ocean wanted more.
He didn’t like hiding. He said it made it seem like we were doing something wrong, and he hated it. He insisted, over and over again, that he didn’t care what other people thought. He didn’t care, he said, and he didn’t want a bunch of idiots to have this much control over his life.
Honestly, I couldn’t disagree with him.
I was tired of hiding, too; I was tired of ignoring him at school, tired of always giving in to my cynicism. But Ocean was a lot more visible than even he knew or understood. Once I started paying closer attention to him—and to his world—the subtle gradations of his life began to come into focus. Ocean had ex-girlfriends at this school. Old teammates. Rivalries. There were guys who were openly jealous of his success, and girls who hated him for being uninterested. More important: there were people who’d built their careers on the back of the high school basketball team.
I knew by now that Ocean was really good at basketball, but I didn’t know just how good until I started listening. He was only a junior, but he was outperforming his teammates by a wide margin, and he was, as a result, attracting a lot of attention; people were talking about how he might be good enough to win all kinds of state and national Player of the Year awards—and not just him, but his coach, too.
It made me nervous.
Ocean had this quintessential all-American look, the kind of look that made it easy for girls to fall in love with him, for scouts to know where to place him, for the community to think of him, always and forever, as a good boy with great potential and a bright future. I tried to explain why my presence