A Very Large Expanse of Sea - Tahereh Mafi Page 0,73
told Ocean to go away after he followed me out of Mr. Jordan’s class. If only I hadn’t texted him later that night. If only I’d never agreed to talk to him at lunch. If only I’d never gone with Ocean to his car maybe he never would’ve kissed me and maybe then I wouldn’t have known, I wouldn’t have known what it was like to be with him and none of this would’ve happened and God, sometimes I really wished I could go back in time and erase all the moments that led to this one. I could’ve saved us both all this trouble. All this heartache.
Ocean stopped texting me on week two.
The pain became a drumbeat; a rhythm I could write a song to. It was always there, stark and steady, rarely abating. I learned to drown out the sound during the day, but at night it screamed through the hole in my chest.
32
Thirty-Two
Yusef had become a good friend of Navid’s, and I’d been completely unaware of this until he started showing up to our breakdancing practices. Apparently Navid had sold him on the art of breakdancing, and he was now interested in learning.
We were practicing in the far corner of a rarely frequented Jack in the Box parking lot when Yusef first showed up, and I was upside down when I saw him. Navid had been in the middle of teaching me to spin on my head, and when he let go of my legs to say hi, I fell over on my ass.
“Oh my God,” I shouted, “What the hell, Navid—”
I shucked off my helmet, readjusted my scarf, and tried to sit up with some dignity.
Navid only shrugged. “You have to work on your balance.”
“Hey,” Yusef said, and smiled at me. His eyes lit up; his whole face seemed to shine. Smiling was an objectively good look for him. “I didn’t know you’d be here, too.”
“Yeah,” I said, and tugged absently at my sweater. I tried to smile back but wasn’t really feeling it, so I waved. “Welcome.”
We spent the rest of the week together, all six of us. It was nice. Carlos and Bijan and Jacobi had somehow become my friends, too, which was comforting. They never really talked to me about what happened with Ocean, even though I knew they knew, but they were kind to me in other ways. They told me they cared without ever saying the words. And Yusef was just—cool. Friendly.
Easy.
It was kind of amazing, actually, not to have to explain everything to him all the time. Yusef wasn’t terrified of girls in hijab; they didn’t perplex him. He didn’t require a manual to navigate my mind. My feelings and choices didn’t require constant explanations.
He was never weird with me.
He never asked me dumb questions. He never wondered aloud whether or not I had to shower with that thing on. One day, last year—at a different high school—I was sitting in math class and this guy I barely knew wouldn’t stop staring at me. At all. Fifteen minutes passed and finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I spun around, ready to tell him to go to hell, when he said,
“Hey, okay, so—what if you were having sex and that thing just, like, fell off your head? What would you do then?”
Yusef never asked me questions like that.
It was nice.
He started hanging out at our house all the time, actually. He’d come over after practice to eat and play video games with my brother and he was always really, really nice. Yusef was the obvious choice for me, I knew that. I think he knew that, too, but he never said anything about it. He’d just look at me a little longer than most people did. He’d smile at me a little more than most people did. He waited, I think, to see if I’d make a move.
I didn’t.
On New Year’s Eve I sat in the living room with my dad, who was reading a book. My dad was always reading. He read before work in the mornings and every evening before bed. I often thought he had the mind of a mad genius and the heart of a philosopher. I was staring at him that night, and staring into a cold cup of tea, thinking.
“Baba,” I said.
“Hmm?” He turned a page.
“How do you know if you’ve done the right thing?”
My dad’s head popped up. He blinked at me and closed his book. Removed his glasses. He looked me in the