My backpack sagged on my shoulders.
I had to call my dad.
“Darius? Is everything okay?”
Dad always said that. Not Hi, Darius, but Is everything okay?
“Hey. Can you come pick me up from work?”
“Did something happen?”
It was humiliating, telling my father about the blue rubber testicles, especially because I knew he would laugh.
“Really? You mean like truck nuts?”
“What are truck nuts?”
“People hook them on the hitch of their truck, so it looks like the truck has testicles.”
The back of my neck prickled.
In the course of our phone call, my father and I had used the word testicles more than was healthy for any father-son relationship.
“All right, I’ll be there in a bit. Did you get the goldfish?”
“Um.”
Dad breathed a Level Five Disappointed Sigh.
My ears burned. “I’ll go grab them now.”
* * *
“Hey, son.”
Dad got out of his car and helped me load my wheel-less, seat-less bike into the trunk of his Audi.
Stephen Kellner loved his Audi.
“Hi, Dad.”
“What happened to the truck nuts?”
“I threw them away.”
I did not need the reminder.
Dad pressed the button to close the trunk and got back in. I tossed my backpack onto the backseat and then slumped in the passenger seat with the goldfish suspended in their plastic prison between my legs.
“I almost didn’t believe you.”
“I know.”
It had taken him thirty minutes to come get me.
We only lived a ten-minute drive away.
“Sorry about your bike. Does security know who did it?”
I buckled my seat belt. “No. But I’m sure it was Trent Bolger.”
Dad put the Audi in drive and took off down the parking lot.
Stephen Kellner liked to drive much too fast, because his Audi had lots of horsepower and he could do that kind of thing: Accelerate to escape velocity, slam the brakes when he had to (in order to avoid running over a toddler holding his brand-new Build-a-Bear), and then accelerate again.
Thankfully, the Audi had all sorts of flashing lights and sensors, so it could sound Red Alert when a collision was imminent.
Dad kept his eyes on the road. “What makes you think it was Trent?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell my father the entire humiliating saga.
“Darius?”
Stephen Kellner never took no for an answer.
I told him about Trent and Chip, but only in the broadest strokes. I avoided mentioning Trent’s references to tea-bagging.
I did not want to talk to Stephen Kellner about testicles ever again.
“That’s it?” Dad shook his head. “How do you know it was them, then?”
I knew, but that never mattered to Stephen Kellner, Devil’s Advocate.
“Never mind, Dad.”
“You know, if you just stood up for yourself, they’d leave you alone.”
I sucked on the tassels of my hoodie.
Stephen Kellner didn’t understand anything about the sociopolitical dynamics of Chapel Hill High School.
As we turned onto the freeway, he said, “You need a haircut.”
I scratched the back of my head. “It’s not that long.” My hair barely touched my shoulders, though part of that was how it curled away at the ends.
That didn’t matter, though. Stephen Kellner had very short, very straight, very blond hair, and he had very blue eyes too.
My father was pretty much the Übermensch.
* * *
I did not inherit any of Dad’s good looks.
Well, people said I had his “strong jawline,” whatever that meant. But really, I mostly looked like Mom, with black, loosely curled hair and brown eyes.
Standard Persian.
Some people said Dad had Aryan looks, which always made him uncomfortable. The word Aryan used to mean noble—it’s an old Sanskrit word, and Mom says it’s actually the root word for Iran—but it means something different now.
Sometimes I thought about how I was half Aryan and half Aryan, but I guess that made me kind of uncomfortable too.
Sometimes I thought about how strange it was that a word could change its meaning so drastically.
Sometimes I thought about how I didn’t really feel like Stephen Kellner’s son at all.
THE DISTINGUISHED PICARD CRESCENT
Despite what boring Hobbits like Fatty Bolger might have thought, I did not go home and have falafel for dinner.
First of all, falafel is not really a Persian food. Its mysterious origins are lost to a prior age of this world. Whether it came from Egypt or Israel or somewhere else entirely, one thing is certain: Falafel is not Persian.
Second, I did not like falafel because I was categorically opposed to beans. Except jelly beans.
I changed out of my Tea Haven shirt and joined my family at the dinner table. Mom had made spaghetti and meat sauce—perhaps the least Persian food ever, though she did add a bit of turmeric to the sauce, which gave a slight orange cast to the oil in it.
Mom only ever cooked Persian food on the weekends, because pretty much every Persian menu was a complicated affair involving several hours of stewing, and she didn’t have the time to devote to a stew when she was overwhelmed with a Level Six Coding Emergency.
Mom was a UX designer at a firm in downtown Portland, which sounded incredibly cool. Except I didn’t really understand what it was that Mom actually did.
Dad was a partner in an architecture firm that mostly designed museums and concert halls and other “centerpieces for urban living.”
Most nights, we ate dinner at a round, marble-topped table in the corner of the kitchen, all four of us arranged in a little circle: Mom across from Dad, and me across from my little sister, Laleh, who was in second grade.
While I twirled spaghetti around my fork, Laleh launched into a detailed description of her day, including a complete play-by-play of the game of Heads Down, Thumbs Up they played after lunch, in which Laleh was “it” three different times.
She was only in second grade, with an even more Persian name than mine, and yet she was way more popular than I was.