“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 if she came home from work tomorrow and someone hadn’t already made dinner for her we were both going to get our asses kicked—and I was only forty percent sure she was joking.
Navid looked annoyed and I almost started laughing when my mom turned on me and said, “How’s school?”
That wiped the smile off my face pretty quickly. But I knew she wasn’t asking about my social life. My mom wanted to know about my grades. I’d been in school for less than a month and she was already asking about my grades.
“School’s fine,” I said.
She nodded, and then she was gone. Always moving, doing, surviving.
I turned to my brother. “So?”
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we’re going to meet after school.”
“And if we get a teacher to supervise,” Carlos said, “we could make it an official club on campus.”
“Nice.” I beamed at my brother.
“I know, right?”
“So, uh, small detail,” I said, frowning. “Something I think you might’ve forgotten—?”
Navid raised an eyebrow.
“Who’s going to teach us to breakdance?”
“I am,” Navid said, and smiled.
My brother had a bench press in his bedroom that took up half the floor. He found it, disassembled and rusted, next to a dumpster one day, and he hauled it back to one of our old apartments, fixed it, spray-painted it, and slowly amassed a collection of weights to go with it. He dragged that thing around with us everywhere we moved. He loved to train, my brother. To run. To box. He used to take gymnastic classes until they got to be too expensive, and I think he secretly wanted to be a personal trainer. He’d been working out since he was twelve; he was all muscle and virtually no body fat, and I knew this because he liked to update me on his body-fat percentage on a regular basis. Once, when I’d said, “Good for you,” he’d pinched my arm and pursed his lips and said, “Not bad, not bad, but you could stand to build more muscle,” and he’d been forcing me to work out with him and his bench press ever since.
So when he said he wanted to teach us how to breakdance, I believed him.
But things were about to get weird.
3
Three
It happened a lot, right? In high school? Lab partners. That shit. I hated that shit. It was always an ordeal for me, the awkward, agonizing embarrassment of having no one to work with, having to talk to the teacher quietly at the end of class to tell her you don’t have a partner, could you work by yourself, would that be possible, and she’d say no, she’d smile beatifically, she’d think she was doing you a favor by making you the third in a pair that had been very excited about working the hell alone, Jesus Christ—
Well, it didn’t happen that way this time.
This time God parted the heavens and slapped some sense into my teacher who made us partner off at random, selecting pairs based on our seats, and that was how I found myself in the sudden position of being ordered to skin a dead cat with the guy who hit me in the shoulder with his bio book on the first day of school.
His name was Ocean.
People took one look at my face and they expected my name to be strange, but one look at this dude’s very Ken-Barbie face and I had not expected his name to be Ocean.
“My parents are weird,” was all he said by way of explanation.
I shrugged.
We skinned the dead cat in silence, mostly because it was disgusting and no one wanted to narrate the experience of cutting into sopping flesh that stank of formaldehyde, and all I could think was that high school was so stupid, and what the hell were we doing, why was this a requirement oh my God this was so sick, so sick, I couldn’t believe we had to work on the same dead cat for two months—
“I can’t stay long, but I have a little time after school,” Ocean said. It felt like a sudden statement, but I realized only then that he’d been talking for a while; I was so focused on this flimsy scalpel in my hand that I hadn’t noticed.
I looked up. “Excuse me?”
He was filling out his lab sheet. “We still have to write a report for today’s findings,” he said, and glanced up at the clock. “But the bell is about to ring. So we should probably finish this after school.” He looked at me. “Right?”
“Oh. Well. I can’t meet after school.”
Ocean went a little pink around the ears. “Oh,” he said. “Right. I get it. Are you— I mean, are you not allowed, to, like—”
“Wow,” I said, my eyes going wide. “Wow.” I shook my head, washed my hands, and sighed.
“Wow what?” he said quietly.
I looked at him. “Listen, I don’t know what you’ve already decided about what you think my life is like, but I’m not about to be sold off by my parents for a pile of goats, okay?”