“Herd of goats,” he said, clearing his throat. “It’s a herd—”
“Whatever the hell kind of goats, I don’t care.”
He flinched.
“I just happen to have shit to do after school.”
“Oh.”
“So maybe we can figure this out some other way,” I said. “Okay?”
“Oh. Okay. What, uh, what are you doing after school?”
I’d been stuffing my things into my backpack when he asked the question, and I was so caught off guard I dropped my pencil case. I reached down to grab it. When I stood up he was staring at me.
“What?” I said. “Why do you care?”
He looked really uncomfortable now. “I don’t know.”
I studied him just long enough to analyze the situation. Maybe I was being a little too hard on Ocean with the weird parents. I shoved my pencil case into my backpack and zipped the whole thing away. Adjusted the straps over my shoulders. “I’m joining a breakdancing crew,” I said.
Ocean frowned and smiled at the same time. “Is that a joke?”
I rolled my eyes. The bell rang.
“I have to go,” I said.
“But what about the lab work?”
I mulled over my options and finally just wrote down my phone number. I handed it to him. “You can text me. We’ll work on it tonight.”
He stared at the piece of paper.
“But be careful with that,” I said, nodding at the paper, “because if you text me too much, you’ll have to marry me. It’s the rules of my religion.”
He blanched. “Wait. What?”
I was almost smiling. “I have to go, Ocean.”
“Wait— No, seriously— You’re joking, right?”
“Wow,” I said, and I shook my head. “Bye.”
My brother, as promised, had managed to get a teacher to sign off on the whole breakdancing thing. We’d have paperwork by the end of the week to make the club official, which meant that, for the first time in my life, I’d be involved in an extracurricular activity, which felt strange. Extracurricular activities weren’t really my thing.
Still, I was over the goddamn moon.
I’d always wanted to do something like this. Breakdancing was something I’d admired forever and always from afar; I’d watched b-girls perform in competitions and I thought they looked so cool—so strong. I wanted to be like them. But breakdancing wasn’t like ballet; it wasn’t something you could look up in the yellow pages. There weren’t breakdancing schools, not where I lived. There weren’t retired breakdancers just lying around, waiting for my parents to pay them in Persian food to teach me to perfect a flare. I wasn’t sure I’d have been able to do something like this if it weren’t for Navid. He’d confessed to me, last night, that he’d been secretly learning and practicing on his own these last couple of years, and I was blown away by how much he’d progressed all by himself. Of the two of us, he was the one who’d really taken our dream seriously—and the realization made me both proud of him and disappointed in myself.
Navid was taking a risk.
We moved around so much that I felt like I could never make plans anymore. I never made commitments, never joined school clubs. Never bought a yearbook. I never memorized phone numbers or street names or learned anything more than was absolutely necessary about the town I lived in. There didn’t seem to be a point. Navid had struggled with this, too, in his own way, but he said he was done waiting for the right moment. He would be graduating this year, and he finally wanted to give breakdancing a shot before he went off to college and everything changed. I was proud of him.
I waved when I walked into our first practice.
We were meeting in one of the dance rooms inside the school’s gym, and my brother’s three new friends looked me up and down again, even though we’d already met. They seemed to be assessing me.
“So,” Carlos said. “You break?”
“Not yet,” I said, feeling suddenly self-conscious.
“That’s not true.” My brother stepped forward and smiled at me. “Her uprock isn’t bad and she does a decent six-step.”
“But I don’t know any power moves,” I said.
“That’s okay. I’m going to teach you.”
It was then that I sat down and wondered whether Navid wasn’t doing this whole thing just to throw me a bone. Maybe I was imagining it, but for the first time in a long while, my brother seemed to be mine again, and I didn’t realize until just that moment how much I’d missed him.
He was dyslexic, my brother. When he started middle school and began failing every subject, I finally realized that he and I hated school for very different reasons. Words and letters never made sense to him like they did to me. And it wasn’t until two years ago when he was threatened with expulsion that he finally told me the truth.
Screamed it, actually.
My mom had ordered me to help him with his homework. We couldn’t afford a tutor, so I would have to do, and I was pissed. Tutoring my older brother was not how I wanted to spend my free time. So when he refused to do the work, I got angry.
“Just answer the question,” I’d snap at him. “It’s simple reading comprehension. Read the paragraph and summarize, in a couple of sentences, what it was about. That’s it. It’s not rocket science.”
He refused.
I pushed.
He refused.
I insulted him.
He insulted me back.
I insulted him more.
“Just answer the goddamn question why are you so lazy what the hell is wrong with you—”
And finally he just exploded.
That was the day I learned that my brother, my beautiful, brilliant older brother, couldn’t make sense of words and letters the way that I could. He’d spend half an hour reading a paragraph over and over again and even then, he didn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t craft sentences. He struggled, tremendously, to translate his thoughts into words.
So I started teaching him how.
We worked together every day for hours, late into the night, until one day he could put sentences together by himself. Months later he was writing paragraphs. It took a year, but he finally wrote his own research paper. And the thing no one ever knew was that I did all his schoolwork in the interim. All his writing assignments. I wrote every paper for him until he could do it on his own.
I thought maybe this was his way of saying thanks. I mean, it almost certainly wasn’t, but I couldn’t help but wonder why else he’d take this chance on me. The other guys he’d collected—Jacobi, Carlos, and Bijan—already had experience in other crews. None of them were experts, but they weren’t novices, either. I was the one who needed the most work, and Navid was the only one who didn’t seem irritated about it.
Carlos, in particular, wouldn’t stop looking at me. He seemed skeptical that I’d end up any good, and he told me so. He wasn’t even mean about it, just matter of fact.
“What?” I said. “Why not?”
He shrugged. But he was staring at my outfit.
I’d switched into some of the only gym clothes I owned—a pair of slim sweatpants and a thin hoodie—but I was also wearing a different scarf; it was made of a light, cotton material that I’d tied up into a turban style, and this seemed to distract him.