A Very Large Expanse of Sea

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?”

“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. And I was really 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 said, stepping forward. He grinned 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 started flunking out of 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 on a page. 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, especially, wouldn’t stop looking at me. He seemed deeply skeptical that I’d end up any good, and he told me so. He didn’t even seem 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.

Finally, he nodded at my head and said, “You can breakdance in that?”

My eyes widened. For some reason I was surprised. I don’t know why I’d thought these dudes would be marginally less stupid than all the other ones I’d known.

“Are you for real?” I said. “What a dick thing to say.”

He laughed and said, “I’m sorry, I’ve just never seen anyone try to breakdance like that before.”

“Wow,” I said, stunned. “I’ve literally never seen you take off that beanie, but you’re giving me shit for this ?”

Carlos looked surprised. He laughed harder. He tugged the beanie off his head and ran his hand through his hair. He had very black, springy curls that were slightly too long and kept falling in his face. He put the beanie back on. “All right,” he said. “All right. Okay. Sorry.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but he was smiling. “Seriously. I’m sorry. That was a dick thing to say. You’re right. I’m an asshole.”

“Clearly.”

Navid was laughing so hard. I suddenly hated everyone.

Jacobi shook his head and said, “Damn.”

“Wow,” I said. “You all suck.”

“Hey—” Bijan was in the middle of stretching his legs. He pretended to look hurt. “That’s not fair. Jacobi and I didn’t even say anything.”

“Yeah but you were thinking it, weren’t you?”

Bijan grinned.

“Navid,” I said, “your friends suck.”

“They’re a work in progress,” he said, and chucked a water bottle at Carlos, who dodged it easily.

Carlos was still laughing. He walked over to where I was sitting on the floor and offered me his hand.

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Really.”

I took his hand. He hauled me to my feet.

“All right,” he said. “Let me see that six-step I keep hearing about.”

I spent the rest of that day practicing simple skills: doing handstands and push-ups and trying to improve my uprock. An uprock was the dance you did while you were upright. Much of breakdancing was performed on the ground, but an uprock was given its own, special attention; it was what you did first—it was an introduction, an opportunity to set the stage—before you broke your body down, figuratively, into a downrock and the subsequent power moves and poses that generally constituted a single performance.

I knew how to do a very basic uprock. My footwork was simple, my movements fluid but uninspired. I had a natural feel for the beats in the music—could easily sync my movements to the rhythm—but that wasn’t enough. The best breakdancers had their own signature styles, and my moves were still generic. I knew this—had always known this—but the guys pointed it out to me anyway. We were talking, as a group, about what we knew and what we wanted to learn, and I was leaning back on my hands when my brother tapped my knuckles and said, “Let me see your wrists.”

I held out my hands.

He bent them forward and backward. “You’ve got really flexible wrists,” he said. He pressed my palm backward. “This doesn’t hurt?”

I shook my head.

He smiled, his eyes bright with excitement. “We’re going to teach you how to do the crab walk. That will be your signature power move.”

My eyes widened. The crab walk was exactly as strange as it sounded. It was nothing at all like the sort of thing they taught you in elementary school gym classes; instead, it was a move that, like much of breakdancing, challenged the basic rules of gravity. It required total core strength. You held your body weight up on your hands—your elbows tucked into your torso—and you walked. With your hands.

It was hard. Really hard.

“Cool,” I said.

Somehow, it had been the best day of high school I’d ever had.

Four

I didn’t end up getting home until around five, and by the time I’d finished showering my mom had already shouted at us several times that dinner was ready. I made my way downstairs even though I knew I had a bunch of worried, and later, exasperated, text messages from Ocean waiting for me on my phone, but only because I didn’t have the kind of parents who allowed me to ignore dinner—not even for homework. Ocean would have to wait.

Everyone was already assembled when I made it downstairs. My dad had his laptop out—the ethernet cable dragging all across the floor—and his reading glasses on his head; he waved me over when I walked into the room. He was reading an article about pickling cucumbers.

“Mibini? ” he was saying to me. Do you see? “Very easy.”

It didn’t look particularly easy to me, but I shrugged. My dad was a master of making things, and he was always trying to recruit me to join him in his projects, which I didn’t mind at all. In fact, it was kind of our thing.

I was nine the first time my dad took me to a hardware store, and I’d thought the place was so cool my brain just about exploded. I began daydreaming about going back there, about saving up the money I would’ve otherwise spent on Lisa Frank notebooks and instead purchasing a piece of plywood just to see what I could do with it. Later, my dad was the one who taught me how to work a needle and thread. He’d seen me stapling the cuffs of my jeans to keep them from dragging, and one night he showed me how to properly hem a pair of pants. He also taught me how to swing an ax to split firewood. How to change a flat tire.

But sometimes my dad’s mind worked so quickly I almost couldn’t keep up. My father’s father—my grandfather—had been an architect in Iran, responsible for designing some of the country’s most beautiful buildings, and I could see that same kind of brain in my dad. He devoured books even faster than I did; he carried them around with him everywhere. Wherever we’d lived, our garage became his workshop. He’d rebuild car engines, for fun. He built the table we were currently sitting around—it was a re-creation of a mid-century Danish style he’d always loved—and when my mom went back to school and needed a bag, my dad insisted on making one for her. He studied patterns. He bought the leather. And then he pieced it together for her, stitch by stitch. He still has a scar, spanning three of his fingers, where he accidentally sliced his skin open.

It was his idea of a romantic gesture.

Dinner was already on the table, slightly steaming. I’d been able to smell it from upstairs: the scents of buttery basmati rice and fesenjoon had flooded the whole house. Fesenjoon was a kind of stew made of walnut paste and pomegranate molasses, which sounds weird, I know, but it was so, so good. Most people made fesenjoon with chicken, but my late aunt had reinvented it with bite-size meatballs, and it had become a family recipe in her honor. There were also little side dishes of pickled vegetables and garlic yogurt and the still-warm disks of fresh bread that my dad baked every evening. There was a plate of fresh herbs and radishes and little towers of feta cheese. A bowl of dates. A cup of fresh baby walnuts. The samovar, gurgling quietly in the background.