“What? Why not?”

“Because you’re crazy intimidating,” he said. “And you don’t even see it. You don’t look at people, you don’t talk to people, you don’t seem to care about anything most kids are obsessed with. I mean, you show up to school looking like you just walked out of a magazine and you think people are staring at you because of something they saw on the news.”

I went suddenly still.

My heart seemed to speed up and slow down. I didn’t know what to say, and Ocean wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“Anyway,” he said. He cleared his throat. I noticed he’d gone pink around the ears. “So you went to twelve different schools?”

I nodded.

“Damn.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It sucked. Continues to suck.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I mean, it doesn’t suck right now,” I said, staring at our feet. “Right now it’s not so bad.”

“No?”

I glanced up. He was smiling at me.

“No,” I said. “Right now it’s not bad at all.”

12

Twelve

Ocean and I split up for lunch.

I think he might’ve joined me, if I’d asked, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t know what he did for lunch, who his friends were, what his social obligations might be, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know yet. At the moment, I just wanted space to process our conversation. I wanted space to figure out what to do about Mr. Jordan’s class. I wanted time to get my brain on straight. I was no longer hungry, thanks to the stack of pancakes I’d eaten at IHOP, so I headed straight to my tree.

This had been my solution to the lonely lunchtime problem. I’d grown tired of both the bathroom and the library, and enough time had passed that I no longer felt too self-conscious about eating alone. This school had a couple of green spaces, and I’d picked one at random to make my own. I chose a tree. I sat under it, leaning against the trunk. I ate food if I was hungry; but mostly I wrote in my journal or read a book.

Today, I was late.

And someone else was sitting under my tree.

I hadn’t been looking at people, as was my unfortunate habit, so I hadn’t noticed the person sitting under my tree until I nearly stepped on him.

He shouted.

I jumped back. Startled. “Oh,” I said, “Oh my God, I’m sorry.”

He stood up, frowned, and I took one real look at his face and just about fell over. He was, wow, he was possibly the most good-looking guy I’d ever seen. He had warm brown skin and hazel eyes and he looked distinctly Middle Eastern. I had, like, a Spidey-sense for that sort of thing. He was also clearly not a sophomore, whoever he was; he was maybe my brother’s age.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hey,” he said back. He was looking curiously at me. “You new here?”

“Yeah. I transferred in this year.”

“Wow, cool,” he said. “We don’t get a lot of hijabis in these parts. That’s pretty brave,” he said, nodding at my head.

But I was distracted. I never thought I’d hear any kid at this school use the word hijab so casually. Hijab was the word for a headscarf in Arabic. Hijabis was a sort of colloquial term some people used to describe girls who wore hijab. There had to be a reason he knew that.

“Are you Muslim?” I asked.

He nodded. “Hey, why were you about to step on me?”

“Oh,” I said, and felt suddenly awkward. “I usually sit here during lunch. I just didn’t see you.”

“Oh, my bad,” he said, looking back at the tree. “I didn’t realize this was someone’s spot. I was catching up on some homework before class. Needed a quiet place to work.”

“The library is pretty reliable for that sort of thing,” I said.

He laughed, but didn’t offer to explain why he’d bypassed the library. Instead, he said, “Are you Syrian?”

I shook my head.

“Turkish?”

I shook my head again. I got this a lot. There was something about my face, apparently, that made it so people never really knew where to place me on the map. “I’m Persian.”

“Oh,” he said, his eyebrows high. “Cool, cool. I’m Lebanese.”

I nodded, unsurprised. In my experience, the hottest Middle Eastern guys were always Lebanese.

“Anyway,” he said, and took a deep breath. “It was nice to meet you.”

“You too,” I said. “I’m Shirin.”

“Shirin,” he said, and smiled. “Nice. Well, I hope I see you again sometime. I’m Yusef.”

“Okay,” I said, which was kind of a stupid thing to say, but I didn’t really notice in the moment. “Bye.”

He waved and walked away and I was not too proud to watch him go. He was wearing a tight sweater that did little to hide the fact that he had the body of an athlete.

Damn. I was really beginning to like this school.

Bio was my last class of the day. I was expecting to see Ocean, but he never showed up. I dropped my bag on the floor and looked around the classroom. I sat in my seat and felt distracted. When we were sent to our lab stations, I cut into my soggy cat and couldn’t stop wondering where he was. I even worried, for a second, that something bad might’ve happened. But there was nothing to be done about it.

When the bell rang, I headed to practice.

“So I heard you cut class today,” was the first thing my brother said to me.

Shit.

I’d almost forgotten about that. “Who told you I cut class?”

“Mr. Jordan.”

“What?” Outrage, again. “Why? How do you two even know each other?”

Navid just shook his head. He almost laughed. “Mr. Jordan is our supervisor for the breakdancing club.”

“Of course he is.” Cool Teacher Mr. Jordan would’ve jumped at the chance to supervise a breakdancing club. Of course.

“He said he was worried about you. He said you got upset during class and ran out without a word.” Navid paused. Leveled me with a look. “He said you ran off with some dude.”

“What?” I frowned. “First of all, I didn’t run out of class. And second of all, I didn’t leave with some dude. He followed me out.”

“Whatever,” Navid said. “What’s going on here? You’re ditching class? Running off campus with random guys? Am I going to have to kick the shit out of someone tomorrow?”

I rolled my eyes. Carlos, Bijan, and Jacobi were watching our conversation with great fascination and I was annoyed with all of them. “Mr. Jordan was being an asshole,” I said. “He forced me and this other guy to stare at each other in front of the whole class, and then he told the guy to say, out loud, exactly what he was thinking when he looked at me.”

“And?” My brother crossed his arms. “So what?”

I looked at him, surprised. “What do you mean, so what? What do you think happened? It was humiliating.”

Navid dropped his arms. “What do you mean it was humiliating?”

“I mean it was horrible. He said I looked like nothing. That I basically didn’t even exist.” I waved a frustrated hand. “Whatever. It sounds stupid now, I know, but it really hurt my feelings. So I walked out.”

“Damn,” Navid said quietly. “So I really do have to kick the shit out of someone tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to kick the shit out of anyone,” I said, and slumped down on the floor. “It’s fine. I think I might just drop the class. There’s still time.”

“I don’t think so.” Navid shook his head at me. “I’m pretty sure you missed the window. You can still withdraw, but it’ll show up on your transcript like that, which m—”

“I don’t give a damn about my transcript,” I said, irritated.

“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands. “Okay.” My brother looked at me, genuinely sympathetic, for all of five seconds before he suddenly frowned. “Wait, I don’t understand one thing—why would you ditch class with a guy who thinks you don’t exist?”