“I have.” Ruth dropped to a whisper: “But he wants all four. Including the one I wrote about coming out to my mom.”
Just then, I spied Matty walking across the football field with a couple juniors and seniors. It looked like they were leaving campus for lunch, and I watched all of them pile into a beat-up minivan. Maybe if Matty and I date, I’ll be able to leave campus for lunch, too.
“Parvin!” Ruth clapped. “Hello?!”
I sucked my eyes away from the parking lot and back to Ruth. Her face looked flushed, and I could tell she was truly freaking out. I snapped out of my daydream.
“Huh?”
“My teacher wants me to write about coming out to my mom, remember?” Ruth huffed.
“Just make up another goal. You don’t have to come out to your Creative Writing teacher. That would be a violation of the Geneva Convention, or whatever it’s called.”
Poor Ruth. Most assignments came really easily to her. I was pretty sure she’d never had an essay topic she hadn’t outlined within hours of it being assigned.
“Maybe your fourth goal could be something like ‘I’ll give my friends extra peanut butter cups,’” I offered.
“Parvin! Be serious,” Ruth cried.
“Okay, okay,” I said, thinking. “Well, you’re worried about sharing something important with your mom, right? Maybe you don’t have to mention that you are into boys and girls and nonbinary people. Maybe you could just talk about sharing more parts of yourself with her.”
Ruth chewed, thinking. She always squinted hard when she was considering taking any of my advice.
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “That just might work. I’ll do a rough draft tonight and see how it feels.”
“There we go.” I grinned. “Now can I have your Hot Cheetos?” I said, pointing to the bag she was trying to hide in her backpack.
Ruth laughed. “No.”
Just then, the loudspeakers crackled on. “Whoever stole my parking sign, please return it to the front office,” Principal Saulk demanded.
Ruth shot me an accusatory look.
“What?” I said. “I did that after I ran into Wesley and Teighan—I needed a confidence boost.”
“That poor man,” Ruth chided me.
“Fine, fine, I’ll return it tomorrow before school and say I found it in a bush somewhere.” No one would believe a quiet, mousey freshman like me had done it, anyway.
“This is Principal Saulk of James Knox Polk High School, by the way,” he added on the loudspeaker. “That’s James Knox Polk. Thank you.”
■ ■ ■ BLEACHERS 3:00 P.M.
I’d almost forgotten about my Wednesday study-buddy session, but Amir had thoughtfully sent me a calendar invite. Needless to say, it was the only event on there. After school, he came trudging up the bleachers with his Farsi books, and I settled in for what was going to be the longest half hour of my life. I doubted I’d learn anything useful, but hoped to at least get our Farsi homework done.
“Hey,” he said, and smiled. I smiled back. Thank goodness Amir was nice, which would make these tutoring sessions easier. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved Team Melli jersey, which was the Iranian national soccer team. He looked, if possible, even more Iranian than the last time I’d seen him. “How’s your first week at school going?”
I shrugged. It was only our second day but already it felt like a lifetime. “Fine,” I replied, trying not to think about how I’d started school by being unceremoniously dumped at orientation. “What about you?”
Amir groaned. “I already have so much homework. And my teachers say this will be nothing compared with junior year.”
I winced sympathetically. Thank god our teachers hadn’t assigned us any reading yet. All I really had to do was start thinking of my intro video and decide if I wanted to play the bassoon. Which, once I thought about it, was actually a lot.
“I noticed you were tripping yourself up on some of the letter combinations in Farsi, so I thought I’d break them down for you.”
“Letter combinations?” I asked. Wasn’t every word a letter combination?
“For example,” Amir began, getting out a sheet of paper. “Here’s an alif,” he said, drawing an .
“And here’s a laam,” he continued, drawing a .
I yawned. “Yeah, I know that.” Dad had given me Farsi alphabet blocks when I was barely a year old. This was, literally, child’s play.
“Okay, but what you don’t know is that when you have a laam and an alif together, it makes this symbol,” and then Amir drew a .
“Aha!” I shouted. “That was the stupid symbol that kept messing me up during my reading.”
Whoops. I’d just shouted, pointing my finger accusingly at a piece of paper in a decidedly not Quiet Parvin way. But I guess I didn’t have to pretend to be less loud or passionate around Amir. Everyone knew Iranian kids only dated other full Iranians, which meant Amir would never be an option for Homecoming anyway. Plus, we probably were related.
Amir laughed. “I know. But it’s just an L and an A connecting. So, you pronounce it ‘La,’” he said, giving it a soft A sound.
I nodded, copying the combination into my own notebook. For a language with zero irregulars, Farsi was a slippery beast. Maybe this tutoring stuff wasn’t such a waste of time after all.
“Wanna learn some more?” Amir asked.
I nodded. These were the things I’d missed out on by jumping straight into Advanced Farsi. It was useless trying to ask Dad for grammar help because he’d always answer my questions with things like “I don’t know why it’s like that, it just is!” or “I don’t know how to conjugate a verb, I just do!”
“Parvin, you there?” Amir asked. He had shaggy curly hair, and he kept running his hands through it. He had another letter combination written down.
“Yeah, sorry.” I focused back on the paper in front of me. Amir scooched closer, and I smelled that rosewater scent again.
■ ■ ■ DINNER 8:00 P.M.
Mom and Dad felt bad about how much time
