I tossed my phone back onto my quilt. I needed Ameh Sara to help me make sense of everything that happened last night. Until then, I had no idea how to face Amir at Farsi school today.
I was being a bad person and skipping class this Sunday. But to my credit, I actually did look pretty pale, and my throat was hoarse from shouting our location to the pumpkin patch manager from the maze for twenty minutes with Amir. In the end, I think Mom felt bad for me. She tucked me into bed and made me a cup of tea with honey this morning.
My phone had been blowing up all night with our group text. Apparently, Fabián had beaten Matty for the lead role in the play, and Ruth couldn’t shut up about her first kiss with Naomi. She’d even walked Ruth to her front steps, risking a serious smooch despite her mom being able to fling the door open at any moment. I was super happy for both of them, but my brain just felt dead after last night.
10:07 AM FABIÁN: so you brought your friend from Farsi school to apple picking
10:15 AM PARVIN: Amir? Yeah, he’s helping me with my reading
10:15 AM FABIÁN: uh-huh
10:16 AM RUTH: Why were you acting so weird after the corn maze?
10:16 AM FABIÁN: [shares a photo from Amir’s Instagram] pretty cute, for a friend
10:20 AM PARVIN: Um. Because Amir kissed me last night.
10:20 AM FABIÁN: HAHAHA! ruth, you owe me $10!
I had no idea how to feel about Amir kissing me. How had I missed that he liked me like that? We were just Farsi friends—I didn’t think guys like Amir dated watered-down Iranians like me.
I liked Amir a lot—he was funny, nice, and easy to talk to—but part of me felt a little weirded out that he liked me that way at all.
I replayed the way I acted around Matty and the way I acted with Amir. The two Parvins could not be more different. When I was around Matty, I acted like the Quiet Parvin I wanted to be. The one who didn’t talk so much and laughed without snorting. When I hung out with Amir, though, I felt like the Parvin that I already was, the one who was “passionate,” and who cracked jokes and slurped soup even if that wasn’t what women did in the movies.
It was almost like I found Amir less attractive for liking the version I was now. Even I knew the Parvin of this moment wasn’t that great. I had let my heart get stomped on over the summer, been uninvited from the clarinet, and couldn’t even speak the language that matched up with my face. The Parvin that Amir had seen was the same Parvin who didn’t get asked out in middle school, the one who’d spent every school dance on the sidelines. And just when I was working on making sure that never happened again, Amir made it clear he liked that version of me.
Wasn’t your significant other supposed to make you a better person? To help you be the best version of yourself that you could possibly be? I was still updating my software. Only someone demented would choose Parvin 1.0 when they could wait and get the latest model.
I reached toward my laptop to email Ameh Sara since I couldn’t call her, then stopped. There was something I’d been afraid to think about when it came to Amir—a deeper, ickier dread that I had never said out loud, much less dared to drag to the front of my brain. It was a feeling that was hard to put into words, and one that I knew would seriously upset Ameh Sara.
I opened my phone and stared at Amir’s photo feed. He had the same crick in his nose as me, and the same thick, curly hair. His skin was a bit tanner than mine, but the arm hair was just as present. He practically looked like a member of the Melli soccer team, he was so Iranian.
Meanwhile, I’d spent the past few weeks waxing my body, shaving my arms, and straightening my hair. It was like I was trying not to look Iranian at all. And here was Amir, liking me on the days I hadn’t bothered to do those things, accepting me for who I was.
I thought back to our sleepover: None of the women in the movies looked like me. There were no ads in magazines of girls with big noses or commercials with women who could definitely grow a unibrow. The more I tried to look like those models and actors, the closer I looked to my mom . . . and the more beautiful I felt.
Now I knew Amir thought I was pretty. You didn’t kiss someone you found ugly. So what did that mean for the things I’d always thought were beautiful? Were the movies and TV shows wrong? Or maybe it was wrong of me to try to change myself to look like them in the first place.
This was the kind of thing I couldn’t ask Ameh Sara about over email without her getting super upset. Just mentioning that I didn’t feel beautiful would probably send her reeling into a long lecture about self-esteem and how society was always trying to bring women down. No, this weird feeling was something moms helped their daughters with, because most moms looked like their daughters. Too many freckles, knobby knees, big teeth—those were the kinds of things where moms could say, “I had those when I was your age, but look at me now. I grew to love those features.” But my mom didn’t have oily skin or ingrowns or frizzy hair that puffed up the second it rained. I didn’t have a mom who could help me understand how I felt. My stomach was in knots just replaying the kiss and what that meant for everything I thought I knew. And
