“Wait—where are you going?” he said, keeping up.
I was still moving, now staring at a distant stoplight. I waited for the red light to turn green, waited for my body to stop shaking before I said, as steadily as I could manage, “What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean? I was picking my sister up from school.”
I stopped walking.
In the last year of my friendship with Zahra, Ali refused to drive his sister to school, refused to pick her up. I thought I knew why—it seemed obvious he was trying to avoid me—and my hypotheses were occasionally validated by Zahra’s mom, who’d suddenly become my only ride to and from school. It was a lot of work for Zahra’s mom to shuttle us around everywhere, and she’d been looking forward to bullying Ali into doing some of the work for her. She’d complain about him as she took us around, making empty threats to take away his car, lamenting the fact that she could never get her son to listen or take direction. I often felt like Zahra’s mom made the drives more for me than she did her own daughter; she seemed to know, somehow, that if she didn’t show up for me, no one would. Of course, this was a baseless theory, one I found both comforting and embarrassing, but I’d been grateful to her nonetheless—most of all for never making me feel like a burden.
The day I realized Zahra and I were no longer friends was the day I arrived at the after-school pickup before she did. I’d seen Zahra’s mom, waved hello. I’d just begun walking over to her car when Zahra showed up and said Oh my God, stop following me around everywhere. And for once in your life, get your own ride home. That was the day she tore off my head and filled me with a humiliation so dense I nearly sank straight into the earth. There were some things I had not yet learned how to forget.
Slowly, I turned around.
Ali was staring at me. Ali the liar, standing there lying to my face.
“Since when,” I said to him, “do you pick up your sister from school?”
He frowned. “I pick her up all the time.”
Liar.
He could only dare to lie like this because he had no idea that my own mom never took me anywhere anymore. Up until two months ago I’d sat beside his sister in his mother’s red minivan every single day; I still saw his mom’s car come and go in the school parking lot.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
It was becoming clear to me now that there was something Ali had come here to say, and I decided to give him the chance to say it before I disappeared from his life—because I intended to disappear, this time for good. I didn’t want to be accosted by Zahra anymore. I was sick of her accusations, sick of being made to feel like a terrible person—in perpetuity—for something I hadn’t even done.
I took an unsteady breath.
Ali had lied to me, and though I saw no point in exposing his lie, I did not also see the point in making this easy for him. Instead, I kept my eyes on his, the deep wells of brown, the shatteringly dark lashes. Mostly I stared at his face so I wouldn’t stare at anything else; I worried he’d catch me grazing his neck with my eyes, touching his shoulders with the tilt of my head.
He’d always been hard to ignore.
Ali loved soccer, was religious about the sport not unlike many men—especially Iranian men—but his obsession was unique in that he actually played the sport, and kicking that ball around had honed his body into something beautiful. I knew this because I had seen him, on a single occasion, by pure accident, without his shirt on. I had walked the hallowed halls of the shrine that was his home for six years, had been attacked by the evidence of his existence since I was eleven. I didn’t even need to see him without his clothes on to know why the female contingent loved him. He was a rare specimen. And it had always driven Zahra insane.
Finally, Ali broke.
“What?” he said, and sighed. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Why did you come here?”
He turned away, shoved both hands through his hair. Most guys wore so much gel in their hair these days you could break the strands with a hammer. Ali did not appear to care for this trend.
“I didn’t know,” he said finally. “About your dad.”
I held my breath.
“I wanted to apologize. For all of it. For not knowing. For forgetting about Mehdi. I just—I needed to say it.”
My anger died on the spot. The feeling deserted me so quickly I felt light-headed in its absence. Limp.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s okay. There’s no reason for you to know things about my life.”
Ali exhaled, frustrated. “I just wish I’d known. Sometimes I ask Zahra how you’re doing, but she never tells me much.”
“Hey, maybe in the future”—I hesitated—“maybe you shouldn’t talk to Zahra about me. At all. She’s not— She’s getting the wrong idea.”
Ali frowned. “I don’t talk to her about you. I almost never talk to her about you. But after I left the hospital I went to pick her up from school, and she saw your backpack in my car. When she asked me about it I told her I’d given you a ride to the hospital.”
“Oh.”
“And, I mean, she asked me what happened, and I explained, and then I asked her about your dad and then . . .” He trailed off. His face cleared, realization imminent.
“Okay. Yeah, I might’ve asked her a lot of questions about you last night.” He looked over his shoulder suddenly. “Speaking of which, I should probably go. She’s waiting for me.”
I nodded, looked at nothing. And then I swallowed my pride and said, “When you see her, will you
