My friendship with Zahra had long been imperfect.
She’d been cruel to me in a thousand small ways for years, had proven herself a fickle, disloyal friend many times over. I should’ve been the one to walk away, should’ve done it long ago. But she’d been one of the few solid things in my life, and I hadn’t been ready to let go. I clung with the tips of my fingers to the fast-crumbling cliff of our friendship, and when she finally kicked me down, into the chasm, I experienced a strange, disorienting relief.
Part of me missed her fiercely.
A greater part of me did not.
I shuddered as a gust of wind tore through the park, whipping at my body. I was naked underneath this hoodie and I suddenly regretted my haphazard choices. I wrapped my arms around myself. Held on tight.
This graveyard of memories was nearly empty now, save a distant soccer field still dotted with players. The streetlights were unnecessarily aggressive, and I sat away from one, atop a bench, my legs curled under me. The bench wasn’t wet, exactly, but damp with drizzle and fog, and the cold seeped through my clothes, chilling me further. A child’s swing swayed gently in the breeze; I stared at it. I clasped and unclasped the old, loose cigarette rolling around in my pocket.
I’d been trying not to think about this cigarette.
I’d known it was here, tucked away in a zippered pocket; I’d known, because I left cigarettes everywhere. It was a stupid, reckless indulgence, but I couldn’t seem to help it; I liked finding them in my clothes. I carried them around like some kind of talisman, smoking them only occasionally, and at first only because I was curious. I’d since developed a dangerous taste for the poison, which worried me. But I couldn’t part with them.
Mehdi had stashed two large cartons of cigarettes in his closet, a bulk quantity I can only assume he purchased through a third party. I’d tossed his dirty magazines, disposed of the weed, destroyed the glass pipe, chucked the condoms into a massive garbage bin behind a grocery store.
The cigarettes, I kept.
I sighed, tucked one between my lips and left it there. I found a lighter in the pocket of my jeans, weighed it in my hand.
I knew I couldn’t smoke this cigarette, no matter how much I wanted to. I had to get home soon, before my mom came looking for me and unraveled a long string of lies I did not want to acknowledge. But I wasn’t ready to leave. I spun the spark wheel a few times, stared at the flame.
I thought often of the stupidity of man. One, in particular.
I thought often of my father’s self-righteousness, his self-assured certainty, his unequivocal conviction that his thoughts and actions were sanctioned by God. It was perhaps true that my father had never had a drop of alcohol. I knew he regularly gave charity, never missed one of his daily prayers, fasted during Ramadan. My brother, on the other hand, had done none of those things. And yet I felt quite certain that, in the eyes of God, my brother was the better person.
I didn’t mind dogma. I liked guideposts, appreciated a little structure. But I could not understand those people who disregarded the essence of faith—love, compassion, forgiveness, the necessary expansion of the soul—in favor of a set of rules, a set of rules they declared to be true divinity.
This—this—
I did not think Shayda and I would ever agree on this. Here was where we diverged, where our lives tore on a perforated line. She felt that my father had been right to be angry with Mehdi, that Mehdi had broken the rules, had made poor choices, had angered my father when he should’ve been repentant, and deliberately disrespected my mother, who begged him to stay.
He made his own choice, she’d said.
I thought it was the job of the parent to be smarter than the child, I’d said. I thought it was the job of the parent to protect their child from harm, I’d said. I thought it was the job of the parent to lead by example, I’d said.
She’d screamed at me. Thrown me out of her room. We’d never talked about Mehdi again, not until tonight.
I sighed, ran my thumb over the top of the lighter. Spun the starter.
Spark and flame.
Spark and flame.
And what about me? I thought. What did it make me, if I sat around, cold and without compassion, hoping for my father to die? Did that make me any different from him?
Or just worse?
I sat up suddenly, startled free of my reverie by a sharp motion, a blur of movement. A body sat down heavily on the seat beside me, and I turned to stare at it. Him.
Ali was holding my cigarette, which he’d snatched from my lips.
“Give that back,” I said quietly.
He laughed.
I’d wondered, when I saw the brilliantly lit soccer field, whether Ali might not be out there tonight. He lived close by. He played soccer. I didn’t know exactly what he played—it was some kind of local, intramural team—but my thoughts ended there, did not build a bridge elsewhere. The field was situated far from my bench, and I’d not determined there to be a high probability of our worlds colliding.
So I was surprised.
He took the lighter from my limp hand, his fingers grazing my palm in the process. I held my breath as he lit the cigarette I would not smoke, put it between his lips. It was all I could think as I watched him smoke it, that the cigarette touching his mouth had been touching mine not a moment ago.
“This is so bad for you,” he said, exhaling with an elegance attained only with practice. “You shouldn’t smoke these things.”
He offered me the cigarette without turning his
