He still wasn’t looking at me; he was staring into the darkness. I found his silence fascinating. His appearance, here, confusing.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“What are you doing here?” he said, and laughed. “I live here.” He gestured, generally, at nothing. “You know. Around here.”
“Right.” I took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
He took another drag on the cigarette. “So,” he said, exhaling a neat line of smoke. “You want to tell me why you’re stalking me?”
“What?” I said sharply. I felt my face heat. “I’m not stalking you.”
“No?” He turned a little in his seat, looked me up and down. He was almost smiling. “Then why do you look like you’re undercover?”
I shook my head. Looked away. “It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
“It’s a stupid story,” I amended.
“Even better.”
“My sister is getting married.”
Ali choked, started coughing violently. He tossed the cigarette to the ground, stamped it out with his foot. Kept coughing. Ali was about to die of asphyxiation, and I was suddenly very close to laughing. I also noticed, for the first time, what he was wearing: cleats and shorts, a blue soccer jersey. It was freezing out, and his arms and legs were bare and he didn’t seem at all bothered by the temperature. The streetlamps bolstered the wan moonlight, sculpting his body in the darkness. I watched him press the heels of his hands to his tearing eyes, watched as the muscles in his arms tightened, released under his skin. When he finally sat back and took a normal, steadying breath, my head felt uncomfortably hot.
“Oh my God,” he said. Another cough. “Is your sister insane?”
I was fully smiling now, rare for me. “She’s not getting married this second. But she’s on her way, I guess. Picked out the guy.”
“Picked out the guy? What does that even mean? And what does any of that have to do with you looking like a”—he gestured at me, my face—“getaway driver?”
I laughed. I missed this version of us, the easy conversations we’d once had. Ali and I had always been so comfortable together, and remembering that now—remembering what I’d lost—made my smile feel suddenly brittle. I shook my head to clear it.
“He came khastegari,” I said. “She accepted. And tonight h—”
“Wait, what’s khastegari?”
I frowned, turned to face him. “Since when do you not know how to speak Farsi?”
Ali shrugged. “I always spoke Farsi like a child.”
“Oh.” I was still frowning. “Well, it just means he proposed.”
“But you said she picked him out. Like a peach at the grocery store.”
“Well, yeah, I mean, lots of guys propose,” I said, squinting up at the blinking light of an airplane. “But she picked him.”
“Shadi, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know any guys who propose.”
I laughed again.
He didn’t.
“I’m serious,” he said. “This sounds fake. It sounds like you’re describing The Bachelor in reverse.”
“The Bachelorette.”
“Whatever.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s sort of like that. Sort of.” I frowned again. Turned to face him, again. “You’ve really never heard of khastegari?”
“Why on earth would I know what that means?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It’s a pretty common thing.”
“You mean this is normal? This happens all the time? More than one guy will ask the same girl to marry him and then just stand around waiting until she chooses?”
I laughed. “No.”
“Thank God.”
“But, I mean, sometimes.” I took a sharp breath. I was beginning to feel self-conscious. “Sometimes that happens.”
“That sounds insane.”
“It’s not completely insane,” I said, no longer smiling.
Ali turned in his seat without warning, one of his arms bracing the back of the bench. He was studying my face from an uncomfortably close distance when he said:
“Holy shit. Are these assholes kasigaring you, too?”
“It’s khastegari.”
“Whatever.”
“They’re not assholes.”
“Oh my God.” He sat back against the bench, stared at me, slack-jawed. “Who would propose to you? You’re seventeen. How is that not illegal?”
I bristled.
Who would propose to you? was possibly the most offensive question I’d ever been asked, and I’d been asked a great deal of offensive questions.
“First of all, I’ll be eighteen in like a month.”
“Still illegal!”
“Listen,” I said, irritated. “You’ve clearly been away from the mosque for too long, because you don’t seem to understand how this works. You don’t just get married. Proposing is a formality, a custom. A khastegari is basically just a request to date, to get to know each other with the specific intention of possibly, one day—maybe even years into the future—getting married. It’s considered a courtesy. Dating done properly, respectfully, with honorable intentions.”
He wasn’t listening to me. “How many guys kassgaried you?”
“Khastegari.”
“How many?”
I hesitated.
“Two?” His eyes widened. “Three?”
I looked away.
“More than three?”
“Five.”
“Holy fucking hell.” He stiffened and stared at me, stared at me out of the corner of his eye like he’d never seen me before. Like I’d contracted leprosy.
None of this was flattering.
“You’re telling me that there are five dudes just waiting around to see if you’ll choose one of them?”
I sighed.
“There are five dudes just sitting at home, staring at the wall, waiting for you to decide which one of them gets to marry you?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Wait.” He laughed. “Do these guys even know you smoke? Do they know you wander around abandoned playgrounds at night, stalking innocent men?”
I shot him a hard look. “Okay, I think I should go.”
I stood up and he stopped me, his hand curving around my forearm. I stared, surprised by the scene sketched poorly in the uneven light, surprised by the weight of such a simple touch.
“Wait,” he said. He was no longer smiling. “Wait a second.”
I sat back down, tugged at my beanie.
“What?” I said, still irritated.
“You’re not actually going to marry one of these guys, right?”
I looked up at that, at the horror on his face. I was angry with him, suddenly. Angry with him for making me feel small, for shattering what little was left of my vanity. “I thought you said I shouldn’t need anyone else’s permission to live my own life.”
He flinched at
