Chapter Three
When I was thirteen, I was in homeroom with a super popular but utterly average white girl named Sam.
She had warm brown eyes that crinkled in the corners when she smiled and long blond hair that she wore French braided down her back.
And she played lacrosse, one of the most American sports there is—short of football, of course.
I used to sacrifice good study time to sit up in the nosebleed bleacher seats of our high school and watch her run around holding a net on a stick.
(The rules of the sport never really sank in, but the BO of the rest of the crowd sure did.
Literally ew.) Anyway, she sat behind me in biology.
Whenever an exam question confused her, she’d absentmindedly play with my hair.
One day, she asked if she could give me a braid that matched hers.
I said yes, and later, she invited me to hang out at her place after school.
Up until that point, I had been a bit of a loner.
No girls wanted my smelly food near their perfectly packed lunches in the cafeteria.
So I jumped at the opportunity to make a friend.
To know what it felt like to be accepted.
To be understood. My test scores suffered after that, of course. Worth it, though. Or so I thought.
After a few weeks, Sam and I started doing everything together.
I went to all of her games to hoot and holler.
She invited me to sleepovers at her house, but my strict Iranian parents never said yes.
In between classes, I walked with her down the hall—always several steps behind her, but still, I was there.
We exchanged friendship necklaces from Claire’s; I wore BEST FRIENDS, and she rocked FOREVER.
She invited me to my first ever boy-girl party.
I went over to her house beforehand, and she straightened my hair and lightened my skin with foundation.
And even though I didn’t look like myself, I felt pretty enough.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t on the outside looking in.
Then one day when I arrived late to class, she wouldn’t make eye contact with me. There was an unreadable expression on her face. After the bell rang, she tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey,” she said. “Can I ask you a question?”
I nodded, praying to whatever God she believed in that she couldn’t hear the pounding inside my chest.
“The war.”
“The war?”
“In Afghanistan. Whose side are you on?”
I blinked. It was common knowledge in our small town that Sam’s older brother had been deployed. Her family had hosted a big tear-filled send-off party. But I wasn’t sure what that had to do with me.
Carefully, I responded, “I’m American, Sam.”
She shook his head. “Not really, though. You’re one of them. Right?”
My cheeks started to heat. “My family is Iranian,” I said. I willed my temper to remain in check.
“So?”
I tried to reason with her, to get her to see that I was still me, Joonie—the same Joonie I’d always been—but I could tell she’d already made up her mind.
She told me that she needed space, a “break” from our friendship.
A day turned into a week turned into a month.
Texting 24-7 became forced smiles and curt words in passing, as if we were strangers.
When Tey found out, he told me to keep my head down and not cause trouble.
He’d learned the hard way what could happen when you made a scene in a small town.
But then I told Nico, and he lost his shit.
Showed up at Sam’s house and had a little “talk” with her parents—who, unsurprisingly, were the source of her vitriol.
But after that, Sam never bothered me again.
My “best friend” also never spoke to me again.
I’ll never forget the way Nico sat me down.
Held both of my hands and told me that I deserved better.
That not all people would treat me like I was a foreign object instead of a human being.
Nico made me swear that I wouldn’t let an over-tweezed idiot like Sam dull my sparkle.
That I would keep romanticizing life, believing in happily ever afters. And I promised him.
Looking at Nico, how could I not?
The proof that good people, true protagonists, existed was right in front of me.
Until it wasn’t.
But that was a huge wake-up call, a lesson about how other people in town saw me and my family.
Other than Nico, of course. He always stayed the same—loyal to a fault.
But to everyone else, we were Other. Alien.
Even, in some circumstances, dangerous. A threat.
I spent hours walking aimlessly around the streets of Mystic after school, searching for distrust in the eyes of passersby.
One day, I decided something had to give. If the town wasn’t going to change for me, I’d have to step up and change myself. And change always required sacrifice.
So when I went away to college, I decided to take a new approach.
I’d suppress the louder, more colorful parts of my identity and do my best to fit in with my peers.
If I looked, spoke, and smelled like everybody else, maybe I could go four years without anyone bothering me.
I could finally blend into the background, melt into the floorboards.
I began straightening my hair every morning, just like Sam had taught me, and lightening it so it was no longer midnight black.
I plucked and threaded my eyebrows and lathered my skin in a whole-ass protective layer of sunscreen each morning to keep my complexion as pale as possible.
Abandoning my vibrant, expressive wardrobe, I focused on dressing the same as all the other students: leggings and oversize sweaters and sneakers, all in dark colors.
The mission was to look ordinary. Mundane. Average.
And for the most part, it worked. I made surface-level friends and got invited to terrible parties with milquetoast music and white-people dancing.
Sure, I was no longer myself, but no one called me names or asked invasive questions about my cultural heritage.
I ate sushi and watched The Bachelor and pretended to love Disneyland.
(To this day, I have an irrational fear of Disney adults. Shudder.)
Then, as a consequence of my deception, I was rewarded.
The impossible happened.
I caught the eye of a boy. A quiet, sensitive English major named Kyle.
We met at a 1975 concert. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and had a slight lisp.
The next day, he offered to carry my books to class.
I knew he was smitten with the artificial, watered-down version of me, but by the time I was ready to expose myself to him, both metaphorically and literally—my life prior to college had been sexless as hell—I was too afraid to jinx it. To scare him away.
Plus, he was kind to me. Well, kinder than most people.
He held my hand before the plane took off and always paid for our movie tickets. I didn’t notice that he always chose our seats and what we watched until much later.
Little by little, Kyle started to restore my faith in happy endings.
To piece together what Sam had cracked.
And what Nico had fully broken.
Then we graduated college, and the nature of our relationship changed.
He got a boring desk job that he hated in New Haven.
We moved in together. When he arrived home each day, he expected me to dress and behave a certain way.
And he started taking out his stress on me—little by little, then all at once.
If dinner was cold, he refused to eat it.
If I cried in response, I was purposely trying to guilt him.
The real world hardened him. Or maybe he had been hard to begin with.
Perhaps he’d been putting on a show, too.
Kyle began casually controlling every single aspect of my life.
When we were out with other people, he treated me as a punch line rather than his partner.
And things at home weren’t much better. Although I was normally the one to cook dinner, he began dictating what we ate, controlling how many calories I consumed in a day.
When we’d started dating, I had stopped seeing my college friends as frequently, so our social group now consisted mainly of his own buddies, which meant he decided who I saw on the weekends.
My girlfriends, mostly the partners of his friends, often reported our conversations to him.
Nowhere was safe. He told me what I could and couldn’t wear, even going so far as to call me names if I went outside in something he deemed too revealing.
When I questioned him, he told me he was behaving this way because he loved me so much.
He was worried about me. He wanted what was best for me.
For a while, I was na?ve enough to believe him.
I was afraid to say anything, to fight back.
The truth was, I thought I’d found my soul mate, my one true love.
Admitting I was wrong felt terrifying. I thought that if I left him, I’d never get another chance at love.
I’d be alone forever. The possibility paralyzed me.
Cruelty, I resolved, was better than excommunication.
I let all of the sunshine drain out of me, a slow, steady, depressive drip.
Kyle had let the light back in, then shut the blinds. His explosive declarations had actually been love bombs. He lit candles inside of me only to snuff them out on a whim. I was tired of fighting tooth and nail to hang on to my optimism.
Sam. Nico. Kyle.
They were all the same.
Happy endings had never felt more like a myth.