Chapter 2 Farshid
FARSHID
You’re so used to people saying your name wrong, you don’t realize it at first. After all, people have been messing up Farshid for as long as people have been saying it. Even the teachers who get it (mostly) right can’t quite do the ar, which is sort of halfway between air and are.
Add in the jumbled footsteps and slamming lockers and shouts of the C Hall during passing period, and you’re honestly surprised anyone can hear anything at all.
So, yeah. You’re used to it.
So used to it, it takes several seconds to realize what you actually heard.
You whip your head around to look over your shoulder but then face forward again, keeping your pace through the halls steady, because at this point you should know better than to let anyone know you heard them.
Don’t react. That’s the rule.
Don’t let them know it bothers you.
And it doesn’t, anyway, because what do they know? You’re not gay, after all. At least you don’t think you are, and even if you were, you wouldn’t have told anyone, least of all anyone at school.
Why do you have to know yet, anyway? Six months ago, you still had a LEGO fortress in the basement and your friends spent the night for Mario Kart tournaments and pancakes in the morning, but then this summer, it was like a switch flipped and your imagination flickered and died.
All your LEGO adventures seemed childish, even Mario Kart seemed too easy, and everyone wanted to switch to Fortnite.
High school is even worse than you imagined. Half your classmates only want to talk about who’s dating who. The other half, you don’t even know, because they came from the other middle school that feeds Meadowbrook.
And meanwhile, last week Valerie Farrell started crying at lunch when her girlfriend dumped her while they were waiting in line for the salad bar. Brody Connors got in-school suspension for making a joke about whacking it in algebra yesterday.
Dayton Reilly got pulled out of this morning’s assembly for shouting a slur at the top of his lungs. The same slur you just heard in the hallway. Were they talking about you? Were they just shouting it because they wanted to be edgy?
Or were they relaying the story of what Dayton had done?
After, as that word echoed in the auditorium, Dayton had waited, like he was expecting a laugh or something, but everyone had gone all quiet.
Mr. Markham’s presentation had been pretty good, a little funny even.
You don’t really care about poetry—even though Baba says it’s in your blood—but Mr. Markham had some pretty good jokes, and he also talked about playing Mario Kart, so all in all it was a decent talk.
But still, this is nothing like middle school.
No one seems like themselves anymore, except for you.
You still feel like you’re in eighth grade, other than the fact you grew taller over the summer, tall enough you had to get new clothes.
You’re too big to play with LEGO sets anymore, but you miss them anyway.
You think you hear it again. You’re almost certain.
Whispers and laughs follow you as you slip inside the classroom, take your seat, and wait for the bell. Ms. Suchecki’s stepped out of the room and hasn’t come back yet.
Your hackles rise. You didn’t know you had hackles, but that’s what this feeling is, right?
Maybe you’re hearing it wrong. Maybe it’s not you.
Maybe they really are just talking about Dayton.
You didn’t realize he was a homophobe. You’ve known him since third grade, when you had to change schools because your family moved half a mile, which put you over the county line, which meant you had to say goodbye to all your old friends and make brand-new ones.
You’ve never been friends with Dayton, but he seemed fine.
He never said anything meaner than anyone else.
He let you borrow some lead when your pencil ran out last week.
He should be here in US history right now, sitting behind you, but you saw him get pulled out of the assembly.
Maybe he’s still in the office. Maybe he got sent home.
You can’t believe what he said.
One word. Six letters like daggers, shouted for all the school to hear.
So why does it feel like they’re aimed at you?
“How’d you do?” Nour asks.
Her locker is right above yours, which is annoying, because she’s like a foot shorter than you, so she has to go on her tippy-toes while you have to crouch, and it didn’t occur to either of you to switch early on, and at this point hers is all decorated with magnets and stickers and you’re both too used to things to change now.
Nour’s wearing a keffiyeh over her vintage Star Trek T-shirt, her black hair pulled into a ponytail.
You thought she might be Iranian, like you, when you heard her name, but it turns out Nour means “light” in Arabic, too, and she’s Palestinian and Jordanian, not Iranian.
Plus she was born here—her parents, too.
“We still caucus together, though,” she had told you blithely as you talked about your backgrounds. “All from the ‘terrorist-y’ part of the world.”
“Fair,” you had answered, trying to pull off blithe yourself, but you weren’t sure if you had or not.
You’ve gotten better since, so now you blithely answer, “At least a B-plus. You?”
“I think I messed up a couple, but I know I got the extra credit at the end right.”
You nod. Thank God they still do extra credit in high school.
You grab your orchestra folder out of your locker and stuff it into your backpack.
You don’t have orchestra until sixth hour, but it’s on the other side of the building from the computer lab, where you have fifth hour computer science, so you don’t have time to visit your locker.
At least you don’t have to lug your cello around—you keep yours at home and use one of the school’s for class, even though it doesn’t sound as good.
Nour stands on her toes to look in the mirror hung inside her locker door and apply some sort of tinted thing to her lips with the pad of her middle finger. You smell a hint of cherries before she screws the lid back on the stuff and drops it into her backpack. “Ready?”
You shrug your backpack to settle it and nod.
Nour’s got bio next hour, but her class is close to yours, so you walk together through the press of bodies on all sides, freshmen weaving in and around tall seniors who have time to stand in place talking to one another because their lockers are actually close to their classes.
You hear it again—those six letters—but it’s someone talking about Dayton this time. Nour must see those hackles of yours.
“That was awful, huh?” she asks. “The assembly.”
“Yeah.” You don’t know what else to say.
Dayton never did show up to US history. Maybe he got sent home. Maybe he got suspended. Maybe he got expelled.
Whatever happens, he deserved it. Unless it was, like, a firing squad, but you don’t think they do that in high school, not even in Missouri.
“I mean, I knew we had bigots here, but to just shout it like that, with all the teachers there…” She shakes her head. “What a butthead.”
“Yeah,” you say again, because there’s something churning in your chest, and you can’t quite decide what it is. But your heart feels a lot louder in your rib cage, as though its syncopated beats should be making your shirt ripple like the skin of a timpani when it’s been struck. Bumb. Bumb. Bumb.
And then something hits you from behind, and you stumble, and for a second you wonder if getting beaten up is a thing that really happens to people in high school.
You thought it was a myth. But then you realize it’s another freshman, their backpack way too full and probably giving them scoliosis or something, barreling down the hall like an awkward Ninja Turtle trying to make it to the far end of the A Hall before the bell.
Nour catches you before you actually fall.
“Thanks.”
She pats your back and looks after the retreating turtle. “Sure. See you?”
“Yeah. See you.”
Nour keeps going, and you turn left at the cross hall for your computer lab, TECH 4, and though you’ve seen TECHs 1, 2, 5, and 6, you’ve never actually seen TECH 3. You’re not entirely convinced it exists.
TECH 4 smells a little like burnt dust, like that first day when the heat comes on in the fall, and you wonder if maybe the computers need to be cleaned or something.
The lab is in four rows, monitors and keyboards and mice (mouses?) on the blond desks, the towers themselves on the floor below at just the right height to bang that soft spot in your knee if you wheel your chair in at the wrong angle.
You take your seat at the far end of the second row, get signed in, log in to the portal to see if the grade from your history quiz is posted yet, but of course it’s not, Ms. Suchecki probably hasn’t even graded it yet.
There’s one notification, though, from your student email.
The From: line reads Dr. Henry Matthews, Principal, MHS.
Your heart does that bumb bumb bumb thing again, but you’re not in trouble, right?
It’s not your fault if people are calling you names.
Oh God, what if you cheated on your quiz?
You’re not sure how you could’ve, but maybe Ms. Suchecki thought you were looking at someone else’s desk when you were really staring at the ceiling?
One month in and already flunking, and you didn’t even do anything!
But no, the subject line reads Today’s Assembly, and you definitely didn’t do anything there, especially not compared to what Dayton Reilly did.
The computer lab is filling up. You’re the only freshman in this class.
You had to appeal to your counselor to skip Comp Sci I, because it was all stuff you’d known since seventh grade.
One of the juniors in the back row is snickering, and your hackles, your brand-new hackles, rise again. Are they laughing at you?
When did you get to be so worried? So … afraid?
Maybe that’s what the feeling in your heart is.
You’re afraid.
Not just anxious. Or nervous. Or any of the other million weird things you’ve felt since you started high school and had to learn all new rules and a brand-new building and suddenly you were grown-up but not really grown-up because you still have to do what all the adults tell you, but now they think you’re supposed to be responsible just because you’re in ninth grade.
No.
Fear. Real fear. It’s new and it doesn’t feel good and you don’t remember being afraid before, but now Dayton Reilly’s shouting slurs for the whole school to hear, and people might be calling you a slur behind your back, and maybe they really do beat up gay kids here. And you’re not even gay!
That doesn’t matter to them, though. Whoever they are. The bigots and homophobes and all the people who don’t like you because you’re you, because you like computers and LEGO sets and your cello instead of boobs and Fortnite and whacking it.
The bell rings, but Ms. Walton is always a minute or two late because the hallways aren’t exactly friendly to her wheelchair, so you swallow away your fear and read Dr. Matthews’s email and hope that’ll make you feel better.
It doesn’t, though. You’re not sure there’s anything that could.
To the students, parents, faculty, staff, and community of Meadowbrook High School,
An incident occurred today during our assembly hosting Adam Markham, an award-winning poet and MHS alumnus who was kind enough to come speak to our first-year English language arts classes.
That incident is inconsistent with our values here at MHS—values of tolerance, kindness, compassion, and integrity.
I’ve already spoken to Mr. Markham to extend an apology on behalf of our entire school, but I’d like to take a moment to discuss in more detail what measures we’re taking and how the Meadowbrook community plans to move forward from this …