Too Far
TOO FAR
Then
Kian had thought it would be fitting if it rained the day everything changed yet again, but no, the sun was shining radiantly, marking summer’s arrival. That day everyone sat in the fields at lunch, looking up at the cloudless sky. Kian had kicked a football with Connor and the other boys and then they spent ten minutes lying down, their book bags under their heads as they shut their eyes and soaked in the sun.
Something Shirin had said the day before had stuck with him. She was always trying to convince him to take his art seriously, and often he didn’t believe her when she said he was talented or that he should pursue it. But they were making their final A-level decisions this week and, in one last bid, she’d told him it wasn’t fair what his parents were doing to him.
“ They haven’t done anything,” he’d said.
“Are you sure? Or do you just want to think that? They’re projecting onto you—they want to make up for what happened to Mehdi with you, but that isn’t how life works. Remember it’s your life, not his, not theirs.”
He knew this, but hearing it said aloud, when he had started to doubt his decision, had changed things. He’d spent the rest of the day pondering the answer, and he’d woken up with something like clarity. Kian had risen from sleep realizing it was true—it was his life, and if he wanted to study art, he should. So it was on this day that he’d asked his form tutor to amend his selection of A-levels. She’d been uninterested as she’d changed his form, which had somewhat dampened the momentous moment.
After school, he went to meet Shirin. They sometimes took a detour on the way home and got milkshakes from a dessert restaurant owned by a Turkish man who often chucked free things into their order because he said they looked like his children. It was a bit weird, but they always took it anyway.
She’d told Kian to meet her outside the food tech room because she needed to collect the things she’d made earlier in the day. He had been in science, which was at the opposite end of the school to food tech, and by the time he made his way to the cooking block the school was almost empty.
That day he was feeling content for the first time in a long while. He had heard that they would be releasing Mehdi from prison in two months, that his sentence was being halved for good behavior. The end was finally in view.
As he walked down the long corridor to the food tech room, he heard them before he saw them.
“Are you crying ?” Jordan said mockingly.
“Just leave me alone,” Shirin said. “Please.”
“Oh, come on,” Rob said. “It looked shit anyway.”
It sounded like there was a struggle, grunts, and pushing.
“Maybe we should leave it…” Tom said.
Kian turned the corner and entered the classroom to see Jordan, Rob, and Tom standing around Shirin, who had her head bent low. On the floor were a dozen or so smushed-up cupcakes.
The boys pushed her around in a circle like she weighed nothing, and she struggled against them, attempting to scratch their faces, but then Jordan pushed her down onto the floor, holding her hands behind her back. Rob loomed over her, a predatory look on his face. Shirin looked terrified, eyes impossibly wide.
Kian froze, stopped breathing even. He felt himself leave his body, just for a moment. And where before he might have stayed there, frozen in time, another look at Shirin spurred him into action. He didn’t even think, really. He strode toward them, grabbed a rolling pin off one of the countertops, and swung it toward Rob, who was closest. It struck his head and he bounced away, hit the countertop, and crumpled against it. Kian struck him a second time on his back, the impact making a cracking sound.
Tom’s face was pink and he immediately looked terrified and ran out of the room, narrowly avoiding Kian in the process.
“Fucking leave her alone!” Kian shouted at Jordan, who still held Shirin.
Jordan let her go to move toward him. Something about the way he strode made another part of Kian snap, his hand already raised. He punched Jordan hard in the face, like Mehdi had taught him. Jordan fell to the ground, his nose bloodied. All the anger he felt, the incandescent rage that felt like it might explode, was bubbling violently within him. He had repressed so much, beaten himself down, but this feeling had never left him, it just lay dormant until this moment.
He thought of all the nasty things Rob had said and done and then kicked Rob in the ribs, which made him shrivel up, curling into a ball on the floor, rolling over the cakes he had ruined. He kicked him twice, three times, and in the distance he could hear Shirin saying “Stop,” but he couldn’t.
He didn’t see Jordan get up, and that was when Jordan grabbed him by his shirt and smacked Kian across the side of his face. Shirin shouted something and pulled Jordan off him. They were a fighting mass, limbs flying, yelling gutturally. They only stopped when the food tech teacher came in shouting, “What is going on?”
It was only then that Kian could think and see clearly. The terrified expression on Shirin’s face was now directed toward him, and that was a bigger punch in the stomach than any of the physical punches he’d received in the past ten minutes. He wanted to speak to her, ask her if she was okay, but they were promptly separated by more teachers escorting them to the headmaster’s office.
The physical damage to Jordan and Rob was much greater than the damage to Shirin and Kian. And when it was taken to Mr. Rodgers, the blame was put on Kian. Kian had used a weapon on a student. Kian had bruised a student’s ribs. Kian had taken it too far, just like his brother had done.
When Kian tried to defend himself, to say all the things they had done to Shirin, then and in the past, Mr. Rodgers raised a hand and said, “This is the first we’ve heard of any of this. I gave you a chance, Kian. I thought you were different from your brother.” He shook his head, the picture of disappointment. “I’m sad to say I was wrong. Violence at North Oak cannot be tolerated.”
He tried to say how unfair that was, but Mr. Rodgers slammed his hand down on his table and said if Kian were to speak again the consequences would be much worse.
Kian was given a one-week suspension from school, but they were near the end of the year anyway. They only had to sit for their GCSE exams, and so his mum made the decision to remove him from the school completely. To begin with, she was mad, shouted at him, threw her plastic slipper at him even.
It all happened so quickly. And no one listened to him. He couldn’t believe they were being punished for this—that life could be this unjust. If he had left them, he dreaded to think what they might have done to Shirin. So while everything had fallen apart, he had no regrets about what he did.
In the evening, hours after his parents had torn him apart, his mum came into his room. She sat on the edge of his bed where he was resting and said she was sorry. “I didn’t listen to you when you said that school was bad,” she said. Kian shrugged, his eyes red, looking off into the distance, not meeting her gaze. He had spun in his mind so many arguments with everyone—Mr. Rodgers, the teachers on his side, and his parents—that now he was spent, had nothing else to say. He was numb.
His dad came into the room and Kian expected him to go off too, but he agreed, said when he’d moved to the UK people had always called him names, and he had experienced great prejudice. Kian was even more surprised when his dad also sat on his bed, and his parents reminisced about coming over from Iran, how they wouldn’t have changed it, but how hard it had been. They hadn’t thought it would be hard for him too.
“But clearly we were stupid. Look what happened to poor Mehdi,” his mum lamented.
There it was again. “I’m sorry,” Kian said, though he wasn’t even sure what he was sorry about. Sorry he disappointed his parents? That he took it all too far? That he wanted so badly to be the kind of person that could defend himself that he ended up just like his brother?
“You were helping your friend,” his mum said.
“I know, but I took it too far. Like Mehdi. I was just so angry. They were going to really hurt her, you know. They had hurt her many times before, no one ever cared.” His breathing became ragged when he remembered the look of terror on Shirin’s face—not just at the boys, but at Kian too. He had been trying to forget it.
His dad laid a heavy hand on his back. “We take things too far for the people we love.”
Kian shook his head. “It doesn’t make it okay though. I should have stopped sooner, I should have been smarter.”
“You made a mistake, azizam,” his mum said. “These boys, they sound like bad people. You’ve said they bothered that girl again and again, and you wanted it to stop. You’re human.” The justification sounded exactly like how they had justified what Mehdi had done—how far he had taken it.
“It’s not that simple,” he said.
“Life never is,” his dad said sadly.
All Kian knew in that moment was that he needed to speak with Shirin.