Suspended
SUSPENDED
Then
Obviously there was shouting. It reverberated around Shirin’s house, a tsunami of blame and shame. It mainly came from Shirin’s dad, though her mum would sometimes interject. Words in Farsi, English, even Turkish. She was a disappointment. She was predictable. She was nothing like the daughter they wanted. What Shirin found most frustrating, apart from her dad’s spit hitting her face with every shout, was that no one asked her what had happened. No one wanted to hear her side of the story. It was all about Rob, Jordan, Tom, and Kian. The boys were the focal point, and she—the person at the center of it all—was both ignored and unfairly punished.
She barely had the time to even process what they wanted to do to her—or the look on Rob’s face that would haunt her for the next ten years.
“! My child is suspended from school for being in a fight?” her dad shouted, his face visibly red, bleeding into his bald head so that it was also red. “Why were you hanging around with these boys?”
“We told you no boys until you’re older,” her mum added, from behind Shirin’s dad. They hovered over her while she sat in the middle of the sofa, taking in their tirade. “What are we going to tell people?”
“No, we never said that,” her dad retorted. “No boys ever .”
“They were literally bullying me,” Shirin said. “Kian was defending me—they were pushing me around. They held me back—”
Her dad held his hand in the space between them. “Kian? Why was this Iranian boy defending you? Huh?”
She frowned and spluttered the next sentence, “Because he’s my friend!”
“Girls and boys can’t be friends,” he said. “You should never hang around with boys—let alone boys like him, ” her dad went on, to which her mum muttered something in agreement.
“Boys like him?” Shirin repeated.
Her dad let out a long breath, waved his hand in the air, and told his wife to speak to her daughter. He threw himself onto the armchair close by, dejected, like he was the one who was being pushed around and punished for it. Shirin was still shaking, her body a bag of nerves and adrenaline, and it was two hours since it had all happened. She kept her gaze down at the Persian carpet, at the way the red and cream of the pattern had faintly bled together because her mum had insisted it was okay to wash it with hot water.
“Kian comes from a bad family,” her mum said. “We don’t hang around with people like them.”
This was the first Shirin had heard of this. “What? His dad is a dentist and his mum’s a nurse—”
“His brother is in prison. They’re violent people. You can’t hang around with people like that. Look at what he did. Beating someone up with a rolling pin? We aren’t animals. Now you’re in trouble with the school, and they’re saying they might get the police involved.”
“Those people are racist,” Shirin said, her voice almost a shout. “They’re always bothering me. Always calling me a Paki, making things up about me, pushing me around, and I don’t get why I’m the one in trouble now. Why no one cares about me. I don’t even know what they were going to do to me…” Even venturing into it made her heart beat quickly, her throat swell up. She couldn’t finish her sentence.
Her dad stood back up then and Shirin gulped, feeling the air shift. He gave her a long look. It terrified her more than when he’d been shouting at her.
“You need to be stronger than this, Shirin. We had it much harder. I’m going to tell you one more time: if you want to live in this house, you won’t see this boy anymore and you’ll behave. Understand?”
She nodded and he left the room. With just her and her mum remaining, Shirin let out a breath. Her mum sat next to her on the sofa and was quiet for a moment before saying, “You need to remember your future, azizam. If you hang around with someone like him, he will get you in trouble. I didn’t want to say it in front of your dad, but the school said your suspension might go on your record. It might affect the university you want to go to. You always said you wanted to go to a university in another city—don’t let this boy be the reason you can’t. Remember your future, Shirin.”
It was this that got it into Shirin’s head that maybe they were right. The thought of being stuck with her parents, in this city with people who hated her, spun in her head. She knew she would need to distance herself from Kian if she wanted to get out of here. She had to put herself first.