“Thanks,” she said without looking up. Her eyes had dark circles around them. I sat next to her, waiting for the coach to take roll. Then the school speakers began to crackle. The principal’s voice came on.
“Good morning, students. It is with great sadness that we make the following announcement: On Saturday evening, Winnetka High School tenth-grader Arash Yekta was shot and killed at the Woodland Hills Mall. Eleventh-grader Nadir Javan was also shot and remains in stable condition at the Encino Medical Center. Arash will be remembered fondly by family, friends, and the Winnetka High community. He was vivacious and good-natured, and will remain in our hearts. We send our best wishes for recovery to Nadir and his family. There will be a gathering this afternoon at the Woodland Hills Mall, at four o’clock, for those who wish to mourn Arash together. We will now have a moment of silence.”
On the speakers, the S sounds broke, screeching into our ears, and this reassured me. I thought if we couldn’t properly hear what was being said maybe it wasn’t really true. A gust of wind blew across the football field. The seagulls scavenged for leftovers from the weekend’s football game. They shrieked and sunk their claws into the ground, bickering over soggy fries. Azar’s birthday balloon was a lump of sparkly plastic hanging from her wrist. I batted my lashes a few times. All I could think was that I should have gotten her a new one that morning. I should have woken up early and gone to the twenty-four-hour Taiwanese party store. I should have gotten her five balloons with kittens and I should have thrown a teddy bear in there also—but why was everyone getting quiet all of a sudden? Why were they all looking down at the ground? Didn’t they also know this was just a misunderstanding? I would see Arash. We’d go to the abandoned middle school, like always. I know I told myself I wouldn’t speak to him again, that I would not know how to look at him without rage, but I changed my mind—I took it back, I swore. We were going to bust through the side doors and break free on the sidewalks like we always did. We’d go to the building with the cracked pavement and the tall grass and the shafts of light that made dust sparkle—that school, tucked between the hills with the lonely gardeners in orange vests. We would talk about nothing and spit on the ground and listen to the chain saws. That school. We went there every day. That’s what we did, so he wasn’t dead.
Some students started to cry. Azar looked for someone to comfort her. She was Arash’s cousin, but nobody knew that except for me. I hugged her tight and my hug communicated something like we were going to get to the bottom of that misunderstanding together. She hugged me back, pretending to believe me. She was wrapped around my waist and I felt like a mother. Her feeble body was like a cracked branch inside my arms. Her big black hair tickled my neck. Black hair on her arms embracing me. Black hair over her lips pressed against my chest. Black eyebrow shutters, opening and closing onto my clavicles while she cried. She unwrapped the balloon’s silver string from her tiny wrist, hoping for a cathartic moment, a liberating flight, but the balloon had lost helium and gravitated in front of us. Even the wind couldn’t carry it away. It wouldn’t fly up and it wouldn’t lie down. It just lingered like a piece of bad news we did not know what to do with.
—
The last time Arash and I had escaped to the abandoned school in the hills I tried to take a photo of him with a camera I bought at a garage sale for three dollars, but he pushed my hand away. He said I might blackmail him and tell his friends about us. Then he hugged me and pushed the hair from my eyes. When I developed the photo it looked like Arash was saying goodbye with the hand he was using to distance me.
“I know we’re just fooling around. But you know, this is the best part of my days,” he had said.
“It’s the best part of my days too,” I told him. And it was true.
“I could never come to such a shitty place with my friends.”
No, he couldn’t. I smiled and lifted my face from his chest. I looked at him, half naked—his pants still unbuttoned and his soft white T-shirt rolled up against his chest. The cars cruising the residential streets were in another world and we lay in our made-up living room on the cold classroom floor. I looked at him and he seemed like just a boy. A boy with a penis. A man. One of those beings stripped to their essence. No Persian pride, no gold necklaces, no oversize pants. It was him—naked with his deep dark eyes, long lashes, and dimpled chin. But on that Saturday night when he was shot, I knew what he wanted to be. I felt it just looking at his undulating stride the second we crossed the mall’s sliding doors.
After he got rid of me, he performed the essence of his public self: loud, crude, offensive. Inside the theater Arash and his friends had screamed at the screen and gotten kicked out for being too rowdy. Who knew why Arash had screamed at the screen, why Robert did—why they all did. Maybe screaming at screens was the only way young people had to be part of the city’s culture, to subvert it. Movie theaters were places where we were expected to be silent and still, but they were also the few places where underage people were free to go on Saturday nights. That freedom was too small an allowance.
The newspapers said the drive-by shooting revealed the allure of gangster culture among Valley teens. I read the articles over and over because it was the only way to know what had happened. Nobody knew about my relationship with Arash. I had no access to direct information. So I read and imagined and placed details where none were given. I filled in the blanks.