When Skateboards Will Be Free (20 page)

It was in December, around day forty, while everyone in class was enjoying a break before our history teacher arrived, that Daniel and I sat huddled over my desk with a piece of paper folded into a tiny triangle, pretending to play football with our fingers. The edge of the desk was the end zone, and if you managed to flick the piece of paper so that it hung just over the edge into the abyss you would have scored a touchdown. Back and forth we went, our fingers working frantically at scoring, the tiny paper football either falling short or sailing out onto the floor. And just as I was stooping to retrieve it yet again from beneath my desk, I heard Daniel ask me, “What do you think about the hostage crisis, Saïd?”

I righted myself quickly, which made all the blood rush out of my head. For a second I thought I might topple. Daniel’s face appeared composed and unperturbed. He must have thought it was a throwaway question, more small talk than inquest. It was certainly asked with ease.

“Let’s bomb Iran,” I thought to say. How simple that would be. Just a quick retort. I could feel the words right at the tip of my tongue. “Let’s bomb Iran, Daniel. That’s what I think. How about you?” “I think the same thing, Saïd.” Then we would finish our game of paper football. But the
thing that had gripped me one year earlier at Victor’s dinner table with his father gripped me again. The orator rose. I saw him rising and I was helpless to stop him. He entered the stage, took his place behind the podium, and said to the audience, “I believe the hostages are spies and should be tried for their crimes against the Iranian people.” And on top of that, indulgently, speaking long after the applause had ended, he added, “They’ll deserve whatever they get.”

Daniel stared at me. Perhaps he was trying to ascertain whether or not I was kidding.
Just kidding, Daniel. Ha-ha.
I could feel a fog settling around us. Mr. Petrisko entered the room, bald and eyeglassed, and I watched Daniel turn to his desk and open his book. He moved slowly, like he was made of clay. Everything was slow. Even Mr. Petrisko’s voice was slow. “Let’s stop all the chitchat,” he said to the class.

The following day Daniel did not speak to me. I knew immediately that I was in trouble, but I chose to cling to other, more-hopeful versions of events.

“Are you sick, Daniel?”

“What did you say?”

“Are you sick?”

He wasn’t sick. In the lunchroom I could see him over at the other table laughing freely with Tab. What were they laughing about? Maybe I was the one who was sick. Yes, I was not feeling too well. With my uneaten lunch I navigated my way, stumbling, groping, to the bathroom. I ran my hands under the cold water. In the mirror I observed the features of my face.
Your eyebrows are like his.
The eyebrows rested
thickly over my eyes. Is that how eyebrows are supposed to look?

The next day at school, Daniel’s back seemed to always be facing toward me. And now Tab’s back was turned. “Are you sick, Tab?” The next day too. Had it now been three days of silence?

And then I did a terrible thing, a desperate thing. “Hey, Daniel,” I said. We were sitting in math class but it hadn’t begun yet. “Hey, Daniel, I was watching
Saturday Night Live
and one of the actors—I can’t remember his name—one of the actors was pretending to be from South Africa and he was talking about the Krugerrand, but instead of saying ‘Krugerrand,’ he was saying ‘niggerand.’ Isn’t that funny, Daniel? Niggerand.” How simple, how easy. And Daniel smiled.

“Daniel, do you want me to come over to your house today?” I asked. “I thought we could play Ping-Pong.” I could hear the sound of pleading in my voice.

“Oh, sure. Okay.”

Okay? Yes! Okay. He had said it. There, see, the fog was lifting. There was nothing to be worried about. He had been sick but now he was well. And when the bell rang to end the day, I gathered my books and rushed to the parking lot to wait for him to come and collect me. As I stood there, I observed the white students boarding their yellow buses. Each with their books and their bags. A horde of white students, one after the other. Beyond them were the black students as they went their own way. Then the yellow bus doors closed. I looked for Daniel in the crowd but could not see him. Perhaps
we had missed each other and now he was already sitting on the bus, hoping I’d come. But which bus was his bus?

“Is Daniel on this bus?” I yelled to the driver.

“Who?”

And when the bus pulled away, I saw that all the buses were pulling away. I stood alone in the parking lot and watched them go. A row of giant yellow animals. Still I waited. Eventually the teachers came out the side doors, carrying their papers and their books, and they walked to their cars and also left for the day.

How immense the parking lot looked when there was nothing in it. The trees cast long shadows.

It had been a mistake, of course. A mix-up. He had been waiting for me, and I had let him down. Oh, well, we will try again tomorrow. But when I started to squeeze through the fence in the direction of my apartment, I suddenly saw so vividly the Ping-Pong table and the beanbag chair and the backyard, and without considering what I was doing I began to walk the other way.

I followed the path that his school bus would take, meandering through the city streets, curving and winding block by block as if tracking a trail of bread crumbs. I trekked up steep hills and then down steep hills—Pittsburgh is a city of hills. It was getting dusky. I was losing time. Will we have time to play in the backyard? My legs ached and I grew thirsty. I walked on. Daniel will be surprised to see me when I arrive. He will be happy to see me.

“I was getting worried,” he will say.

It was evening when I arrived at his front door. I could
hear the sound of voices coming from somewhere, boys’ voices. Laughter. I pressed the bell and the door opened.

“Hey, Daniel,” I said with good cheer.

His face went pale to see me.

“I missed your bus,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

He shrugged and turned without a word—was he sick?—and I followed him through his grand home and then outside into the backyard, where I joined the other boys already at play.

“Throw the ball to me, Daniel!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, but now there was no time, because I had arrived too late and it was already night.

And the next day in school it was all laid bare when Mrs. Irani distributed a piece of paper to each of us. “This is a homework assignment,” she announced, her Indian accent causing the words
homework
and
assignment
to bounce up and down like rubber balls. Listed on the paper were a series of sentences, and within each sentence was the name of a country. Australia, Spain, Japan, etc. And Iran. What were we supposed to do with the names of these countries in each of these sentences?

“I will explain in a moment,” Mrs. Irani said, but before she could explain, Daniel rose from his seat like a lawyer objecting to the judge and declared with mock outrage for all to hear, “Iran is on this paper!” Then, looking directly at me, he held the paper up by the tips of his fingers as if it were a thing that had rotted in the sun. “Burn it!” he shouted to me. “Burn the paper!”

There was tittering and twittering in the class. Tab turned and looked at me with eager eyes.

“Burn the paper!” Daniel said.

“Burn it!” someone else said.

“Bomb it!” Daniel said.

“What?!” Mrs. Irani said. “I will not have this in my class!” But in the noisy confusion she thought only that her students were angry about having been given a homework assignment.

My classmates’ faces floated around me, fleshy and white, distorted with laughter, like gargoyles on the side of a building. A school of gargoyles, a city, a country.

“I will explain the assignment in a moment!” Mrs. Irani shouted. But there was no one anywhere who could hear her voice.

M
Y MOTHER CONTINUED TO LISTEN
to National Public Radio at breakfast, but I ceased watching her expression. I assumed, as a matter of course, that the news would do me no good. On my walk to school, I would pass the American flags and the yellow ribbons and the bumper stickers of Mickey Mouse giving Iran the middle finger. I no longer paused at the vending machine to look at the day’s headlines, as today’s headlines could not be distinguished from yesterday’s headlines. Once inside the walls of school, I did my best to stay as still as possible, to look at no one, to engage no one, praying that my quietude would encourage quietude in others. I had gone beyond expecting ever to be included again by Daniel or Tab or anyone else and instead sat in the back of the classroom, resigned to my fate, my gaze fixed at the center of my desk, hoping I would not be called on, hoping that current events would not be discussed, hoping that we would not have a substitute teacher that day who would mispronounce my name, bringing full focus once again to the fact that there was an Iranian in our midst. In the evening, I would still sit with my mother and watch Walter Cronkite, but I no longer asked, “Good or bad?” “And that’s the way it is,” he would say, “Wednesday, January sixteenth, 1980.” Now amended to include the coda, “The seventy-third day of captivity for the American hostages in Iran.”

One morning, going first as I always did to my locker to put away my lunch and to retrieve my books, I heard Daniel’s familiar voice behind me, close to my ear, saying “I bet he won’t fight.”

I was kneeling on the carpeted floor and I had the impulse to stand and turn, but then Tab’s voice joined in: “No, he won’t fight.”

“They’re too scared to fight.”

“They’re all cowards.”

“They’re yellow.”

“They’ve got yellow streaks running down their backs.”

“Look at that yellow streak running down his back.”

It was a bizarre, antiquated taunt. Something from another era. I continued to rummage through my locker as if I could not find the thing I needed. The fact that I was on my hands and knees while they stood above me added to the tableau of submission. I had knelt of my own accord, but it felt like I had been forced. To stand would imply a willingness to confront them, and that was not something I wanted to do. So I stayed on my knees, and let them carry on until the bell rang for our class to begin.

Daniel continued to remain handsome in my eyes. In fact, he became more handsome, while I, in turn, became more ugly. This was the unhappy side effect of having first perceived him as my flawless opposite. I grew skinnier, frailer, as he
grew more strapping. My features became loud and prominent while his became refined and elegant. I was sure that he would be a movie star when he grew up. It was as if my face was cannibalizing the flesh from my body, absorbing it into itself, so that my nose and eyes and eyebrows intensified with each day, growing darker, larger, hairier. It was a hideous face, I was sure, loudly calling attention to itself. Now I avoided the mirror at all costs.

And one afternoon in the lunchroom, as I ate quietly among boys who did not know my name or where I came from, I was approached by a white student, a scholar from another class, whom I knew only vaguely. His name was Alan, and he was short and intelligent and Jewish, and he had an impressive vocabulary, having once astonished me by using the word
literally
in a sentence. “The teacher literally stood up and …”

“Hey, Saïd,” Alan said. “Come with me, I want to show you something funny.”

I was surprised to be invited, and I stuffed my uneaten lunch into my brown paper bag and followed Alan toward the edge of the lunchroom where I could see a dozen boys standing in a circle. I wondered suddenly where he was taking me and why I had agreed to follow so unquestioningly. But I had conceived of these questions too late and could not now turn back. When we were just a few yards from the circle it opened dramatically, like a claw, and in the center stood Daniel. His shoulders and chest looked broader than they had before, his hands and forearms thicker, a boy in a
man’s body. I could feel the energy of the boys in the circle, many of whom I knew only tangentially Daniel looked at me and I looked away. Where were the teachers? The din of the lunchroom swelled. I watched as Alan, who had invited me there, now crossed into the open claw and took his place beside Daniel, the two facing out at me. The thought of raising my arms to fight panicked me. I will allow myself to be beaten, I thought. That is what I will do. It will be easier that way, faster. I will fall. My lunch will spill. My pants will tear. Then it will be over.
I’m yellow
.

“If you were a girl,” Alan asked Daniel, turning to him and projecting his voice like an actor onstage, “which boy in our class would you think was the best looking?”

And Daniel said, like he was also an actor responding to his cue: “It’d be me, of course.”

To which Alan replied, “I can see why!”

The heat in my chest rushed into my face as the boys erupted in laughter. The circle closed. I stayed on the periphery, pulled in by its orbit, listening to the high, friendly chatter. I waited for it to reopen, but the role I had been cast in was no longer needed.

And that night I told my mother.

“They’re bothering me at school, Ma.”

It was a shameful thing to admit.

My mother was in the living room, sitting on her bed, and she leaned forward, her eyebrows creased with concern.

“Who’s bothering you?”

“Boys,” I said generally. “Boys.”

“What boys?”

“Boys in school.”

“In your class?” Her voice rose. Her fingers intertwined.

“I guess so.”

“Why are they bothering you, Saïd?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you do something?”

“I think they’re bothering me because I’m Iranian, Ma.”

And at the word
Iranian
, my mother’s eyebrows unknit themselves and a void spread across her face. We looked at each other for a while. Was there something more I was supposed to say? And then my mother nodded, a short nod, as if to say “You are excused.” I went into the bedroom and waited for her to come and let me know what she was going to do next. When I was in second grade a teacher had referred to the class as “a pack of wild Indians,” and my mother had written a letter of complaint that I was made to hand-deliver. But when she called me now it was because supper was ready, and at supper the subject was not raised. Nor was it raised the next day.