Note: This piece was originally published in Fruitslice Magazine.
The first thing Darius told me was a lie.
“Got an A. You?”
“Same,” I replied, keeping my paper face down.
We were each other’s first friend, I’d like to think. Despite being inches shorter than I was, he stood with confidence, as if he hadn’t landed two months prior. Dark tight curls covered his head, eyes brown with a tint of redwood if you looked close enough, and eyebrows thick above them. I envied his long eyelashes, even as a child. It didn’t take long until I found out he envied me, too.
“You fit in,” he told me once afterschool. “Help me dress like you, yeah?”
We spent our time in my closet, Darius trying on various t-shirts and tank tops. I might as well have been a cat chasing lasers the way my eyes fixated on his body, staring at the light trail beginning to form on his stomach. I watched his back hide behind fabric, only to be revealed moments later when Darius deemed the clothing “American” and “middle school” enough. From that point on, we walked to school side by side, carrying cheap skateboards we were too scared to ride.
Our final summer before high school was spent at the public pool. Both of our voices had dropped recently, no longer sounding like young boys but young men. Darius and I stood at the door, towels in hand as we waited for the pool to open. We walked through the humid locker room, not yet filled with naked men and slippery floors. The smell of cheap powder soap lingered between us as we stuffed our bags into one locker.
We were the first to get into the water before it was polluted by band aids, mucus, and un-showered bodies. We savored the ten minutes of silence, floating on our backs before families crowded in. We play-fought in the water while ignoring the lifeguards’ warnings. We ran by the side of the pool, jumped into the shallow end, even held each other under the water to see which one of us would survive a tsunami. The pool water helped conceal most of our questionable activities, from pulling each other’s swim short strings to underwater wrestling. By the time we stepped out, our eyes burned from the chlorine, our hands shriveled, hair soaked flat against our foreheads.
The walk through the locker room after a swim was never something I looked forward to. The smell of cleaning products, the slippery bodies, the lack of towels wrapped around waists. Unlike earlier, it was impossible to walk through the room without your skin touching someone else, whether intentional or not. We dressed with our eyes down, scared to catch a glimpse of other men, and left with our hair semi wet and clothes stained with patches of water.
At sixteen, Darius’ uncle hired us at his Armenian market to stock shelves and sell cigarettes and lottery tickets we couldn’t yet buy. By this point, Darius was taller and toner than I was. His facial hair was already coming in—not peach fuzz but genuine stubble—something I wouldn’t experience until my early twenties. During our shift, I listened to the words he used in Farsi and Armenian, wrote each syllable on receipt paper that I would then memorize with the hopes of impressing him.
Salam, merci, chetori, barev dzez, yerek dollar.
Rarely did I pronounce them right the first time. Still Darius showed the patience of a teacher, repeating words as many times as I asked him to.
“What was Iran like?” I asked as we stocked the metal shelves with off-brand Cheeto puffs.
“My family’s there.” He shrugged, opening another box of snacks. “I miss my cousins. And my friend next door. His mom always invited me for a snack after we played football in his yard.”
I asked if he would ever go back.
“My dad really wants to. Regrets coming here. I think he just misses his home. And it’s not like I’ve got a choice in it, you know?”
I did not know. Still, I nodded, disappointment swelling in my chest.
Most days, Darius and I found any excuse to talk to Luke, a nineteen-year-old who worked at the pizza place next door. Luke worked hard, always kept the front of the shop clean, even caught a guy trying to steal a case of carbonated doogh from the fridge. Not that any of that mattered to Darius and me—we were busy watching the muscles in his arms move under suntanned skin as he helped truckers unload boxes of produce. We listened to his voice as he spoke above the noise of traffic, greeting regulars and strangers the same. We even smelled the oranges he peeled as he walked past our entrance during his breaks.
We first smoked weed sitting on Luke’s closed trunk in the parking lot beside the market. More enjoyable than the rebellion of it was the simple presence of Luke. His hands worked gently, folding small creases into the filter before rolling. We watched in contained excitement as his lips touched the paper and his fingers ignited the flame. As he inhaled, I listened to the weed burn, blackening before exposing the embers inside. My lips would touch that same joint.
“This doesn’t mean we kissed, right?” I semi-joked, taking the joint which, upon closer look, didn’t seem all that elegant. But this was Luke, and whatever he did was good enough.
“Of course not. If sharing a joint was the same as kissing someone, everyone’d be a faggot,” Luke reassured. “Do I look like a faggot to you?”
Yes, I wanted to speak, as if saying it could make it true. Instead, I took my first hit, forcing the back of my throat to burn as I suppressed a cough. I held the joint out to Darius, who took it with confidence. Luke broke the news as Darius took his first hit. His girlfriend was visiting from college. Whether from the news or the weed or both, Darius coughed into his elbow. It broke us silently—two boys wishing it was untrue that the one man we looked up to in ways we couldn’t explain had a girlfriend. I faked a phone call, claimed that my mom needed me at home, and excused myself. The mere twenty-minute walk home caused my legs to ache, as if I were operating something more than my body.
When his girlfriend started showing up to work, waiting for his shift to end, Darius and I stood by the front entrance, sharing a can of Monster. Darius said it was what white boys like Luke drank. We watched in envy as our prized possession showed that he was never really ours to begin with.
“This is the third day in a row. It’s like he forgot about us or something.” I took a sip of the can and tried to ignore the all-too-sweet aftertaste.
“Whatever, man, I don’t care,” Darius lied as he patted my shoulder to head back inside. “We don’t need him.”
After our shift, we walked around the block to the park, usually inhabited by child soccer teams and family gatherings. At night, it was occupied by faceless people, staying far enough away to not have to acknowledge each other’s presence. We sat on the empty swings, kicking the wood below our sneakers.
“Do you think they’ll stay together?” Darius lit a joint, bought from the only smoke shop that willingly ignored fakes.
I shook my head and kicked off the ground. The joint passed between us as we launched our bodies into the starless sky. Each swing seemed to take longer to descend as the world slowed down. The chains felt comfortably cold against my palms. The sound of leaves seemed to grow by about a million decibels, drowning Darius’ voice. My body soared into the trees, lifting from my seat.
“What?” I remember turning to Darius, waiting for my eyes to catch up with my face.
“You good?” he repeated, a smile on his face.
I nodded, and our laughter echoed through the park.
We lay in the dark grass, side by side while looking for stars, trying to decipher them from the planes. Each moment of near victory was refuted by a green and red flashing. We tried to guess the number of dogs who had probably pissed and shit on that very spot where we lay.
He sat up and rested my head on his legs. “If I do something, will you get mad?”
“I doubt it,” I replied, almost too quiet to hear.
Darius was hesitant. I could tell from looking up at his face, a smile formed in times of anxiety. He lit the rest of our joint, took a hit of confidence and kissed me, smoke and all. I could feel a cross hanging from his neck, the coldness of it laying against my chin. I’d imagined doing this so many times, but I never accounted for the details. Like his height requiring that he crane down over me. Or the taste of his fancy cologne that he sprayed too close to his mouth. Or his stubble against my top lip, I’ll often wonder what he remembers from that day. Does he recall the shirt he wore? One of mine, borrowed and never returned.
I spent my walk home failing to act casual. I was a newly hatched baby turtle, pushing towards the water. I was no different, following the moon home, where I would spend thirty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to convince myself that I was real. We’d spent the following day finding any excuse to touch—him picking an invisible lint from my shirt, me wiping an eyelash from his face. We brushed past each other with boxes of produce, apologizing for intentionally being too close. Once, briefly, the thought crossed my mind to tell Luke all about the night before, and just like that, I tripped on reality.
We were stocking the fridges when Darius told me he was going back to Iran.
“My grandpa’s sick,” he tried to justify, focused more on the floor than me. I hated him in that moment—Darius and his dad and his grandpa and everyone else on Earth. Darius, for pulling me into a world I had no intentions of accepting and leaving me there alone. His dad, for taking Darius back without thinking of me. His grandfather, for not gathering the strength to stay alive. Hell, even his uncle. For hiring me, for putting me next to a shop with a Luke and a Darius. They were pulling my heart across the world by plane only to land in Tehran.
“You can’t live with your uncle or something? You could even crash here,” I pleaded as the childlike urge to cry climbed my throat.
“I wish. My dad wants us to be with him. You know, in the end.”
If I opened my mouth I didn’t trust myself to stay composed, despite biting the tip of my tongue as a distraction. And so, I nodded.
We stood with luggage at our feet, ready to be loaded into the trunk. Not knowing how long they’d be gone, Darius and his dad took practically everything. I wondered if some of my “American” clothes made it into the cases, tucked away as a reminder of here, and of me. We hugged stiffly, so as to not look too sentimental towards each other. We fit the suitcases into the trunk of a Toyota, taking turns in this heavier version of Tetris. Despite my best judgement I let my thoughts run wild with scenarios between Darius and I, two American boys. I was sure he’d come back soon. How long could it take for an old man to drop? I fantasized about his return, hopefully not long from his departure, where I would greet him at the airport and go straight to the park where we both had our first kiss. Darius broke the silence.
“Don’t mention what happened to anyone, okay? I’ve thought about it and I’m not into guys.” His eyes refused to meet mine.
“Yeah, me neither,” I lied back.