(Not that I owned any.)
“It’s okay. I brought extra.”
“You sure you don’t mind? Sharing, I mean.”
Sohrab squinted at me. “Of course not. Come on. Let’s go.” He opened the door again and then turned to holler back at the kitchen. “Khodahafes, Agha Bahrami.”
“Khodahafes, Babou,” I said.
Sohrab led me to a park down the street from Mamou’s house. A chain-link fence ran all the way around, and it was bordered on three sides by squat stone houses and on the fourth by another of Yazd’s boulevards.
The field was full-sized, or pretty close at least, and the sort of vibrant green that only came from constant watering. Nothing else I had seen in Yazd so far was that green—not even Babou’s garden, though I would never tell him that.
Sohrab led me to the small, sad-looking public bathroom at the edge of the field. It was clean inside, even if it did have the feta-cheese-and-baby-powder smell of a boys’ locker room.
There were no urinals, only a few stalls with sitting toilets—none of the squatting ones, like my bathroom at Mamou’s—and I wondered if that was a Social Cue I had missed. What if I was not supposed to pee standing up in Iran?
It wasn’t the sort of thing I could ask Sohrab.
How do you ask a guy if it’s okay to pee standing up?
“Lots of people play football here.” Sohrab started pulling clothes out of his backpack. He tossed me a green T-shirt and a pair of shorts so white, they were blinding in the alien glow of the bathroom’s fluorescent lights.
“Darioush, what size shoe do you wear?”
“Twelve,” I said.
Sohrab bit the inside of his cheek. “Here,” he said, and stepped next to me. “Take off your shoes.”
I toed off my Vans, and Sohrab stepped out of his sandals. He wrapped his arm around my side and lined up his foot with mine.
My feet were a bit longer but a lot wider.
I had Hobbit feet.
At least they weren’t furry on top.
My stomach tickled where Sohrab had grabbed me. I blushed.
No one ever stood right next to me like Sohrab did.
I wasn’t used to guys doing that.
“I wear forty-four,” Sohrab said. “I think they will fit you. They will be tight, though.”
“Oh.” I didn’t even realize Iran used a different shoe sizing system. “That’s okay. Thanks.”
Sohrab dug in his bag and handed me a pair of faded black Adidas.
He avoided my eyes as he passed me the cleats, rummaged through his bag, and pulled out another pair of cleats for himself. They were white (well, they had been, once), and were in imminent danger of experiencing a non-passive failure.
“Uh. Wouldn’t you rather use these?” I tried to give back the black Adidas. “I can play in my Vans.”
“No. You use them. They are newer.”
They were so worn, I wasn’t sure they had ever been new, but they were in better shape than Sohrab’s white cleats.
“They’re yours,” I said. “You should use them.”
