Sohrab squinted at me.
Ali-Reza elbowed Hossein and said something in Farsi. Sohrab’s neck turned red, and his jaw twitched, like he was grinding his teeth a little bit.
“Um.”
Sohrab didn’t let me ask. “Come on, Darioush.”
Like I said, I hadn’t been on a soccer team—a real one, not just one in physical education class at Chapel Hill High School (Go Chargers)—since I was twelve. Dad had signed me up for the neighborhood soccer club when I was seven. I was okay at it, but according to our coach I wasn’t aggressive enough.
And then I got diagnosed with depression, and I started on my first round of medication, and I couldn’t focus on the game at all. I was too slow to track the other players, or the ball, or even the score.
One week, I left every single practice in tears because Coach Henderson (father of our midfielder, Vance Henderson, who I was destined to smack across the face less than a year later) kept humiliating me in front of the whole team. He didn’tunderstand why I had gone from being an okay-but-not-very-aggressive center-back to a complete and utter failure. All he could see was that I wasn’t trying hard enough.
I didn’t know how to talk to people about being medicated back then. And Dad kept saying I just needed more discipline.
Mom finally put her foot down and insisted it was okay for me to quit, scuttling Stephen Kellner’s dreams of me playing professional soccer before they even made it out of dry dock.
It was another of Stephen Kellner’s many disappointments in me.
At least he eventually got used to them.
We only used half the field. For a simple two-on-two, using the entire thing would have been illogical.
Sohrab was our nominal forward, which left me de facto defender, but really, both of us played all over the field.
Ali-Reza was supposed to be the forward for his and Hossein’s team, but Sohrab played so aggressively, Ali-Reza spent most of his time helping Hossein ward off Sohrab’s relentless assaults on their goal.
Coach Henderson would have loved Sohrab’s aggressiveness.
Not that Ali-Reza wasn’t aggressive too. I had to fend off my share of goals, which I mostly did, through some combination of luck, coincidence, and latent memories of my pre-medication training.
It seemed I had misread the situation between Sohrab and Ali-Reza, who had acted like friends, but were clearly engaged in some sort of personal vendetta that could only be settled through soccer/non-American football.
They fought much more fiercely than Trent Bolger and Cyprian Cusumano, and I was shifting the balance of their vendetta by preventing Ali-Reza from scoring.
The best was when I executed a perfect sliding tackle, stealing the ball from Ali-Reza and passing it down to Sohrab.
I felt very Iranian in that moment, even covered in grass stains.
Ali-Reza hissed and ran back after Sohrab, who dodged Hossein and scored again.
“Pedar sag,” Ali-Reza spat as he followed Sohrab back toward center field.
Sohrab stopped and said something to Ali-Reza, which ended up with them shouting in Farsi so fast I couldn’t make out a single word. Ali-Reza shoved Sohrab, who shoved him back, and I thought things were going to escalate from there until Hossein started shouting too.
I didn’t catch much of that, either, except I could make outnakon, which means “don’t,” so I figured he was telling them to stop it.
Sohrab shook his head, ran over to me and slapped my shoulder. “Good job, Darioush.”
“Um. Thanks,” I said. “Uh.”
But Sohrab ran off again before I could ask what happened.
We played forever.
We played until I couldn’t run any more.
We played until my shirt was soaked and translucent with sweat, and my boxers were causing some Level Eight Chafing.
