I didn’t know how to answer that.
It wasn’t like I could lie to Sohrab.
I think Sohrab realized how uncomfortable I was, though, because before I could say anything else, he said, “It’s okay. I don’t have one either.”
I almost smiled.
Almost.
He said, “It’s different here. Boys and girls don’t...”
He chewed on his sentence for a moment.
“There is not much interaction. Until we are older. Yazd is very conservative. You know?”
“Oh. I guess.”
I didn’t know. Not really.
But before I could ask, Sohrab looked away and pointed.
The khaki wall on our right had given way to a wide green park. Scrubby trees dotted the lawn, casting dappled shadows over the benches scattered around. A squat public bathroom stood in the corner, surrounded by a chain-link fence.
Who puts a fence around a bathroom?
The breeze came up again, stirring the grass. Sohrab closed his eyes and breathed in.
“This is our favorite park,” he said. “We come here for Sizdeh Bedar.”
Sizdeh Bedar is the thirteenth day after Nowruz, when Persians go for a picnic.
Persians are crazy about picnics, especially Sizdeh Bedar. Back home, every family makes too much of whatever dish they are most famous for—dolmeh and salad olivieh and kotlet—and we commandeer an entire park so there’s room for pretty much every Persian, Fractional or otherwise, in a fifty-mile radius.
Because Nowruz moves around every year, depending on the equinox, so does Sizdeh Bedar, which means it sometimes falls on my birthday. But somehow I could never manage to correctly calculate it.
“It’s April first this year. Right?”
Sohrab looked up as he did the calculations from the Iranian calendar to the Gregorian one.
“April two.”
“Oh. That’s my birthday.”
“You’ll still be here?”
I nodded.
“Good. We can celebrate both.”
Sohrab grabbed me by the shoulder and led me toward the bathroom.
“We play football here, sometimes. When the field is too full.”
“Oh.” I hoped we weren’t about to play soccer/non-American football. I wasn’t ready for that. “Cool.”
“Come on,” Sohrab said, leading me around the back of the squat building. “I want to show you something.”
Sohrab spared me a brief squinty smile, then stuck his fingers in the chain-link fence surrounding the bathroom and started to climb. The metal flexed and bowed under his slender weight as he wedged the toes of his sneakers into the diamond-shaped gaps.
