“Enough sad things. How is Landon?”
The back of my neck prickled. “He’s okay.”
Sohrab looked at me, like he knew there was more.
Sohrab always knew.
“We talked some. About stuff.”
He kept looking at me.
“Sex stuff.”
Sohrab’s eyes got big for a second and he let out this little cough.
“Oh.” Sohrab’s camera wasn’t good enough for me to tell if his face was getting red, but his voice was distinctly pinched when he said, “Are you...”
He couldn’t finish the sentence, though.
“No. We just talked. Landon... he wants to.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
Sohrab looked away for a minute. He shifted in his chair.
I could tell he was uncomfortable.
Sohrab didn’t have many walls inside, but one of them was about sex. He always got nervous if the conversation veered anywhere near the topic.
I felt kind of bad, bringing it up.
So I said, “I just want him to be happy.”
And Sohrab said, “I want you to be happy too, Darioush.”
“Thanks.”
A silence hung between us, laden with the things we couldn’t say out loud.
I swallowed.
“Mamou and Babou don’t know.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to tell them.”
“I know.”
MIRROR UNIVERSE
Our next soccer match was an away game, against Poplar Grove High School down in Salem.
After school, we grabbed our away kits and boarded the bus waiting in the student parking lot. I ended up in the middle of the bus, with Chip right across the aisle from me. At the front, Coach Bentley cleared her throat.
“It’s your first away game, gentlemen,” she said. “I’m not going to bore you with the Code of Conduct or anything. You all know what’s expected of you. So why don’t we go make it three and oh?”
