And that looseness in your chest clenches up again, this time with a flare of anger.
“What’s your problem with me, dude?” you blurt out.
Farshid looks back at you. “Problem?”
“You act like I’m…” You don’t even know. He’s just like your old friends. Like Cooper and Tyler. He acts like you’re toxic. Like you’re a walking hate crime.
“Why do you hate me?”
Farshid blinks at you. “Me? Hate you? You’re the one who shouted a slur in front of the whole class. You’re the one who hates people.”
“I don’t,” you say. “It was a stupid joke. And I already paid for it.”
“Paid for it? Three days of ISS. You never even apologized.”
You realize people are pausing their workouts to watch you. Angel’s staring, mouth dropped open, but you can’t stop yourself.
“Idid.”
“Not to me.”
“Well, I didn’t know you were gay! I’m sorry!”
“I’m not!” Farshid shouts, and anyone who wasn’t staring definitely is now. He’s breathing hard, harder than he was when he was doing his squats. His head jerks around, taking in all the stares.
Then he’s moving at you, and you think he’s going to punch you. You think you might deserve it.
But he swerves around you, barely brushing past your shoulder, and stomps out of the weight room. The door shuts behind him with an echoing thud.
All the anger drains out of you. All the embarrassment, too. Instead, shame floods you. You’re intimately familiar with the sensation by now. But this time is worse.
Youmadeit worse.
You don’t hate anyone.
Except maybe yourself a little bit.
12FARSHID
The Birth of Bahá’u’lláh is one of the most important holy days in the Bahá’í calendar. So important that you get to stay home from school, which is just fine, because after conditioning yesterday you never want to see Dayton or Angel or anyone ever again.
You can’t believe you let Dayton get to you. What were you thinking, shouting like that? Insisting you’re not gay is only going to make people think you are. And you’re not.
You’re not.
Cold anger creeps along your shoulders, down your arms, as you fill the giant water boiler in the Bahá’í Center’s kitchen. Dayton acted likeyouwere the one with the problem, whenhe’sthe bigot. He let the whole school know right at the beginning of the year. He showed everyone exactly who he was.
“When people show you who they are, believe them,” Nadeem told you once, when you came home from fifth grade crying because one of your classmates—you don’t even remember her name anymore—told you you were going to hell for not being Christian.
You weren’t crying because you thought you were going to hell. You know you’re not. You were crying because you thought you were friends, thought she accepted you as you were, but it turnedout “accepted” really meant “pitying and praying for,” and you didn’t want that.
Madison. That was her name.
You haven’t thought of her in a long time. You wonder what ever happened to her. She moved before middle school. Sometimes you’re still a little sad how it all ended. You used to build LEGO sets together. She had this really sweet castle set with knights and dragons and wizards, which frequently got visited by your ninjas and the occasional Avenger.
You shake the thought away. There’s still a lot of work to do.
“Farshid, take more than that,” your mom tells you in Farsi as you fill your plate.
