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  I went out the back door. The Wheelers’ home was on a hill on what must have been an acre of old farmland in the suburb of Weston, with a small creek running across the bottom. I walked past a few kids smoking on the corner of the patio, where the pool was covered with a tarp for the season and a few patio chairs stacked up for the winter were covered in snow. I walked down the slope until I was far enough away that I couldn’t hear any music from the party. I spotted a tiny toolshed tucked away by some snow-covered pine trees. It was far enough from the house that I felt comfortable taking a leak.

  I walked to the back of the shed. I tried to pick which shrubbery planted near the side of the structure might benefit from some alternative methods of watering. I had already undone my fly when I overheard some not-so-quiet conversation coming from inside.

  I zipped myself up and squatted behind a clump of bushes. I didn’t want to get caught with my pants down in Erin Wheeler’s backyard. That was when I heard Stephanie.

  “I’m not going to demean myself and, what . . . make myself over to appease your insecurities,” she hissed, her voice rising to a yell before she regained her composure. “We’ve been playing this game for months. What are we doing? Are you . . . are you into me or aren’t you? These mixed signals no longer feel healthy. Because I . . . While we haven’t done anything, I like you. I like you very much. Can you understand that?” She didn’t say anything for a moment. When she did speak again, her voice trembled. “Please. I need you to understand that.”

  Then I heard it. Lips smacking. Stephanie was kissing someone! Either that or she was really enjoying a Popsicle in the dead of winter. Even though I was curious to know who else was in that shed, it was time for me to exit this private moment.

  There was one problem. I heard a rustling coming from a bush about fifteen feet away from me. A little kitty with white stripes on its back emerged, and we locked eyes.

  The rest of me froze too. I didn’t want to get caught eavesdropping, but I also didn’t want the skunk to get scared and spray me. I thought the best course of action was to stay crouched down until the skunk scurried away, when I could give Stephanie all the privacy she needed.

  “You said you liked me,” I heard a voice say.

  A girl’s voice.

  A very specific girl’s voice.

  “That’s the first time you said it.” There was no denying that husky voice belonged to Erin Wheeler.

  “Was it the first time? I thought I’d already told you,” Stephanie whispered, breathless.

  I stared at the skunk in disbelief. My furry friend didn’t seem to appreciate the enormity of what was happening inside the shed.

  “I pay attention to everything you say. Which is not always easy, considering how verbose you are,” Erin said.

  Stephanie laughed. “You’ve been studying those SAT cards I gave you. What do we do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you don’t. You finally admit your feelings for me, but only in private, right?”

  “Look, I broke up with Drew—”

  “So there’s nothing holding us back anymore,” Stephanie interrupted. “I was never going to be the other woman to that Neanderthal.” She paused. The skunk was sniffing a pinecone. My quads burned from crouching for so long. “Unless you don’t want to let people know?”

  “It’s not the being out of the big gay closet part that bothers me. It’s . . . My friends and that school are going to tear you apart.”

  “I don’t think you give your friends enough credit. I’ve spent some time with Elle, and she hasn’t been mean to me in the slightest.” I could picture Stephanie crossing her arms. I could also picture her lecturing me for eons if she knew what I was up to at the moment, so I stayed as quiet as possible.

  “Yeah, but . . . I don’t want you to . . . deal with more junk than you usually do,” Erin said. “Can we please table this whole out-and-proud business? We’ll figure out what to do over the summer.”

  “Don’t pretend that this is about protecting me. It’s about protecting you and your social status.” Stephanie no longer bothered to keep her voice low.

  Meanwhile, the skunk was foraging through the snow. There was no way I was getting out of this without smelling like rotten eggs, and I still had to pee so bad.

  “Can we at least kiss some more before we have to have everything figured out?” Erin asked. “In my room, maybe? It’s freezing out here.”

  “I’d be amenable to that,” Stephanie said, and I heard Erin gasp. Stephanie Bergner had game, way more game than I did.

  I was sitting on the most amazing secret of all time, and a locker room story for the ages about the skunk (who was still chilling way too close for comfort). But I wouldn’t say anything, even to Stephanie, until she told me about it. I shouldn’t have been there. But oh man, I’ll always have the memory.

  “That skunk doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon, Reggie.”

  “Nope. Sure doesn’t. It looks like Majidi has lots of time to work on toning his quads.”

  ***

  My new friend Fluffy and I stayed out in the cold well after Stephanie and Erin went back into the house. Just when I thought my situation was headed from bad to worse, he waddled back into the bushes. As soon as Fluffy was out of my sights, I stood up and relieved myself. After I finished, I booked it back to the house. I didn’t want to take a chance on Fluffy’s relatives stop­ping by.

  As soon as I rushed inside, Will managed to find me and slapped me on the back. “Yo, there he is,” he said. He was wearing his Granger warm-up pants and jacket, as though he was still waiting to be put in the game. “Having a good time, Beej?”

  “I was,” I said.

  “Your boy Sean is having a blast upstairs,” Will said. He leaned right in to my face, doing his best to intimidate me. “I thought you two were joined at the hip. How will you be able to take a piss without him holding your dick?”

  “He’s his own man,” I said. “But it’s true, my dick is far too big to hold. Your mom said so last night.” I had never met Will’s mom, but if I ever did, I would apologize to her profusely.

  “By the way,” Will retorted, “which of his moms did it with a turkey baster?”

  I pushed Will away from me.

  He just laughed, backing away with his hands up. “You think you’re a big deal now?” He had a stupid grin on his face. “I got some friends at Mercer Day I want you to meet at the tourney next week. I’ve told them all about you, and they’re real excited to meet you.” He turned around and sauntered over to a sophomore girl. He put his arm around her waist and nibbled on her earlobe. I guessed he and Jessica were off again.

  ***

  I looked for Sean. It didn’t feel right to leave him alone after what Will had said. What if Will had done something to him while I was creeping on Stephanie and Erin? And why had I continued to listen in on them, anyway? Yeah, it was hot, and yeah, Fluffy was a problem, but that was a private moment.

  I wandered into the kitchen to find Elle at the table with a group of seniors hanging on every word she said. Popular guys with nice cars who had no viral iconography casting a shadow over them and would never bring up Chuck E. Cheese’s in her presence sat there rapt. I was kidding myself to think something could ever happen between us.

  “Big fella’s liquid courage has left the building.”

  “No party like a pity party, Kevin.”

  I left to scope out the living room, where I found Sean lying on the couch, snoring. A crude drawing of a penis graced his cheek. I licked my thumb and crouched down to rub some of the black marker off. Thankfully it wasn’t Sharpie.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I woke up the next morning on my own living room floor to the sound of my mom banging pots and pans in the kitchen. Something was up; she never made breakfast. I usually had what she ca
lled “Cocoa Poops” because they were all sugar and terrible for my teeth. Her usual morning meal was coffee, sometimes paired with a banana.

  Sean, lying next to me, had apparently rolled to the floor from the pullout bed. I had slept near him, in order to assist him as quietly as possible to the bathroom when he needed to hurl chunks, for his sake and for my mom’s. After he puked, I helped him scrub the uninspired doodle from his face.

  Sean lay on the couch barely awake, his hands covering his ears.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  He grunted and turned over.

  “Rise and shine, gentlemen!” Mom said with aggressive cheerfulness. She entered the living room with a cup of coffee in her hand. “Sean!” She stood over him. “Your moms are going to pick you up this afternoon. They assumed you wouldn’t be ready to join them this morning.”

  “Whatever gave them that idea?” Sean mumbled into the carpet. “On a scale of one to ten, how upset did they sound?”

  “I’d say nine and a half. But they’re glad you made it home safe.” My mom crouched to Sean’s level. “Do you drink coffee?”

  Sean shook his head, his face still buried in the carpet.

  “Well, today is the day you start,” Mom said, gently taking his hand and closing his fingers around the mug, which she had set beside him on the floor.

  “Thank you, Dr. M,” Sean said. “You have always been my favorite.”

  “And thank you for showing my son how awful a hangover is.” She turned her attention to me. “Though I think he has some idea himself?”

  “What? No way!” I lied. I hadn’t put away beers like Sean had, but I worried she knew I’d had one. I had a feeling that later she was going to yell at me or punish me by taking me to her book club and having all the members ask me what college I planned on going to, over and over and over again.

  “Fix the sofa, please,” my mom said before she walked back to the kitchen. I held out my hands and pulled Sean up. We stripped off the sheets and folded the bed back into the sofa. Sean winced at the creak of the metal frame dropping into place.

  “So how was the party?” Mom asked, once we had eased ourselves into chairs at the kitchen table. She kept her back to us as she chopped potatoes and onions for hash browns. Until then, I hadn’t known slicing could be loud. “Any trouble last night?”

  I didn’t want to bring up my conversation with Will, and I definitely wasn’t going to tell them about Stephanie and Erin. I shook my head. “It was fine.”

  “Not that I remember,” Sean said, shrugging and gesturing to his scoured-clean cheek. “You should totally come to the next party, Dr. M.”

  “I should come next time to keep an eye on you, Sean,” Mom said over her shoulder. She’d love that. Then she could watch me like the NSA monitors Verizon customers. “You’re more than welcome to have get-togethers here. Without alcohol, of course.” When the hash browns were done, she scrambled a few eggs in the pan and spread the cooked food across two plates. She sat at the table with us, sticking with her cup of coffee and banana in lieu of our heartier fare.

  “I will let the ladies know,” Sean said.

  “The same ladies who left you to get wasted?” I muttered.

  He didn’t look up from his mug of coffee when he answered me. “My wingman left me to get wasted too.”

  I hadn’t been the best friend to Sean lately. I had been so caught up in the team and my email problem that I hadn’t really asked him much about what was going on with him. I knew he had an exhibition coming up for Granger Arts Night that he’d been working hard on in the ceramics studio, but I didn’t know what day it was going to be or how it was going. I hadn’t even asked if Granger had won the last JV game or if he’d heard back from that girl he liked who worked at the Central Square Starbucks.

  “Sorry. I should have been looking out for you. I was kicking back with the guys from the team. Figured it wouldn’t hurt to fit in a little better.”

  “By drinking?” my mom asked.

  “You didn’t drink in high school?”

  “That’s none of your business,” my mom said. “But you are my business, and I am concerned about what’s going on with you. You never drank before. I don’t want you using alcohol to numb yourself.”

  “I was trying to have fun! What do you guys want from me? I’m sorry I don’t meet your superhero criteria for dealing with narrow-mindedness, but what should I do? Go to that stupid board meeting? Be a poster child for the cyberbullied?”

  Neither Sean nor my mom had an answer for me.

  None of us ate very much at breakfast. Sean and I played video games in relative silence until Sean’s parents picked him up. I let him pick the games.

  ***

  After Sean left, I retreated to my room. Mom didn’t yell or give me a speech about how disappointed she was; she left me alone to do homework. I was typing up an overdue essay for history class, but I was having a hard time focusing. Ms. McCrea had been understanding and given me extra time. I knew I had to get it done, but my thoughts wandered to the email, Elle, Stephanie swapping spit with Erin, Will’s threats. Current events were making it almost impossible for me to focus on historical ones.

  There was a knock at my door.

  “I brought you a snack,” Mom said, entering my room. She held a plate of grapes, apple slices, and fig jam on toast out to me, even though she knew I wasn’t going to eat much of it.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  She placed the food on my desk next to my computer. “The Celtics are playing in an hour. I thought we could watch the game together?”

  We used to watch the games together all the time when I was younger. I rocked a Kevin Garnett jersey while my mom complained that she wished I were a Lakers fan like her and her family. No matter what, she’d always let me watch the fourth quarter of playoff games, even if they went really late. But when Mom’s workload became overwhelming, we didn’t have time to watch together anymore.

  “Maybe after I finish this paper,” I said as I stared at my computer.

  Mom didn’t leave my room. Instead, she sat down on my bed. I kept my back to her. I didn’t want her to lecture me about underage drinking or try to convince me to make a speech at the board meeting.

  “When your father and I learned you were going to be a boy, we spent a lot of time thinking about a name for you,” she said. “Your father thought of some names in Arabic that could be shortened, and I thought of some Persian ones to honor relatives. We considered a lot of English names too. We thought it would make your life easier in the long run for job interviews or roll call on the first day of school, that sort of thing. I had experience with that growing up here, but your father didn’t.”

  My mom isn’t one to wax nostalgic. She doesn’t like talking about the past. I think it makes her too sad. I swiveled my chair to give her my full attention.

  “Then we reminisced about when we met. When he found out I was Persian, he said if I was willing to go on a date with him, we would have a romance greater than that of Bijan and Manijeh from Shahnameh. I was embarrassed that I didn’t know what he was referencing.”

  Mom flushed as she continued to tell the story of their first date: My father had a heavy accent and a wealth of knowledge in various areas, and he grinned at her every time she spoke. They asked each other lots of questions that evening. With each answer, Mom said she was more certain my father was the man she would marry. Just like that. Not love at first sight, but love at first meaningful conversation.

  At the end of the night she asked him to tell her the story of Bijan and Manijeh. He was surprised she didn’t know it. The story was a part of the great Persian poet Ferdowsi’s epic poem Shahnameh, which roughly translates to The Book of Kings. It was written a thousand years ago and is twice the length of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad combined. I couldn’t even make it through The Od
yssey freshman year, so I kind of can’t imagine reading this poem (especially if it wasn’t going to be on a test).

  Shahnameh helped keep the Persian language intact. The text used virtually no Arabic, in subtle protest of the Arab conquests of Iran in the seventh century. My mother asked if this offended my father. He answered that it didn’t, but Ferdowsi would be appalled that an Arab knew more about his epic poem than a nice Persian girl.

  My father told my mom that Bijan was a great Persian knight tasked with helping farmers whose crops were being attacked by wild boars. When Bijan traveled to enemy territory to vanquish the boars, he fell in love with a princess, Manijeh, who was the daughter of his country’s greatest enemy.

  “Your father always enjoyed stories where love comes out of hate. He was so ridiculously sentimental that way,” she said softly. For a moment, and only a moment, she seemed to be back there, in that time and in that place. Then she cleared her throat, and it was gone. I don’t know why she thinks she has to put on a brave face all the time, but maybe one day I’ll be courageous enough, like the hero I was named for, to ask her.

  “Do you have a nickname at school?” Mom asked with a hint of uneasiness. She knew Sean and the guys called me Beej sometimes, but she didn’t know it didn’t sit right with me when someone like Noah said it. Coach Johnson hadn’t even tried to say my name. He might as well have called me by the number on my jersey. He probably wouldn’t learn my name unless I made it to the NBA.

  “Bijan suits me fine,” I said.

  “Good.” She nodded. “Try to eat something, and let me know if you change your mind about the game.” She gave me a wet smooch on my cheek, then left me to my work.

  I swiveled back around in my chair, looked at my computer screen, and minimized my history paper. I opened up my Granger email to see what my English assignment was. There was a new email from another address I didn’t recognize. It had been sent ten minutes earlier. I held my breath and braced myself. It was so stupid that little things like checking my email made me so anxious.