Page 10 of Female Fantasy
“In Afghanistan. Whose side are you on?”
I blinked. It was common knowledge in our small town that Sam’s older brother had been deployed. Her family had hosted a big tear-filled send-off party. But I wasn’t sure what that had to do with me.
Carefully, I responded, “I’m American, Sam.”
She shook his head. “Not really, though. You’re one of them. Right?”
My cheeks started to heat. “My family is Iranian,” I said. I willed my temper to remain in check.
“So?”
I tried to reason with her, to get her to see that I was still me, Joonie—the same Joonie I’d always been—but I could tell she’d already made up her mind. She told me that she needed space, a “break” from our friendship. A day turned into a week turned into a month. Texting 24-7 became forced smiles and curt words in passing, as if we were strangers.
When Tey found out, he told me to keep my head down and not cause trouble. He’d learned the hard way what could happen when you made a scene in a small town. But then I told Nico, and he lost his shit. Showed up at Sam’s house and had a little “talk” with her parents—who, unsurprisingly, were the source of her vitriol.
But after that, Sam never bothered me again.
My “best friend” also never spoke to me again.
I’ll never forget the way Nico sat me down. Held both of my hands and told me that I deserved better. That not all people would treat me like I was a foreign object instead of a human being. Nico made me swear that I wouldn’t let anover-tweezed idiot like Sam dull my sparkle. That I would keep romanticizing life, believing in happily ever afters. And I promised him.
Looking at Nico, how could I not?
The proof that good people, true protagonists, existed was right in front of me.
Until it wasn’t.
But that was a huge wake-up call, a lesson about how other people in town saw me and my family. Other than Nico, of course. He always stayed the same—loyal to a fault. But to everyone else, we were Other. Alien. Even, in some circumstances, dangerous. A threat. I spent hours walking aimlessly around the streets of Mystic after school, searching for distrust in the eyes of passersby.
One day, I decided something had to give. If the town wasn’t going to change for me, I’d have to step up and change myself. And change always required sacrifice.
So when I went away to college, I decided to take a new approach. I’d suppress the louder, more colorful parts of my identity and do my best to fit in with my peers. If I looked, spoke, and smelled like everybody else, maybe I could go four years without anyone bothering me. I could finally blend into the background, melt into the floorboards.
I began straightening my hair every morning, just like Sam had taught me, and lightening it so it was no longer midnight black. I plucked and threaded my eyebrows and lathered my skin in a whole-ass protective layer of sunscreen each morning to keep my complexion as pale as possible. Abandoning myvibrant, expressive wardrobe, I focused on dressing the same as all the other students: leggings and oversize sweaters and sneakers, all in dark colors.
The mission was to look ordinary. Mundane. Average.
And for the most part, it worked. I made surface-level friends and got invited to terrible parties with milquetoast music and white-people dancing. Sure, I was no longer myself, but no one called me names or asked invasive questions about my cultural heritage. I ate sushi and watchedThe Bachelorand pretended to love Disneyland. (To this day, I have an irrational fear of Disney adults. Shudder.)
Then, as a consequence of my deception, I was rewarded.
The impossible happened.
I caught the eye of a boy. A quiet, sensitive English major named Kyle.
We met at a 1975 concert. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and had a slight lisp. The next day, he offered to carry my books to class. I knew he was smitten with the artificial, watered-down version of me, but by the time I was ready to expose myself to him, both metaphorically and literally—my life prior to college had been sexless as hell—I was too afraid to jinx it. To scare him away.
Plus, he was kind to me. Well, kinder than most people.
He held my hand before the plane took off and always paid for our movie tickets. I didn’t notice that he always chose our seats and what we watched until much later.
Little by little, Kyle started to restore my faith in happy endings.
To piece together what Sam had cracked.
And what Nico had fully broken.
Then we graduated college, and the nature of our relationship changed. He got a boring desk job that he hated in New Haven. We moved in together. When he arrived home each day, he expected me to dress and behave a certain way. And he started taking out his stress on me—little by little, then all at once. If dinner was cold, he refused to eat it. If I cried in response, I waspurposely trying to guilt him.The real world hardened him. Or maybe he had been hard to begin with.
