Tahereh Mafi - A Very Large Expanse of Sea

“Just answer the question,” I’d snap at him. “It’s simple reading comprehension. Read the paragraph and summarize, in a couple of sentences, what it was about. That’s it. It’s not rocket science.”

He refused.

I pushed.

He refused.

I insulted him.

He insulted me back.

I insulted him more.

“Just answer the goddamn question why are you so lazy what the hell is wrong with you —”

And finally he just exploded.

That was the day I learned that my brother, my beautiful, brilliant older brother, couldn’t make sense of words on a page. He’d spend half an hour reading a paragraph over and over again and even then, he didn’t know what to do with it. He couldn’t craft sentences. He struggled, tremendously, to translate his thoughts into words.

So I started teaching him how.

We worked together every day for hours, late into the night, until one day he could put sentences together by himself. Months later he was writing paragraphs. It took a year, but he finally wrote his own research paper. And the thing no one ever knew was that I did all his schoolwork in the interim. All his writing assignments. I wrote every paper for him until he could do it on his own.

I thought maybe this was his way of saying thanks. I mean, it almost certainly wasn’t, but I couldn’t help but wonder why else he’d take this chance on me. The other guys he’d collected—Jacobi, Carlos, and Bijan—already had experience in other crews. None of them were experts, but they weren’t novices, either. I was the one who needed the most work, and Navid was the only one who didn’t seem irritated about it.

Carlos, especially, wouldn’t stop looking at me. He seemed deeply skeptical that I’d end up any good, and he told me so. He didn’t even seem mean about it, just matter of fact.

“What?” I said. “Why not?”

He shrugged. But he was staring at my outfit.

I’d switched into some of the only gym clothes I owned—a pair of slim sweatpants and a thin hoodie—but I was also wearing a different scarf; it was made of a light, cotton material that I’d tied up into a turban style, and this seemed to distract him.

Finally, he nodded at my head and said, “You can breakdance in that?”

My eyes widened. For some reason I was surprised. I don’t know why I’d thought these dudes would be marginally less stupid than all the other ones I’d known.

“Are you for real?” I said. “What a dick thing to say.”

He laughed and said, “I’m sorry, I’ve just never seen anyone try to breakdance like that before.”

“Wow,” I said, stunned. “I’ve literally never seen you take off that beanie, but you’re giving me shit for this ?”

Carlos looked surprised. He laughed harder. He tugged the beanie off his head and ran his hand through his hair. He had very black, springy curls that were slightly too long and kept falling in his face. He put the beanie back on. “All right,” he said. “All right. Okay. Sorry.”

“Whatever.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but he was smiling. “Seriously. I’m sorry. That was a dick thing to say. You’re right. I’m an asshole.”

“Clearly.”

Navid was laughing so hard. I suddenly hated everyone.

Jacobi shook his head and said, “Damn.”

“Wow,” I said. “You all suck.”

“ Hey —” Bijan was in the middle of stretching his legs. He pretended to look hurt. “That’s not fair. Jacobi and I didn’t even say anything.”

“Yeah but you were thinking it, weren’t you?”

Bijan grinned.

“Navid,” I said, “your friends suck.”

“They’re a work in progress,” he said, and chucked a water bottle at Carlos, who dodged it easily.

Carlos was still laughing. He walked over to where I was sitting on the floor and offered me his hand.

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “Really.”

I took his hand. He hauled me to my feet.

“All right,” he said. “Let me see that six-step I keep hearing about.”

I spent the rest of that day practicing simple skills: doing handstands and push-ups and trying to improve my uprock. An uprock was the dance you did while you were upright. Much of breakdancing was performed on the ground, but an uprock was given its own, special attention; it was what you did first—it was an introduction, an opportunity to set the stage—before you broke your body down, figuratively, into a downrock and the subsequent power moves and poses that generally constituted a single performance.

I knew how to do a very basic uprock. My footwork was simple, my movements fluid but uninspired. I had a natural feel for the beats in the music—could easily sync my movements to the rhythm—but that wasn’t enough. The best breakdancers had their own signature styles, and my moves were still generic. I knew this—had always known this—but the guys pointed it out to me anyway. We were talking, as a group, about what we knew and what we wanted to learn, and I was leaning back on my hands when my brother tapped my knuckles and said, “Let me see your wrists.”

I held out my hands.

He bent them forward and backward. “You’ve got really flexible wrists,” he said. He pressed my palm backward. “This doesn’t hurt?”

I shook my head.

He smiled, his eyes bright with excitement. “We’re going to teach you how to do the crab walk. That will be your signature power move.”

My eyes widened. The crab walk was exactly as strange as it sounded. It was nothing at all like the sort of thing they taught you in elementary school gym classes; instead, it was a move that, like much of breakdancing, challenged the basic rules of gravity. It required total core strength. You held your body weight up on your hands—your elbows tucked into your torso—and you walked. With your hands.

It was hard. Really hard.

“Cool,” I said.

Somehow, it had been the best day of high school I’d ever had.

Four

I didn’t end up getting home until around five, and by the time I’d finished showering my mom had already shouted at us several times that dinner was ready. I made my way downstairs even though I knew I had a bunch of worried, and later, exasperated, text messages from Ocean waiting for me on my phone, but only because I didn’t have the kind of parents who allowed me to ignore dinner—not even for homework. Ocean would have to wait.

Everyone was already assembled when I made it downstairs. My dad had his laptop out—the ethernet cable dragging all across the floor—and his reading glasses on his head; he waved me over when I walked into the room. He was reading an article about pickling cucumbers.

“ Mibini? ” he was saying to me. Do you see? “Very easy.”

It didn’t look particularly easy to me, but I shrugged. My dad was a master of making things, and he was always trying to recruit me to join him in his projects, which I didn’t mind at all. In fact, it was kind of our thing.

I was nine the first time my dad took me to a hardware store, and I’d thought the place was so cool my brain just about exploded. I began daydreaming about going back there, about saving up the money I would’ve otherwise spent on Lisa Frank notebooks and instead purchasing a piece of plywood just to see what I could do with it. Later, my dad was the one who taught me how to work a needle and thread. He’d seen me stapling the cuffs of my jeans to keep them from dragging, and one night he showed me how to properly hem a pair of pants. He also taught me how to swing an ax to split firewood. How to change a flat tire.

But sometimes my dad’s mind worked so quickly I almost couldn’t keep up. My father’s father—my grandfather—had been an architect in Iran, responsible for designing some of the country’s most beautiful buildings, and I could see that same kind of brain in my dad. He devoured books even faster than I did; he carried them around with him everywhere. Wherever we’d lived, our garage became his workshop. He’d rebuild car engines, for fun. He built the table we were currently sitting around—it was a re-creation of a mid-century Danish style he’d always loved—and when my mom went back to school and needed a bag, my dad insisted on making one for her. He studied patterns. He bought the leather. And then he pieced it together for her, stitch by stitch. He still has a scar, spanning three of his fingers, where he accidentally sliced his skin open.