Page 22 of People Change

He scratches his neck, a vein visible on the back of his hand as he does so. ‘Only the ones that are special to me.’

She doesn’t allow herself to venture into what this means. It is something she will tuck away to dissect later, when she is alone in her bed and needs something to keep her up at night. ‘So what you’re saying,’ she begins, jokily, ‘is that I was special to you?’ She is smiling, thinking he will laugh and make a dig.

Instead he says, ‘Yeah, you were, actually.’

She is dumbfounded by this admission. Of course she is. Who says that? Even if they mean it? Especially if they meanit? So she clears her throat and says, ‘I best go soon, I’ve got an early-morning meeting with an author tomorrow.’

He nods, the tops of his ears pink now, matching his cheeks, and if it were not for that, she might think him not bothered at all by the abrupt end to their night. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘It’s getting late.’

Skipping School

Then

Cars whizzed past them. It was three weeks after the cross-country run. Skipping class was Shirin’s idea. She had told Kian that it was only PE that she skipped, because it was ‘pointless’ and ‘teachers get a power trip from making us do things we don’t want to do’. She ended her rant by saying it was ‘sadistic, really’, and he scoffed and asked her if she even knew what that meant. She glared at him. PE was Kian’s favourite subject. He was naturally athletic, so it didn’t feel like class to him. He told her this and then it was her turn to scoff.

Shirin was looking ahead now, her eyes squinting, as though she was focusing on something in the distance. Though, when Kian followed her gaze, he couldn’t see anything worth staring at. Her cheekbones were a sharp contrast to her soft eyes. She looked at him and he looked away from her, ahead, like he had only been looking at her very briefly. He wanted to study her face, to imprint it into his memory to dissect later. He thought she was attractive, but not in an overwhelming way. As he walked with her now, he considered her again and concluded that she was quietlybeautiful, which was maybe more special than if she were overtly beautiful.

They turned down a side street, and he kicked a rogue Dr Pepper bottle out of his way. It bounced twice before rolling under a car.

‘You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but why did your brother go to prison?’ Shirin asked.

He chewed on the inside of his mouth. No one at North Oak had asked him this. He thought no one even knew he had a brother. He didn’t realise until now how much he wanted people to talk about him – even if it was to ask the question that kept him up at night.

His brother hadn’t always been the kind of person to get into trouble. He had loved all the same things Kian had loved: comic books,South Parkand WWE. The change had happened when Mehdi had gone to upper school. Kian was still in primary school during that time, though he remembered Mehdi returning home each day and going directly to his bedroom and staying there until their mum forced him out for dinner. Afterwards he would go right back upstairs. This only lasted a few months, and it was such a brief period that Kian sometimes forgot it. Though there was one particular moment that, looking back, he thought was the cusp of his brother’s change. Perhaps, if he’d known then what he knew now – if he’d told someone, done something – maybe he could have changed the course of his whole family’s life.

His brother had just returned from school, and Kian wanted to ask him something – it was so inconsequential that months later he forgot what it was – and approached Mehdi’sdoor. As he advanced, he noticed the door was ajar. He was about to make a joke, shout ‘Boo’ or something to scare him, when he caught sight of Mehdi’s bare back. It was bruised: a large discoloration that took up most of his top-right shoulder. Mehdi was inspecting himself in his mirror, using a hand-held mirror to see his back in the reflection. He was facing away from Kian, so he did not know that he was watching.

When Kian asked his brother what had happened, Mehdi turned quickly and the look he gave him seared into Kian’s memory. It was a cross between a scowl and absolute loathing. He told Kian to not tell Mum and Dad about what he’d seen, before slamming the door in Kian’s face. It wasn’t spoken about ever again. But looking back now, Kian thought it must have meant something, must have been instrumental to the moment his brother changed.

He couldn’t bear to say any of this now to Shirin, or tell her the actual reason Mehdi was sent to prison – couldn’t even think about that, really. He barely knew Shirin, but he already knew that she likely wouldn’t judge him. Even so, he didn’t want her to see him the way he saw himself. He wanted her to like him. So he settled for a half-truth.

‘He was in a fight with some racist pricks,’ he said. ‘He always got into fights, always got into trouble with the police. If he hadn’t had prior offences, he would probably have got off, but this was one too many, I guess.’

They rounded the corner and made their descent up a steep hill leading to a vast field. He opened the wooden gate for Shirin to enter before him, which she did, and he made sure to close it properly after him. Deeper into the field,horses stood in clusters, each looking off into the distance, unfazed by their arrival. The grass beneath them was yellow and sad. It was unseasonably warm for October, so he left his coat in his locker and rolled up his jumper sleeves. Shirin edged away from the horses. She would later comment that while she would never eat an animal, that didn’t mean she wasn’t scared of them.

She nodded now, like she understood, but he thought she couldn’t really – not the full extent of it. ‘I saw them stop him once. I was driving past in the car with my dad, and they were searching him. The police, I mean,’ she said.

They walked deeper into the field, past the windmill, which he thought made the area look twee, until they found a good patch of grass to sit on. They sat cross-legged in front of each other, their bags laid between them.

‘They did that a lot. Even before they had a reason to search his car. I think that’s why he got into so much trouble.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, leaning towards him to open the side compartment of her bag. She took out a little jar of Vaseline, which she proceeded to rub across her lips with her forefinger. She did all this while looking at him, not breaking her concentration, though Kian was momentarily distracted by her glossy lips, feeling a stirring within him that he hadn’t expected. He shook his head. He didn’t even know why he was telling her all this. There was something so open about her. It made him think he could tell her everything. Almost everything.

‘The police, his teachers, every adult, got this impression of Mehdi as a troublemaker, as the kind of person whowould be part of a gang, who was good for nothing. And I don’t know, but once you get that stereotype, it’s hard to shake it. And when people in his class started to bother him … I think he just did what was expected of him.’

‘That’s really sad. I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Do people look at you that way?’

Kian shrugged, laughed a little, though it wasn’t funny, so he didn’t know why he was laughing. ‘Not as bad as him, but sometimes, yeah. He was a lot bigger than me, a lot stronger, had – has – muscles, and he’s taller than most of his teachers, so they treated him as if he was an adult like them. By comparison, I feel like Mr Rodgers is almost too nice to me. It’s weird; like, because I’m foreign, I need special attention. Do you know what I mean?’

The first week Kian started at North Oak, Mr Rodgers had called him into his office to see how he was getting on. For a headmaster, he seemed alright. He’d said if Kian ever needed anything, his door was open. He’d told Kian he found Iranian culture fascinating and that Iran was on his bucket list of places to visit. In the same breath he’d said he’d just returned from India, actually, and had pushed the collar of his shirt aside to show a brown beaded necklace. He’d mentioned Shirin then, had asked if they were related, and when Kian had said they weren’t, he’d laughed, backtracked that of course they weren’t.

‘He does that to me too,’ Shirin said now. ‘Always talks about Iraq or India, like any country beginning with I is the same …’

They both let out a laugh. Kian’s was shaky, a mixture of nervousness and relief from expelling half-held truths.

‘Do you remember his speech in assembly last week?’ Kian asked. The headmaster had given a long-winded talk about people needing to be more tolerant towards ethnic minorities because he had first-hand experience of being an outsider when he’d visited India, and it not feeling ‘nice’. Afterwards, Rob had shot his hand up to ask, if foreigners didn’t like it here, why didn’t they go back to their country, like Mr Rodgers had eventually done? To this, Mr Rodgers had said it was because these people might come from war-torn countries and not be able to. When he’d said this he’d looked at Kian. Kian’s parents were not migrants and his country was not war-torn.

‘You’ll get used to it.’ Shirin shrugged. There was a short silence, before she asked, ‘Can you speak Farsi then?’