Chapter 4: January

School took us back the first week of January the way school takes everyone back — indifferently, with new syllabi and old smells, as though nothing had happened to anyone over the break.

Something had happened to us. Three somethings, if you were counting, and I was always counting: Parisa had come home with a diagnosis, I had made a declaration in a dark bedroom, and Brent Saunders had spent a winter break being a slightly better boyfriend to me than one month of dating strictly required.

Only the first one showed.

Parisa came back to school with her stitches out and a thin pink line through her left eyebrow where the Monopoly board had caught her, and the story had traveled the way stories travel — softened by distance, wrong in the details, right in the only part that mattered to the hallways: something is wrong with the quiet Nazari twin. People were kind about it, mostly. Kindness at our school looked like a certain carefulness, conversations that adjusted their volume when she approached, friends who asked how she was feeling with their heads tilted. Nobody was cruel. Nobody had to be. The tilt of a head can do a year of work.

Parisa absorbed all of it with her composure intact and her arithmetic running. I watched her recalculate her social standing by the end of the first week, file the result, and go back to her books. The math came out about where she had predicted. She did not seem surprised, which was its own small heartbreak.

But she came to the movies with us that second Friday.

I want that on the record, because it was the first dividend of the December talk. Four of us — Brent and me, Parisa, and the aisle seat she chose with a tactician’s eye for exits — at the seven o’clock showing of something forgettable. She made it through the whole film. Nothing happened, the way nothing usually happens. On the drive home she was quiet in the back seat, and when we pulled up to the house she said, to no one in particular, “That was nice,” in the voice of someone entering a successful experiment into a log.

Brent caught my eye for half a second. Neither of us smiled where she could see. It felt like watching someone walk again.

Here is how the geometry happened, and I want to tell it honestly, because later — much later — people would assume it had been designed. It was not designed. It assembled.

It started with logistics. Brent drove to school; we rode the bus; the bus was terrible; he started picking us up. Both of us, obviously — what was he going to do, drive his girlfriend and wave at her twin at the bus stop? So the mornings became the three of us, Brent driving, me in the passenger seat, Parisa behind us with her travel mug and her paperback, and the fifteen-minute ride developed its own small culture. Radio negotiations. A running argument about whether audiobooks counted as reading. Parisa, it turned out, was funny in the morning — drier than usual, her wit still uncombed — and more than once Brent laughed hard enough that he had to check his mirrors twice.