The two boys sat in the library after school. The newspaper on the table was opened to an article about their country. “Iran Sentences Woman to Death by Stoning,” it said. They had read it. It was difficult to go straight to their chemistry homework after reading it.
“I don’t remember hearing about stoning when we were still there,” Mohammad Reza said.
“You were probably too young,” Keyvan said.
“I was seven.”
“You were probably too young.”
“Well, somebody should have told me.”
“What good would that have done?”
“I don’t know.”
The two boys had both covered their chemistry books in paper that was bright green, the color of the national protest movement. Sometimes it helped them to feel very close to Iran. Other times they felt very far.
There were some girls sitting at the next table from their class. They were whispering excitedly about the school dance coming up. Neither of the boys was going. They both had dreams of going. They hadn’t told each other those dreams. They were very good friends but they hadn’t told each other those dreams.
“I would jump in front of her if I was there,” Mohammad Reza said.
“They would shoot you.”
Mohammad Reza shrugged. “I would do something.”
“I would pick up a rock and pretend to miss and hit one of the people throwing a rock instead.”
“Yes, that’s it. Pretend to be the worst thrower in the world.”
“It could be a distraction. You could get all the people in the crowd to throw rocks at each other instead.”
It felt good to think of pretending to be bad throwers. They knew it wasn’t going to feel good for very long, but it was nice to imagine it.
It was good to have somebody at school to be angry with. They each had a place to be angry at home too, but with each other they could be angry and funny and other things. There was another boy in their class who was Iranian, and they played basketball with him on the weekends, but his family was royalist, and whenever he heard about something bad in Iran, he talked about America doing something to Iran about it.
“They believe that bombs can be messages of hope,” Keyvan’s father had told him about them. “I don’t know why this is, but they believe it.”
They watched the girls sitting at the next table. They hadn’t told each other about their dreams of going to the dance, but it was partly because it was so obvious. It would be a dance, and a girl in a dress, and arriving there together at night. What was there to tell? It would be a dream. If they were going to be angry about some things, it was good to have some things they dreamed of too.
The woman in the article had been convicted of killing her husband who had abused her. The boys knew how it was in Iran: Women were supposed to be under men’s control, even if the men were doing something like that. The way they were told it, it was not like that in America. The way they were told it, a woman could be anything she wanted to be. It did not make them feel better about anything. It did not make them feel better about being in America.
One of the girls at the next table had asked them once why they always read the newspaper. They hadn’t understood her question. They thought she was asking why they didn’t read a different newspaper. But she was asking why they read something that was so far away from them.
It was hard not to think after that that they wanted to go to the dance with a boy who did not read the newspaper. The two boys believed that they would want to know what was happening in Iran even if they weren’t Iranian. It was because the dance was half the story. The other half was the world.
What was happening in the article was very far from them as they sat in the library, but they didn’t think the idea was to call it very far from them. It was to call it very near to them, and then to figure out how that was true. They threw themselves out to some place where they knew they didn’t know what to do once they were there. But they thought that some day they could throw themselves out there and they would know what to do there.
And it didn’t matter if there were girls who did not want to go to the dance with a boy who read the newspaper. They had to be thinking of the woman in the article. They had to be thinking of what they owed her.
Just then their friend Alex came into the library. They waved and he began walking over to their table.
“Close the newspaper,” Keyvan said.
“Why?”
“I don’t like the way they read things like this. About women in Iran.”
“What do you mean?”
“They read it to prove a point. To prove they are right about something. It is not the right way to read it.”
Mohammad Reza closed the newspaper. Alex joined them, and after talking for a few minutes, they began to get to work on their chemistry homework.
