Nazemian Like a Love Story

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78895-796-0
Verlag: Little Tiger Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 448 Seiten

From a Stonewall Honor-winning author comes a bighearted, sprawling epic about friendship and love and the revolutionary act of living life to the fullest in the face of impossible odds. Perfect for fans of?Last Night at the Telegraph Club, The Black Flamingo and?If You Still Recognise Me. It's 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing. Reza is an Iranian boy who has just moved to the city with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. He's terrified that someone will guess the truth he can barely acknowledge about himself. Reza knows he's gay, but all he knows of gay life are the media's images of men dying of AIDS. Judy is an aspiring fashion designer who worships her uncle Stephen, a gay man with AIDS who devotes his time to activism as a member of ACT UP. Judy has never imagined finding romance ... until she falls for Reza and they start dating. Art is Judy's best friend, their school's only out and proud teen. He'll never be who his conservative parents want him to be, so he rebels by documenting the AIDS crisis through his photographs. As Reza and Art grow closer, Reza struggles to find a way out of his deception that won't break Judy's heart - and destroy the most meaningful friendship he's ever known. A Time Magazine Best YA Book of all Time.

Abdi Nazemian?is the author of?The Chandler Legacies,?Like a Love Story, a Stonewall Honor Book, and?The Authentics. His novel?The Walk-In Closet?won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Debut Fiction. His screenwriting credits include the films?The Artist's Wife, The Quiet,?and?Menendez: Blood Brothers?and the television series?The Village?and?Almost Family.?He has been an executive producer and associate producer on numerous films, including?Call Me by Your Name, Little Woods,?and?The House of Tomorrow.?He lives in Los Angeles with his husband, their two children, and their dog, Disco. Find him online at?www.abdaddy.com

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nazemian, Abdi

Leseproben

There should be a limit on how long any human being has to wear braces. Also, there should be another name for braces. Mouth invaders, maybe, or teeth terrorists. Although I suppose an Iranian boy these days shouldn’t even think the word terrorist, so I take that back. Maybe I should just call them friends. They’ve accompanied me as we moved from one country to another. But it’s been three years now, and I’m done. Tomorrow, I start my senior year of high school, in a new school, in a new city. This is it. My last chance to not be invisible.

I’m watching two television shows at once on the largest TV screen I have ever seen. Everything in this home, and in this country, is jumbo sized. It isn’t even a normal television. It’s a projection screen. Abbas says the quality of the image is a lot better. And the image can split, so you can watch multiple things at the same time. As if the split screen television weren’t stimulating enough, he also has an endless VHS collection and closet full of board games. The only games my dad ever played were called “How fast can I empty this bottle?” and “How many times can I leave my family and come back, only to leave again?” My mom wants me to call Abbas “Baba” or “Daddy,” but that’s never going to happen. No man with this many versions of Monopoly could ever be my father.

I’m watching The Golden Girls on the television, and in a smaller box at the bottom of the television, I’m watching The Neverending Story. I grab ahold of the edge of my braces, the part that digs into my gums, and pull. Hard. I yank on those braces like I am playing tug-of-war with them, and soon they start tearing off. I feel a sharp pain, and with it, sudden freedom. It feels right. Maybe freedom always comes with pain. That’s what my dad used to say about the revolution. There’s blood too, lots of it. I see it on my nails, now ruby red like my mother’s.

My mom, who is at her desk reading Architectural Digest, sees me and screams.

“Reza, what have you done?” she asks. “Are you out of your mind?”

I look at her as the taste of blood clogs the back of my throat. She removes a tissue from a gold box and approaches to help clean me. But as she’s about to touch my face, I push her away and grab the tissue.

“I can clean it myself,” I say. I hear the edge in my voice and immediately feel guilty. I wish she knew the truth—that I’m trying to save her. Just in case my blood is toxic. Just in case you can get it from having too many thoughts of boys in locker rooms.

“You really are out of your mind,” she says, with enough tenderness to make me feel guilty again.

I want to tell her that of course I am. What else could I be after what our family has been through? But instead I just say, “I think I need an orthodontist.”

We moved so recently that I don’t even have doctors here yet. My mom sighs, unsure of what to do. I can feel the wheels in her head turn as she whispers to herself. Then she finds the yellow pages and starts flipping through them until the ruby-red fingernail of her index finger rests on the image of a smiling man.

“He looks capable,” my mom announces.

“Hard to tell,” I say. “All these guys have crooked teeth.”

My mom smiles finally. Almost even laughs. Her own teeth are, of course, perfectly straight and gleaming white. There’s something unspoken here; that she doesn’t want to call Abbas and disturb him at work. She doesn’t want him to know that his new stepson is the kind of deranged kid who rips out his own braces. She likes to deal with problems privately and quietly. That’s her way.

“I can’t handle this right now,” my mom says. But she rushes me to the orthodontist, proving that she can, in fact, handle this right now. That’s the thing about her. She always can handle it right now.

As I lie on the orthodontist’s chair, listening to the doctor and my mother chat, my mind zones out. I do this sometimes. I’m afraid of speaking, of saying the wrong thing, of revealing something about myself I shouldn’t. So I listen. And if I listen too long, the voices become hazy, like I’m hearing them through an ocean. When I was a kid, I would sink into the bathtub every time my parents would fight. Or more specifically, when my dad would yell, and my mom would appease. I could still hear them from below the water, but they sounded far away. And I felt safe. Well, almost.

There was so much blood, Doctor. Should I call you Doctor? 

I have so many Persian patients. I love your people.

Can we be done by the time my husband gets back from work?

And so beautiful. Do all Persians have such long eyelashes?

The orthodontist puts on his blue gloves, which makes me feel a little better. I wish the whole world could wear a giant latex glove around itself, like a shield of armor. It would not be so different than Iran was, with women in their chadors. They thought those chadors were protecting men from their impure thoughts. Maybe latex around everyone would protect me from mine.

“You have such a quiet child,” the dentist says. “My own kids won’t stop talking.”

“I’m not a child,” I say, coming out of my haze. “I’m seventeen. I should be allowed to make my own decisions.”

“Reza,” my mom says. “When you are my age, you will thank me. I promise you.” My mother has made many promises to me. That the revolution would never succeed. That my father would change. That I would grow into a good-looking man.

I don’t tell her that I will never be her age. I have known this from the moment we left Iran and landed in Toronto. I was eleven years old, and there was so little I knew about the world. But I knew that my dad would never change, and that my mom had finally found the strength to leave him. But there was something else I knew, something I knew from the moment I first went swimming with some other boys, and one of those boys’ swim trunks fell. I knew that I longed for other boys, to touch them, and hold them, and be with them. I hid that knowledge away, buried it. It was safe inside me. Then we landed in Toronto, and my mom and my sister made a beeline to the airport newsstand, giddy over the selection of fashion magazines, choosing which to buy, discussing Isabella Rossellini’s beauty.

Does she not look vaguely Iranian?

Well, Iranians and Italians do not look so different.

No chadors. I can’t believe it.

She looks identical to her mother. You both look like your father.

I think I want to be the first Iranian supermodel.

My eyes were glued to another section of magazines, and to the cover of Time. “The AIDS Hysteria.” My mom and my sister were so immersed in analyzing Isabella’s skin tone that I managed to covertly flip through the magazine, and inside I saw sickness, disease, lesions, young men dying. I knew that I liked it when boys’ swim trunks fell. But the fact that this would kill me, this was something I did not know until that moment. Until Time magazine informed me that I would die soon.

I’ve been living in fear ever since.

“I just want to be able to smile this year,” I plead, to both my mom and the orthodontist. Before getting the braces, my incisors were so high on my gum line that even when I smiled, they were invisible to the outside world. This horror was among the many reasons I never smiled, but let me be honest, I had many other reasons for not smiling.

“Is that too much to ask, to be able to smile without scaring people? To be able to start at a new school without being the four-eyed, metal-mouthed kid everyone makes fun of?...