Jahar couldn't sleep. He lay on his bed, staring at the glow in the dark stars he had misguidedly put there at the beginning of the year, thinking they would remind him of home and his family. His whole room smelled like weed. Normally he wouldn't mind, after all, that blessed plant practically kept him alive theoughout the monotony of gray cinder block buildings and homework that was laughably easy. Smoking was the favorite past time of him and his friends. High Jahar was Jahar at his most socially adept. He laughed and joked and showed off and blew smoke rings and found the effortlessly cool balance between letting girls know he was interested without looking desperate. But when he was alone, the dank smell struck him as sort of pathetic. It made him realize that the rest of life and his normal personality were essentially a massive let down.
Come to think of it, there was nobody he hadn't disappointed in the past few days. His failing grades in Biology, World History, and Spanish suggested that his professors were probably disappointed in him (he couldn't be sure, though, because he hadn't actually been to class enough in the past semester to remember their names, nevertheless their personalities). The text he had gotten earlier that day from Lauren, his, well, it was always complicated figuring out what to call her... The thought broke off in his brain and escaped, presumably out of his left ear. Either way, whatever name you wanted to give Lauren, she was apparently no longer comfortable letting him fuck her on Friday and Saturday nights and snuggle with him on couches while they shared a bong during all the so called parties they went to together. She had made that quite clear in her message. She was "looking for a real relationship". Not one with a "screwup like you, Jahar". Even his closest friends, Aza and Dias, seemed to find him boring these days. He consistently bailed on playing soccer or lighting foreworks with them, preferring to watch TV alone in his room. Worst of all was Tamerlan. Tamerlan thought, no, he knew, that Jahar was the epitome of failure. He was a failure of a son, a brother, an uncle (how could someone even be a failed uncle? What responsibilities did they even have?), and most egregiously, a failure of a Muslim.
***
Jahar woke up late the next morning, as usual. The clock on his shattered iPhone read 9:00. US Lit started at 9:05. He jumped out of bed, grabbed his backpack, remembering the book he was supposed to have read. Leaving the dorm at a full on sprint, he was a tiny bit thankful for the exercise Tam had been making him do recently. Something about "making his body strong for Allah". He burst into the lecture hall at 9:07, according to the big clock behind the professor. Only two minutes late; not too bad for a lazy bum like Jahar. Grabbing a seat in the back row, he dropped his bag on the floor. It was louder than he had expected, half of the class turned around to see what had caused the disruption. Trying not to blush, he looked around him to figure out what page of Catcher in the Rye they were reading from. The girl to his right was obscuring her page with a curtain of long brown hair. Jahar tapped her on the shoulder.
"What page are we on?', he whispered.
"296" was her reply. There was a hint of a smile in her eyes, as if she thought his whole late-entrance act was vaguely comical. Jahar studied her profile as she turned back to the projector screen at the front of the room. She had dark brown eyes with long, curly, black lashes that stood out from her face like an inky wedge. Out of habit, he tried to picture her with a hijab. All the women he had grown up around wore hijabs. Purple, that was probably her color. A purple pashmina with lots of volume at the back. A dangly amber gem that hung on her forehead, if there was anything to celebrate. She felt his eyes on her and saw his messy curls in her peripheral vision. He felt suddenly shy.
Though all of Jahar's friends teased him (hiding their jealousy) about the marked success he had had with girls in college, he attributed it to features he had no control over. Namely, his hair. Jahar had hot hair. It was undeniable. Even he thought it looked pretty damn good most of the time. Sometimes he wondered if it was really normal to be so attracted to one's own hair. If he brushed it, it looked good. If he ignored it, it looked even better. His eyes were pretty nice, too. They were big and round and alternated between being jet black and chestnut brown. All in all, Jahar was a handsome boy. And he knew it. His body wasn't lacking much either. Wrestling and boxing had given him strong hands that girls liked to hold and he liked to hold girls with. He was skinny but muscular. And he was doing okay, well, down there. These physical attributes gave Jahar the unsatisifying luxury of knowing with 99% certainty that if he wanted anything sexual from a girl, he could have it. Relationships, well, those were another story.
The hubris that accompanied Jahar's aesthetically pleasing appearance sometimes came in handy. It certainly allowed him to do what he did next. He ripped out a piece of lined notebook paper and began filling it with his signature scrawl, messy for a girl but not too bad for a boy: "I haven't seen you around campus before... I'm Jahar :) What's your name?". He folded it over and slid it to mystery girl. She looked at him fully for the first time. He could tell she liked what she saw. She motioned with her hands to show that she didn't have a pencil. Jahar gave her his. She bent over to write on the shred of paper and then passed it back again. It read: "Hey Jahar! Nice to meet you. My name's Evelyn but all my friends call me Evi.". The piece of paper was all filled up.
"Evi!" Jahar mouthed her name with his lips. He pointed on his iPhone calendar to show the time after US Lit., and then to the empty Starbucks cup on her tiny desk. He shrugged to show that it was a question. She nodded, smiling.
