I DIDN’T THINK it was good etiquette to show up at a goodbye party for someone who might hate me, but I showed up anyway. It felt wrong not to be there for Jahan’s last night in Rome—even if it meant facing Giovanni and Rocco, too.
It was a surprise party. People started to trickle in, and we were waiting to hear from Jahan after his exam. I didn’t even know half the people there, on the rooftop of Rigatteria. Some of them were familiar faces from Garbo, like the woman with the femme rage tattoo.
What would my life in Rome look like after Jahan left? It was a selfish thing to wonder as we took our positions hiding behind all the furniture and antique doors and mirrors for Jahan’s last big night in Rome, but I wondered it anyway. I was pretty sure I had gotten a taste of it these past couple days. I pictured my life in Rome like the nipple ring in Jahan’s story, dangling off a thread.
“He passed!” someone screamed. “He passed his exam! But now he’s saying he’s tired and doesn’t want to meet us for a drink.”
“Cazzo.”
“Tell him to get his ass over here,” Neil said.
We all got quiet while someone got on the phone with Jahan and demanded he meet them for “a drink.” “Stronza, vieni qui,” they told Jahan over the phone. “Bitch, get over here.” At least my Italian was getting better.
Eventually, Jahan agreed to come, and we all got back in our hiding positions and waited. Finally, someone whispered that he was coming up the stairs.
“Sorpresa!”
“Surprise!”
Jahan was genuinely floored; as in, he fell to the floor, laughing and crying. He was in such good spirits after passing his exam. He floated around the crowd. He hugged everyone. But when he got to me, he just smiled and gave me a quick hug. It even seemed shorter than the others, like he was barely acknowledging me.
There was a projector screen in the front of the room, rolling through old photos and videos of Jahan and his friends. Every time I looked over at this screen, it was a younger Jahan with green hair, or Jahan dancing through a museum lobby I didn’t recognize, or Jahan and Rocco dressed up as Sonny and Cher for Halloween. It made me think maybe I didn’t know Jahan as well as I thought I did.
My parents loved to go through old photos and videos of Soraya and me at home. I remembered just a couple of months ago, right after Ben and Jake had begun blackmailing me, we were gathered in our living room, celebrating the Persian New Year, which always falls on the first day of spring. My dad put on a video from when I was six. Soraya was a baby, and in it, I was inspecting her face, her cheeks. Then suddenly she hiccupped and cried. My parents laughed. “Aww, jigari,” a weird term of endearment that means “liver.”
It made me wonder if we owe our parents that kind of simple, unfiltered happiness for the rest of our lives. Why couldn’t they find our hiccups now as cute as they were back then? Who had changed—them or me?
Throughout the night, Jahan would stop and stare at the projector screen, too. He was lost in the nostalgia. I hardly existed to him that night. It was like this summer had never happened. We were like strangers at the bar. The party continued, and I overheard him from just a few feet away talking about how relieved he was to be done with algebra.
“It was like the one thing I’ve wanted most my entire life,” he said, “hinged on the one thing I’m not good at.”
A group of Italians stood chatting and laughing at the end of the bar, next to a broken mirror; I recognized one of them, a girl with punk-rocker hair, as a friend of Rocco’s. There were two other girls next to me whispering in Italian. I found Neil and hung out with him for a while.
“Giovanni and Rocco never came,” Neil said to me.
I nodded, my gaze focused on Jahan. He was waving his hands wildly and pedaling his feet. “Probably for the best,” I muttered.
The people around Jahan burst into laughter.
I stayed all the way until the end of the party. Even though I lived in Testaccio, I walked back to Trastevere alongside Jahan and one of his friends, someone whose name I don’t remember. It was five in the morning. They were yelling Italian curse words loudly through the streets as we crossed the bridge over the Tiber. It was a long walk, and I was mostly silent. As much as I wanted closure, I couldn’t bear to bring up my problems, not on Jahan’s last night here in Rome.
We said goodbye at a small intersection in Trastevere. It was unspectacular. Plain. Like saying goodbye at the end of another day. There was nothing about staying in touch, nothing about our time together in Rome and everything I had learned from him. Jahan left Rome, our Rome, much like I had left my family.