“You should take that one,” he said. I was reading the back cover of The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons by Goli Taraghi. “There’s a story about a polite thief who barges into this family’s house in Tehran and asks if he can take their things.”

“Only in Iran would the thieves have manners,” I said.

“Yeah. The grandma comes out with a rifle or some shit, and the thief is just like, ma’am, please don’t get violent, I’m simply going to take this expensive bowl and leave.” Jahan yawned and wiped his watery eyes. “Shit gets real. Post-revolutionary Iran, man.”

I shook my head. “Hey, you have some ghey in your eye.”

“Some what?”

“Ghey,” I repeated. “You have ghey in your eye.”

Jahan frowned. “Amir, you’re being extremely homophobic right now. . . .”

My ears got red. “No, I just . . .” I ran into the kitchen to get a paper towel, came back, and wiped the thin mucus out of Jahan’s eye.

“Ohhh, you mean sleep?” Jahan said.

“Yeah, that. I can never remember the English word for it. My mom always called it ‘ghey.’”

Jahan took out his phone to look up the word on his Persian dictionary app. “So it says here that ‘ghey’ means ‘vomit.’ Must be like vomit of the eye or something. Isn’t that neat? See, I would much rather be learning Farsi than this algebra crap.”

“I thought you spoke Farsi.”

“I took a semester in college, but I didn’t speak it growing up like you. My dad barely spoke it himself. He was second generation.” Jahan patted my face. “But hey, you’re as Persian as they come. And you have a little ghey, too.”

I touched the inside of my eye, but there was nothing there. “Ahh.” I rolled my eyes. “I guess I do.”

• • •

The next night, Giovanni invited me over to his apartment by the Colosseum for a drink and pizza. I said sure. I thought it was important that I start hanging out more with Giovanni and his friends. Not only was Jahan leaving next week, but Neil had just told me that he and Francesco were thinking of moving to the countryside.

It wasn’t like I was going home anytime soon. It had been a week since the last time my family had tried contacting me. I’d even checked my old phone that morning to see if I had any texts or voicemails from them. Nothing. As much as I wanted to believe I had moved on, I hadn’t. It was like I’d torn up a letter and tossed it in the wind just to have the pieces blow back in my face.

But maybe I had to accept that this was my life now. Maybe Rome was my new home. I was even starting to think about enrolling at John Cabot, an American university in Rome. That way I could apply for a student visa. Plus, Jahan said he knew someone who worked there who could help me get a scholarship.