My sister, fidgeting nonstop in her seat, almost seems manic now that she’s officially out of quarantine. She keeps moaning about how hard it was to be in solitary confinement for two weeks, how nice it is to be in the same room with us again, but as far as I can tell, the isolation didn’t seem to make her crave any form of human connection with me. She doesn’t even make eye contact when I ask her to tell us about college.

“Yale is good,” she says, looking down at her lavash. “Lonely in the beginning, to be honest. I was homesick. And then I started hanging out with Gideon.…”

I can feel my parents glance at me for a reaction. I take a bite of my eggs and try my best not to give one. Iranian parents, no matter how long they’ve lived in America, are incapable of subtlety.

“Gideon from high school?” my mom asks.

“The same Gideon your little sister had a crush on?” my dad adds.

I throw him a look that says: “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?” I instantly regret that, in a moment of weakness, I wanted to experiment with a close father-daughter relationship and confided in him that I was in love with Gideon Kouvaris and didn’t want to lose him to my sister if they went to Yale together. Heartbreak, he told me, has been the impetus for every great work of art. If that happens, use it in your favor, Parisa.

“Oh my God. You seriously had a crush on Gideon? That is hilarious!” Neda responds. “Did you know he didn’t even realize we were related?”

LIES, LIES, AND MORE LIES! I want to scream.

If he didn’t know we were related, why would he have called me Little Neda for half of sophomore year? Why would he have said that I was a hell of a lot funnier than my sister when I made a joke in English class that the white walkers in A Song of Ice and Fire seemed a lot more pleasant than a Reddit chatroom of angry internet trolls.

“I never had a crush on Gideon,” I reply. “He’s a little too arrogant for my taste, and I find his writing pedantic.”

“Ha. You’ll be eating your words when he writes the next Great American Novel.”

My dad coughs as he chokes on his coffee. “Not if Parisa writes it first,” he says.

I know he’s probably just trying to make up for revealing my crush on Gideon, but I still appreciate the sentiment. Maybe if he has an hour free on his calendar someday, I’ll tell him about the book I’m writing, a haunting exploration of a child of Iranian immigrants wading through inherited trauma.