Of course he remembered; I hadn’t thought he would forget. It was at the beginning of our second year of upper school. Our first year we had been assigned different roommates—new students were encouraged to expand their social horizons—but for the second we got to choose. I had no other friends, so my choice was obvious, but I had worried all summer Baqir might want to live with somebody else. But he never mentioned it, never brought up the possibility, and by the time the school year began, I was both thrilled and terrified—thrilled that we would be together all the time, terrified for the same reason, because by that point, fourteen years old, I had certainly figured out that the way I felt about Baqir was not the way he felt about me. I was sure he would notice that I sometimes lingered too long watching him while he bent over his schoolwork or when he stretched after waking in the morning. He would notice, and he wouldn’t be cruel about it, that wasn’t his nature, but as soon as he understood, something would break between us, something irreparable, and everything would change. I carried that fear with me during the first days of that school year.

Then I woke one morning to find Baqir already awake, sitting on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees, watching me. My heart leapt into my throat. He was going to tell me that he wanted to move to another room. He wasn’t comfortable sharing with me. He was sorry but he just couldn’t. I was so sure of what he would say.

But what he said instead was that he’d noticed I was having nightmares, and he wanted to know what it was that frightened me so much in my dreams. His own worst dreams, he said, were of being back in the refugee camp at the edge of the wasteland, lying in a cot beside his sick sister and not knowing if she would survive the night, knowing only that his parents wept every day because the children weren’t getting better, and being so afraid he wouldn’t notice her dying that he couldn’t breathe. He had never told me that before, but he told me then in a quiet, sad voice. He wanted to help. He knew what it was like to be afraid of the past. He didn’t like seeing me so scared.

I knew that morning that the love I had for him wasn’t going away. Not then, not ever. I resigned myself to a thousand small joys and heartbreaks every day because he didn’t feel the same way, and it wasn’t going to change.

The answer I had given him then, three years ago, was honest but incomplete.