Five Feet Apart meets Kate in Waiting in this timely story of two best friends navigating the complexities of friendship while their world is turned upside down by a global pandemic, from the author of Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Sara Saedi’s I Miss You, I Hate This, which releases on October 11th 2022.
The lives of high school seniors Parisa Naficy and Gabriela Gonzales couldn’t be more different. Parisa, an earnest and privileged Iranian American, struggles to live up to her own impossible standards. Gabriela, a cynical Mexican American, has all the confidence Parisa lacks but none of the financial stability. She can’t help but envy Parisa’s posh lifestyle whenever she hears her two moms argue about money. Despite their differences, as soon as they met on the first day of freshman year, they had an “us versus the world” mentality. Whatever the future had in store for them—the pressure to get good grades, the litany of family dramas, and the heartbreak of unrequited love—they faced it together. Until a global pandemic forces everyone into lockdown. Suddenly senior year doesn’t look anything like they hoped it would. And as the whole world is tested during this time of crisis, their friendship will be, too.
With equal parts humor and heart, Parisa’s and Gabriela’s stories unfold in a mix of prose, text messages, and emails as they discover new dreams, face insecurities, and confront their greatest fears.
PARISA
I have a confession to make: I haven’t left my house since the first day of lockdown. More specifically, that means I haven’t gone on any afternoon strolls around our Bay Area neighborhood, or made a quick coffee run for a double oat milk latte, or seen any of my friends. It’s been nearly five months since I’ve gone anywhere. My parents and my older sister have started to suspect, of course, that I’ve been too nervous of getting sick to venture out. But no one else does. I haven’t told my best friend because I’m afraid that she won’t understand. I’m embarrassed to admit to anyone who’s not related to me that my anxiety, which I try to hide when I can, has potentially evolved into full-fledged agoraphobia. Some of my classmates have braved airports and airplanes to quarantine closer to grandparents. I haven’t braved anything.
There’s no telling right now how long this pandemic will last. Some experts tell us to expect a series of lockdowns until a vaccine is widely distributed, which could take at least twelve to eighteen months, and that’s being optimistic. No one knows if schools in California will reopen during that time. No one knows if my first year of college will take place in my childhood bedroom. Like most teenagers, I don’t do well with uncertainty, but another part of me is comforted by the thought of twelve to eighteen months of staying indoors.
For the first time in my life, I feel safe. I realize that might not make any sense considering there’s a very infectious and deadly disease hunting down people in my age group, but as long as I stay in my tiny bubble, I’m hopeful I won’t fall victim to it. Sure, I still go to sleep terrified that the San Andreas Fault might end it all, but at least if I stay home, I don’t have to worry about dying in a head-on collision in my mom’s old Volvo or getting kidnapped at a gas station and sold into sex slavery or getting murdered in a school shooting.
I don’t have to worry about school shootings.
If only I could measure how much of my brain energy has been freed up during remote learning now that I’m not sitting in a classroom, bracing myself for what to do if a maniac rushes in, guns blazing. I miss my friends and my teachers, but I don’t miss the residual anxiety of active-shooter drills. I’ve always made it a point to be nice to everyone at my high school, so if the day came, and one of my classmates snapped, they’d remember my gestures of kindness and spare my life.
The irony that I attend Winchester High School is not lost on me. We’re named after Sarah Winchester, whose husband was a firearm magnate. Sophomore year, our history class went on a school field trip to the Winchester Mystery House. As legend has it, Sarah Winchester moved from New Haven to San Jose on the advice of a medium and started building a mansion to appease the ghosts of those killed by Winchester rifles.
The mansion has doors and stairways that lead to nowhere and windows that look into other rooms in the house. It has forty bedrooms and forty-seven fireplaces. There’s a bathroom door with a window in it, so a nurse could keep watch on Mrs. Winchester while she was relieving herself. As we toured the house, I remember feeling a certain kind of kinship with Sarah. I understood what it was like to live in fear that something horrible was looming just around the corner. I also concluded on that field trip that if I ever did die in a school shooting, I would spend the afterlife haunting the monsters who manufactured the gun.
I’m not exactly sure why I’m telling you all this. The first draft of my essay was about how sad I was when my grandmother died, and I was really sad, but mostly because I didn’t know her that well. The prompt said to write about my greatest struggle, and my greatest struggle is my own brain. A brain that’s terrified you will read this and think, We can’t let this head case into Harvard. But my brain is also the brain that can recite entire passages from To Kill a Mockingbird and entire scenes from the movie Booksmart. It’s the brain that speaks Farsi better than anyone else in my Iranian American household. It’s the brain that’s writing her first novel. It’s the brain that considers empathy my superpower and my cross to bear.
Come to think of it, I was wrong when I said I’ve braved nothing. I am braving anxiety. I am braving mental health stigmas. I am braving my own hang-ups and insecurities every day, all the time. But I want to do it on my terms and in my own time and in my own words. My dream is to be a writer and to hone my craft as an undergraduate at Harvard. But to be a writer, you have to live. And to truly live? You have to leave the house.
I let out a breath and glance up at my computer. Gideon stares back at me and smiles proudly.
“How do you feel about it?” he asks. “How do you feel about it?” I ask him. “I asked you first!”
“I feel good about it,” I admit. “I think . . . it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever written.”
Gideon nods. “There’s blood on the page, Parisa. I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
He runs his hand through his hair and shakes his head. “Yes, you could have.”
I want to tell Gabriela about this moment, but I know she will judge it harshly, and then it would be tainted. I let Gideon know that I’m going to send my application tonight, and that I’m not even going to ask my parents to weigh in on the essay. I know it could piss them off on an epic scale, but they were the ones who asked for authentic, and I’m worried this level of honesty will scare them. The essay is too personal. Gideon nods his head in agreement. We say our good nights, and as soon as I leave our Zoom meeting, I take a deep breath, say a prayer to my late grandma, and click the Submit Application icon. Before I can scream or cry or break into a dance, there’s a knock on my door. I glance at the clock. It’s too late for anyone else to be awake.
“Parisa, can we come in?” It’s my parents.
“Yup,” I say.
They open the door and walk in. My dad’s eyes are all red, and I can tell he’s been crying, but that’s not necessarily cause for alarm. The man cries every time we see that Amazon ad with the golden retriever and the baby on TV.
“What’s wrong?”
My mom’s shoulders slump when she answers. “It’s about Andrew ”
