This lyrical coming-of-age novel for fans of Darius the Great Is Not Okay and On the Come Up, set in southern California in 1996, follows a teen who wants to honor her deceased friend’s legacy by entering a rap contest.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and the first two chapters of Shideh Etaat’s Rana Joon and the One and Only Now, which is out July 25th 2023!
Perfect Iranian girls are straight A students, always polite, and grow up to marry respectable Iranian boys. But it’s the San Fernando Valley in 1996, and Rana Joon is far from perfect—she smokes weed and loves Tupac, and she has a secret: she likes girls.
As if that weren’t enough, her best friend, Louie—the one who knew her secret and encouraged her to live in the moment—died almost a year ago, and she’s still having trouble processing her grief. To honor him, Rana enters the rap battle he dreamed of competing in, even though she’s terrified of public speaking.
But the clock is ticking. With the battle getting closer every day, she can’t decide whether to use one of Louie’s pieces or her own poetry, her family is coming apart, and she might even be falling in love. To get herself to the stage and fulfill her promise before her senior year ends, Rana will have to learn to speak her truth and live in the one and only now.
CHAPTER ONE
There’s a jungle down there, and almost a year ago, it swallowed my friend up. I’m standing at the very spot my best friend, Louie, died. Topanga Canyon is just off Ventura Boulevard, the bridge between the San Fernando Valley and the Pacific Coast Highway—dry hills and majestic beaches. It’s the type of road to get nervous on. It’s the type of road that Louie, with his grandma-driving skills, would’ve been extra careful on. He was one of the safest drivers I’ve ever known, always managed to stay right below the speed limit, passed his driver’s test sophomore year on the first try with a perfect score, and yet he somehow lost control of his car and it flipped over and over again down the side of the canyon, into the dense brush where coyotes and mountain lions roam. It was the last day of junior year. Nobody knows why it happened.
I lost my virginity the day of his funeral. I know that sounds all types of wrong. He had one of those open-casket funerals, so I was dreading going, but I obviously had to. I was more angry than sad, though, because they put him in a stupid blue suit, like he was an old man or something. I knew he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes spread over the ocean.
So he could stay in the flow, he told me.
And if they just had to bury him, he would’ve wanted baggy jeans, his gold chain around his neck, a simple white T-shirt that would expose the artistry of tattoos on his arm—ocean waves, the Buddha sitting in a meditative pose, the Wu-Tang symbol, a few Alan Watts quotes, and Janelle, the name of the only girl he’d ever loved, who broke his heart freshman year and made him swear off love for good. He had a hookup at a tattoo spot in Hollywood—his good friend Lucky was apprenticing and needed someone to practice on and Louie was down because it was free. To be honest, some of the tattoos were shit—I always teased him, saying Buddha looked more like an Asian grandma taking a nap—but they were him.
I wanted to cry, trust me, especially because his face looked different; he’d had so many bruises and broken bones, but they put on a ton of makeup, as if trying to hide the fact that death can hurt. I was pissed off and almost tried to reach down into the casket to undo one of the buttons that was closed so high up on his neck. He looked like he was choking, but it didn’t matter because he was already gone.
Traffic whirls by me. I parked up at the overlook and walked down to the very spot where it happened. I’m not sure why I came here today. Maybe it’s because almost a year without Louie means this circle of grief is coming to an end, and I’m just not ready for it. I used to come a lot and leave flowers for him or read him some of my poems I’d been obsessively writing the year before he died. The poems, however mediocre they might’ve been, brought me a lot of joy—just knowing they came from me, they were my creations, my voice, and no one could take that away from me. I didn’t think I had much skill, but Louie believed otherwise. He always told me they were just masterpieces in the making. That’s the thing about Louie: he always made you feel like you were capable of anything. Grief has sucked all my creative juices dry, though. Here I am almost at the end of senior year, and I haven’t done shit. Fuck, I miss him.
I wasn’t planning on losing my virginity that day. Death isn’t particularly sexy, but when we went back to Louie’s house so we could eat Subway sandwiches and Jell-O with his mom and aunts, his manager from Ralphs, and some kids from school, I snuck into his room. Most would call that a disrespectful move, but Louie and I were tight, best friends since the beginning of freshman year when he took me to see Tupac in concert. Back then, I used to wear Tupac shirts religiously—I realized a little too late that I was acting like a poser, and if you really love someone’s music, you don’t need to wear their face on your body at all times—but luckily, because of that shirt, Louie stopped me in the halls one day, said he respected my commitment, and asked me if I wanted to go to a Tupac concert with him. I’d seen Louie around, had noticed how blue his eyes were against skin that lingered on the darker side, his hair a blond mess of curls, like a lion’s mane. But this was the first time we’d ever talked.
I have an extra ticket, he said. My girlfriend hates him, and you seem legit into him.
That was the best night of my life.
Louie’s room was decked out in Wu-Tang posters—the infamous yellow W, a black-and-white picture of all nine rappers, a cartoon drawing of a dragon with nine ninjas posing from its head to its tail—and quotes that Louie had copied in his perfect handwriting on poster board from his Alan Watts books on Zen Buddhism. Alan Watts was this British, hippie philosopher who Louie idolized and I’m still trying to understand. He said things like, Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun, and, I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
I hadn’t come to Louie’s room to sniff his pillows and climb into his bed or kiss his old shirts, because our relationship was never like that—but it went deep. I was always down to hear about his latest life philosophies, and he was always down to eat In-N-Out with me after a crappy day.
I was in his room because I wanted a little peace and quiet and I was looking for some part of him, something to hold on to, something that would only be mine. Police said he was driving a hundred miles an hour when he died, which felt impossible to me, knowing how often he got honked at on the freeway for going below the speed limit, but the facts were the facts, I guess. I was about to pull out his desk drawer when the door opened. I turned around and saw Tony, Louie’s twin brother, standing there with a black eye I hadn’t noticed until then.
Did I mention Louie has a twin brother? Not an identical twin brother who would make you do a double take, but a brother who lived in the womb with him, came out first, weighing something like five or six pounds while Louie weighed a measly three pounds two ounces; a brother who grew up with him, loved him, but didn’t particularly like him, and who was completely different from him. They weren’t the type of twins who had a lot in common. Louie was some sort of genius, an honor roll student, tough-looking on the outside but soft and spiritual on the inside, kind to nerds, and a hardworking bag boy at Ralphs. Tony was tough through and through—got into way too many fights, smoked an excessive amount of weed, got fired from every job he started. They both had tatted arms, but Tony’s were devoted to big-breasted pinup women, our 818 area code, his friend Joe’s face after Joe got shot in a drive-by the year before Louie died. I’d probably had one conversation with Tony the whole time I knew Louie—he was out getting into trouble and Louie was a homebody with his nose always in some book.
I thought Tony would yell at me to get the fuck out, that I had no right to be in Louie’s room, but instead he said, “Wassup, Rana?”
“Hey,” I said, leaning my butt on Louie’s desk, in sudden shock that I’d been discovered, but also that Tony knew my name.
“What’s up with your eye?” I asked him.
“Just stupid shit,” he said.
I was wearing a black dress, one of the few dresses I owned, and because my mom bought it for me, it was lacy and very feminine—not really my style. Tony had even lighter-toned skin than Louie, but Tony shaved his head, and I wondered if he would have the same blond curls if he didn’t. They both had those blue eyes that looked unreal.
“You snoopin’ around?” Tony asked. He sat on Louie’s bed, wearing a T-shirt and jeans like Louie should’ve been wearing that day, and he lit up a joint, not even waiting for an answer from me. He offered the joint to me, and I knew it would’ve grossed Louie out and he would’ve gotten all judgmental on his brother, but I’d always wanted to try it, and maybe it was Louie dying so suddenly and so young, but I was starting to feel like Alan Watts was right—we only ever really have this moment. I grabbed the joint from Tony and sucked on it and immediately coughed and blew the smoke out.
“Naw, you ain’t doing it right. You gotta really let it rest in your mouth,” he said, and demonstrated for me. I stared at his lips, realizing that he and Louie shared more than I’d wanted to admit. I tried again, and he nodded in encouragement this time. I could feel my brain sizzling, my body letting go. I’d drank a few beers at parties before, but always stopped myself after the initial buzz. This was something else completely. Tony smiled at me. Behind the bruise, his eye was red, either from the weed or too many tears. I hadn’t cried yet and I hated myself for it, but right then, despite all of Louie’s and Tony’s differences, it was like I was staring at Louie. And maybe it was the weed or the thought of Louie’s body being eaten by worms when he’d wanted his flesh burned and thrown out into the ocean flow and there was nothing we could do about it now, but I started sobbing.
Snot-nosed and high, I covered my face with my hands, and my whole body convulsed with each sob. Tony got up and wrapped his arms around me, rocked me like a baby. Even though I didn’t particularly like Tony in that way, it felt good to be touched and to feel his strength take over me. When I looked up, I saw Louie’s eyes, alive and ready.
Tony kissed me. It wasn’t my first—I’d kissed a boy named Ramptin in eighth grade, but it was sloppy and the whole experience was vomit-inducing, so let’s not even go there. This time, the weed or the kiss or the reality of death had me really living inside my body. I could taste the kiss like candy on my tongue; I could feel Tony’s breath expanding my lungs.
He undressed me. It was difficult to get the dress off because the material was so expensive and delicate. I bet my mom wasn’t thinking of me having sex when she bought it, or maybe she was and that’s why it felt like hours before we could get it off. Once I was naked, though, I was surprisingly not overthinking shit; I wasn’t worried that my boobs were too big or my stretch marks too jagged. His touch felt easy, so I let him do it. I let him lick my neck, my nipples, my belly, in between my legs. I let him put a condom on and find his way inside me, and I tried to stay in the moment and convince myself we were doing this out of our mutual love for Louie, to honor his death, and that Louie wouldn’t be upset with me, even though he would’ve known I was lying to myself the whole time. Louie was the only one who knew my secret.
I like girls.
CHAPTER TWO
This morning, my mom’s preparing all the ingredients for the cooking class she teaches at our house Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons. She usually sleeps in, but on these days, she’s too excited and is awake by six and does all the prep work before her students get here. Cooking a Persian dish of any kind usually requires six hours of hard, focused labor, but by doing all the prep, my mom cuts that in half.
“What’s on the menu today?” I ask her. I love watching her in her element and can almost ignore the fact that even this early in the morning, she already has her red lipstick on, her fancy blouse and heels. Her idea of womanhood is something I could never live up to, and I wish she could just relax sometimes and stay in her pj’s all day, but that hasn’t happened since I was a little girl.
“Ghormeh sabzi,” she says, chopping the variety of herbs it takes to make the stew, including fenugreek, which results in horrible BO.
“You better tell them to wear extra deodorant,” I say. She smiles at this.
“Sometimes you have to pay a price for a delicious meal,” she says, and then notices that I’m about to put two slices of bread into the toaster.
“Two?” she asks, without even looking up at me. “Do you really need two, Rana Joon? Especially since you’re not playing basketball anymore these days, you know? You need to watch it.” I can tell she’s trying really hard to make her tone even, but it doesn’t matter, because anytime my mom brings up food, my blood pressure skyrockets and I just want to do the exact opposite of whatever it is she’s telling me to do. But sometimes I become extremely insecure and end up listening to her instead, which makes me feel even shittier about myself.
My grandfather moved in with us a few years ago and was my main ally because my mom also tried to control the way he ate, insisting he cut salt and sugar because of the cancer. We’d run into each other in the middle of the night at the kitchen table.
You’re hungry too? he’d ask. She’s worse than your grandmother was.
It was during these midnight ice-cream/bread-and-cheese/cookies-dipped-in-whipped-cream fiascos that my grandfather would read me poems. Some were his own, some from famous Persian poets like Rumi or Hafiz or my favorite, Forugh Farrokhzad.
I plant my hands in the garden soil—
I will sprout, I know, I know, I know.
It’s in your blood, he would tell me, to be a poet. He knew that I loved poetry, but back then, I was hesitant to put pen to paper.
He died the year before Louie did, and sometimes I don’t know who I miss more. Louie gave me this beautiful notebook after my grandfather passed, and told me it was time, and, just like that, the ideas, the words, the memories flowed—as if I were just waiting for two people to believe in me instead of one. But, like I said, all that stopped after Louie died.
I toast one piece, slab too much butter and jam on it, and try to leave before she notices, but she stops me.
“Your orientation packet came in the mail yesterday. I left it on the table for you. I’m so proud. UCLA is a wonderful school. This is the most important thing you’re doing, Rana Joon.” My mom got married young, and I know one of her biggest regrets is never having gone to college. She loves her students, but I know she really wanted to help people and become a psychologist.
I don’t respond because I used to think the same thing. I used to think studying hard, getting a good GPA and high SAT scores, and getting into a good college were the most important things I could do. Even after Louie died, I worked my ass off, grief making it impossible to write a poem, but somehow motivating me even more to get into what I thought was my dream school. It was always me and Louie’s plan to go to UCLA together, and I was going to work hard enough for the both of us. I even quit the basketball team to focus more on schoolwork, which pissed Coach Lock off, but I didn’t care. And then a month ago, the letter came—I got in. But the sadness in the pit of my stomach was still there. All that work and Louie was still dead and I was still living a lie, so what was the point?
“Oh, by the way, I talked to your dad today.”
“That’s cool,” I say, mouth full.
“He’s coming to visit earlier than usual this year.”
“What? Why? How early?”
“He wants to see you graduate. He gets in this Saturday,” she says, the sound of her chopping suddenly louder. I can hear the unease in her voice even though she tries to hide it. My dad has been living in Iran since I was in the sixth grade and comes to visit once a year for about a month. How can two people share a sacred bond when one lives in California and the other in Iran? It’s actually really easy when there’s a certain level of denial involved. If they were a normal fucked-up American couple, they’d just get a divorce and not insist that having children was a legitimate excuse to stay together, but it’s not that easy.
My dad works his ass off in Iran. He owns an auto parts manufacturing company and manages four different factories and sends us a decent amount of money every month—and my mom only has a tiny bit of money from her cooking classes, so how could she survive without his money? And how could my dad survive without something to work for? He’s always prioritized Babak’s, my whitewashed younger brother, and my college educations. Of course, he could come here and make some money—maybe not as much as he makes in Iran, but at least he’d be with us. Instead, this is their arrangement; this is what they’ve decided to pretend works.
And what would people say about them if they did get a divorce? How uncivil, how American to do something that might make you happier in the long run but would ruin your reputation and show that you’re just a fucking human who has flaws like everyone else. God forbid. My mom is a free woman when my dad isn’t around, and when he does come, she transforms into this manic version of herself. Let me tell you, it’s not pretty.
“He doesn’t need to come to my graduation,” I say. It may seem like I’m being selfless—trying to spare her from him—but I’m really trying to spare myself. I haven’t seen my dad since Louie died, and I’m a different person now. I mean, I’m still on track to go to UCLA, which is probably the only thing that really matters to my dad at this point. He calls us a lot, but never asks me how I’m really doing. He’s usually telling me about his cousin or his friend who knows a professor at UCLA and that maybe they can give me a private tour or make sure I get all the classes I want, especially those science ones because they’re important for being on the pre-med track. (Little does he know I actually applied as an English major.)
I guess my dad, like everyone else, thinks I’m over it by now—and I thought I would be too. I thought grief was something you could just stuff down, something you eat your way through or study your way through or smoke your way through. Turns out this isn’t a straight line; this isn’t steps in organized numerical order. This is loud chaos, the kind you can’t quiet, the spiral that keeps pulling at your heart, reminding you over and over again that there’s a big hole where this person used to be that no other person can ever possibly fill, that life will never be the same—you will never be the same. How can I express any of this to my dad? How can I be real with him when I can’t even be real with myself?
“He’s your father, Rana Joon. It’s important for him to feel like he’s a part of your life.”
He’s really not, though, I want to say, but I know I have to keep my mouth shut out of respect. Everything beautiful that lived between me and my dad feels so distant. Gone are the days where I’d help him in the garden, or accompany him on long walks with my grandfather, or when I was in the fourth grade and he’d pick me up after school and we’d share an extra-large pizza between the two of us.
If he were around, maybe things would be different, but he’s not, and how is that my fault?
“He’s paying for school. You should be grateful; without him, you wouldn’t be able to do any of this. You would have no future,” she says. Guilt is for sure the glue that keeps any immigrant family together, and I’m a real sucker for it.
“Fine. I’ll try to be more grateful.”
I take my last bite and wash it down with a cup of tea and tell my mom I’m going to be late coming home after school because I’m going to study with my friend Naz.
“Tell her I say hi, okay? I love you,” she says, and gives me a kiss without questioning me because she knows Naz is more Muslim than we are and is under the impression that she’s not the trouble-making type. My mom’s controlling side is usually only unleashed when it comes to dictating what I put into my mouth.
I wish I could tell her the truth, starting with where I’m really going after school, but she would never understand.
“I love you too” is all I can manage.
Naz is waiting in front of school with Starbucks—a black coffee for me and a Frappuccino with extra whipped cream for herself.
“So I have a plan,” she says, barely letting me thank her for the coffee first.
Everything she’s wearing today is some shade of green, and her lips are bright orange, and she’s lined her eyes thick like a cat’s. The hijab is meant to cover women up, not draw attention to them—but at school everything about Naz screams look at me. Which is what I love about her.
“A plan?” I ask as we walk through the jam-packed hallways—people riding skateboards, making out, checking their pimples in their locker mirrors.
“Ya, I’m going to make out with Paul Stewart today,” she says, like it’s a fact.
Naz gets the whole living-a-double-life thing—her parents are from Afghanistan and are way more conservative than mine, and in front of them she wears zero makeup and tones down her outfits. But she wants to be a fashion designer and is always quoting Coco Chanel. Even though Naz mostly buys her fabric from thrift stores, she has an elegance about her that’s undeniable. And guys flock to her—she has these really dark, majestic eyes and has given blow jobs to a few guys at different parties. But she told them her dad would come murder them if he ever found out, so no one ever spreads rumors about her or anything like that.
“Why Paul Stewart?” I ask, and then burn my tongue as I take a sip. “Fuck.”
“That’s what you get for questioning me,” she says playfully, smacking my arm. “Dude, Rana, he’s so hot, and I’ve never hooked up with a surfer dude. Like, he’s so white, it’s blinding,” she says, and we both crack up.
Naz and I met on the bus in middle school, because some dickhead told her to go back to Arabia and tried to throw a glass bottle at her head, and the one and only triumphant moment of my middle-school life was throwing that bottle right back at him—missing, but breaking it near his head at least—and telling him to go fuck himself. Naz and I have been friends ever since, but we never hung out outside of school until Louie died. Naz showed up to Louie’s funeral, even though she didn’t really know him that well, and brought flowers—I thought they were for his mom, but they were actually for me. She was one of the only people in my life who could acknowledge Louie’s death as a big loss for me and didn’t expect me to grieve on a particular timeline, so we’ve been pretty inseparable all year.
“Well, you keep me posted on that, please. I gotta go to English,” I say, and give her another hug right as the bell rings. I head to English class.
My English teacher, Mrs. Mogly, is old. The skirt-below-her-knees, I-need-to-sit-down-every-fifteen-minutes-to-catch-my-breath-and-call-in-other-teachers-to-take-over-so-I-can-take-pee-breaks kind of old. She’s been teaching for thirty-five years, and I don’t think she actually cares anymore, especially now that we’re done with the AP exam.
Right now we’re doing a poetry unit, probably because Mrs. Mogly thinks it’ll be fast and easy since we’re all burnt out from studying for the exam. To be honest, I’m actually pretty excited. All year I’ve been hoping for that spark again, for a moment of inspiration to break my dry spell; maybe reading some poetry, even with Mrs. Mogly, is what I need to write more poetry.
“You have thirty minutes to read the poem and answer the questions. We don’t have that much time left together. Just stay focused and do the work,” she says. Her tone always makes it feel like we’re freshmen, not seniors about to enter the real world. While everyone else drags their feet, I turn to the assignment page right away.
My grandfather used to tell me that a poem is a gift, that you have to take your time with it, unwrap it slowly, savor each word, each line, each stanza, as its own little world. I skip the poet bio and get right to the poem itself: “A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde. It’s about people born into fear, facing moments they were never meant to survive, and how every beautiful thing also has a flip side.
I read the whole poem over and over, listening to the tiny heartbeats within every line. The only other time I’ve ever felt like this was when I read Forugh Farrokhzad’s poems with my grandfather. But it reminds me of Louie and Alan Watts too because what Audre Lorde is really saying is that all you have is this moment and no one is ever guaranteed anything, so you need to demand to be heard even if the whole world is trying to silence you.
I turn back to the bio and read about Audre Lorde. She died not too long ago. She was born in New York City to Caribbean parents. In the fifties she established her identity as both a poet and a lesbian.
I read the last line—the last word, really—several more times, and then I get up and go to the front and put the open textbook in front of Mrs. Mogly, because I’m not about to ask a question in front of the whole class.
“Yes?” she asks, not looking up from the quizzes she’s grading.
“This poem,” I say.
“Yes?” she asks again, still grading.
“What do you think she means by ‘who love in doorways coming and going / in the hours between dawns’?” I ask, and I suddenly have her attention. She reads over the poem and then looks up at me, her pink lipstick covering a space larger than her lips.
“What do you think it means?”
“It sounds like it’s about having to love in secret. Not being free to love,” I say.
“Well, she was a lesbian, so yes, I’d say that’s about right,” she says with a smile.
I’ve never heard any of my teachers openly talk about anyone we study being gay, and I certainly don’t expect conservative-looking Mrs. Mogly to be the first, but here she is opening a door for me.
“It’s good to hear your voice, Rana,” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“You never share in class and barely have any questions for me. You do so well on all the tests and essays, but I was starting to think you didn’t need me,” she says. I give her a smile before going back to my desk to finish answering the textbook questions, and once I’m done I pull the notebook Louie gave me out of my bag, pen hovering over paper just in case.
Before the bell rings, Mrs. Mogly collects our papers and hands out another one with details about our last assignment of the year.
“You will have your final exams, of course, but I am also asking you to write a poem about you. It’s about where you’re from, but also what and whom you’re from—all the smells and tastes and memories that make you who you are. And since it’s the last assignment of the year I’m going to let you just do as you please. No rules, other than it has to be at least twenty lines and, well . . . good.” She says this last part with a little smile, revealing her lipstick-covered teeth to us all.
Everyone groans a little bit, but I can feel the start of something beautiful rising in my chest.
