A Very Large Expanse of Sea

Shirin’s difficulty with fellow students represents a consistent and deep fear of peer relationships. Her fear manifests itself in outward-facing personality traits like toughness, vulgarity, rudeness, and emotional passivity. Inside, Shirin recalls lost friendships from her family’s moves when she was younger, which causes enough pain to convince her that friends are not worth pursuing. After September 11, strangers and acquaintances showed distrust and intolerance toward Shirin because of her religion and appearance; soon after the terrorist attacks, two male students attack Shirin. These events caused Shirin to develop fearfulness with interpersonal situations in general (such as when strangers on the street, including adults, yell insults at her) and with peer relationships specifically, causing Shirin to construct figurative emotional barriers between herself and other students. She acquires a label of “mean” because of her lack of interactions and open unfriendliness with classmates. Although she wants deeply to have friends, the potential for pain and consequent fear make it too arduous a process; having seen and experienced others’ racism and bigotry, she feels they perceive her as different: “I’d become a talking point; a statistic. I was no longer free to be only a teenager, only a human, only flesh and blood—no, I had to be more than that” (159).