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No matter how much I tried, I couldn't get my body to fall back asleep. I had woken up at my usual time, told Sam I thought it was too early for me to go back to school with Tatiana there, and then fell back asleep. However, I only fell back asleep for another hour before I woke up again feeling more tired than I did before.
After officially waking up, I got up and went into the kitchen to get myself some breakfast.
"Morning," Dan said to me as I sat down next to him on the couch. "Sam and Phil left. I think they said they went to Los Angeles. I dunno."
"Did they say when they'd be back?" I asked. Dan told me they didn't.
Dan and I spent the next few hours talking about music, and TV shows, and our hobbies. After a while, our tummies grumbled in hunger. We went to a local Mexican restaurant to grab a bite to eat. It felt like a nice date, but I didn't tell him that.
Soon after, we took a stroll back home. He and I had been deep in conversation when Sam and Phil burst in and ruined the moment. They told us they had gone to the aquarium and then had lunch. Sam said they brought back Dan and me the leftovers since they got more than their stomachs could handle.
"We already ate," I told Sam. "We went over to Domingo's. I was in the mood for some carnitas."
"Oh, well then. Maybe you guys can share this for dinner." Sam said as she put the Styrofoam box in our fridge.
Dan, Phil, Sam, and I spent the rest of the day lounging around doing nothing. Dan and I were kind of jealous of Sam and Phil's Los Angeles adventure, so she promised to take us to see all the cool stuff in Los Angeles the week after my exams had concluded. Though, she did say we were all going to take a trip up to north California and Washington to visit some of Sam and Phil's family.
"Nazaryan," Mr. Kandarian said during roll call. I got up from my desk, walked up the front of the classroom, got my exam, and then took my seat again. "Norashkarian...Ortega...Petrov…" Mr. Kandarian called off names until everybody in the room had their exam.
After quickly breezing through the calculus exam and handing it into Mr. Kandarian, I packed up my things and headed to the cafeteria to wait with the other students who finished their exams until the next exam time started. I then finished my chemistry exam before anybody else in my class room, and then, once again, waited in the cafeteria before I could leave.
I am almost completely finished with my high school career. These four years of the average American teenager's life are often called the best years of our lives. I really want to know when that begins because I have two more days left of these "best years" and I am miserable every time I walk through those prison doors. But, soon, I'll be off to university working towards being an ER doctor and maybe then my school years will be better. I highly doubt it, though, since a bunch of horror stories about how horrible and unmanageable university life is.
When I finished my final exam of the day, I packed up all of things from my locker, since I didn't think I would attend school on the last day since it was just to get old school work and to clean out our lockers, and started walking to my mom's house.
On this particularly cruelly hot day, I was very thankful to get inside my mom's air conditioned house. However, this euphoria quickly took a sharp three-sixty and became dysphoria. My siblings were pretty disappointed that I had decided I wasn't staying for the week. Before Yeraz started the waterworks, Sam showed up to take me back home.
"You know, on Friday, I'm having my birthday party at Zakar's house," I said to Koko. "If you and Salma want to go, you're invited. Maybe we can all do something on Sunday for my birthday."
Koko gave me a weak smile and said he'd see what Salma said before he gave me a definitive answer. Though, he was very excited about throwing me a birthday party. He even said he'd plan all the details.
"So, how was your first day of exams?" Sam asked as I got into the car. I told her they were boring, but I thought I did a good job.
I spent the next few days sleeping, internetting, and hanging out with Dan and Phil.
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Esperanza brought out the cake from the kitchen. It was a simple chocolate cake with "Happy Birthday Kaya" written sloppily in frosting across the top. Terrell put in nineteen candles and then everybody sang Happy Birthday to me. Unfortunately, my only sibling to show up was Koko; Salma didn't want to come. Not too long after, Sam and Phil were leaving early so they were going to drop my gifts off at home so I wouldn't lose them. Sam and Phil planned on going to drive over to see her dad on the Arizona border, so they wanted to get a head start.
I quickly tore through the presents my friends had gotten me. Nothing extravagant, as they're all unemployed teenagers, but that doesn't matter to me. Marcelo had gotten me the new Twenty One Pilots CD. I love my friends, but the best gift was from Sam's dad who had restored an old junkyard car from his shop for me. He's always treated my siblings and I like family, especially after what happened with my dad.
Sam and I have been sharing one car since I got my license. As it turns out, working as an "on-call" doesn't pay very well. Who would've thought? The lack of jobs is another downside of small town living.
Within an hour, Zakar's house was packed with kids from my school and even people I didn't recognize. I'm assuming they are people from Junction and Sugar Ridge, which are two smaller towns about half an hour away. One kid even told me he's a college student from Melody Heights, which is an affluent town an hour away.
The music blasted through the speakers in Zakar's house. The bass was so powerful that I could mistake the beat for my own heart. Marcelo's iPod was plugged into the speakers playing some popular rap song that I didn't know the name of. I told Marcelo, who has a polar opposite music taste than me, that it's unfair that his iPod was plugged in since it's my birthday and I should be picking the music. He told everybody would leave because nobody likes my music. He's acting like my music is so obscure when, really, all I listen to is Fall Out Boy and Twenty One Pilots.
As the clock struck eleven, I asked Zakar if I could just hang out in his room on his laptop until the birthday festivities. Zakar gave me the go ahead and I sat in his room on the internet for another hour. I was in the middle of putting the finishing touches on my makeup when the door flew open.
"Oh, sorry. I was looking for the toilet," Dan said. He had started to turn around to leave before I asked him to stay.
"I'm lonely. Don't leave me here all by myself," I begged. He told me he would go to the bathroom and be back. He came back a few minutes later, sat down next to me on the bed, and asked me why I'm alone at my own birthday. "I just didn't feel like being around a lot of people right now so I'm just hanging out in Zakar's room, you feel me?"
Dan and I spent the next half hour just scrolling through his Tumblr and laughing at all the silly things we saw. We were staring at a GIF of a Fall Out Boy music video when I decided to play something from Folie à Deux and the rest of Fall Out Boy's albums.
"Did you know that Brendon Urie is on 20 Dollar Nose Bleed? 'Cause I didn't until like a week ago," I said as the song ended. Looking over at Dan, I noticed he looked kind of bummed out. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah." he said simply. I gave him a look that told him to tell the truth. He let out a sigh and continued talking. "Honestly, I'm okay. It's just that my ex girlfriend really liked Fall Out Boy, and I have so many bad memories with her which makes them kind of hard to listen to, you know what I mean?"
"Do you wanna talk about it?"
"Okay, so Chloe and I started dating when we were about seventeen. We dated for like two and half years. I thought everything was going great until I went to go surprise her at work and she I caught her cheating on me with one of her co-workers. Apparently, she had been cheating on me for the last six months of our relationship, but I don't know if it was more or less or if there were other people before that guy. I dunno, I guess I should've seen the signs."
I gave Dan my sympathies and he asked me if I've ever had something like that happen to me. I told him I hadn't and admitted that I never had a boyfriend.
"You pronounce my name wrong, by the way," I told him since I wanted to get off the subject of boyfriends. "It's Kai-ya-neh, not Kay-anne." Dan apologized for mispronouncing my name and worked with me to get the accents of my name just right. "I don't understand why my mom makes such a big deal out of it though. Like, she threw this huge fit in the dean's office the other day because he kept calling me Kay-annie. Like, she has this huge obsession with all of my siblings' names and it's kind of embarrassing when we're in a doctor's office and the receptionist says our name wrong and my mom acts like someone just died. Like, if you wanted people to be able to pronounce our names, you should've given us an amreekan name. I understand my name is hard to pronounce for people who aren't familiar with Armenian, that's why I go by Kaya, but it feels like I'm erasing my heritage by going by something other than my actual name."
"Is there a special meaning behind your name or something? Were you named after somebody?"
"Yeah, there was an early saint named Gayane, which is the Eastern transcription of my name; my family speaks the Western dialect. During Armenia's conversion to Christianity, some kings fell in love with this girl, I don't remember her name, and she didn't want to marry them and she ran off with Abbess Gayane and some other nuns. They were eventually captured and then tortured and martyred. It's a really sad story but Saint Gayane got a church and my grandmother was born near there.
"I don't know how much you know about the history of Armenia, but during the first World War, there was a genocide and a lot of people died and a lot of people were forcibly expelled from the country. My family history is kind of complicated, but I was born in Syria. My grandmother was really young during the genocide and a nice Syrian family took her in when they were forced into the desert. I guess Kayane is special to her because of the connection it has to Armenia."
My name has always been important to me. It's a plane, a boat, a train that brings me back to Armenia, a place I've never stepped foot in. It's the air I've never breathed and the culture I've never entirely felt. Yes, I live in a community with a large Armenian population but many of them have either assimilated, or their cultures aren't exactly the same because their parents aren't from the same place as mine. Yes, I have an Armenian surname but it's my first name that brings it together. My parents could have assimilated and given me an Arabic or Russian name, like many diaspora Armenians do, but they kept the language and gave their children Armenian names (except for Salma).
It makes me feel selfish that I let people to Americanized my beautiful name that my grandmother gave me decades before I was born. My name was given to me in the small town of Kessab, Syria in a small home that housed a small family with a son named Razmik, which means solider. My mother named me so because my grandmother wanted her first born daughter to be named after the church she was born in, but my mother has no sisters and my grandfather insisted on naming her Amal, which means hope.
I've never understood why my mother makes such a big fuss about the mispronunciation of my name until Dan had me speak it aloud. But now I do understand. My mother doesn't want me to forget Armenia. She doesn't want me to forget where my name came from and she doesn't want people corrupting a name with history because they can't take two seconds to pronounce it.
"Kaya?" Dan's voice broke me out of my thoughts. "Can I tell you something without coming off as weird?"