Physics Class

Zara's eyes discretely roam around the class to get a gauge of the people around her. She was always painfully shy as a kid and as such, people would usually ignore her. It didn't help that she was a Muslim and wore a headscarf to school and was surprisingly the only person to do so in her entire school. It brought all kinds of negative attention. All of this and on top of that, the Afghan army surrender and US withdrawal had left a sort of bitter taste in everyone's mouth and they all looked at the nearest Muslim to place their blames.

Zara tugged at her headscarf, a part of her always wanted to tear it away and show off her beautiful, curly, long, jet black hair to the world. The other part lived in constant fear of reprisals that she would earn as a result of rebellion. In the past, Zara had hard fought and pleaded with her mother (Mariam Darwish) to not wear the loose hijab and she had succeeded. People had begun to notice her and compliment her hair and she genuinely loved every moment of it. This period however was short lived. When her father (Assad Darwish) came to the US, he nearly exploded with rage upon seeing her teenage daughter without the headscarf and the situation nearly came to blows if not for her mother stepping in to prevent any .

She had always resented her father ever since that day. He wasn't like the man she had remembered idolizing when growing up in Iraq. The kind, wise, prankster of a father was nowhere to be seen. It felt like his soul had been torn from his body and replaced with a more malevolent version of it. Zara's mother explained it as PTSD from the war. While she and her mother had left Iraq pretty early during the war in 2006, her father had to stay back for another 11 years, just in time to fight and finish another war with a new foe, the ISIS. A war that he never wanted to take part in in the first place. But he had to pay that price and risk his life and limb to act as an informant and spy for the US government so that he could one day meet his family once again. For his assistance, he was granted immediate refugee status in 2017 followed by a green card.

A small part of her though, wished he had never come back from Iraq.

"Settle down, class. Settle down." Mr. Einhorn, the portly middle aged teacher says in his gruff voice.

Mr. Einhorn is looking around the class disinterestedly when his eyes fall on Zara's. Zara gives him a quick little smile and his tired face gives a quick nod in acknowledgement. He gives the same quick nod to other students who greet him or smile at him.

"Okay...today we're going to go off on a bit of a tangent here and talk about the newest black hole images that we just received a week or so ago and I'm going to be explaining why they're so special." Mr. Einhorn's face had transformed from that of a tired man to one of a man who was excited and brimming with energy. There was always variations of the joke going around that the only way you could turn on Mr. Einhorn was talking dirty to him using Physics. Zara suspected that must be at least partially true seeing how he was married to an astrophysicist and how he sometimes wouldn't stop talking about his husbands research.

*1 hour later at the bell ring*

People immediately began gathering their stuff to leave their classroom.

"Hey, sit down I'm not done speaking yet! This class is over when I say it is!"

A collective groan is heard from everyone.

"Now since you guys really liked today's lesson I'm gonna give you an assignment. You'll need to write a report summarizing whatever I just explained in the class and I won't remind you what it was since I'm assuming you guys were paying attention," he says with an evil smirk, "you'll have to explain what you understood from it and how do you think it might open up new research opportunities. This assignment will be graded and anything below a C will be given a special punishment. You may choose one other partner to help you with the assignment. Last day for submission is Wednesday, so you have two full days to get it done. And that's it for today's class. I hope ya'll learned something new today." After saying that , Mr. Einhorn immediately gets up and leaves, leaving the class in a bit of a mild panic.

The rest of the class scrambles to go to the nerds of the classroom who were paying attention to get them to partner up. Zara looks with barely disguised disgust at Rose Gallaghan who was wearing a tanktop with jeans. The blonde bombshell was bending down to show her full cleavage to Thomas "Tommy" Linghorn, one of the top scoring students in the entire school in a bid to get him to partner up with her. Tommy was still seated and he had other people surround him to get him to partner up but he already had his eyes glued to those bountiful child rearing mammaries of Rose. An exasperated groan was heard when he said he'd do the assignment with Rose. Rose, for her part, was sporting an extra wide grin after she had secured her win.

"Hey Zazi, you wanna do this assignment together?" Zara looks down at the adorably worried face of Jonas which made her blood pump a little bit faster.

"You weren't paying attention were you? Hmm, I think this time I'll do the assignment alone." Zara says with a tiny smirk.

"Zazi pleeeaaase! I'll worship the ground you walk on....I'm on my knees Zazi!"

"I can still see you standing though."

Jonas immediately drops to his knees and looks up into her gentle forest green eyes with his hands joined in prayer.

"Okay fine, get up. And please don't call me with that nickname in front of other people. It's embarrassing!"

"Hey it's my right as your best friend to call you whatever cute name I want!"

"I'm gonna submit the assignment on my own."

"I humbly apologize, Zara Darwish, for any wrong that I may hath devout and I humbly beseech that thee reconsider thy decree and admit me within that assignment."

"...............Fine, I can never say no to you when you go all Shakespeare on me. "

Jonas beams a thousand watt smile at Zara. Truth be told he paid enough attention to know what needed to be done for the assignment but he had lately developed a really big crush on her and he really wanted to maximize the time that he spent with her. This was easier said than done. Her father always made everything 10x times harder than it really needed to be.

"So, my place after school today?"

"I would love to, but you know how my Baba is. He won't be happy at all. You can come to my place though."

"And spend the evening being ruthlessly scrutinized..."

"Hey, do you want to be in the assignment or not?"

"I do. I'm gonna swallow my pride...for now." He turns around to pick up his bag off the floor.

"That's not the only thing I want you to swallow." Zara says in a barely audible voice.

"Huh, did you say something?"

"Nothing. I was just wondering how much of an idiot you are." Her lightly tanned face reddens considerably. She can't believe what she just said earlier. Jonas always made her a bit more loose and free but this was getting out of hand now. Lately, she was regularly having thoughts that were completely Haram. Thankfully Jonas does not notice her blush or what she just said. He was always pretty bad at reading subtle cues and Zara thanks her stars that her best friend is kinda dumb like that.

"Haha. Very funny. C'mon, we have Chemistry class next."