The Heart Adjacent
i.
Before I knew his birthday or his siblings' names or what kind of movies and video games he liked, I knew his mom's minivan's license plate.
At the time I was 12, Henry and I had been neighbors already for almost four years, but I didn't properly know who he was. We lived in the same aging development of condos, on a busy street crammed with other apartment complexes. We were the only two in that complex of sixteen units that attended the same middle school. His was in the middle of the front row; mine was in the row behind, the last unit at the end, facing the gate that all the cars had to pass through. We had diagonally facing garages and I could see his unit from my bedroom window. Every time I was at my computer desk, pretending to be working on homework, I would read the license plate on back of his mom's pastel blue Toyota Sienna minivan as she paused before the gate.
It was a neighborhood in the sketchier part of our area, on the border between two school districts. The road itself was part of a high-traffic 5-lane intrastate. Across the street was a little strip mall, with a sad little tutoring place and a laundromat. At the time, there was still a turning lane in the middle for left turns. Part of the road formed a bridge for train tracks and had no pedestrian access, making it very hard to get anywhere on foot. Every few weeks, we would see police cars with their flashing lights parked in front of the nearby apartments. At night I heard the train horns and bells constantly, loaded with freight cars.
In 7th grade, we both ended up in the same health and biology class. I finally got to see Henry up close. He had a very pointed chin at the end of a long face, and a fringe that drooped over his large forehead. Sly eyes that seemed cunning. Thin as a rail. Did karate. Always getting in trouble, never all that worried about doing the right thing, or being the smartest person in the room.
Without a doubt, he turned out to be the class clown, always cracking jokes and making a ruckus. We inhabited separate worlds. He had mediocre grades, whereas I had straight A's. Loads of friends, while I escaped to teachers' classrooms to read in silence during lunch period, to avoid former friends who rejected me. Cantonese like a lot of my classmates, whereas I only spoke Mandarin. Three noisy siblings to keep him company, whereas I was an only child. An absent father, whereas I spent most of my teenage years pestering my dad for conversation, who I didn't really fight with, the way I did with my mom.
We never spoke in class, but I mentally noted his every action and interaction with furtive excitement. When you’re a teenager with a silly crush, every ounce of new detail about that person is an exciting discovery. You imagine, delusionally, that at any moment you might suddenly be inserted into your crush’s life, and thus your great love story together would begin. To see bits and pieces of his home life — him and his brother on skateboards playing with nerf guns, his mom’s busy schedule running her own store as a single mom of four, the piles of storage boxes and knick knacks in their garage — only further fueled this delusion. I carefully guarded each detail as if they were seeds for a fertile story.
Our middle school had a nearby ice cream truck that sold a plethora of chips and other junk food. After the last school bell, students could be seen flocking to it, spare change in hand, to get their fill of slightly overpriced delights. The main advantage, of course, being that their parents wouldn't have to know about such consumption. I didn't often partake, more out of stingy self-consciousness than a concern for health. But while waiting on the curb to get picked up from school by my 'after school' program, I saw him go often, violin case in one hand, laughing with his friends at something or the other, a bag of Hot Cheetos in the other hand. He never seemed to grow out of this habit, and even many years later could often be seen with the red dust on his fingertips and under his nails, a half-finished bag tucked into his backpack or sitting at the floor of his car.
'After school' consisted of Chinese 'lessons' in a rented church basement. The ages ranged from 5 to 13, and there were about 30 kids there at any given time, from a mix of the local school districts. The pricing was reasonable and the parents were mostly paying for the pickup, not the 'lessons'. Suffice it to say, it was a lame place to be, especially at the older end of the age range. The three kids from my middle school with the misfortune of being stuck in this program were myself, Mirabel, and Jane.
The two other girls were pretty close friends. In fact, I had originally befriended Mirabel the year before, when we both started at this school district for the first time. We began spending inordinate amounts of time together on the weekends, when her working dad inadvertently used my parents as free childcare. I felt bad for her, but was generally glad for the company and tried my best to be a kind host. By the end of 6th grade she had dropped me as a friend in favor of Jane because she decided I wasn't cool enough to hang out with her new group, only to get stuck with me for 7th grade 'after school' pickup.
The car rides, at first cold and tense, eventually became a giddy, confidential ritual where we would take turns dishing out new observations about our crushes. Mirabel liked Calvin, who seemed funny and very down to earth. Jane liked a tall, spiky-haired bad boy who sagged his pants. Both the girls were in orchestra and knew Henry, and clearly thought he was a bit of a loser. But having a crush meant getting to partake in the ritual, and it became very exhilarating and important to me. The key part was being observant, not necessarily being observed, and it was something I felt I could be good at. Evading notice was precisely a good thing, lest the crush would accidentally get discovered.
"So today before 6th period he looked over at me again..." Jane began.
"And did he say anything?" Mirabel asked.
"No! Of course not."
"Coward. Maybe I should just tell him, so you guys don't have to make googly eyes at each other anymore."
Jane was very pretty, and genuinely nice. Almost all the sensible boys in our grade had at one time or another some sort of crush on her. She tried her best to include me despite my tensions with Mirabel.
"What about you, Sharon? How was biology?"
"Um. It was his birthday over the weekend, I guess. We changed seats and now I sit two seats behind him. He talks to this one girl a lot." I struggled to think of a more interesting detail to share. "And he failed his quiz again, and has to do the makeup."
"That's dumb," Mirabel said. "He sounds really stupid."
"Well, maybe you could tutor him, or something," Jane offered.
In any case, the car rides were short, and the two of them got to stick together in the 6 year old Chinese class, whereas I was a native speaker and more or less reading at my grade level. Outside of our little gab sessions, it was like I didn't know them at all.
To this day I can't recall how I finally became friends with Henry. Indirectly through friend groups, perhaps. In any case, we didn’t have any other classes together besides biology; my teachers had pushed me despite all my skepticism and shyness into the honors classes. He scarcely noticed me and it didn't take long for my infatuation to die off. In the end, nothing much happened with the crushes of the other two, either.
By 8th grade, I had managed to escape the dreaded after school by carefully choosing my extracurriculars. I had a solid set of friends from marching band and mock trial, who included people that Henry knew from way back in elementary school. We became proper 'nice' neighbors. He kindly lent me his video game consoles and extra controllers, occasionally partaking in our SingStar sessions, belting out ‘Chasing Cars’ alongside us on our Friday pizza nights.
By the time we were starting high school, Henry and I almost never crossed paths anymore, and I stopped noticing the minivan's movements or paying attention to who was skateboarding outside my window. I was absorbed in my schoolwork, in reading and mock trial practice and tumblr poetry and my friends, tenuously navigating puberty by shrinking into myself, and pretending that I could get by as just a brain without a body.
All that changed in our last year of high school.
ii.
In the second half of senior year, I hung out with Henry every single day.
Part of it was logistics. By this time we were much more familiar, and it just made sense to carpool to and from school. In the mornings he would ride together with me in my dad's car in the back seat, often falling asleep the moment he climbed in. In the afternoons his mom would drive us, loudly nagging him in Cantonese. Sometimes he got to borrow his sister's Prius, and he would drive us both ways, and we would talk about video editing or the latest photo gear releases. We texted often to stay in touch on our daily schedules, and borrowed random things from each other like spare keyboards and camera gear.
But curiously, we were also in the process of forming our own little tight knit friend group.
All throughout the last year of high school, I became very close with Calvin's best friend, Theo. Theo and I had almost all our classes together that year, and were pretentious enough to dabble in the kind of philosophical discussion typically reserved for drunken late nights in college dorms, about the peculiarity of the idea of god, and fate, and love. He responded to my mostly unfiltered sadness with kindness. Just like practically every other girl I knew, I too, eventually developed a crush on him after getting to know him. He knew, and had the grace to not make fun of me for it. Ultimately those feelings were wrapped up in a deeper friendship, not to mention he had a steady girlfriend and didn't see me that way, and the stoic theme of our interactions and mutual commiserations took precedence.
I liked the idea of being Theo's intellectual sparring partner without beating him down in the process, which was actually a type of pattern he had developed with Mirabel the year before. I guess we had that in common – being the subject of her spite. In fact, while Theo and I grew close as friends that fall, Mirabel took great pains to tell me that I was spending too much time with him and to berate me on his girlfriend's behalf. Little did she know that Theo and I were close precisely because of her and his girlfriend's mutual obsessions with various television stars (in this specific case, Merlin), among other little jabs at his personality and quirks. Those putdowns fed his thinly veiled inferiority complex. To say that he was suffering from imposter syndrome, as an overall popular and affable guy with heavy extracurricular leadership and decent grades, was an understatement.
Calvin and Theo and Henry began working on a video project for an extracurricular that I was also a part of. Meanwhile, Theo and I started on a separate video project for AP Environmental Science that we were going to submit to a contest hosted by USC. Even though there were two other group members for our science project, they were rather unhelpful, and Theo and I handled the bulk of the project ourselves. I think we would've dropped them if we could, but the contest rules mandated four-person teams. One of those other members was Calvin's girlfriend at the time, who was quite happy to skip out on these hangouts. Eventually, our science video project working sessions just got lumped in with the guys' video project, and we often borrowed ideas from each other.
All four of us were also in AP Stats, and we started studying together for that as well, though the studying efficacy was highly questionable.
We had a funny group dynamic. Left to their own devices, the three boys had virtually no ability to focus, but lots of creativity. Theo and I had worked on a video project the semester before, and I think he appreciated the focus that I injected. I was harsh with my critique, a taskmaster, useful on a deadline.
I got along with Calvin because I saw his philosophical side underneath all the goofing off, and appreciated his pragmatism for wanting to keep things simple. He loved guitar, Legos, Lord of the Rings, artsy photography, design. He had sisters with good grades, which caused his parents to give him a hard time when he couldn't really compete. He and Theo had been best friends since elementary school. They were a package deal, and a great one at that.
I got along with Henry because he was my dumb neighbor.
And most of all I shared the passion that they all had for video production. It was grueling work, wrangling subpar camcorder equipment and sluggish PC's running bootleg Premiere Pro and After Effects. And of top of all that the projects were entirely optional. None of my other more grade-oriented friends wanted to bother with something like that.
The premise of the group was, of course, predicated on my ability to strictly remain 'one of the guys'. I had an easy time of it. I shared their deep seated interest in tech and gear, and even tangentially video games, though I never played the first-person shooters or MMORPGs that they were so attached to. The video projects lent our hangouts an air of legitimacy and structure. Because Calvin and Theo were so close to begin with, and Henry and I carpooled daily, it was easy enough to merge together our activities.
Long afternoons were spent huddled in front of Premiere in Henry's living room. I had to bargain for time from Theo to pay attention to our science project while the other video work was rendering. The distractions were endless. Barking dog, video games in the background, family bickering, half finished bags of junk food strewn around. Sometimes we hopped over to my room for a bit of quiet studying or brainstorming, though my computer was far less capable. It was very convenient to swap between our two places, and our neighbor setup contributed to a better group workflow.
Eventually, both demanding video projects wrapped up. My science project with Theo won honorable mention for best video, with a cash award. Our little group of four kept on hanging out anyway – a study session here, a quick trip to pick up McDonald's there, just plain old hanging out. Between the four of us, we had quite an impressive list of intense participation and leadership in extracurriculars, academic achievements, creative ambition and enthusiastic nerdiness. We were about to finally graduate, and the world seemed at our fingertips. We were going to be great friends forever, in college and beyond. We even came up with a silly little group name, but I'm not going to repeat it here.
In the month leading up to graduation, all four of us – Calvin, Theo, and Henry – were in romantic relationships, some much longer than others.
I had been dating Michael for about three months. "Dating" is probably a creative term for this – we texted. We had classes together, but we spent significantly more time messaging than actually talking. Real life talking was stilted and full of awkward silences, but over messages, it felt just right. He was really smart, well rounded – sports, music, fantastic grades. What set him apart from any other guy I had been interested in was his ability to share deeply about how literature made him feel. In the realm of art, he let down his guard a little and finally talked about his deepest thoughts. Despite his cheery bravado in class, he seemed thoroughly lonely and sad, like me. Like any honest teenager, really.
It was me who had first asked him out on a date. I did it mostly out of experimentation; in February it was the Sadie Hawkins dance, the one where the girls ask the guys, and I was so fed up with all this 'dance' mania from my friends. My group had always been deeply focused on academics, and now they were lamenting that all of high school had passed them by without a single romantic adventure to recount.
Dances, including and especially prom, are just lame gym fundraisers, I insisted. There was nothing romantic about them. But my friends persisted with their Sadies plots, investments in potential prom dates further down the road. Disgusted with their silly anxieties, I asked out a classmate I respected to a movie date for a bit of a fun, in protest of the whole thing.
Michael went along with the idea. The date was polite. But then we got to chatting afterward, and not soon after we were "official". Being a good "girlfriend" over text is really just like being a very supportive friend therapist, with a bit more flirty banter. I considered myself qualified for this role.
Our relationship when not mediated by technology, however, was problematic. I didn't want to kiss him. One time I gave him a peck on the cheek, close to his mouth. It was nothing, and it still felt terrible. I thought he smelled. I tried in kind ways to say this as feedback. I don't think I was clear enough. In any case, he didn't push, but in messages he would refer to his physical attraction to me and I circumvented with jokes. On a handful of occasions, we sat together after school pretending to do homework, and we cuddled. I let him put his hands under my shirt. It wasn't unpleasant. But did I look forward to this? No. I felt it cheapened any feeling I could have for him. My heart pulsed with excitement when he sent me poetry, not when he touched me. Objectively speaking, I thought he had an attractive body. But it just didn't feel right, and I didn't know how to say this.
I think perhaps he caught on, without saying so, and along with the academic stress of college acceptances and end of year exams, his mood began to deteriorate significantly. In English we were reading Camus's The Stranger, and his comparisons to its doomed narrator became ever more literal. He shared thinly veiled allusions to suicidal thoughts. To feelings of being trapped, and hopelessness, when in reality we were all so close to finally getting out.
My close female friends were not in relationships at this time, so from them I had little besides mild sympathy in these issues. My guy friends, on the other hand, had far more experience in dating. They saw the red flags instantly, and unanimously advised a quick and painless end.
I couldn't do it. Why ruin the rest of our final year of high school with a desertion like that? I thought riding it out until graduation was the most neutral way out. If anything, I wanted to remain a good friend, not reject him. I had gotten us into this mess in the first place.
In late spring, college acceptances came out. I got into almost none of the East Coast schools I yearned for, but all of the UC's I applied to. At the time I was devastated, but made my peace with it, and chose Berkeley. Michael got into Berkeley as a spring admit. He was torn between that, and UCLA. I was genuinely happy for him and tried not to give advice on the matter.
Mirabel was in the same boat as him in terms of acceptances. Both of them went on a weekend bonding/pre-orientation trip hosted by an Asian American club at UCLA to learn more about the school. It was on this trip that he shared with this group of mostly strangers about his struggle to decide on schools, because he wanted to see a future with me, potentially at Berkeley.
I heard this from her, not him. He and I never outright talked about any of this. It was extra jarring because Mirabel wasn't on speaking terms with me at the moment (ironically, because of her disliking Michael as my boyfriend, and prom-asking related drama, among other things), and because I had to get it secondhand.
Around this time, Michael asked me to prom. I was incensed. I specifically stated very bluntly to him, as well as repeatedly to any friend who would listen, that I abhorred the idea of it. I was very happy to sit it out, to watch the circus from the sidelines. It was all part of my anti-authority, anti-mainstream act, somehow.
He asked anyway. The ticket cost and flowers and suit rental were an extreme burden to him, but he asked anyway. It was all very sweet, in the end. He did it quietly, without fanfare, god forbid. He carved me a piece of Trader Joe's green tea soap that read "Prom?". He probably worked on it for weeks. He had seen the soap carvings I made for friends and gotten the idea from there.
So it was simultaneously college acceptance season, and AP exam season, and prom season. Both Henry and Theo broke up with their steady girlfriends within the same two week span. I was borderline, a domino ready to fall, gearing myself up to do it before graduation, but after prom. Only Calvin held steady, the sane one who could keep it together.
One late afternoon, I was in my room studying for AP Stats with Henry. Calvin and Theo had both bailed for some reason. Henry was now very familiar with my laments about the breakup I was simply unable to carry out. It turned out that he had more patience for listening to this type of thing than the other two and was a good confidant, keeping it light with jokes and in general cheering me on.
We were sitting side by side on the floor, next to my bed. We had study materials splayed all around, but in reality we were mostly just chatting, shitting on the other two guys, no doubt.
"You know, Theo and I already did it. The breakup thing."
"And?"
"You're next."
I sighed. "I know. But it's not the right time."
"Just do it! Stop torturing yourself! You don't deserve this."
"Well. He doesn't deserve it either."
"He does. He's whiny and mopey and he doesn't deserve you."
I scoffed.
"You should break up with him. Like now."
"Why?"
"Because," he said.
I looked up at him, annoyed at what was sure to be an oncoming joke.
“Because what?”
“I can’t say it.”
"Just spit it out. What stupid joke is it that you can’t possibly say?”
He sighed.
"Because I really, really want to kiss you right now."
iii.
I could hear my grandfather downstairs, rustling his Chinese newspaper. My bedroom door was wide open. My parents would be home soon. It was almost dinnertime, zero studying had been done, and the AP test (as well as 4 others, for me) was in one week.
He kissed me. I let him.
My bedside lamp cast a soft, orange glow. Outside it was getting dark.
We were whispering now, the moment too fragile for words. I looked into his eyes.
So it wasn't a joke.
So this is what it's supposed to feel like.
So this is our story, now.
His mom texted him for dinner. He stood up to go.
"See you around, neighbor," he said with a smirk.
That our following rendezvous were to be held in secret was a given. We split our friend group hangouts into a before, and after. Since we always carpooled home together anyway, the other two guys didn't think much of it.
The remaining task of my breakup still hung between us. We talked about it often. He helped me plan it out – a couple days after prom, in public with plenty of people around, gentle and kind. With the details spelled out like this, I could set it aside and just try to enjoy the moment.
He managed to snag the Prius more and more often, and we detoured to side streets near home for extra alone time. Sometimes there was a rare day when no one was home at his house. Or else my grandfather just left us alone in my room. Three little words were sent via instant message to me, in acronym form. It seemed unreal, a cosmic joke. The complete opposite of how I felt about Michael, I didn't really like Henry's words on my screen. I liked holding hands over his car's center console. I liked making fun of his cheesy taste in shitty rom coms. I liked our tenderness. We didn't do anything that was new to him, but he convinced me that it felt fantastically new, with me.
My interest in getting physically involved with him was surprising to him. I surprised myself, too. It wasn't part of the plan.
"You know, one of my sisters said something last night. She said it's always the quiet ones you have to watch out for."
"Yeah? She doesn't know me."
"I know. But she bets that you're going to be like, this crazy party girl in college."
"That's absurd. She's talked to me once."
"Well. You never know."
He shared with me the inner workings of his entrepreneurial schemes. He had a thorough understanding of arbitrage, and the audacity to carry it out. I didn't necessarily approve, but it became apparent that his ambitions and ability to organize it all far surpassed what I would have expected from someone like him. He wasn't necessarily book smart, but he was calculating.
He offered to teach me how to drive. The year prior, both my parents got into awful car crashes within a few months of each other, completely totaling their cars. My mom's little sedan hydroplaned on the freeway during a rainstorm, and she got sandwiched between a semi and a large truck. My dad on the way to work one morning turned left instead of right on our busy street, and collided with an oncoming vehicle that was changing lanes. I was sick from school that day, hence the left turn. From my bedroom, congested and groggy, I could hear the loud shriek of crunching metal and shattered glass. Minutes later, Henry texted. "Dude, I think your dad got in a pretty bad car accident..." He knew I was scared of driving, but also saw how I was stifled under my parents' rules about going out with friends. He was a conscientious driver, and proud of it. I still wasn't ready, but I appreciated his prodding and admired his autonomy.
He took me to meet his photographer mentor, Will, who he freelanced for as an assistant. Will specialized in weddings and also in high school shoots, informal and otherwise. He was young, affable, full of humorous life advice. To me he seemed very wise. I got to see the inside of his immaculate condo on an errand to pick up some photo equipment. Nothing was said out loud, but he gave me the look that he knew I wasn't just a regular friend. We chatted about art, and college. I found that it was suddenly quite easy to socialize with an adult. This confidence had seemingly come out of nowhere.
As a teenager without a license, and a strict curfew, the sneaking around was intensely exciting. Senioritis was in the air. College acceptance was dealt with. Exams were always going to suck, proper studying or not.
Fuck exams. I was in love.
Henry had asked a friend to prom, someone he once liked in middle school. He asked me if I was jealous. I said no. She was in my extended friend group, one of the best friends of Jane. I barely knew anything about her; she wasn't in any of my AP classes. I thought she was nice, if a bit plain.
I was still going to prom with Michael.
An ostentatious dress was procured. Both my parents insisted on coming with me, and helping me pick it out. Michael did not, thank god. I was upset with the dress; I just wanted to wear something decent from H&M. Instead, this one was pink, strapless and frilly, the only thing vaguely close enough to my size. At this time I had the physical body of a 12 year old, and not an American 12 year old who grew up on whole milk and went to gymnastics either, a Chinese one who unfortunately looked like she barely ate. With no breasts to speak of, I refused to stuff it, resenting the boning at the sides and the itchy underskirt. It had to be tailored extensively to keep it from simply slipping off my body.
I sent a photo to Michael and he told me it was hot.
I hated it even more.
Prom sucked.
I knew it would suck. I made sure it sucked. I didn't want to remember this night. I didn't want Michael getting ideas. I felt queasy thinking about the conversation I would have to have in just a couple of days.
My female friends arranged a big getting-ready party. Will and his crew were there to take our photos. I kid you not, my dear friends physically wrestled me into an armchair as the makeup person transformed me into a raccoon. I had previously, vocally, repeatedly indicated my intentions to just be at this party for moral support, not for makeup. If I had known this would happen, I would have skipped the photos entirely.
Well, the deed was done, and I didn't wipe it off. I didn't want to waste that poor makeup person's time. We did pay for it, after all.
There was a limo. There were more endless photos of all 30 of us arranged in various permutations. There was no alcohol; we were straight-edge straight-A students.
The venue was lovely; the food was not. I gave Michael my full attention. He whispered compliments in my ear and held me by the waist. We danced, me with my shoes off. He got along fine with my friends, even if he was a bit self conscious.
Because of his prom date, Henry was also in our larger friend group. I tried not to make eye contact.
Calvin and Theo were there too, in a separate group. Theo was there with his new girlfriend, giddy and in love. (His ex-girlfriend was also part of my group, glaring daggers at him.) We chatted briefly, smiling through the awkwardly forced merriment. I repeat, it's still just a glorified school gym fundraiser.
At the end of the night, I was in a decently good mood after the dancing. Dress or not, raccoon or not, none of this mattered. I hugged my date goodbye. He gave me sad puppy dog eyes. I had done my duty, slow dance and all.
The limo dropped us off at the getting-ready house where we all left our stuff.
I carpooled home with Henry.
Except we didn't. Go home, that is.
We walked into a Denny's near home and got some food. It was past midnight. Two other kids from our high school were there, guys I didn't know. They nodded at Henry in acknowledgement. We dropped our hands and sat down in their booth, trying to look casual. The bright fluorescents of the restaurant were jarring. I kept glancing at my phone, expecting texts and calls urging me to come home. None appeared.
After Denny's we drove to a random side street. It was 2am. I was still in my shitty pink dress. We briefly debated staying up to watch the sunrise.
"So did you have fun? Was it the night of your life?" he asked.
I didn't appreciate the sarcasm.
"No," I said. "It was awful."
"Hm."
He seemed wistful, his mind elsewhere. I kept squinting into the headlights of oncoming traffic; we had picked an awful parking spot. A sunrise didn't sound all that romantic anymore. By 4am, we finally decided to go home, and made plans to hang out over the weekend.
The Tuesday after prom, I asked to talk to Michael after school. I was nervous as hell. I broke it to him in the kindest way I could think of: I had a nice time at prom, he was sweet, our talks meant a lot to me. But this was the end.
He looked crestfallen, but not entirely surprised. I could tell he wanted me to elaborate, but I was under strict instruction not to prolong the conversation.
I stood firm and said that this was how I felt, and that I would be available to talk at a later time.
I walked out of the school entrance with the guys and we got a conciliatory ice cream together.
The rest of that week was a strange blur. At the senior awards ceremony, I sat in the bleachers performatively cheering alongside everyone else to the music and dancing and announcements. And then the principal announced the valedictorian.
It was me.
I really didn't think it would be me. There were two other students in the running as well, strictly on the basis of grades. They had fewer extracurriculars than me, but my god were they good at physics. One was going to Cal Tech, the other one was going to MIT. They were going to be nuclear physicists or whatever when they grew up.
Theo gave me a sly grin afterwards when he congratulated me. I'm pretty sure he had some influence in this, though he never outright admitted it.
Henry took a photo with just me, which we had never done before. "My neighbor the valedictorian," he beamed.
All my classmates congratulated me. There were so many photos. People who I thought didn't even know my name.
That afternoon, when we were hanging out alone, Henry was particularly giddy.
"Who thought that one day I'd be making out with the valedictorian?"
I thought it sounded unreal, even a little snarky, framed in the subject of conquest. The title didn't really matter out there in the real world. Nobody remembers the high school valedictorian. Who cares? Why did he care, when he never cared much for grades in the first place?
We had a movie date at his house. Some stupid rom com with Jennifer Anniston. "It's really good!!" he insisted. I allowed it, and managed to bargain for me to choose the next movie we'd watch. I came in to his house through the front door and plopped down on the now-familiar couch. He started the movie, but something came up with work that he had to deal with on his computer, and he sat down with me half an hour later. Within two minutes, he was fast asleep on my shoulder.
He looked as he had on all those morning rides to school in the back of my dad's car. He had incredibly long eye lashes. When he slept, he was serene like a child, dainty almost, the sharp edges washed away. I didn't have the heart to wake him. His mom walked past, eyebrows raised at her son's drooping form. I gave her an apologetic smile, and pretended to watch the rest of the movie.
Banquets came and went. Our social calendars were filled with various symbolic events for seniors. I attended them, along with large friend gatherings of a dozen people or more, where nothing of interest was said. This would be our last blah blah blah, goes the formula.
One night, after one such hangout, I got a text from Henry asking if I had any spare index cards. Our friend, the one who was his prom date, needed them for an exam.
Sure, I said.
I dug through my shelves, grabbed the cards, and walked out my house to the corridor in between our garages. He came out, said a perfunctory thanks.
I turned to go and I felt an awful lump catching in my throat. I thought about saying something, but he was already gone.
A girl knows when the mood shifts. All our lives we are trained to keep careful tabs on the emotional pulse of men, especially when less is said than usual.
We knew we were going to separate colleges. We never talked about the future. For so long I had been focused on my impending breakup, and the last thing I wanted was to repeat the agony of dancing around what being apart for college would mean.
In fact, Henry was attending the same college as Michael, and joked about, what if they end up in the same dorm?
"Oh god," I said. "Please don't joke about that."
A couple days passed after I gave him the index cards. I knew he was busy, but I wanted to talk. Instead of our usual hangout, he asked to meet in the patch of grass behind the last row of condos in our development. This is a place where I had filmed video projects with Theo, sat alone to write poetry, and taken photos of flowers after spring rain. I had never been here with Henry before.
"So."
We sat cross legged in the grass. The sun was starting to set, and I had forgotten a jacket. It was hard for me to meet his eyes. I waited for him to say what he had to say.
"I've been talking with her, after prom."
"Mmm."
"I think we're going to date. Give it a real go, and all."
Not computing.
Not what I wanted to hear.
"It's distance, but it's not LA to Berkeley, you know."
Still not what I wanted to hear.
"I think it's for the best. I think you're gonna go off to Berkeley, and have an amazing time, and find the perfect guy. And he's gonna be so smart and take your breath away. And you'll forget all about me. I promise."
"Right."
"Yeah. So."
I shivered, and stood up to go.
"Maybe we'll still be friends, then?"
"Of course," he said.
"Watch one final sunrise together?"
"Maybe," he said.
iv.
At graduation I sat in the front row next to Theo, the valedictorian who gave no valediction. I smiled for all the photos, teary eyed like everyone else, awash in the heavy fragrance of so many garlands of leis.
We didn't talk that summer.
I saw him at those large friend group hangouts, tried not to stare as he and his new girlfriend held hands. They weren't obnoxious about it. I tried to be happy for them. I just didn't want to be there.
I was invited to his girlfriend's birthday party. She lived in a large, sprawling house, with a well-maintained front and back yard on a tree-lined street in the nicest part of town. In addition to our large friend group, her younger siblings, parents, and extended family were all there to celebrate with her.
At the Senior Bonfire, my friend and I hung out with Michael. We dug a giant sand pit to bury her in. The tide soon crept in and washed away all our hard work. We watched the sunset together on the beach, burnt and satisfied. There was no talking, and I was grateful.
This friend had been the only one I told about this whole charade, in the vaguest of terms. It wasn’t cathartic, but she became my secret keeper. And in later years I would become hers, too.
I saw his sister every day. It has been pre-arranged for me to start an unpaid internship at the non-profit legal firm she was working at. I thought about dropping out of it, inconsequential as it was, but I didn't have anything else lined up since my summer would be so short, and it was a good reason to get out of the house. She drove me to and from the office every day, and I often said hello to his mom and other siblings as I got out of their garage.
His sister was extremely considerate, offered to take me to lunch, and genuinely took the time to know me. She was a decade older, but didn't treat me like her kid brother's stupid classmate. She told me funny stories about Henry, and also about how she was so proud of him for making it to college.
The law office itself was a sleepy place during the day. The front desk staff didn't know what to do with an unpaid intern. I sorted files, did data entry. They ran out of tasks for me, so I unboxed printer paper and sorted paper clips out of the stationery drawers.
My second week there, the lead lawyer came back from vacation. He saw me sorting paper clips and asked who I was. I explained that I didn't have any tasks to work on. He handed me some briefs, and I started proofreading them. They were full of typos, and I started marking them up, glad to be useful.
The lead lawyer was impressed with my attention to detail. He went to Harvard Law and was passionate about his pro bono cases. He invited me to come volunteer at the Wednesday night clinics, where I attempted to translate for people seeking help with legal forms and documents. All of them spoke Cantonese instead of Mandarin, and I thought about how Henry would be a lot better at this than me.
I was getting encouragement, doing good work. Grown ups I respected were talking me to like I had my whole life ahead of me. It was unhealthy of me to mope, but I felt trapped.
As far as I knew, Henry's behavior wasn't typical of his past courtships, which lasted several months if not years. That I played the part of the convenient neighbor girl, picked up and discarded on a whim, stung. It rendered my resulting pain senseless and absurd to be so casually downgraded back to 'bro'.
The summer couldn't pass quickly enough. I knew I needed to get out of there.
In our college years, whenever our little group tried to have a collective heart-to-heart about the more sordid details of our breakups, Henry always made it a point to sneak in a lecture on the evils of premarital sex, that it was simply the root cause of all our romantic troubles. He was smug about his moral high ground, and it irked the rest of us to no end.
That he held such a simpleminded and outdated view towards purity, I found positively ironic.
The hardest part about trying to sustain a friendship with Henry, both to outsiders and ourselves, was the stain of secrecy. For the longest time, he pretended nothing happened. Any attempt to talk about our experiences would necessarily trespass on his new relationship. Any attempt to make sense of things would come at the cost of our friend group, he implied. Don't rock the boat. Just go with it.
On one occasion, two years after high school graduation, we did talk about it.
He stayed over in my room in Berkeley, at a drafty old rooming house on Delaware St. Theo and Calvin had been part of the visit too, but they left a day early. We set up a sleeping bag for him on the floor in my large room, but we stayed up all night talking. By the wee hours of the morning, he was beside me in my narrow twin, whispering what-ifs that seemed unspeakable in the daytime. We were clothed, sober but for the high of sleep deprivation. He held me as I cried.
So I wasn't imagining it, after all.
So this is how our story ends.
By now it should be obvious to just about anybody that I have a predisposition to sadness. Maybe it's genetics, or my childhood, or something akin to a Chinese soul. All of the above, probably.
There is one passage in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles that stands out to me now, looking back at all this:
She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly — the thought of the world's concern at her situation – was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought.
This illusion of mine, I carried with me for a long, long time.