It’s clear and cool when we get into San Francisco, the streets swollen—brogrammers in their gym clothes, Asian grandmas carrying pink bakery bags, tourists with their fanny packs and DSLRs, white moms in yoga pants pushing bulky strollers with Philz cups in the cup holders. We park in the Portsmouth Square garage and emerge from the rickety elevator back into the sunlight among all the kids clambering up play structures and the Chinese grandfathers playing chess. Regina, who is excellent at time management and therefore looked up walking directions while we were in the elevator, strides toward the corner so fast it takes me and Harry a few seconds to catch up.
Regina could do anything, I think, become a doctor or an engineer or the lawyer her parents want, but she’s dreamed her entire life of going to Northwestern, which has the best journalism program in the nation, and becoming a reporter. She can spend literally hours reading through headlines and going down current-events rabbit holes. She told me once when she was small she knew the names of TV anchors before she did her grandparents and relatives. But reporters make, like, ten dollars, and her parents have made it abundantly clear they have no interest in sending her to major in communications or broadcast journalism. She’s supposed to go into pre-law.
“I wish my parents would’ve moved here instead,” Regina says as Google Maps steers us through a back alley, the word DEFIANCE tagged across the wall in a bright, arresting blue. I like the lines of the lettering, the way they reach around themselves and keep your gaze captive. “I’m so ready to be done with Cupertino.”
“Really? You like this better?” Harry says, gesturing toward a clump of garbage cans. “It smells like piss.”
“I don’t mean I wish they’d moved right here to this alley. But, yes, I like it better.”
“Why? It’s, like, dirty here. I bet you’ll miss Cupertino when you’re gone.”
We’re walking fast still, and she’s a little out of breath. “Really? I’ll miss driving down the street and seeing nothing but tutoring centers? I’ll miss everyone else’s parents knowing exactly what I got on my SATs and teachers having to commute from like Morgan Hill because Cupertino is full of rich NIMBYs who refuse to build more housing? I’ll miss the hundred percent rule?”
Cupertino’s hundred percent rule is this: if you go out in Cupertino, there’s a hundred percent chance you’ll see someone you know. (Its corollary is the two hundred percent rule, which is that if you’re wearing pj’s/haven’t showered, your odds double.)
“Come on, it’s not all bad. Other cities are just easy to romanticize because we don’t live in them. It would be a pain to live in San Francisco. There’s like zero parking.”
“People should use transit more often anyway. Didn’t your dad vote against high-speed—”
“Okay, yes, but that’s just because the particular proposal wasn’t fiscally responsible. He’s working on another one.” Harry always gets defensive about his dad, even though I know it’s not like he agrees with him all the time anyway. (Mr. Wong retired after making a bunch of money and went into politics and is a state senator now, after a term on the school board and two as our mayor.) “But also, people like you there. You know? It feels kind of crappy to talk about how much you hate it when that’s where all your friends are.”
“When do Northwestern decisions come out?” I say quickly, before she has to answer him—I recognize that slight rise in his voice.
“I don’t know exactly when,” she says. I’m pretty sure she’s lying. “Sometime in the spring. I doubt I’ll get in. Even if I do my parents probably won’t let me go.”
“I’m sure you’ll get in. I hope it all works out okay,” I say. Which—I can hear how formal it sounds. I feel like that sometimes with her now, stiff and awkward and overly careful. One time in junior high Sandra told me her irrational fear was that she’d drop a diary with all her secrets in it. You keep a diary like that? I’d said, surprised—I couldn’t imagine her having the patience—and she laughed. Of course not, loser. I said it was an irrational fear. But that’s how it feels with Regina sometimes now, too, that I’m worried I’ll slip and just randomly blurt out everything I’m guilty of.
“You ever been to Northwestern?” Harry says to me. “It’s like—rich white kid central. It’s different from Cupertino, sure, but maybe it’s not better. Most places aren’t. Everywhere’s just different.”
“You’ve been there?” she says. She knows he hasn’t.
“I’ve looked it up.”
“You’d live here forever, wouldn’t you?”
“I mean, yeah, it’s a nice place to live.”
“Nice like what? Nice like easy?”
“Sure.” He tries to mask it with a smile, but there’s a tightness in his voice. “It makes sense. You know what’s expected. I like people to tell me what they want from me, sue me. It’s fine here.”
We’re meeting everyone outside the International Hall on Larkin. I was maybe 30 percent nervous everyone would bail at the last minute, but nearly everyone’s there already by the time we show up. Regina slips into what I think of as her Editor Mode—circling the crowds with a smile for everyone and this certain, ardent way of listening to people, even just in throwaway conversation, that makes you feel like she’s incredibly glad you’re there.
Reemu Kapoor turns around and lights up when she sees me. “Danny! You got into RISD!” She gives me a hug. “That’s so awesome.”
Harry grins. “I, uh, maybe told people.”
And then a crush of people all surround me, jostling and high-fiving and hugging. Harry wasn’t kidding. I think literally everyone comes up to me to say congratulations, weaving me into their net of goodwill. I can feel my face going all red, my smile stretching wide enough that it starts to hurt.
I still can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that this whole universe we’ve inhabited nearly all our lives is going to dissolve itself in just six months, all of us flung to the far reaches of the world. I’m not like Regina—I love Cupertino. I love the trees and the quiet streets and the way the hills glow behind everything in the late afternoon; I love how contained it all is, how you can spend your whole life in a two- or three-mile radius and not feel like you’re missing very much. I love the people at school. I even love the hundred percent rule.
Maybe Regina blames Cupertino, though. You can play what-ifs forever. Maybe everything would’ve been different in a different place, with different people, with different pressures. I can’t fault her for wondering. I wonder too.
The talk is behind schedule; the doors still haven’t opened. There are maybe a few dozen other people here, not exactly the crowd that screams must-see event!! Behind me Chris Young and Andrew Hatmaker are getting bored.
“This talk better blow my mind,” Chris says. “It better change—”
“Why?” Harry says sharply, whirling around to stare at Chris. His eyebrows go up and stay there.
“Come on, there’s nothing else you’d rather be doing with your Saturday?” Chris says. In middle school Chris was in love with Regina. He used to corner me in the locker room sometimes and demand to know whether I was dating her.
“I’m in this great city with a lot of friends, so yeah, I’d say this is pretty good.”
“I wanted to sleep in.”
“Sucks to your assmar, then, doesn’t it?” Harry’s tone is friendly, but his expression is hard. “I thought it was a really good idea Regina came up with.”
Chris backs down. “Right,” he says. “Yeah, okay.” He offers Harry a smile. Harry doesn’t return it, and stares him down a few more seconds before turning back around. That’s new since March with Harry, that hair-trigger protectiveness at the slightest hint anyone might be somehow in opposition to something, anything, Regina wants.
The doors open then, and we go in. At the front of the room there’s a thirtyish white guy in a blazer writing something behind a podium. The only three sophomores in Journalism, Esther Rhee and Lori Choi and Maureen Chong, sit in front
of me. Esther has a fashion blog, and every now and then I glance at it—she has a good eye, lots of clean text and white space, whimsical outfits with Bible verses Photoshopped along the borders and sale alerts and every now and then posts about fighting child trafficking. She always writes feature stories, usually about people she knows going on missions trips or spearheading volunteering orgs.
I see Esther’s expression change when the first slide goes up, the ACLU logo, and she leans over and whispers something to Lori and Maureen. They’re all close friends, insular in a way that feels familiar to me. (Also, I’m like 95 percent sure they all have a thing for Harry.) The three of them squint at the screen and duck their heads together, conferring in the way you do when you don’t want anyone else to hear what you’re saying. I can’t tell if Regina notices.
The guy speaking, to put it delicately, is full of crap. Basic slides, mansplanations about legal implications of the First Amendment, and then a long, smug humblebrag about how he represented some school that challenged free speech rules and text message records. I let my mind wander to RISD instead. Regina’s watching sharply, a notebook ready, but I never see her actually write anything down.
“Great talk,” I tell her as we’re filtering out of the theater. “Did you like it?”
She looks around, then drops her voice. “I can’t believe I made everyone come watch this.”
“Yeah, maybe don’t say that in front of Chris.”
When we’re all back outside, blinking in the sunlight, everyone gathers at the corner and Regina turns on her bright public smile.
“Thanks everyone for coming,” she says. “Okay, so the guy was kind of douchey, yes?” People laugh. I see Esther whisper something to Lori and Maureen. “That aside, I thought he had some really good points about how important it is to not let your school or anyone else dictate what you can and can’t say.” I obviously have no standing to say this since I actively stopped listening, but the parts I did hear—that didn’t quite sound like his point. And she’s done controversial stories before—one about this mom who always complains to the school board about sex in books we read, an interview with an anonymous classmate (she wouldn’t even tell me and Harry who it was) who’d had an abortion. I don’t remember getting this same speech any of the other times, even though there were people, Esther especially, who didn’t think we should publicize abortion. “I just think it’s so important that we—that we be brave in the stories we want to write. And that we remember we have this platform and this influence, and if we aren’t using it to tell people what matters, even if it’s risky, then what’s the point?”
“Every city should be laid out as a grid,” Harry says as we’re trying to find our way back to the car. “Like, seriously”—he motions to the map pulled up on his phone—“the hell is this?”
“I like San Francisco,” I say. “What kind of dull city is all straight lines?”
“New York, for one.”
“You’re just crap with directions.”
He elbows me. We find Jackson Street. I doubt where we are here in Chinatown looks anything like Shiyan; still, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to the few things I’ve heard my parents talk about. When I was a kid my mom used to tell me sometimes about the food they grew up eating there, savory donuts and sea cucumbers and shaomai. We go by clothing stores with touristy sweatshirts spilling from the storefronts, cheap blue Chinese vases and bamboo cuttings and bright plastic toys all laid out on sidewalk displays, and when we pass by a bakery, its windows steamy, Regina turns to Harry and says, “You know the way you were talking to Chris today? Don’t do that.”
Harry stiffens. “He was just being so negative.”
“People are allowed to be negative.”
“Why bother? There’s so much crap in the world already. Suck it up and find the good.”
“You’re so…optimistic,” she says after a little while, and it doesn’t come out sounding like a good thing.
Harry watches her a moment, then says, more mildly than I was expecting, “True.” He’d never say it, but I think he’s a little hurt. And, I mean, I get what she’s saying, because it annoys me about Harry sometimes too—in his world there’s always a right solution, always a reward waiting if you put in the work, always a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. But it’s one of the best things about him, too. It’s nice to have someone in your life you don’t have to worry about as much, someone you know will always be okay.
It never used to be like this with her. I would never in a million years describe Regina as mellow, or laid-back, but there was always a kind of easiness to her intensity, too. Or maybe that’s the wrong word; maybe it’s just that just about anything feels easy when you believe your friendship with someone is unshakable.
And I would’ve said ours was. I’ve known Regina forever, ever since I moved here and wound up in the same kindergarten class as her and Sandra. Regina and I were both new to Cupertino that year, me from Texas and her from Taiwan, and I knew I wanted to be friends my first week of school when Mrs. Welton yelled at Jincent Wong for knocking over a stack of papers on her desk and Regina gave her a look of such disgust it would’ve withered my heart. “It was an accident,” she said, and then sat glaring at her desk with her arms crossed the rest of the day. At Regnart we were always pretty segregated by gender, and I spent most of my time roaming the blacktop and the field in noisy clumps of boys. But Regina’s was the friendship I’ll always look back on as the most important one I had growing up, the person who always knew me best and whose opinion I always needed before I was sure how I really felt about anything.
We both went to Primary Plus for after-school care and we’d hang out at the tables and I’d draw and she’d write news stories about the people in our class. Sometimes we’d make little books together (I still have some) and we’d imagine a whole future for ourselves, bringing what we wanted to life on our stapled pages. You know people by what it is they want most. When I broke my arm in sixth grade she bought me a left-handed notebook so I could try to sketch with my left hand; she knew how restless I felt, my mind all congested, when I couldn’t draw. And she used to come over sometimes when she was fighting with her parents, which was often. Nothing she did was ever good enough for them, her schoolwork or her violin or her helping around the house or her attitude, the way she looked or the things she wanted for herself. One time, I remember, sophomore year just after she’d gotten her license, it was the middle of the night and she’d gotten into a screaming match with her mom about the future and her mom—who said a lot of awful things to her, but this one always stands out for me—told her she was too ugly to be on TV. I snuck out of the house with a blanket and we lay out on my front lawn and looked up at the stars. It occurred to me to wonder if I should feel guilty (by then she was with Harry already), but lying there like that with her didn’t feel like anything, so I didn’t. She never liked talking about whatever was going on at home, so after we got bored of stargazing (ten seconds, probably; not much to stars when you’re this far away) we watched cat videos online and laughed about stupid stuff for hours and then I woke up at dawn, damp with dew, and then I had to shake her awake and hurry inside, all clammy in my shirt, before my parents came out and saw us.
The light turns red and we stop at the corner. A pungent, earthy smell that reminds me of my mom’s pantry wafts toward us from an herbal shop behind us, sandwiched between a souvenir store and a produce market. I think about what to say. Having to work this hard around them is so foreign to me, like landing in a country I’ve only ever heard people talk about. A taxi goes by.
“Here’s the thing,” Harry says abruptly, and we both turn to him. “I—”
But before he can finish, Regina says, “What’s that?”
We look where she’s pointing. It’s a corner of a building painted all black with giant windows that’ve been elaborately tagged over, and there’s a hanging sign labeling the place as NEIGHBORHOOD: A GALLERY.
“Y
ou want to go in?” Regina asks me.
I spend a pretty significant chunk of my time following art galleries online and browsing museums’ virtual collections, but I hardly ever get to go in person these days. I don’t want to drag them, though, if they’d rather not, feel their polite impatience hovering in front of the paintings. “Oh—we don’t have to if—”
“No, let’s go in,” Harry says. And I can feel their earlier tension evaporate; I feel both of them swivel instead toward this thing they know will make me happy. “This totally looks like your kind of thing. Let’s do it.”
There are more people inside than I would have expected, probably forty or fifty. It’s small, not in a way that makes you feel crowded but more that makes you feel a part of the surroundings. And the installation inside—everyone has those moments, I think, that take them out of themselves, when something you come across makes you see everything around you in a new way. Maybe this is how Regina always felt in church.
Whoever the artist is paints on overhead projector sheets and then casts them all over different parts of a room so they overlap and they look different, mingling differently, depending where you’re standing. I could stay in here forever, possibly, looking at the way the images layer on each other and also watching people take everything in, watching the projections flash across them. It’s a kind of living exhibit, all these real people sliding in and out of the projections, all these lives twined and tangled. The contrast between the physical people and the shaky, flimsy images stirs something in me—lifts from the private recesses of my heart and gives shape to what it feels like to walk with ghosts.
I can feel my mind expanding, all the possibilities filling new crevices in my consciousness. But then I also feel kind of frantic and awful in a way it takes me longer to pin down: it makes me feel desperate. He’s done what I always wanted to do and he did it first, and probably better. In fact, standing here, the three of us experiencing this together—this feels like more of me I could show Harry than anything I could ever draw myself.
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